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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.