finding our own line across the hardangervidda
Sunday, March 14, 2010 at 8:36AM 
The Hardangervidda mountain plateau in Norway.Sometimes you take a trip, and sometimes a trip takes you. Our Hardangervidda expedition in Norway took me skin and blood, sweat and pulse. After 15 days of skiing and camping, my feet were cratered with blisters, my ankles were sore and oozing, my legs were wincing - and I was completely smitten with this trackless land of cold and white.
Why traverse the Hardangervidda mountain plateau in the cold dead dark of midwinter? When huts are closed, no trails blazed? All the usual reasons, really. Because it's there. To substantiate our staunch belief that the interior of the plateau remains ice-free and fertile, as Nordenskjöld was drawn to Greenland. Because it sure beats being stuck indoors. And in all honestly, “because we like the taste of freedom," as Ed Abbey put it; "because we like the smell of danger."
Like Nansen, who more than a century ago turned to polar exploration as a "holiday from the mental fatigue of scientific research,” this trip was for me an antitode to academia. Nansen trained on the Hardangervidda for his polar expeditions. He was my age exactly, 27, when he left the lab because he felt "a craving for wider horizons," wanted to "stumble forwards, alone, and entirely by [his] own efforts."
But as Annie Dillard described in Expedition to the Pole, a favorite essay by a favorite writer, there's no such thing as a solitary polar explorer, fine as the conception is. Explorers never truly go it alone. Like Whitman on the open road, we carry our delicious burdens with us wherever we wander. "I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return." Which is fine, because exploring isn't about escape; at heart it should be a seeking-out rather than a fleeing-from. And no matter the purity of our conceptions, Dillard noted, we manhaul our humanity along with us.
Riley and I manhauled a library along too. We were stormbound almost every other day of the trip so we had heaps of time to read. And we inhaled books with a focus and appetite unsustainable in the civilized world, where you rarely own your hours, where multi-tasking is the modus operandi, where reading for sheer pleasure is dismissed as an indulgence. I love traveling so much partly because I love reading - and living - with such undiluted intensity.
Nansen accompanied Riley and I on this expedition in spirit and text, specifically in Roland Huntford's biography of the Norwegian explorer. Though I am a shameless hero worshipper, I recognize that no hero is total. We all contain multitudes, we all manhaul delicious (or not so) burdens, whatever the sublimity of our ideals. This truth biographies reveal in a ruthless light. Nansen was far from flawless, but there is much to admire about the man, like the guiding principle of his life:
"Don't waste your time on what others can do just as well," Nansen urged. "Let it be impressed upon the young never, when there is a choice, to do anything which can be done equally well or better by someone else. How many wasted lives would then be spared if each individual tried to find his own line."
So we sought our own lines across the Hardangervidda. Riley’s was clean and sinuous, mine sawtoothed and punctuated by snow angels that I frequently crashed into creation. Which was somehow appropriate, because though we often cursed the plateau as a godforsaken frozen hellscape, we mostly exulted in it as a kind of cold heaven. "Rapture is the only sensible response," mused Ed Hoagland, "where a clear line of sight remains." Accordingly, we tried to keep lines of sight clear.
The Hardangervidda didn't always cooperate, of course. Every paradise exacts a penance. In this case: nights of truly terrifying cold, days defined by minus forty winds, feet reduced to raw nubs, food reduced to noodles and liver paste. Sometimes we existed only in the soles of our feet and the tired muscles of our thighs.
But then there was the sublime, right where Dillard said it would be found: around the edges, tucked into the corners of the days. In a land taut with truths that complicate all your certainties. In a vastness that swallows all silences but its own. In skies now hysteric with wind and snow, now a languor of turquoise light. The paradox of beauty fanged with frost, of locating peace within a privacy of storm. The center of the world is elsewhere; the center of the world is only here.
Nansen never went back to the lab after his "holiday." It's all about finding your own line.
More photos available here.
Reader Comments (3)
Dear Kate, this is totally awesome! Congrats on this accomplishment!! You make me itch again... Just the other day I was going through our pictures again and the feeling is still the same. Love, Florian
Agonizingly adorable: "snow angels that I frequently crashed into creation."
Like you, Kate, I am from the northern climes and love to travel by bicycle. I am Norwegian by heritage but have only traveled in Norway in the summer. I feel a great need to get back in winter or to go further north. I will keep following your travels and musings. Thanks for all.