Photograph by Scott Goodwill via Unsplash

“Ut på tur, aldri sur” – “Out on a trip, never sour,” Norwegian rhyme

The Nordic countries, consistently ranked among the happiest in the world, have developed a lifestyle equivalent to the plein air painting tradition: friluftsliv, Norwegian for “free-air life,” or “open-air life.” Originally coined by Norwegian playwright and poet Henrik Ibsen in 1859, friluftsliv is like the outdoor sibling of the Danish concept of hygge, meaning something like curating an aura of coziness and conviviality. Linda Åkeson McGurk, Swedish American author of The Open-Air Life: Discover the Nordic Art of Friluftsliv, defines it as a way of experiencing nature without pressure to achieve or compete, and as a “way of returning to our true home.” She describes it as a “form of slow nature,” echoing the slow food movement.[i] Friluftsliv is a pan-Scandinavian ethos that includes everyday encounters with nature such as walking around the neighborhood or through the local woods, taking a slow kayak paddle, birding, cloud watching, foraging for berries, cooking and eating outside, including taking forest fika breaks during the workday, coffee and a snack in the woods.

Friluftsliv is not about owning all of the latest outdoor gear, or extreme outdoor adventures like rock climbing and jet-skiing, or trying to get from point A to point B in the fastest way. It is about being present to the near and small wonders of the world, and of experiencing being outside as a way of entering the landscape that we are meant to participate in and be a part of. In conceiving of going outside as a way of going home, friluftsliv invites us back to our most basic and essential way of being on this planet, as belonging here.

McGurk suggests that friluftsliv has largely replaced indoor church as the most commonly shared religious or spiritual practice in Nordic culture. This is evidenced by one of the most sacred family traditions passed down from generation to generation — the practice of a Søndagstur, a Sunday family trip to the mountains or forests for a hike and a lunch eaten trailside or cooked over fire. Søndagstur, like friluftsliv, is a year-round, no matter the weather type thing. “No such thing as bad weather,” as the old Norwegian rhyme puts it, “only bad clothing.” Out on a Søndagstur, or on any tur (outdoor trip), turglede describes the peak spiritual dimension of the experience, meaning the joy and elation one feels while outside and on the move. “Friluftsliv,” writes Nils Faarlund, “is one of the warmest words in Norwegian — even warmer than love.”

At the heart of what makes friluftsliv so central and compelling as a nature-consonant way of life is a historic law and understanding that gives the public general access to explore and camp on all lands: allemansrätten, “the right of public access,” or “the right to roam,” or literally, “every person’s right.” Allemansrätten means that, with proper respect, anyone can hike, forage, paddle, make a fire, cook, camp, and live outside, anywhere, among the meandering, borderless rivers, mountains, and forests, and under the roofless skies. The Norwegian language doesn’t even have a word for trespassing.

Here where I live and explore outdoors in Wisconsin, where there is a history and continuing presence of Scandinavian cultural influence, we have but a small vestige of allemansrätten. While it’s not uncommon to see woodlots posted “No Trespassing,” it is Wisconsin law that all waterways are freely accessible, whether wading by foot or paddling by canoe. Known here as the “Public Trust Doctrine,” roots of this law trace back to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and to Article IX of the Wisconsin Constitution that declares all navigable waters are “common highways and forever free.” As someone who has fly fished for trout in many places, I know that, unfortunately, such riparian allemansrätten is not shared among many other states.

According to research by Georgetown University law professor Brian Sawers in his Atlantic article “What Lies Behind That ‘No Trespass’ Sign,” in the United States before 1865, almost all land, and especially unfenced and unpastured land, was open to the general public to roam, hunt, fish, and forage. In 1818 the first recorded court case concerning trespassing shows up in South Carolina, where a landowner sued hunters who were hunting on his property. The court sided with the hunters, arguing that the right of the public to be on private land was to be “universally exercised.” The court said that siding with the landowner would have been so unacceptable to the public as to incite insurrection.

Anti-trespassing laws only start to show up in the South in the aftermath of the Civil War, in legislation intended to prevent formerly enslaved people from leaving the plantations at which they were now employed. Prior to the Civil War, enslaved people had cultivated adept foraging and hunting practices in the woods to supplement their meager rations, and create a type of wildcrafted barter economy. After the Civil War, landowners were anxious to keep the newly freed labor force dependent on them. And so No Trespassing laws were passed — to make the newly freed population food-dependent, and money-dependent, criminalizing foraging for food as both sustenance and potential economic livelihood. “If planters could cut off access to wild food,” as Sawers writes, “the threat of starvation would make workers more tractable.” For example, the first argument for instituting hunting licenses, only offered to white male citizens, was to, in the words of the first game warden of South Carolina, criminalize the “negro, who is continually hunting at the very season of the year when he should be between the plow handles.” The No Trespassing movement eventually spread northwards, in 1909 in Pennsylvania, for example, with a No Trespassing rule that was intended to prevent immigrants from hunting. Racism haunts us and our landscapes in ongoing and innumerable ways, including through those yellow and orange Posted signs that take the original blessing and freedom of allemansrätten away from us in much of these lands.

“Has Norway anything to tell the world — something that is more or less specific for Norway and that should be appreciated by the world?” wrote Norwegian philosopher and founder of the deep ecology movement Arne Næss. His answer: “I don’t know anything other than the classic Norwegian friluftsliv: free-air-life. Norwegians walk, run, creep into nature to get rid of whatever represses them and contaminates the air, not only the atmosphere. They don’t talk about going out, but in and into nature. There they find themselves, who they are, what they stand for.”

Cultivating friluftsliv as an outdoor, plein air type of spiritual practice invites us to head the call to open the door and open ourselves to the outside world. We go out to go in. We go out to put ourselves into relationship and reciprocity with the more-than-human world. We go out to go home.