As I continued
east out of Norway and into Sweden, the landscape, to me, was unremarkable – farms,
forests of pine and birch and poplar, rock outcroppings, the good asphalt road that was
wide and similarly marked – it looked so much like central Ontario, my back doorstep,
that the ride became a bit boring. In fact
Sweden, the 4th largest European country (next to Russia, France and Spain),
was pretty flat. But to someone from Rajastan
in India, or Arabia, or, say, Los Angeles, this region would be quite something:
"It's so green!"
(I was lucky
that my home area had such plentiful vegetation and water.
Desolate inhabited regions that Melawend and I were to travel through would
help me take areas of abundant living environments less for granted.)
At Karlståd,
I crossed the sluggish end of the Klarälven River, which was reputedly among the most
beautiful rivers in Sweden. This crossing was
just before the river flowed into Lake Vänern. According
to Danish legend, the goddess Gefion had been promised possession of as much land as she
could plow in a single night. She turned her
four sons into oxen and plowed an area the size of Zealand.
The land was then lifted out of Sweden and set down in the Baltic, creating
that part of Denmark now called Zealand, and leaving a hole in Sweden that was now
occupied by Lake Vänern.
The first
night in Sweden, I was a heartbeat away from a coronary.
I was camped in a forest near Kristinehamn just off the highway to
Stockholm, "miles from nowhere". There
were moose in these woods – I had seen moose-crossing signs all day. I was haunted by a tale told by a government
executive back home about a camping trip he had made with his sons in a forest in northern
Ontario. While they were sitting around their
campfire one night, they thought they heard a moose calling in the distance. Just for fun, they blew on their own moose-call
whistle. The moose went silent. They listened, then carried on talking and drinking
beer. Several minutes later, they heard a
sound "like a locomotive coming through the woods". They scurried up into the nearest trees just as a
huge bull charged through their camp, demolishing their tent.
"I'll
tell ya, we nearly pissed our pants!" he said.
Maybe it was
my imagination, but during the night, between the shadow-flickered lights and the thunder
of passing transport trucks in the blackness, I swore I heard snorting just outside my
tent. I lay there absolutely motionless and
silent for much of the night.
When the sun
rose, I relaxed and slept for a while before hitting the road to Stockholm.
Two things
were making an impression on me in Scandinavia. One
was all the beautiful, blond, buxom, bright-eyed girls I had already seen. Cliché, to be sure – I had seen quite a few
Scandinavian beauties like the ones that had been featured in Playboy – but here they were, in the flesh! In particular, there was this Swedish goddess who
served me at a pastry shop. Scandinavia was
also famous for its pastries.
The other
impression, besides the prices, which were about twice those in Britain (a sliced loaf of
bread was about $3.50), was the proliferation of American cars, especially the classics. I saw a 1956 Cadillac in Drammen, a '55 Ford
convertible, a '67 Fairlane, a Duster, a Chevy van, and a '79 Mustang in Oslo, a ‘57
Monarch in Kristinehamn, and, across the street from that pastry shop, an immaculate
‘57 Chevy two-door hard-top, which reminded me of the two less-than-perfect ’57
Chevys I had owned.
At a picnic
area just off the highway near the Swedish captial, I met Greta and Anders Hendenstrom of
Stockholm, a 60ish couple who were on their way to their son's guest cottage to lay carpet
(it was rolled up and tied to the roof rack on their Volvo).
Later, as I
was eating a peanut butter sandwich at a picnic table, a man drove up in a Chevrolet
Caprice Classic. The car was painted silver
and black with red-stripes in the same way as my '79 Pontiac Grand Prix (which was stored
on blocks at Dad's home). The owner of the
Caprice was a doctor, a tall, trim, balding man who had a beard and wore a dark shirt and
tie and gray slacks.
"Be
careful driving here," he said. "You
will find that a lot of Swedish drivers are aggressive and stupid."
"Why is
that?"
"They're
tense behind the wheel," he said. "I
lived in Japan for five years. There, they are
friendly and they obey the laws because they are very strict."
I nodded and
then looked at his Chevrolet.
"That's
quite a nice car you have there," I said. "Are
American cars expensive here?"
"Incredibly. For what I paid for this Caprice, you could buy two
Volvos. This is the second Caprice I have
owned."
Our
conversation turned to Chernobyl.
"The
Laplanders are suffering," he said. "Because
of radiation contamination, they are required to slaughter 60,000 of their reindeer each
year for the next five years,"
(It was the
Swedes who sounded the alarm about Chernobyl. Technicians
at Sweden's Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, 60 miles north of Stockholm, detected high
levels of radiation in the atmosphere. They
frantically checked their own facility, then others and determined that the source was not
in Sweden. Prevailing wind patterns confirmed
their fears – that it was coming from the Soviet Union.
From an April
1997 report by the Greenpeace
International Nuclear Campaign: "It has been estimated that, although different
radionuclides were released, the total radioactivity of the material from Chernobyl was
200 times that of the combined releases from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.")
Part of my
mission was to promote peace so it seemed appropriate to have a look at Sweden – this
was a land of peacemakers. Sweden had given us
Raoul Wallenberg, the 32-year-old member of a great industrial and banking family, who
saved about 100,000 Jews from the Nazi death camps, but who disappeared at the hands of
the Russians at the end of the war. It had
given us Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish economist who became the second Secretary General
of the United Nations and the founder of the UN Peacekeeping Force. (He died on a peace
mission to the war-torn Congo in 1971 when his plane crashed under mysterious
circumstances.) Sweden had given us Alfred
Nobel, the armaments tycoon who bequeathed an investment fund for annual awards to be
given to those who "shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind". It had also given us Alva Myrdal, who became the
UN's first top ranking woman director when she became head of the Department of Social
Affairs. She won the 1982 Nobel Peace Prize. She was tireless in her efforts to promote
disarmament and published books and articles.
Myrdal died at
the age of 84 in 1986, the same year as Olof Palme, who had been Prime Minister of Sweden
since the age of 42 in 1969 (except during years 1976 and 1982). Palme had vigorously condemned American policy in
Vietnam, argued constantly against colonialism and the arms race and became one of the
world's foremost champions of oppressed people. He
was also an architect of Sweden’s comprehensive welfare state with the policy of
leveling out social advantage and disadvantage. Sweden
had almost no poor people, and appeared classless and equal.
But there were still large differences in the distribution of wealth. High taxes paid for the welfare state.
The country
had been neutral since King Karl XIV Johan laid down Sweden's long-lasting belief in
neutrality. Even after WWII, Sweden resolved
to maintain its non-alliance. It had been
active in the UN promoting peace.
But Sweden was
also a contradiction in terms of peace. Under
Prime Minister Palme, Sweden had been a vociferous opponent of the
war in Vietnam. This damaged relations with
the United States beginning in the late 1960s and many young U.S. opponents of the war
received political asylum in Sweden. The
country was a conundrum on the issue of disarmament. In
order to maintain an up-to-date defense department, it made weapons. But an armament supplying only indigenous needs
would be an intolerable drain of the nation's resources – it also had to sell them
elsewhere. This led to the hypocritical
situation where the peace-loving and peace-promoting Swedes were among the world's biggest
exporters of armaments. This non-aligned country was providing a substantial amount of the
weapons held by one half of the world – an acceptable practice under the
internationally accepted terms of neutrality – neutral
governments were not obliged to restrain their citizens from selling war supplies or
lending money to belligerents if the citizens have the same legal right to trade with both
sides.
Earlier
evidence of this contradiction was the found in life and times of one of the greatest
benefactors of peace, Alfred Nobel, "the father of Sweden's vigorous armaments
industry”. His father had invented new
and efficient land and sea mines that the Russian forces used in the Crimean War. Alfred went further to patent many of his own
inventions, the most famous being dynamite. It
revolutionized mining, road building and tunnel blasting.
And he gave engineers a manageable form of the highly sensitive explosive,
nitroglycerine. He also went to synthetic
materials, telecommunications and alarm systems – clocking up 355 patents in his
lifetime.
Nobel was a
pioneer in the swift industrial exploitation of his discoveries and the founding of
multinational companies. His ultimate total
was 90 factories and companies in 20 countries on five continents. He also had a reputation as a benevolent employer
who provided social care and welfare benefits.
He was a man
with a penetrating mind, shrewd in business and with a skeptical idealism. He was also melancholy, slightly self-deprecating,
yet with a good sense of humour. He was not a
happy man and wrote of it as "a miserable half-life, which ought to be choked to
death by a philanthropic physician as, with a howl, it entered life." A lonely man
who never married, Nobel did have a strong platonic friendship with Bertha von Suttner, an
Austrian baroness who was not free to marry, and who was a pioneer in the peace movement. (Coincidentally, she was awarded the first Nobel
Peace Prize in 1905.) He also had an 18-year
love affair with an Austrian girl 23 years his junior.
In his youth, he was strongly influenced by Shelley's pacifist views and he,
Nobel, called war "the horror of horrors and the greatest of all crimes." –
yet he amassed a huge fortune from weapons of war – the legacy of which now financed
the world’s major award for peace.
In less than
300 words, his will stipulated how to convert the major part of his estate into an
investment fund. The proceeds were to be used
for annual prizes to be awarded to individuals in Physics, chemistry, physiology or
medicine, literature and now best known of all - the award for "the best work for
fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the
holding and promotion of peace congresses" – the Nobel Prize for Peace. Awards for the first four were to be awarded
by Swedish institutions, but the Peace price was to be given by a committee appointed by
the Norwegian Parliament.
This was the
Sweden I entered in August of 1986. And I was
on my way to its capital. The country was
still recovering from the assassination of its four-term Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, less
than five months earlier. An unknown assailant
had gunned him down on a main Stockholm street as he was walking home from a cinema.
(It was only
recently that details of the assassination came to light.
Lawyer Pelle Svensson said that his client, Lars Tingstrom, who died in
1993, left a detailed 15-page Will, claiming he ordered the killing of Palme and wanted
King Carl Gustaf killed first. Tingstrom had
been in prison for life for two deadly bombings. He
identified Palme's killer as Christer Pettersson. Pettersson
was found guilty in 1989 but was acquitted by a higher court because of insufficient
evidence. Tingstrom's motive was to seek
revenge on society and the justice system. The
two of them wanted to go down in Swedish criminal history.
59-year-old Palme was killed first by chance – Petersson just happened
to run into him and shot him on the spot. Svensson
said he was given the Will on the condition he withhold the contents until after the 10th
anniversary of the murder.)
The government
of Sweden was a constitutional monarchy and by the 1975 constitution, the King's authority
was made purely ceremonial (I would see a bit of this in Cairo). Parliamentary government was built on a party
system. Social Democrats voted into power in
1982. Just as food shortages and lack of jobs
had caused millions to leave Europe in the later 1900’s, so too had nearly a million
Swedes migrated to North America.
Stockholm,
“the Venice of Scandinavia” was a leapfrog city.
It was built on 14 islands (another account says 20) connected by bridges. It had wide bays, broach channels and narrow
waterways. Half of city was on Lake Mälaren
and the other on Saltsjön that led out the Baltic Sea through an archipelago of 20,000
islands – little wonder that I saw so many motorboats.
Stockholm was
a layered old city – it became the capital of Kingdom of Sweden in 1252. Now you saw an ultra-modern city center with the
adjoining cobbled alleyways and medieval buildings of the Old Town. But I had no time to explore the pedestrian streets
of Gamla Stan, the old town, still an almost perfect replica of a medieval city.
My objective
was the Stadshuset – City Hall. It could be seen from any part of Stockholm that
lies south of Lake Mälaren. This masterwork
of Ragnar Ostberg had a massive square tower that rose 450 feet (105 meters) from one
corner of the elegant central building. The green copper roof reminded me of how Harry
Oakes (the uncouth gold mine millionaire) had had his workers urinate on the copper roof
of his huge new home at Kirkland Lake to hasten its discoloration. The Stadshuset, open in 1923 after 12 years work,
revealed how Ostberg had exercised a predilection for piecing, using eight million bricks
and 19 million gilded mosaic tiles, mostly in the famous Golden Hall. The Nobel Dinner took place in this grand building.
It was already
mid-afternoon, so I decided just to take a chance and go in cold to meet city officials. I entered the Stadshuset and in a huge elegant dark
woody office, I was received by Torsten Lilja, the Town Clerk of the City of Stockholm. With a genuine smile and handshake, he welcomed the
exchange. Torsten made a call and arranged for
me to meet Christian Wegenius, the Assistant Director of Stockholm’s Chamber of
Commerce. These were brief and friendly
meetings that yielded some of the nicest Odyssey display materials for Fort Erie's
Centennial Library.
Stockholm was
a good communications point for my journey. I
sent off the third story for The Times Review and a congratulatory postcard to two
fine people back home, my friends, Harry and Vera Herbert, who would soon be celebrating
their 50th wedding anniversary.
One of the
goals in arranging an exchange anywhere was to write or give a story to the local
newspaper. In Stockholm I learned a valuable
lesson: If you want to do this, get into a city
early.
Home for the
night was camp on the farm of Sonja Torstensson near Arboga.
She came to the door holding her naked son who was perhaps five years old. Still carrying her son, she showed me to a spot by
the west edge of the huge front yard where I could camp.
I pigged out on peanut butter sandwiches and watched a sunset over fields
that could have been in southern Ontario.
The next
morning, I kept to the E3, bound for Gothenburg. I
was rushing again. This time I was going to
see a girl I knew in Copenhagen.
I pulled into
a Texaco station for gas only to realize it was a self-serve station – an
“automat” – where you paid by card inserted directly into the pump –
there were no humans at the station. I
discovered all of this when I lifted the platform. I
wasn’t paying attention. I lifted it
beyond the point of balance and it kept going back until I lost my grip and it fell,
snapping off the board to which the hinges were screwed.
Shit!
I took the
mounting gear off the scooter and screwed the loaded platform together where it lay on the
ground. As I struggled to remount the heavy
platform, a highway patrol officer wheeled in on his big white BMW and started to park it
at the far end of a parking area. He looked over, saw me and rode over, parking his
powerful motorcycle next to Melawend.
Damn it! He’s going to fine me for being overloaded.
He was tall
and robust. With his dense red-gray hair and a
ruddy face behind sunglasses, he looked like a Viking in blue motorcycle-cop leathers. He took off his sunglasses and looked at me with
bright piercing eyes.
"Let me
give you a hand with that," he said.
Together, we
hoisted the platform up and I guided the hinged part onto the small steel luggage rack to
which I bolted the wooden platform.
"Thanks,"
I said. I kept busy remounting the load and
avoided looking into his eyes, expecting I was about to be charged with riding an
overloaded scooter.
"That's
an amazing load," he said. "Where
are you going?" He seemed fascinated
rather than interrogative.
I told him.
He shook his
head. "That's fantastic! I wish I was going with you."
"That's
quite a bike you have there," I said. "Have
you been with the force long?"
"Twenty-five
years. I am waiting here for my younger
brother. He has been on the force only one
year. He cannot sit still. I cover about 250 kilometers a day. He covers twice that.
Right now he is riding back up from where we came. I am waiting here to meet up with an undersea
vehicle that we are going to escort for the next 40 kilometers."
His name was
Henning Lindh. As he was simply waiting for
the vehicle to show up, I asked him about Chernobyl.
"I had to
go to Poland to help recruit old men for the clean-up."
There was a
look of disgust in his eyes and I wondered if he meant he had to enforce conscription.
Then he
changed the topic.
"Ah, it
must be nice in Canada," he said. I would love to go fishing there."
We talked for
a while about Canada.
"It is so
nice to talk with someone man to man," he said. "It
seems I am always talking like a police officer to people.
I hope we can meet again in Canada."
He gave me
some Esso hand wipe packets and his Swedish government-issue pen. I wondered how many tickets he had written with it. We shook hands and he took up his position at the
far end of the lot. In a few moments a flatbed
truck lumbered down the road. It took up 1½
lanes and bore a mammoth squat yellow vehicle with wide black tracks. It looked like a huge decapitated military tank. Hennig's brother was in front on his BMW with
lights flashing. Henning waved to me and
joined his brother.
As I
mentioned, I was anxious to get to Copenhagen where an interesting girl was waiting for
me. Home for the night on a farm near
Alingsås and was made possible by the good English spoken by Peter Bjorking. He asked his father Erland and mother Ingrid if I
could camp here. I was urged by the
parents’ gestures and smiles to place my tent near the front door of their modest
neat frame home. In the morning, Peter,
carrying his infant daughter Anna in backpack, and his lovely wife Marie wished me well. I was given another pen, this one from the bank
where Peter worked. Then I was away.
I skirted
Gothenburg, the second city of Sweden. It had
a big infrastructure, geared for largeness and it attracted to its city stages most of the
top events in northern Europe. Bruce
Springstein had staged two concerts here last year (1985) and had attracted 126,856 fans.
I had reached
"The Gold Coast" of Sweden, along the Skagerrak - 250 miles (400 km) of glorious
coastline divided in two by Gothenburg. To the
south was the county of Holland, where the best beaches were. Varberg was a bustling place combining spa, resort,
port and commercial center. It loomed impressively beside the water. Falkenberg was on the Ätran, a river famous for
its salmon.
At
Helsingborg, 25 million people crossed the sound Öresund between Sweden and Denmark
annually. Now it was my turn. At the local office of Scandinavian Ferry Lines, I
summoned the nerve and asked Gunnar Enefält, the Chief Reservations Officer, a tall lean
man who looked like an old friend, about a sponsored passage to Helsingør. No problem. I
breathed again, tied Melawend to rails along hull inside the ferry Betula and was gratefully bound for Denmark to
meet Marie.
Chapter 16
Danish Delights
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