Our First Glimpse of Hugla

Like the migrating cod he once pursued off the deep banks of the Lofoten Islands, the old Norwegian emigrant was returning to his spawning grounds.

We had just boarded a car ferry that would carry us on a short ride north from Levang to Nesna, a small coastal town forty kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. En route, we would pass Hugla, the island where my grandfather was born and raised.

As our boat pulled away from the dock, John Nickoli made his way to the forward deck, where he stood with his hands on the railing in mounting anticipation. A brisk afternoon breeze tilted his hat and ruffled the waters, stirring up the nostalgic scent of salty sea air. The old man knew these surroundings well. It was here that he was taught to fish from an open boat with hand lines and nets. On these waters, he learned how to pull an oar and tack into the wind. The memories so clear, it seemed like only yesterday he left his island home for America.

As we entered the strait that separated my grandfather’s island from the mainland, I had an overwhelming sense of dejá vu. For years, a oil painting by F. Mason Holmes, an American artist (1865-1963) hung on the living room wall of my grandparent’s home. Inspired by an old picture postcard, it was a colorful landscape painting of Nesna, surrounded by water with the islands Tomma, Handnesoya, and Hugla looming in the distance.

Hidden within the canvas were the many bedtime stories I had heard from my grandfather about his life as a young Norwegian boy growing up in the “land of the midnight sun.” There were old Norwegian fables as well, told as if they actually occurred in the setting of his island. I had one particular favorite tale that I would beg him to repeat every night before drifting off to sleep. Now years later, I found myself looking at the very island that I once imagined was the stomping grounds of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” Hiding underneath the bridge, on the trail leading up to the summer meadows, was sure to be a hunched-back, beady-eyed troll.

As depicted in the painting, Mount Huggeltind rose steeply to the height of two thousand feet above Hugla’s southern shore. Further north, my grandfather’s ancestral farm sat at the base of the mountain on a fertile alluvial fan.

As I watched my grandfather looking out on these familiar surroundings, I wondered what memories were swirling through his mind. Was he thinking about his parents and the sister he never saw again after leaving for America? Did this long June day bring back memories of laughter and songs around shoreline bon res that flickered into the dawn on Midsummer’s Night Eve? Could he once again feel the chill of endless winter nights when the sun never rose above the horizon? Did he have any sympathy for the camouflaged ptarmigan and arctic hare that he shot with his .22 rifle as a young boy? The targets, he had told me, were so difficult to spot because their color transitioned from brown in the summer to white with the first winter snow. Gazing at the high point of the mountain, I pictured my grandfather standing there as a thirteen-year-old boy, looking down on his hero, Fridtjof Nansen, sailing north on his ship, the Fram, in a daring attempt to reach the North Pole.

From the ferry landing at Nesna, it was a short ride to a small hotel where we would spend the night. On the way, we passed the quintessential, white Lutheran church that served as the focal point of my grandfather’s oil painting. We learned that it had been built in 1880, the year John Nickoli was born. Perhaps that explains his loyalty to the Lutheran Church on the corner of his brother’s farm in Lakewood.