365 True Things: 96/Light (7/2/15)

Last night and two nights before, we stayed at a lodge (fjellstove) on a lake at Halne, on the Hardangervidda (Hardanger Plateau). Our first night there, the sky was gray, and the lake looked forbidding (see 6/29 post for photo). It defied us to enter that barren landscape.

Which we did nevertheless the next day, taking a 12 km hike to a hut at a place called Tuva. The day ended up beautiful—though the way was sometimes pretty sloshy, what with all the melting snow. The next day, too, on our hike out, was beautiful: a bright blue sky, temperatures in the 70s thanks to a warm wind out of Spain. The biggest danger, after we realized we wouldn't drown in any of the burbling streams, was burning to a crisp.

Yesterday we arrived back at the fjellstove and were struck by the beauty of the lake across the road, now under brilliant sunshine. It's a big lake, and normally at this time of year it would be free of ice and supporting a vigorous boat-going tourist trade. Not this year, though. It will be at least three weeks before summer officially arrives here.

A few hours later—at about 10:30—we were playing cards, and we noticed that the colors of the lake had flipflopped: the snow was now blue, the open water was white. The almost-full moon was just rising—and this brought an analytical discussion of the tilt of the earth, the orbit of the moon, the meaning of the tropics: all to arrive at the fact that, the moon doesn't move very high in the sky during the summer when you're really far north. Or stay up all that long. It's the equivalent of the moon's winter. Or something.

Thinking about the moon and sun was interesting, but what really struck me was the change in colors.

It reminded me of an art class I took at our local community college, all about color. One of our assignments was to go to the same place at three times of day and paint it. We were also to draw a pencil sketch and, for each time of day, cut little snips of paper from a pack of Color-Aid paper swatches—220 gradations mixing hue, tint, and shade—to match various aspects of the scene in question. I went to the frog pond a half-mile away, and I remember being astonished at how different the greens of a single tree were morning, noon, and late afternoon, as I held up sheets of Color-Aid paper and tried to get the best match.

The last few days looking at the Halne lake were another lesson in the magic of color. And they almost made me want to pick up my paints again and try to see in another way than with a camera.

Though the camera worked in this case pretty well. You can see the flip of the colors. And oh, that beautiful, gently ascending moon!