Some places you travel through are like a pool you dive into, swim across, and then exit. You drip for a minute or two and then move on, dry again, as the water behind you smoothes back into an even sheen. Other places give you memories that come at the mention of their name, like an obedient dog returning at your call, carrying with him a memory like a stick in his mouth. There is the name of the place – “Good dog!” – and there is the stick of memory deposited at your feet. The name of the dog the past few weeks has been Denmark, and the sticks he has brought us have been many. And will continue to bring us since once you name the dog and toss the stick, it will come back to you.
The stick that lands at my feet now, when I think the name “Denmark,” is water. And swans. Ribe, the oldest city in Denmark and indeed, in Scandinavia, has a lovely park with ponds and wetlands that are dotted with swans. The swan babies – swanlings? – are a frumpy gray until their white plumage comes in. No wonder the Danish author Hans Christian Anderson wrote his allegorical fairy tale, “The Ugly Duckling.” He was surrounded by the allegories, swimming around the lakes and canals of his home town, Copenhagen.
Denmark is a land bordered by water: by two seas, actually, the North and the Baltic. From Hamlet’s castle in Elsinore you look across a narrow stretch of the Baltic Sea to Sweden. To the south Denmark stares at Germany. Trains criss-cross the seas’ many inlets and bays, tying together the islands of Denmark like a steel lace threading through the many hooks and eyes of the country.
The water is also rain, which has fallen in a Novemberish sluice for much of our time here. Consequently, another image that comes to mind is green: fields of corn, fir trees, farmer’s fields. There is no sprawl. None. A town begins and ends in a tidy grouping of houses, and then the farm fields and forests take up again where they left off. No billboards, rarely a piece of roadside trash. The only non-green image is politically green, if not biologically so: energy-generating windmills. They are everywhere: in fields, beside roads, on the waterfront in Copenhagen, by the sea, even in the sea. Usually in groups of 3 or 4, the big three-bladed white fans rotate in the wind. Denmark gets about one-fifth of its energy from the wind, which lights lamps and illuminates homes across the country. Mounted on huge white posts, the windmill blades rotate about 10 stories above ground. The rotating fan blades emit a loud, low hum, like a giant humming an ancient tune beneath his breath. The windmills harvest air, yielding crops of luminescence. They create man’s oldest talisman: the power of light against the darkness. They light the flickering fire within our caves, holding off the long dark night.
Another stick drops at my feet, retrieved by the good dog Denmark. It is an image of fields of wheat, and other grains I do not recognize. In the midst of the fields are strange crushed circles as if a herd of buffalo had rested there. There are no tractor tracks out to them, no cause-and-effect linkages I can figure out. Just random flattened spaces in the otherwise tall fields. I could ask one of my fellow Danish train travelers, and they would undoubtedly understand my English and if I spoke in German, probably it, as well. But another image of Denmark are the Danes themselves, who I found to be either intensely friendly or coldly standoffish. On one end of the spectrum was the bike shop owner in Copenhagen who gave us three bikes to use for a week for free, and at the other end, the woman in line behind me in the drug store who screamed at me because I couldn’t understand what the clerk was saying. When I whipped around to the yelling woman and said, through gritted teeth, that I was just asking a question, she immediately changed gears and was conciliatory and smiling. Variations of this happened again and again. Human nature, I guess: some people are nice, some are not, not much of a lightening bolt insight there. But what I observed was that nastiness was infrequent and when it occurred, short-lived, and dourness yielded to smiles fairly often. I read somewhere that Danes typically like to avoid conflict, and maybe that’s part of it. Perhaps it’s a result of their Viking heritage in which armed, marauding conflict was the name of the game. Interestingly, the Viking plunder-and-pillage past is downplayed in Danish museums, including the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and the Viking Ship Museum in Rothskilde. The Viking as explorer, as expert mariner – you bet. The Viking that terrorized villages and laid waste to them and their inhabitants – not so much. Not surprising, really, when you consider how many museums in the American West display the guns and chaps and saddles of the U.S. cavalry with reverential awe, but discuss its reign of genocidal terror against Native Americans? Not so much.
Vikings and gunslingers aside, a stick that drops before Max when he thinks of Denmark is Legoland. We spent the day there, a two-week-late birthday present for Max. The Danish Legoland is the Mecca to which all true lego-philes must make a pilgrimage at least once in their lego-playing lives. It is amazing. Monuments from around the world, along with entire villages and cities, have been re-created in miniature with millions of lego blocks. This sounds like the kind of weird road-side attraction you expect to find in some guy’s garage off Route 1 in Podunk, America. But the Denmark Legoland is something to see. Here is Copenhagen constructed from a bazillion lego bricks, complete with canals and a wee version of the canal tourboat that we actually rode on. Here’s Ribe, with a sidewalk restaurant equipped with tables and chairs and diners – just as it was when we sat at this same restaurant in the actual town of Ribe. Here are windmills, powering a Danish town – with real solar panels installed on the roofs of lego houses, generating part of the energy that’s used to make the little boats sail down the canals and the miniature lego trains roll down the tracks.
Along with the miniature worlds created from lego blocks, Legoland has, of course, rides. A few of the baby ones I rode, but Max and Jeff braved the scariest, careening down roller coasters, blasting on log canoes through flumes of water, rotating crazily on circular rafts – all in the pouring rain. About half-way through our day in Legoland it began to rain in earnest, moving from a drizzle into a cold, drenching downpour. We were undeterred. We’d looked forward to Legoland for a loooonnnggg time and by God, we were gonna enjoy it! So Jeff bought a bright yellow plastic slicker decorated with lego figures and Max huddled into his raincoat and I used Jeff’s raincoat (mine having been stolen off the bike in Copenhagen) and we did Legoland. Until at nightfall, when we staggered off to a nearby hotel at which 200 Finish families had just arrived, revved up and excited for their day at Legoland the next day. Let me tell you, the hotel’s breakfast room the following morning was something to behold with 200 Finish families tanking up on calories before their day out at Legoland. Platters of sliced ham, troughs filled with hearty rolls, whole loaves of bread, bins of yogurt, and as the crème de la crème, a bowl filled with chunks of cod: to paraphrase Shakespeare, this is the stuff of which a Finn’s breakfast dreams are made of.
So our Danish dog retrieves many memory sticks for us. For Jeff, Denmark brings to mind the blocks of four- and five-story high apartment buildings in Copenhagen, street after street of them. And the bicyclists, moving in streams down the Copenhagen bike paths, each one of them representing a car not driven that day to work or the grocery store.
And for me, a favorite memory stick of Denmark falls at my feet. The image of a little blonde girl, not much more than a toddler, gripping none other than a big Danish pastry, the coil of golden baked dough topped with white icing, the center filled with a custard dollop. The little Danish girl clutches the big Danish pastry and peers at it lovingly. Then, she plants her entire face in the middle of it, licks a big swathe of icing off the top, and raises her frosting-laced face with a satisfied grin as if to say, “That’s how you eat a Danish if you’re Danish!”
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