FISHMINGLING

LOFOTEN ARCHIPELAGO, NORTHERN NORWAY

We’re here to photograph seascapes and frostscapes. In the off-season when they’re less famous.

April low light lights up the sea, beach and sky, making them bluer, blonder, purpler. The setting sun irradiates a blizzard’s swirling flakes against dusk-faint northern lights.

People are also here to surf arctic waters warmed by the warming Gulf Stream. How coolly the surfers dance over snow to catch a wave.

Alpine maritime arctic: an alluring mix. Most affecting are the fishscapes. Racks upon racks of drying cod. In numbers sublimely olfactory. From half these racks hang heads with tongues, great delicacies, cut out. From the other half hang beheaded bodies. Oh. The stench and stare.

Local photographer, Kjell Ove, proudly assures us that all of the fish is used. Parts not eaten by humans are fed to animals or dug into the soil.

The world’s largest cod stock is a wild seafaring animal. Norwegian Arctic Cod or Skrei (“to move onward” in Old Norse) migrate between Lofoten and the Barents Sea. Since the Vikings, fishers have been dipping their nets in the flow and making lucrative hauls. Today they supply a growing global market, while strictly limiting their catch to sustainable levels. With the warming are the skrei dying? If anything, I'm told, the fish are getting bigger. Where once was sea ice, there’s now greenery for grazing.

North Sea oil made Norway a global energy-broker. But Lofoten islanders still value their wealth in fish. It’s not in oil, they say, but “in cod we trust.”