Adrenalin: Norway
Jackson Kayaks Get closer to nature.
table of contents
Ghost Hunting.........................page 2 Aksel Lund Svindal................page 6 Norway’s Arctic Roots...........page 7 Games.......................................page 13 Sport of the week....................page 14
Norway Has a New Passion: Ghost Hunting MOSS, Norway — Like many Europeans, Marianne Haaland Bogdanoff, a travel agency manager in this southern Norwegian town, does not go to church, except maybe at Christmas, and is doubtful about the existence of God.But when “weird things” — inexplicable computer breakdowns, strange smells and noises and complaints from staff members of constant headaches — started happening at the ground-floor travel office, she slowly began to put aside her deep skepticism about life beyond the here and now. After computer experts, electricians and a plumber all failed to find the cause of her office’s troubles, she finally got help from a clairvoyant who claimed powers to communicate with the dead. The headaches and other problems all vanished. “I don’t know what she did,” Ms. Bogdanoff said. “It was very strange,” she added, recalling how the clairvoyant “cleansed” her travel office of a ghostlike presence neither she nor her staff had seen but whose existence they had all felt and come to fear.
Hege Sandtro Kruse, another employee at the travel agency, described the whole experience as a “bit strange, a bit interesting and a bit creepy.” All the same, she said, it worked: “What it was I don’t know. But there was something here, I am sure of that. Now it is gone. I know I am not a total lunatic.”Ghosts, or at least belief in them, have been around for centuries but they have now found a particularly strong following in highly secular modern countries like Norway, places that are otherwise in the vanguard of what was once seen as Europe’s inexorable, science-led march away from superstition and religion. While churches here may be largely empty and belief in God, according to opinion polls, in steady decline, belief in, or at least fascination with, ghosts and spirits is surging. Even Norway’s royal family, which is required by law to belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church, has flirted with ghosts, with a princess coaching people on how to reach out to spirits. “God is out but spirits and ghosts are filling the vacuum,” said Roar Fotland, a Methodist preacher and assistant professor at the Norwegian School of Theology in Oslo. Instead of slowly eliminating religion, as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and other theorists predicted, modernity has only channeled religious feelings in unexpected ways, Mr. Fotland said.
“Belief in God, or at least a Christian God, is decreasing but belief in spirits is increasing,” he added, describing this as part of a general resurgence of “premodern religion.” Tom Hedalen, a road engineer and committed atheist who is chairman of Norway’s Humanist Association, insisted that religion is still on its last legs and that the grip of ghosts on rational, modern minds merely reflected the success of charlatans at playing on people’s fears. “Belief in God, or at least a Christian God, is decreasing but belief in spirits is increasing,” he added, describing this as part of a general resurgence of “premodern religion.” Tom Hedalen, a road engineer and committed atheist who is chairman of Norway’s Humanist Association, insisted that religion is still on its last legs and that the grip of ghosts on rational, modern minds merely reflected the success of charlatans at playing on people’s fears. Even courts have been dragged into adjudicating on phenomena that nobody can actually see. Two years ago, when a home buyer in the town of Vinstra, 160 miles north of Oslo, came to believe that the house he had agreed to buy was haunted, he tried to get the purchase canceled, arguing that he should have been told about the ghost problem.A court ruled that the buyer had to go through with the transaction regardless. Its verdict said that the seller had no obligation to disclose the existence of something that is “not generally accepted as existing at all.” The court said it could not accept that “alleged mystical events in the form of ghosts fulfill the criterion of being a defect in the property.” Also deeply skeptical is Velle Espeland, a folklorist at Norway’s national library and author of a book on the history of ghosts. “We create ghosts to explain the inexplicable,” he said. “Ghosts are just the name we use for something we don’t understand.”Ghosts, he added, always mirror the mind-set of the people who claim to see or sense them, proving that they have no independent existence outside people’s imagination. They also tend to pop up in clusters in specific places, suggesting their appearance may be linked to the power of persuasion in small communities.The town of Moss has had so many ghost stories that City Hall organized a “ghost tour” led by Vibeck Garnaas, a woman who used to work at the “haunted” travel agency and who has now become a professional medium who charges an hourly rate of 800 Norwegian kroner, around $98, for ghost “cleansing” work.
“I can’t guarantee it will work,” she said, explaining that she tries to “convince the energies to leave the premises but they have free will just like we do.” Another local ghostbuster is Martin Ormen, a 19-year-old science student from Moss who believes that ghosts emit electromagnetic pulses that can be detected with a simple piece of equipment.Along with a group of like-minded young friends, he travels around the region hunting for traces of ghosts and then posts videos of their findings — always invisible — on the Internet. “It is bad and sad that society just says: If we can’t see it, it doesn’t exist,” he said. Arild Romarheim, a Lutheran priest and recently retired theology lecturer, described the conviction of well-educated atheists and agnostics that ghosts exist as “the paradox of modernity” — a revival of old beliefs to slake an innate human thirst for a spiritual life left unsatisfied by the decline of the church. Belief in ghosts, he said, has become so strong that even the Lutheran Church, to which most Norwegians formally belong, has adopted a so-called “ghost liturgy” for use by preachers who get asked by parishioners to help cleanse haunted houses. Unn Bohm Tveito, also from Moss, recalled how she had never believed in or even thought about ghosts until she started working as the manager of the town’s tourism information office. She kept noticing that German-language brochures always ended up being the most prominently displayed, which was odd since few tourists who visit Moss speak German. In 2013, she raised the issue with other staff members, who said they had noticed the same thing. “Ghosts are not the first thing you think of but we decided that this could not be explained in a normal way,” she said. A clairvoyant sent by the ghost television show, she said, solved the mystery: a dead German soldier who had worked in the same building during the 1940-1945 Nazi occupation of Norway was still on the premises and kept messing with the brochures.“Whether you call them ghosts or spirits or something else they exist,” Ms. Tveito said. The dead German, she added, has now moved on.
Spread your wings... learn to fly.
Pheonix Fly Wing Suits
Aksel Lund Svindal
Born in Lørenskog in Akershus county, Svindal is a two-time overall World Cup champion (2007 and 2009), an Olympic gold medalist in super-G at the 2010 Winter Olympics, and a five-time World Champion in downhill, giant slalom, and super combined (2007 Åre, 2009 Val-d’Isère, 2011 Garmisch, and 2013 Schladming). With his victory in the downhill in 2013, Svindal became the first male alpine racer to win titles in four consecutive world championships.[1] Through December 4, 2015, Svindal has won eight World Championship medals, three Olympic medals, two overall World Cup and nine discipline titles (in downhill, super-G, giant slalom, and combined), and 28 World Cup races. Additionally, he won four medals at the World Junior Championships in 2002, including gold in combined. On 27 November 2007, during the first training run for the Birds of Prey downhill race in Beaver Creek, Colorado, Svindal crashed badly after landing a jump. He somersaulted into a safety fence and was taken to Vail Valley Medical Center with broken bones in his face and a six-inch (15 cm) laceration to his groin and abdominal area. Svindal missed the remainder of the 2008 season, and returned to World Cup racing in October 2008. His first two victories following his return were a downhill and a super-G in Beaver Creek, on the same Birds of Prey course where he was injured the year before.[2] At the 2009 World Championships, Svindal won the gold in the super combined. Fulfilling his comeback during the 2009 season, Svindal won his second overall World Cup over Benjamin Raich of Austria. Entering the last race of the season, a slalom at the World Cup finals in Åre, Sweden, Svindal led Raich by just two points. They had won the two previous races (a downhill and giant slalom respectively), with Svindal leading but Raich was the favorite as a specialist in slalom. Both skiers went off course and did not finish the slalom, so the Norwegian became the overall World Cup winner.[3] He also won his fourth discipline title, his second in super G. At the 2010 Winter Olympics on 15 February, Svindal won the silver medal in the downhill competition in Whistler, 0.07 seconds behind the winner, Didier Défago of Switzerland, and 0.02 seconds ahead of bronze medalist Bode Miller of the United States. Svindal’s medal was Norway’s hundredth silver medal at the Winter Olympics, the most for any nation. Four days later on 19 February, Svindal won the super-G, his first-ever Olympic gold medal – ahead of Miller (+ 0.28 seconds) and Andrew Weibrecht (+ 0.31 seconds), both of the U.S. Svindal successfully defended his world title in the super combined in 2011 at Garmish-Partenkirchen, Germany. After an Achilles tendon injury in October 2014,[5] Svindal did not compete in World Cup events during the 2015 season. He did enter the World Championships in Colorado in February,[5] and placed sixth in both the downhill and super-G events.
Norway’s Arctic Roots
In midsummer, night never quite comes to Oslo, which lies on a sheltered estuary seven degrees latitude below the Arctic Circle. The sun sets late, twilight begins, and a long, last light lingers in the sky beyond the darkening clouds. Then, as if changing its mind, the light grows into dawn and the sky becomes bright once more. As I walk along Pipervika, the Norwegian capital’s principal harbor, at five o’clock one morning, the sun is already at high-noon strength. The medieval stone fortress of Akershus guards the harbor’s eastern flank; on the other, onetime shipyards have been redeveloped into a popular outdoor dining area called Aker Brygge, which comes to life in the summer. I can feel the remoteness of this place in the crisp, arctic clarity of the warm air. A little more than 40 years ago, Norway was one of the poorest corners of Europe. For many generations, emigration—particularly to the United States, where there are more citizens of Norwegian descent than there are people in Norway—was the best of a difficult set of options. But starting in the 1960’s, oil began to flow from deposits in the North Sea, flooding an austere, agrarian society with unimagined riches. Norway created a lavish social-welfare state that has helped it to achieve what the UN described this past December as a virtual tie with Iceland for the world’s highest level of human development, a standard measured in levels of literacy, life expectancy, and wealth. (Norway is expected to pass Iceland in 2009.)
Still, the survival mentality born of centuries of hardship has deep roots. Sandrine Brekke, a French friend who married into a Norwegian family, told me, with Parisian bemusement, that locals “have freezers the size of coffins, absolutely filled with food so they can live for months trapped in the snow and survive. Their quality of life has changed so quickly that no one has adjusted.” In fact, a big chunk of the oil money has been saved in a government pension fund that at press time was estimated at $350 billion—which means Norway is on more solid financial footing than most countries around the world during the current economic downturn. The architecture in Oslo reflects this element of the Norwegian character: solid rather than flashy, with heavy stone foundations to survive the fires that regularly swept the city centuries earlier.
With the exception of the stunning new $420 million Opera House, the city’s most extravagant construction, much of Oslo looks more like parts of Eastern Europe than it does sleek, high-design Copenhagen. “Norway, together with Ireland, has always been one of the poorest countries in Europe,” says Finn Bergesen Jr., head of the Norwegian business association NHO. “We became an independent country in 1905; before that we were 100 years under Sweden and 400 years under Denmark. So we did not have a capital of our own; we did not have any monumental buildings.” Remarkably, two-thirds of municipal land in Oslo is given over to deep, expansive forests. It’s easy to board a bus near the harbor and be hiking in the wilderness in less than an hour. “It’s a place like a hot cup of cocoa,” says Nosizwe Lise Baqwa, former leader of the African Student Union at the University of Oslo, of her native city, where her mother moved from South Africa before she was born. “I like that it is so safe and I don’t have to look over my shoulder the whole time. I like that it is innocent, still, in a world that is so globalized. Norwegians are very democratic and fair.” “No single Norwegian is considered better than another—even the king. We respect him for his position, of course, but we don’t feel like we have to go down on our knees for him. You can meet him on the street just like a regular person.”
Will this attitude inevitably change?When I ask locals about the effect that oil money has had on their society, most of them look momentarily embarrassed by the question, then remind me that the oil will not last forever and that much of the money has been socked away, as if this prudence means they remain unchanged by it. High taxes and a high cost of living—Oslo is among the most expensive cities in the world—also temper any possible extravagance. Baqwa’s answer is more nuanced, perhaps because of her unusual perspective as both insider and outsider. “Their lifestyles have changed,” she says of her fellow Norwegians, noting how the petroleum industry has buoyed the entire nation’s economy. “Because they have so much more money, they travel more. But travel just makes them even happier that things are as simple as they are back home. Norwegians are trying to deal with the fact that they are so rich and that this country is becoming, on some level, connected to the world.” No one knows why The Angry Boy is so angry. The sculpture of a petulant child is the most beloved of the hundreds of works designed by Gustav Vigeland for Oslo’s Frogner Park. Their installation was completed in 1950, and they have a special place in the hearts of Oslo’s residents. The oversize nudes Vigeland carved in granite feel exceptionally soft to the touch—almost soapy—and have a puffy muscularity reminiscent of the work of Fernando Botero. Of the long row of bronze sculptures, it is The Angry Boy whose pedestal has been rubbed to a polish by visitors. I look at the boy’s tiny clenched fist and hunched shoulders and see not so much anger as stubborn defiance: a refusal to change or grow up. It is, for me, a monument to a wish for things to remain as they are.Shoe Lounge, and stylish restaurants like Sult, evidence of the process in which commerce capitalizes on a neighborhood’s edginess.
Viking Spirit
coming soon
The Crossword
Sport of the Week Major to moderate steeps, perhaps a chute or three, and glades where good carvers can slide between the trees—these are the types of terrain where you’re liable to find expert snowboarders who are looking to ride in ungroomed territory. Here’s a list of resorts filled with areas to entice riders seeking extreme terrain. Boarders who like to cruise and carve down groomed and manicured slopes will find plenty of choices, too. While riding up the Lone Peak Tram at Big Sky, much of the extreme terrain is within view. You’re at the peak of the resort and the only way down is via steep routes, such as the Gullies. If you and a buddy have the proper avalanche gear and experience, you can check with ski patrol to challenge Big Couloir, with its 53-degree pitch near the top. Boarders’ favorite runs include the natural half-pipe located off the Swift Current high-speed quad chair next to Lower Morning Star and Shedhorn, which they call Shredhorn. Boarders who want to carve head up the high-speed quads on Andesite Mountain for fast runs down. tel.