Yesterday, I sat at the dining table, looking out at the trees swaying in the breeze and the ranch down below. I was eating lunch, which consisted of a tin of smoked mackerel drizzled with Sriracha sauce and spears of cucumbers. I realized, just as I finished the herring, it was extremely similar to the lunch the day before. The previous day’s lunch was a tin of brisling sardines dressed up with my homemade jalapeño paste, a tomato cut in wedges, and cucumber spears. I asked myself, Who eats this sort of lunch with such frequency? Normally, that would have ended that; a rhetorical question posed in passing. But it did not. The question evolved from a rhetorical question into an interesting daydream.
Who would, day after day, sit and stare at the world outside his window while eating tins of smoked fish and munching on crisp vegetables? My answer, sprung from my imagination and complemented with a little internetical magic, was this: a Norwegian fisherman by the name of Kolbjørn Landvik, a man who kept to himself and had no family, except for his dog. He lived a solitary life on the Norwegian Sea in a tiny fishing village called Reine near the tip of the Lofoten Archipelago.
Kolbjørn died at sea, the victim of bad luck and drowning. He caught the heel of his boot in the anchor chain, just as he dropped the ninety pound piece of iron into icy cold water. The chain spun around his leg in an instant, so tight it drove links straight through his pants and into his flesh. He was alone on the boat, far from land. No one saw him dragged by that chain into the Norwegian sea. No one but his dog, Albrikt, missed him. No one thought of him for all these years until yesterday.
That’s when I realized a small piece of the universe that once was Kolbjørn found its way through the cosmos to me. In me. I do not mean that I am the reincarnation of Kolbjørn Landvik. Just molecules, microscopic bits and pieces of Kolbjørn ended up in me, purely by coincidence, out of the randomness of the universe.
We share just a few traits. The tendency to eat tins of fish and cucumbers for lunch. The penchant for staring out the window and letting the imagination run amok. Kolbjørn Landvik’s window, though, did not give him a view of trees and farmland.
His tiny cabin, right on the water, looked westward across Reinevågen Inlet. When he wasn’t fishing, he spent his time looking at the water, watching the birds, and painting. Dozens of oil paintings covered the walls; dozens more, stacked on their edges, filled boxes. Almost every day around noon, he sat at the worn wooden table beneath the row of windows across the front of the cabin, where he opened a tin of smoked fish. He pulled a cucumber from a cold-sack where he stored vegetables and sliced it with the pocket knife he kept in his fishing trousers. If he had crackers or bread, he might eat them, but it wasn’t necessary. Smoked fish and a crisp vegetable were perfectly satisfactory.
He left that cabin one morning in April 1921 and sailed his 31-foot mackerel boat north up the inlet, then south when he got to open water and, finally, west out into the Norwegian Sea. That was the last time anyone heard from, or about, Kolbjørn until yesterday, when his habits and his memories invaded my thoughts.
So, that’s where my lunchtime habit came from. Thank you, Kolbjørn Landvik, for enjoying a can of smoked fish for lunch. I might not be so grateful if you enjoyed eating raw frogs, instead.
