Did you hear what the oak tree said to the river? I’d be lying if I said I heard it but neither would it do not to mention the river and the tree as they are a part of it too, do you see? The threads of life are many and there’s one, not one but a big knot of events in amongst the wire cage branches and out on the white icesheet looking up in wonder at an ordinary grey Nordic sky. You won’t understand much at all without the Nitelv and the oak. You won’t understand my Hatiya without my
In the low hillocks above the small river that oak tree
guards a gully beyond the suburbanised streets outside Oslo and from its
enormous, watchtower trunk branches radiate upward and then, spindly and
thinner, shower downwards once more in a lattice network that gives to the tree
its overall mushroom shape. That tree
must’ve witnessed things: the carving out of small plots of farmland from
around its position, the retreat of the pine forest to the tops of the hills,
the replacement of deer with a few cows or sheep feasting on the newer grasses
that colonise the cleared space of the paddock when the summer comes.
The Nitelv meanwhile cannot be seen from the oak but it’s
only over the nearest hills in the broader valley, and the small river is also
an historian. On its flat marshy lands
that were once the habitat solely of summer reeds and wild ducks a minor town
came to settle, when in the nineteenth century a steam powered sawmill encouraged
the populating of the river flats by workers.
Lillestrøm was founded. These
days it’s a satellite town of the capital, Oslo, and alongside the collection
of apartments, stores, the culture centre and buildings of civic administration
that look a bit 1970s Nordic, amongst the older wooden cottages, there’s a fast
train service to the airport and a ticket on it costs more than Situ’s budget
for half a trip to Ukraine.
In summer the greenery of the parkland and bike paths along
Nitelva’s banks bring cheerfulness to the long evenings. The sunshine is warmer at that time of
year. In autumn white swans paddle the
blackened ponds just out from the deadened reeds nearest the shore, now brown
and newly covered in frost and by winter the Nitelv is frozen silent and
layered with snow. It was winter when I
first saw it. Each morning, so it was,
I’d resolve to walk across the winter’s Nitelv instead of using the bridge, on
the way to Norwegian class. I’d seen it
done in movies, walking across frozen rivers although for me the opportunity
was the first of its kind. But I was
worried about falling through a hole in the ice and drowning as also happens in
movies; so I hesitated.
Aha! To hesitate is not the story of the oak and the river.
But it was between the two on the Rælingen bank that stood
the first Norwegian house. From its
kitchen there were views across the river with Lillestrøm beyond. There were views further too, as there always
are, that our eyes are unable to master, away downstream to the grazing buffalo
of Thailand and a hilltop quarter-mosque in the green scrubby jungles of Assam,
away downstream to the yellow and red cherries in a water cooler bottle in the
steppes of the East and to the pungent steam of stargazing in the vast treeless
plateau to the South, that plateau fresh with mud from the unusual event of
rain. There was the view too, of course,
to a shack on a strip of road on an island: all the many oak and river aspects,
do you see it?
The first Norwegian house isn’t there anymore. The land on which it lay was resumed, the
apple trees in the garden gone for the building of the high speed train link.
I really don’t know what the oak tree might’ve said to
Nitelva, calling out across the few hills between them. I speak neither oak nor river, so it is, but
they must’ve had some interesting conversations over the course of
centuries.
Perhaps adventure calls for a bigger river, a river of legend or a trip to the Bay beyond...
Perhaps more trees are required or you're at a point in your life where you've just had enough of trees and want nothing more to do with them!
Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway
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