Norway Stories

NORWAY STORIES -- INTRO-
DUCTION


Thirty years ago I slung manure, buried bloated sheep, pull apple tree roots on a 45 degree hillside, gained twenty pound and woke up every morning to the most incredible scenery framed by my cold bedroom's window.

I picked fruit, bailed hay, and cut grass to make the winter's silage; built roads and ate lovingly prepared food.

I hike up a steep trail to the tundra every weekend and gillnetted trout on an alpine lake in a locally built wooden skiff with the farmer's daughter. We ate them pan-fried with a little butter in an ancient wooden hut above the tree line.

I drank export beer in cold wet bottles cooled by a glacial stream with other young vagabonds from England, Ireland, Holland and the U.S., and out of desperation I read the complete works of Shakespeare.

I climbed and almost topped the local mountain called Vasfjoro. This I did against the wishes of my hosts, who in retrospect were well founded in their concerns for my safety.

I smoked the meat of calves and sheep slaughtered in the barn and almost succumbed to the sweet smoke of the apple roots I had ripped from the hillside.

I guided, though maybe was lead by, the dairy cows coming down from their summer pasture to begin their long winter internment in the warm red barn.

I stood in trees picking fruit as large snowflakes blew off the mountain, melting in the warm autumn sun before ever touching the ground. I harvested potatoes with a plow meant for draft horses and now pulled by diesel.

I worked hard and enjoyed the simple honesty of the farmer and his wife. And I left with much more than I came.

I left with an appreciation for natural beauty. I left with calluses on my hands and a sense of the unforgiving sanctity of tradition.

I left understanding the fragility of life on the edge of a fjord and of the abundance of food that backbreaking work and fifteen acres can provide.

I left understanding the consequences of war and the German occupation. I left with my heart in my hands and all the produce that could be stuff into a 1960 blue VW beetle.

And now I am returning, thirty years hence. Spending as much in a day as I spent in a year. I am returning sleeping on 400 thread count sheets, and not old feed sacks and rocks.

I am returning with my wife Charlotte and not my traveling companion in 1973, Curt. He has disappeared into the Everglades to spend a life riding out hurricanes.

As we drop into Oslo I wonder if Norway can live up to my expectations: it seems hardly possible. Is it Thomas Wolfe that said you cannot go home again, but then home is the only place they have to take you in, so we will see.





WATERFALLS…


Global warming makes a lot of sense to me, heaven knows Chicago has gotten warmer. As a kid I spent the entire winter outside. Winter lasted from November to April, and I was able to sled, skate and freeze for the majority of that time. Quite a bit older now and on a flight from Kirkenes, Norway to Oslo, back-tracking the entire six day trip up the coast on the Kong Harold, one of the coastal steamers of the Hurtigurten line, I finally have the time to contemplate this trip.

Norway is spectacular – sounds trite I know – but around every bend I am forced to take three or four more picture and the road is very curvy. At one point I swore not to take any more photos of fjords, but this proves impossible. Now with five gigabytes of images stored on my hard drive I am wondering if they will all look the same when I finally get to review them.

On my first visit to Norway water was everywhere. It was overhead and underfoot. Rain gear, complete with rubber boots, was a necessity. I do not mean any of that namby-pamby Gore-Tex stuff. I mean real rubber coated cloth guaranteed to bake you alive if the temperature rises above fifty degrees.

Rushing streams of water were everywhere. I walked through them, drove through them, drank from them and never bored of watching the torrents fall from the sky over dauntingly high cliffs to be absorbed without a hint into the deep blue-black briny water of the fjords. Every crack in the rock was another excuse for a waterfall. Another excuse to revel in the majesty of it all. To contemplate the forces necessary and the time, time, time to wear the rock into submission. For it is not the rock that rules in Norway, it is the water.

At first glance Norway is nothing but rock, but on closer inspection it is the water that moves the people and freight, that provides the cod and the herring, that the oil platforms are built on, that makes the moss for the reindeer to eat and the sweet hay for the cows and sheep. It is the water that the Vikings sailed on and it is the water that inspired the people of Norway to build the wooden craft they take to sea in, once to conquer and now to fish and recreate.

There is a flat out cropping of rock that I have been privileged to trod upon thirty times in the last thirty years. It is half way up to Jonstal, the summer cabins of the farmers of Lekve. It is an open area to gaze on the farms and the fjord of Ulvik, the town that Lekve is part of. It is also the spot to refresh on the steep trek up or down the mountain.

Off to the side of the cairn, inconspicuously trickling, is a rock and moss laden stream with clear, cold, dark glacial water that flows out of the rock. Water so sweet I gorge myself on it; making my head swim and my insides ache. This water is the true soul of Norway. Ask any farmer or fisherman, they will agree with me.

And this brings me back to waterfalls or more precisely the lack of waterfalls. I remember them every where, gloriously streaming, careening down the side of massive cliffs or bubbling over moss covered rock, no more. There seems to be a deficit of water these days: less snow in the mountains and less rain in the valleys.

Tore the farmer is busily irrigating his hay fields and fruit trees. Tour guides are busily chasing retreating glaciers. And all this leaves me pondering, not so busily, green house gases and global climate change.




LIGHT…


In 1973 I arrived in Norway during the summer brightness and left in the gloom of an early winter. Never fully experiencing the zenith or the nadir of the sun’s passage across the Northern sky, but none-the-less getting a sense of the immensity of the procession. This short trip is meant to exploit the midnight sun, being more interested in light rather than darkness at this point of my life.

I get a sense of the light in Oslo. It is 10:00, 10:30, even 11:00 PM before the light begins to fade. Every one is out parading around the town and you have to convince yourself to get ready for bed. I watch from our vantage point at the Grand Hotel as brightly painted 1950 vintage American cars drive past to stop and party at The American Club just down the street; their beautiful paint gleaming in the late evening sun.

The first mistake southerners make is not drawing the curtains in the hotel room to get some sleep. The light makes you feel invincible, like being eighteen again. This behavior has dire consequences days into the trip. I am sure Rick Steves mentioned this in his travel guide to Norway, but I was too preoccupied to pay it any heed.

From Oslo we travel north to the farm country and it only gets worse, well brighter actually. Ulvik is our destination. It is a dead-end branch of the Hardanger Fjord. This area is the orchard of Norway. All the brochures show spring’s blossoming fruit trees intermixed with tidy red farmhouses and barns. The fjord is always in the background, more often than not pictured with a cruise ship hovering in the bay in a misguided attempt to give the scene more cachet.

As if it needed it. Ulvik is the equivalent of New England, the Rocky Mountains and the Northwest coast of Canada wrapped up in one small hamlet. In Ulvik we sit in our own little garden provided by Sjur and Helen, the farmer and his urban wife, who run Uppphein Farm B&B where we are staying. The farm is located one shy of the highest tier of farms as they snake their way up the mountainside from the fjord below.

When we should be having our after dinner nap, we are deciding where to eat. And when we should be dressing for bed, we are sitting in the garden looking out at the fjord below. Farmers are tractoring by, sheep are bleating and I need to force myself to get under the covers and dream about sleep. At 3AM I awake to see the light glimmering on the water hundreds of feet below and wait for breakfast.

I will not bore you with the splendor of our boat ride up the coast. I do not possess the literary skill to do the description justice and after all I am writing about the light. We venture north on the mail ship Kong Harold at a touch below fifteen knots till the light becomes more pervasive and finally never disappears beneath the horizon.

I stand bundled in my new sweater and stare, as the sun never drops below 15 degrees. At first it seems to be darkening, then an instant pass midnight it begins to rise and morning begins, warmth reappears and a certain mania takes over. The ‘night’ this first occurs the boat is infused with energy. The entire compliment of passengers and crew are up and celebrating.

The second night, after a cold day of wind and rain, the clouds clear just prior to midnight and the few souls that are up feel the heat of the rising sun as it reflects off the surface of the Barents Sea. I resist pointing my camera at the hovering sun and try to not to stare, but cannot help myself. Little red orbs cloud my vision as the sun’s photons change the chemistry in my rods and cones.

On the last day of our journey the light has a smoky, fluorescence quality to it. It streams sideways like a million arc lamps lighting up the southern face of Europe’s northern most cliffs. As we stream along a succession of glacial valleys, mountains and villages are bathed in it. Finally I draw the curtains to put the North behind me.

Now as I write this we are chasing the sun back across the North Atlantic. I expect Chicago to be dark and although jealous of the midnight sun I leave behind, I take comfort in the familiar glow of mercury vapor that perpetually baths the city in light.

Norway Story - Manure Bucket

Holiday Letter 2006

Thirty years ago I was handed a plank that moments before was holding back a great dammed up river of, lets just say, very ripe manure. Not knowing exactly what to do, I grabbed it knowing that Lars Brandstveit, the Norwegian farmer I was working for was all business. More planks followed and more manure flowed. We proceeded to fill the large rectangular steel bucket on the back of his 4-wheel drive tractor, and then Lars drove the bucket and me to the upper pasture.

Little did I know I was to spend the next week, pitch fork in hand, spreading bucketful after bucketful of sh-t in circles radiating out from the center of the piles that were regularly delivered from the barn below. My amazement at actually standing in piles of year old manure was tempered when I realized I was fertilizing next years hay crop and somehow that mollified my tormented soul.

Why am I telling you this, because this year on July 3rd, 2006 Charlotte and I were riding in that same bucket up past the high pasture in Norway. We used it to travel half way to Jonstal, the name for the summer cabins at the base of the local mountain call Vassfjora. This time Charlotte rode next to me with the late farmer's son Tore at the controls. His six-year-old grandson Lars, grandpa's namesake, was perched behind him in the cockpit of the rugged Italian four-wheel drive tractor.

It turned out that this was Charlotte's first tractor ride and you would think we were on a speeding roller coaster at Great America for all the hoop-and-hollering she was doing as we made our way up the steep rock strewn road. In 1973 we would have started at the back of the barn and climbed some 1000 meters up doing a fast Norwegian jog through fruit trees, deciduous forest, towering pines and firs, into larch and short scrub. Finally emerging on the mossy tundra above the tree line.

In forty-five minutes of relentless walking we would leave the well-manicured farms along this branch of the Hardanger Fjord, and walk high into the greenery, rocks and snow of the high summer pasture amongst the thirteen huts that belong to the farmers of Lekve. Though we are in Ulvik proper, every small grouping of farms has their own title and Lekve is where the Brandstveit's farm is located.

Once we reach the top we are surrounded by mountains, valleys and trout filled alpine lakes. It is here and in other similar areas that the citizens of Ulvik rode out the German occupation. And it is here that I spent every weekend but one of my three month stay on the Brandsteivt's farm in 1973.

The cows and their by-products are long gone, so the bucket is as clean as a farm bucket can be. Tore, with the urging of his wife Karin, has made us a comfortable seat of old pallets and cushions. It was a bit like riding in a Model A's rumble seat except we faced backwards. Once hearing protection was donned we started on our climb. Tore engaged the hydraulics of the tractor decisively lifting the bucket, and us, a meter into the air. This should have enabled us to clear most obstructions, but due to the severely rutted road did not.

I had been exhorting Charlotte for months with threats of Jonstal. We were to have started getting in shape for Norway at the first hint of spring, but as it worked out we were less active. To make matters worse Charlotte's ankle mysteriously swelled, turn blue and painful the beginning of May. Sticking to the adage to avoid treating one’s family, I directed her to the local Urgent Care facility with instructions to request an X-ray. Five hundred dollars later, not including an eighty-dollar ankle brace, a fracture was ruled out, ice applied, Celebrex swallowed and disaster averted.

I could count the cylinders firing as we slowly made our ascent. We passed through three or four fenced off areas: first rocky fields, then deciduous and coniferous forests that delineated the various pastures. Our Midwest sense of grazing land is turned on its head and as we break out of the tree line onto the tundra Charlotte exclaims, “The Sound of Music” and right she is.

But I am getting ahead of myself here. I have skipped over our final forty-minute hike up where no tractor could go. The rock out cropping where we drink sweet water from a glacial stream filtered through miles of rock and moss. Looking out over the Hardanger fjord and hiking past two special boulders: one named for an alcoholic berry that grows on its top and the other called the “Bride’s Chair” due to its distinctive shape.

Walk simply does not describe the slippery moss covered boulders, the stream beds traversed, the horse fly’s nipping at our heels, the cool of the dark canopy, the heat of the open mountain sun, and the effort we extend trying to follow the long stride of this tall Norwegian farmer with the new titanium hip and his skipping grandson.

For two out of shape, car addicted flatlanders we do not embarrass our country or ourselves. We arrived intact and were fed sunny-side up eggs with thin slices of smoked salmon on thick whole grain bread spread with sweet butter and washed it all down with quarts of instant ice tea.

We discussed gillnetting trout and skip stones while little Lars skinny-dipped in a clear glacial lake. To get there we walked through moss much drier than I remember. There has been little rain or snow in recent years. This is evident in the sparsely covered mountaintops and the disappearing waterfalls.

The decent, while more torturous and hurtful to feet and knees, was anticlimactic. If that can ever be said while catching views of Ulvik’s bowl shaped valley as it cradles the terminus of the great Hardanger fjord. As if the walk to Jonstal was not enough for one day, Tore peeled off at the upper pasture to turn the hay he cut earlier in the morning, leaving Lars to guide us down the steeply graded road to the homestead.

Below awaits a meal of whole baked salmon and boiled parsleyed potatoes that we ladled a delicate white sauce onto. We drank apple juice frozen since last years harvest and ended the meal with fresh strawberries covered in clotted cream and sprinkled with sugar.

Other than the coffee, all we needed was a crisp Riesling to top off this meal, but alas it is dry on this Norwegian farm. After dinner the four of us sat on the veranda over looking the orchards of the Hardanger valley and waited for the sunset that never came.

Cultural Connections: Connecting Cultures Through Kimono and Sari

This article was initially published on the Chicago Japanese American Historical Society's website: www.cjahs.org.

Why do we live in Chicago? It is not for the weather, traffic is not a big selling point and as far as the government, well I think enough said. We live here because of a word that I fear is quickly becoming a cliché, diversity. Living in small cities while working my way through school, I quickly became bored with the lack of diversity in those towns and grew to love Chicago’s people and food, music and architecture, art and though I am not a devoted fan, sport. The constant variation keeps my mind (and stomach) stimulated and entertained.

So to this end, on a February morning when a faint hint of spring was in the air, a diverse group of Chicagoans gathered at the Indo-American Center on North California Avenue to discuss how attire and appearance impact the Japanese American and Asian Indian American communities. Present were representatives from the Field Museum, Indo-American Center, Japanese-American Cultural Association and the Urasenke Chicago Association, a group of Japanese and American tea enthusiasts; the group that I am affiliated with and the reason I had been asked to participate.

This was the first planning session for Cultural Connections, an event sponsored by The Field Museum’s Center for Cultural Understanding and Change. The center brings the museums anthropological mission into the neighborhoods of Chicago by partnering more than twenty ethic museums and cultural centers. The theme for this year’s programs -- The Language of Looks.

Though we are here to organize the event, I find myself in the midst of one of the best history classes I have ever attended. My fellow attendees comment not only on history, but demographics, anthropology, theology, philosophy and no less important, fashion design.

I learn that Japanese history in the United States begins with the Meiji period, some 150 years ago when Commodore Perry's Black ships forced Japan to open its doors to the West. These first immigrants to America were farmers and agricultural workers. Their history in America is complicated by import quotas, exclusion laws, picture-brides and darkest of all, forced internment and resettlement.

This contrasts with the more recent history of an urban Asian Indian culture that migrated to America in the 1960's during the Cold War in response to a need for professionals, mainly scientist, engineers and doctors. They had the advantage of speaking English and being able to settle wherever the jobs took them. There was no need for them to be segregated into towns as the Japanese were on the West coast.

Their disparate backgrounds have seen the Japanese strive for inclusion while the Asian Indian's inclination has been to blend and reshape American culture. To think of this in real-time, count how many women you have seen in sari versus kimono, it will be thousands to one.

The title of the program is “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall…How Am I Perceived By All?” As the afternoon proceeds various presenters discuss how history, politics, economics and culture all play a role in dress, as does social status, gender, group affiliation, profession, values and taste. How the resources available to us, our communities accumulated knowledge and creativity, combine to affect how we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived by the culture at large. And you thought dressing for work in the morning was simple.

What is dress after all but cloth? It is just there, unless drawn attention to as in couture. It is what grandma and grandpa wear, and what culturally aware youth use to play off of: sari with jeans and high heels, coats and accessories made out of antique kimono fabric. For most, ethnic dress is only brought out of the closet for important milestones: birth, coming of age, marriage and death. It is not a comfortable part of life.

We think of ourselves as sophisticated and some how distanced from the natural world, but as Darwin's finches have evolved their coat of feathers in response to natural selection and isolation, so has our dress. Many years ago I spent three months on a small farm in the town of Ulvik, Norway. During the summer, at festivals and weddings, the locals came dressed in traditional garb and depending on where the revelers hailed from their dress differed slightly. It was very regionally specific to a trained eye. Trying to figure which towns were represented at these events was a bit like bird watching.

Another aspect of dress not often considered is technique. You do not just throw kimono or sari on−you dress. There are multiple layers and acres of cloth to wrap yourself in. There is extravagant jewelry and demur sashes to be adorned with and then there are the knots.

I have become intimately aware of this since acquiring my first kimono in the 1980’s. In Western clothes knots are not much of a consideration. Most men learn to tie their shoes and neck ties early in life, usually instructed by a patient grand parent. Women have scarves to master, but these pale to the knots involved with wearing kimono.

Having sailed on Lake Michigan for forty years and practicing marlinspike seamanship for much of that time, I still find securing my kimono a daunting task. Most knot tying is done in front of you with the proper orientation, but when dressing you are at a disadvantage. If you are lucky enough to have a mirror then what you see is backwards and if not, well it is like tying your shoe laces with your foot tied back behind you.

But what does this have to do with ethnic dress, simply it was all designed before that little machine we seldom think of, the zipper. I am not sure when the zipper was first developed, but I know a lot has changed in the world since then and our specific cultures have had to adapt to the changes.

A perfect example of this was the story told by a young college-aged Asian Indian women concerning nose piercing. Her mother was shocked to find out she had gotten her nose pierced while away at college, but her grandmother was so happy that she bought her multiple nose rings. It was as if her ethnicity skipped a generation before reasserting itself. Her mother had done what she could to fit in and her daughter had found a way to blend tradition with the fashion of the day to make a strong personal statement.

So in the end what are we left with? Some one at the end of the program commented that the topic should not have been the Language of Looks but the Calculus of Looks because dress is the outcome of multiple variables. It is an adaptation, over hundreds of years by millions of people, in response to the world they find themselves in. Sometimes in favorable circumstances and sometimes in dire ones, but always looking to the future and to what will be the best for them and more importantly for their children, though they seldom realize this until they themselves are parents and grand parents.