The drive from Oslo to Eggedal had been going suspiciously well, which in my experience is always a warning sign. My partner had navigated, I had done the actual driving, and we had only argued once about whether the satnav was taking us past a lake or merely a very committed puddle. Then, about three miles from the cabin, I confidently turned onto what I insisted was a shortcut and promptly wedged our hire car between two rather judgmental birch trees.

"Well," said my partner, with the particular calm of someone who had predicted exactly this, "at least the Norwegians seem organised."

She was not wrong. Within ten minutes of my increasingly pathetic waving at passing vehicles, a chap called Arne appeared in a tractor that looked older than my father. He did not speak English, I do not speak Norwegian, and yet we managed an entire conversation about my stupidity through the universal language of expressive hand gestures and sympathetic grimacing. He towed us out in approximately ninety seconds, refused payment with a look of genuine offence, and pointed us toward the cabin with a final gesture that I choose to believe was encouraging rather than pitying.

The cabin itself sat halfway up a slope overlooking Eggedal lake, all red wood and white trim, looking like something a child might draw if asked to illustrate "proper Norwegian holiday." I had barely stepped onto the porch when the door of the neighbouring property opened and a woman emerged bearing what appeared to be an entire cake.

"American?" she asked, thrusting it toward me.

"British, actually," I said, as if this explained anything.

"Same thing," she declared, which would have offended me more had the cake not been extraordinary. Her name was Ingrid, she was seventy-three, and she had lived in Eggedal her entire life except for one regrettable year in Bergen that we somehow covered in the first four minutes. The cake was because, as she put it, "new people need feeding before they make bad decisions." I thought of the birch trees and said nothing.

She introduced us properly to the area by shouting across the lake to a man called Geir, who was fishing from a rowboat and who shouted back with what I initially assumed was hostility but Ingrid translated as enthusiastic dinner invitations. "He has too much trout," she explained. "His wife left him for a man in Hokksund who keeps chickens. Geir believes fish are revenge."

We spent that first evening on our little porch, watching the light do something complicated and beautiful across the water, while Ingrid appeared periodically with additional food and unsolicited life advice. "You," she told my partner, pointing at her with a fork she had borrowed and never returned, "you are the sensible one. Him," the fork swung toward me, "he needs watching. The trees told me."

I started to explain about the satnav, then stopped. There was something about Eggedal that made detailed self-justification feel unnecessary, even embarrassing. The locals operated on different rules - Arne's wordless competence, Ingrid's aggressive hospitality, Geir's shouting friendship from a boat. They had seen my mistake immediately, helped without performance, and moved on to the more interesting business of who we were and what we might become to them.

By the time the proper darkness finally arrived, sometime around half eleven, I had accepted cake I did not deserve, promised to eat fish from a man I had not properly met, and learned that Ingrid's grandson in Drammen thought he was too good for wooden boats. "Plastic," she spat, with genuine disgust. "He has a plastic kayak. In Eggedal."

I sat there with my tea going cold, my partner laughing quietly beside me, and felt something shift. The mishap with the trees had become a story I would tell, but more importantly, it had become a story Ingrid would tell, and Arne, and presumably Geir if he ever stopped fishing long enough to speak to someone at normal volume. I was not a tourist who had made a mistake. I was the idiot in the birch trees, which in Eggedal apparently qualified you for cake and concern and immediate, slightly bossy inclusion.

The lake went silver-black in the fading light, and somewhere a dog barked once, thoughtfully. I had come for the scenery, which was undeniable. I had stayed, already, for the people, who were something better.