Space
is my ground, after 11 hours and change, in the air, across the
Atlantic, licked by Aurora's melts. Oslo is buzzing with a tiny-town
efficiency on a dense scale. Our troop has been asked to wear—I
suppose for collective purposes—maroon colored wind-breakers.
However we are in uniform as we come into the terminal like invading
descendants. (I'd guess 98% of our troop has Norse ancestry.) The
cooler, older scouts—which now includes me—immediately locates a
restroom to doff the uniform for non-mandated clothes, even though
the windbreaker covers them. I don't recall being so vain.
We
bus to the Immie Hotel. It is a four-story hotel in the left of
center Oslo. Its height dwarfs its stars. The rooms are like Ikea
shows, virtual catalogs. Our maid is named Hydra and has hairy legs.
The younger scouts believe she enjoys being asked for ice and towels
and soaps. There are vicious towel fights, wet, whipping sounds break
through stale, woody air of Ikea rooms, drawing blood in some
circumstances.
A
game is at kiosks. It is a glass encased labyrinth a ball runs
through for some prize or pellet. It acts as a Skinner box for the
young scouts. They are amused by the money, the Kroner and Øre,
the Krone coins with holes in the middle. The latter we place in
slots at the top of the case and hit, like the flippers on a pinball
machine. It is a game of chance.
I
joined troop 262 in 1979. In those days, in the Beartooth mountains
in Montana, or to get to camp sites off trails, I required help. I
was driven as the others hiked, or simply hung back usually in some
compensatory fashion. By 1983, when I was told we would be
hiking—with full pack—through flat clean city streets my eyes lit
up. This was it, my time to shine, to hike like the rest. I had my
Eagle badge and this trip was my coda. I could go out with a
long-awaited equity. Before we went over a father, just looking out
for me, had rigged up some contraption on two wheels on which to
pull my pack. I said no thanks.
Walking,
smiling, sunny peopled city streets indulge us. They clear for us and
we are the Israelites led from America, from the hairy-legged
obscurities of the Immie Hotel by at least four Mosaic fathers. We
were laughing and joking, acting brash, assimilating to culture
class. We were horn-dogs at the Norse smorgasbord. Flirtations
impeded our progress. Twenty marooned mice break pipers' wind. A few
people think we are a break-dance troupe and the young punks bust a
few moves. They spin on the pavement and rock on their heads like
the pros. The natives are fooled and we're hallowed, we're revered
until they find it's just a horny scout in a maroon shell. Onward,
and upward, hire to conspire, church steeples rain down. We curtail
our hormones and walk the pews, soaking culture and Anglicized
history as we leave Oslo.
We
cross Sognefjord via ferry to Balestrand on its northern shore.
Enormity slims me, intimates me, shrinks me more than anything has
before. I peer at the rock iced walls with a timidity known only to
giants. I imagine the history, the geology, the ages that past
between here and Minnesota. Our 10,000 odd pot-hole lakes are
nothing, mere divets in the earth to pale in volume to this
pageantry. It is clear blue, deep. It's a knowing depth that give a
chill to me, a fear, an insecurity. It's a waiting epic catastrophic
property, a swallowing, a swelling of earth's precarious proportions.
As sun descends early, hesitant, behind icy coolness, we make camp.
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