THE GREATEST outdoors

At the charmingly ramshackle farmhouse in northern Norway where Roddie and Lindis Sloan live with their three children and a dog named Stella Bente Svendsen, a burst of unexpectedly warm weather has given everything the slightly giddy feel of a holiday. It’s late May, and we can sit outside to drink our tea in the morning and dig into grilled meats in the evening. At certain hours of the day, the sun makes the mountains appear to glow, and the Arctic light lends everything a startling clarity. It is, in many ways, the archetypal Nordic summer scene. Which is exactly as I want it, since I’ve come here in hopes of figuring out whether all I’ve heard about one very Norwegian concept, friluftsliv, is true.

Scandinavians have a special relationship to nature. They’ve built an entire cuisine around foraging. They leave their babies in prams outdoors in winter because they think it toughens them up. They love telling you there’s no bad weather, only bad clothing. They have laws that ensure the public’s right to walk through pretty much any uncultivated land they want. And Norwegians have that word, friluftsliv, which is meant to convey something profound and culturally specific about why they like to spend time outdoors and which, they insist, resists translation.

Scandinavians love to say that kind of thing. Long before every lifestyle magazine in the Western Hemisphere was urging readers to light candles and eat more cake, Danes and Swedes were insisting that and could not be fully grasped by anyone who lacked a deep understanding of their culture. But five years of living