Here at home—do I really still call it home? I can’t fathom it, after having been away for almost forty years—no, soon fifty years. I came home only to clean up after a death in the family, to grieve the compulsory five days after the funerals, first my mother’s, then my father’s. A total of ten days is all the time I have spent here during all these years. I have two brothers here, half brothers, but I hardly ever speak with them. They are my mother’s boys.

I lean my head against the bus window, look at the changes. The area is more built up, the buildings closer together; a new construction project consisting of white prefabricated houses with small windows clings tenaciously to the hillside. The bus passes the indoor swimming pool. It has a new roof and there is a big blue sign at the entrance: Ringfjord–Water Fun. Everything sounds better in English.

The bus climbs upward, inland, and a couple of the young people get off at the construction site at the top, but most of them remain seated. We ascend, the road changes, narrows, becomes full of potholes, at almost the exact same time we drive into the neighboring municipality. This is where most of the young people get off. Apparently they still don’t have a high school out here, still don’t have an indoor swimming pool, here in the town of Eidesdalen, the little brother, the loser.

I get off with the last of the young people, stroll slowly through the center of the village. It is even smaller than I remember. The general store has been shut down. While Ringfjorden has grown, Eidesdalen is a fraction of its original size. But it’s not for Eidesdalen’s sake that I have come today, I can’t cry for Eidesdalen anymore—that battle is over, it ended many, many years ago. It is now the ice that has brought me here, Blåfonna. I take the dirt road leading to the mountain.

Even the national newspapers write about it. I have read the articles again and again and can hardly believe the words. They are extracting ice from the glacier, pure, white ice from Norway, and marketing it as the most exclusive ingredient: to be put in a drink, a floating mini-iceberg, surrounded by golden liquor. But not for Norwegian customers, no—it is for those who have really deep pockets. The ice is to be shipped to desert nations, the homes of oil sheiks, and there it will be sold as if it were gold, white gold, to the wealthiest of the wealthy.

It starts snowing, winter’s final spasm, April’s way of thumbing its nose, as I climb toward the mountain. There are little pools of frozen water on the road, rimmed with crystals. I put my foot down against the thin surface ice covering a small puddle, shatter it, hear it break—but it’s no fun any longer, not the way it once was.

I grow short of breath. It’s steep and farther than I remember.