With my computer sitting on the windowsill I'm watching the
sun rise over the Nordåsvann. In this part of Norge the
word vann, which also means water such as you drink from a
glass, refers to lakes big enough to be worth putting a boat
on as well as inlets of the sea connected by a small opening
that widen up inland. The later is the case with
Nordåsvannet. And, at it's mouth, this place where the water flows
rapidly in and out at the changing of the tide is called a straum.
This word you might recognize from it's English cognate
stream. When you think of a stream like a creek the sense is
perhaps not there as much as when you think of stream as a
flow like in "stream of concisous" for example. In the Deutsch
cognate Strom we find that in addition to refering to the
flowing water, the word has moved out through the water mill
to refer to the power it once generated but that is now often
generated by other means and transported as electricity. Last month
in Stockholm outside the royal palace we saw guys in waders
salmon fishing in the ström there. It is a word
well preserved in the Germanic family of languages.
Further back on the Indo-European tree the word supposedly
has cognates in the Slavic and Hellenic branches but I have
not met them yet.
Now the odd thing is as the bright orange of sunrise ends it
seems almost to darken here as the sun passes low across the
sky and fails to rise above the height of the mountains to the
southeast of me. Swans and ducks swimming by disurb the
otherwise flat as glass surface of the water which reflects
perfectly the clouds, and trees, and mountains nearby. Down at
the water's edge I can tell that it's low tide because we have
a small beach that is submerged when the tide is high. The air
is crisp and a dusting of snow remains on the grass now hardened
to ice, yet still I envy the birds swimming across the water,
the ducks diving down to find some morsel among the reeds. The
water is no doubt much warmer than the air, connected as it is
to the North Sea. Resisting the temptation to Wim Hof it out
into the Nordåsvann will not last many days here I think.
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By late morning though the sun has crested the mountains and
stands somewhere in the southern sky, although I know not
precisely where because the clouds have rolled back in.
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