Could Someone Please Hit the Light Switch

These leather chairs are comfortable, but not as comfortable as the van would have been, had we been allowed to stay there. We almost did stay actually, locked in for five hours while we rocked our way across the waves to the island of Rost. John caught me just in time! The announcement in Norwegian that all passengers must leave the car deck meant nothing to us and I pulled down the bed, fluffed up the pillows and laid down. With the curtains drawn, it was almost dark in there. Darker at least than I'd seen it in almost two weeks.

They say that to acclimate your body to the twenty four hours of daylight here you should start drawing the curtains around 8 or 9 at night. Then slowly start to draw more of them as bed time approaches. We have five curtains. Which ones do we close first? No one curtain seems to makes any difference in darkness so we pull them all. Then we turn on the fluorescent light. At least it gives the illusion that it's dark enough outside to need it.

Getting to sleep in the light hasn't been easy. We've propped pillows against cracks where the curtains don't quite come together; we've stuck cereal box cartons against sunroof; we've hung sweatshirts from the windows to blot out a still-visible ray of sunlight so that maybe, just maybe we could fall asleep. Anyone looking in would think we keep a very messy house.

We can make very little distinction between mornings and evenings. (We pull back the curtains and lo, the world hasn't appeared to change.) So when darkness presented itself to me on the lower deck of the ferry, I jumped at it.

Alas, I was discovered; so here I am, hanging out in the cafeteria, soaking in more of this endless vitamin D, trying to sleep with a glove draped over my eyes. They have cures for people who don't get enough sun. Do they have the same for those who get too much?

People who get more sun have more energy. We heard that on the radio yesterday. That may be true. John and I have been going and doing and doing and going. But it's beginning to catch up with us now. We are craving darkness. Of course I can't imagine endless hours of dark, which is what the people who live here face every winter. "It's not really black out," one man told us. "There is a blueness to the atmosphere." And of course there are the Northern lights which at least on the postcards look spectacular. But even with two full months of darkness, Norway's North still sees a lot of light. According to one brochure I read, those blues and green lights of the Arora Borealis, added to the 1440 hours of direct light from the midnight sun, the daylight during the rest of the year and the moonlight give that area more total light a year than the equator. Seems we can't get away from it.

Lights!