Sparstadstolen part 1: the cheese, milk, and a place of power

Synesthesia a natural state from which we’ve been divorced.

I want to experiement with a slightly different type of linguistic sculpture that weaves tasting notes and thoughts about the origins of flavor with surrealist musings on the magical quality of immediate sensory impressions.  Our senses can lead to many types experiences, and the most enriching for me happen when I can minimize the domineering primacy of my brain. Rules of grammar will be broken.  Leaving rational thought on the shore, I paddle the boat which is this story out onto the deep, murky waters.  And there are enchanted, supernatural beings lurking in the depths, if you have the eyes, ears, and heart to sense them. 

Katharina sits on a goat hide while looking into the enchanted hills above Sparstadstolen, and hand churning butter.

The road flattened as we entered a hanging valley, the glacial carved sidewalls dissolving into ominous mists. My mind imagines the peaks shrouded there.  “Is that mist, clouds, or fog?” I asked myself, or anyone else who was listening.  A hard call to make sometimes, in the mountains of Norway, where the air can be as thick as pancake batter.   Through a cattle gate….beyond the threshold.   As we climbed above this water/air emulsion, a small collection of red houses and barns materialized ahead.  Sparstadstolen .  We drove past these houses, and got to the end of the road.  Looking back, we saw our host Katharina waving from one of the houses we had passed. “Is this a fantasy?” I asked myself, seriously.  Something felt off, vibes of a dream rather than waking state. Strange energy, mythopoetic vibes.  “Are these real people, or am I imagining this? Is this a trick of supernatural beings?”

The colorful Caprine crew on their daily jaunts to browse in the unfenced hills.

The landscape was unrealistically scenic. I doubted what my eyes and ears perceived.  The place was too still.  Calm in a spooky way.  Some places have power, I have alway said.  This is one of those places.  You may think this is delusion.  And you may be right.  But you may be wrong. Your coherent worldview may be a comforting collective illusion.  Like mine.  Maybe we are both wrong, and the truth stranger than can be imagined.

Something creamy, lurking in the cauldron. The seas of cheese perhaps?

We sat down to a simple dinner of resuscitated leftovers.  Rice given new life with some vegetables and ground beef from a retired dairy cow.  My favorite kind of beer: a tall cold one.  A block of cheese that is made here which I sampled first, my palate sharpened by hunger.   I knew at first glance that I would like it. Cracked and imperfect, a yellow/red rind with blue mold valleys, white geo hillsides.  It is a rugged wheel made from cow milk with a small dose of goat.  Raw, naturally. The smell seconded the motion of my eyes; yeasty, with malty aromas I associate with a less controlled fermentation of milk.  I cut a slice and placed it in the proper recepticle.  Onomatopoeia from a superhero cartoon bubbled in my brain.  Pow.  Blammo.  Zah. No need for proper words…….. but I will humor our linguistically fixated minds.

The wonderfully defective wheels of Toma de Sparstadstolen.

The cheese was very unlike any I had tried 3 weeks into this tour of Norway.  I had tasted very good stuff, but this was more feral. Unruly. A statement of resistance.  A cheese from another realm, above the clouds, outside of time.  My mind always wants to categorize, and compare the cheese in front of me to others I have tried.  “Non-academic cross-cultural-comparison and playful-rather-than-serious sensory-evaluation of fermented dairy products” is a good description of what I do.  This cheese reminds me of those made in the Italian Alps near France and Switzerland.  Val D’aosta, or adjacent areas of Piedmonte.  Rustic wheels like Maccagno, Plaisentif, or Toma del Lait Brusc.  I sensed a familiar range of flavors in this Toma de Sparstadstolen: beef broth, root vegetables, apple/pear, organ meat, and a substantial bitterness.  These are wrapped in a blanket of cooked sour milk and butter; kissed with yeasty, kefir lined lips.  A lot was going on.  I brought a big chunk of it when I left, but it doesn’t taste the same anymore.  The enchantment of that night has passed. Coming down, out of the clouds, back to the dull world of solid land, 5G and power lines, something was lost.  Sometimes a cheese grows on you.  You need to “sit down and get to know it”.  Other times that first hit is the best, and you will never recapture the original high. Luckily no one can ever taste more than a fraction of this planet’s cheeses in a lifetime.  There is always a new fix.

Mint (to discourage flies?) hangs above the aging cheese and brunost.

Katharina showed me to my sleeping quarters.  “We’re putting you in the barn” she said in her curt, matter-of-fact but probably-sarcastic manner.  The structure looks like one of the small outbuildings a bit removed from the main home on many Norwegian dairy farms.  Inside was another story, very modern and intensely cozy.  Two beds form an L in one corner.  A small wood-burning stove takes center stage.  Peace and quiet. The only sounds are healing ones: distant water cascading down granite. The occasional cow bell, muffled by the light breeze, fog, and esoteric murmurs of the night air.

Where I slept, a small wooden walkway leads to the privy.

My first morning on a new farm, I like getting up before milking, to see where the animals sleep.  How they start their day, what their routine is.  It is common on these summer farms in Norway for the livestock to sleep out where they please, which tends to be close to home base. I found the goats unexpectedly, sleeping under a small dilapidated mini-barn or shed-like building.  There was a hole in the side that allowed the goat kids in, but was small enough to keep the full grown does out.  The does slept under the building, which gave them shelter from the mist and light rain that alternated for most of the two days I was there.

The black queen, with her penetrating eyes, and take-no-shit attitude.

They mulled about a bit after I startled them by getting too close.  I backed off, and allowed them to get used to my presence before slowly approaching again.  I often feel it is an aromatic presence that livestock find alarming or comforting.  Perhaps an energetic presence, and maybe these two things are related, or in fact one? Aroma as an energy?  Our emotional state and mindset conveyed in a smell?  The goats didn’t seem to bother with these idle speculations.  I am inspired by the immediacy of their approach to life.  I try to act in the opposite of the focused manner of a wolf or border collie.  They seemed to accept me.  Eventually the leader - a black goat with large alert eyes and bony face who was sleeping by herself in a sentinel position - stretched and began to walk down the road towards the main house.  The rest of the goats followed, with a gang of stragglers and kids running playfully to catch up.

Katharina was shuffling around the milk shed in the manner of someone who has milked cows for many decades.  Stiff steps, but a definite forward momentum, and zero hesitation.   She shooed the goats into their section of the shed, where they seemed happy to be locked inside.  Now the cows were bugling as they began to come towards the office as well.  6:15.   Stunning, breathtaking, the vibe no longer eerie but just lovely.  I seek these pastoral scenes, because they make me feel complete, like everything inside and out has aligned.  The sense of participating in an ancient ritual, repeated by a multi-species congregation.  Not humans and livestock.  Just animals, giving and taking.  Being in a place.  Doing the dance.

The cows head to the milk shed.

Katharina had been stone-faced as she did her morning routine.  I liked her a lot.  She began milking, by hand, into a small plastic pail that she emptied into a larger metal one.  She became quite talkative, asking me about my work.  There was an overhead air-line where she could have hooked a vaccum pump up to allow her to milk mechanically; but she said she didn’t like the noise, and neither did the cows or goats.  I like that.  I, like Katharina and the cows and goats, am sensitive to these types of acoustic interferences.  The chaos, noise, and sensory overload of modern life in Babylon is not for us.  Maybe its not for anyone, but animals can get accustomed to incredibly unhealthy circumstances, and then actually feel uncomfortable in their abscence.  I was slowly realizing that Katharina was trying to live her life in a very low-tech way.  She seems to be sticking to the dairy tools that existed in maybe the 1960s.

She poured the milk through a well-used aluminum filter into an equally beat milk can that wore a patina of time.   I marveled over the incongruity of the milk can - a vessel for pure and holy white milk - standing in shit and mud. Maybe the two things are not so seperate.  Shit and milk.  Both are nectars of the body.  They are both sacred gifts.  I have come a long way in embracing these ideas.  But I was still impressed with this blatant disregard of “sanitation”.  The full milk can was moved to a pool in a flowing stream to keep cool.

I hope to wrap this story up at a later time, continuing this thread about the taste of this place, and Katharina’s farming and milk processing techniques. I will pick up with a discussion of goat milk, and it’s particulars. The butter needs to be discussed. How do you like this piece, and the voice I am finding as I write freely, expressing the various aspects of myselves? The fact that myselves is not considered a word is telling. It is a word. That ends with Elves.