JOURNEY INTO THE MIDNIGHT SUN

Dear Friends,

Following is a telling of my Skandic Tale. I meant it to be brief, but then, you know me, if I am writing prose “brief’ is a bit of an oxymoron. Some of you will end up seeing this several places. I apologize in advance for that. And for the fact that it WON’T be brief.


Journey Into The Midnight Sun

I. HEAD-LIGHTS

* Day 1. Suitcase lost between Oregon and Salt Lake City. 105 degrees in SLC, in a hotel with a broken air conditioner, my bag is delivered at 4:30 a.m. for a 7:30 a.m. flight.

* I meet my sister and mother in the SLC airport, along with a tour group from my University who I will come to know *very* well. SLC-NYC flight is delayed and we barely make the connection.

* British Air’s NYC-London flight is over booked. We sit on the tarmac for two hours while they beg someone to get off. By the time we finally reach London we have missed the connection to Copenhagen. The Tour Director begins his act which will include a lot of disapearing, inept juggling and a string of mismanagement and bad judgement this is astonishing. I could give at lot of specifics, but it would render my narative into the realm of unbelievable, really bad fantasy.

* A fiasco unlike anything I’ve ever encountered ensues. The tour is split, some people going on and catching the cruise ship in Copenhagen, some remaining for what begins to feel like an eternity in London. The brilliant fellow manages to split up most families, including ours. My sister goes on to meet the ship, my almost-ninety-year-old mother and I are left behind with the “stranded.”

* For 24 hours we literally run from one side of London-Heathrow to the other - again and again and again - to find that the flight he thought he had booked won’t take us. We have no luggage because they have lost it. Because of extremely tight security after the London bombings, we can’t get on an airplane, because we have no luggage. Catch 22. How did the other part of the tour get on the airplane without their luggage? He doesn’t know. There is MUCH he doesn’t know.

* It finally become clear that the cruise ship has sailed from Copenhagen and we are still in Heathrow. We finally go to a hotel in London. British Air gives us a toothbrush and a white T-shirt.

* The following day we begin the Saga entitled : “Lost and Scrambling through Norway” as we attempt to get to a port and meet the cruise ship. Missing Denmark completely we fly through tiny airports in tiny airplanes. We stand in lines. We run. We wait. We run again. After another full day ‘lost’ we find ourselves in Ålesund where we spend another night. Without luggage. Mother and I watch a sunset that burns the Fjord bronze. We are walking along the water when some people from the tour come to tell us it is Midnight. Still fully light and the sun just gone into the sea. Ah yes! We had forgotten.

* Busses across Norway, ferry across a fjord, working our way to the top of the world. We reach the tip tops of the tallest mountains in Scandinavia and begin the descent - down from 6,600 feet to sea leavel - down the “Steepest Road In The World” - a hairpin curved switchback called the “Path of Eagles,” down to where we finally find the cruise ship waiting in the cold, dark water of the Geiranger fjord.

II. LOW-LIGHTS

* The Tour Director, who I believe was the choreographer for the Keystone Kops in his last life and arrived in this life a few points short of a double digit IQ. Incompetence personified. X 20. When asked any question: “What gate are we headed for?” “Where are we going?” “What is the airline?” he answers: “I don’t know” and disappears into the crowd. Insanity.

* Having to be the one - out of group of 14 adults - who has to keep grabbing the Tour Director and say things like: “No! You cannot yell ‘everyone who hasn’t got a ticket follow me!’ and run off! No! Stop! Read the list of names in your hand.” There were often people left off of all the lists. Notably me. I hadn’t slept for 72 hours, couldn’t eat, was shaking from anxiety and the most together person there was me. Frightening.

* Being left off lists constantly so I begin to wonder if I existed. No hotel reservations in my name. No airplane tickets. I can’t get through security because I’m not on the list and my mother is on the other side. At least he didn’t have our passports, since I wouldn’t give them to him.

*Getting hit by a motorized card in the Oslo airport. After I was visited by three very cute Norwegian Fireman who couldn’t do anything, I got the EMT’s from the ambulance who recommended I go to the hospital. In the midst of a lot of shooting pain, I have to make a sudden judgement call since the Tour Director has taken one look at the situation and . . . disappeared. He has gone through security and boarded the next airplane - with all our tickets. Do my mother and I go to the hospital, staying in Oslo with no tickets to anywhere and no idea how to meet the ship? I say Adjø to the EMT’s and get on the airplane.

* This whole fiasco happening to both myself and my almost-ninety-year-old mother. She also had to literally run again and again, stand in lines, wait for hours and hours, having no idea what was going to happen next. Run again.


III. HIGH-LIGHTS

* My almost-ninety-year-old mother who literally ran again and again, stood in lines, waited for hours having no idea what was going to happen next, ran again, and arrived in better shape than anyone else.

* Deck Ten (see below)

* The top of the world inside the mountains of Norway. Coming down the “Path of Eagles.” The big beautiful homes set all alone back in the massive green mountains. “My husband would love it here!” I say. “How can they stand living so horribly isolated?” asks one woman. “My husband would LOVE it here,” I repeat.

* Finally reaching the beautiful Italian Cruise Ship laying in the deep, dark waters of the Geiranger fjord. After the incredible, formal seven course dinner I refuse to go to the “entertainment” and go instead to the top deck of the ship - Deck Ten. Here I discover that it is fully light at 11 p.m., a soft muted twilight. On either side of the ship, towering mountains of grey and green slide past, their heads still covered with snow and wreathed with a drifting pearled mist. Down their sheer sides spill hundreds of dancing, diamond waterfalls; some are narrow, snaking sharply through the rugged rock, some are voluminous and vast, spraying wide swaths of shimmering crystal into the wind. Some of the falls cling to the steep slopes, dancing a tight path through the great grey stones, some free fall for thousands of feet sparkling like white stars in the cold green twilight.

As we drift past the soaring granite walls, inlets suddenly appear - deep ice cut bays where the mountains dance away into enchanted, emerald dreams. I hear old voices calling from these towering hills; I hear ancient names whispered on the white wind.

I put the earphones of my walkman over my ears and suddenly I am inside Edvard Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite; I am SEEING the music as well as hearing it. I have never had such an incredible sense of visual music. I have never seen anything like the massive, magical mountains of Norway drifting in the mist. My face is covered with sea spray and tears. I don’t know one from the other. It is one a.m. and still light. Walking on water, in the Land of the Midnight Sun.

* The next night, escaping ‘entertainment’ again, I return to Deck Ten. We are at sea now and the sea is rough. 10 p.m., the sky overhead is as blue as my April’s eyes and the horizon, all the way around, is on fire. The pale blue above blends down into cotton candy pink which glows into apricot, amber, creamy gold champagne clouds. Against the water, all around, the eternal circle of the horizon is blazing: rose melting into ruby, claret flushing into crimson . . . carnation, cerise, brilliant, blooming, bright blood red.

The sea is deep, dark and cold, with stupendous swells rising across the miles of sea. They heave up from the surface translucent, inky blue, frothing with white caps. The blaze of the sunset catches the white and the surface of the sea is ignited with flying flashes of fiery foam - crimson, coral, feathers of pink.

The sunset flames for three solid hours, not giving up color until after midnight, not relinquishing light until nearly two. Tonight I have “Flogging Molly” (Irish punk) in the walkman and I walk and walk, hard, fast and exalting - around and around - into the sunset, into the sunset, into the sunset.

* Bergen. A charming Norwegian city of pointed wooden houses set on a beautiful bay, Mount Sandviken and Mount Floeyen rising behind. Here I visit Troldhaugen, the home of Edvard Grieg, my favorite composer. I am able to see the tiny house overlooking Lake Nordaas where he wrote, the enchanted
grounds full of gardens and huge, twisted, moss covered trees. I see the peaceful, deep grotto where his ashes rest and hear an inspired Norwegian musician with beautiful hands invoke his spirit from a black baby grand piano. I listen to the concert smiling, wondering, as I often do, what they would do if I started dancing. I have choreographed and danced to Grieg’s lovely, lyric music before. I want to dance again.

* Night three. It is later when I arrive on Deck Ten and the flaming sunset is only in the west, the eastern sky is darkening. It is nearly midnight when I come around the east side of the ship and suddenly see a huge rim of gold lifting from the sea. I stand by the rail and in a matter of minutes an immense, round, completely full moon rises dripping from the sea. She is gigantic, unbelievable, bigger even than the swollen moon of the desert. I’ve never seen a moon like this enormous golden sphere, dripping amber as she climbs the eastern sky.

I have discovered a stairway that takes me above the top of Deck Ten to a tiny deck next to the huge engines that drive the ship. Tonight I don’t bring any music, but walk Deck Ten in the silence of the sea and then climb up to the top deck to ‘listen’ to the great throbbing engines that I can ‘hear’ through my feet, tingling all through my blood. Duende, indeed. From my eagles nest I watch the golden moon rise in the eastern sky. In the west it is still light and the sun is still setting in splashes of salmon and scarlet. At one point they hang balanced ~ massive moon of cream and amber, sun of red-gold fire ~ with the pale blue sky of the Midnight Sun arching between. With my back to the throbbing engines I can see the whole sky.

When I get back to the cabin, I find she has followed me and is floating outside my window, smaller and white once again, scattering a trail of sparkling silver across the sea. I sit for a long time behind the curtains of the cabin, which have been pulled so my sister and my mother can sleep. The moon and I are remembering Sorrento and ribbons of silk that once sung across the Bay of Naples.

* I have missed four days of the cruise while ‘lost’ in London and chasing across Norway. The last night on board ship we must pack our suitcases (which showed up just before they would have had to buy us new clothes) and put them outside our rooms before 1 a.m. It is nearly two and getting dark before I make it to Deck Ten. I have a bottle of French Champagne in my water bottle. From the back of the ship, I call to Odin, as my Viking ancestors did so long ago and send my libation sparkling into the cold, crashing sea below. I say Adjø to the roof of the world.

* The final long day - 24 hours of daylight - chasing the sun into the west. 4:30 a.m. in Copenhagen to 10:30 p.m. in Medford. NOT missing a single airplane. NOT having my luggage lost. Finally coming down through one more incredible pink sunset into the beautiful Rogue Valley. AND finding that while I was gone my children had completely redone my office: new book shelves, new oak desk, new reading corner with an over stuffed chair, all repainted in soft sea green with a painted border of trailing ivy wreathing the walls. My best friend Larkin has hand made a new shade for my window, burgundy fabric with a ivy patterned dancer leaping from the center of a labyrinth scattering a spray of pearls from her hands.

I did think of all of you as I journeyed. You walked beside me in the mist and in the Midnight Sun. It did, indeed, make everything more intense and interesting to know there were those who would want to hear my tales. It could, of course, get to be a habit and if I ever should happen to leave my beautiful office again (doubtful at this point) I just might take you with me again.

With Love,

Winnie

* Poetry to follow. You didn’t think you were going to get off without being subjected to poetry did you?