Secret Life of the City by Hanna Hagen Bjørgaas

Author:Hanna Hagen Bjørgaas [Bjørgaas, Hanna Hagen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

– OCTOBER –

Marvels of the Darkness

THE CITY FELT DIFFERENT on this October night. The fog and darkness sharpened the senses. And as I stood on a footbridge linking Oslo’s east and west sides, I could feel the damp air clinging to the walls of my nostrils. Brick buildings that flanked the river vanished into the fog, while soft white cones of light seemed to rise from the ground below the streetlamps. The thundering sound of the river almost drowned out the traffic noise from the bridge a short distance away. It had been raining for weeks. There was almost no one around, except for two heavily made-up teenaged girls who passed me on the bridge. A frost was on the way.

As I looked down at the smooth, black river running below, a tall man in his fifties came striding toward the bridge from the east. It was Kjell Isaksen. Kjell is a biologist and one of the country’s leading experts on Norwegian bats. When he spotted me, the chiseled face beneath his hood broke into a friendly smile. An old bum bag slung round his waist suggested that he is perhaps an avid cross-country skier during the winter.

After briefly discussing the plan for the night, we walked toward the footpath that runs alongside the river. But instead of continuing along the illuminated path, Kjell did a sudden ninety-degree turn, tramped across the withered grass, and disappeared into a wooded embankment that slopes down to the river. Leaving the safety of the footpath felt slightly uncomfortable, and I soon regretted wearing my light jogging shoes when I slipped on a pile of leaves and skidded the last little bit to the riverbank on my ass. I brushed the leaves and soil from my trousers while Kjell stood and listened. Above our heads, a dog and its owner crossed the bridge that looked almost as if it had been slung over the river like a string of lights. The walkers didn’t see us, confined as they were in their tunnel of light. But my eyes were now adjusting to the dark, and it was like discovering a secret room in the middle of the city.

In the cold and clammy darkness, Kjell reached into his bum bag and fished out a small black rectangular box called a Pettersson ultrasound detector D240x. He connected some headphones to the box and gave them to me.

The dominant noise came from the river. But the moment I put the headphones on, I was able to hear other things too. There was a gentle hissing sound, like the rustling of a swan’s feathers as it comes in for a landing, which came and went at random interludes. I also heard some kind of clicking sound, like raindrops hitting a soft surface at rapid intervals. I took the headphones off again. Silence.

The Pettersson D240x is a bat detector, a device that converts the bat’s high-frequency sounds to a range that is audible to humans. We’re essentially deaf to the noises bats make.

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