There is a particular quality to the light on the last Sunday of August in Røros, a kind of golden stillness that settles over the wooden buildings like a held breath. The morning drizzle has cleared by ten, and the streets of Bergstaden are drying in patches, the cobblestones steaming faintly where the sun catches them. I have been here eight days now, and this is my last Sunday, and I have learned that the town saves its quietest moments for days like this.
I am walking out of the old town centre, past the Malmplassen square where the Hyttklokka bell hangs silent above the reconstructed smeltery. The Rørosmuseet Smelthytta is closed today, but I have been through it twice now, and I know the dark interior of the copper works, the working models that clank and whir when you press the button, the smell of old wood and metal dust that clings to your coat long after you leave.
My destination is the Mellomriksveien road, a little way out of the centre, where I have heard there is a traditional-food buffet running every Sunday in August. I was told about it by a woman at the Rørosmeieriet dairy shop on Wednesday, and I have been saving my appetite for it ever since. The bus does not run this route on Sundays, so I walk, following the road north past the old miners' cottages with their turf roofs and white wooden walls, the gardens bursting with late-summer phlox and dahlias.
The walk takes about twenty-five minutes, and by the time I reach the place I can smell the food from the car park. It is a large wooden building, painted the traditional red, with a sign outside that reads Mellomriksveien 912, and the doors are open to let the warm air out and the Sunday morning in. I pay about two hundred and fifty kroner at the door, which includes a coffee and a slice of krumkake, and then I follow the queue inside.
The room is long and low-ceilinged, with wooden benches and tables draped in white cloth, and along one wall there is a buffet table that seems to go on forever. There are platters of cured reindeer meat, dark and slightly gamey, arranged with thin slices of mountain lamb, and bowls of cloudberries and cream that I recognise from the marshes I picked them in three days ago. There is a pot of rømmegrøt, the sour cream porridge that I have learned to love, and a whole section of cheeses from the Rørosmeieriet that are nearly identical to the ones I bought at the dairy shop last week.
I take my plate and find a seat by the window, and for a while I just sit and eat slowly, looking out at the garden where the last of the summer flowers are still trying to bloom. The other guests are mostly Norwegians, families and older couples, and the room has a comfortable murmur of conversation, the clink of coffee cups, the scrape of forks on porcelain. A woman at the next table is speaking to her husband in a soft Trøndelag dialect, and I catch the word 'fjord' once, though I do not think she is talking about the sea.
I have been thinking all week about what this town has cost me, and what it has given back. A night in a mid-range guesthouse here runs about fifteen hundred to nineteen hundred kroner, roughly a hundred and sixty dollars, and that is expensive for a town of five thousand people. A dinner at Vertshuset or Skanckebua will set you back two hundred kroner for a main course, and a coffee at Kaffestuggu is close to fifty. Yet the Rørosmuseet admission is a hundred and fifty kroner, and Olavsgruva mine tour is two hundred and twenty, and somehow the heritage here does not feel like a theme park, it feels like a living thing that requires you to pay attention.
After the buffet I walk back towards the town centre, taking the long way past the Slegghaugan, the mountains of copper-smelting slag that rise out of the flat ground like black hills. The Elden theatre stage has been dismantled for three weeks now, and the slag heaps have returned to their ordinary quiet, the gray-green grass growing in patches where the ground has cooled enough for it to take hold. A man is walking his dog along the base of the heaps, and the dog is barking at something in the grass, and the sound carries across the empty field in a way that makes me stop and listen.
I have been carrying my D-number now for two days, issued on Friday afternoon by the tax office, and I still have not opened the bank account in Røros. I had planned to visit the SpareBank 1 SMN branch in the centre yesterday, but the queue was long and I lost my nerve. Today is Sunday and the banks are closed, so I decide to walk past the bank anyway, just to look at the building, to imagine the desk where I will sit tomorrow morning when the doors open.
The bank is on the main street, in a cream-coloured wooden building that used to be a merchant's house in the eighteenth century. I stand outside for a moment, looking at the ATMs and the poster in the window advertising a new savings account with a low interest rate. In my pocket I have my passport, my D-number papers, my rental contract for the flat in Trondheim, and a copy of the RF-1401 form I downloaded from the tax administration website. I know that once I open the account and get my BankID, everything else becomes easier, the health care, the phone contract, the electricity bill that will arrive in my name in September.
I walk on, across the Hitterelva bridge to the Øra district, the older residential area on the other side of the river where the houses are smaller and the streets are quieter. The water in the river is low for this time of year, and I can see the stones on the bottom, the dark shapes of trout hovering in the deeper pools. A group of teenagers are sitting on the bank, their feet dangling over the edge, and they are laughing about something, and the sound of their laughter bounces off the water and mixes with the rush of the current.
There is a small swimming spot here, a place where the river widens and slows and the bottom is sandy, and in the summer the children from the town come here to cool off. Today, on this golden Sunday at the end of August, a father is teaching his daughter to swim, holding her under her arms while she kicks her legs and splashes. I sit on the bank for a while, watching, and I think about all the summers that have ended on this river, all the children who have grown up in these wooden houses and learned to swim in this cold, clear water.
By mid-afternoon I find myself at the Røros Kirke, the great baroque stone church that the miners built and called Bergstadens Ziir, the town's ornament. I have been inside twice before, on Wednesday and Thursday, but there is something about a Sunday service light coming through the high windows that makes me want to sit in the pews once more. The doors are open, and I step inside without a sound, taking a seat at the back near the old organ pipes.
The church is empty except for an elderly woman in the third row who appears to be praying, her head bowed, her hands resting on the back of the pew in front of her. I look up at the ceiling, at the painted biblical scenes and the chandeliers that were gifts from the mine managers, and I think about the sixteen hundred people who could fit in these pews at full capacity. On a Sunday in winter, with the snow falling outside and the temperature dropping towards minus forty, this church must feel like a warm cave, a place where a whole town could gather and wait out the darkness.
I remember that Røros has recorded temperatures of minus forty-two degrees Celsius, one of the coldest inhabited places in the country. And I think about what that means for the people who live here, for the farmers who graze their flocks on the high plateaus and the reindeer herders who move their animals across the frozen ground. The summer is short here, and precious, and I understand now why the last Sunday buffet felt so significant, why the cloudberries I picked last Wednesday seemed so valuable, why the light that falls on this town in August is treated with such reverence.
The organ is the oldest functioning one in Norway, built in 1742, and I have heard that it is still used for the Sunday services. This afternoon the church is quiet, and I do not hear it played, but I have read about the sound it makes, a deep and ancient noise that fills the stone vaults and carries out through the open doors into the square. I sit in the pew until the elderly woman rises and walks out, nodding to me as she passes, and then I leave too, stepping back into the sunshine.
On my way back to the guesthouse I stop at the bakery on the main street, Bakeriet på Røros, and buy a skolebrød, the cardamom bun with custard and coconut that has become my afternoon ritual. It costs around forty kroner, about four dollars, and I eat it sitting on a bench outside the church, watching the town go about its Sunday. A couple of tourists are photographing the old wooden houses, and a local woman cycles past with a basket of groceries, and above everything the sky is the particular pale blue of late August, the light thinning at the edges as the day turns towards evening.
I think about the journey that lies ahead of me, the train to Trondheim tomorrow morning, then the slow curve down the northwest coast towards Ålesund, the fjords opening up one after another like pages in a book. I have learned so much in these eight days on the Røros plateau, about copper and reindeer and the long winters, about what it costs to keep a heritage town alive and what that heritage gives back in return. But mostly I think I have learned something about slowness, about the value of sitting in a wooden church on a Sunday afternoon, about the way a town can teach you to see the important things.
Tonight I will pack my bags and close the book on Røros, and tomorrow the Rørosbanen will carry me north to Trondheim, where a flat in Singsaker is waiting for me and a bank account is waiting to be opened. I know now that the D-number is just a piece of paper, and the BankID is just a digital key, but they are the beginning of something, the first steps into the particular shape of a life here. And I carry with me the memory of this Sunday, the golden light on the wooden houses, the taste of cured reindeer on my tongue, the feeling of a town that has held its breath all summer slowly starting to exhale.
Everything I have talked about, the buffet at Mellomriksveien, the church, the bakery, the bank, the details of the D-number process, is in the episode notes. And so is the train timetable for tomorrow morning, which I will be checking one more time before I fall asleep.