Lofoten, late season

The ferry from Bodø left at 15:00 and arrived in Moskenes a little after 18:15, which meant the last hour of the crossing happened in a grey that could not decide whether it was weather or evening. There were maybe thirty of us on board. In July that boat carries campervans stacked like dominoes and a queue for the coffee machine; in the last week of September it carries a school group, two Dutch cyclists with wet panniers, and a man reading a paperback with his boots off. I had the whole upper deck to myself for twenty minutes and spent it watching the islands appear as a flat, uninteresting smudge, which is not what the postcards promise.

I had six days. It rained on four of them. Not dramatic rain — no wind that knocks you sideways, no lashing at the windows — just a steady, committed drizzle that starts before you wake and is still going when you give up in the afternoon. The forecast on my phone showed the same small cloud icon repeated in a row like a stutter, and I remember thinking that was almost funny on the first morning and much less funny by the third.

My cabin was a rorbu in Å, one of the red fishermen's huts on stilts over the water, converted for people like me who want to sleep somewhere with a story attached. Mine had a kitchen the size of a wardrobe, a heater that made a ticking sound at night, and a window facing straight into the harbour. The floor sloped a little towards the sea. I kept putting my coffee cup down and watching it drift half a centimetre to the left, which the owner told me was completely normal and had been that way since the sixties.

The drying racks were the thing I had come to see, though I would not have said so out loud. Great wooden frames standing in fields and along the shoreline, built for hanging cod, empty now — the fish come off in June and the racks stay up all year, bare and enormous, like the skeleton of a building nobody finished. In the rain they go almost black. I walked out to the ones near Sørvågen at about seven one morning and stood there for half an hour without taking a single frame, because the light was flat and the whole scene looked like a photograph of a photograph.

Then on the fourth day the sky opened for about ninety minutes. This is the thing about Lofoten in late September that nobody warns you about properly: the weather does not improve, it just pauses, and when it pauses the light is so specific and so low that everything looks slightly unreal. The mountains behind Reine went from grey lumps to something with edges. Water in the fjord turned a colour I would describe as green if I were being honest and turquoise if I were trying to sell you something. I got maybe a dozen frames I liked. Then the cloud came back down like a lid and that was that until Saturday.

I ate badly and happily. There is a bakery in Reine that opens at 08:00 and sells cinnamon buns roughly the size of a fist, and I bought one every morning without exception, sometimes two. Dinner was usually cod, because it would be strange to eat anything else there, though I did have a very average pizza in Leknes on the night I did not want to think. The supermarket in Ramberg closes at 20:00 and I misjudged this once, arriving at 20:06 to watch a woman lock the door and look at me with genuine sympathy.

The car broke down on Thursday, on the stretch between Ramberg and Flakstad, in — naturally — the rain. It did not do anything dramatic. The engine simply lost interest halfway up a small rise, the dashboard lit up in a way I have never seen a dashboard light up, and I coasted onto the gravel and sat there listening to the wipers. No signal. I had one bar for about four seconds and then nothing.

A man in a white van stopped after roughly fifteen minutes, which is a very short time to wait on a road where I had counted three cars in an hour. He was maybe sixty, wearing overalls, and he opened my bonnet before I had properly explained the problem. "You rented this in Svolvær," he said. It was not a question. I said yes. He made a small noise. "They keep these too long." He worked at something I could not see for a few minutes, told me to try the ignition, and it started. Then he told me it would probably do it again and I should not drive it after dark, and gave me a phone number written on the back of a receipt.

It did do it again, on Friday, outside my own cabin, which was the most considerate possible timing. The rental company sent a replacement the following afternoon and apologised in the flat, unbothered way of people who have done this before. I never learned the man's name. I have the receipt with the number on it in my notebook and I am fairly sure I will never call it.

What I keep thinking about is not the light between the storms, though that is what the photographs will show. It is how empty the roads were. In summer this place is a queue with a view. In late September you can stand in the middle of the E10 at half past six in the evening and hear nothing but water. I had expected that to feel peaceful. Mostly it felt like arriving somewhere after everyone has gone home and the chairs are already stacked — not unpleasant, just quiet in a way that made me want to phone someone.

I would go back at the same time. That is either a recommendation or a warning, and I have not decided which.