Notes on walking the city of Oslo, part four

Roald Amundsens hjem, July 16, 2004

In this final installment, we walk about eight miles down the fjord to Svartskog, in search of Roald Amundsens hjem.

Notes on walking the city of Oslo, part four

The path from Ljabru led to a long beach at Hvervenbukta, and marked the boundary between Oslo kommune and Oppegård commune.  There one found a small kiosk, a restaurant, and more of the same attractive unsmiling young women, resting on elbows, warm uncovered breasts pressed against cool weathered granite, living copies of the Gustav Vigeland sculptures in Frogner.  From here I chased the slowly falling sun in its arc over the fjord.  I needed to get to Svartskog while the bright summer light illuminated the glass of Amundsen’s home.  ‘Great men must live in great houses, Leon,’ Amundsen had remarked in The Last Place on Earth, when his brother questioned the rising building costs.  The paved trail climbed up from Hvervenbukta and around a small inlet.  There began a roadside walk of some dozen kilometers to Svartskog and back. 

            This narrow road, winding along a pretty series of sandy pine seascapes cut into a granite slope, was called Ingierstrandveien.  Many homes, roofed with grass or crooked black slate, had managed, just above the waterline, to construct small areas of patio or dock space in or around the folds of granite outcrop.  There were a few more public ‘beaches,’ really only occasional gaps in the pine or level patches of granite.  There folk could jump into the water or sunbathe.  I passed one called ‘Bestemorstrande,’ the grandmother’s beach.

            It was a long walk on a warm day.  I ate my lunch and drank all of my water as I walked.  Halfway to Svartskog—or about where I thought was halfway—I met an old Norwegian, out to check his mail.  I asked if I was on the right course.  He looked at my map and told me—if I understood correctly—that when I reached Bekkenstein I was to stay straight, to not stay on the main road.  A half hour later, just at Bekkenstein, there was the fork in the road.  There was also a sign, on the main road (the first such sign on the entire walk) pointing to “Roald Amundsens hjem.” 

            The sign led me along the main road, which branched upwards and to the left, away from the fjord.  Before long I stopped to reconsider the map, as well as the old man’s words.  I turned around and returned to the fork.  I was about to lose the sun.  Quickly, I threw in my lot with the old local’s directions, and stayed on the straight road.  This soon morphed into a dirt road, then a private road, then into someone’s backyard.  I was about to turn around again and, in the U.S., I would have, since I was now trespassing. 

            But this was a country where one’s right to walk anywhere was still nominally protected.  As I thought this, I looked down the hill and through the trees.  Hard on the fjord, its decorative wood trim unmistakable, was the home of one of the greatest explorers in history.  It had been left just as it was when he flew north in 1928 to rescue the Italian airshipman Nobile lost in the Arctic, and met his own death instead. 

            At the bottom of the hill, a straight path led along the fjord to Amundsen’s front yard.  There, one gained a tree-shaded view forty kilometers north toward the center of busy Oslo.  Here, Captain Amundsen had silence and solitude and a glass study on the second floor where, on clear summer days, like this one, he would have enjoyed a view of the fjord lasting nearly twenty hours, from first light to dusk. 

            I stayed only a short while.  Workmen were making repairs to the very front steps I had walked all the way from Ljabru to photograph.  The sun had made its slow northern arc and at this mid-afternoon moment was beating directly on the fjord-facing home.  As I took a few photographs, the workmen suddenly removed the tarp and left.  I got the image of the steps I had come for.

            As I walked back up the hill from Amundsen’s home, through the several private yards that led to the dirt road that led back to the long return walk along Ingierstrandveien, I could not shake the feeling that Amundsen himself was walking with me.  Or that he had put it in the minds of those workmen that it was time to wrap up and go home.  He had made me work hard for those photographs, and that is what I would have expected of him.  When I reached Ingierstrandveien, I was on my own again.  I felt Amundsen leave me, felt sure that a paved road would not have interested him all that much. 

            It took almost two hours to return to Ljan and the regional train station there.  I skipped a return all the way to Ljabru.  I was tired; not yet old but no longer young.  But my sore feet felt lighter, as they did for the rest of the summer.

Notes on walking the city of Oslo, part three

Wherein I meet a real Nakholmer and have just enough daylight left to try to find Roald Amundsens hjem at Svartskog.

Notes on walking the city of Oslo, part three

The day after I walked around Bygdøy–a mid-July Friday morning that dawned clear and increasingly warm–I took the No. 92 ferry to the island of Hovedøya, intent on completing a series of photographs of the Cistercian ruins.  Waiting for the ferry at Vippetangen, an elderly pensioner came and sat on the bench next to me.  In the shade of a warehouse, he initiated a friendly chat in English, until I insisted on switching to Norwegian, which he followed in equally friendly indulgence.

Why was I here, he asked.  It was a question one heard over and over.  Living in the perfect country, Norwegians seem yet surprised when outsiders trouble themselves to come this far north, even for a brief glimpse of perfection.  Or maybe they are simply reassuring themselves that you will not be staying long.  The old man was a retired creative arts editor, and his face cracked into a bright grin when I mentioned writing poems.  He lived across the fjord in a house on the Tangen peninsula.  He had a vacation home in the Canaries.  And he owned a simple summer hytte on Nakholmen, a brilliant rock sitting in the fjord more or less between Bygdøy and Hovedøya.  He was going to Nakholmen now.

Akershus fortress, from the quay at Hovedøya, 11 July 2004

Don’t you own a boat? I asked.  It would make for a much shorter trip from Tangen to Nakholmen.  Oh yes, he answered.  He had two boats.  But he liked taking the ferry.  That way, he got to meet new people and talk to them.     I knew something of Nakholmen.  Before I’d arrived in Norway, I’d seen on the internet, properties for sale on Nakholmen.  They were idyllic, romantic, sun-poured huts, and one could easily imagine writing novels there amid half-emptied wine bottles and pregnant lovers.  Now a real Nakholmer had introduced himself to me, and he was an old man with bushy gray hair and old mismatched clothes.  He would have been mistaken as homeless if encountered in Philadelphia.  Here he owned two homes and two boats, to go with a place in the Canaries.  He gave me the number of his hytte on Nakholmen and asked me to visit.  I promised I would, but when I’d left Norway a month later, time had gotten away from me and I had not made the journey.  I regret this.

After photographing the ruins, it was not yet noon.  There was still time if I hurried.  I left Hovedøya and then from the ferry dock at Vippetangen walked toward Oslo sentrum in search of the No. 19 trikk, or tram, to Ljabru.  After a few minutes of standing on a corner near the central station, the No. 19 pulled up.  It hummed past the old Oslo Hospital, past the sjømannsskolen and Café Utsikt, then glided toward quiet remote Ljabru.  The station at Ljabru consisted of a tear- drop turn of track laid into a bowl of granite and trees.  Neither the granite nor the trees had been leveled or otherwise modified.  The track had been made to accommodate the landscape, not the other way around.  From this toy train station at Ljabru, it was a roundtrip walk of more than twenty kilometers to Roald Amundsen’s fjord-side home at Svartskog.  I had no car, refused the bus, and there were no closer tram stations.

The turnaround at Ljabru station, 31 July 2004

So from Ljabru, I started out on a well-established walking path, partways tarmac and partways dirt or gravel, as it wound downhill through the suburb of Ljan.  There, a long winding foot/cycle bridge crossed the E-18 highway and became a dirt path, wide enough for a vehicle.  The path led to the edge of the fjord: granite shore-slope interspersed with tiny strands of sandy beach.  The air smelled like cold perfume, the path lined in the uplands with scrub pine and granite outcroppings, along the fjord with smooth granite shields.  These waterside slopes cradled women, young and old, sunbathing and swimming without tops or cares.  I hurried past, with just enough sunlight to try and reach down the fjord to the home of one Roald Engelbregt Gravning Amundsen, the greatest explorer in history.

Notes on walking the city of Oslo, part two

The Oslo waterfront in evening, June 28, 2004

The news out of Norway has been so heartbreaking, it causes one to recall just how special the place is.  Below are some more notes from walking the city of Oslo in the summer of 2004.  In these, I walked to Bygdøy, in search of the home of Quisling.  The arrest of Breivik reminded me of this walk, with its echoes of Norway’s experience with reactionary politics under Quisling and Terboven.  It also reminded me of the plot of Jo Nesbø’s Rørstrupe, about an unregenerate Norwegian Nazi who fought alongside the Germans against the Russians on the Eastern Front.  He survives the war and in the year 2000 plots an assassination to avenge the wrongs he believes he has suffered since his return to Norway.

Notes on walking the city of Oslo, part two

On a walking circumnavigation of the island-turned-peninsula named Bygdøy, I searched several streets for the notorious estate of the Second World War Nazi collaborator Vidkun Quisling.  It was the morning after I’d witnessed the disturbing movie Hamsun, with Max Von Sydow’s Knut Hamsun enduring much of the war in domestic exile, and in increasingly oblivious efforts to convince the weak Quisling to spare Norwegian lives condemned by Nazi governor Terboven.  Someone had mentioned that Quisling’s house had recently been offered for sale.  Given its association with the synonym for national treachery, there were no offers.  The government had stepped in, apparently, and purchased the property for development as a Holocaust museum.

It was hot that day—in the end it was a very hot summer–and I missed the street and became lost.  I was about to give up when I saw a man on a side street, standing near a gate house.  He was opening a locked section of a chain link fence.  I asked him, in rudimentary Norwegian, if he knew of Quisling’s house.  He pointed up beyond some trees.  The gate house where we now stood opened there.  Could I see the house itself?  I had an idea to write a poem about Quisling and wanted a photograph of the doorknob of his house.  I thought this might illustrate what I had envisioned as the entrance into evil.

The man, who, as it happened, was a workman on the museum project, refused.  He seemed a bit perplexed that some foreigner wanted to take a picture of Quisling’s house.  Perhaps I was some kind of neo-Nazi come to worship.  Even as I asked him, I could sense I had trespassed on a subject that, even after all this time, was still very close to the surface of Norwegian memory.

The man tried to rid himself of his discomfort by explaining how Quisling had not lived here for more than a few years.  When I remained standing next to him he reached for another thought.  In his short time in residence, the man said, Quisling had evicted several long-time residents from their homes and incorporated these properties into his estate.  I nodded, but did not go away.  It seemed clear that the locals cared little for a new ‘attraction’ that would bring gas-fuming tour buses–or would-be poet/pedestrians–down these narrow manicured lanes, in search of a poisonous memory of the Nazi infiltration into Norse life.

Perhaps because of my obvious struggles to communicate a difficult request in his native language, or perhaps in search of one final reason to rid himself of me, the man pointed to the gate house itself.  This, he said, was the only structure actually built during the Quisling years.  It housed the hand-picked soldiers Quisling deployed to guard his estate.  These young men presented Quisling’s romantic image of a modern Norwegian Viking state.  The word Quisling gave to these men was a medieval Norse term for bodyguards of the King.

The Quisling gate, July 2004

The man spoke this word twice, before he saw my obvious non-comprehension, and kneeled to trace it the dirt in front of the gatehouse.  Then he wrote in my notebook: Hird.  This four-letter word is almost absurdly complicated to pronounce for beginners in Norwegian language, each letter requiring its own distinct sound.  As a term for his Norwegian storm trooper guards, Quisling had dragged it back into modern usage, at this very gate.

            I thanked the man.  He, though a bit more well-disposed toward me now, nevertheless took my thanks as a sign to hurry through the gate and lock it quickly.  Leaving me outside, he strode uphill to Quisling’s estate, still hidden behind the trees.  I never did see it.  Instead, I took photographs of the gatehouse, until a local resident with his child began to stare at me with either curiosity or contempt.  It was still a raw nerve, and I retreated accordingly.

Notes on walking the city of Oslo

View of Oslofjord and Bleikøya from Café Utsikt, 3 July 2004

Like many of my friends and colleagues, I have been following the immensely sad news coming out of Norway. I did my doctoral field research in Norway, and Oslo is my favorite city in the world. For those who have not had the pleasure of experiencing it in mid-summer, below are some notes from a lovely Saturday in July of 2004, when I walked across the entire city and, in the process, sealed my love affair with it. Re-reading them this morning, they take on new and sadder layers of meaning.

Notes on walking the city of Oslo

From the university station at Blindern to the edge of the Østmarka woods at Mortensrud is a thirty-three minute ride on the Oslo T-bane. The train whips into the central station in a handful of minutes, then winds gradually east and south through rolling green hills near Hellerud station, the terrace apartments of Skøyenåsen, the strip malls of Oppsal, before reaching more heavily forested Ulsrud and Bøler. Past Bølerskole, the train climbs into the hills of eastern Oslo, rocky, wooded, and green, past high block apartments at Bogerud and a light industrial area at Skullerud, before rolling to the end of the line at Mortensrud station with its massive curved wooden shelter.

Here, at 0859 on an early July Saturday, three people exited the train. I was one of them. I do not know what the other two people were about that day. For my part, I laced tight my light hiking boots, and began the second half of my life. Six times I had transited Oslo on my way to some other place, usually to archaeological research in the Arctic. Not until this seventh time had I more than a few hours to explore the city. This time I had more than six weeks. I would start by walking from Mortensrud back to the university. What had taken thirty-three minutes by train would require more than eight hours by foot.

Soon after arriving in a cloistered room at the university, I invested free moments in extended walks throughout the city and beyond. From Blindern to the high hedges of Sognveien the first evening, to the statuary of Vigeland at Frognerparken the second, I ranged a bit further each time. In this northern world, summer daylight remained with you for a very long time. It required some adjustment in one’s sense of time, but the endlessly elongated evening was an instant source of joy, a quiet sensuality of boots on cobblestones, in a landscape sunlit nearly to midnight.

After the sunlight, one noticed the quiet. A near-silence broken by the occasional motorized scooter or passing tram shaded a world largely independent of the automobile. Elderly pensioners grappled up hills and walkways, walking stick in each hand, unyouthful knees more inconvenience than incapacitation. What voices one did hear were low and private, inward-turning contemplation entwined with multi-lingual literacy.

The lengths of these miniature expeditions increased each evening until, at the end of the first week, I arrived at Mortensrud for a full day of urban exploration. I had planned this visit for more than a decade, planned to cover a European city on foot since my first visit to the continent as a teenager. But time had somehow gotten away from me and on this morning as I stepped off the train I was forty-four and beset by contradictions: no longer young but not yet old; barely communicative with people seemingly in command of a handful of languages; a seeker of solitude and silence straining to differentiate a multitude of Norse dialects.

I left the station and followed a map to wind along forested paths. Through neighborhoods bright with islands of flowers and clean clear air like mulch and perfume, I watched low clouds scud along the edges of a cold vault of pale blue sky. The map was almost alarmingly truthful, especially for one used to the near-impossibility of walking the urbanized American northeast.

Oslo was seemingly crossed with as many kilometers of hiking trails and hidden pedestrian paths as ribbons of roads. Roads were mostly narrow, with vehicles squeezed into two lanes, while side-walks—three meters wide for long stretches—were expanded for pedestrians. Dozens of footbridges spanned tram lines and highways. Walking tunnels burrowed under regional rail lines.

After only a few hours of walking it was clear that much thought had gone into arranging this city as lightly into nature as the urban needs of half a million humans would allow. Here was a place easier to walk within than to drive around. Paved roads diminished abruptly into gravel ways, narrowed further into footpaths, even as, on my map, the street names remained. The human had been thought of first rather than last

On the steps of one footbridge I stood for several moments trying to understand the meaning of two long metal planks that led up one side and then down the other. Then two young woman strode rapidly to the bridge and, pushing infants in strollers, crossed it quickly, the wheels of the strollers fitting exactly into the grooves of the metal strips. It was perhaps at that moment when this landscape became truly alien, along with the subtle muscular ways people had fitted themselves into it. Someone had thought of infant strollers when they designed this bridge.

Curved around the northern end of a long fjord, Oslo had been constructed first for thigh muscles and hard feet, then for bicycles and ski, and then for trams and trains and buses. It was easy to see that automobiles had arrived last, and were not given much room to maneuver. This simple discovery came as a kind of rebirth.

From Mortensrud the terrain gradually descended into a series of humpbacked meadows forming a valley above a narrow stream called the Ljanselva. From there, a brief climb brought me to a wide boulevard, Nordstrandveien, that splits the eastern half of the city. Brief side-streets hid triangular, terraced dollhouses, behind front yards of controlled wildness.

From Nordstrand, the journey wound along Munkerudveien, past cobblestone and, occasionally, marble driveways cut and fitted like flat sculpture. These were occupied by cars that seemed more immobile art than accelerating machines. Wandering along Ekebergveien, I stumbled onto Kongveien—the King’s Way and obviously so. Kongveien trended along the eastern ridge of the city, revealing a series of crystalline views down to and across the fjord.

A view from Solveien, 31 July 2004

A long stretch of wide sidewalk led to Café Utsikt—the View Café. A path descended from Kongveien, through a screen of trees, to a broad slope. Under thickening clouds, a scattering of blue- and yellow-painted picnic tables offered a god-like view of the fjord. One could imagine this view preserved as a national park, rather than a little-known place where elderly locals and young women pushing infants came to talk and eat byens beste vafler, the city’s best waffles.

The café itself was a small hut where one could find a bottle of beer for twenty-two kroner—about three dollars and maybe the cheapest price in the whole city. I sat down at a picnic table with a bottle of beer, unwrapped a matpakker of a cheese sandwich and some crackers, and came to see this place as the edge of the universe, where one could watch everything God ever created, moving in slow motion down there in the fjord.

Meadow of god; it was the literal translation of the originally spelled Ås-lo, now ‘Oslo.’ [I would learn that summer that one’s pronunciation of these four letters marked not only one’s place in society, but one’s view of society as well.] Looking down from the ridge at the roadways and clear fjord, I traced the wakes of sailboats, ferries, and small wooden Vikingish sjekte boats.

One gained a new sense for the individual pleasures and obsequious communities of Scandinavian socialism. Men with bodies like Greek gods drove tiny automobiles in calm observance of posted speed limits—when they weren’t roller skiing uphill. Women with eight decades or more on the planet carried bags of groceries a mile homewards, even as any offered assistance would be adjudged a profound insult. It was difficult not to feel as if one had stumbled onto some kind of doomed paradise.

A woman with blue eyes like an endless polar ocean entered my vision. I tried not to stare but felt possessed of that sense of near-invisibility that accompanies ignorance of the local language. In my notebook, I sketched a brief verse to this impossible incarnation of my long Norwegian sommer. One could sit here above the fjord, amongst the pensioners and the impossible blue eyes, and almost see the earth spin minutely across time.

Down the slope of Kongveien and over the bridge into the city sentrum were many more of the same self-confident people, in full command of a kind of athletic intelligence. If this landscape and these humans were the product of half a century of secular socialism, then this time and place, at least, had correctly arranged its human affairs.

Happy 149th Birthday, Evelyn Briggs Baldwin

Evelyn Briggs Baldwin, who served as second-in-command of the 1898-1899 Wellman expedition to Franz Josef Land, and who led the Baldwin-Ziegler Polar Expedition in Franz Josef Land in 1901-1902, was born in Springfield, Missouri, on July 22, 149 years ago.

E.B. Baldwin, 1862-1933

E.B. Baldwin graduated with a Master of Arts degree in 1885 from what is now known as North Central College in Naperville, a school founded in the early 19^th century by evangelical Methodists.  After travels in Europe, a large-wheeled bicycle tour of southern California, and a stint on the lecture tour, Baldwin took a position as school principal in Oswego, Kansas.  After five years, Baldwin went to work as an Assistant Observer for the U.S. Weather Bureau.

In 1893, Baldwin signed on as meteorologist for Peary’s second expedition to North Greenland.  At Anniversary Lodge on the shores of Bowdoin Bay, Baldwin kept notes on weather and auroral phenomena from August 3, 1893 to August 1, 1894.  On a trip across the Bowdoin Glacier in the summer of 1894, Baldwin described the sensations felt when the mass of ice began to move.  “Quick, sharp, deep-tingling, ringing, shrieking sounds frightful enough, came, not as sound usually does, horizontally, but vertically up to our ears, seeming to vibrate through our feet, our limbs, our very bodies, spitefully shouting in our ears…”

Baldwin's diary from the 1898-1899 Wellman expedition, edited by P.J. Capelotti, available from McFarland Publishers

On his return from Greenland, Baldwin’s description of Peary’s efforts as a “partial failure … clearly owing to inadequate provisions and equipment,” led to a permanent rift with Peary.  In an attempt to strike out on expeditions of his own, Baldwin in 1896 published The Search for the North Pole, a 520-page history of Arctic exploration and fund-raising tract. Baldwin’s purpose was to show how private and corporate sponsorship had led to geographic and natural resource discoveries redounding to the eternal fame of the sponsor.

The next to last chapter of Baldwin’s book was devoted to the just-announced Andrée polar balloon expedition. In the summer of 1897, Baldwin made his second journey to the Arctic, this time to Svalbard on board the tourist steamer Lofoten, captained by Otto N.K. Sverdrup, captain of the Fram on Fridtjof Nansen’s three-year polar drift from 1893-96. Lofoten arrived at Danskøya two days after the departure of Andrée in his balloon—much to the dismay of Baldwin, who apparently intended to talk his way onto the expedition. Having just missed a chance to fly toward the North Pole, the idea of using aircraft in polar exploration was one that would fascinate Baldwin for the rest of his life.

The sculpture of the Sagas

The art and archaeology of exploration in the north is a fascinating subject to explore.  Here is a brief video from my trip last month to Iceland showing some of the sculptures of figures from the Vínland sagas.  They range from the heroic Leif Eiriksson (by Stirling Calder) and Thorfinn Karlsefni (by Einar Jónsson) in Reykjavik (note the cross Leif is holding, which along with the sword would have made him one of the first Christian soldiers, if you believe that he was indeed carrying Christianity to the Greenland and the New World), to the strong maternal explorer Guðríður Þorbjarnardóttir as sculpted by Ásmundur Sveinsson, to the almost prancing version of Leif at Eiríksstaðir by Nína Sæmundsson. The two Leif statues were apparently in competition in 1930 to see which would be given to the people of Iceland from the people of the U.S. on the 1000th anniversary of the founding of the Icelandic Parliament, the Alþingi. It seems probable that Sæmundsson’s intepretation of Leif was a bit too effete for the Modern Age in which it was produced. Calder’s Christian soldier hero carried the day.

From Nanortalik to Herjolfsnæs

After a few days of decompression, I am starting to clear out my notebooks from the ICASS VII trip.  First, the video of the flight over southern Greenland.  This footage was shot on Sunday, 19 June, on the flight from Boston to Reykjavik.  It starts with a view of the daunting ice belt surrounding the fjords that day, and gives something of a sense of the difficulties that would have been faced by Norse mariners if they tried to approach this jagged coastline in anything other than perfect sailing conditions.

The clip shows the area around the southernmost of the Norse fjords in Greenland, in the area from Nanortalik down to Kap Farvel, with the site of the Norse ruins at Herjolfsnæs somewhere about halfway in between.  You can see the spectacular Prince Christian Sound that spans southern Greenland and which all but invites you to imagine Norse vessel navigating the sound a thousand years ago.  How I would love to have my small research vessel Odin and its side-scan sonar in that long and historic passage.

However, the timing of such research would have to be as closely calculated as that of the approach of Norse mariners a thousand years ago.  With today’s news that the “ice sheet in Greenland melted at its highest rate since at least 1958,” (see:  http://news.yahoo.com/greenland-ice-melts-most-half-century-us-204848118.html)  perhaps the Norse colony in Greenland did not meet its end when the climate cooled but when it grew warmer and belts of ice such as these made navigation in and out of the Greenland fjords impossible.  As the Icelandic reenactor at Eiríksstaðir said when speaking of Norse ships and their encounters with disastrous sailing conditions: “When it went bad, it went really bad.”