Sketching Lofoten: At home in the far north

It’s a Monday afternoon in Stamsund — a tiny fishing village on Norway’s Lofoten Islands — and a bracing mix of rain, hail, and gale-force winds is currently sweeping over the island.

I’m sitting in my favorite seat in the village — a pale blue wooden bench at a matching wooden table, positioned right beside a window framed with red-and-white checkered curtains, looking out over a harbor that is ordinarily calm. Today, however, the wind gusts across its surface, stirring up occasional cyclones of sea spray.

“The wind takes the water,” said my new friend Arne just a moment ago, “and makes it look like fire, like smoke.”

I arrived on Lofoten two weeks ago today — just over a year after my first visit to the islands, in February of 2015. Though I had only five days here then, I was immediately taken by its rugged, soaring mountains, and the way they plunge straight into the sea. I fell in love with its communities of wooden homes and fishermen’s cabins, painted in hues of red and gold that stand in such striking juxtaposition to their surrounding landscape.

But mostly, I loved the quiet — the silence, the solitude, the calm. The memory of that solitude was what drew me back to Lofoten again, this time for ten weeks. After seven months in San Francisco, it was time to temporarily step away from my new home in the city and begin the next journey.

My goal for these ten weeks on Lofoten is to hammer out the first draft of a book project. For four of my weeks here, I’ll be staying in an artists’ house in the port town of Svolvær, which I arranged in hopes of placing myself within a community, even in the far north of the world.

For the rest of my time on Lofoten, I found a hostel in Stamsund, for which my only expectation was a place to hole up in. To not get out much. To speak little and write as much as I could.

But then I arrived at the hostel — a former shelter for fishermen built in 1934 — and found myself standing in a common room more full of life and character than I could have ever imagined: those picture-postcard windows and their checkered curtains, the long, wooden dining table, creaky rafters and floorboards, and the building’s original wood-burning, cast-iron stove on which it’s possible to toast bread, boil water, and fry an egg. It was as though the hostel’s owner Roar had learned of my childhood dream to be a pioneer, and made it possible for me to finally live out that fantasy.

Stamsund’s best surprise, however, hasn’t been the common room, or the long-awaited attainment of my pioneer dreams, but the community it has held these last two weeks: Arne from Norway, Alex and Lena from France, Roxana from Germany, Keith from Australia, David and Amin from Iran, and Anne-Pierre, Barbara, and Magalit from Switzerland, among many others. Even my dear friend Sophie made the very long trek from England and came to visit over Easter weekend.

Every morning in Stamsund, I’ve happily perched over my laptop for hours at the dining table — exactly as I expected to while planning this trip from San Francisco.

But what I couldn’t have known to expect is how happy I’ve then been to put away my laptop each night, when everyone returns from their walks and snowshoe hikes and fishing trips, and the table swells with conversation — so much so that as I went to bed one night, I found my voice had actually grown scratchy from all the talking and story-swapping.

My initial stay in Stamsund ends tonight (weather permitting!) as I move north to the artists’ house, but it wouldn’t have felt right to leave without first sketching the common room I’ve come to love so much — making sure to include the box of tea from Russia that Alex left behind on the windowsill, Lena’s lime green raincoat and Sophie’s dubiously waterproof trousers drying by the stove, and the bright orange candle Arne bought for Easter that’s been burning on the table for three days now.

Again, Lofoten has reminded me of one of my favorite life lessons:

No matter how well we think we know what we need from a journey, sometimes the universe knows even better…