After all the excitement yesterday, I forgot that I had some night sky pictures I took on Friday when we had one of these rare cloudless skies and almost no wind. Too bad there was no snow on the trees, but it’s such a long time I’ve made any major effort with night sky photography that I didn’t really care. I was out with the snowshoes and although I didn’t get very far from home, I spent three hours at it… it was wonderful! Orion has me totally spellbound, I don’t know what it is about it but I just can’t take my eyes off it.

As for night sky photography in Föne in general, I found some ok spots. Not great, perhaps not even good, but ok. But ok is better than anything I could ever find in a city, unless of course I wanted to get light pollution in the picture. It’s hard to avoid light pollution even in a small place like Föne, but then I started playing around with the orange glow that crept in the pictures. Certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, but if you can’t avoid something, they you have to work with it.

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(This part is really for my personal diary only so feel free to skip…)

Now that I’ve had a day to recover from my cold dip, I’m starting to get an idea of what really happened yesterday. The thing is, I seem to have a gap of a second or two in my memory. I remember the ice caving under my foot and I remember sitting by the ice and trying to get my foot out of the water, but I can’t remember the actual moment of falling in. But last night after the adrenaline had disappeared, I felt that my left arm was hurting. A closer inspection revealed a big bruise on the outside just above the elbow and a long horizontal bruise straight above the elbow, and some minor bruising almost all the way from the big bruise up to the shoulder. So what I figure is, that when my foot sank through, I fell forward to the left and my arm hit the edge of the ice (big bruise) and then kept gliding down in the water (the small bruising up to the shoulder), but I was able to straighten up my body so fast that the fall didn’t register in my mind and the adrenaline rush hid the pain of the impact. I still don’t understand where the long bruise above the elbow came from, unless it’s secondary bruising from the actual point of impact. And credit to my jacket to keep my body dry despite this, because the only wet part in my upper body was the left hand and forearm.

With the adrenaline gone in the evening, I was really tired. I went to bed and I found that I couldn’t fall asleep anyway. The events just kept playing in my head… and it wasn’t the actual fall that bothered me the most. It was on my way back. There was this one place where I had stopped for a long time on the way in, wondering if I dare to cross the patch of ice or not. I managed to summon the courage and got over it without problems (and fell about 20m after that), but on the way back as I was going across the same spot, I heard the ice crack. And it is that moment which keeps coming back to haunt me. Because at that point I knew that the ice was treacherous. I knew that there was water under (I had half thought that there was no water where I fell). And I knew exactly how bad it could’ve been. I was lucky the first time when only one foot had gone in. But being that lucky twice in a row? There’s a whole lot of ”what if’s” playing in my head right now, that’s for sure.

I can barely believe how lucky I am. I crashed with the motorcycle, flew over the handlebars and landed face first and walked away with nothing worse than a cut lip. I fell through the ice and walked away with nothing worse than a bruised arm. Either I’m a careful person with a lot of safety margins on my side, or then I’m just the luckiest person I know. I might as well stop buying lottery tickets because obviously I’m spending all my luck on staying alive and keeping my bones in one piece!