I have never been so relieved to see a wooden sign with a fish painted on it in all my life. Three hours out of Bergen, my hire car's sat nav had given up the ghost somewhere near Lindas and I was navigating by instinct, a crumpled paper map, and the occasional sheep. The mishap came at a petrol station where I confidently filled the tank with diesel, despite the car being petrol. The lad behind the counter, a teenager called Erik with hair that defied gravity, watched me do it without saying a word. Only when I tried to start the engine did he wander out, hands in pockets, and mention that he had been wondering why I looked so pleased with myself. We spent twenty minutes siphoning fuel into a bucket while he told me about his grandmother's method for curing herring, which apparently involved more secrecy than a spy novel.

The road to Masfjorden unravelled like a dropped ball of wool after that. I arrived at the cabin proper frazzled, half an hour late, to find the key not where the instructions said but in a fake rock so convincingly ugly that I had kicked it twice looking for the real thing. My neighbour appeared over the fence before I had even wrestled my suitcase through the door. Ingrid was seventyish, wearing wellies that had seen better decades, and she informed me that she had been watching for my arrival since morning because she had made too much rhubarb compote and someone needed to help her eat it. I was still holding my car keys and a half-eaten emergency sandwich. She took the sandwich, inspected it with the suspicion of a customs official, and pronounced it "sad."

The cabin itself smelled of pine and something else I could not place. Ingrid explained it was the previous week's dried fish hanging in the little outbuilding, and that I would get used to it or I would not. She had lived in the adjacent property since 1978, when she and her husband moved up from Stavanger because he wanted to fish and she wanted him to stop talking about fishing and actually do it. He had died five years ago, she told me, still with his rod in his hand, which she considered a victory of sorts. She showed me how to work the wood burner with the authority of someone who had corrected many a cocky tourist, and left me with a jar of compote and strict instructions not to burn the place down.

That evening I walked down to the water, partly to clear my head of diesel fumes and partly because Ingrid had mentioned that someone would be there I ought to meet. Sure enough, a man in his sixties was untangling a net with the patient frustration of someone who had performed this ritual ten thousand times. This was Gunnar, who spoke English in the manner of someone who had learned it from American films but refused to commit to the accent. He told me he had been fishing these waters since before the road was properly tarmacked, back when the post came by boat. He asked what I did for work and when I said something vague about marketing, he nodded slowly and said, "Ah. Making people want things." He said it the way one might say "Ah. Herding cats." We watched the light change on the fjord and he told me about the time a German tourist had tried to pay him to take her to a waterfall that did not exist, and how he had felt bad about the money for weeks afterwards.

I went back to the cabin with a bag of mussels Gunnar insisted I take, though I had no idea what to do with them. Ingrid appeared at my window as I was googling "how to cook mussels without poisoning self," which she found hilarious. She came in without waiting for invitation, examined my kitchen with the disappointment of a headmistress, and took over. Within half an hour we were eating something she called "fjord soup," though it bore little resemblance to any recipe I could find later. She talked about her daughter in Oslo who phoned every Sunday and worried about her living alone, and about the American couple who had stayed in this same cabin last summer and tried to barbecue in November. "Americans," she said, with the particular sigh that transcends nationality.

By the time she left, with the empty compote jar reclaimed and a warning about the shower's mood swings, I realised I had spent my first evening in Norway being mothered by strangers and fed fish I had not caught. It was not the self-sufficient wilderness experience I had imagined. It was something else entirely, something I had not known I needed. I sat by the wood burner later, listening to a silence so complete it felt almost rude, and thought about how I had come here to be alone and had instead been collected, inspected, and adopted. The diesel mishap felt like weeks ago. The smell of dried fish was already becoming something I associated with being looked after, which disturbed me slightly.

I fell asleep to the sound of water against rock and the distant putter of a boat engine, Gunnar probably, or someone like him, doing something they had always done. I had not even been here a day and already I was part of a story I did not fully understand, held in place by people who had decided I was worth the trouble. It was not comfortable, exactly. But it was something better than comfortable. It was being known.