I am in the train riding from Oslo to Stavangar, Norway, on my way to visit my friend Steve and his wife Anna and son Joshua. The train takes about eight hours total, with the half-way point being Kristiansand. It seems that not many folks are interested in going on to Stavangar that day and when we pull in to Kristiansand, the car I am in empties completely. I see an old man standing with a cane on the platform. He slowly climbs into the train and appears at the door of the car I am in, he slowly seats himself maybe ten rows ahead of me. All the seats in the car are facing the same direction, backwards to the direction of travel. I am seated at one end of the car, my back to the wall. I can see the back of his head barely protruding above the seat-back towards the other end of the car. The train pulls out: another four hours of rather pleasant scenery and winding motion ahead before we arrive in Stavangar. I am immersed in the motion and virtual landscape passing my eyes. Quite some time passes. An hour or more. I am no longer aware of the presence of the old man any more when suddenly a voice in English says, “Come, we must not be as two animals, we must speak!” He has not turned around. I am stunned, feeling both ashamed and curious and almost afraid. I stand up and walk to his seat and sit down next to him. We speak. He tells me many stories of his life on a small island near Haugesund in the west-coast fjords of Norway. He never tells me directly, but he is clearly sick, and I believe he is going home to die. He speaks of the rune-stone ring that is near his house on the island, of the Nazi occupation, of the storms which sweep in off the savage North Atlantic. He tells me of one night when an especially intense storm was raging and he was awakened by something, he did not know what. He felt compelled to go to the stone ring. He lit a naked candle and walked out into the storm to the ring, and stood at the center for a time. The candle was never extinguished by the wind and rain.
I don’t recall what happened when we arrived in Stavangar. I did get his address and his name, Peder O. Dahl — he was a photography teacher — and sent him a postcard some weeks later thanking him for our dialogue. I never heard back from him. I spent a few days with Steve, Anna, and Joshua before returning to Germany again via Oslo and another warm visit with Janine.