I look through the maritime maps. I have everything I need, I’ve sailed these waters before, so I quickly undo the mooring lines, start the engine, and leave Ringfjorden, gliding through silent, pitch-black water.

It’s as if I can feel the ice. The helm of Blue seems heavier under my hand, the distribution of weight is different, and it infiltrates my body, as if the locus of my own center of gravity had also shifted. It feels like the boat is lying low in the water, but that can’t be right—a couple hundred kilos is nothing compared to the boat’s 3.5 tons, it can’t be enough to produce this change.

Painful shocks tingle through my fingers, the warmth in them starting to return. I have put on gloves, thick knitted gloves, threadbare on the fingertips. It was Mom who knitted them, she struggled for months with these gloves. I can’t remember her ever knitting anything else. They are water and wind resistant; wool keeps you warm even when it’s wet.

I put my foot carefully on the throttle and press it slowly toward the floor, letting the engine run at the highest rotational speed I think it will withstand. I don’t raise the sail. I make do with the engine, the iron sail. The night is calm, the ocean lustrous, but nonetheless I must get away quickly, before somebody discovers what I have done.

The mountains flatten out as I approach the ocean. I remember this fjord being long, the trip out taking an eternity. It was almost meaningless to try to make it all the way to open sea, too much for one day, I remember thinking, even though that was also all I wanted, to get out.

For some people the mountains are a security blanket. They wrap themselves up in them, pull them over their heads, to hold them in place. Magnus was like that, they made him feel calm, he said. I never understood how he could think like that, because they loomed over me. I could feel their presence even when I was a child, the heaviness, the weight of them.

That feeling only released its grip at higher elevations. Daddy used to take me up into the mountains, ever since I was small, just he and I, to the glacier, to the Sister Falls—and up there I could breathe, together with him.

Had it been up to me, we would have gone hiking every day, Daddy and I. He stopped all the time to show me plants, insects, or animals, point out small things on the ground, or birds, no more than specks way up in the sky, which I never would have noticed without his help.

We often followed the river up to the mountain.

He loved the River Breio—that was what had brought him here. He came to Ringfjorden as a young student. He was going to write a long dissertation about the freshwater pearl mussel, Margaritifera margaritifera, an unassuming small species that lived partially hidden between stones and gravel at the bottom of the river. He told me that the larvae pass through a parasitic juvenile phase, maturing in the gills and fins of salmon and trout, while the adult mussel filter-feeds on microorganisms and in this way also cleans the river for everything in the surrounding environment.