Unstoppable but not happy. There are people who live their entire lives with a glint in their eyes. They move slowly, walk securely through the world, able to take pleasure in a nice meal, an evening spent with good friends, a hike in the woods with people they care about. They collect such experiences, carry them inside them, and turn to them when life turns against them. They cling to them, use them, warm themselves on them. I think this ability must be innate, genetic, like a talent for numbers or words.

But I was happy up there. I remember that I was happy. We set up camp at the end of the access road up in the mountains, 1,100 meters above sea level, where according to the plans the new dam was going to be built. But there would be no dam, no tunnel, no pipeline down to the power plant, we thought, because every day more demonstrators joined us, soon we were more than five hundred. Mostly young people, even some children joined us, because it was summertime and school was out and the children roamed about as if they were attending an unusual kind of summer camp.

The tents, all of them low mountain tents designed for conditions such as this, were scattered across a large stony area. The weather was rough up there, so far above sea level, and it rained often, because the area was located where the clouds from the ocean met the mountains. But it made little difference to us.

The days were long—there were many hours of daylight—and we shared everything: stories, food, coffee, cigarettes, and engagement. We gathered around a huge bonfire in the evenings, filled the silence of the mountain with singing and reading letters and newspaper articles out loud. Everything that came to us, everything that was about us, we read. Every day we received declarations of support in the form of letters, newspapers, and food, all of it airlifted to us from light aircraft. All these things were signals letting us know that we were being noticed, that we were taking part in something historic. Never before had the Norwegian struggle to protect the environment found expression in a demonstration like this. And best of all: our protests were reverberating beyond the borders of Norway, because soon Swedish, Danish, and even German newspapers were writing about the demonstration.

I have never felt as much at home anywhere as I did up there and I hoped it would last forever. But the memories didn’t turn into something I could warm myself on, because soon it would all come to an end, along with the rest of my life as I knew it.