Norway Tops the Happiness Charts
The fact that Norway is the happiest nation according to UN Agency reports got me thinking about our vacation there a few years ago.
It was close to midnight but outside it was eerily light. A seagull flashed white against dark clouds. Thunder coughed above the terra cotta roof tiles of Bergen. It was the first night of our summer holiday in Norway.
"Why?" everyone had asked. "Are you Norwegian?" As my husband, Dom, pointed out, if you say you're going to France, you aren't usually asked if you are French. We are not Norwegian. Although, I did walk down the aisle aged thirteen for my confirmation with a friend who was Norwegian, and she did so in full traditional dress of billowing sleeves under a beautiful ivory tunic with delicately embroidered scarlet blooms.
It seemed uncool to think about it too deeply when I was thirteen but in the years that have passed, I shed my religion, like a lizard losing its skin. In many ways it saddened me that the church was no longer part of my life, its rich history of art and literature, music and architecture, its symbols of love and hope and sacrifice and forgiveness, but there it was.
In the absence of transcendence, we bought all our messy imperfection to Norway. The first night, Jack, who was three, vomited all over his bed in a room he was sharing with his brothers. It was a long night, one in which I did the math. One stomach bug multiplied by our three young kids was probably just enough to mean someone would be felled at every destination on our planned road trip through the Norwegian fjords.
The next day was bright and glistening after the night's rain. Dom took the older two to ride the gondola over Bergen, bought them milkshakes and went to the fish market to see the King Crabs. I disinfected the bathroom, washed my hands with scalding water and encouraged Jack to sleep. By the next day he had rallied and we flew north to Alesund where we would pick up a car and take a week to drive back to Bergen. It was a bumpy flight but no-one threw up and the plane didn't ditch, so there was that.
But it turns out the flight was the source of another drama that three days later found us tipping out our suitcases on a dirt track near Hellesylt. Oliver, five years old and lithe as a cat, had vomited before and after our ferry ride through the Sognefjord but was feeling better when Dom asked me if I had the passports.
"You had them on the flight." I said.
"But I gave them to you." Dom threw back.
The grenade of blame was tossed between us as we rifled through both suitcases, picked through bags, dug into the kids' backpacks, checked the car's glove compartment and scrutinized the gap between the seats. As we tried to connect the dots it occurred to us we'd switched seats in the plane three days before. Scandia Airlines had split us up on the flight and at the last minute Jack had wanted Daddy. I'd gone to the front, Dom to the back. The passports, of course, were in the seat pocket of Dom's original seat that I never bothered to check, because I'd put nothing in there.
So began 72 hours of phone calls to airport officials in Alesund, Trondheim and Tromso. We played with the idea of changing our route to head straight for Oslo to start the bureaucratic journey of getting new passports. On the bright side, two kids were through the vomit virus, with only one more to go. We found out the bickering on the back seat could be immediately silenced with audio books of either Stig of The Dump and Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories. We discovered that in Norway, there's a legal right to roam, as long as you respect wildlife and don't pick cloudberries, so tipping the kids out pretty much anywhere for an emergency hike was within the rules. We also found out that there's a special hiking notebook system and if you complete a hike you can sign your name and record your ascent (there's always an ascent) in a small book under a pile of stones. It was like a treasure hunt and hiking challenge rolled into one. We discovered Norway has some of the longest tunnels in the world and their midpoint is lit by a subterranean glow giving the impression you are under a glacier and you can see the light. I mused on this as the perfect metaphor for religion, a fake light in the dark, but on a practical level, I thoroughly appreciated Norwegian engineering. Especially when we got a puncture near Fjaerland and our car was lifted onto the back of a truck and, because there was nowhere else for the five of us to sit, we sat in the car but it was the truck driver who was in charge, barreling through the endless tunnels with us strapped to his vehicle, without the comforting Just So Stories and unable to escape. Even if we had waved manically at the driver, he'd never have seen us behind the five spare tires blocking his view. Then it became apparent that Jack had left his stuffed dog behind.
When we finally heard that the passports had been found in Tromso, well into the Arctic Circle, and would be flown back to Bergen for us before the end of the week, we celebrated with gin that was so expensive we should have been ordering a round at The Pierre in Manhattan. Instead we were at the Scandic in Skei. We drank to Northern European efficiency. We drank to finding what was lost. The next day the boys spent a morning in the hotel pool and later, snacking on wild raspberries we ventured out to the edge of a glacier. At the Glacier Museum experts suggested these giant rivers of ice were not obstacles but opportunities.
In Norway we got ill, we forgot things, we bickered, we made up, we felt claustrophobic, we were reassured, we lost agency, we relied on strangers, we climbed hills, we wiped away tears. We carried all our messiness into one of the most beautifully serene and vastly remote environments and it gave us a perfect sense of scale.