Norway’s Magnetic North : Renting an affordable fisherman’s cottage in the Lofoten Islands, where the draw is pristine air, fresh fish and majestic landscapes.

You see the Lofoten Islands long before you get to them. They stretch across the horizon in a massive, jagged rampart, trapping storms from the sea on their windward side. We caught our first sight of them from an incredible spot on Norway’s west coast, an old trading post called Kjerringoy. My wife, Liet, and I were in the company of a bearded Norwegian, Karl Erik Haar, a painter of strong landscapes and seascapes, whose favorite subject is the islands floating in their ever-changing northern light.

Haar is a distracted man--always looking to his side or over his shoulder through round-rimmed glasses, as he studies the light, even while he is talking to you. Some might think him rude, but I would not be able to focus my attention either if I were a painter exposed to a land like this, which seems continually to reinvent itself in the sudden shifts of the weather.

For example, as we walked beside Haar around the trading post’s cluster of red, ocher and white board-and-batten buildings, a boiling, cloudy sky sent down a shaft of silver light, threw a rainbow over a white church with belfry, tossed rain at us in wide-spaced drops that plopped and splashed into puddles left over from the last shower, then lifted like a theater curtain and shone thin blue behind the distant islands, now themselves a dark, powdery blue.

We had only just arrived in Norway’s far north with a group of friends, and we were already dazzled. Our train had taken us over stony mountains, where waterfalls descended the steep slopes in narrow, ropelike lengths, through green agricultural valleys dotted with brightly painted houses of toylike charm, and up again, high into the mists.

Well above treeline, at the most elevated point on the Trondheim-Bodo rail line, we crossed the Arctic Circle, which was marked by two small stone pyramids on either side of the tracks. At this latitude we might have expected the landscape ahead to be bleak. But the Gulf Stream, flowing along the country’s west coast, has a mitigating effect on the climate here, and soon we had evidence of this as the train whisked us away from the tundra and the fog, down through a series of lush farmed valleys.

I am a fan of northern realms, drawn by the crisp, invigorating freshness, the clarity of the light and the purity of the air. And the Lofoten Islands (pronounced LOW-fo-ten), an archipelago of more than 500 square miles that juts out into the Norwegian Sea, have all three--and a whole lot more--to offer travelers searching for new horizons. Their mountain scenery is the kind that sets the heart to pounding.

People who like to hike or climb will find miles and miles of trails through birch forests, moors and bogs. And bird-watchers will find about 180 species; thousands of raucous cormorants, kittiwakes, auks and puffins inhabit the seaside cliffs. For those who enjoy fishing, there are numerous freshwater lakes, or a rented boat can take anglers out to sea to hook any of the 110 different kinds of saltwater varieties, sometimes among seals and whales.

To reach the first day’s destination, the island of Vestvagoy, our party had to cross the Vestfjorden, the wide body of water separating the mainland from the Lofotens, and the scene of the annual cod catch that has been going on here for several hundred years. The four-hour journey by coastal steamer from the modern port of Bodo began smoothly enough, but soon had us hurtling forward one minute and lurching sideways the next as the ship wallowed and pitched in the waves. And no wonder: The Vestfjorden is famous for its Moskenesstraumen , or maelstrom, one of the strongest tidal currents in the world. So renowned was it as a wrecker of ships and killer of men that both Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe included it in their works, Verne in “20,000 Leaques Under the Sea,” Poe in “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.”

Eager to escape the stuffy atmosphere of the steamer’s salon, Liet and I went up on deck to breathe in the cold sea air. The closer the ferry approached the Lofoten Wall (the local term for the archipelago’s saw-tooth profile), the more the six large islands constituting it emerged as separate masses. And again I was struck how quickly--and often--the weather changes this far north. As I watched, angled wings of light from smoking clouds descended to the horizon, brushed a streak of glittering mercury on the sea, and turned the mountains alternately black, gray and green. Then, almost as quickly, mists wreathed the peaks and flowed down the slopes like dry-ice vapor. And where only moments earlier the sea had glittered, the water deepened to the color of hammered lead.

*

We spent the night at a hotel in the port of Stamsund. After feasting on grilled salmon and those little butter-yellow, deliciously earthy potatoes that northern farmers grow in dark brown loam, we went off to bed. But since there is no real darkness in this realm of the 24-hour midnight sun during summer months, we drew the drapes tight to shut out the light.

The next morning we boarded a bus charted by Leif Christoffersen, the Norwegian organizer of our little party, who, with his American wife, Becky, lives near us in Virginia. We were heading for the town of Reine, which lies two islands to the south. Liet and I sat up front, across from the driver, a pretty blond woman in her 20s. As we stared ahead, viewing the scenery through an enormous front window, I felt as though I were watching an IMAX movie on a giant screen--with some of the same heart-stopping action thrown in for effect. The confident driver obviously saw herself as a master of the narrow road that over its 80-mile course links four of the six islands. She drove with disconcerting insouciance, using only one hand to turn the steering wheel as we rounded curve after curve. And though Liet now seemed to be doing the driving, applying an imaginary brake with her foot whenever the fat-tailed sheep that clustered along the roadside seemed in danger of being hit by the bus, I decided to hand myself over to fate and enjoy the scenery.

Not so long ago, the only way to get around in the Lofotens was by boat or ferry; today they are linked by bridges and a brand new tunnel that runs from Vestvagoy under a broad channel to another island, Flakstadoya. The ride provided breathtaking views of broad, green valleys, blue lakes, perpendicular mountains and the omnipresent sea, and it packed a surprise as well: the sight of white-sand beaches. With turquoise water lapping them, they seemed curiously out of place in this cool northern environment.

A long concrete bridge, only one lane wide, signaled the approach to the island of Moskenesoya and to Reine, regarded by many as the most beautiful place in Norway--and we soon saw why. The town sits at the mouth of a fiord, its red, white and yellow frame houses strung out across a peninsula and along the opposite shore. Rising steeply behind it are steel-gray, granite mountains; in the upward sweep of their concave slopes they seemed almost draped against the sky.

Here we would stay for almost a week. One of the Lofotens’ major charms is the uniqueness of its accommodations. The islanders have converted dozens of little fishermen’s cottages, known as rorbuer, into self-service units. These provided shelter for the intrepid souls who in years past had seasonally ventured north in the hundreds to try their hand at cod fishing, a way to line their pockets with money when there was a good run. Some rorbuer can be quite plain, but most, like the one Liet and I were assigned with some of our friends, are delightfully cozy.

Painted red on the outside with white trim, each of the cabins in our particular cluster had a sod roof--an overhead meadow as it were--sprouting bluebells and buttercups among the grasses. Such a thick blanket of earth, besides pleasing the eye, provides insulation against the cold and the wind.

Our own cabin lay just over a rise. It stood rather precariously on pilings anchored to a granite ledge poking out into the fiord. To one side, I could see new rows of wooden A-frame racks--used by the locals to dry cod, a sign that tourism has not yet overtaken fishing as Reine’s major source of income.

Together with our four housemates, we explored the premises. A boatroom, with a tiny bedroom on the left, opened onto a large, pine-paneled kitchen, where two large windows offered silvery panoramas of the fiord. Just off the kitchen was the living room, perhaps the oldest section of the cabin, for the walls were made of thick, flattened logs, dark with age. Upstairs, squeezed under the roof, were two more bedrooms. Unpainted pine cabinets, tables, and low-slung chairs and couches created a welcome atmosphere, and we felt instantly at home.

By pre-arrangement, the rest of our companions--who occupied equally snug rorbuer close by--joined us that evening for drinks in our cottage, which we had personalized with bouquets of pink fireweed picked just outside the front door. And when the decibel level reached a din, we all went off merrily to dinner in the local restaurant, the Gammelbua (Old Store). I took an instant liking to this rustic, shadowy place, crowded with a hearty clientele. Warmth from an open fire and the delicious cooking aromas emanating from the tiny kitchen followed us upstairs to the loft, where our group sat down at twin pine tables illuminated by hanging lamps. At the far end, two whale ribs formed parentheses around a single window glowing with evening light.

None of us had any problems selecting from the menu: tiny pink shrimp as a first course and local cod as an entree. By the time our party had finished eating, it was almost midnight; but none of us had noticed the lateness of the hour because the sky still glowed. As we walked home under a canopy of motionless, sleeping clouds, gulls were flying about, mewing and crying, and wood smoke drifted on the air.

*

The members of our group had agreed to take the next day as it came. There were more than enough activities for us to choose from. We could hire bikes or rowboats. Or, if we wished, we could charter a fishing boat and go, quite literally, to Hell, an abandoned village, passing through the maelstrom on the way. We could also sail to Vaeroy and Rost, smaller islands to the south, and take in their bird colonies.

Liet’s and my pleasure was to wander around Reine and out into the countryside. The morning, which had begun gray and damp, turned suddenly bright and the town sprang to life. With the break in the weather, the inhabitants came out to weed their gardens, mow their lawns, paint trim, make home repairs--though why all this was necessary I could not fathom since everything looked in perfect order to begin with. In addition to a meticulously kept garden, each house displayed blooming plants in its windows. Framed by snowy lace curtains, they suggested the coziness that must lie within, the antidote, I supposed, to gray, lusterless days when the storms roar in.

On our meandering walk, we went down to the harbor and found the doors to a warehouse wide open and ventured inside for a peek. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with dried cod, piled up like firewood, ready for shipment. I expected a fishy odor; instead, there was barely any, an indication of how effective is the process of drying the cod in air as clean and brisk as this.

Several of our friends wanted to fish, and we joined them the following day for a trip in a small rented vessel, first motoring along the coast on a side trip to the Refsvikhula Cave. The cave boasts 2,500-year-old rock carvings discovered only a few years ago. Putting into a quiet cove, we followed a narrow trail that hugged the steep slopes of the mountains, descended to a white-sand beach, and hopped from one huge boulder to another between which were snagged enormous logs that had drifted all the way from Siberia. The 379-foot-long cave interior turned out to be spectacular, carved into an almost cathedral-like space by the sea about 100,000 years ago, with aisle, transepts, nave and a soaring 165-foot ceiling. The carvings were a disappointment by comparison, stick figures that our guide’s dying flashlight did little to illuminate.

Later we reached a shoal where fish from deeper waters come up to feed. As we lowered our hand lines over the railings, the sun, hidden much of the afternoon, suddenly came out, filling us with optimism.

Yanking gently on the lines, we could feel the fish bite. Liet caught 12 of them in almost as many minutes, two sleek mackerel and 10 sei , or pollock. The wooden locker on deck was soon filled with our bounty, including several bright-eyed, white-bellied cod. It seemed wasteful to go on catching more fish if we could not eat them all, so we pulled in our lines.

*

Back in Reine, our group agreed to take turns cooking all this fish in a kind of progressive dinner that would occur over three nights in different cabins. The first belonged to Leif and Becky and their Norwegian friends and cabin mates, Kaare and Metta. Metta prepared the cod in the traditional Norwegian way, bringing thick slices of the snow-white flesh to a boil in salted water, to which she had added a little vinegar, then cooked them for only a few quick minutes. She served the steaming fish with a pitcher of drawn butter to pour over it, boiled new potatoes and a dill and cucumber salad. The snow-white cod could not have been more perfect, falling into flakes at the pressure of a fork. But the surprise for me was the liver, which Metta had popped into the pot. I will admit to tasting it tentatively, fully expecting it to be as fishy as cod liver oil; instead, it had a delightful, mild taste, almost like sweetbreads.

If, in the unlikely event that our group had run out of the fish we had caught, we could easily have bought some, as Liet and I discovered the next afternoon on another of our walks, this time across a bridge to the little island of Sakrisoy.

After the long hike, we were glad to find that the local doll museum had a cafe, where the woman behind the counter had just made Norwegian waffles in a round iron divided into heart-shaped segments. We couldn’t resist, and they came piping hot and egg yellow, with dollops of pale butter and big spoonfuls of raspberry jam. Marvelous.

As we were sitting in the window, sipping the last of our coffee, we spotted the seafood market: a van, open at the back, with steps leading up to it. Run for the benefit of seasonal visitors like us, it belonged to the local salmon farm and processing plant. We decided to have a look. Its clean-smelling treasures were spread out on chipped ice, and among these were slabs of smoked salmon. The friendly woman in charge must have seen me ogling the salmon, for she cut off a generous slice and urged us to sample it. One bite was enough; we could not resist the buttery consistency, the light smoke taste or the price, which was several dollars less than we would have paid at home. We bought a whole side to share with our friends.

To our consternation, it began raining, and neither of us looked forward to getting soaked on the way back to Reine. When we asked the woman who sold us the salmon if there was a bus we could catch, she kindly volunteered to drive us home. She reassured us that she really was not going out of her way on our account; she had an errand to do in Reine.

With cod still a mainstay of the islands’ economy, some of us decided to make a visit to an open-air fishing museum at a village called, strikingly enough, A, pronounced “awe.” We journeyed there by local bus, along the rocky coast. One run-down building housed a pathetic collection of memorabilia, bits and pieces of the past, flotsam almost, that proved strangely touching. Here were the relics of a harsh, demanding way of life--rusty hooks, splintered oars, coils of frayed rope. One wreck of a boat, typical of the kind used in the old days, showed how exposed to the elements the eight men who rowed it had been, and of course there had been no weather reports to warn them of sudden storms that often took a sad toll of lives.

The open-air museum at A consisted of 20 or so buildings clustered around a commanding manor house, dating to 1864, which once was home to the local squire. The squire’s high standard of living derived from the fishery; with the introduction of the potato and smallpox vaccine, the population in southern Norway swelled and the demand for fish to feed it grew apace. In 1896 there had been enough rorbuer in A alone to accommodate the 300 men who arrived each winter to participate in the fishery.

*

Not least of the happy challenges we met in the Lofotens was a climb up one of the steep slopes behind Reine. Liet and I are not climbers, and mercifully this peak was gentler than most. Still, it required effort. Our entire group maneuvered upward, single file, passing an eerie black lake, one of several created in the islands thousands of years ago by glaciers. After the ice began melting, the depressed land rebounded from the great weight that had lain upon it, and the arms of some fiords were left landlocked. To this day, their saltwater, called fossil water, still lies trapped at the bottom of the lakes.

So wet was the moss underfoot, it actually squirted as we stepped on it. But whatever effort went into the climb, we were more than rewarded when we reached the top. From there, we had a sweeping view south and could see, through tissues of clouds, the hulking islands of Vaeroy and Rost.

But there was something else to delight us as well: a meadow filled with arctic cloudberries. This orange fruit the size of a large raspberry grows on the tundra at high elevations and is regarded by the Norwegians as an enormous treat. A rich source of vitamin C, it used to be the islanders’ winter cure for scurvy, and the berry’s high benzoic acid content meant that the fruit could be preserved for months at a time without benefit of sugar. The plants stand only inches high, and generally hold a single berry each, which says something about the patience needed to gather a pailful of the sweet-sour fruit.

On our last day in the Lofotens, Liet and I remained housebound. And smart we were: The Lofoten weather put on as fine a display of its ferocity as we had yet seen, one best observed inside. The wind howled and shrieked, the cabin shuddered on its pilings, the wind swept up between cracks in the floorboards. A great clap of thunder startled us. Yet for all the tumult, we were warm and cozy. We drank blueberry tea, ate milk chocolate and talked about how lucky we were to have seen this rare, unblemished part of the world. And then, as so often happens in the Lofotens, the storm ran out of energy, the sun came out, and a rainbow spread a long handle of color over Reine.

GUIDEBOOK: North by Norway

Getting there: The Lofoten Islands are in Norway’s far north, above the Arctic Circle, and the journey there is long. There are no nonstop flights from LAX to Oslo, but SAS, KLM, Delta and British Air all fly there via connections in New York, Amsterdam or London. Current lowest advance-purchase round-trip fare is $1,088. From Oslo, there is train service to Bodo via Trondheim, in the country’s midsection; the Trondheim-Bodo trip alone takes about 10 hours, but the scenery is spectacular. You can also fly directly from Oslo to Bodo (about $275 round trip), and take a 4 1/2-hour ferry ride to the islands (about $40 one way), or fly from Bodo to the Lofotens (about $95 one way).

Where to stay: Simple fisherman’s cottages, or rorbuer , range in style from basic to very comfortable. Reine is considered the most beautiful location, and there’s a restaurant close to the cabins; in other locations, there may be no restaurants, and visitors must cook. Costs range from $100-$264 per cabin per night, depending on number of bedrooms and amenities. A company that specializes in booking rorbuer stays is Borton Overseas (5516 Lyndale Ave. South, Minneapolis, Minn. 55419; telephone 800-843-0602, fax 612-827-1544). For hotel accommodations, contact the Norweigan Tourist Board.

For more information: Norwegian Tourist Board, 655 3rd Ave., 18th Floor, New York 10017, (212) 949-2333.