Zero Point

Sunrise over the Nitelva

Continued from here…

Besides, just as the heart might be found unexpectedly inhabiting some distant delta, the cogs of the brain might turn their first in a snowy land. 

In the free hours in those initial weeks in Norway, at the zero point, I’d taken to exploring and found that up the street from the Rælingen house suburban Oslo gave way to open country which at the time of year was decked white.  There were deep pockets in the landscape of fields and in one I found an impressive oak tree.  Against the grey skies of the Eastland the stem patterns seemed to mimic the shades and arcs of light in the house and the flicker of the candles.

There was a small pine forest and having grown up in a land of eucalypts I was excited to clamber through it, up the icy slopes with a leg occasionally falling deep into a random hole of snow.  I had all the wonder that Bangladeshis do when they say they’d one day like to see snow, and touch it.

Lillestrøm Town Centre

I was wrong about Gunborg and Olav.  Theirs was not a bingo existence; the Rælingen house was no retirement village.  Perhaps I appreciated that best in the summer, because although I was staying in the Westland by then I continued to visit whenever I had the chance to reach Oslo again.  To my astonishment, that summer Olav sprang about the lawn in his sports outfit.  He leapt and stretched as we played the badminton he’d proposed.  It was tiring.

They were members of a swimming club so we’d swum; they liked to walk so we went to see the wild birds in the river flats a little to the south of Lillestrøm town.  They were members of a pensioner’s ski club and one day we all went cross country skiing.  I was part of a team with an octogenarian leader and all other participants over seventy.  There must’ve been at least some arthritis for them to contend with, but the pace was altogether suitable for an Australian skiing novice.  Maybe it was really me who was seventy.

Meanwhile the oak tree had been busily changing its dress, not into a sports outfit but donning a light green hairdo for spring, a mature deep green summer crown and a short-lived autumn cloak of yellow and brown.  It wasn’t only Gunborg and Olav I came to visit in every season, but the equally active oak tree.

But I get ahead of myself.  In the initial days Gunborg and Olav, ironically, spent some amount of energy concerned that I was bored, despite my saying I wasn’t.  They proposed the museum trips and the National Theatre for a play.   They organised for me to spend one weekend with their eldest son Torgrim and his family; but unfortunately, because of the language difficulties, I hadn’t understood that plan.  Just as we were leaving there was a sudden fussing because I hadn’t packed any clothes.  I had no idea I needed to.

When it became apparent I wasn’t going back with them on the same day, I was quite upset about it, though I said nothing.  I thought I must’ve done something wrong.  I was sure they were bored with me.  And I don’t know what their son thought because I was sullen and consumed in thoughts about what bad and probably Australian thing I might’ve unthinkingly done.  It was only when we went down to their tennis court on the next day that it properly dawned on me, that they thought I would enjoy the change.  Their son’s wife Frøydis asked, ‘Didn’t you bring your tennis shoes?  Didn’t they tell you we’d be playing tennis?’  So I played tennis, embarrassed, in bare feet.

Eventually I challenged the Nitelv.  With courage built I followed footprints through the snow covering the ice of the river, thinking I could turn back if the tracks suddenly stopped by a hole; yet without incident I reached the far side.  My Australian parents would’ve been more than a little concerned; but Gunborg had watched calmly from her kitchen window.  She knew the exact temperature from the thermometer affixed outside the glass pane and from past days she knew the ice was thick.

Walking on ice was a skill to learn, not only on the Nitelv but on the footpaths too; and it came in handy, later, in Hatiya, when fearlessly negotiating the muddy back roads of the monsoon.  There’s something similar about the stepping lightly and placing your body weight with care.

There was one morning they managed to tell me to be sure to take warm clothes as it was six degrees.  I thought I must’ve misunderstood.  Six degrees was hardly that cold: a winter’s night in Sydney might be as low.  I asked several times and surely they were saying ‘six’.  Pleased, I thought I might escape the full horse of clothes and sneak away to class in just a jumper; but I didn’t make it three steps.  In winter Norwegians don’t always vocalise the minus in the temperatures, I learnt. 

Of all meals in Rælingen breakfast was my favourite.  We ate slices of brown bread with paté and gherkins, herring in tomato sauce, Gunborg’s homemade apple jam, cold meats and cheeses: there was Jarlsberg with the holes, ‘key’ cheese with the little crunchy brown pieces in it, goat’s cheese and the soft caramel tasting brown cheese for which Norway is famous.  We’d swallow a teaspoon of cod liver oil washed down with milk, orange juice or filter coffee. 

The evenings shared were often given to pointing at things, with me repeating the Norwegian name; not unlike what would later occur in the tea shops of Hatiya as the villagers taught Bangla.  Sometimes we used dictionaries and Gunborg made sure there was a pad by the kitchen table to supplement with doodles the communication struggle.  I practiced the basic phrases from class and learnt new vocabulary.  They also asked things: Olav once enquired if when one had had enough to eat it was possible to say, ‘no thanks, I’m fed up.’  It was the dictionary that divulged why Gunborg’s food was as it was: she’d spent her working life as a home economics teacher.

And it was truly remarkable to have these new, varied and detailed Norwegian memories.  I’d even seen Ingrid from their optometrist business, a tradition their younger sons had continued, appear on a love match TV game show and I hoped she’d find someone nice.  It was strange that I cared about anything so specific occurring at the far end of the world.

I used to wonder about the simplest differences: the thoughts behind the habits and the décor of Rælingen.  Why was the Norwegian concept of how a room should be altogether different?  How had light taken its Norwegian meaning?  What of more complex ideas? 

It is the caveman drawings of my thoughts I write of, the zero point.  Thoughts are culture shaped and predictable most of the time; they’re barely ours.  But in Norway there were thoughts in the curtains, in the spreading of butter upon bread and in the lacing up of boots by the door: new thoughts to be had, everywhere.  And those first days in Rælingen were for my thinking as the fabled first primeval steps of prehistoric animals, from the swamp onto the land.

Sometimes I consider that although my body had been born in Sydney eighteen years earlier, my thoughts are creatures of the icicles that crunched underfoot and dangled from the lampposts at old Fornebu Airport, in Oslo, on that first evening when I met Olav. 

As it happened, like the Brahmaputra's, my journey started with ice.

** Photos from later visit in Autumn 2006.



And speaking of the Clauses, there's no forgetting the brave fisherman, the mother bear from Goldilocks or the riders from the north.




This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Zero Point

Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway

Norwegian Light

follow the footprints

...continued from the Nitelv and the Oak.

Besides, a journey cannot be a journey without a beginning….

I remember ice. It was a winter’s night we walked across the car park of Oslo’s old Fornebu Airport, when I was eighteen.  Oslo had a light as I’d never seen, of a soft cloudy grey variety delivered in small parcels by the illumination of the lampposts.  It was a light of punctuation rather than words.  The trolley slid and I slipped a bit as I followed my new host father to the space he’d found for the car.  I felt my chin freezing.  Along with the astonishment of being for the first time beyond Australia I held a minor measure of disappointment.  My host father was old.

All the Rotary exchange students from Australia had been met by their families, where we would billet for the first three weeks in an Oslo satellite town, Lillestrøm, in order to attend an introductory Norwegian language course before travelling to our final destinations across the country to spend the year.  I was the last to be met and I wondered if they’d forgotten me, whoever they were.  When he did arrive he was tall and slim, Olav, with cotton thread hair in white and a red glow about his cheeks.  He was the clean cut younger brother of Santa Claus.  Olav wore glasses and must’ve been in his seventies.  I imagined playing bingo in a retirement home. 

He’d brought a jacket I had to put on, doing up the zipper then the outside studs until the collar pushed the underside of my chin.  He’d arranged my scarf and there was a beanie and ski gloves.  I was more clad than at anytime previously for that journey across the car park.  We loaded my belongings into the boot and I walked to the front to get in.  There were barely words in any of this for Olav spoke little English, though he tried.  When I opened the car door he abruptly stopped, eyeing me with surprise, and upon looking in, I realised that by instinct I’d gone to the driver’s side.  They drive on the right here, I scolded myself.  Finding the other side where Norwegian passengers sit I unrobed for the heating.  Off came ski gloves and beanie, jacket studs were unclipped, jacket zipper undone and scarf unwound.

The first glimpses of Oslo were enticing.  There were old buildings of large stone blocks, grey or painted in pastel yellow or light blue and the footpaths were made of bitumen; they needed round blue street signs with walking people outlined in white to direct cars not to go there.  Suburban houses were wooden and starkly painted in red, yellow, blue or black and the road tunnels under the city centre were not neatly tiled like the small number of examples that Sydney had, but rough, cavernous and suitable exactly for the inhabitation of trolls.  The simplicity of train platforms, the ice on the Oslo fjord and the billboards of foreign disposition, especially if they featured the extra letters, with an ‘æ’, ‘ø’ or ‘å’ in them, were marvellous.  There would’ve been a conversation of interest with Olav had there been the means.

But the excitement of the evening scenery was outdone by something unexpected: the driving.  On icy roads it is to be imagined the car would slide a bit but it soon became apparent that the unsteadiness in the weather was more than matched by the unsteadiness in Olav’s steering.  In the forty minutes it took to cross the city we nearly had a few accidents and when Olav changed lanes other cars honked at us, the ones we were set to collide with, causing him to get nervous and swerve jerkily back the other way.  I found myself holding onto the door, no longer embarrassed about having gone without thought to the driver’s side.  It might’ve been the best option. 

I wondered if his lenses were sufficiently thick, not knowing he was an optometrist.

My new home in Rælingen, across the Nitelv River from Lillestrøm proper, sat midway up a small hill at a swing in the road.  It’s not there now. But the house was large, white and wooden with red window frames.  As Olav took a few automobile charges in battlement with the hill, which turned out to be normal for conditions of ice, I held my breath.  He insisted on it: scarf re-wound, jacket zipper closed, studs clicked, beanie and ski gloves on, for the few short steps to the front door.  I found a small area inside with racks and coat hangers and a heated metal stand for shoes, but as I had no knack for tapping boots together to loosen snow, my snow was left to melt inside.  Then all the extra clothes came off again. 

My host mother Gunborg waited.  She had a wrinkly round face and permed brown hair such that she could’ve been Santa Claus’s sister-in-law; and she wore an apron when she cooked.  She spoke no more English than her husband; I suppose it wasn’t the lingua franca of the North Pole.

As usual she’d whipped together some culinary masterpiece in anticipation of our arrival; soon enough I looked forward to every meal.  There were boiled mountain potatoes as a rule, dripped with melted butter.  There was fish or meat, sometimes both, with matching creamy, garlic or gravy sauces.  I liked that the soft drinks were chilled on the veranda to save fridge space.  I liked the taste of deer.

Apart from the white walls, the living room was of deep colours, burgundy leather, heavy cream and browns.  The rich patterns of rugs and the art: the photos, handmade woollen tapestries and prints of classical Norwegian paintings on every wall wherever there was space, gave to the house warmth.  In Australia our living room was painted yellow and had just one painting in it. 

At meal times Gunborg lit a candle in an old candleholder they’d bought in Pompeii, a Roman replica.  In Australia most rooms were lit by just one or a few ceiling bulbs that cast undeniable light across the breadth of space and in Hatiya, I would see later, kerosene lamps and candles held ground from their being no other option.  But in Norway each room had numerous light sources.  There were lamps with metal skeletons that could be bent in strained configurations for reading or sewing, table and free standing lamps in classical or modern design, of ceramic, copper or glass, and candles, regularly lit, on shelves, tables and windowsills.  On the ceilings as often as not were no lights at all.  My Australian father was forever telling us to turn off lights as we left each room, to conserve electricity.  It wasn’t the environment he wished to save but the bill, and candles were out of the question save for blackouts since they would burn the house down when we forgot about them.  In Norway nobody cared about either.  ‘It is dark in winter,’ they said, ‘We need light.’

The Norwegian way of light was initially annoying, absent of the convenience of a single switch, especially when looking for something in luggage for example; and because every lamp seemed to have its switch in a different place.  But after a while I reconsidered.  The grades of shadow from lamp to lamp, the meeting of light arcs and the flickering ceiling patterns of the candles were like people gathering, mimicking the changing shades and arrangements of life.  Light in Norway was a continuous conversation.  Outside, with the night sky turning a soft pink from the reflection of the snow, to such arrangements Norway gave a nod.

Snuggled under the doona on that first evening in Rælingen, on the fold down velvety couch that was my bed, I was ecstatic.  Picturing a globe in my mind I was quite in awe I was now at the top of it.  ‘Norway,’ I repeated to myself, ‘I’m in Norway.’  It was reassurance I really was.

continued...

This article also published in Star Magazine, here: Norwegian Light

We need light

▲ North ink black sea ice

              East ►

                                      fire dance water snake

  COMPASS

            the scientific centre

                 ◄ West

                              cloud mountain green life

                                                             drums street rhythm move South ▼

GO!

                            Like a Portuguese explorer

Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway

The Nitelv and the Oak

Did you hear what the oak tree said to the river?  I’d be lying if I said I heard it but neither would it do not to mention the river and the tree as they are a part of it too, do you see?  The threads of life are many and there’s one, not one but a big knot of events in amongst the wire cage branches and out on the white icesheet looking up in wonder at an ordinary grey Nordic sky.  You won’t understand much at all without the Nitelv and the oak.  You won’t understand my Hatiya without my Norway.

In the low hillocks above the small river that oak tree guards a gully beyond the suburbanised streets outside Oslo and from its enormous, watchtower trunk branches radiate upward and then, spindly and thinner, shower downwards once more in a lattice network that gives to the tree its overall mushroom shape.  That tree must’ve witnessed things: the carving out of small plots of farmland from around its position, the retreat of the pine forest to the tops of the hills, the replacement of deer with a few cows or sheep feasting on the newer grasses that colonise the cleared space of the paddock when the summer comes.

The Nitelv meanwhile cannot be seen from the oak but it’s only over the nearest hills in the broader valley, and the small river is also an historian.  On its flat marshy lands that were once the habitat solely of summer reeds and wild ducks a minor town came to settle, when in the nineteenth century a steam powered sawmill encouraged the populating of the river flats by workers.  Lillestrøm was founded.  These days it’s a satellite town of the capital, Oslo, and alongside the collection of apartments, stores, the culture centre and buildings of civic administration that look a bit 1970s Nordic, amongst the older wooden cottages, there’s a fast train service to the airport and a ticket on it costs more than Situ’s budget for half a trip to Ukraine.

In summer the greenery of the parkland and bike paths along Nitelva’s banks bring cheerfulness to the long evenings.  The sunshine is warmer at that time of year.  In autumn white swans paddle the blackened ponds just out from the deadened reeds nearest the shore, now brown and newly covered in frost and by winter the Nitelv is frozen silent and layered with snow.  It was winter when I first saw it.  Each morning, so it was, I’d resolve to walk across the winter’s Nitelv instead of using the bridge, on the way to Norwegian class.  I’d seen it done in movies, walking across frozen rivers although for me the opportunity was the first of its kind.  But I was worried about falling through a hole in the ice and drowning as also happens in movies; so I hesitated.

Aha! To hesitate is not the story of the oak and the river.

But it was between the two on the Rælingen bank that stood the first Norwegian house.  From its kitchen there were views across the river with Lillestrøm beyond.  There were views further too, as there always are, that our eyes are unable to master, away downstream to the grazing buffalo of Thailand and a hilltop quarter-mosque in the green scrubby jungles of Assam, away downstream to the yellow and red cherries in a water cooler bottle in the steppes of the East and to the pungent steam of stargazing in the vast treeless plateau to the South, that plateau fresh with mud from the unusual event of rain.  There was the view too, of course, to a shack on a strip of road on an island: all the many oak and river aspects, do you see it? 

The first Norwegian house isn’t there anymore.  The land on which it lay was resumed, the apple trees in the garden gone for the building of the high speed train link.

I really don’t know what the oak tree might’ve said to Nitelva, calling out across the few hills between them.  I speak neither oak nor river, so it is, but they must’ve had some interesting conversations over the course of centuries. 

More about the philosophy of the Oak and then the philosophy of the river.

Perhaps adventure calls for a bigger river, a river of legend or a trip to the Bay beyond...

Perhaps more trees are required or you're at a point in your life where you've just had enough of trees and want nothing more to do with them!

Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway

The Arguments for Winter

Winter Sunset, More og Romsdal, Norway

An Open Letter from Dhaka to the People of Norway

To the people of Norway,

I know what you’re thinking: in Bangladesh there isn’t any Winter.  I know this because when I lived in Norway many Norwegians said the same thing about Sydney, a city where Winter is marginally colder than in Dhaka.

I want you to know, things are relative.  It’s not that I don’t remember that first week in Oslo, when I got used to wearing what felt like my entire wardrobe at the same time just to step outside the house; or that I’ve forgotten the preparation: the multiple socks, the boots, the gloves, taking off gloves again from having forgotten to do up shoelaces first, re-putting on gloves…  I recall how, with so many layers of clothing, bending arms and legs conjured the image of a tin man in need of oil and yes, I learnt to tap the snow off boots before drawing them into a vehicle.

There was that morning in the first week when my hosts said in English it was ten degrees outside.  It’d sounded good: occasionally Sydney can be as low as ten and I’d expected worse from a Norwegian Winter.  You know of course they meant minus ten, which I discovered on stepping out the front door; that in your country the minuses are often just assumed. 

Swans on a soon-to-be-frozen River, Oslo

And there was that problem with my hair.  As usual I’d styled it in the morning using a little water.  How was I to imagine that after several outside minutes I’d have a hairstyle of ice?  I remember slipping along the footpaths, trying to find the sprinkled gravel you use in public spaces to create grip.  I remember walking home from school across that frozen river, following somebody else’s footprints.

I learnt the meaning of your temperatures: up to minus ten was okay, towards fifteen meant icicles on the chin and loss of feeling in the cheeks and nose; beyond that the pain in one’s frozen ears really set in.  I don’t remember you having the flies’ eyes like they do in Dhaka; maybe you should.

As said, things are relative.  How else could it be that in my first Australian Winter thereafter I barely bothered with jumpers?  The reverse happened: after most of the year in Bangladesh I once found myself wearing a jumper during the Australian Summer.  It’d been over thirty degrees and I noticed people around me were in shorts and t-shirts; but to me it’d felt a little nippy.  It takes time to adjust, climatically speaking, please understand.

I want you to know that despite the lack of minuses, and the usual Winter sports like skiing and shovelling snow off the roof, the Bangladeshi Winter is real. 

Don’t consider please the middle of the days, without the evening to morning chill in the air, the time of day you might be tempted to label ‘Summer’, if not a particularly warm one.  Forget that it may come to pass in January’s Dhaka that you consider swimming around noon. 

Winter Mountains, More og Romsdal, Norway

Just know that in Sydney, if you made one of your ‘this is not winter’ comments in the middle of August, on one of those gusty, rainy days, nobody would be amused as they slipped on their caveman-inspired Ugg boots, an Australian specialty, and turned up their electric heaters. And neither would people be amused in the Dhaka of January.

For while I am not in the habit of speaking on behalf of Bangladeshis, I would take a risk on this occasion to let you know: we feel cold.  Just look around Dhaka and you’ll see it, the public rugged up in intricately embroidered chadors or shawls, with scarves surgically bandaged about the head; or western-inspired in jumpers and jackets.  There are all those beanies, sometimes gloves and scarves, items that true, aren’t common in Sydney. 

It may look sometimes as though many Dhakaites are prepared for the impossibility of imminent snow; for we who live here, impossible is not how it feels.

Then there are the flies’ eyes, those thermal earmuffs that fit like sunglasses only around the back of the head, and lend a person a look from behind that’s slightly reminiscent of an insect.  I am liking those flies’ eyes: in blue with white polka dots, in tartan straight from the Scottish Highlands, the military camouflage variety or the leopard skin.  And as they’ve multiplied across Dhaka of late we cannot doubt that Winter is with us.  Nor can you.

A Mild Winter in the Trondelag Mountains, Norway

And just on the side, I tell you I bought a pair of fly’s eyes, in urban grey camouflage for thirty taka from a vendor at Farmgate.  I mention this thinking you could pick up a pair or two for home, though the material might not be thick enough for your Januaries.

While it’s true in Dhaka nobody has to change their car tyres to cope with the slippery conditions on Winter roads; while the days are not short and dark as occurs in what you call Winter; and while I understand the reason you talk so much and often about the weather is simply because there’s a lot of weather to talk about; please bear in mind that in Dhaka also, we have our ten degrees, we have our fifteen.  The pluses are assumed, absolutely, and the trees keep their leaves, but of course the CNGs and rickshaws are not enclosed vehicles, remember that, so as we get around there’s a wind chill factor to be accounted for.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the water.  It was actually my grandfather who pointed it out; he was more practical than me.  Back in Sydney after Norway he’d asked how you stop the water from freezing in the pipes during Winter.  I believe you spiral a small copper wire around the pipes and send a low current through it to prevent the water freezing, is it so?  

The Mountains of Trondelag, Norway

And in the mountains I recall such a system can be unavailable such that the water does freeze and it becomes necessary to find fresh snow to boil down for drinking.  But this alone is not the measure of Winter and besides, there are many in Dhaka who know the feeling of turning on the tap and nothing comes out, be it for different reasons.

So don’t mind as we find ourselves rugged up under a blanket at home in the night, in my case with the ceiling fan running on full to keep the mosquitoes away.  They are indeed less at this time of year.

In Bangladesh many people look forward to Winter as their annual hill-station away from the heat, but still, you mustn’t scoff as we shiver at the tea shops holding our tea cups with both hands, as in Christian prayer, to promote heat transfer to our palms, or as we devour those piping-hot chitol pithas or rice-flour cakes from the roadside stalls in the foggy evenings.

Try to understand our Winter in Dhaka, though it may slip in and out of the city as readily as a foot into the bindings of a Telemark ski.  It is Winter.  Perhaps you might even find room for sympathy.  Enjoy your snow, skiing and rømmegrøt or sweet cream porridge; and spare a thought for the people of Dhaka as we face Winter, we too.

Best Regards, Yours Truly, etc. etc.




If you're into seasons, you might like the monsoon. Or you could just take it easy in Barbados, or maybe on a smaller scale in Lilliput.


Also published in Star Magazine, here: The Arguments for Winter

Advent Lights, December, Norway

Norwegian Light: Article Index for articles about Norway

Bangladesh Dreaming: Article Index for articles about Bangladesh