The view through the window

Historians of the American West and the environment have often commented on how people experience the landscape and nature through windows.  

The window of the train car framed the landscape for tourists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  Early automobile tourists shaped their journey not just through their choice of destination but also through the direction in which they pointed their cars.  Yosemite Park designers appear to have designed automobile routes so that tourists could see the valley from the same angles as did early photographers of region. Even those with a unique eye used the windshield to focus their vision.  When she moved permanently to Abiquiu, New Mexico, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe specially designed the passenger seat of her car as a rotating easel so that she could paint from the driver’s seat.  Perhaps not surprisingly, New Mexico was also the place where O’Keeffe had learned to drive.

We have been without a car here, but bus windows, ferry windows, and train windows have framed many a picture when the beauty of the Norwegian scenery tempted us to record it.  Most of our pictures are marred by rain drops and the blur of snow, but here are a few of the images we have tried to capture or, perhaps, been encouraged to record, through the frame of the window.

From the train between Oslo and Bergen in October:

From the ferry between Oslo and Nesodden in December:

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From the train between Tynset and Oslo in January:

From the train to Verdal, a small town north of Trondheim -- a landscape that I found lovely but that residents called "eerie."  When I visited in late January, fires plagued the area, and I found no snow.

From a hotel room in Ålesund in February:

And, finally, from a ferry and a bus in the fjord country of western Norway between Flekke and Bergen in March: