The Pirate Queen (43 page)

M
AGGIE AND
Helen and I were on day three of the Norwegian coastal voyage, which travels up the Norwegian coast from Bergen around the North Cape to the border with Russia and then back again. They were doing the whole eleven-day round trip. I was getting off in the Lofoten Islands, then continuing on to Tromsø for a week, before beginning a series of flights that would take me back to Seattle. It was late August by now, and the shortening days made me think of home, even as I longed to be at sea forever.

I'd met Maggie the morning of the first day out, when we were sailing toward Ålesund. In her mid-fifties, plump and asthmatic, wearing a large flowered blouse over several turtlenecks, and a thickly crocheted blue cap on her head, she was a junior high school teacher from a small town outside Sacramento. Within twenty minutes I knew how much Maggie's house cost, when she bought it, what it sold for last year, what her two children did, and what they earned. This was her fifth trip on the coastal steamer. She'd first traveled up to the North Cape the summer of 1973; she'd even been on the
Kong Olav.

“I was on the
Kong Olav
then, too!” I said. “I was a dishwasher.”

It turned out Maggie had taken her trip in May, before I'd started my job, but even if we'd been on the ship at the same time, we probably wouldn't have met. “Just think, you could have washed my dishes,” she said, punching my arm in a friendly way.

In the years since Maggie and I had made that first trip, the ships of the line—
Hurtigruten
it's called in Norwegian—have gotten larger. The
Kong Olav
was retired some years ago and sold to Thailand; its sister ships, the
Lofoten
and the
Harald Jarl,
were destined for a similar fate soon. These older ships were
being replaced by vessels with dance floors and panorama lounges, vessels that could compete with the massive cruise ships that plied Norway's scenic fjords.

No doubt about it, the
Lofoten,
especially after traveling on big car ferries like the
St. Sunniva
and the
Norröna,
seemed tiny and cramped, low in the water, an Alice in Wonderland change of scale. The doors opened heavily; the stairs were narrow, the corridors crowded. No lightweight materials here, but cast iron, many times painted, so that there was a thick skin of white, green, and black over every part of the ship. The wooden railings had been much lacquered; they had a skin of shellac, worn thin in places.

Still, like many passengers, I was attached to the old ships for their ambiance, and I especially loved the
Lofoten
for the memories it brought of my summer working on the
Kong Olav,
an experience that, like many during a hand-to-mouth, unstable period of wanderlust in my early twenties, seemed now both remarkably interesting and even amusing. Then, I'd been bitter about my low standing onboard, and wracked with anxiety about what to do at the end of the summer. I had been lonely at times and bone-tired from the long hours. But on this voyage, as a passenger, I'd found myself haunting the areas where the crew draped themselves over the railings to enjoy a smoke. I peeped into the kitchen, caught a glimpse of the cooks' and dishwashers' mess. The same jar of pickled beets seemed to be still sitting on the table amid overflowing ashtrays.

No cruise ship could ever replicate the feel of one of the coastal steamers, for the line had a long history in Norway. Inaugurated in 1893, at a time when the country didn't have railways or highways in the north, the coastal steamer connected towns and villages from Bergen to Kirkenes, bringing
news, cargo, and passengers. News came no longer, but the daily ships, one steaming north and the other south, were still an event in some places, where small children might still wave as we came into or out of port. I found I was still fascinated, as I had been on the
Kong Olav
and during my childhood visiting the Port of Long Beach, to see the cargo being loaded and unloaded. Frozen fish came onboard; boxes of grapefruit and bananas and car parts were taken off. Occasionally a car swung on or off the top deck of the ship. The
Lofoten,
like the
Kong Olav,
could only fit four cars aboard at a time.

In Maggie, for all the ways we were different, I'd found a similar appreciation of the
Hurtigruten.
“There's nothing I'd rather do on vacation,” she said, “than be on one of these ships and at sea. A cruise ship, no thank you. On a ship like this, it doesn't matter who you are, if you're alone, whether you're young and fit. The coastal steamer has a purpose—and you're part of it.”

She and Helen had joined forces early on. A teacher from New Zealand, Helen was in her late twenties, attractive but shy, with beseeching blue eyes. Her mouth wore a practiced and brave don't-worry-about-me expression, but even her shoulders looked rejected. I'd seen her wandering around the ship the first evening, and she'd looked melancholy among the younger couples and out of place among the retirees. Maggie told me later that Helen's fiancé had dumped her in London, where they'd been staying with his brother. “And so she just decided, on the spur of the moment, to go to the North Cape by sea. I told her, ‘To hell with him! This is the trip of a lifetime!'” Maggie chuckled, wheezing, “Does this mean I've had five lifetimes?”

The sun broke through, decisively, and cast a radiant gleam over the bronze “Fisherman's Wife” as we slipped past. She continued waving, not to us, but to the imaginary man fading out of
sight. The verse of the skaldic poets in old Norway and Iceland often assumes a woman standing on shore, admiring the man setting off to sea. The skalds were employed, often by the courts of the kings and nobles of the Norse realm, to celebrate the battle victories of the ruler on land and at sea. One of them wrote:

       
The prince's band can pull

       
their oars straight out of the sea.

       
The widow looks and admires

       
the wondrous flight of the oars.

       
Madam, there'll be much rowing

       
till the tarred sea-tools fall apart.

Some Viking scholars, such as Judith Jesch, dismiss the story of Alfhild and other women warriors as male fictions based on stories of Amazons that date back to the ancient Greeks. Jesch suggests that these warriors (sometimes called Valkyries after the Norse god Odin's handmaidens who conducted slain heroes to Valhalla) were setups; after all, in the tales of Saxo and Olaus Magnus they invariably lose the battle and the kingdom in the end. Other historians are more sanguine. If the names of male nobles in Saxo correspond to other historical genealogies, why shouldn't Alfhild, Rusla, and Sela have existed?

Folklore that can't be proved or disproved presents a conundrum. I want to believe that parts of Alfhild's story might be true, that she turned pirate and performed “feats beyond a normal woman's courage.” But I'm skeptical that she embraced Alf as robustly as he apparently embraced her. Her reaction to him isn't noted, and if the word “passionately” is removed from
the sentence, “He seized her passionately and straight away had her adorned with the most elegant and feminine clothing,” it might well sound more coercive than romantic.

In a corner of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark, a former Norse stronghold and trading town near Copenhagen, are a mirror, some photographs and a row of pegs on which hang Viking clothing, men's and women's, in three sizes. For the girls and women there are a long white under-dress with full sleeves, a blue overdress, an apron gathered up at the shoulders and pinned with bronze oval brooches, and a long, fur-trimmed mustard-colored cloak. For the boys and men there are tunics and leggings and a short cloak edged with fur, secured at the shoulder with a stickpin. Just in case you should get any wrong ideas about which costume is appropriate for your gender, there are three pairs of photographs—boy and girl children, teens, and adults—to guide you.

But wearing male attire at sea, as Grace O'Malley, Trouser-Beret, and Skipper Thurídur could have explained, was more a matter of practicality than defiance. When Alfhild's warrior tunic and leggings, cloak, and helmet were stripped from her and she was once again “adorned” in dress and apron, it wasn't just a matter of gender being restored so marriage and motherhood could begin. It was a signal that Alfhild's days at sea were definitively over.

I
SAID
goodbye to Maggie and Helen and spent several days in the Lofoten Islands before traveling onward on a different ship. This was the
Richard With,
one of the newer-generation coastal steamers built to resemble a cruise ship. On the
Richard With,
you could move about freely without bumping into anyone.
There was a cocktail bar, a library, and all manner of soft swivel chairs in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows with spectacular views of narrow blue fjords and sharp granite mountains, of red fishermen's shacks and wharves, once the site of intensive winter fishing (this is where Trouser-Beret captained her boat), and now impossibly picturesque. Yet the
Richard With
was a more insulated world, whose very comfort made it seem sometimes as though we were passing through a travel video about the breathtaking Land of the Midnight Sun. To sit in a panorama lounge with a view of mountains and sea, with a novel on one's lap, was not the same as leaning over the railing and taking in great gulps of marine spray: salt water, fish, diesel, and a hint of frost from distant glaciers.

Still, it was the coastal steamer, and I loved the coastal steamer's route. Back in 1973 I'd joined the crew of the
Kong Olav
on a whim, after seeing an ad in a Trondheim newspaper during my second summer working in Norway.
Skipspike,
“Ship's Girl,” sounded a lot better than stock clerk, the job I held at the time, and I was disappointed to find out that in this case it meant dishwasher. All that summer I slaved long hours and couldn't get the smell of fish and potatoes out of my hair. But I never tired of going out on deck and watching the coastline; I never tired of coming into port and leaving port. I could have done that the rest of my life.

The journey to Tromsø was short in coastal-steamer terms, just one night, just one last night sleeping in a cabin to the sound of the engines, just one more morning eating breakfast by a porthole, just one more port for a final disembarkation. I was sorry to have gotten off the
Lofoten
and often found myself wishing that I'd gone all the way up to the North Cape. I missed Maggie and Helen a little, the odd trio we'd formed by the end,
shipboard friends with little in common except the voyage, three Norns at sea.

Yet in Tromsø, even with the weather getting colder and the days growing shorter, the time passed quickly. I had research to do and café lattes to catch up on. I went to museums and the university library, and even to the College of Fishery Science, a marvelous building in the general outline of a ship, with many festive decorative touches like portholes and fish-print drapes. The assistant director gave me a tour, loaded me with brochures and promotional material, and put me in contact with a few women who could tell me about women fishers. Another day I persuaded my friend Ragnhild to go with me to Polaria, a high-concept museum with little of interest except a model of how whirlpools are created. I'm afraid I taxed her patience by pushing the button again and again so I could see how the funnel swirled up from the bottom of the tall glass tank, faster and faster, until it became a tornado of white water with a wide opening on the surface. If ever there were a symbol for the once revered and now lost power of the feminine to create and destroy life, this was it. Call me the Cailleach, creator of sea cauldrons, the storm goddess now living in a glass box.

One afternoon I sat in the market square with my notebook, and sketched the statue before me: a large bold fisherman in a small boat, tilted at a vertical angle over two abstract curls of either wave or whale. His harpoon raised to strike, he was the epitome of action. All around the granite pedestal were bas-reliefs made of forged metal. One of them was a small tableau of two women and a small boy staring out at a ship. One woman had her hand on the other's shoulder; the boy wore a sou' wester and pulled impatiently away from his mother.

I'd just come from a meeting with Marit Husmo, who'd
done a lot of interesting statistical research on women in the fishing industry, and now I sat in the square, across from a man hawking fresh shrimp and a Russian woman selling lacquered boxes and dolls, reading through my notes. At the end of our talk I'd asked Marit about the custom of erecting statues of women staring out to sea, and she sighed. “Most women still work in factories, on the fish processing assembly line. That's the reality. There's no statue to
them.
There's nothing that reflects what women actually do.”

It hadn't been until my last day in the Lofoten Islands that I'd tried to find out something about the Fisherman's Wife statue there, and about some of the other statues now being erected along these maritime coasts. Although most of these statues show women in old-fashioned dress—long skirts (the better to blow in the sculptor's breeze), kerchiefs and shawls—almost all have appeared in the last decade or so. When I finally asked, “Who's putting these statues up and why now?” the answers surprised me. Although the figures clearly drew on an iconography of mourning as old as Homer, most people didn't mention loss, but told me, “It's to acknowledge women's contribution to Norway's fishing culture. The men went out fishing and whaling, but the women did everything else. So this is a tribute to these women.”