Nusfjord, and Learning to Wait

Nusfjord has eleven year-round residents and one of the best-preserved rorbu harbours in Norway, which means in summer it has approximately eleven thousand. In February it has us and a man mending a door.

The cod-liver oil factory is open. It smells, precisely and unmistakably, of 1890.

We had come for the light and there was none — a flat grey lid all day, the kind that makes the sea and the sky the same object. So we sat in the car and waited, and at ten past two the lid cracked open over Vestfjorden for maybe six minutes.

Six minutes is plenty. That's the whole lesson of this island in winter.