"I Dream of Lofoten" a Lofoten Travel Page by yooperprof

Sometimes my travel instinct - my travel "gut" - gives me odd instructions to visit a certain place. Before summer of 2002, I had never heard of Lofoten, but it suddenly became clearly pressing to me that I make a visit to these offshore Norwegian islands. Why? I couldn't really tell you. I don't have any Norwegian ancestry, I don't have any real interest in fish or fisheries, I certainly didn't know anyone in Lofoten. But I heard stories of the place from Norwegian friends, I saw photos of Lofoten in books and on VT, and I even started to have dreams of this place. It became a very important locus in my inner mindscape. Has that ever happened to you?

I think everyone has their own private "mythological geography": places where we act and re-enact our own psycho-traumatic dramas. (Maybe I'm a little more psycho-traumatic than most. . . .) Islands have always had a special place in my own "mythos" - places of simultaneous yearning and contentment. Ironic perhaps, in light of the fact that I grew up "in the heart of the heart of the country". Like Dorothy Gale, I'm a black-and-white Kansan in search of a technicolor paradise. No doubt about it: my "Oz" would certainly be on an island. Perhaps that's part of the attraction of Lofoten for me.

The rocky coast of Moskenesøya - the southernmost island of Lofoten - reminds me of some of the shoreline of Lake Superior close to where I live. In both places, the underlying rock strata is very very old - billions and billions of years. It's interesting how other minerals are embedded in the fundamental granite - here is a prominent streak of white rock that stretches visably a long distance. (My guidebook to Moskenesøya says that this is "white pegmatite" and was created during cataclysmic geologic events "about 500 billion years ago.")