A Journey in Which I Travel North On the World’s Most Beautiful Voyage Searching for the Ever-Elusive Midnight Sun. A Journey in Which I Travel North, on the World’s Most Beautiful Voyage, Searching for the Specter of My Grandfather and a Glimpse of the Ever-Elusive Midnight Sun. “That’s the one,” said Coleman, pointing up at a drab, second-story apartment. We were standing on a street corner in Trondheim — a lovable, wharf-laden university town perched on the lip of a fjord in central Norway. Trondheim is also where my grandfather had grown up, and this, supposedly, had been his family’s apartment. It was early June and though it was almost 10 p.m., the light felt lazy and endless. Indeed, Coleman, my 85-year-old second cousin once removed, still jovially referred to it as “the afternoon,” a catchall term that seemed to refer to any time after noon but before midnight. Such is the casual relationship that people seemed to maintain with time at northern latitudes, where in winter the daylight shrinks to a couple of hours and in the summer the night never quite grows dark. Above the Arctic Circle, this binary existence becomes even more extreme, to the point where the entire year becomes a kind of single, interminable day, with six months of light and six months of night. This was one of the reasons I had come to Norway — I wanted to go as far north as I could and see for myself how people managed to survive such a dualistic relationship with the sun without going at least some kind of crazy. The other, more personal motivation for this trip was to untangle the riddle of my mercurial grandfather. Although I am only technically one-fourth Norwegian, you wouldn’t know it by the long shadow my grandfather casts over our family. Harry Irgens Larsen escaped Norway in the middle of World War II, on a 38-foot boat across the North Atlantic. At the time, Norway was occupied by the German Nazis and all travel was being closely monitored. Harry and three friends — none of whom had any experience on the open ocean — told the Nazi harbormaster that they were sailing up the coast to Trondheim. In the middle of the night, they turned their little boat west and simply sailed across the ocean. The first day their compass went overboard, but by some miracle, they made it to New York City, with only a platinum fox pelt to their name. My grandfather spoke little of his exploits during the war. He died when I was only 2 years old, and while I don’t remember him, the idea of the man became a much more powerful narrative force for me than any living human. My grandfather’s birthplace was the emblematic launching pad for my current mission. I was to start in Trondheim and take the famous Hurtigruten ferry, all the way up the Norwegian coast, past the Arctic Circle, to Kirkenes, the land of the midnight sun. It was a voyage my grandfather had taken with my own father 50 years ago. MY GRANDFATHER (CENTER), UPON ARRIVING TO THE NEW WORLD, IN CAPTAIN’S HAT AND CUSTOMARY WHITE, NAZI-EVADING SLACKS I was bringing along my wife and my own son, Holt, who had just turned 6 months old. It was to be a journey supposedly loaded with familial symbolism, self-discovery and solar epiphanies. Yet here we were, still at the “locate my grandfather’s apartment” stage, and on this front, I was already failing. About two years ago, I had come searching for Harry’s apartment in this same neighborhood. On that occasion, however, Coleman had pointed to a different place entirely — one block away from where we now stood. “Are you sure that’s the one?” I finally asked Coleman, not wanting to offend. (In Norway, I always felt on the edge of offense.) “Oh yes, that is it,” he said with great certainty. And then: “I think so.” The next day, under an ominous grey sky, we bade farewell to Coleman and boarded our ship, the MS Trollfjord. As Trondheim slid from view, I could feel that very particular tingle — the Germans call it die Reisevorfreudekribbeln — that one feels just before departing for uncertain territory. With a long blast from the ship’s horn, we pulled out into the fjord and headed north.

into the fjord and headed North. I. Hurtigruten literally means “the express route,” and while there is nothing “express” about it these days, back when it was founded in 1893, the ferry line was nothing short of a revelation, delivering mail and cargo and passengers to northern communities that were otherwise completely isolated from the rest of the world. Beginning in 1936, boats departed daily from Bergen and sailed all the way up to Kirkenes, covering a distance of 2,500 nautical miles while calling at 34 ports in just over six days. By combining navigational prowess, humble practicality and stunning natural beauty, the Hurtigruten ferry has become one of Norway’s treasured national symbols. Yet the Hurtigruten of 2014 bears little resemblance to the Hurtigruten of old. Over time, the original service mission of the coastal express became largely redundant as mail, cargo, and passengers turned increasingly to the convenience of air transport, forcing the company to look toward tourism for its primary source of revenue. Its transition from a utilitarian coastal ferry to an all out cruise line has caused more than a few growing pains. The MS Trollfjord was representative of this new Hurtigruten. As Holt and I excitedly surveyed the ship’s nine decks, what quickly became apparent was that we were witnessing a company in the midst of an identity crisis. Our hosts were simultaneously trying to indulge the desires of the increasingly discerning modern cruise passenger while maintaining the understated modesty of Norwegian culture. Thus, our ship featured two small Jacuzzis, complete with multicolored party lights, but these closed promptly at 11 p.m. There were five bars on board, but several remained shuttered during our entire journey. Deck 8 featured an abandoned dance floor that nonetheless piped out soft ‘80s ballads 24 hours a day, as elderly couples sat nearby, sipping Scotch and playing bridge. Each afternoon at 4, the tour manager would present an information sheet about the following day’s excursions. My fellow passengers appeared to love receiving information about the excursions as much as the excursions themselves; the sheet was hungrily snatched up, analyzed and debated. Occasionally, the tour manager would announce that there would be “eine kleine, kleine informationsveranstalting” — “a very short informational meeting” (apparently there is a whole classification of informational meetings in German) about excursion 4A to the Svartisen Glacier, for instance. Would anyone signed up for excursion 4A please meet in the conference room on deck five? The announcements, in Norwegian, German and English, on the ship’s P.A. system, were near constant. When I later met Esklid Arne Ognes, the tour manager who broadcast these messages, I felt a bit like I was meeting the voice of God. But the real attraction of the MS Trollfjord was the view. On sightseeing cruises like the Hurtigruten, landscape is transformed into a kind of currency — an inherent (albeit shifting) value placed upon unimpeded sightlines. By boarding a ship that declares itself “the world’s most beautiful voyage,” passengers maintain an expectation of transcendent topographic voyeurism. This was encouraged by the ship’s layout: almost all of the chairs face outwards. Such an arrangement did not inspire community or group engagement. People could get territorial about their sightlines. Those in the very front of the panorama lounge on Decks 8 and 9 were always occupied, and if someone abandoned their post (gasp), a keen lingerer would quickly take up the position. It should be said that the view from the Hurtigruten is very slow. As in: very, very slow. Despite once being billed as the “coastal express,” the ferry actually travels at a maximum speed of around 15 knots, which is about the speed of a brisk bicycle ride. So you really have time to linger on every skerry, every shoal, every wind-blown bluff.

every skerry, every shoal, every wind-blown bluff. II. The slowness of the Hurtigruten forced all of us into a relationship of reciprocity with the landscape. Despite being only 150,000 square miles (about the size of Montana), the country boasts one of the most undulatory coastlines in the world, measuring an astonishing 64,000 miles (by comparison, the entire United States coastline measures 95,471 miles). Unsurprisingly, the Norwegian coastline is essential to the country’s identity — and not just because of the country’s primary industries of fishing and offshore drilling. A line of skerries — small, uninhabited rocky reefs — create a naturally protected coastal passage all the way to the North Cape and give rise to the country’s name: Nor-way means “the way north” in Old Norse. Studying Norway’s ragged coast, with its hundreds of thousands of islands, is like studying the country’s metaphorical DNA: it is unique, it is unendingly complex, it is the fingerprint of a nation. Staring out the window, I could not help but slip into a quasi-profound reverie: I began to contemplate the arbitrariness of islands, the phallic language of lighthouses, the band of sky-land-coast as a kind of naturalized EKG readout. I zoned out and zoned in and zoned out. When I came back to my senses, no one around me had moved. This protracted (and mediated) narrative pace mirrors a baffling trend currently taking place in Norwegian television called Slow TV. In 2009, the public television station NRK broadcast a six-hour, 22-minute uninterrupted train trip from Bergen to Oslo by mounting a camera on the front of the locomotive. NRK had modest expectations for viewership, but the show became an overnight sensation. NRK followed this up two years later with an even slower program, “Hurtigruten Minute for Minute,” in which the entire 134-hour coastal journey was broadcast live. After the boat’s relatively subdued departure from Bergen, the show began to steadily gather viewers, such that by the third or fourth day, entire towns were coming out to greet the camera. People dressed up in ridiculous Norwegian costumes; marching bands serenaded the boat’s arrival and departures; one opportunistic local politician announced her candidacy on the show by unfurling a giant banner across the quay. The program became a bona fide national event — half the country watched the voyage at some point. Realizing they had created a whole new genre of television, NRK next broadcast a 12-hour show called “National Firewood Night,” which included long debates on the correct method of stacking wood (bark up or bark down), interspersed by bearded men drumming on wood, and culminated in eight hours of a fire burning overnight while sleepless citizens excitedly wrote in on Twitter or Facebook to advise where the next log should be placed. Another show featured 18 hours of salmon fishing. The head of RTV would later admit that this felt “a bit too short.” “COW WALKS THROUGH FIELD”

— AN EXCERPT FROM THE 134-HOUR TELEVISION PROGRAM "HURTIGRUTEN MINUTE FOR MINUTE" I made a habit of asking almost every Norwegian I met why they thought Slow TV was so popular in Norway. Most of them gave me highly unsatisfactory answers — they said that Norwegians were simply “patriotic” or that they found the shows “relaxing.” I explained to them that many people were patriotic or wanted to relax but this did not mean they would sit down and watch a train for six hours. I eventually called Rune Moklebest, a producer at NRK who was in charge of the Slow TV programing. “[Slow TV] feels different than anything you see on TV,” he said. “If you slow the pace down... if you wait past the moment you feel you should cut away, a whole new story emerges. And then it doesn’t take much to become dramatic.” He pointed to a particular 10-minute sequence from “Hurtigruten Minute for Minute” in which the only action is a cow walking across a beach. “Will the cow keep walking? Will it stop?” he said. “You just don’t know. And this is exciting.”

III. After two days on board, the journey had come to feel like a small eternity. One night around 1 a.m., walking past the abandoned dance floor, I couldn’t resist dancing solo to “Life Is a Highway,” as I stared out a sky that had forgotten to turn dark. As the ferry’s many stops began to run into one another, sometimes it seemed like we were no place at all. Or maybe we were everywhere at once. We disembarked at the village of Stamsund, on the southern coast of the Lofoten Archipelago, which extends out into the Norwegian Sea like a lazy finger. We rented a beat-up old Mercedes and followed the road down the island chain, passing over 16 bridges. Lofoten became much more accessible in 2007, when the road to the mainland was finally completed. But this connectedness also coincided with a different kind of modernization — the great decline of small-boat cod fishing, which used to sustain the Lofoten communities. Industrial boats, offshore processing and corporate consolidation have caused entire villages to disappear. These days, Lofoten is primarily a playground for tourists, who come to stay in an authentic "rorbuer," or fisherman’s cabin, now abandoned by the fishermen. Many of these cabins are no longer very authentic — our rorbuer featured radiant heat floors and a rain shower. But “authentic” is often a flexible idea, and Lofoten was only one example of the swift change that had transformed Norway during the past several decades. During my time traveling up the coast, I had been slowly developing a more robust hypothesis about what attracted Norwegians to Slow TV. While I was touring the bridge of the MS Trollfjord, I had met Sverre Andreas Rud, the ship’s first officer. We got to talking about how much Norway had changed over the last 20 years, a sentiment echoed by many of those I spoke with. Officially founded in 1905, after finally ridding itself from Swedish rule, Norway is the youngest of the Scandinavian nations. In the past, Norway was relatively (and I mean relatively) cheap compared to Sweden and Denmark — Swedes would come to buy products in Norway and Norwegians would go to Sweden to work. But then oil reserves were discovered off Norway’s coast in 1969, and everything changed. The youngest child had suddenly become rich. One of the byproducts of this sudden influx of capital has been an intensive modernization in nearly all sectors of Norwegian life. Just 20 years ago, Oslo was a sleepy, provincial town known mainly for annually handing out the Nobel Peace Prize. Today, it is Europe’s fastest-growing capital. Everywhere you look, skyscrapers are being thrown up, including a controversial series of five metal and glass buildings disparagingly dubbed the “bar code.” As income and consumerism have increased, the pace of life has also accelerated dramatically. In trying to adjust to such rapid change in a relatively short amount of time, many Norwegians seem to be suffering from a kind of cultural whiplash, leaving them apprehensive for the future and nostalgic for a past that is barely the past. When I asked him about his thoughts on Slow TV’s popularity, Mr. Rud became reflective. “Maybe it’s a way for people to get back to the way things were not so long ago,” he said. “To remember what it was like.” “What was it like?” I asked. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Slower.” The more I thought about this, the more sense it made, as even Norwegians in their 30s would grow nostalgic about their youth using the same kind of hyperbole normally reserved for someone in their 80s. Perhaps Norwegians were gathering around the virtual campfire to hear wistful tales from the old frontier, longing for a mythical pace of life that perhaps never quite existed.

IV. After coming to America with basically nothing, my grandfather started what would become an extremely successful multinational shipping business. But even after he became wealthy, he maintained a strange relationship with his homeland. He did not buy a house in Trondheim, his boyhood home, but rather acquired an isolated retreat in the southern Norwegian region of Telemark. He christened it Neset. "NESET," PALACE OF DREAMS

— RAULAND, NORWAY It was an idealized version of Norway — composed of a dozen or so traditional wooden houses with grass-covered roofs and tiny, ornamental beds. There is a picture of me when I was 2, sitting on one of these roofs in a traditional Norwegian sweater. In his own way, I think my grandfather was trying to create something authentic and rustic to share with his American family, but in creating a place out of nothing he ended up created a placeless place — an idea of a place. I thought about this ersatz Neset as we drove back over the 16 bridges of Lofoten to Stamsund, where we re-joined the Hurtigruten. It was nice to be back at sea. Honed by our prior experience, Holt and I had become seasoned veterans of scenic voyeurism. We expertly elbowed our way through to a choice seat at the front of the panorama lounge and settled in to watching the landscape slide pass. We sat. Holt grew restless, then fell asleep. I began to realize that whereas placelessness on dry land can leave one feeling hollow, yearning for a true home, here, on the Hurtigruten, there was a certain comfort to our constant movement. The landscape was never the same landscape twice. You could process it without judgment,with a clean kind of wonder. There was a certain beauty to its presentation: Norway was framed for us in the windows of the ship, like a television screen with only one channel.