When I was sitting in the mess of the accompanying ship ‘Cable One’ yesterday evening, listening to the talk about the plans for the Sea Stallion’s onward journey, a childhood memory came into my head.
While the weather forecasts and sea charts were being studied, I looked over the skipper’s head and fixed my gaze on the chart on the table in front of him.
My eyes wandered backwards and forewards. From the west coast of Norway across the North Sea and back again. It stopped at last, however, at the waters before the Sea Stallion’s present position. Two words. No more were necessary. Two words and I was carried back 30 years in time. To lazy Sundays in my room in a farm in Hjermind just north of Bjerringbro. To a grey Bang & Olufsen transitor radio with a bent telescopic aerial. To a droning female voice reading the marine forecast for me in the radio.
I don’t know why I listened to the voice. I cannot explain why I tuned in to the marine forecasts. As far as I know, it is not possible to point to a single fisherman in my family, nor even a sailor.There was nevertheless something mystically alluring with the marine forecasts in the Danish Radio.
The most peculiar thing, perhaps, is that there was one name in particular that enchanted a small boy in Central Jutland: namely Sydlige (southern) Utsira.
“North-west... 15... visibility moderate".
Today I cannot repeat the precise words exactly but as I recall it, a report could sound something like: “Sydlige Utsira... North-west veering to west...15... visibility moderate”. From there the female voice droned on with the forecasts for other waters. Fladen, Dogger Banke, Munkegrund... but for me none was surrounded with such mystery as Sydlige Utsira. Now I think that it was probably the name that made me prick up my ears. As a child I was mad on drawing maps. Not maps of known landscapes. No, maps of lands, landscapes and waters that I imagined. That only existed on my pad of paper and in my fantasy. With mountains, towns, continents, islands and frontiers that gradually grew out of the pen’s meeting with the paper. And as the fantasy countries took shape, they also acquired a form of cultural identity; historical events, wars, confederations, trade and raw materials and all that goes to make up a nation.
Who knows? The mystical ‘Sydlige Utsira’ can have been the high-octane fuel in a rather timorous boy’s fantasy motor. If the real world causes difficulties, it can be a good idea to place one’s own secure world on the drawing board with pen and paper. Fra fantasy to reality.
Yesterday evening I kept saying the name Utsira to myself. To this very day I think that it tastes of unknown fairy stories. As though it came from J. R. R. Tolkien’s universe. Or Alice in Wonderland.
But ‘Sydlige Utsira’ is reality. And I am here together with the Sea Stallion. And even better, I shall be sailing through these very waters on our way from the south-west coast of Norway to northern Scotland.
This windblown corridor across the sea, where the North Sea becomes the Atlantic Ocean. Where the wind howls, the rain lashes one’s face and the sea is choppy. Where fishermen for centuries have earned their living by hard work and still do so. Where the oil industry is in clover.
I have heard that there is a wind-swept island out there: Utsira. While I am sitting here in Spangereid trapped by the lack of wind and daylong rain, I begin to dream that it might be possible for us to visit the island or at least sail by it on our way to the Orkney islands and northern Scotland. And to imbibe the impression of nature when it is harsh, rough and commanding respect. And the ‘revisitation’ of a childhood memory.