Bardufoss

As the days get shorter, I’m always reminded of a trip I made to Bardufoss, Norway. The trip itself was an interesting one. We picked up a company of army reservists from Augusta, Georgia (the closest I’ve ever gotten to The Masters) who were deploying for several weeks of winter warfare training in northern Norway, above the Artic Circle. It was March, which doesn’t sound like winter, but Bardufoss is surrounded by mountains, it sits at the end of a fjord, actually, way up in the very northern part of Scandinavia where Norway, Sweden, and Finland all come together. It may have been March, but it definitely was still winter.

Since it was March, the days were fairly long, close to the 12 hours a day of daylight that the entire world experiences at the spring equinox. But I was curious what it was like to live in Bardufoss in the winter and summer since I knew it had to have several days of total darkness each winter and an equal number of midnight sun days in the summer: The Artic Circle is the line of latitude, North 66 degrees, 33 minutes and 39 seconds, that experiences one day of total darkness and total daylight per year. Bardufoss was above that at North 69 degrees 3 minutes and 21 seconds, so it had to have at least one full day of light and darkness each year; I didn’t know exactly how many such days they would have two and half degrees or so above the Artic Circle, but guessed three or four.

What really made it interesting to me was that Bardufoss otherwise seemed like a perfectly ordinary Norwegian village. I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, not igloos for sure, but maybe something more like Greenland or Labrador—something very basic and utilitarian. But it wasn’t. There was a pizza shop and a video store and a nice hotel, the one we stayed in, and the houses were very attractive, modern Scandinavian homes. The kids ran around outside after school dressed in standard European/American outdoor gear with colorful Norwegian touches. We could have been in Minnesota. All very prosperous, clean and healthy. Yet these people lived for a long time with very short days, including several non days each year, and also for a long time with almost no nights, including several when the sun never fully set.

So I cornered the handler—the local agent assigned to handle our flight the next day, I think we went on to Ramstein Air Base in Germany—and asked him how many days a year they had of total darkness in Bardufoss.

“Days?” he said.

“Yah, how many days of total darkness do you have here each year?”

“It’s more like months,” he said.

“Months?” I said. But you’re only a few degrees above the Arctic Circle.”

“That may be, he said, “but the mountains block out the light for several hours after sunrise and before sunset, and even with the sun not completely setting we don’t see it here. It’s dark for months here in the winter.”

“But,” I said, “here we are in March with 12 hours of daylight and just a short while ago it was completely dark. That’s a lot of change.”

“Yes,” he said, “the length of the day changes by about 10 minutes every day, longer or shorter. You notice a difference from one day to another.”

“So what’s it like to live like that?” I asked.

“It’s just the way it is,” he said.

We didn’t get into Daylight Saving Time. It didn’t seem appropriate.