Connective Visions

When I looked out the plane window and saw a North Sea oil rig below me, I literally wept for joy … because I knew I’d made it back to Norway.

Over Norway

I was here less than a year ago, so to most of my American friends, and I dare say to the average reader, this shouldn’t have been a big deal. In fact, one friend asked me, “Haven’t you had enough of that country already?”

No. I haven’t.

Norway doesn’t top the U.S. tourism list generally. Americans who know of its existence are conditioned to think it snows here year-round. (It doesn’t – at least, not in most of the country.) It lacks the flash of Mexican beaches, not promising great snorkeling expeditions, a flamboyantly dressy nightlife, or encounters with spicy, sultry lovers.

And though I love much Norwegian food – gjetøst (brown cheese) and reinsdyrpølse (reindeer sausage) and pølse med reker (hot dogs topped with prawn salad, chiefly available at Statoil stations) and tyttebær preserves (kind of a cross between cranberry and currant) – the fare has never topped the haute cuisine list in any American restaurant. The closest you get is IKEA, whose Swedish meatballs with lingonberry jam have, to be honest, deteriorated sadly in their Philadelphia outlets.

(Yes, it takes a particular attention to Scandinavian detail to see that IKEA’s food has gotten worse. But it has – at roughly the same time that more and more Philadelphians began eating it, when the recession made Olive Garden too expensive and the Swedish furniture store the last, best hope for a balanced meal out, before the family descent to McDonald’s.)

View from a Norwegian bus

Being safely over here now, I feel oddly content with the fact that my analysis for why Norway makes me happy will fail. To many, it will never be more comprehensible than I find people’s attraction to NASCAR, cable TV news, Dr. Phil or Dancing with the Stars, and uncomfortable stiletto heels. And that is fine – now that I’m out of the United States, where I have to justify my preferences.

When it comes to national matters, Americans particularly feel a need to explain themselves – which I attribute in part to the vicious tendency since the mid-1980s for right-wing U.S. politicians to brand people who disagree with their military ambitions as “disloyal” and “unpatriotic.” One cannot say, “I like this about Norway, and I dislike this about my country,” without invoking anxiety in one’s fellow Americans. It’s a bit curious, as we generally complain about ourselves all the time. Besides, we wouldn’t get so aggravated if a person were to say, “I like corn on the cob, and I don’t like carrots,” nor would we assume that they were therefore out to ban carrots (though “I don’t like summer” has led to screaming matches in Philadelphia – as if one had it in mind to deprive others of their right to enjoy it).

With me and Norway, the attraction is almost pheromonal. I even notice a particular smell when I travel from Gardermoen Airport through to Oslo’s central station, and even on the bus ride down to Kristiansand. I can’t pinpoint it; it’s just the smell of Norway to me, and it speaks of “home.” (I notice a smell at Philadelphia International Airport too. It’s the gas works.)

And there is also the Norwegian language, which it gives me great peace to hear. I’m sure part of that is because I don’t fully understand it, which takes away the pressure of being in reactive mode all the time. (I recommend this.) But it also lacks characteristic tones of American speech that have come to raise my stress levels: irritation, helpless exasperation, defensive meandering, false enthusiasm – and neediness.

Everything Philadelphian in one poster

A whole lot of neediness: to solve problems, to be right, to be heard, to be respected, to be desired, to be successful, to get perfect service, to have everything run smoothly (and it never does), to win every argument, to be prepared for every eventuality (from falling off a bike to ensuring a completely solvent retirement), to be universally liked, to have our traumatic childhoods appreciated, to have our feelings cosseted, to lead the world….

It’s insanity. And its expression is a whole lot of complaining.

There were plenty of complaints on the escape from Philadelphia. It was almost 90ºF (34ºC) when I left, and humid. The SEPTA train to the airport – dating to around the 1970s, I think – was late and none too clean. The airport public address system didn’t work, so frustrated employees were screaming the boarding calls over crowd and TV noise. (The televisions did work, too well, and we were subject to CNN’s Rick Sanchez shrieking about bloodbaths in Connecticut and demanding that the reporters on the scene uncover “what the shooter was thinking.”) A Norwegian woman trying to find out when we were boarding asked me to help, explaining that she is deaf, and found me responding, “You are not missing a thing.”

The plane was an hour late departing. US Airways proved incapable of keeping track of its passengers, much less pronouncing their names correctly, and thought I wasn’t on the plane (despite my ringing the call button to inform them, several times) – even going so far as to call my father and tell him I never showed up. The American gentlemen behind and around me didn’t find a movie they wanted to see, moaned about the length of the trip, and wondered why they couldn’t get places in Norway quicker.

Clean, modern Norwegian Flytoget

When I got past passport control and onto the (clean, modern) Flytoget – the train between the airport and Oslo – the tears of relief came again. Everyone was just going here – making their trips, patiently awaiting their destinations, not straining to love their fellow humans or erupting into exasperation with them.

True, not everything functions perfectly here. True, things do run late. True, the government has just found a new thing to tax (floating docks) – which is rather an achievement, as they are running out at top speed.

But on the bright, sunny, 74ºF (23ºC) Norwegian summer morning when I arrived, patient self-sufficiency seemed to radiate from everyone. Even from the poor fellow at the train station dragging a dog carrier sized for a Dalmatian – while being dragged, himself, by the carrier’s former occupant.

On the wall of the bedroom my friends have set up for me here in Kristiansand is a collage poster of Philadelphia (above left), featuring all sorts of features of my city. I know it recalls for them good memories from when they lived there, and I smile to see it. But I also notice that it expresses exactly how I’ve come to feel about Philly: that everything crashes into everything else, leaving no room to think or feel or breathe, all demanding full attention with a sort of militant urgency.

When I first logged onto Facebook from here yesterday, at the top of my wall feed was a posting from a U.S. friend cursing out our government for allowing wealthier Web sites privileges in Internet streaming. Today, there was a 31-comment mélee between Tea Partiers and “liberals” over Proposition 8, with more personal comments than an encounter group (and with everyone taking everything extremely personally … even though I don’t think there was a gay or lesbian voice among them). The most recent post was someone checking how she felt with the “Mood Detector” app.

I don’t need the “Mood Detector” to tell me how I feel.

I’m happy.