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.’”
