I’m back now. Blåfonna, the glacier that once was ours, has forced me to return. There is no wind when I reach Ringfjorden. I am obliged to use the engine to travel the final stretch, and the clattering sound drowns out everything else. Blue glides through the water and leaves only small ripples in its wake.

I can never forget this landscape. “It has created you, Signe,” Magnus once said. He meant it had imprinted itself in me, the way I walk with my legs slightly bent, as if I were always confronting a hill. Nonetheless I am surprised now when I see it again: the summits, the falls, the vertical meeting the horizontal.

People travel here from far away to see this landscape and find the sight to be “beautiful, fantastic, amazing.” They stand on ship decks as large as football fields while enormous diesel engines spew out exhaust fumes. They stand there and point and gaze at the clear blue water, the bluish-green hillsides where fragile houses cling tightly to forty-five-degree-angle slopes. More than one thousand meters above them are the mountains, the earth’s stripped, sharp edges, breaking against the sky, with a sprinkling of white that the tourists love. “Wow, it’s snow,” they say, whether it’s winter or summer.

But the tourists don’t see the Sister Falls or Sønstebø’s summer farm on the mountain. They have long since disappeared. They can’t see the River Breio, which was the very first to go, before the ships arrived, long before the Americans and Japanese came with their telephones and cameras and telephoto lenses. The pipes are concealed underground, and the damage inflicted on the wildlife by the excavation work has slowly been concealed by vegetation.

I stand there with the tiller in my hand, moving slowly as I approach the village. I pass the power plant, a huge concrete building all by itself down by the water. It is heavy and dark—a monument to the dead river and waterfall. From there the cables stretch out in all directions, some of them cross over the fjord. They have even received permission for that.

The engine drowns out everything, but I remember the sound of the power lines, the soft humming, in wet weather, water against electricity, a crackling. It has always given me goose bumps, especially in darkness, when you can see how it sparks.

All four of the moorings for visitors at the wharf are vacant. It’s too early for tourists—the moorings are used only in the summertime, so I can take my pick. I choose the spot farthest out, mooring the craft astern and at the bow and put out a spring line to be on the safe side; the wind from the west could blow up without any warning. As I pull the throttle control completely astern, I can hear the reluctant gasps of the engine shutting down. I close the hatch to the saloon and place the bunch of keys in the breast pocket of my parka. The key ring is a big cork ball that ensures it will float—it produces a small bulge over my stomach.