Jan Kjaerstad - The Discoverer

They eventually managed to catch a peacock, a tortoiseshell and an admiral. This last had only just arrived in Norway from the south. Bo popped each insect into its own large glass jar with air holes in the lid. Ranged side by side in this way, they looked like parallel thoughts, Jonas thought. But the brimstone butterfly presented more of a problem; its primary flying season was probably over, Bo said; their only hope was to find a straggler. He studied the yellow notebook, with a worried frown. ‘Couldn’t we use a Camberwell beauty?’ Jonas asked. Bo glowered at him. ‘It has to be a gonepteryx rhamni, otherwise the whole thing’ll be ruined.’ It was Bo who taught Jonas never to make compromises.

At last, one day on a hillside just down from the dump behind the garages, Jonas spied a brimstone butterfly, as bright and conspicuous as a yellow Citroën tootling around on the slope. Jonas’s heart was pounding, he had never thought a fluttering yellow insect could make him feel so happy, so thrilled. He caught this wonderful creature in his net at the first attempt, and the ground seemed to tremble slightly, as if something were already starting to reveal itself.

In the afternoon they sat out on the balcony with their ham and mayonnaise sandwiches, contemplating the four different butterflies in their respective clear glass jam jars, as if they were looking at the key to some vital code. Bo had placed an orangeade top filled with sugared water in each jar. They observed the way the butterflies unrolled the probosces which at other times lay coiled like fire hoses under their heads — a real little fakir trick, this. Crouched down in front of the jars, examining the insects’ markings — the admiral’s reddish-orange bands, the blue spots on the peacock’s lower wings — Jonas sensed that they had an inherent potency, that they embodied tremendous forces, that collectively they were, in a way, dynamite. That they could be downright dangerous, were they to come into contact with one another. Bo studied the contents of each jar through a magnifying glass. ‘Perfect,’ he murmured, taking the pencil stub from behind his ear and scribbling down a sentence in the notebook. That pencil always seemed to Jonas to be sharp, although he never saw Bo sharpen it.

‘We’ll go tomorrow,’ Bo said. ‘That leaves just one question. What should we take with us?’

‘D’you mean like sandwiches and stuff?’

‘I was thinking of something to show the Vegans what we are. Who we are. What we believe in. So they won’t turn us away.’

For Jonas, this question was to be of much greater consequence than the expedition itself. Bo made it sound as though they could be killed on the spot if they did not come up with just the right things to take with them. Maybe that was why Bo talked more than usual that evening about his homeland. As they sat on the balcony surveying the holiday-quiet lawns and roads, as they sipped from their mini bottles of Cola through paper straws, Bo spoke, with a stronger American accent, about everything from cars with fins to the delights of candy floss — spun sugar on a stick; of grilled steaks as big as pancakes and machines with popcorn whirling around inside a glass box, and had Jonas ever heard of marshmallows? Bo scooted off and came back with a bag; Jonas sniffed that blissful aroma. Bo described the Chrysler building, waxed eloquent about Disneyland and hummed songs by Elvis, the king of them all. But above all else he told him about American television, which even had programmes in the middle of the day: game shows and quiz programmes and really great series, best of all Batman. From then on Jonas always thought it was nice to sit on the toilet at Bo’s place and consider what he ought to take with him, while feasting his eyes on the pictures on the wall of the American liners with ‘fjord’ in their names. In his imagination, these ships were breakaway fjords that had branched outwards.

The thought of Norwegian-American Bo Wang Lee crossed my mind several times during our visit to Fjærland. Although I was actually thinking more of the mass exodus from Norway to America in the nineteenth century. After Ireland, Norway was the one country in Europe which had sent the largest percentage of its population across the sea, and Sogn was one of the areas hardest hit by emigration; between thirty and forty thousand people were said to have left the hamlets and villages around the fjord. I have always been fascinated by the thought of another Sogn in the United States. By the possibility of a ‘Lærdal Association’ in Iowa. There is more than just one small town in Kansas called Norway, to some extent a whole Norway is contained within the USA. In that vast land there lies a hidden Norway, like an invisible, many-armed fjord. During their first years there, some enthusiasts even dreamt that ‘the spirit of Norway’ would come to form the backbone of the American nation. The reason such reflections should have been prompted by Fjærland, of all places, was, of course, that Walter Mondale, former vice president of the United States, had made several much publicised visits to the village of Mundal, home of his forebears. He had even had the honour of opening one of the long tunnels not far from where we were docked, just down from the lovely old Hotel Mundal, near the very head of the narrow Fjærlandsfjord which at this time of year had an otherwordly air about it, owing to the way the mineral particles washed down with the glacier water in the rivers refracted the light, lending a mystical green cast to the fjord.

The thought of America also gave me a sense of affinity, stronger than before, with Columbus. My discovery was, however, the result of journeying not outwards, but inwards, deeper and deeper into my native land. I was forever making new discoveries. It was almost too much sometimes. I did not see how we could possibly include even a fraction of all the possible subjects which presented themselves. What about the seals in Nærøyfjord? What about Balzac’s strange tale Séraphîta , set in a Norwegian fjord? What about Johann Christian Dahl; all the pictures he had painted of places around the fjord: ‘View of Fortundalen’, ‘Winter in Sogn’? What of all the old photographs by Wilse and Knudsen? What about the mass of information we had collected on bird reserves, wilderness museums and nature trails? There were times when I wondered whether we had bitten off more than we could chew, or whether the notion of converting Sognefjord into digital form was, in fact, both blasphemous and insurmountable.

Nevertheless, we endeavoured to make the most of every minute at each stop along the way, noting down thoughts and suggestions for a concept of this, the longest, and most beautiful fjord in the world; in just a few months we had to present the initial outline to our clients. Sometimes it felt as though the abundance of ideas would alter, or break the bounds of the very medium we meant to employ, and this in spite of the fact that it was a totally new medium, an unprecedented fusion of words, pictures, film, sound, architecture and design, of facts and storytelling. Were we already working towards something else, an as yet unconceived medium?

In any case, we had to choose what to take with us, which is to say: decide on the essentials. We tried to evade the issue, but it was brought home to us again and again: some sort of hierarchy was unavoidable. Certain things had to be accorded higher priority than others. A thought occurred to me: this was the all-eclipsing problem of our age, ethically and existentially, a dilemma we did not like to think about. For people today the difficulty lay both on the horizontal and the vertical plane. You could not take in everything, far less immerse yourself in everything. Maybe that was the main challenge of life, apart from meeting the primary needs: choosing what to take with you and which elements of this to concentrate on. For an individual living in the first years of a new millennium, it was more difficult to discard than to accumulate. It was a constant struggle for us. As far as I can remember it was at this stage that we discussed the possibility of restricting the menu to twenty-odd carefully selected headings or ‘links’, the main attractions, as it were. We knew that many consumers of our product would be short on time; what their senses first encountered was most definitely not immaterial. Every visitor to Sognefjord suffered the same agonies of indecision. You have three days. What should you see, visit? When the brain was seething with such questions as these it was a relief to resort to the saloon and dig your teeth into one of Martin’s pizzas with sardines and black olives.