Such Lofoten, much anticipation

You don't need a reason to visit Lofoten other than it's there. The jagged peaks shooting straight up out of the ocean and the bright red, white, and yellow fishing villages nestled along the crinkly shoreline speak for themselves.

I do have a reason beside the mere existence islands themselves: My dad loved this place. Among the photos he left behind is a trove from the late sixties; he and my mom first spent time there in '66, I think, maybe on their honeymoon.

Being a keen photographer — my dad didn't do anything half-assed once he decided to focus on it — the drama of the landscape and the changing weather appealed to him, as it does to photographers today. Lofoten isn't actually that far, and that different, from where he grew up, in Finnsnes. The archipelago, like its cousin islands Andøya and Senja to the north, is just more concentrated. It's the spriti of the northern Norwegian landscape, harsh and rugged, distilled.

At the time, tourism still wasn't much of a thing. That's since transformed the islands, but at the time these old fishing villages were a quiet backwater most of the world didn't even know existed. I must have been two or three the first times my parents took me there, too young to remember, but I can just barely make myself out next to my mom:

Two different tents, two trips, neither of which I recall. They must have made an impression, though, because I always just knew Lofoten had some sort of special significance. Can I claim to have roots? No, not really; having grown up in south-east Norway, I'm a søring, a somewhat dismissive term up north for us soft city-dwellers from down south.

My dad, did, though, and that's what counts. Never a religious man, this landscape was the closest he came to considering something sacred. Three or four more times we'd make the drive up there, the last time in, what was it, '84? '85? And those memories it is that I'm about to revisit, five hours away across Vestfjorden, today, June 29, 2019.

You always asked, dad, if I remembered. And I do. I remember those trips, dad, and we're coming back.