It's not the end of the world

Way back in the fall I overlapped with one of my fellow rovers in the southern part of the country.  In addition to the opportunity to observe her teach, which was a fabulous learning experience for me, we also had a chance to explore the area a bit together.  A teacher had suggested that we go to Verdens Ende – the End of the World.  We set off after classes had concluded in the late afternoon and arrived almost at dusk to an unearthly landscape.   The area is well named indeed.

    

I had plenty of time to write a blog entry about the end of the world, but somehow the place never seemed to fit into the themes and concerns that I was exploring.  The area was certainly naturally beautiful.  The experience of getting directions from one Norwegian after another as Sarah cheerfully asked: “We’re trying to get to the end of the world?” seemed to be perfect fodder for a traveler’s journal, but the experience sat, waiting, I think, for more perspective.

My last school visit in December was to Bardufoss, my northernmost visit scheduled to date.  Since it looked like our best chance to see the Northern Lights, my family came with me.  I had not paid much attention to the calendar of Oslo events when I was scheduling, but as the date neared, I realized that the visit overlapped with the Nobel Prize ceremony.  Other Fulbrighters were attending the ceremony, and, although I wasn’t one of the lucky ones with a ticket, I had wanted to participate in a candlelit vigil outside the Peace Center celebrating the recipients of the prize.  But…the Northern Lights!  With my family!  At the top of the world!  It seemed like the supreme environmental history dilemma – the choice between the pinnacle of human culture – a scheduled, certain celebration of the best of human ingenuity and compassion -- and the pinnacle of nature – the sublime touch of the universe on the skin of the Earth’s atmosphere.    

    So we headed out each night we were in Bardufoss, fleeing the surprisingly large amount of urban light to maybe, maybe see the Northern Lights.  Our first night was clear: good conditions!  We had been reading the Golden Compass as a family, and I imagined our dæmons running alongside the car, wolves or foxes maybe, tossing the snow with delight.  My husband and I stretched and stretched our son’s bedtime, peering into the darkness.  We were reminded of the skies over Zuni Pueblo and of adventures from long before our son was born.  We were on top of the world!  

But we did not see the Northern Lights.  The next night was cloudy.  The night after we returned too late for the candlelit vigil.  “Well,” I consoled myself, “It’s not the end of the world.”

Almost a month later, on the last day of the calendar year, we were outside Rome at the site of Ostia Antica, an ancient Roman sea port.  But the area is seaside no longer.  Centuries of silting have moved the coast and, lucky for us, preserved the town.  I do not think that it is only historians who marvel at places so old and so well preserved.  The streets were narrow; the painting of a café menu still covered a wall; the mosaics advertising port town necessities and amenities were still clear.  

As an environmental historian, I often reflect on humans’ tiny position in the wider sweep of the universe and its past.  But as a historian of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I rarely reflect on the wider sweep of human history and the simultaneous proximity and distance of those parts of human culture that I consider so very modern, like cities.  Visiting, as we did, on New Year’s Eve, made the experience all the more powerful.  When did the residents of Ostia realize that their town was on the decline?  A particularly decadent evening?  A notable sacking by pirates?  Did people only slow drift away or did if feel like the end of the world?

With only three months before our departure from Norway, every moment begins to have more meaning.  “This might be my last time on this train…on this bus…looking at this view….” More than once I have wondered on this adventure, “How much better can life be? Can happiness have a limit?”  Back when Sarah and I hopped from one rock to another at Verdens Ende, I thought I was sure to come back.   “Maybe in the summer,” I mused, “with my family.”  Now the time goes so fast.  There is so much that we will never see.  But it’s not the end of the world.