Oh, to sail in a boat through the forest! To swim among the trees! Now that would be something.
We sometimes used to drive to the far side of the island when the weather was good, park the car on the old shooting range, and walk down to the sea-smoothed rocks, our regular spot, not so far from Spornes beach, where of course I would have preferred to be, as there was sand and I could wade out to a depth that suited me. By the rocks the water was immediately very deep. There was, however, a little inlet, a kind of narrow cleft that filled up with water, which you could climb down into, where you could swim, but it was small and the sea bottom was uneven, covered with barnacles, seaweed, and shells. The waves beat against the rocks outside, causing the water to rise inside, sometimes up to your neck, and the Styrofoam floats on the life jacket I wore were lifted up to my ears. The sheer walls amplified the gurgling and slopping of the water, making them somehow sound hollow. Terrified, I would stand there, suddenly incapable of drawing breath in any other way than with great, shuddering gasps. It was just as creepy when the waves receded and the water level inside sank with a slurp. When the sea was calm, Dad would sometimes inflate the yellow-and-green raft, which I was allowed to lie on and float close to the shore, where, with my bare front stuck to the wet plastic and my back hot and dry from the burning sun, I would splash around, paddling with my hands in the water, which was so fresh and salty, watching the seaweed languidly sway to and fro along the rocks it was attached to, looking for fish or crabs or following a boat on the horizon. In the afternoon the Danish ferry came in, we could see it in the distance when we arrived, and it would be in the Galtesund strait when we left, white, enormous, towering above the low islands and reefs. Was it MS Venus? Or was it Christian IV? Kids all along the southern and western sides of the island, and presumably also the kids living on the other side of Galte Sound, on the, for us, foreign island of Hisøya, would go swimming when it came because its wake was immense and notorious. One afternoon, as I was paddling around on the raft, the sudden waves made me sit up and I toppled into the water. I sank like a stone. The water would have been about three meters deep there. I thrashed around with my arms and legs, shouted in panic, swallowed water, which only increased my fear, but it didn’t last more than twenty seconds because Dad had seen everything. He dived in and dragged me to the shore. I regurgitated some water, I was very cold, and we went home. I hadn’t been in any real danger and the incident had no lasting effect, except to leave me with the feeling I had as I walked up the hill to tell Geir what had happened: the world was something I walked on top of, it was impenetrable and hard, it was impossible to sink through it, no matter if it rose in steep mountains or fell in deep valleys. Of course I had known it was like that, but I had never felt it before, the sense that we were walking on a surface.
Despite this incident and the unease I could occasionally feel when I was paddling in the narrow inlet, I always looked forward to these trips. Sitting on a towel beside Yngve and scanning the light-blue, mirror-glass sea that only ended on the horizon, where big ships glided slowly past like hour hands, or looking at the two lighthouses on Torungen, the white a sharp contrast with the bright blue sky: not much was better than that. Drinking pop that had been in the red-checked cooler bag, eating cookies, perhaps watching Dad as he walked to the edge of the rocks, tanned and muscular, and dived into the sea two meters below a second later. The way he shook his head and stroked back the hair from his eyes when he emerged, the rush of bubbles around him, a rare gleam of pleasure in his eyes as he swam to shore with those slow, ponderous lunges of his arms, his body bobbing up and down in the swell. Or walking to the two sinkholes nearby, one a man’s depth with distinct spiral marks in the rock on the way down, filled with salty seawater, covered by green sea plants and at the bottom clusters of seaweed, the second less deep but no less beautiful for that. Or up to the shallow, extremely salty, hot pools that filled the hollows in the rock, refreshed only when there were storms, the surface thick with tiny, swirling insects and the bottom bedecked with yellow, sickly-looking algae.
On one such day Dad decided to teach me how to swim. He told me to follow him down to the water’s edge. Perhaps half a meter below the surface, a small, slippery ridge overgrown with seaweed jutted into the sea, and that was where I was to stand. Dad swam out to a reef four or five meters from the shore. And turned to face me.
“Now you swim over here to me,” he said.
“But it’s deep!” I said. Because it was, the seabed between the two reefs was barely visible, it was probably three meters down.
“I’m here, Karl Ove. Don’t you think I could rescue you if you sank? Come on, swim. It’s not in the slightest bit dangerous! I know you can do it. Launch yourself and do the strokes. If you do that you can swim, you know! Then you can swim!”
I crouched down in the water.
The seabed was a greenish glimmer a long way down. Would I be able to float over that?
My heart only beat this hard when I was frightened.
“I can’t,” I shouted.
“Course you can!” Dad shouted back. “It’s so easy! Just push off, do a couple of strokes, and you’ll be here.”
“I can’t!” I said.
He studied me. Then he sighed and swam over.
“OK,” he said. “I’ll swim beside you. I can hold a hand under your tummy. Then you can’t sink!”
But I couldn’t do it. Why didn’t he understand?
I started to cry.
“I can’t,” I said.
The depth of the water was in my head and in my chest. The depth was in my arms and legs, in my fingers and toes. The depth filled all of me. Was I supposed to be able to think that away?
There weren’t any more smiles to be seen now. With a stern expression he clambered onto the land, walked over to our things, and returned with my life jacket.
“Put this on then,” he said, throwing it to me. “Now you can’t sink even if you tried.”
I put it on, even though I knew it didn’t change anything.
He swam out again. Turned to face me.
“Try now!” he said. “Over here to me!”
I crouched down. The water washed over my trunks. I stretched my arms under the water.
“That’s the way!” Dad said.
All I had to do was push off, do a few strokes, and it would all be over.
But I couldn’t. I would never ever be able to swim across that deep water. Tears were rolling down my cheeks.
“Come on, boy!” Dad shouted. “We haven’t got all day!”
“I CAN’T!” I shouted back. “CAN’T YOU HEAR?”
He stiffened and glared at me, his eyes furious.
“Are you being belligerent?” he said.
“No,” I answered, unable to suppress a sob. My arms were shaking.
He swam over and took a firm grip of my arm.
“Come here,” he said. He tried to tow me out. I twisted my body toward the shore.
“I don’t want to!” I said.
He let go and took a deep breath.
“You don’t say,” he said. “We know that much.”
Then he went to where we had left our clothes, lifted the towel with both hands, and rubbed his face. I took off the life jacket and followed him, stopping a few meters away. He raised one arm and dried underneath, then the other. Bent forward and dried his thighs. Threw the towel down, picked up his shirt, and buttoned it while surveying the perfectly calm sea. Then he pulled on a pair of socks and stuck his feet in his shoes. They were brown leather shoes without laces, which matched neither the socks nor his bathing trunks.