Dave's Travel Journals
Far from Reality
Oslo, Norway: September 13, 2001
By Dave Fox
Thousands of flowers, children's drawings, and notes of condolence in broken English line an entire block across the street from the US embassy in Oslo. Norwegians cried quietly as they lit candles this afternoon. Norway observed a minute of silence at noon today in support of the United States.
Northern Norway was leveled by the Nazis in World War II. The king and government fled to England. The king was then welcomed in the US as a guest of President Roosevelt. Norwegians know what it's like to have their nation attacked. I was taken aback today by the outpouring of sympathy for the United States.
It's difficult for me to grasp the fullness of Tuesday's attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon from across the ocean. It feels surreal.
Whenever a big news event hits, people talk about remembering where they were years later. I was in an unlikely place when I heard about Tuesday's attack. I was on a ship, pulling out of Helsinki harbor headed for Stockholm. I had just come out of the sauna and ordered a beer in the ship's spa bar.
"Did you hear a plane crashed into the World Trade Center?" the bartender asked me. She didn't know I was American. Stockholm also has a World Trade Center.
"The World Trade Center where?" I asked, confused.
"New York."
She turned the TV on, and I sat at the bar straining to understand a Swedish newscast over the shrieks of drunken businessmen partying in a roaring jacuzzi nearby. The only video at this point was of the smoldering first tower that was hit.
I didn't understand the full scope of what was happening until an hour later when I headed up to my cabin for a shower. I never made it to my cabin. BBC news was on in one of the ship's TV lounges, and I sat glued to the TV for the next several hours.
There were people in my group who wanted to phone home, but it wasn't possible. The ship's pay phones didn't work for calls to the US, and in the middle of the Baltic Sea, my cell phone had no signal.
I went to bed early but I couldn't sleep. At 3 a.m., I sat alone in the TV lounge, watching the same scenes repeated over and over. I wanted something to grab on to, so I could begin to absorb what was happening. I was bobbing up and down in the Baltic Sea, feeling eerily disconnected from a surreal reality.
My tour group was subdued the next morning. I was torn at first as to what to say as we boarded our bus. My job was to deliver an upbeat tour, but ignoring the news seemed disrespectful. I've reacted hard to similar news stories before, and I didn't want my own sense of shock to drag others down. But after other people started asking if we could have a moment of silence before the bus rolled, I knew it was okay to do what I was selfishly planning to do anyway -- to have a quiet, lecture-free morning on the bus.
We had a long drive Wednesday from Stockholm to Oslo. The news was on TV at rest stops we made, and it was hard to leave. When we stopped for lunch at a cafe in rural Sweden, the first thing the cashier said to me was, "How are the Americans doing?"
Our tour is continuing but things feel different to me now. We finish Monday night and people are worried about flying home Tuesday. A few transatlantic flights left Europe late today but everything is horribly overbooked after several days of grounded flights.
I wandered up to the embassy during a free hour at noon, I suppose because I was still trying to connect with all of this. I've watched the airplane crash into the south tower too many times now. It reminds me of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986. It looks too much like Hollywood pyrotechnics to be real.
I am saddened -- and disgusted -- by news reports of vandalism at American mosques. Maybe this is a sort of reverse naïveté on my part, having been fortunate enough to travel as much as I have. But it stuns me that there are people so ignorant that they can't distinguish between a handful of extremists and a major world religion.
Even CNN, usually reliable, is getting sloppy and borderline racist. On the MTV-style ticker-tape that's been spouting terrorism trivia at the bottom of the screen, they reported a man who looked "Arabic" was led from an Amtrak train in handcuffs. They noted they did not know the cause for the arrest, and that it might not have anything to do with the terrorist attacks.
So why report it? And what exactly does it mean to "look Arabic?"
[Personal note to the CNN ticker-tape editor guy: People don't look Arabic. They look Arab. Arabic is a language, not an ethnicity. And you sound like a redneck.]
Forgive me. I am letting my own prejudices show now.
This is not one of my usual attempts at an endearingly whiny journal entry. The night before the attack, on my way to Finland, I began rambling about the horrors of my looming seasickness, but seasickness is too trivial to write about now. I've been in a haze since Tuesday afternoon -- aware something very bad has happened. But to see the United States attacked from so far away, nothing feels real right now.
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