The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness Read online

  “So being alive is the same thing as being dead.”

  “Something like that. If we realize we’re already dead, then there’s nothing to fear.”

  “So being scared of life and trying to stay safe is stupid, because even though what we’re scared of is death, we might as well be dead.”

  It was hard to think straight.

  “In other words, living in fear is the same as being dead, because we spend all our time trying to be safe, and sitting inside and watching television and smoking joints and we don’t actually do anything.”

  “Exactly,” said Hanna.

  I stared at the fire. “I’m still fucking scared of everything.”

  “You swear too much.”

  “I know.”

  “Fear is just fear. Don’t take it too seriously. It doesn’t matter.”

  “No. It does matter. I want to be like you. I don’t want to be scared of everything. Like now.

  “I’m scared of what lies ahead. I’m scared that when I get back to the van and say good-bye to you I will feel like I did before I met you. That nothing will have changed.”

  “Then you must find your key.”

  I had to stifle a giggle. I imagined an old, rusty key the size of my hand, and some old man with a gray beard dangling it in front of my face—come and get it!

  “How exactly do I do that?”

  “Think of something you really, truly want to do but don’t because you are afraid. Not something you have to do or think you should do but something you want to do. Something you want to do with your whole heart. For me it was meditation. There was a group who met once a week and I used to go every time but I could not go in. I used to stand outside instead and watch them through the windows.”

  “I don’t watch people meditating through windows.”

  “So what do you like to watch?”

  “Jack.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Everything. Climbing. Surfing. Surfing more than climbing, I suppose. The worst part of it all is the fact that she’s a fucking surfer.” I paused. “But even if I did want to do it myself, which I don’t, because I’m too scared, I wouldn’t know where to start. I wouldn’t know how.”

  “You just do like you did when you got on the ferry to come to Norway. You take one step. That is all you ever have to do.”

  She stood up and fixed her strange eyes on me.

  “And what matters in the end is not what happens but that you are awake, because life is short and these moments are all precious.”

  The trail ended the next day on the shores of the big lake I had seen through the trees from the Nature Center car park. The lake called Ounasjarvi. This time it was my van I could see glinting through the trees. There was a flag you had to hoist to signal that you wanted a boat to come and take you back to Hetta. We sat down to wait. The final hike had been an easy one, following a well-trodden path through the forest. I glanced sideways at Hanna. She had her legs crossed and was staring straight ahead. She had a ticket to fly from Hetta to Helsinki and from there to London, where a magazine was waiting for her photographs of the midnight sun. I knew that once we crossed the lake I would never see her again.

  “I am not like normal people,” she had said, that morning, as if I hadn’t noticed.

  She meant that, unlike Jan Erik, she wouldn’t be giving me her telephone number. We wouldn’t stay in touch via email. The wilderness was behind me. The midnight sun was behind me. Life stretched out again, empty like the road and with nothing at the end of it except death. I noticed that I didn’t feel quite as daunted by this as I had done before the hike.

  “What would you do now?” I asked Hanna, lying back and looking at the sky. “If you were me.”

  She thought about it for a moment.

  “I think I would go to Unstad,” she said.

  “Where’s that?”

  “On the Lofoten.”

  “Hmmm.”

  “And I would stop wanting everything to be different all the time and instead I would live my life as if it was the best book I ever read.”

  I sat up and frowned.

  “I wish I hadn’t finished all my books.”

  Hanna opened her rucksack and began rummaging inside it. She pulled something out and passed it to me. It was a thick blue book written by someone called Tsoknyi Rinpoche.

  “Don’t you want it?” I asked.

  “I have already read it. I think when you finish a book it is good to pass it on.”

  “Thank you.”

  She rummaged in her rucksack again. “I think you had better have these, also.” She dropped two ribbons in my lap. One was gold and one was green.

  “The ribbons are for fearlessness,” she said.

  18

  I dropped Hanna off at Hetta’s tiny airstrip. When she had gone I sat in the driver’s seat and stared at the forest. I felt like I had been dreaming. Maybe I still was dreaming. Only I felt more awake than I had ever felt before. Hanna wouldn’t say good-bye. It was the beginning of something, she said, not the end. And she was right about that, too. Although I never did see her again.

  I climbed into the back of the van and opened Aase’s map. It took me a while to find Unstad. It was hidden halfway down the west side of an island with a jagged coastline called Vestvågøy. I traced the coastline downward with my thumb, letting the exotic place names roll off my tongue. Strønstad, Sand, Delp, Laukvik, Sandsletta. I emptied the contents of my backpack on to the floor. I fished the ribbons out of the pile of wet clothes and held them in my hand for a moment. Then I leaned through the hole in the bulkhead and hung them carefully over the rearview mirror. I put a pot of coffee on the stove and picked up the book Hanna had given me. It was called Fearless Simplicity. I opened it at random. It was nearly as odd as Hanna. I flicked through it, reading sentences I only half understood, about being asleep and dreaming and then discovering that the dream is not real and waking up. I could relate to that, of course, but the book seemed to be saying that life itself was a dream from which we could wake up. The coffee was boiling over.

  When I had dealt with the coffee I returned to the book, starting at the very beginning. Now it seemed to be all about freedom. About knowing within yourself how to be free, without needing other people to set you free. I thought about this. Jack had seemed free. I suppose I was envious of his freedom, of the way he could just up and leave like that, without caring what he left behind.

  This book seemed to be saying that if you could find out within yourself how to be free you would not be needy any more. Hanna had said I was free. I sipped the coffee and stared at the mountains, which I could still see through the open door. Maybe I was free. It was a radical idea. I certainly hadn’t been free before. I had needed Jack so much, clung on to him like a drowning child. I cringed. It was no wonder he had left.

  I closed the book and poured the contents of the biscuit tin out on to the bed, stacking the coins into neat piles. There was still nearly one thousand five hundred kroner left of the money I had made in Tromsø. About one hundred and fifty pounds. I tried to work out distances. The only way to get to the Lofoten seemed to be a roundabout route through Narvik and then north to catch a ferry at a place called Melbu, then south again from Fiskebøl, the northernmost settlement on the northernmost island, which was called Austvågøya. It looked about a hundred kilometers from Fiskebøl to Unstad. I worked out that I had enough money to get there, but probably not enough to get back. I considered stopping in Narvik, like I had on the way up. But Narvik was a horrible place to busk. I decided to go straight to Unstad. I’d get back somehow. Perhaps that’s what freedom meant. Knowing you’d get back somehow. I didn’t want to waste any time. Unstad was my last connection with Hanna.

  It was a long drive. There was a road that went west from Hetta to the border town of Kilpisjärvi, but it was unpaved and full of potholes. People were strung out along it, picking precious cloudberries in a bitter north wind. It was the first week of August b
ut already it felt like October. I would have stopped in Kilpisjärvi to stock up on cheap food and diesel, but I had no euros and there was nowhere to change money. So I crossed the border and bought a tank of diesel in a garage just outside Narvik. The man behind the counter told me it had been eight degrees on the Lofoten that day.

  It was six weeks since midsummer and the very heart of the night was dark again. There was something welcoming about the velvet darkness after all the endless light, but it didn’t last long. Dawn had already broken by the time I reached Melbu at 2:00 a.m. Luckily the ferries ran all night. I slept in a chair in a bar that smelled of chips. After I disembarked I wound my window down so the cold air would keep me awake. I played “Bruca Maniguá” over and over again, rewinding and rewinding and rewinding the tape. The air smelled strongly of old fish. I later learned that this was the famous stockfish, the dried cod that makes the Lofoten economically viable. Stockfish is such big business that trucks headed for Portugal and Italy travel with armed guards. A single fish can fetch a hundred euros.

  I had planned to stop and sleep once I was on the islands, but I started driving south from Fiskebøl and found I couldn’t stop. The sky was red and autumnal and the road hugged the coast, punctuated by dozens of tunnels and bridges. There were white clapboard houses and white sandy beaches on the seaward side and bare granite mountains to the east. Once I had skirted Svolvær, the main town, and crossed over on the bridge to Vestvågøy, the atmosphere changed again. It was wilder. The wooden hamlets were further apart and I was overtaken on dangerous corners by speeding cars, openly flouting the rules that were followed so carefully on the mainland.

  The E10 curved inland and I nearly missed the road that went to Unstad. It was an interminable twisting lane built with oil money to replace the old mountain track that was closed half the year because of snow. There was no snow that morning. Just seagulls and chickens and a couple of goats tethered in a rough meadow by a lonely clapboard farmstead, and a gray mist and a dripping tunnel that finally spat me out to a view of the sea. The name Unstad translates as “no town,” and there certainly was no town at the end of that lane. There was just another crumbling farm with a sign outside that said CAMPING, but no sign of any campers, and a line of rickety wooden fishing huts hung with broken nets that looked out over a rocky bay circled by mountains. I kept driving until I was about six feet away from the sea and couldn’t go any further. I turned off the engine and stared at the sea. I couldn’t work out why on earth Hanna had sent me there.

  Until I realized that I wasn’t alone, after all. There was somebody sitting out in the bay.

  On a surfboard.

  19

  I turned the van around so the back doors were facing the sea, which was on the far side of a line of boulders. To my right the boulders gave way to a small, sandy beach that looked like it probably wouldn’t be there when the tide came in. Beyond it was a long headland with a patch of very square woodland on it, so square I thought it must have been planted deliberately, perhaps for firewood. The fishing huts were on my left. A sandy track passed in front of my van, linking the beach to the fishing huts and the fishing huts to another wooden building that I thought must have once been a chapel, because it had a tower with a wooden cross nailed to it. In the field behind the chapel was an old bus with a car parked next to it.

  I climbed out of the cab, put a pot of coffee on the stove, and sat watching the surfer. He caught a few short waves, and then he caught one and rode it all the way in to the beach. I had watched Jack and Andrew enough times to know that the surfer was good. And that the waves were not. They were wild and messy and breaking straight onto rocks.

  I picked up Hanna’s book, which said that the basic quality of illusion was bewilderment. I put it down. I cleaned my teeth. The tide was coming in. I sat cross-legged on the grass and tried not to keep looking at the bus. It had a stack of surfboards outside. There were more surfboards tied on to the roof of the car.

  The surfer got out of the sea and walked up the beach toward me. He was tall and had a loose-limbed, loping kind of walk. I expected him to take the obvious route, the track along the shore that passed in front of my van, and I got ready to introduce myself. But instead of using the track he clambered awkwardly over a dry stone wall and crossed a couple of overgrown fields, wading through knee-high grass. When he finally got to the bus he peeled off his wetsuit, threw a bucket of water over his head, and disappeared inside. That’s when I did something completely out of character. I followed him.

  The bus was dilapidated up close. Even rustier than my van. The surfboards stacked outside were covered in snails. Grass had started growing over them. I knocked on the door, which was opened by a completely different man, who smiled and invited me in.

  It was no ordinary bus. The line of windows facing the sea made the inside feel like a greenhouse. The line of windows on the other side had been boarded up. At one end there was a kitchen a bit like mine, made of sawn-off bits of plywood, and an ancient gas hob. At the other end were a couple of makeshift bunk beds. Aside from that there was a sofa facing the sea and a huge stack of old surfing magazines on the floor.

  The surfer’s name was Børge, pronounced Burger. His father came from Texas and his mother from Stavanger, although he sounded neither American nor Norwegian. When he spoke, which was not very often, he sounded Australian. Johan, who was staying in the bus with him, told me it was because Børge had gone out to Tasmania and stayed there for several years, building Viking ships. Børge wasn’t much of a talker. He was more of a scowler.

  Luckily, Johan was as friendly as Børge was sullen. In fact, they couldn’t have been more different. Børge was tall. Two metres tall to be exact. Six foot six, with dark frizzy hair cut short. Johan was small and wiry, and had blond hair tied back into a ponytail. His eyes were brown and trusting, like reindeer eyes. Børge’s eyes were slate blue and suspicious. Johan looked a little bit like Andrew. He seemed happy that I had turned up.

  “The more the merrier.”

  Børge didn’t look anything like anyone, and he didn’t seem at all happy I had turned up.

  “Who the hell told you about Unstad anyway?”

  “A girl I met at Knivskjellodden,” I said. “We went hiking in Finland. She’s called Hanna. She was born on the Lofoten. In fact, maybe you even know her. She’s got twelve brothers and sisters.”

  I suppose it did sound crazy. Børge shook his head in disgust. Johan promised to ask his Polish housemates. They knew everybody, he said, kindly.

  Børge was sitting on the sofa. I sat down tentatively, as far away as I could from him. The sofa was so old the springs were poking through. The bus belonged to the farm that was also a campsite. Johan lived seventy kilometers away in a village called Moskenes, at the other end of the last island in the chain. But he knew the farmer at Unstad and sometimes gave surfing lessons to the campers. In return he got to use the bus when the surf was good.

  “Unstad is the best wave for hundreds of miles,” he said, grinning. “Actually it’s the only wave for hundreds of miles.”

  “Bit of a curse,” growled Børge, who had edged as far away from me as was humanly possible. Johan and I looked at him. “Now the whole frigging world wants to be a surfer.”

  Johan gave me a cup of instant coffee.

  “You’ve timed it well,” he said. “There’s a big swell coming.”

  “Oh.”

  Awkward silence. I cleared my throat.

  “Actually, the reason I came over is that I was wondering if I could borrow a surfboard.”

  “Sure,” said Johan. “What kind of board do you normally ride?”

  I wished so much I had been doing it for years.

  “Um, well, actually I, um—I don’t know.”

  Børge sighed heavily.

  “I’ve never done it before.”

  I tried to maintain some kind of smile.

  “You’ll need a big one then.”

  Johan glanced at Børge.r />
  “You got a wetsuit?”

  “Oh shit, I forgot about that,” I said. “Look, it doesn’t matter.”

  “I’ve got a frigging board and wetsuit you can have,” said Børge suddenly, getting up off the sofa and stomping outside. Johan looked like he was going to say something but he didn’t. He just followed him. I went outside, too. Børge pulled a board out of the pile. It was pink, with a blue stripe. He threw it down on the ground by my feet. Then he went inside. I looked at Johan. He still didn’t say anything. Børge came back a few minutes later and threw a wetsuit in my direction. It landed on my feet.

  “I don’t need it anymore,” he said.

  We both stared at him. Then he turned on his heel without saying another word, stalked off across the field, let himself into the chapel, and didn’t come out again.

  “Don’t worry,” said Johan. “It’s not you.” He shrugged and pointed at the wetsuit. “You’ll need that if I’m going to teach you how to surf.”

  20

  Johan’s idea of teaching me how to surf was to bang loudly on the van at the crack of dawn as he ran past in his wetsuit, board under one arm, whooping.

  “If you snooze you lose!” he shouted over his shoulder, when I opened the door in my pajamas and peered at him, rubbing my eyes. Børge was already out, miles out, beyond the seething shore break. To say it was stormy would be an understatement. The wind was howling. The beach was a mass of swirling foam. Behind it waves were breaking head high. At least the tide was out and they were breaking on sand, instead of rocks. The pink board with the blue stripe was lying on the grass right in front of me with the wetsuit face down on top of it like a casualty.

  “Damn,” I said to the gulls that were gathering, hoping for breakfast.

  Mark Twain tried surfing once.

  “I got the board placed right, and at the right moment, too,” he wrote afterward, “but missed the connection myself. The board struck the shore in three-quarters of a second, without any cargo, and I struck the bottom about the same time, with a couple of barrels of water in me.”