2005

I should have been asleep. I was at Lofoten Golf Links in Norway, the fourth or fifth northernmost golf course in the world, during the summer solstice last June.

I'd just traveled for 26 hours straight: the flight to Oslo, then another to the northern city of Bodo, a quick dash to catch the coastal steamer for the six-hour passage to Svolvaer, the port town in the breathtakingly beautiful Lofoten islands, then a 45-minute drive to Hov, a farmstead on a single-lane road surrounded by ocean and snow-capped peaks.

I was 95 miles above the Arctic Circle and exhausted. But the midnight sun was out, the temperature was a soothing 60 degrees, and a lush golf course was at my disposal, so why sleep?

``This time of year, you get spectacular bursts of energy,'' said Frode J. Hov, the course's founder and managing director, who grew up in this place. ``At 2 a.m. you suddenly decide you want to paint the walls, so you do, then three hours later you realize that you have to finish the whole room, and you wonder, `What was I thinking?' ''

It may have been 1 in the morning, but I was not the only golfer on the course. Two local boys of about 18 were searching for a ball in the heather on No. 3. ``I play every day,'' one said. ``This is the best time -- midnight or later.'' On No. 5, an Australian named Ian trotted over to introduce himself. ``I work here at the shop,'' he said, ``and after I close at 12:30 or so, I come out and play nine holes. It's kind of ridiculous really, but I've worked here three summers now, and this is where I've learned to play golf.''

But 90 minutes later, I was the only soul on the course. The mountains were standing out clearly in the Arctic three-quarters light, the Norwegian Sea was lapping against the rocks, sparrows and gulls were chirping and calling as if it were dawn, and just off a white sand beach less than half a mile away, a small red house stood alone in a deep green field of turf.

Grandfather's blessing

Lofoten Golf Links stands on Frode Hov's family land. The idea to open a course here first occurred to a family friend and was embraced by Frode's father and by Frode himself, who thought about it further as a student of tourism at Lillehammer College in the mid-'90s.

Many found the idea quixotic -- there were very few golfers and courses then in Norway and Scandinavia in general, and the game was almost entirely unknown in the north. Frode's father died before he could start work on the course, but his grandfather, a fisherman like so many of the older generation in Lofoten, had given his blessing. `` `As long as it makes money,' he told me,'' Frode recalled. ``He was a fisherman, so he knew what the important thing was.''

In April 1998 work finally began on the seaside fields that would become the course. Using very little construction equipment, Frode and his associates went at it, right up to opening day on July 14. The result is a nine-hole course of just 2,172 yards -- par 31, with four par-4s and five par-3s -- incorporating all the natural features of the rocky headland and only rudimentarily manicured. The architect, a Sweden-based Englishman named Jeremy Turner, placed tees on promontories, fairways on narrow isthmuses and postage-stamp greens bare centimeters from sandy beaches. He left thick stands of gorse and clover everywhere. It's the kind of golf course the Scots might have made hundreds of years ago.

The next morning, the wind was up out of the south. Huge clouds poured over the tops of the mountains. Greens I could hit with a seven-iron the night before now required a five-wood to reach. I played with Chris and Yvonne, a Dutch couple. Chris sliced his shot into the ocean. I hit mine onto the beach. Yvonne lost balls in the gorse, in a brook, in a lawn of enormous daffodils, in the rocks, on a waterside strand of old mollusk shells.

``I am hitting the ball in silly places,'' she said.

In the afternoon, I played with Frode. ``When the sun comes out for a whole day,'' he said, ``the grass just explodes. It grows like a couple of inches just in a few hours.'' On No. 2, he pointed to some rocks and shrub-covered peat marked off by four little white out-of-bounds stakes. ``That's a Viking grave,'' he said casually. ``There are a couple more over on No. 8.

Two months of sunlight

``When my grandfather, and his father, used to plow this land,'' he continued, ``they'd sometimes turn up skeletons and some artifacts -- a Viking sword, a gold ring, the foundations of a house, the outlines of a Viking ship.'' Hov, Frode said, comes from an Old Norse word meaning sacred place of offering.

What did he think of people playing golf where Viking bones rest?

``They'd probably think it's fun,'' he said. ``They were Vikings.''

The day drizzled on, gray and chilly and wet. Others came into the clubhouse from Sweden, from a Norwegian town on the mainland about 180 miles to the north, from Lofoten itself.

Paal-Tore, a midfielder for the local soccer team, clomped in. He is one of 450 dues-paying members of the Lofoten Golf Links and like many of them, his expectations have been warped by having this golf course form their entire experience of the game.

``I had a good shot on 5,'' he said, ``and it was 6 inches short.'' Well done, I said.

``No, no,'' he said. ``It was 6 inches short, and it rolled into the water.''

Lofoten, one of only a half-dozen Norwegian courses north of the Arctic Circle (two, in Tromso and Narvik, are both 18 holes and set in the woods rather than on the water; another, at North Cape, is a muddy six-hole course at the most northerly point in continental Europe), plays host to between 2,000 and 3,000 non-member rounds each season, mid-April to mid-October.

From May 23 through July 24, the sun doesn't set at all, and it is light all night till the beginning of August. Late May to early August is the season of ``midnattgolf,'' when, supposedly, you can circle the course 16 times in 24 hours, as a South African guest claimed to have done in 2001.

The 100-mile-long chain is first glimpsed as a massive sheet of mountains rising 3,000 feet out of the sea -- the so-called Lofoten Wall -- but as boats approach, the mountains part into innumerable fiords, bays and coves. In the main town, Svolvaer, a perfect harbor is set against towering mountains, and the last few years have seen the appearance of waterfront condos, a popular coffeehouse and several restaurants.

A 10-minute boat ride from Svolvaer takes you to the island of Skrova, population roughly 300 -- most of which is involved in Norway's whaling industry. Whaling is legal in Norway, which puts a veterinarian on every whaleboat to monitor the humane hunting of the minke whale and ensure that the quota -- 790 this year -- is not exceeded.

No casual golf here

In August, when most of Europe is on vacation, Lofoten's narrow roads fill with camping Germans, Swedes and Norwegians who fish, scuba dive, hike, climb or just relax. Beaches, coves, cute but sturdy fishing boats and tidy farmhouses appear and disappear in bright light or foggy mists, each island linked by spectacular bridges that soar over surging tidal straits. Along the way, beautiful fishing villages hug the fiords, and in the middle of the islands, in the town of Borg, site of the largest Viking manor house ever unearthed, a museum re-creates the Norse world of a thousand years ago.

A fog rolled in from the sea. Frode and I were tromping down the second fairway, through a patch of little white flowers that in July produce the northern delicacy of Arctic cloudberries. ``People have gotten into fights over picking cloudberries on other people's land,'' he said. ``You go over to your neighbor's land to pick his berries in the fog so he can't see you. Then you sneak back to your land. And you run into him sneaking back from picking your cloudberries.''

Later the clouds were high, leaving everything gray but perfect for golf. ``Two years ago I played in a midnight sun tournament in Tromso,'' said Kenneth, a Svolvaer hotel manager, before teeing off on No. 3. ``You were supposed to play four rounds of 18 holes in 24 hours. It was exhausting. I don't even remember playing the last round.''

In Scandinavia, the golf boom of the '90s was handled more formally than it was in the United States, explained the Lofoten club pro, Van MacDougall, an expatriate Canadian who has lived in Sweden and Norway for the last 30 years. Beginning golfers have to earn a ``green card'' in order to play at many courses; that involves passing a basic golfing test as well as a written test on the rules. ``As a result,'' Van said, ``most Scandinavians don't play golf the casual way you're used to playing. Especially up here -- they're all competing with each other, keeping an eye on each other, all the time. You've got to remember it's still new to them, but they've come a really long way in a short time.''

At 1 a.m., the light was like late afternoon. The wild North Atlantic surged around a little 19th-century navigation cairn on the rocks off the shore. I was out with Ian, who'd just wrecked an excellent round by losing two balls in a row.

``Every time something goes wrong like this,'' he said, ``you look up and see what's around you, and you say, `Right, what was I upset about?' ''