Dear Ms Enger,
This is an account of what I am going to refer to as the ‘Oppdal Disaster’, which occurred in and around the town of Oppdal, in Trøndelag region, Kingdom of Norway, on Wednesday 23rd August 2023, following a major landslide on the highway E6 near Ulsberg at around 19:00, which forced all traffic on this busy thoroughfare to turn back. It is my intention with this narrative to be as accurate and forthright as I can, and for that reason I declare without shame that the title The Oppdal Disaster is meant ironically, and that this ‘disaster’ resulted in neither fatalities nor injuries (at least not to my knowledge, as will be discussed later). I should also stress that neither does the title refer to the ‘major’ landslide, which was due, in all likelihood, to the unusually heavy rainfall that had pounded Norway in the preceding weeks and caused considerable damage to infrastructure. Indeed, it was only by mere chance that no vehicles were in the immediate vicinity when the road collapsed and slid down the hillside, and I have no wish to be flippant or facetious about what might so easily have been a great tragedy for many people. No, the ‘Oppdal Disaster’ refers to the very minor landslide a good way to the south of the major one, which resulted in only a small loss of property, time and money, a sleepless night for about a dozen people, a daring escape by bicycle and one mental breakdown. Nor was the mental breakdown, mine, entirely caused by the Oppdal Disaster; there were many factors, and more significant ones too, that brought it on, as is always the case with something so horribly complex as a life crisis, but suffice it to say that the mental distress I suffered in the wake of the events of 23rd and 24th August gave me a good little shove down the slippery slope to paranoia, mania, psychosis, suicidal ideation and hospitalisation in Stockholm the following month.
The bus journey from Lillehammer to Trondheim, replacing the rail service cancelled due to the heavy rain already mentioned, boded ill for me from the beginning. The driver of the ‘express’ bus (there was one other making a few stops along the way) snatched my rucksack and flung it into the luggage compartment under the bus with a force and carelessness that would have been offensive even if he had been in a hurry to leave on time, but he was in no hurry. I was too tired and grumpy to complain, tired of my own exhausting, self-inflicted schedule and grumpy about the five-hour journey ahead on a stuffy, crowded bus instead of on one of your magnificent, spacious trains. But such is travel, and it’s as pointless to grumble about bad-tempered bus drivers as natural disasters ruining your itinerary. Both are immovable features of the travel landscape. Human error is a different matter, of course, professional negligence quite another. Managerial penny-pinching, however, is a complaint an order of magnitude more serious, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
The journey was uneventful until the northbound traffic on the E6 came to a standstill around 19:00 in the vicinity of Ulsberg. Only a matter of seconds before this, the bus had passed a small waterfall close to the right of the road that seemed likely to have been newly created by the heavy rainfall. As we passed this ‘waterfall’, it had not yet spilled over onto the road, though it would do that within the next half hour while we waited in the traffic queue about a hundred metres ahead, bringing with it a very small amount of debris from the hillside. This minor detail will turn out to be significant later on, as we shall see.
Meanwhile, the driver and co-driver (I assumed that’s who he was) of the bus were trying to find out what had happened up ahead. This I dimly ascertained partly from my knowledge of Norwegian, which I studied at university thirty years ago, and partly from my knowledge of Swedish, as I have been living in Sweden for several years, but I say ‘dimly’ ascertained because, although my studies and travels had prepared me somewhat for the bewildering diversity of Norwegian dialects, and for that matter of the written variants of Norwegian too, nothing could prepare me for the harsh acoustic reality of what I now guessed was the dialect of Trøndelag. I am also a linguist by education, profession and passion, a big fan of the work of the Norwegian linguists Einar Haugen and Arne Foldvik, and this unfortunately distracted me from the much more important task of extracting whatever information I could from the confused dialogue between the drivers and between the drivers and the Norwegian passengers. For some time, I was ‘lost’ in contemplation of this fascinating speech variant, with its intense retroflex consonants and even a phoneme, a basic unit of speech, which, as far as I know, does not exist in any other variety of the entire Germanic language family, namely the palatal-n! Come to think of it, did Norn, the now extinct ‘Scottish’ dialects of Norwegian (or West Norse in those days) once spoken in Orkney, Shetland and northern mainland Scotland, have it too, I asked myself dreamily? I vaguely remembered an old Orcadian song collected by Jakobsen in the nineteenth century about a Norn-speaking man from Orkney travelling to Caithness on the mainland and becoming ‘a man of the world’ by virtue of learning the Scots language, and in it… Anyway, this was all very interesting, to me at least, but what was actually happening? If I was confused, what chance did the other ten to twenty non-Norwegian passengers have? Right from the beginning, even when there were a few weak attempts to translate the announcements into English, I saw confused and worried faces looking around for reassurance and help in understanding what was going on. I heard later that there was even a Swede on board who struggled to understand. But as I say, those attempts by the drivers to translate the announcements into English in any case did not last long and were eventually taken over by the Norwegian passenger sitting next to me, who generously took it upon herself to pass on the drivers’ announcements, but for some reason she only directed her efforts to two women sitting opposite and a little forward from us, Germans I believe. Now I think of it, at some point in the evening ahead the bus seemed to have become segregated, with the Norwegian passengers sitting at the front and the foreigners to the rear, the exceptions being myself and the two women I just mentioned. The microphone made the physical distance between drivers and passengers unimportant, and so I suspect the extra distance the foreign passengers put between themselves and the drivers, when really they needed less, was a reflection of the psychological distance the drivers had placed between them. The drivers had excluded the foreigners by speaking in Norwegian (dialect), and so the foreigners in their turn excluded them. Poor Mrs Tomaselli, for example, admirably stoic as she was, couldn’t hide her disquiet: even the English language was a struggle for her, and she was almost entirely dependent on her husband to translate into Italian (interestingly, Mr Tomaselli could speak a little Norwegian too, but when faced with Trøndersk, he was at more of a loss than I was). As the drivers gradually gave up even trying to make announcements in English, I sometimes tried to convey the very uncertain gist of what was said to Mr Tomaselli, who then further translated for his wife. This phenomenon used to be called ‘Chinese whispers’ in English and is meant to convey the entropic degradation of the information content of communications over time. And to stress, when the original communications are already poor, what chance do they have of being understood at all at the end of such a chain of whispers?
Anyway, one way or another, by land or sea, the messages sort of got through. A man who was neither driver nor co-driver appeared from nowhere, took the microphone and in a loud and theatrical voice told us, in English, that there had been a major ‘avalanche’ [sic] up ahead somewhere and the other avalanche behind us meant that we were in great danger… I’m not sure if there really was a dramatic pause here, but what is certain is that you could have cut through the tense atmosphere ‘with a knife’, as they say, as the mystery man announced, “THE WHOLE MOUNTAIN MIGHT COME DOWN, TAKING US WITH IT!” or something to that highly dramatic effect.
Now most of the foreigners on the bus remained admirably calm after hearing this horrifying prophecy (among the last to be made in English and the only one to be relatively clear and certainly emphatic). Presumably they were all seasoned travellers and knew how to take the rough with the smooth, accepting without question the vicissitudes of travel. What came next, however, was not so readily accepted: in order to safeguard our lives, it seemed, we were all to vacate the bus immediately, leaving all our possessions behind, and to make great haste to join the other bus somewhere behind us. I’ve rendered this message clearly ‘edited’, as it were, but once again, it cannot be stressed enough how unclear it was to the foreign passengers. Testament to this fact was that the drivers and the Norwegian passengers were already long gone by the time it, or something resembling it, had got through to some of the foreigners. In the meantime, there was much worried discussion of what exactly we were to do and where we were to go. And if, we speculated, we understood correctly that we were to leave everything behind, what about the important things we would need in the meantime: contact lenses, medication, passports and even in one case documents pertaining to a deceased relative, to name a few. These important matters were discussed to no purpose among ourselves, the foreign passengers. As I said, the drivers, the people responsible for our safety, keeping us informed and, dare I say, as paying customers, our wellbeing also, were long gone by this time, out of sight even, the hillside being shrouded by mist and rain, but also because of the great speed with which they fled the scene. It was a case of ‘every man for himself, and the Devil take the hindmost’ as the saying goes in English.
So yes, we, those not fast enough on the uptake, had been quite simply abandoned and left to figure out what to do when the mountain came down on us and where to go if we lucky enough to be able to dig ourselves out of the scree. It was our own fault for dithering, no doubt. As I mentioned, I was one of the lucky ones who did get the message, more or less, but I am naturally slow of temperament, and just as well, because this enabled me to help some of the other ‘stragglers’ and witness the failure of those responsible to handle this situation competently. I started down the hill towards where I understood the other bus to be. At least that’s what I thought I had understood, but I couldn’t see the other bus with the ‘Trondheim’ sign, or indeed any other people at all, let alone anyone I recognised from the bus. At this point I should point out that if I had dithered, it wasn’t for long, a few minutes at most, and that with the purpose of conferring with other passengers. It should be noted here that there was an elderly couple on board, from the USA or Canada I think, and the woman seemed very frail, her companion having to help her on and off the bus and occasionally complaining about the cold. At various stages of the night, this couple’s safety and needs were prioritised and served promptly, which is doubtless as it should have been. However, it seems that caring for the elderly couple and a very few others consumed all the available resources of both Entur and Nidaros Tour and overloaded existing systems and procedures to the point where there was simply nothing left for the other fifteen or so passengers, as we shall see, regardless of their needs, which were never asked about anyway.
It was raining and cold as I made my way down the hillside, and I was glad I had defied our orders and taken my coat. I also took one of the two carrier bags I had stowed in the bins over the seats, as it contained my passport, medication, a little water, etc., and time would also tell how wise was the little voice in my head that urged me to make this death-defying decision, as we shall see.
Before long I reached the lesser of the two ‘landslides.’ As already mentioned, the water had by this time spilled over onto the road, but it was only one or two centimetres deep and the debris it brought with it was really very little. I was wearing ankle boots and my feet stayed completely dry. It struck me as being a small matter for the bus driver simply to have reversed over this, but Norway is not my country and I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. From experience, he probably saw dangers lurking that I could not. On the other hand, the faint inner voice, a little louder now, told me that I had grown up in the West Highlands of Scotland, which is geologically and climatically almost identical to the West of Norway, and so I am no stranger to landslides brought about by heavy rainfall blocking roads and railway lines. I thought it unlikely that drivers at home would have jumped ship and run screaming down the hillside faced with such a minor – I hesitate even to call it a landslide – such a minor overspill of rainwater onto the road. Moreover, if the people responsible for our safety could, in fact, based on their experience, see hidden dangers, why were they in such a panic? Experience brings about calm; it is lack of experience, on the contrary, that causes people to shriek and flail their arms in terror. And so, sensing something wrong in all of this, I stopped to take some pictures and make a film of the ‘disaster area’, and as if in confirmation of my misgivings, the mystery man who had prophesised that the “WHOLE MOUNTAIN COULD COME DOWN!” appeared as if from nowhere and, literally flailing his arms this time, repeated his prognosis of doom. This had the effect of making me feel very foolish, like those people who stop to film a cyclone ripping up houses from their foundations when they are only a mile away. But once again, the faint inner voice chimed in and told me that this was no such natural disaster and mine was no such death-defying act of stupidity for the sake of short-lived social media fame. No sir, this was documenting a potentially criminal act of negligence and incompetence. I wanted to ask the man for more information, but he was, no word of a lie, already running down the hill before I could get the words out. He was soon out of sight, perhaps because of the low visibility, but perhaps because of the sheer speed with which he made off, but at least his rapid flight confirmed the direction in which I was to go, not that there was much choice: uphill, towards the landslide, or down. I followed him down.
A few minutes later, there was still no sight of the bus, and I was starting to feel a little anxious, not from the ‘landslide’ as such but from abandonment. Surely the bus, wherever it was, wouldn’t leave me stranded on the hillside in the rain twenty kilometres from the nearest town? On the other hand (the inner voice again), I had already been abandoned, so why shouldn’t I be abandoned again? There were other buses which had parked, and I stopped to ask their drivers if they knew about the people from the evacuated bus, but none did. At some point I saw a woman I recognised running back up the hill, an Italian, I think. During the journey I had overheard her talking to some other travellers, describing a gruelling cycling trip through Norway. I had listened in amazement: she was clearly one of those obsessive cycling enthusiasts who thrive on such absurdly difficult challenges as cycling the length and breadth of ‘the Mountain’ (Berget), as you Norwegians call your country. She looked upset and flustered as she ran back up towards the bus. I guessed then what was happening: all this time, due to the poor communications, she had been unaware that the bus was being abandoned, and when that information finally got through to her, she realised that she might lose her bicycle for several days, or maybe even for good, and so she decided to go back and retrieve it. I never saw her again, so I guess she pulled her bike off the bus and cycled on, negotiating the landslide (the real landslide, I mean) and continued through the night to Trondheim under her own steam. I hope and trust she made it. There were moments in the course of the long night ahead when I wished I had done the same, even if on foot. I am used to long-distance walking, and with hindsight it would have been preferable to the night I would eventually spend in the professional care of Entur and Nidaros Tour.
Shortly after the cyclist’s departure, and still with no sign of the bus, I looked back and saw the Tomasellis hobbling down the hillside. They had no overcoats and were wet through. Mrs Tomaselli was wearing a light summer dress and had sandals on her squelching feet. Thankfully it was still summer, and I guessed the temperature to have been no colder than ten or twelve degrees, so hypothermia was unlikely except in the most vulnerable. I turned back to talk to them and offered Mrs Tomaselli my coat, but she stoically refused. As that long night wore on, she turned out to be one of those people who, seeing themselves as humble guests in a foreign country, never feel they have the right to complain about anything, regardless of how badly they are treated. In any case I conveyed what little information I could to Mr Tomaselli, who then translated into Italian for his wife, though she continued to bombard me with questions as we continued down the hillside, but of course I was unable to answer most of them. Eventually we located the bus and got on it, but I was immediately struck by the absence of any kind of check that we had all boarded safely. Naturally it was possible that the check was done beforehand and that the drivers were just waiting for me and the Tomasellis to arrive, the cyclist having presumably already excused herself. But no one asked me or the Tomasellis our names when we got on, then, or indeed to my knowledge, for the rest of the night until we reached Trondheim, and at no point over the next five hours did I see anyone go around with a list, and this impression was later corroborated by some fellow travellers as we passed a sleepless night in the concourse of Trondheim Railway Station. To be fair, I did see a driver going around once counting empty seats, but such a method of ascertaining missing people seemed irresponsibly lax under the circumstances, and even there, when we had stopped at a petrol station in Oppdal for our hot dog ‘dinner’, I heard the driver complaining that he saw a lot of empty seats, as though our lack of punctuality after having been evacuated from a so-called disaster area were somehow our own fault.
Well, we were all probably safe on the bus, at least, the cyclist notwithstanding, but it seemed to take another age until we got moving. Where important, even vital information from the drivers was sorely lacking, there was no shortage of the annoyingly unimportant variety. The co-driver involved all the Norwegian passengers in an exhausting discussion of where to go and what to do next. The only other main road into Trondheim would involve a long detour, and the short cut was partly along gravel roads. Should we go and eat something first (it was by now around nine p.m.) and should we look for a hotel? But where, O where? It was getting late and such-and-such a local event meant that many hotels were full. On and on went this tormented and one-sided committee meeting that could have been of no conceivable use to the passengers, especially not the foreign ones, whose only concern was where they would be sleeping, when they would get to Trondheim and if and how they would get their luggage back. However, eventually all efforts to convey this ‘information’ in English ceased anyway, and my original fascination with the local dialect slowly evaporated. Truth be told, I am ashamed to say that I was starting to curse my four long years learning Norwegian Bokmål. Even in Norway, apparently, it was of little use, and under the present circumstances it was preventing me from ‘tuning out’, as it were. I was doomed to sit and half-listen to all this unnecessary and distracting talk, understanding little except that it was unnecessary and distracting. That much, at least, was loud and clear.
After what seemed an eternity, a decision was finally made to turn around and head for Oppdal, a decision which should have taken all of thirty seconds, since Oppdal was the nearest town of any size in the region, and en route for any of the alternative routes to Trondheim (this I got from my Norwegian neighbour), and therefore the only place to make for, either to get closer to Trondheim, or to prevent the handsomely paying passengers from going hungry that night, or indeed both. So off we went, and as we approached Oppdal about half an hour later, at ten p.m., we (some of us) were told that all the restaurants were closed and that we were therefore going to dine on hot dogs at a petrol station. Around three hours had passed by now since the landslide (the real landslide) had halted us. The driver urged us to save our receipts, I think, so we could claim back the expenses, meaning of course we were going to have to ‘cough up’ for this feast ourselves. I wanted to ask if we could have two sausages, but I refrained. Irony would do nothing to improve this situation and, given our treatment so far at the hands of these drivers, it could conceivably get worse.
There was no room for us to dine in the petrol station shop, and so we were required to stand outside in the cold night air while we fed on our processed meat and melted cheese products. The bus was parked some distance away, and some people got lost and took time to find their way back. But I presume they all made it in the end, and off we go again, with more pointless discussion and more aimless wandering. I use the words ‘aimless’ and ‘pointless’ advisedly, because after we had come to a hotel and waited in the lobby for yet another frustrating hour and more, it was announced that the current hotel and apparently every other in the region was fully booked. We were therefore to get back on the bus and head for Trondheim. What was to happen there was anybody’s guess. Why, I wondered, could this have not been ascertained by phone from the petrol station, or indeed much earlier? It was now after midnight, and by this time we could have been at our intended and paid-for destination for an hour or even two already. But no, after the maddeningly long wait at the hotel, it was back on the bus for what turned out to be the Grand Tour of Trøndelag. Tired out, I drifted in and out of sleep but was woken every few minutes by nausea. One of the reasons I prefer to travel by train is that I suffer from motion sickness when in buses and cars, and it became clear after a while that we were travelling on very windy back roads. This was an unavoidable consequence of having to take the alternative route, of course, or then again, my inner voice piped up, was it? Eventually, ‘the penny dropped’, for me at least, that we were making at least some of these detours so as to drop passengers off near their homes. I even saw one passenger stride straight up the garden path to his or her front door. They were being chauffeured, in fact, door-to-door. By now it was approaching two a.m. and my anger at realising that the miserable night to which I and my fellow foreign travellers were being subject seemed to be for the convenience of others whose needs were less than ours was inflamed by the intermittent prattle coming from the co-driver’s microphone. As already stated, translating the announcements into English had ceased hours earlier, but now, to add insult to injury, all pretence of actually giving information at all had been abandoned and he was merely bantering and joking with the Norwegian passengers in his quaint, homely dialect. Most of this I didn’t understand at all, but I could see that it was well received and responded to with much polite laughter and camaraderie. They were having a nice old get together, it seemed, while I and the other foreigners remained silent, ever less patiently waiting to be brought to a hotel so that this frustrating day would finally be over and we could rest, wait for our baggage to arrive (fingers crossed) and reschedule our journeys. There was one part of the co-driver’s speech that I did more-or-less understand, however, and that was that he and the other driver were that very day celebrating their tenth anniversary working together. He smiled proudly while the Norwegian passengers gave him a warm round of applause. We foreigners did not join in, most of us because we hadn’t understood what prompted the applause, I because I had. Nauseous from the winding road and the fatty petrol station food, tired out and longing for a bed, and now also excluded from the warmth of human fellowship (deliberately so, I couldn’t help but suspect, which made it even worse), I thought this would be the lowest point of this wretched evening, but I was mistaken.
At this point a brief detour about the nature of communication and the significance of choice of language or dialect is necessary to show how wrong, how hurtful all of this Trøndersk business is.
‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy,’ the great Norwegian language scholar Einar Haugen famously quipped. Most of Europe’s well-known literary languages began life as humble regional dialects spoken by farmers (the English of the East Midlands, the Italian of Tuscany, the German of Upper Saxony, etc.), but then those dialects and their regions gradually acquired power, prestige, Bible translations and more territory, over time coalescing into the nation states and national languages we know today. One result of this coalescence was that the dialects (or even distinct languages) lying outside the powerful centres of these emerging nation states tended to lose speakers as more and more adopted the prestigious variety, and eventually to die out altogether. Now for sure all this ‘language death’, as some call it, is very sad, because when languages die, whole cultures and ways of seeing the world die with them. But something lost, something gained, as they say, and what is gained is better communication. People inside the country concerned find it easier to talk to one another, and if their regional dialects are important to them (and it is understandable if they are), they can make use of diglossia, like bilingualism, except instead of switching between languages, you switch between variants of the same language. This is famously so for the German speakers of Switzerland, for example. One moment they are conferring amongst themselves in Schwizerdütsch, and you understand nothing, and the next they turn to you and speak the German you learned in school, albeit with a strange accent. And what’s more, people from outside the country have an easier ride learning the language if they want to visit; instead of many dialects, they have to learn only one ‘standard’ language, a task already hard enough as it is, I’m sure I don’t need to point out. The point doesn’t have to be laboured: the maybe million people who spoke ‘English’ a thousand years ago could barely understand one another if they lived a hundred miles apart; now, 400 million can communicate without much trouble, all around the world. How many millions (billions?) of conversations happen in standard English every day? What are you reading now? Are you still reading? Regardless, I am deliberately avoiding the even more illustrative examples offered by the Norwegian language, because you know all about them already, right?
So then, improved communication across social and ethnic boundaries is clearly a good thing, and language standardisation and even language death, as sad as it might be, can facilitate this. But what if the very point is not to communicate? A real ‘spanner in the works,’ as they say. A few examples from history will illustrate.
Germans tell of how some radio operators during the Second World War would use their native Swabian (Schwäbisch) dialect to confuse the enemy who might be listening in, or even, it is said, the many Germans who could not understand that little-known idiom. The fewer ‘outsiders’ who could understand, the better, even if nominally on the same side, so went the paranoid logic of war. Careless talk cost lives, as they say, so what better, or at least easier way to encode secret messages than in an obscure regional dialect? A perfectly legitimate wartime strategy, of course, but I wonder how many allied soldiers, perhaps even civilians, died because of failure to intercept these ‘dialect-encoded’ messages. And for that matter did even Germans die because they couldn’t understand Schwäbisch? We’ll never know now, but food for thought, nonetheless. Whether in war or peace, what is the human cost of deliberate miscommunication?
The Belgians tell another interesting story about choice of language. It is well known that political power is divided in that country along linguistic lines: Dutch (Flemish), French and German, but less well known is the historical injustice that led to the establishment of that federal system. During the First World War, the Belgian Army’s officer class (and the rest of the ruling class in general) was still largely French-speaking, and after one infamous address, in French, a commanding officer concluded the speech to his men with “Et pour les flamands la même chose…” (“And the same thing goes for the Flemish”). Now in any age, such a cynical refusal even to bother to try and communicate with the people for whom one is responsible would be patronising and hurtful, but in the early days of the First World War, with many of the lower class Flemish servicemen unable to understand French and so forced to rely on the good will of any comrades who happened to know that language for help in understanding the orders, the consequences of the miscommunication (actually, the refusal to communicate) were potentially fatal. Quite possibly, men died because of the commanding officer’s indifference to whether or not those for whom he was responsible were able to understand his language. Significantly though, this minor episode of the war, which you won’t find in any history books, is still talked about in Belgium today, over a hundred years and two cataclysmic wars later. It has become proverbial, in fact. The pain and resentment caused by deliberately excluding people from one’s communications is still felt across the great expanse of time. And to repeat, it can also get people killed. It can even split nations into three.
Yet another surprisingly little talked about choice of language, between Urdu and Bengali, had even more serious historic consequences. At the partition of British India in 1947 into the independent states of India and Pakistan, Pakistan itself was further divided into an eastern part (later Bangladesh) and a western part (‘Pakistan’ today), separated by more than 2,000 kilometres. From the outset, ‘West Pakistan’ was politically dominant, and it used its power to exploit the East economically and dominate it culturally. Urdu, the prestige language of the West, was declared Pakistan’s one and only national language, and the official use of Bengali was suppressed, even though, in the country as a whole, speakers of Bengali outnumbered their ‘rulers’; the minority was actually a majority. Understandably, this caused great resentment in the East, and the conflict culminated in protests and riots in Dhaka on 21st February 1952 and a number of protesters being killed by the police. This day is now observed by UNESCO as ‘International Mother Language Day’. War eventually broke out between East and West in 1971 and resulted in the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh. To emphasise again, choice of language can get people killed. It can also be an instrument of political oppression. It can even start wars and create entirely new nations.
These three very different anecdotes have one thing in common: choosing a particular language or dialect deliberately to exclude people can have the most profound consequences.
At this point it might look as though I am drawing parallels between the Swabian radio operators, the Belgian commanding officer and the early government of Pakistan in their language choices and our drivers in their use of Norwegian dialect to communicate with some passengers and exclude the others. I am. It may also look as though I am doing that in order to blame our drivers for the way we, most of the foreign passengers, were treated that night. I am not. Neither do I condone their behaviour. They were responsible for the way they treated us, but blaming them for it would be a bit like blaming the German radio operator for the allied casualties he might have caused. They were just doing their jobs as well as could be expected under normal circumstances, give or take. However, circumstances were not ‘normal’. The climate is changing and flooding in Norway and other places that already have heavy rainfall is only going to get worse and more frequent. The drivers had very clearly had no training in such contingencies and there were very clearly no systems in place for dealing with them. Should we blame the drivers for this? Or does the blame for the shoddy and improvised way this fortunately very minor ‘disaster’ was handled lie further up the chain of command, to the management of Nidaros Tour and then still further up, to the management of Entur AS and then on to the rarefied heights of Jernbanedirektoratet? Even the unfriendly and professionally negligent behaviour of the drivers that I have described in detail here, as we shall see, wasn’t really their fault. And as for their choice of communication medium, could it be that there were higher management decisions, bad ones, unethical ones, potentially criminal ones that made the drivers ashamed to talk to us foreigners in a way we could understand and tell us the simple truth of what was happening?
So, to return to the night of The Oppdal Disaster, or more correctly the day after it, our bus finally rolled into Trondheim at roughly 2:30 a.m., over seven hours after our journey was halted by the landslide. To put that into context, from the site of the landslide to Trondheim via the alternative western route was about 170 kilometres, or three hours’ drive on the bus at an average speed of about 55 kph, the low speed because of the extra time needed due to the quality of the roads. Let’s be generous and call it three and a half hours’ driving at a cautious speed. Add another generous hour for a leisurely dining experience at the petrol station and waiting for people to find their way back to the bus. That still leaves three missing hours to account for. What happened to those? Even allowing for a certain amount of time for the drivers to make decisions about what route to take, where to stop to eat and to establish that every hotel in the sparsely populated area around Oppdal was fully booked, I see no reason why we shouldn’t have been in Trondheim before midnight and at least waiting in the railway station to be taken to hotels, if not already tucked up snugly in bed. But no, it was not to be. This is what actually happened.
As mentioned, we arrived at Trondheim station between two thirty and three in the morning, stumbled groggily and irritably off the bus (‘we’, as in the foreigners; the remaining Norwegians all strode off, primly thanking the driver for the nice trip as they went) and wandered around until we spotted someone with a clipboard, around which a small crowd had already gathered. After what seemed a very long wait indeed, each person taking several minutes due to the many questions they had, when it came to my turn, the man with the clipboard only asked where my next destination was and when I intended to depart for it. He then handed me a scrap of paper with a telephone number written on. The following dialogue is reconstructed and translated and does not claim to be accurate, only to convey the gist of the conversation. Human memory is unreliable at the best of times and worse in the middle of the night after the kind of death march we had just been subjected to. Moreover, I spoke to the man in Swedish and he replied (yes, you guessed it) in heavy Trøndelag dialect, and so the rendering is further degraded, even allowing for the fact that I was starting to get used to it now, perhaps unsurprisingly, after the hours and hours of unintended free tuition I had received from our drivers.
“What is this number for?”
“Call them if you want to find out what’s happened to your luggage.”
“So that’s it? Do you mean we’re sleeping here tonight?” I gestured towards the entrance of the railway station.
“I don’t know. I’m just a train driver [I’m by no means sure I understood his profession correctly, but in any case, his point was rather, ‘it’s not my responsibility’]”
“Just answer yes or no. Are we sleeping here or not?”
“Like I said, I don’t know. Just go inside and wait. Someone will come and see you shortly and tell you what’s happening.”
I’ve rendered the last utterance short and concise, whereas in fact it was long and rambling, and I am almost certain he talked about hotels and taxis to hotels, all of which was regrettably taking time to organise because of the number of people involved. The pattern was becoming clear: the less information to be had, the longer the announcements; the simpler your question, the more complicated the answer, and so on. I was reminded of Samuel Johnson’s account of his tour of the Scottish Highlands in 1773, something to the effect that the more you talk to Highlanders, the less you know. Yet again my inner voice spoke, this time not ironically but angrily.
‘Idiot! Samuel ‘Doctor’ Johnson was a pompous ass, and this isn’t the eighteenth century. That train driver was brought up in one of the most modern and egalitarian nations in the world and is probably better educated than you. The reason why his communication is so bad is either that he’s been told to lie to you, but isn’t very good at it, or that he’s too ashamed to tell you the truth. Or indeed both.’
But my frustrated, angry, sleep deprived mind wasn’t listening to the quiet voice of reason. It had got stuck between the stark parallel lines of our two countries and cultures. When I was a boy, the old propaganda of the raping, burning, pillaging, behorned ‘Viking’ still had a lot of currency, but after the eighties there was a steady flow of new archaeological and later genetic evidence about the settlement of Scotland by… let’s just call them Norwegians, shall we? It turns out that you traded, farmed, fished, mingled and intermarried peacefully at least as much as you slashed and bludgeoned, and eventually you seem to have submerged yourselves in the local populations altogether. King Håkon sailed with his fleet in 1263 past the village where I grew up in a failed attempt to stamp his authority over the colonies spread over the archipelagos of the North Atlantic, but by that time Norwegians had been living there for over 400 years and the land had long borne their stamp, albeit with a heavy Gaelic accent. The villages of Diùirinis, Lacasdal, Sìldeag and hundreds more would be recognisable to you if written Dyrnes, Laksdal and Sildvik. Genetic studies have posited Hebridean communities (‘The Southern Isles’, as the Icelanders still call them) with 60% and more Norwegian DNA. As a result, it should never surprise me that I always feel very much at home in your country; my salmon valley is your salmon valley, so to speak. Then there’s the particularly brutal form of Protestantism, the holier-than-thou puritanism, the alcoholic guilt, the tightly-knit small communities, Janteloven, and so on, and so on that we share. The biggest cultural differences between our countries are recent and superficial and will disappear again as soon as the thing that causes them runs out or stops being sucked out. I speak of course of fossil fuels. It’s a fine historical irony that, along with everything else (geology, climate, culture, etc.), Scotland even has oil in common with Norway, but in contrast to your country, Scotland chose to stay loyal to the more powerful neighbour that had dominated it for centuries, and therefore, much later, lost most of the riches the black gold had bestowed. Yet another historical irony is that both our nations now lie outside the European Union, but Norway willingly so, Scotland unwillingly, and for the same reason as above. As a result, Norway is now ‘rolling in it’ as they say (being oil-rich and not required to share the profits with anyone), while Scotland daily looks more like a so-called ‘developing country’ (being oil-rich but required to ‘share’ most of the profits and now getting no help from the EU either). But such is our historical destiny: Scotland threw in its lot with the powerful neighbour, dissolved its own legislature and so became England’s poor cousin, shabby without the chic, and too depressed to even dream of the long-vanished ‘time of greatness’ (Storhetstida), as your historians rather hubristically call Norway’s empire-building period many centuries ago. Norway, by contrast, boldly defied its powerful neighbours, set up a new legislature and eventually liberated itself completely, so that when oil was found, it was free to sook up a’ its ane gravy, as the Scots might say. And then, having succeeded through determination, hard work and good luck in becoming one of the richest countries in the world, the old law applies: getting rich is one thing, but nobody stays rich for long by just giving money away, do they now?
Again, all very fascinating, but such are the mind’s aimless meanderings when starved of sleep, information and by now fluids also, having foolishly neglected to stock up on water at the petrol station in Oppdal, and I am embarrassingly squeamish about drinking water from the wash basins of public toilets, even in such a scrupulously clean country as Norway. It was by now about three a.m., and there was clearly nothing to do but go into the station and await instructions as instructed (I guessed). For the next hour I paced irritably around the concourse, waiting for someone to tell me what was happening, but no instructions were forthcoming. I realised my judgement was also being clouded by a certain metabolic need (yet another that aggravates sleepless nights), and so I went to the toilets, only to find locked doors which would only open on production of a credit card. Without hyperbole, Trondheim Railway Station is by a long way the worst hotel I had ever stayed at, and though certainly cheap, it wasn’t free. Had rock bottom finally been hit? By no means! On returning to the concourse, I was amazed to see some of my fellow refugees trying to sleep on the hard wooden benches or even on the concrete floor. Hardened travellers, no doubt, but I was far too wound up for this. I looked outside periodically, but the staff always seemed busy. As I mentioned earlier, the elderly American or Canadian couple had been whisked away at speed, and a very few others followed, but the majority of us foreigners were left to wait. At around 3:30 a.m. I looked out again but saw no one. I ran outside to confirm my suspicions and my suspicions were confirmed: the area in front of the station was deserted except for one apparently homeless man who, on seeing a passenger wander out in the middle of the night, must have realised that, unusually, the main station entrance was still open. Grasping the opportunity, he sheepishly slid through the door and eventually made up his bed on the floor for the remainder of the night. I felt momentarily bad for complaining about having to spend the night on a hard wooden bench in a railway station, when others less fortunate than me should be so lucky, but once again the little voice of reason in my head coughed and reminded me that the homeless man wasn’t paying for his good fortune.
But by now I was too angry to sleep. I stayed outside and resumed my pacing until at last I saw the ‘train driver’ hurrying past, perhaps in an attempt to avoid me. I ran to meet him and asked in Swedish:
“Are you going home?”
“No, I’m going to work.” (I think)
“So we are sleeping here.”
He didn’t answer this, but anyway, my utterance hadn’t been a question. I continued:
“The toilets are locked in there, and we don’t have any water.”
He took out his phone, dialled a number and spoke to someone, requesting the things I had asked for, I think (I’m pretty sure he said /vɑɲɲ/).
“Look,” I think he said after he had hung up. “I hope you get your bag back and you get to where you want to go. I mean that.”
Assuming I understood him correctly, I believed his sincerity, and I was starting to feel bad about haranguing him. How often does this kind of thing happen these days? Time was when you got bad service or a faulty product, there were armies of low-paid telephone operators and impenetrable automated dialogue systems to act as a defensive wall protecting the management and shareholders from angry customers. I know. I was once one of those on the wrong end of the telephone line absorbing the disgust and rage of the robbed and cheated, and I’ve also worked on the dialogue systems used to ‘triage’ the restless mob into ‘frustrated’, ‘angry’ and ‘furious’, and both of those jobs were the most soul-crushing I’ve ever done, but at least they were the jobs I had chosen and was being paid for, unlike the train driver. Eventually those ‘call centres’ were farmed out to low-wage countries like India, to give the shareholders even higher dividends and the customers even more obstacles to overcome. But even that solution proved inadequate to society’s big stakeholders: it still cost too much to run and too many angry customers were still getting through and being served, or even, God forbid, getting compensation for the wrongs done them. But then along came the dazzling chimera of so-called ‘artificial intelligence’ and its army of virtual ‘chat bots’ as the Final Solution to the Customer Problem. I use the term ‘artificial intelligence’ here only with its superficial marketing connotations, because, in truth, chat bots, along with most other systems that process and generate speech and language automatically, aren’t intelligent at all. They are merely probabilistic human language behaviour imitators, trained on whatever unintelligent speech and language data you like. They are, in truth, obedient and friendly idiots doing their job of hindering customers from getting any but the lowest value information and service and blocking them from getting compensation altogether. And the cherry on the cake is that they work around the clock without complaint and for no wages at all, quite unlike Karel Čapek’s original intelligent roboti of 1921. But, mirabile dictu, even the cherry has a cherry on top, because all the data collected by the chat bots can in turn be harvested to retrain the virtual customer service entities to recognise ever angrier customer language, but to reply in the same unhelpful but reassuringly friendly way.
Now this works like a dream for many bad products and inadequate (possibly criminal) services, but the problem for infrastructure and public transport the world over is that they are just so physical and real. There is no sleight of hand that will hide the fact that people were not brought from A to B as promised and paid for, or that they were mistreated (for example driven around unnecessarily for hours and then dumped onto the street in the middle of the night). Or maybe there is? Why not take inspiration from the hugely successful chat bot model, recruit customer service people with specific but entirely irrelevant skills, for example train drivers (or something)? That way they will appear competent and knowledgeable, but in fact are not. They might be friendly and reassuring, but they are not given any actual resources (for example money, proxy, or even information) with which to help the desperate customer. Or how about bus drivers who suddenly and inexplicably lose their means of communicating with the big world outside Trøndelag, i.e. their knowledge of English or even Norwegian Bokmål, knowledge that they had almost certainly been using without difficulty for the last thirty or forty years before the fateful night of the Oppdal Disaster?
Sorry, my mind is wandering again, exactly like it was on the night in question. Where was I? The train driver, or whoever he was, was walking away, and as I was starting to get used to by now, there really was nothing to be done but go back into the station concourse and wait, again, because there was no way in hell I was going to get any sleep. The blood was thumping in my temples at the frustration and powerlessness I had been feeling for, what? eight or nine hours by this time. I went back inside and marvelled at the seeming passivity of my fellow abandoned travellers, many of them lying outstretched on the hard wooden benches or even on the concrete floor. But then again, I wondered, was that true? In fact, the Tomasellis were not sleeping either, and they soon wandered over towards me, asking me what I had learned from the man outside. “Nothing,” I told them bitterly, but relayed my request for water and free access to the toilets. They fretted a while to me, the husband in English, the wife in Italian, about what was happening with our luggage and how they might plan their onward journey without it, if it came to that. It struck me then that neither the Tomasellis nor any of our fellow travellers had complained about the failure to accommodate us anywhere better than the floor of Trondheim Railway Station, but on closer scrutiny that strange behaviour too started to make sense. Everyone was worried about what would happen to their luggage, as is quite natural when one contemplates the rest of one’s holiday (two weeks? a month? longer?) without passports, visas, medicines, documents about deceased relatives, books, laptops, tents, bicycles, sleeping bags, towels, false teeth, socket adapters, power cables, contact lenses, batteries, CPAP masks, nail clippers, expensive gifts, lubricant gel, marital aids, fancy lingerie, treasured souvenirs, memorabilia of absent loved ones, memento mori, sacred texts, religious relics, lucky amulets and so on, and all the while dressed in the same stinking clothes for the next few days or longer, at risk of pneumonia from the interminable West Norwegian rain, worsening yearly because of global warming, because your raincoat and nearly everything you own is still on the bus. Hardly surprising, then, that all this anxiety about lost things can easily distract you from the otherwise glaring fact of how badly, how contemptuously, how possibly criminally you have been treated by the various companies paid to look after you, so that they could save a little money on their running costs…
Damn! I’ve gone and let it slip. Oh well, here goes nothing! Could it conceivably be true that all the interminable dithering on buses, petrol stations and hotels, the whole meandering, nauseating tour of Trøndelag’s back roads that took about eight hours, instead of the required four, five at the most, was precisely to save the companies involved the expense of ten or twelve hotel rooms, taxis to hotels, dinners in a proper restaurant and breakfasts? Ah, the devil of it is that I will never be able to prove it. Or will I? In any case, it’s very hard to gather evidence of the wrong being done to you when you’re in the thick of it. Victims don’t think to themselves, ‘How will I be able to prove the crime being committed against me right now in a court of law? Wait, I know! Excuse me, sir, could you pause for a moment while I take a picture of you in the act of trying to rob me? It would be great if I could get a clear shot of both your face and your hand on my wallet in the same picture…’ But I suppose your legal department knows this already, right? But consider yourselves lucky to have such a thing as a team of highly trained lawyers. My imaginary thief has no such recourse to plausible deniability if unlucky enough to be caught with the stolen wallet on his person.
And for that matter, what about that decision to abandon the bus immediately? There was indeed an incontrovertible and documented landslide that swept away part of the road at least several hundred metres ahead of our bus, but to call the overspill of rainwater onto the road behind us a ‘landslide’ would be stretching the definition of the term to the point of absurdity. According to such a denotation, every road onto which heavy rainfall has carried a log or a few kilogrammes of mud and gravel must be closed and all the people in vehicles in a one-kilometre radius evacuated immediately in the interest of saving their lives. But here again, the difficulty, in fact the impossibility of proving the extremely low likelihood that we were in any actual danger comes to your rescue, just as it comes to your rescue in the impossibility of proving that we, most of the foreign passengers, were deliberately denied a bed for the night, a decent meal and information on what was being done to us in order to save you a bit of money on your running costs. Yes indeed, the undeniable fact of an actual landslide (even if relatively far away) will always justify the decision to evacuate the area immediately, and any complaints about the high cost to the evacuees in terms of health (both physical and mental), spoiled itineraries, lost property, time and money, etc., can always be silenced with a wave of the hand and the altruistic argument that ‘we were just trying to save your lives’. A decision to back the bus over two centimetres of water might indeed turn out to be the wrong one, even if it were staggeringly unlikely (like 0.0001%) to be wrong, but erring on the side of caution, the snug and safe option, occasionally the cowardly option, is rarely criticised. But how cheap and facile that noble decision was! And how conveniently it removed the possibility of any major insurance liability for you! Remember the man flailing his arms and screaming that, “THE WHOLE MOUNTAIN MIGHT COME DOWN!”? What a hero! In a single Herculean stroke, he managed to save all our lives, at the same time shutting down any possibility whatsoever that the company could get into, one might even say, a major legal landslide that would SEND THE COMPANY TUMBLING DOWN THE MOUNTAIN! The brave man, whoever he was (I never found out), should be given a medal for his services to Nidaros Tour and Entur (and all of humanity).
So anyway, it turns out I was wrong about the others taking all this abuse passively. As mentioned, the Tomasellis were up, Mrs Georgi was up, another man with his teenaged son… pretty much everyone was up, and soon we were all sharing notes, seething in resentment together, sleep-deprived and angry together. Getting hungry and thirsty together too. It was after four o’clock by this time; the sun had risen. Eventually, the young woman who, together with the train driver (?) had been carrying a clipboard when we got off the bus made an appearance bearing gifts of bottles of water and small bags of potato chips. We all pounced on her, but I was first, struggling to condense my long, and by this time utterly confused list of complaints into something coherent, but there was no need. She knew very well why we were there, and unlike the hapless train driver, this smartly dressed young employee had apparently made a careful study of the methods and techniques of the chat bot. Her demeanour remained as cool and self-possessed as an automaton, and her ability to avoid answering difficult questions was impressive, worthy of a politician even. Accommodation was in very short supply in Trondheim at that time, she said predictably, among other things. I told her that her train driver colleague had done nothing but take my intended next destination and given me a number to call and ask about our baggage. In a flash, her obsequious tone changed to one of righteous indignation as she pounced on her conveniently absent colleague and began to tear him to pieces. I could hardly believe my ears as she blamed him (in faultless English, of course) for his failure to give us the information he was charged with giving. By now my quiet inner voice was screaming in my head: ‘ARE YOU JUST GOING TO STAND THERE AND PUT UP WITH THESE SHAMELESS LIES AND BUCK-PASSING?’ Unfortunately, like many others, particularly us stupid men, I am quite helpless when up against a charming, pretty, well-groomed (at 4:30 in the morning!) young woman. To my eternal shame, I think I even smiled and thanked her as she handed me a small bottle of water. The punchline, however, to this particular episode, in a night of so many bad jokes and worse punchlines, is that, unlike a select few others, I received no bag of potato chips, doubtless as punishment for having complained so vociferously. This was a shame, because I had thought to give them to the homeless man.
As soon as her dazzling presence was out of sight, however, my ill humour immediately returned, and I felt as though I would burst into flames. I suddenly recalled how she had even had the astonishing audacity to congratulate herself about her very own initiative of bringing us the ‘Red Cross packages’, when it was actually me who had requested them and thanks to the train driver she had so shamelessly stabbed in the back that they had been ordered in the first place. It wasn’t just the sleeplessness. I felt the fringes of my reality starting to blur. I have experienced psychotic episodes before (they are often triggered by insomnia), and I wondered if one was starting now. Thankfully, it wasn’t. My holiday might have ended quite differently if it had.
The interminable night had now merged with the interminable day. There isn’t much to do in Trondheim as five in the morning, and so I continued my angry pacing. I tried to read, but just felt even angrier about having to start a new book and gave up. I was then half-way through Karen Blixen’s great novella Babette’s Feast, which I had bought in Copenhagen, but that was still in a carrier bag on the bus at Ulsberg. It would later end up in the trash, but more about that later. I went to use the toilet again and was glad to see that one of the cubicles had been opened so that we wouldn’t have to pay again. Among the many neuroses that irritate daily life for me is the so-called ‘shy bladder syndrome’, or paruresis, which, despite the funny name, is a real social anxiety disorder and involves, according to the American Urology Foundation, ‘trouble urinating when other people are around’ and which causes me to seek privacy behind a locked cubicle door when the call of nature is heard. The origins of this condition are not particularly mysterious in my case: at junior school in Southwest Scotland, there was a gang of boys who would creep up to you noiselessly from behind when you were occupied with ‘number one’, kick you into the foul-smelling urinals and run off shrieking like banshees. However, as with so many other events in these eventful 24 hours, my happiness at seeing I would not have to pay 10 NOK merely in order to pee quickly turned to disappointment. Since the cubicle door’s lock was electronic, it had been deactivated simply by securing the bolt, and as a result it was impossible to lock the door again. By this time, the station was getting busy, and so it took ten or fifteen jittery minutes for me to perform this simplest of bodily functions. I would be on the verge of ‘going’ when someone would come into the washroom, and my shy bladder would seize up again in sheer terror. Of course, I should have just paid the ten kroner and locked the door, but as is so often sadly the case, I had unconsciously sublimated the anger and frustration I felt about the bad treatment I had received and turned it back upon myself in a grotesque act of self-punishment. ‘Cutting off your nose to spite your face,’ as the saying would have it.
I went for a long walk around the docklands to kill more time and managed to procure some sort of breakfast (receipts for this, the dîner à la carte at the petrol station, the toilet fees, the books, CDs and DVDs that probably ended up in the trash at the Nidaros Tour depot, bus transport in Trondheim, a ticket to the Ringve Museum of Music and an excellent fish dinner with middling-good wine are not attached to this email, the reasons for which should be getting obvious by now). The rest of the day is blurry with sleep deprivation, but one event has remained crystal clear in my memory. At around ten in the morning, I called the ‘Radisson Blu’ hotel at Trondheim airport and ascertained that there were four rooms available (quite possibly there had been more the previous night), and that I could have one for about 4,000 NOK. I explained that I didn’t actually want a room for that day, but just wanted to find out if there were any rooms available, since we had been told by an employee of the Norwegian railways that there weren’t and that we had therefore spent the night in the railway station. The helpful and considerate receptionist suggested I reserve a room anyway, so I could have proof, and that I wouldn’t have to pay for it if I cancelled by such and such a time that day. This I did and thanked him profusely for his kind and thoughtful service.
So around and around Trondheim I tramped like a sleepwalker. The Tomasellis, as ever admirably keen to make the best of a bad situation, had gone to Nidaros Cathedral, but I was in no such mood to play tourist, and so, much to my discredit, I just paced and grumbled, seeping negativity from my pores like decaying uranium. Eventually, however, I relented, acknowledging that the Tomasellis had the right attitude, so I went to the Ringve Museum of Music. It did indeed turn out to be a wonderful little museum, with its hundreds of beautiful, old and obscure musical instruments. Whenever I was alone in a room, however, I found myself starting to cry. It had something to do with a sleepless night, I suppose, but it was also related to being repeatedly and cynically lied to and excluded from communications (which, if I haven’t yet made clear, is a tremendously shitty thing to do to anyone, let alone to someone who is paying you good money). Ultimately, however, I think it was just about being abandoned and dumped, whether on the concrete floor of Trondheim railway station or for human fellowship doesn’t much matter. Nevertheless, as already mentioned, there was in addition a hideously complex background to this outpouring of emotion, but all that was needed was a good, hard shove, like the one last night, to open the sluices of my tear ducts. For this reason, I was driven to seek out the least frequented places in the museum. Eventually, I found some sort of art installation, an ‘immersive sound experience’ in a big, dark hall into which only a few people had wandered and where you could sit on comfortable bean bags and let the tapestry of sounds rush over you. Naturally, I fell fast asleep after only a few minutes, and my bear-like or pig-like snoring (the perception depending on whether I am liked or not) had driven all the other visitors away and I woke with a start, bewildered and completely alone, an hour or so later.
On returning to the railway station, I heard the joyous news that our baggage had been returned, which of course meant that in fact THE WHOLE MOUNTAIN HAD NOT COME DOWN as prophesied. But as ever, my joy turned sour on discovering that the carrier bag I had left in the overhead bin, containing books (including, but not only, Babette’s Feast (in Blixen’s own Danish translation of her own novel) and a beautiful illustrated edition of H. C. Anderson’s Ugly Duckling that I had bought at the author’s birthplace in Odense and that was to be a present for my five-year-old daughter), a tin of chocolates, also for my daughter, various CDs and DVDs (including, but not only, the film version of Hans Scherfig’s Det forsømte forår that I had been searching for in vain for decades and had finally found second hand in Copenhagen) had not been returned with the rest of the luggage. The bag also contained a few worthless souvenirs wrapped in tissue paper, such as a crab shell and some soft, fluffy saltmarsh reeds from the beaches of Skagen, where I had visited the Artists’ colony museum a few days earlier.
I wanted to shout obscenities at the top of my voice but thankfully managed to restrain myself. How could the person who was cleaning out the bus have missed this? It was quite a large, full, heavy bag. No litter could have weighed as much unless it was a refuse sack from an archaeological dig. I doubted also that it had been stolen; books and discs are virtually worthless these days, and in Stockholm people often just throw them straight into the trash. Some of the finest books in my library have been rescued from this oblivion, for example an original, mid-nineteenth century collection of Swedish sermons, albeit very worn and with the cover taped back on. But that was probably it, wasn’t it? My bag of treasures had doubtless ended up in the trash, along with the dirty paper handkerchiefs, decomposing food leftovers and used barf bags. I called Nidaros Tour several times over the next few days, and one man I spoke to twice was very unfriendly indeed, probably annoyed that I was wasting his time with such unimportant nonsense. Eventually they stopped answering altogether, presumably having made a note of my telephone number.
And to repeat an earlier sentiment, do not think for one moment that I’m blaming the person who cleaned the bus for this, even if he or she did in fact throw my treasures into the trash. These are simply the times we live in. The internet, exponentially increasing computational resources and mass media have effectively brought down to zero the value of ‘physical media’ and indeed images and written words of any kind. And who am I to argue? The biblical deluge was probably a subconscious allegory, a dim collective memory of the thawing of the last ice age and the ten thousand ensuing floods. Perhaps future generations will allegorise the twenty-first century as another flood, this time of words and pictures, music and opinions. And we are all drowning in it, except of course for Noah’s successor, wherever he or she is, busy building a data ark and loading animals onto it, two by two.
So by now, I was incandescent with rage, and it wasn’t only my personality type that tended to make me turn my anger upon myself. The whole thing was set up, is always set up these days, in such a way that the only people available to blame are the innocents at the bottom of the pile: the train driver, the bus drivers, the bus cleaner, the customer service people at the station, and my quiet inner voice advised strongly against letting fly at them. And to what purpose anyway? Even the colleague-back-stabbing, well-dressed woman with the obsequious smile and the bags of potato chips wasn’t to blame. Her behaviour was merely unfair and unhelpful, but she was not the architect of the Oppdal Disaster, and in any case, whoever said life, or for that matter customer service, should be fair? No, it was Management that was to blame, but where were they? Like God almighty, Management is omnipresent and these days also omniscient, determining the course of your life in the tiniest detail, deciding whether you sleep and eat and go to the bathroom, and like God also, it is invisible and unknowable. You must pray to Management, have faith and go on hoping that your prayers are answered, somehow.
However, now that I had retrieved my luggage, or at least most of it, I could put my rucksack in the station lockers (another 250-odd NOK down the drain, receipts not attached) and rebooked my seat on the overnight train to Bodø. The ticket clerk was pleased to be able to offer me an upgrade to my accommodation, free of charge, but bitter experience had by now taught me to suppress my enthusiasm brutally, and of course, I was right in doing so. The upgrade consisted of a slightly better reclining chair than the one I had originally booked, but a reclining chair nonetheless. This meant being woken up throughout the night by the other restless passengers and a sore, albeit slightly less sore coccyx anyway. Still, beggars can’t be choosers, right?
Before I set out, I had intended to be careful about my spending during my four planned days in Norway, since, I’m sure I needn’t remind you, your country is, at least by the metrics important to tourists, probably the most expensive in the world, and I live in Sweden, which is hardly what you’d call cheap either. In fact, I saw signs during my stay in your country luring customers with the promise of ‘Swedish prices’ (svenske priser), which I think in itself adequately illustrates how prohibitively dear your country is, to use the old word. And now, thanks to the Oppdal Disaster, I had to confront the prospect of being bludgeoned by an additional 24 hours of norske priser on top of the rest. Nevertheless, under the circumstances I felt an overpowering need to plant myself in some quiet restaurant somewhere, read Ibsen’s Enemy of the People (En folkefiende) and have a good, long, leisurely dinner. So yes, even in a quite modest restaurant, the heavenly halibut, three glasses of middling quality white wine and dessert cost a small fortune, but it was worth it, and for the first time in the last 24 hours I began to relax. But relaxation is a dangerous thing when you are teetering on the brink of a mental breakdown whilst travelling abroad and consequently need to keep a good hold of yourself. The tears returned with a vengeance, and this time they wouldn’t stop. Was it an hour? A long time in any case. Knowing how upset your people can get at the display of strong emotions, I had to pull myself together roughly, dry my eyes and blow my nose every time the waiting staff came to my otherwise quiet corner, in case they called an ambulance and had me taken away and committed. However, in the interests of full disclosure, these were not just the tears of frustration, impotence and sadness accumulated over the last 24 hours; they were also tears of joy. Here I was, after all, alive and well, (in body, at least), eating delicious food, reading Ibsen in the original Danish (difficult to find when I lived in Bergen in the nineties, but finally procured that morning in Trondheim) and thinking about my daughter at home in Stockholm, safe and happy and so well looked after. It is truly magnificent how you people in the North take such tremendous pains to ensure the little ones have happy and healthy childhoods, whatever ethnicity or socioeconomic class they belong to. It forgives a multitude of sins, even, I freely confess, the shameless and cynical abuse of foreign tourists to save yourselves a little money. And so, on and on the tears flowed, putting me at risk of a creeping dehydration, while I somehow also managed to eat, drink, read and rejoice.
Later that evening on the overnight train to Bodø, I was greeted by a very young and smiley steward in a uniform so flawlessly pressed that not one single wrinkle was visible on it, and the crease on his trousers was so sharp that it looked as though it could cut paper. He positively beamed with pleasure as he announced I would be in receipt of a ‘matpakke’ completely free of charge (those were in fact the English words he used, as by this time I had completely given up on Bokmål or Swedish or some hideous amalgam of both). I momentarily forgot to control my enthusiasm, and very soon paid the price for this lapse. It had been thirty years since I lived in Norway, and I had forgotten what the word matpakke exactly meant. Going by a literal translation (which you must never do), I was expecting some sort of ‘lunchbox’ with all manner of goodies, which would have been nice for the five-hour bus ride from Fauske to Narvik the next morning. But needless to say, when I got to the restaurant car and requested my ‘completely free of charge’ matpakke, my memory returned and brutally crushed my absurdly wishful thinking as I looked into my hands to see two thin slices of buttered bread with a very thin slice of salami on top. I couldn’t see it, but suddenly remembered that there was another, slightly different type of thinly sliced sausage in the middle. Oh, and no garnish or vegetable matter of any kind in it either. But wait! This punchline has a punchline too, because my partially restored memory had again failed to inform me of one more important quality of the matpakke, and I had eaten half of the wax paper between the slices, wondering why it was so chewy, before I suddenly remembered, gagging slightly, though fortunately not enough to make me bring the ‘inverted sandwich’, together with its wax paper, back up again.
As expected, I didn’t get much sleep that night, despite the ‘generous upgrade’ to my accommodation. The sheer excitement about moving on at last, and to the northern realms at that, put paid to any possibility of sleep during the following day on the bus either. You see, I love your country. Ja, jeg elsker dette landet deres. I have always loved your big, wild, beautiful country and all the wonderful countries around it. One of my first two records, at the age of seven or eight, was Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite with a picture of a fjord landscape on the cover (the other was a compilation of Smurf songs). As a teenager I discovered the hallucinogenic paintings of Edvard Munch and read half a dozen of Ibsen’s plays in English. It even haunted my dreams. I longed to go there, but lacked anything like the money I would need to do so, and so I did the next best thing (actually the better thing) and enrolled in Scandinavian studies at the University of Edinburgh in 1990. The man who would be my Norwegian teacher for the next four years, one of those really great teachers who you never forget, was fond of recalling that when he went to set up the stall for the Scandinavian Studies department at the academic fair in the first week of term, I was already there waiting for him. My studies allowed me to live in Bergen in the summer of 1991 and then a whole year between ‘92 and ‘93, and so the course of my life was already set. Two more residences in the region and many more visits followed, and here I am at last, in the psychiatric ward of Nacka hospital in Stockholm, 45 years after my mother granted my birthday wish and bought me the Grieg recording. As with so many other things, the way people treat the ‘troubled in spirit’ here makes me want to shed even more tears of joy, or ‘gladiators’, as I at first thought my daughter called them (actually, glädjatårer). If Trondheim Railway Station is the worst hotel in the Nordic region, Ward 40 of Nacka Hospital is surely the best: spotlessly clean and comfortable, with private rooms and en-suite bathrooms, full board, beautiful views and the kindest, most sympathetic staff, always there to take care of your every need and even to listen to your troubles, whether day or night. True, there’s no mini bar and you can’t get coffee after six p.m., but then again, neither can you in Trondheim Station, and in all other respects it is the diametric opposite of that awful place.
Anyway, so I got off the bus at Narvik, excited to be in the Far North again, but also saddened by the hot weather, which I think was between 20 and 25 degrees. I used to love the feel of that slight icy chill in the air that slapped your face on arrival at the high latitudes, even at the height of summer, but those days are gone now. The Arctic is the new Mediterranean, and soon there will be refugee tourists fleeing the furnace of Southern Europe for the ‘pleasantly cool’ 28 degrees in the shade of Northern Scandinavia. Ice melting, rivers bursting, forests burning, oceans rising, railway lines washed away and bears drowning. Nothing to do now but hope and pray while the cost of the delusion of never-ending economic growth finally gets counted.
All was well the next day when I boarded the train in Narvik for the magnificent Ofoten/Iron Ore Line to Kiruna and Luleå. Perhaps too well. It may have something to do with the more intense electromagnetism of the northern latitudes, or maybe the pure, ionised air or the vast, wild landscapes that crush your little ego down to its proper size, but whatever it was, I soon felt the old familiar excitement rushing to my head as we rolled out of the station. I am not very gregarious by nature, but soon found myself babbling to strangers, I doubt very coherently. In an interesting little quirk of fate, history decided to repeat itself. We had just crossed the border with Sweden and the Swedish crew had taken over when the train was halted by yet another landslide up ahead (and another clear reminder of the future ahead of us), but in contrast to the bus drivers during the Oppdal Disaster, the conductor gave all of us, individually, an update of the situation, in English or standard Swedish, and attempted to answer our questions, every half an hour for the two to three hours we were stationary. There was no panic, no flailing of arms, no prognostications of doom, but just a calm, brief update going regularly up and down the train and coffee on the house. So there you go, that’s how it’s done.
However, being able to get off the train and walk around in that magical, empty landscape for a few hours, an unexpected treat, together with the sleeplessness of the past few nights and the whole ‘abandonment trauma’ in Trondheim, a strange alchemical reaction was beginning to foment in my head. I later realised I was having a ‘manic episode’, which, though much preferable to a ‘psychotic episode’, still implies a number of perils to be navigated by a mind currently in a poor condition to navigate them. What this in concrete terms means is that I fell into several hours of rambling conversation with a woman well versed in European politics, Hindu philosophy and ayurvedic medicine, and, to be brief, this mystical, philosophical, political babble at the high latitudes on one of the world’s most beautiful and sublime railway lines and fuelled by good Norwegian akkavit caused me to ‘blow a fuse’, as the tradesman’s metaphor goes. Mercifully, I somehow gathered the strength I needed to stop myself yelling a declaration of love to the poor, by now tired-looking woman as she got off the train four hours later at Boden, but worse was the email I then composed, declaring my eternal, cosmic bond with her, blah blah, something about forever wandering the universe at her side and the sad impossibility of having another child with her. When I regained my senses the following day, I wrote again to apologise, burning with shame, and thankfully, she replied to accept my apology. She might have become a good friend to me had I been able to sleep the preceding three nights, but that seems very unlikely now.
And so, onwards around the top of the Gulf of Bothnia to Haparanda, then a delightful walk over the river Torne/Tornio and across the totally unguarded border to Finland, where the only official in sight was calling out numbers in Swedish and Finnish over a PA system for a game of al fresco bingo by the river. Sadly though, my first ever visit to that wonderful country had to be rushed because of the extra day spent dicking about in Trondheim, so I went home via Helsinki, Turku and the Åland archipelago. A few weeks later I suffered a mental breakdown and sought refuge in one of the psychiatric wards of Nacka Hospital in Stockholm. I was out after a week but came back in March for another two weeks. I wrote a lot of this letter in the peace and quiet of my room there. It was very therapeutic, and I realise, now I come to the end, that I needed those six months between the Oppdal Disaster and now to figure out what the underlying problem was and why it has been eating at me all this time. It was this: never once in the six or seven years I had lived in the Nordic Region, nor on my many short visits, had I been treated badly, by anyone in any way, until 23rd August 2023. And I mean quite literally. I had never been robbed, beaten, cheated, threatened, manipulated, insulted, lied to, scolded or put on a guilt trip. Wait, I tell a lie. When I first went to Stockholm in May 1995, I was wandering around the Old Town looking for a toilet, as you do, and I stumbled upon the Royal Palace, whereupon one of the guards assumed a hostile stance, pointed his rifle at me and yelled ‘STANNA!’ That was pretty alarming, and for sure the man was an asshole, but on reflection, he was probably just bored and wanted to have a bit of fun with a lost tourist, and I don’t think I was in any real danger of being shot. Can’t judge a whole nation on one bored palace guard. Oh, and then a policeman in Copenhagen once gave me a hard time about cycling without lights, but he was just doing his job and probably also very bored. He let me off without a fine too, which was a relief, because I was broke. Fortunately, he didn’t notice that I had no brakes either.
But no, to repeat, never once had I been treated badly until that night, when all of a sudden and totally unexpectedly I was repeatedly lied to, insulted, excluded from fellowship (effectively ostracised), denied information, service, a couple of meals and a night’s sleep, and as if to add insult to injury, my precious little treasures were tossed into the trash. This hurts, and it hurts all the more because until then, I had only ever been treated with the greatest kindness, consideration and respect in your region.
So what do I want? I want compensation for all my losses, of course, and I also want to be paid for writing this letter, which you should see as not just one of complaint, but one of warning too. As I have pointed out, flooding and damage to infrastructure is only going to grow more frequent in Norway, since global warming has been demonstrated with a high degree of probability to cause temperate regions with high rainfall to get even wetter and warmer. Together these phenomena lead to more landslides as the mountains higher up ‘melt’ and the lower slopes ‘dissolve’. That means the people who run that infrastructure, you, have to put protocols in place for handling various emergencies and then training your staff accordingly and rigorously. On this occasion, properly trained drivers would simply have turned around and driven through those few centimetres of water on the road with no risk to life or limb and got us to Trondheim just a few hours late. But also thinking further ahead, you are going to need to upgrade your stock. Many buses in Iceland have high wheels and watertight engine compartments that allow them to cross rivers to a depth of one or two metres. You might have to start getting those too, but you can start with the training. That’s not such a big deal, is it? It’s time to start contingency planning for a very uncertain future.
Oh, and there’s one more thing I want. I want you to stop making your lower-ranking and lower-paid employees clean up the mess that you made. I realise that’s a tall order in a world that runs on the principle of ‘passing the buck’ instead of taking responsibility for your own mistakes, which of course means passing them down the hierarchy. It is such an overlooked phenomenon in our global civilisation, but I believe it to be of such supreme importance to the health and well-being of society at large, that it should be enshrined in our human rights. An example from my youth might serve to illustrate and support the ones given already.
In 1988 I worked as a barman in the Jewel Miners’ Social and Welfare Club in Niddrie, Edinburgh, at the time one of the most deprived areas of Europe where heroin addiction and AIDS were rife and a big chunk of the adult male population had lost their jobs after the disastrous miners’ strike of 1984. Those unemployed miners came to the Jewel Club, which was effectively a charitable organisation, for companionship, entertainment and cheap beer, but my boss, the bar manager, was eager to maximise the profit of the bar, even though there were to be no profits as such, probably so he could ‘butter up’ the club’s management. One of the ways he meant to achieve this was by instructing his staff to short measure the customers, to give them less beer and spirits than they had paid for, and to empty the ‘drip trays’ of the taps into glasses and serve up the old stale beer. Naturally, if the customers caught you doing this, it was you they would give a hard time, not the manager. I did the same the night of the Oppdal Disaster and it’s a crying shame that it’s the poor souls who do the masters’ evil bidding who take the rap. It’s called the cat’s paw. This, and a thousand other ways managers in a thousand different sectors project their mistakes, misdemeanours and crimes onto those beneath them in the hierarchy causes untold stress and misery in the world.
Now as I said, it’s a pretty tall order to change something that may very well be ingrained in human nature overnight, but isn’t Norway one of the most egalitarian societies in the world? You agree? Well then, let Norway be the first to attempt this radical change in fundamental work ethics and lead the world forward. You can start by allowing employees to question decisions that reflect badly on them. Go on, you know you can do it. And don’t forget the climate change contingency planning.
So for my part, I think about 50,000 NOK should do it. That would cover some of my losses, give me a reasonable fee for this highly instructive essay and go a little way towards removing the bitter taste in my mouth left by the events of that night in Trondheim for which you, the senior management of Nidaros Tour AS, Entur AS and Jarnbanedirektoratet, are collectively responsible. I will not accept a voucher for a minor accommodation upgrade on my next train journey, or indeed any other kind of voucher, and under no circumstances will I accept another matpakke. Thank you for reading. Have a nice day.
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