Rudy’s Blog

[ The following is the second-to-last installment from my notes on a recent trip to Scandinavia.]

June 30, 2009.

We took a regular bus from Fjaerland to Hellesylt, and then a ferry from Hellesylt to Geiranger. I was anxious about catching the bus, but it was on time to the second, and very comfortable inside. Great views as we labored over the ridges separating one fjord from the next. In many stretched the road was what we’d call one-lane, although it had traffic in both directions. The busses and cars would pull over for each other at times.

The cruise from Hellesylt to Geiranger really takes the prize. We saw dozens of really big cataracts—any one of which would be a major sight back in the continental US—and here they’re lined up on both sides of the fjord, writhing down the tree-studded cliffs that are several thousand feet high.

Abandoned farms perch on some of the nearly vertical meadows—what kind of maniac build his farm in a place like that?

Sore hip or not, I managed to hike to the top of a thousand foot bluff this morning. It felt like being back in Zermatt. I saw lots of ferns and rushing streams. The trees are mostly aspens. Some bell-collared sheep were in the thickets, peering suspiciously at me. And at the top, goats lolled with gratifying recklessness at the very edge of a towering drop. On the way back, I walked along the edge of a field, quite lovely with a barn and a cliff in the background.

The exercise made me happy, and I started singing a song that I heard on the Mickey Mouse Club show forty years ago, a song about Donald Duck’s global fame. The song, as I recall it, was presented in what may well have been a Norwegian accent. “Kvak kvak kvak, Donald Duck, watch him do his stuff. Kvak kvak kvak, Donald Duck, now he’s had enough.” I videoed myself performing this number.

Now I’m limp and tired from the hike. Waiting on the dock for a lighter for the large Hurtigruten ship, which we plan to board for a five hour ride up the length of this fjord to the city of Ålesund.

[Those tiny dots by the top railing are people!]

People are pouring off the lighters from a repellently gargantuan cruise ship called “The Jewel of the Sea,” truly the size of a starship—then flocking directly to a waiting line of tour buses. From the outside, it looks as if going on a cruise tour means doing everything in a crowd, with lots of standing in line. But it’s easier, I’m sure, than freelancing the trip, and for some people just the right thing.

I may go on a cruise myself one of these days, especially when I’m older and less mobile. Today in any case we’re riding a more reasonably-sized Hurtigruten mothership to Ålesund.

Great excitement riding the lighter to the Hurtigruten ship. A hatch in the big ship’s hull opens for us at water level, and we enter via a gang plank. It’s so spaceship-like, just like Han Solo landing in a hatch of the giant ship in Star Wars. One deck up was a desk like at a hotel, the “Resepsjon.” Now we’re in the panoramic view lounge on Deck 8, very comfortable, and this particular cruise ship isn’t looking so bad from the inside.

As we approach the mouth of the fjord, the view opens up to resemble the coastline of, say, Maine or Vancouver, with low islands and peninsulas on every side. But vaster, mistier, and calmer than anything I’ve seen before. The Happy Isles, the Blessed Lands of the far north.

[ The following is another installment from my notes on a recent trip to Scandinavia.]

June 29, 2009.

Today we got a boat from Balestrand to Fjaerland, a sweet, quiet hamlet between the Fjaerland fjord and the Jostalbreen glacier, which is the largest in Europe.

When Sylvia and I got off the ferry to Fjaerland, it felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone. The other passengers on our boat all got into a tour bus that had ridden in the ferry. They drove off, leaving us alone, in this utterly silent and deserted Sunday morning Norwegian village, the fjord beside us and snow-capped mountains all around.

Anything I say feels superficial, overly dramatic, here in the core of this uncanny beauty. I feel like a fly on a freshly frosted cake.

Sylvia had been talking about finding a book to read so, lo and behold, there’s an unmanned shelf of books by the road, with a sign reading “Honest Books, 10 Kr. each.” We’re both wearing shades, very Californian. I light a cigarette, I’m a noisy wise-guy, the tour bus grinds by, I wave, nobody seems to see me.

True to Twilight Zone style, I imagine myself as a city clicker in a black suit, and my consort as a sexy blonde on spike heels, our voices overly loud amid the silent mountains.

[Part of the porch of the Hotel Mundal appears on the left.]

The Hotel Mundal is the size of a large house, vintage 1891, with a fresh-faced young woman at the desk, perhaps from the founder’s family.

Across the street is a wooden church. Some first names in the churchyard across the street form our little hotel: Gurid, Ingvald, Ingebrigt, Ola, Kjell, Ola, Mikkel, Anggar, Brynhild. There’s a Swanhild Aarskog.

Many of the gravestones bear the epitaph, “Takk for Alt,” meaning “Thanks for Everything,” some just say Takk. I love that.

What a great sentiment with which to leave the world. “Thanks for everything, world, it’s been great—you really went all out.” And forget about any bitter rant like, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Go out happy. Why not?

Life’s rich panoply. I’m so grateful that I made it here.

The second day I rent a bike and ride up the canyon, nobody in sight for miles. At one point a single vehicle drives by: a blue tractor. I pass a bridge too rickety to walk upon.

In the evening an older woman, the manager of the hotel, tells us about its history.

She mentions that a few months ago a farm’s concrete reservoir of cow manure had burst uphill, releasing a kind of a poo-avalanche that swept past the hotel and into the fjord. No sign of that now.

In the front yard of the hotel is a vertical stone plinth, like a mini-version of that 2001 slab, covered not with writing, bit with (seemingly) lichen-like spots. Suppose that the spots are glyphs in the Unknown Tongue used by the Great Old Ones who live beneath the placid surface of the fjord.

Thinking back to our arrival in terms of a Twilight Zone episode, I imagine that the woman finds a book with curious blotches and symbols. It’s called God Bøk, which is Norwegian for Good Book.

“Is this math?” she asks, flipping through the pages. Her consort is a mathematician, she’s a linguist.

Suppose that the bursting of the cow-poo reservoir was orchestrated by the Great Old Ones? Too ludicrous maybe. Perhaps it would be more commercial to have a moonlit clearing with the proposed human sacrifice of a beautiful Norwegian girl, a sacrifice blocked by the woman heroine, with her man’s aid—they have power because they’ve deciphered the blotch-runes on the stele by using the God Bøk.

[ The following is another installment from my travel journals, written during a recent trip to Norway.]

June 26-27. 2009.

This morning we took a boat from Flåm to Balestrand, a slightly larger resort spot. The boat left at 6 a.m., but, in a way, this didn’t feel that early, as by then the sun had been up for hours and hours.

Riding the boat up the Sognefjord, I was sitting in a plastic chair on the back deck, still sleepy, and I closed my eyes to rest. I became aware of all the air currents around me—flapping my trouser legs, waving my several tufts of hair, buffeting my cheek, the whole atmosphere alive with currents and waves, the ocean of air all around me.

Now it’s about 9 a.m. We’re on the front porch of Kviknes Hotel, a grand old place, all wood, with endless lobbies and parlors full of vintage furniture and Norwegian impressionist paintings. Wood floors and ceilings. No cruise boats here, the nearest highway is hidden in a tunnel under the mountain behind the town, it’s utterly still.

The mountains across the fjord stand in layers, like a theater’s curtains, framing the onward path.

[Click the panoramic image of the view in photos and drawing at Balestrand to see a bigger version.]

A panoramic view of this might be easier to paint than to photograph. I’d love to have my paint kit here. Well, I’ll make a sketch. David Hockney took his watercolor kit to Norway, I just remembered, and there’s some nice fjord images in his book (and website), Hockney’s Pictures .

I can hardly believe we made it here. Living the dream.

It’s the next day, 7:40 a.m., I’m sitting on our balcony at Kviknes Hotel. As I mentioned, painters came here in the late 1800s, and a lot of their pictures are in the hotel lobbies.

There’s one mountain in particular near the hotel which appears very often. A dumpling of a mountain, a pudding with a curly top. I’m looking at it right now.

I bought a cheap bathing suit at the COOP supermarket and went swimming for a fairly long time off the steps in front of the hotel, the fjord is wide here, and much warmer than at Gudvangen. My bathing garb is one of those nasty tight little suits that you see on old men in Europe. It’s always great to be in the living water. It tastes only slightly salty, due to all the streams flowing into what is, by rights, a 150 mile long estuary of the sea. Brackish.

For the last two nights we’ve had these enormous hotel buffet dinners with, like, two dozen kinds of cured fish and dried meat as appetizers, not to mention the hot roasted or friend meats and fish—and the formidable array of puddings. Everything is yummy, but it’s binge eating—you feel stunned when you’re done. I guess this is how you eat on a cruise ship. Indeed, the Kviknes dining room feels like a ship, we sit by the window with the fjord twenty feet below.

Very quiet in this town. Two or three seagulls circle nearby squawking, just as they’ve squawked for thousands of years. Nice to think I’m hearing the same sounds as the ancients. Nobody analyzes a seagull squawk, and I don’t suppose the bird premeditates it.

“Squawk.” The critic: “But what does this squawk mean?”

[This is how the Kviknes Hotel looks from the back...at midnight. It’s never really dark at all.]

It’s good being on vacation, away from my usual concerns about my writing career. My attention is either in the ongoing Now or in the What Next, that is, in the plans for our free-form itinerary—boat to Fjaerland tomorrow, then bus to Hellesylt, boat to Geiranger and boat to Ålesund.

We’re running out of days—we’ve spent ten nights in Scandinavia, with six more to come. Precious treasure, these slow days. Each vacation day dilates, filled with new sights and experiences. At home, a week can go by before I’ve noticed. “What? It’s Sunday again?” Or even a year: “I can’t believe it’s time for Christmas.”

My left hip is hurting a lot—it’s wise to walk slowly and sit down a lot and take elevators when I can. Last year a doctor said my hip joint is deteriorating and eventually I might have it replaced. Maybe next spring? I’ll try taking the debatably efficacious glucosamine supplement pills first. In any case, the hip hurts somewhat all the time, and more if I walk all day. So I don’t feel as able to go on long hikes or on scrambles up the mountains—like I used to do. We rented a canoe yesterday, and I’ve been biking.

But today we went for it and managed a three mile walk—lovely to be up in those trees and meadows with the village and the fjord below.

On the way back from our hike, Sylvia and I happened to be walking by the tiny Balestrand harbor just at the right time to see a new ship, Stril Challenger, being christened—funny that we use so liturgical a word in this context. Apparently the ship belongs to the Havyard company, an oil-drilling outfit, and is designed for emplacing anchors for the immense off-shore oil-rigs of Norway.

[Mannequin in folk garb.]

The high-school brass band played a few numbers, including the Norwegian national anthem and Happy Birthday—the musician kids all pale-skinned blondes and redheads. An official made a short speech, a woman in a Norwegian folk dress broke a bottle of champagne against the hull, and we joined a stream of locals filing up the gangplank to look around the huge Stril Challenger. And then the ship took off for a little cruise across the fjord and back, although Sylvia and I had gotten off by then—I was unsure about how long the cruise might be.

Later, after the passengers came back, we watched as the ship cavorted around the fjord, with smaller launches buzzing around it—I think of the word, “lighter,” used to mean a smaller boat that you use to unload a barge. I like that ships use smaller boats as extensions of themselves. Imagine still smaller shuttle pods emerging from the lighters. A fractal regress of ships.

This set me to thinking about a starship launch ceremony. I imagined a great mothership ship with smaller ships circling it—the lighters. And one of the lighters darts down to a boy’s house, the lighter appears in the room of our young hero, Gunnar, to take him on a trip. As the lighter carries him off, Gunnar cries out for some precious object that he forgot—and a lower-level lighter the size of a basketball goes back to his room to scoop up the pet soft plastic robot that Gunnar calls a “shoon.”

[Sunrise at 1 a.m.]

Sitting by the fjord at the edge of the grand hotel’s green lawn. I could stay here for months. It feels like the afterlife, like heaven. The air is slightly hazy, drenched in light. The flat water, the mountain ranges doubled as reflections. We’re so lucky to be here

June 24-25, 2009.

Today we rode the train to Flåm—you say that funny letter like “oh”. On the ride down into the valley we passed an immense waterfall. The train stopped and a woman appeared, dancing in the distance with wavy arms, the troll-woman of the falls, I guess.

The hotels were full, but we found a stark room at the Heimly Pension, every surface covered by linoleum, a kind B&B with boarding-house food, but with an exhilarating view of the tip-ass end of the fjord. Great steep wooded cliffs plunge down into the blue-green water.

There was a cruise ship the size of a really large hotel docked here, blocking the view, roaring like an idling bus, spewing a steady plume of diesel smoke—but just now he honked for his scattered passengers and lumbered off. Sweet silence.

The next day I rented a bike and rode up into the valley, getting deep into the countryside—it was just what I wanted to see, tiny roads with farms and weird Nordic cattle, some sheep.

A wild river with rocks that had walking platforms.

A tiny church with a fresh grave for a woman with a surname the same as the village: Flåm.

In the afternoon we took a cruise up into an even narrower branch of the fjord called Naerøyfjord—leading to a spot called Gudvangen. The narrower fjords have steeper walls—in one spot we passed a sheer mass of stone that was 1800 meters tall. It’s hard really to grasp how big something like that is, in the clear air, your eyes can’t quite assess it. Sometimes we’d see a single mad farmhouse teetering on a brink—or a lone hiker, and the scene would snap into its gargantuan scale.

In most spots the fjord walls are at least partially wooded. Up above them is an undulating highland of gray-brown mountains, patchy with snow even now in midsummer. It’s like Norway has only two elevations: sea level and 1 km high, with a labyrinth of steep cliffs connecting the two.

The water from the melting snow gushes down the cliffs in streams that fall in cataracts, bedizening the precipice with white skeins, some of them free-falling for a hundred meters. One waterfall was striking a slanted rock with such force that a steady geyser shot up at the base—an upwards waterfall.

We rode on a huge boat, a big steel car-ferry, with gratifyingly few passengers. We saw some smaller boats that were packed like sardines—chartered by the big cruise ships, I guess.

In Gudvangen there was a tourist restaurant with a funny sculpture of a troll—seems like the trolls always have long dick-like noses. Guys were riding a helicopter up to the tops of the fjord cliffs and hang-gliding down. People are always looking for a chance to run an internal combustion engine.

Sylvia and I went for a hike. It was an unseasonably hot day—we’re very lucky with the weather—and near the end I jumped naked into the fjord, not far from where a glacial waterfall was falling in. It was so cold that the instant I hit the water I was scrambling to get out—moving fast before my limbs seized up and I sank to the bottom of the kilometer-deep gulf.

[Reminder: I’m giving two readings this weekend, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. The following is from my travel journals, written during a recent trip to Norway.]

June 22-23, 2009.

We’re in Bergen now, in a new country. The Norwegians are even better-looking than the Danes.

We passed through a maze of traffic and dull-seeming neighborhoods between the airport and downtown Bergen, but here, near the water, it’s very cute, a little like Gloucester, Mass, with wood frame clapboard houses on hilly narrow streets around a port.

Tomorrow night is the Midsummer festival in Scandinavia. A young woman at the hotel desk told us that the locals have a bonfire somewhere near town, and a big party, with many people coming by boat.

“It starts after dark?” I ask, still got getting it.

“It doesn’t get dark,” she says.

We’re far enough north that we have that 24-hour light.

This is a picture of me sitting in the full sunlight at 10 p.m. In the end, we didn’t have energy to seek out a bonfire party. The sun wouldn’t stop shining, and we went to bed tired, feeling like kids who have to turn in before the grown ups.

[Upper Ole Bull Place.]

We saw a statue of the famous Bergen-born violinist Ole Bull, a name which briefly obsessed me, and I started saying it a lot, as in “I wish Ole Bull was here with us now,” or “What would Ole Bull do in this situation?”

Maybe he’d go to this bakery.

It was fun in Bergen—the beautiful little streets and colorful wooden houses. Unbelievably beautiful women and handsome guys—clean-featured as models, with shocks of naturally blond hair and interesting double-bowed lips. Vow!

The main department store in Bergen. I like that font.

This morning, walking a quiet back street, I wished I lived there.

Passed a California-seeming shop called Witchy Bitchy Beauty Spot, for tattoos and punk gear like boots and skulls. Supposedly Bergen is the best rock and roll city in Norway.

Apropos of nothing much…I read “The House Left Alone” by Robert Reed in the SF Year’s Best #14 this morning, it has a great set-up. Two guys get a “starship” in the mail. It’s the size of a bowling ball. But then it turns out just be a robotic scout ship with some nanomachine seeds in it—a probe to be launched by a rail gun.

[A cool picture of a futuristic yacht appearing in a California-shaped space between some ancient houses.]

It would have been much cooler if the ball had really been a starship. Like if (1) that object the guys get in the story had generated a field in the shape of a big starship that our characters could ride inside. Or if (2) it had been a kind of teleportation amulet—you just grab onto it, swing it like a bowling ball, and whoosh, it takes you somewhere far away. Or if (3) it had been filled negatively curved space, so the boys could just get inside it and then take off.

[Germ-killing blue light in the men's rooom at the local museum, which has some good Edvard Munch.]

It’s occurred to me that walking is a form of teleportation. You think about moving, and then…you move. Being alive at all is so very strange.

Now leaving Bergen.

June 20-21, 2009

The Tivoli amusement park is sweet, cozy, European. I only went on one ride, a small roller coaster. No point giving myself a stroke with some neck-whipper. He had a late lunch of smørrebrod, that is, buttered bread with…you pick. I had fjordrejer on mine, local shrimp. The place was called Grøften, meaning Ditch. One of the guys I met the other day, Morten, told me that his grandparents used to take the train into town for a big day at Tivoli, ending with a great beer-drinking cigar-smoking dinner at Grøften.

Right now I’m sitting at a street cafe under an umbrella, rain showers taking turns with the sun. the cafe gives the customers blankets to huddle in. A steeple in front of me, church name unknown, but I’m tired of looking up names on the map. Just being here is enough, adrift in unnamed Danishness. The blonde women pin their hair in Danish pastry updos.

Earlier today, Sylvia and I saw a half dozen couples in the cavernous City Hall, with parent friends, grandparents and even children, Danish toddlers, brilliantly blonde—everyone dressed up for civil wedding ceremonies. It reminded me of Sylvia and I getting married at the City Hall in Geneva, some 42 years ago.

[Near the palace, Rosenborg Slot.]

The fountain on my left has big bronze storks, wings up, perched, beaks facing out. Illustrating a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale? Danish storks.

Score! I just a blanket to huddle in on my cafe chair—looking bumlike, I’m sure, in the striped Rastafarian watchcap I just bought on the street—sipping hot tea, this is the life. It’s quite cool here, June or not, although the Danes seem to find it summery. The younger women wear tights and T-shirts, always the leg-warmer-type tights under the skirts.

This square is tiled with polygonal stones in red and shades of gray, five shapes in all, a regular but unorthodox tessellation, deserving of an illustration in any comprehensive volume on the Tilings of the Plane. Here comes the rain again.

[It’s good to be King Christian IV of Denmark.]

The other day we toured this great palace called Rosenborg Slot. One room was paneled in wood, with an oil painting on each panel, good little Bruegelesque pictures. I can see this place as a model for the inside the castle of the King of Flimsy in my novel.

In the display cases of treasures, they had some nautilus shells that had been carved away in spots to reveal the inner surfaces, which were in turn pierced to resemble the iron lace of a knight’s helmet.

[Bruegel painting of the poor eating the rich at the Statens Museum for Kunst.]

Last night we went to a Baroque music concert in an ancient little octagonal wooden church. We went by bus and had dinner on the way, and arrived fifteen minutes late, so we had to wait in the vestibule with a lone Scandinavian usher, who looked like the frequent Bergman actor Max von Sydow. In a way, hearing the first song this way made it the most beautiful, as if we were waiting in the wings of Paradise, the musicians visible through the peepholes in the closed double doors, the walls pale green with dry flaking paint, the whole structure elderly and spindly, the music unutterably rich and sweet. Finally going inside it was even more like a Bergman film, so utterly 1910, a line of distance and idiosyncratic faces along one of the balcony railings, and I could imagine the skillful sequence of scenes that would unveil to me the inner passions behind these specific visages, the dark-haired woman with vivid eyes, the short-haired lean man with a striped tie, the youth in a windbreaker, the aging beauty with her white hair pulled back in to Danish pastry updo.

[A writing desk at the Danish Museum of Art & Design, dig how the writer controls the dragon of creativity by wielding...a red-hot poker?]

I didn’t bring my laptop—partly to avoid the weight and the hassle, partly to get away from computers. I have been checking my email every day or two on the hotel’s machine, although it’s a very expensive $12 for twenty minutes, and the rip-off lamers who run the system—www.wayport.net—(a) start the timer at 15 minutes instead of 20 minutes even though I’ve supposedly paid for 20 and (b) eat up two more minutes of my time with their login and their ads, and (c) only have Internet Explorer, instead of Firefox, and IE pops up a security warning every few seconds when you read webmail, a warning that you have to click on to continue, wasting more of your expensive time. I sound like a junky complaining about a short count…and that’s why, in fact, I’m glad to be away from computers.

We haven’t been seeing any English-language newspapers either—it’s great not seeing the ongoing media hype for the right wing and not be reading about the Middle East, health care, the recession, and the California budget crisis.

June 22-23, 2009

I feel heavy and slow today—I ate lamb for supper before the concert last night, something I normally don’t do. It felt good eating it, though. Before the dinner we walked in a gorgeous park called Frederiksberg Have, it was like an anthology of gardens, little walls and hedges closing in the short stories of flowerbeds and fountains. A wedding party was in full swing in a clearing. Passing a shadowed bench, I saw a bridesmaid (or bride?) lying on her back with her pale silk skirt hiked up , and an urgent black-suited groomsman (or groom?) lying on top of her. People go nuts at weddings.

“People f*cking!” I whispered to Sylvia, who hadn’t noticed them.

“Oh stop it,” she said, taking my remark for one of my random lies or Tourette-syndrome-like outbursts.

All day the sun and the rain squalls alternate. So far it’s never rained longer than half an hour. It’s like the rapidly changing weather you get on an island.

We unwisely got on a tour-the-town bus this afternoon, a bus stinking of diesel fumes, waddling like a crippled hippo, filled with numb or voluble tourists. It drove straight to a row of desolate souvenir shops along the cruise-liner dock, and then to…the Little Mermaid, a small and undistinguished statue, forlorn in a remote corner of the waterfront, surrounded by parking lots, and mobbed my tourists. Ugh. The Disney Version. Locals have twice sawn off the Little Mermaid’s head.

[We didn’t go to Legoland, but here’s a store with a cool display representing the infinitely regressing doctrine that objects are made of small replicas of themselves.]

Imagine if a town were to deliberately erect a lowest-common-denominator tourist attraction, well away from the city center—just to keep the more gullible tourists out of the way. When we have a cook-out at home in California, a certain kind of hornet or yellow-jacket often appears, aggressively going after the meat—and one strategy against them is to set an unprotected plate of meat scraps off to one side. The hornets will tend to gather at the scrap plate—at the tourist attraction.

[Concrete armchair at the Danish Museum of Design.]

We got off that bus for good after the Little Mermaid and walked to the Danish Museum of Design, a fascinating place with a great cafe in a big garden, hardly anyone there, a I felt like a guest a rich person’s city house.

I liked the Art Nouveau rooms in the museum—those gnarly, chaotic zigzag curves in the decorative patterns. Like the late Sixties, Art Nouveau didn’t last nearly long enough.

I hung out by the harbor for awhile, the waters alive with boats: water taxis, moored restaurants, kayakers, sightseeing barges and even a submarine. The first hot day we’ve had here. Did I mention that the sun goes down around 11:30 p.m., and that the sun is up by 4 a.m.? In between it’s like twilight. We’re pretty far north, nearly as far as Alaska.

On our last night in Copenhagen we ate in a cafe full of cute young people—the tables and chairs were mismatched thrift-store items, mostly pastel—I’ve seen this fashion in New Zealand but not yet in the US. Again it felt like being at someone’s house. After supper we walked along the river, with the sun still setting at 10 pm. As always, I long to paint the CAPOW-wave-rule patterns of the light reflected on undulating water. I remember admiring these sunset blogs in Maine, forty years ago. Pale whitish blue and pale beige-yellow.

[The Kong Arthur is a great hotel.]

I woke briefly at 3 am, and it was already light. The actual night is only a few hours long, and even then it’s not dark. Obversely, it must be the case that, around Christmas time, it’s only light from, say, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Now I finally understand why, in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, they go to church in the dark on Xmas morning. I’d always imagined that for some strange reason they were going to church at 5 a.m. But it was probably closer to noon.

And now on to Bergen, Norway…