Slip slidin’ away in Norway
The Oslo Opera House overlooks the ice-blue waters of the Oslofjord
(Friends: I hope you enjoy this new blog about my Norway trip. My debut novel, “The Garbage Brothers,” continues to receive enthusiastic reviews and is available at bookstores everywhere, including Tsunami Books, Black Sun, J. Michael’s, and Barnes & Noble in Eugene. My next event is a reading/ book signing at 6:30-7:30 p.m. on Oct. 19 at Paulina Springs Books, 252 W. Hood Ave., Sisters, OR. I hope to see my Central Oregon friends there. Paul)
In his travel book “Innocents Abroad,” Mark Twain wrote, “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.”
Beg to differ, sir. I figured it out on Day One of my three-week visit to Norway. After checking into a tiny, immaculate Airbnb near downtown Oslo, my wife Candy and I walked a wooded trail along the Akerselva River to the harbor. Our destination was the Oslo Opera House, whose white marble flanks rise like a glacier next to the ice-blue waters of the Oslofjord that it overlooks.
I decided to take a quick detour down to the water to perform a ritual I have done many times in my travels. Many years ago, I was given a tiny kayak carved out of ox bone on a whitewater trip. I wear it on a string around my neck as a reminder of my paddling days and friends, and I make a point of dipping it into rivers, lakes, and oceans wherever I travel.
To reach the water’s edge, I stepped over a railing that most sentient people would understand was intended to keep meandering tourists away from the water. A woman feeding seagulls nearby watched me with curiosity.
I strode down the embankment, glancing up at hundreds of people above me, climbing to the marble roof of the opera house and its grand overlook of the harbor. Pitying my fellow tourists for their unwillingness to take the path less traveled, I walked toward the water’s edge and saw the pavement was covered with brownish-green slime.
No problem, I thought. Just take small, steady steps. A microsecond later, I saw both my feet fly above my head, framed by the brilliant blue harbor sky.
Readers will forgive me if I leave myself momentarily suspended in the chilly morning air as I sing the praises of Norway and tell you about the rest of our journey.
Our trip began with a week in Oslo and ended with eight days in Bergen, one of the world’s most beautiful, cultured, friendliest, and downright coolest cities in the world. In both cities, we spent our days wandering museums and historic sites, taking long, glorious hikes, and devouring massive quantities of fish, cheese, and bread.
Between our Oslo and Bergen stays, we rented a car and drove into Norway’s mountainous midsection. Our goal, which we knew we had little chance of accomplishing, was to find the farms where my wife’s grandparents on her father’s side were born and perhaps find long-lost relatives.
We were still 45 kilometers from the town where we hoped the Odden (my wife’s grandfather’s last name) family farm might be located when I pulled into a beautiful old rural church, surrounded by a cemetery on all sides like most rural Norwegian churches. A groundskeeper. who understood a smattering of English answered our “Odden? Odden? Odden?” inquires by pointing at the cemetery. As we walked through it, we found the graves of dozens of Oddens, and the groundskeeper gestured down the road in the direction we had come from. “Odden farm. Two or three kilometers,” he said.
A Norwegian woman who had stopped by the church to visit her mother’s grave offered to translate for us as we stopped at farms, trying to find the Odden farm. Most young Norwegians are fluent in English since public schools must teach it starting in first grade, but many older Norwegians speak only their native language. After stops at two farms, we were directed to the Odden farm, where we said goodbye to our translator and knocked on the door of a tidy little farmhouse.
The rest of the story belongs to my wife to tell, but I will say that the door was opened by a reserved, older man, who shortly after he grasped our mission, pulled out a drawer crammed with genealogy charts that matched those in my wife’s laptop. And I will tell you that when we left an emotional hour later, I typed, “This has made my wife very happy” into my cell phone’s Google translator and handed the phone to my wife’s newfound relative, Tore Odden. He nodded and smiled, his eyes—and ours—tearing at the edges.
The next day, we had more good fortune when we drove to the mountain village of Loen (also the last name of my wife’s Norwegian grandmother), located at the easternmost end of the massive Nordfjorden. We stopped at an old church, where several dozen Loens were buried in the large cemetery. I spotted a thin, middle-aged woman carrying a ladder past a nearby red farmhouse surrounded by apple orchards and grazing sheep. We asked her if she knew where we could find the Loen farm.
“Well, my name is Ingrid Loen, and this is the Loen farm,” she said. And I watched my wife come to grips with the realization she was standing on the very land where her father’s mother had been born.
I have to point out here that I loved Norway for more than personal, familial reasons—and for its heart-achingly beautiful fjords and glaciers, its graceful cities, and its reserved but invariably friendly, helpful people. I love that the country provides its citizens with free higher education and medical care and had the foresight to set aside a trillion dollars in oil revenues for future generations. As an author from a country with no shortage of struggling artists, I love Norway’s commitment to providing its professional artists with a guaranteed income.
Let’s return to the Oslo waterfront, where I am suspended, feet flailing above me in the chilly harbor air.
Down I plunged onto the cobblestones covered by several inches of slithery seagull droppings, and I felt a sharp pain in my right hand and wrist, which broke my fall.
“Are you all right?” the bird woman asked. The same question was echoed by several onlookers above, and I looked up to see dozens of passers-by stopping to watch me. And it was at that moment that I had the horrifying realization that I would fall again if I tried to stand where I was and that the only way I could get out of my poopiferous predicament was to crawl slowly through the slime on my hands and knees to dry pavement several feet away.
And when I finally rose to my feet dripping green goo like the “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” I looked up to see that the people above me who had been watching had mercifully turned away and were moving along on their appointed rounds—another reason to like Norwegians and their innate civility.
Our first day in Norway ended with a visit to a clinic where a physician ordered X-rays, worked my thumb back into its socket and taped my swollen hand and sprained wrist.
“And tell me, please, how did you injure yourself,” she asked.
I opted for brevity: “I slipped,” I said.
“Slipped on what?” she persisted.
“Bird shit,”
“Ah, I see,” she said, stifling a laugh that Mark Twain would have appreciated.
