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We're home again.
Home to where the sky stretches wide from horizon to horizon pulling the blue down closer.
Home to where fields have been shaken out onto the landscape like tablecloths for a Parthenopian feast.
Home to streets wide enough enough for four cars but designated for two, to grocery lanes where a shopper can stand awed by the choices and others pass without anyone touching anywhere, to parking spaces drawn for monster trucks and therefore big enough for eight Smart cars, to car dealers with Monster trucks lined up along the curb just as they were before the price of gas doubled.
Home to hope springing eternal.
Home to a closet full of clothes and shoes: goodbye to Sabbatical Spare!
Home to perfect strangers saying “Hi!” just as if you'd known one another for years, and home to teenaged friends of the children wrapping their arms around us and holding tight.
Home to the tractor mower and the lawn bigger than the parking area at the Himmelev grocery store, to deer eating the begonias, to red-winged blackbirds whistling at the birdfeeders, to Milo stealing his way toward a bird in the echinacea.
Home to cheap beef and cheap beer and cheap cheese and giant packages of toilet tissue and cardboard tomatoes and dismal cheese and limp herring, but home again to Easy Bean, our miraculous Community Supported Agriculture bringing us this week Napa cabbage and radishes and broccoli and more, heirloom varieties that taste of some where, of the Cherokee River flowing south to the Minnesota on its way to the Mississippi.
Home to tomatoes planted by my dad already setting fruit and spreading their leaves, and to carrots, their tops lacy as Easter Sunday, the gold hidden, to squash we'll have to thin but haven't found the heart yet.
Home to my mother's chocolate cake, and Pete's cold wine, and Brenda's lilting laughter, and Fylla's gammeldansk (one old Dane deserves another), and Windy's crazy accent, and my sister's voice on the phone now so close though she's in Texas, all the people here who make home home and who we've missed so much in the last eleven months, people I dreamt of being with in a huge room, all of us sitting together in a wide circle, a circle as big as the prairie sky, stretching from loved one to loved one and pulling the blue down.
A 12th Century Byzantine writer, away from his beloved Constantinople, wrote in a fit of homesickness, “Oh, land of Byzantium, oh thrice-happy city, eye of the universe, ornament of the world, star shining afar, beacon of this lower world, would that I were within you, enjoying you to the full! Do not part me from your maternal bosom.” The Vikings called it Mikklegarth, the Great City. There's no doubt of its greatness: consider a population of 16 million spreading across the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus, one of the Seven Wonders glowing on the hill above the water, and a long history influenced particularly by two of the world's great religions.
Arne and I flew in Tuesday and after checking into our hotel room, a small room on the top floor of a rehabbed older wood building overlooking the Sea of Marmara, we headed uphill to the Sultanahment Mosque, or the Blue Mosque as it's more often known. And we fell like the naivest of tourists right into a trap. As we passed into the inner courtyard before entering the mosque a young man came up to us and began chatting casually. The next thing we knew he was our unofficial tour
guide, professing knowledge of architecture (which we discovered after a few questions to be untrue), and taking our picture in a key location. Then we left the mosque together and once outside the main gate he said, “And now, you come to my rug store!” Getting out of that rug store took a good hour and many variations on the theme of “No, we are not going to buy a rug.”
On Wednesday and Thursday Arne attended the conference of international energy economists, hearing interesting talks, meeting smart people from all over the globe, and giving his own well-received talk. Meanwhile, I explored. In 1979, when I traveled around Europe, it was my intention to get to Istanbul, but I heard too many stories about single female travelers having a hard time of it, so I changed my itinerary. Now, thirty years on, I'm weathered--interpret that how you like--and not easily intimidated. What was intimidating was the heat--well into the 90s with high humidity and no air conditioning in many places. Fortunately water is available wherever you go, and if you're shopping, shopkeepers even hand you a paper towel to sop up your own burst system. And if you're on the right side of the hill, there is even a nice breeze off the water.
Istanbul must be an archaeologist's idea of hell: several thousand years of history buried beneath mosque, church, palace, house, and cobble-stoned street, utterly inaccessible, but calling out to be uncovered. It turned to heaven though, when, in 1912 fire struck an area just downhill from the Blue Mosque and the Haghia Sophia (an area where our hotel was located, as it turns out) revealing some of the remains of a palace Justinian, one of the most famous of the Byzantine Emperors, built in the early 500s. What they eventually found were the remains of a mosaic floor from the main hall of the palace, a floor that covered 2,000 square meters. These remains are now on display in a little museum below the Blue Mosque and beside a pleasant though touristy market. One archaeologist calculated that it would require 80,000,000 tessarae (each about 1/4 inch square) to cover a floor this size. The tiles are pottery, glass, and stone, and show every sort of scene, from bucolic to violent.
Justinian was also responsible for one of the Seven Wonders, the Haghia Sophia, Church of the Holy Wisdom. Built as an orthodox church, it was the patriarchate until 1453 when Constantinople was sacked by the Ottoman Turks and the church was converted to a mosque. Part of the conversion involved plastering over the mosaics that covered the walls, ceilings, and enormous dome, the largest in the world until St. Peter's was built. Ataturk, in the early 20th Century, like a modern-day Solomon, solved the problem of Christians and Muslims clamoring for the right to the holy property, by turning it into a museum. Plaster was removed from many of the mosaics, but additions made to the building by the Muslims were protected. Today the building reveals the beauty of expression and, until the 20th century, the mutual tolerance of the two faiths in Turkey.
Everywhere we went in the old part of Istanbul we were reminded of this long history of peoples from two continents, on a key point of the Silk Road, and of two faiths making a home for themselves. Shortly after arriving we were having a coffee on the rooftop patio of our hotel, looking out at the Sea of Marmara where some 30 tankers were anchored and awaiting berth in the port (the Electronics Road, perhaps?), when muezzins from five different mosques nearby began chanting the azan over loud speakers. Below us a train rumbled by with young Turks hanging out the doors catching a little wind over the tracks.
The Blue Mosque is so named for the luscious tiles, predominantly blue, that are made even today in Iznik, in Asian Turkey. The design of these tiles was inspired originally by the blue and white Delft tiles from Holland. Inside the Harem in the Topkapi Palace, the official palace of the Ottoman sultans that was begun in 1459, the Sultan's inner sanctum is tiled in Delft tiles. The Silk Road has led to another interesting Dutch-Turkish connection. One group of rugs woven by the Anatolian masters are known as Holbein rugs--because one of them was featured in a painting by Hans Holbein, who, I'd like to think, purchased the rug from some itinerant rug merchant who just wouldn't let Hans get back to his painting until he'd spilled the contents of his purse.
We, however, exited the rug seller's empty-handed, though the temptation was indeed great.
As the Danish king
Christian IV lay dying in Rosenborg castle, he looked up at a topless
Hera surrounded by cherubs. Hera looks more like a voluptuous
Renaissance Italian woman than like the haughty goddess of
mythology—a delightful
last vision for a man who delighted in life's pleasures.
We spent the afternoon yesterday in Rosenborg castle, Christian IV's Dutch Renaissance pleasure house. Christian lived from 1577 to 1648, and ruled just after Elizabeth I and at the same time as Gustavus Adolphus. Though he was not well educated he spoke several languages, loved conversation and was eager to learn from others, and was generally very curious about the world. He enjoyed the good life and was known as a womanizer and drinker. In his chamber at Rosenborg is a primitive telephone—a tube that ran to his wife's chamber and another that ran to the wine cellar—he could meet his needs at a moment's notice. Still, he had a reputation as hard-working, starting the day early, even after a night of partying. Christian IV oversaw the growth of the Danish navy, sent an expedition to seek the northwest passage, sent an admiral to Ceylon where the admiral declared a Danish colony in Tranquebar, and Christian himself loved sailing and made trips around Denmark and Norway, then part of Denmark, to check on the state of affairs.
He loved music and led the development of an organ culture in Denmark. Dietrich Buxtehude, the great organist and composer, was the organist and music director in Helsingor as a young man, not long after Christian IV's reign. Christian had pipes built in Rosenborg that would carry the music being played by musicians in the basement up into rooms on the main floor.
Perhaps to make up for his bad treatment of Tycho Brahe—causing Brahe to exile himself to Prague—and also because of his interest in astronomy, Christian built the Round Tower, an observatory in downtown Copenhagen.
And Christian had a lively sense of humor. At Rosenborg we saw a special chair for guests. When they sat down, “concealed tentacles in the arm rests” would trap the visitor. Then, at a sign from Christian a servant might pour water into a funnel at the top of the chair. The water then spurted from holes in the arm rests, dousing the visitor in an unseemly way. When the visitor rose from the chair, a horn in the seat—an early version of a rubber chicken—would toot. Ah, the indignity!
Christian's
life ended sadly, as he had involved Denmark in the Thirty Years'
War, draining the coffers and gaining nothing politically.
Nevertheless, he's the most beloved of the Danish royalty and it's
easy to see why. In his later portraits you see a man who ate too
much, dressed dashingly, and met the world with a twinkle in his eye.
*I found the photo of Christian IV at Flickr; it was taken by somebody called jconn.
One thing that distinguishes the Danish character from the American character is attitudes toward privacy. In the United States we value our right to privacy and plenty of air time is devoted to protecting it. But we Americans are a very public people. Bumper stickers announce to the world where we stand politically, what churches we belong to, and what schools our chidren attend, they urge others to behave or think in ways we do, and they even tell our neighbors where to stick it if our neighbors don't meet our standards. We wear t-shirts and buttons that cover that same territory. Memoirs are among the hottest real estate in publishing--even if they're not actually true--the hunger for revelation is so strong and the earnings so tempting. American poets brought us the confessional poem. And our very own brand of revelators, Oprah et.al., make sure nothing personal is concealed.
Danes do not slap bumper stickers onto their cars, they do not wear buttons declaring allegiances, and they don't wear t-shirts that give away anything personal, anything private. Anika put me on to the t-shirt fact: she brought along a number of t-shirts declaring her feminism and pacifism, but she doesn't wear them to school because she would just stand out like a sore thumb. I can't report on memoirs, confessional poetry, or lay-it-all-out-there televisions shows in Danish culture, alas, but they don't appear to exist.
Perhaps the Danes' almost extreme private nature is a result of living in a small place. But whether it's a chicken or an egg problem, Danes' privacy serves well their living small. Most Danes do not cover their windows, so when you walk down the street it is possible to look right into most homes, even right through them into their back gardens. But it's really not culturally acceptable to look. So it's okay to have big glass windows on the front of your house and to live inside your house just as if it were all closed off to the world: no one will look in. When houses are close together and not far from the street, but when you want to get as much light from outside in to counterbalance the long dark winter, then the rule of not looking is necessary.
On the street, Danes do not look you in the eye, much less greet you in any way. To us it seems rude, this Danish reticence; to the Danes we Americans are just pushy and brusque. I've grown to like this public privacy. If I'm in a deep reverie as I walk along, and I often am, I know that little can burst in on me, I'm safe in my own portable privacy.
I wonder how much landscape has to do with it. In the United States we've got “land, lots of land under starry skies above” and we sure don't want to be “fenced in.” But if we're all spread out (and just think of the average suburb today, with houses well back from the street and well apart from the others, and no public space whatsoever, not even sidewalks) then it's easy to feel as though we are nobody, we're disconnected and immaterial. What better way to assuage our fear of total anonymity, than by making a point of saying who we are--via bumper stickers and t-shirts--, by sharing what's private so publicly that we can't be ignored?
I can't help but wonder at how the American character will evolve as gas prices rise and our landscapes change. Perhaps in my grandchildren's time Americans will have learned something about privacy.
Here's a link to the Kildegaard family YouTube page, created by our very own techno whiz, Otto. Here you can see a tour of our house in Himmelev, a walk to the nearby kæmpehøj (prehistoric burial mound), Otto's bike trip in our neighborhood, and a clip showing the change of water in the tadpole tub. If you bookmark this page and look back over these next few weeks, Otto will be posting other clips showing our Danish "home."
Yesterday we traveled to Lund, Sweden, to spend time with a friend from Arne's childhood, Simon, and his family. They live in a neighborhood on the edge of Lund that was built in the 1970s, but it might as well have been erected in the Middle Ages. The streets are so narrow that you can practically touch the hedge on each side, and the houses are tucked in close together. Although it's possible to drive through in your car, and folks do if they need to drop off groceries or make quick pick-ups, the cars are parked in a row of garages on the edge of the neighborhood. The houses themselves are not huge--that is most seem to be about 1500 square feet.
On the surface, this just doesn't sound appealing, but the truth is, the neighborhood is charming, welcoming, and livable. First, with almost no through-traffic, it is quiet and safe. Second, the houses are arranged so that front doors are not opposite one another and so that sides with fewer windows are closest to neighbors. Back gardens are enclosed by hedges and fences. In short, even though folks are living in close quarters, there is a sense of complete privacy. And every few houses are arranged around a small park. Biking/hiking trails lead out of the neighborhood in several directions.
What a contrast this neighborhood is to the one we live in in Morris, built about a decade earlier. Parkview Heights (what pretension!) consists of ten houses, each one a good 3000 square feet or more sitting on about 1 1/2 to 2 acres each. The street is wide enough that a semi can park on it and neighbors can still get by in their SUVs. Houses are built well back from the street, feature long, wide driveways, and two car garages. You know the sort of place I mean. We all have the accoutrements of living large: sheds and patios and rider mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, snow blowers, boats, snowmobiles, trailers, RVs.
In Lund, developers on the same size property as Parkview Heights could accomodate four times as many houses and two small parks and still have room for everyone to have one car in a garage. And on weekends, instead of spending all of Saturday morning mowing our par-three yards, we could talk to our children or grandchildren.
But in Morris, as in all of the United States, the Middle Ages are not memory but curiosity. Living large on the land is our birthright, what sets us apart from our ancestors who came over from the small countries. Here in Denmark you can walk from one village to the next in half an hour. From Morris, if you walked half an hour from the city limits you'd be in a corn field and you may not even be able to see the farther limit of the field. If you wanted to get to the next village you'd walk the better part of the morning. No, in Morris, if you go anywhere, you drive. And any public building put up in the last twenty years begins with a parking lot. One topic in the community or on campus that is guaranteed to raise the temperature is the question of parking. Remodel the old ugly parking area downtown, but for god's sake, don't lose any parking space!
So it's interesting to think about what's going to happen at home in the next few years given that gas prices are not going back down. We might have to dust off our history books and take a lesson from the Middle Ages, when people lived small, quiet lives with few possessions and their two feet to get them around.
It's been interesting to read stories in the American press lately about the spike in public transit ridership—attributed to higher gas prices. Here in Denmark we're paying just over $8 a gallon, double what folks are paying stateside, and though prices have gone up here, they haven't risen as much as in the US. Europeans have been paying high prices for many years.
From the moment we stepped out of the airport in Copenhagen and saw hundreds of bicycles parked between the terminal and the automobile parking ramp, we knew we were in another world. It is all but impossible to imagine anyone getting to work at an international airport in the United States. I stepped out of Newark airport hoping to take a walk in the sunshine only to find the sidewalk came to an abrupt end at the point where cars and taxis turned to connect to the highway. Like most international airports, Karstrup is well outside the city limits. Nevertheless, enough Danes live close enough to it that commuting to work on a bicycle is possible. (The average Dane rides 4 km a day, which doesn't seem like so much until you realize that that number takes into consideration all Danes, 2 year olds and 90 year olds.) And there's an infrastructure in place to accommodate the bicyclists.
The Copenhagen government recently announced a big, well-funded project to increase bicycle ridership in the city. Currently, 36% of commuters travel by bicycle, 27% by car. The city is hoping to increase bicycle commuting to 50% (that's about where it is in Amsterdam, the bicycle capital of the world). So they're going to build bicycle ramps over particularly busy streets (the first went up just a couple months ago), create more bike lanes, build more bicycle parking areas, and put in pumping stations. Have a flat tire? Not to worry, air will be close by.
Of course, Denmark has a few things going for the bicyclists. The mild climate means that if you're particularly stalwart, you can keep your bicycle going year-round, but even if you're not, there are only a few months when ridership really drops. Denmark is basically flat, so traveling by bicycle in your Gucci suit is not unheard of. We've seen women in furs and stiletto heels spinning along. Really, everyone bicycles: our mail comes on a bicycle, senior citizens bike to the grocery store, teenagers bicycle along drinking soda pop, dog owners run their dogs alongside the bicycle, and dads with toddlers in car seats run errands.
Though you see people on high-tech road bikes wearing sleek latex gear, most people are out on sturdy, upright bicycles meant for getting around comfortably, and bicycle shops are found in any shopping district. (Aside: in our neighborhood shopping area are a grocery store, two banks, a shawarma/pizza joint, and a bicycle shop. No Blockbuster or McDonald's or Dunkin' Donuts.) Bicyclists have the right of way and bike lanes (where no parking is allowed) run alongside most streets and many country roads. There are even street lights just for bicyclists. Trains have special cars with room for bicycles, and at the stations are elevators or ramps for bicyclists to get up or down from the tracks and huge bicycle parking areas (in Roskilde it's a two story parking ramp!). It is not unusual to find large bicycle parking areas near public buildings and no car parking whatsoever.
This bicycle culture has many benefits, of course: people get into the outdoors, into the fresh air and the weather; it is unusual to see obese Danes; there are not huge ugly environmentally stupid parking lots everywhere you go; traffic is slow and light; and people aren't spending $8 a gallon every time they drive to work or go out for a gallon of milk.
So, as I read the stories about spikes in public transit ridership in the US, I think of what it might mean if Americans were paying $8 a gallon for gas, like the rest of the world does. Maybe we'd actually enter the 21st Century.
The past two Sundays we've driven due north to Tisvildeleje, a charming town right on the coast of the Kattegat. The day of our first trip was sunny and clear but cool, a good day for a hike, not good for swimming. Last Sunday, on the other hand, the temperature had risen, and we went north in our swimming suits.
To get to the beach, you drive down through the town past several restaurants, ice cream parlors, galleries, and thatched cottages on a narrow street made narrower by parked cars, down to the biggest parking lot we've seen in Denmark with the exception of the Ikea lot. On the first Sunday there were few cars, but on the second, the day before a national holiday, maybe a fourth of the lot was filled. It was easy to imagine a summer day with the lot just packed with cars and campers. On the town end of the lot is a little pølse (hotdog) and ice cream stand, and on the other end is a modest bathroom, still locked for the winter.
The beach itself stretches on and on in both directions, white sand broken by pebbly areas, with no lifeguards or garbage cans or beach-chair-rentals or any other signs of human presence other than the human beings themselves. If you go inland, you climb up the dunes and then enter a scrubland where people have formed paths to get to a lovely hiking/biking trail that cuts between the scrubland and the beech/pine woods and hillside that rises to the south. Many people bike in on the trail, lock their bicycles to a scrubby bush and then cut in to the quieter western end of the beach. And it's here where the nudists find the sun.
If you continue west you come to Troldeskoven, the Witch Wood, a fantastical wood of trees twisted and gnarled by the wind off the sea.
I had packed our beach towels in a big blue Ikea bag (thanks Lise and Luther!) and felt rather sheepish about it, but Anika immediately pointed out a number of other beach-goers who'd used the same bag. So we plunked down in the sand, spread our towels out, and opened our books. To our right were two young men speaking Polish. Between us and the sand was a trio of women, one older, perhaps the mother, of the two other women who looked to be in their 30s. The mother, a plump woman with sagging breasts, suntanned topless. To our left was a single man who lay in the sun and then cooled off in the water and lay in the sun some more. Off further to the right was a group of women and several small children; one woman, who was hugely pregnant, swam naked and stood drying herself beside the children.
The water was cold. And clear right to the bottom, so clear that you could watching the refraction of light off the rippling water as it moved along the sand at your feet. A man in waders fished and caught something, but then, while his admirers on the beach watched, the fish got away.
Arne and I slipped through the brush to the trail and walked west and then cut back to the beach. There, high on the dune, we sat on a crude bench and watched the people below. Here came a ripe and elderly gentleman, completely naked, tanned all over, and carrying an overstuffed backpack. Down on the beach we passed a family with small twin sons, naked except for big white floppy hats, both of them digging in the sand with bright blue shovels. A little ways on an elderly couple came walking toward us carrying nothing, then they stopped, stripped off their clothes, and walked into the water.
No one had music, we heard no one speaking loudly or shouting or even laughing loudly. We could hear the sea, pulling in and pushing out, pulling and pushing, its rhythm a reminder of eternity.
In a story today posted at CommonDreams about Dahr Jamail, the author of a new book Beyond the Green Zone, comes this paragraph:
In the introduction to his book, he quotes the story of an indigenous Canadian hunter who was called to give evidence at an inquiry into a planned dam that would flood his homeland and destroy his traditional way of life. The hunter was asked to swear on the Bible that he would tell the truth, but he had never seen a Bible and wondered how this miraculous truth-telling instrument worked. “He spoke with the translator at length,” writes Jamail, “and finally the translator looked up at the judge. ‘He does not know whether he can tell the truth. He says he can tell only what he knows.’”
Last night Arne and I rode the train into Copenhagen to attend a free concert--unheard of!--at the Black Diamond, the new addition to the Royal Library. The Black Diamond, which opened in 1999, is covered in glass and Absolute Black granite, stone that was mined in Zimbabwe and then cut and polished in Italy. When the sun is right the building throws its elegant shadow right over the canal toward Christianshavn. In addition to more archival space, the Black Diamond features a
lovely cafe with seating along the canal, a fabulous small bookstore, a gallery (where a show of Sally Mann's work opens next month, eat your heart out), and a gorgeous and acoustically perfect auditorium. It was here that we enjoyed a debut concert by Danish composer Peter Due.
Due grew up just north of where we live, in Hillerød, and then went on to the Fynske Musikkonservatorium in Odense where he studied violin and composition. From there he attended the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, and in the last couple years he's been in Los Angeles studying film music. A respectable crowd came out for his music, many of them family and friends, judging from the number of folks who walked onto the stage at the end with bouquets of flowers and bottles of champagne, and judging also from the man sitting beside us who took pictures throughout the concert, even of Due himself who came out between numbers to attend to the arrangement of music stands.
One of Due's interests is astronomy and that interest has influenced
his music. The first piece of the evening was a brand new composition
for computer called “Sub-Limit” that featured two competing
“melodies”--the first a thrumming note from deep space that was
insistent and almost grating, and the second “melody” reminiscent
of insects on a spring day--the two melodies working against and into
one another. The second composition, “Han Den Det - Scene 6,”
featured three singers, a saxophone, trumpet, slide trombone, piano,
violin, cello, and two fellows on a variety of percussion
instruments. Oh, and two water glasses. The music was eerie and
soothing, returning in waves to the tonic but exploring atonalities
on the way. Here is what it sounded like:
thththhhhh mmmm thk thk thk rrrrrrreeeeeeeeththththhhhh
phthkphthkphthk mmmmmm
The third piece featured a whole string orchestra (14 violins, 6 violas, 4 cellos, and 3 basses) and two flautists (one the composer's sister). This music drew its inspiration from the two-star system in the constellation Leo called Gamma Leonis. These two stars have an orbital period of some 500 years which means that since they were first seen we've only witnessed a fraction of their orbit and therefore know little about them. The music hinted at the power of these two stars (having a luminosity 23 and 10 times greater than our own sun) but the hints matched the incompleteness of our knowledge about them. And what virtuosity on the flutes! The musicians had to hum and play simultaneously, blow and suck air through their instruments, and use the keypads percussively, all of this in quick succession with traditional playing intermingled.
The last piece before intermission featured Due's music for a short animated film by a Danish film student, and when we came back from the break we heard a longer piece for the string orchestra, one flute, harpsichord, and computer. This last piece made me realize how a baroque sensibility underlay all of these compositions: a fugal, linear method brought into the 21st century by a wide-ranging experimentation with the sounds that can be made from the instruments.
We walked back to the central station by way of the moat surrounding Christiansborgslot, the sprawling white castle and outbuildings constructed in the 17th century by King Christian IV, the inspired one-eyed king and member of the Order of the Elephant. Stars shone brightly above us, their music thrumming in our ears.
