The Side of The Mountain
The night wind is blowing cold from the front of the ferry. We’re traveling at such speed I need to hold the steel bar with one hand. The other is keeping my hat from falling off in the black sea below us. Sky and sea are of the same black you can’t pick out the horizon.
Then I begin to see them. Small rocky islands coming out of the darkness. Hundreds. Then a lighthouse, then another in the distance:
I’m in Norway.
I have left Italy 2 days ago. 7 trains and one ferry later I’ve reached my destination: my Erasmus semester at the University of Agder, South of Norway.
In every journey there’s the moment, when you say to yourself I’ve arrived. Sometimes it may even take a few days after your arrival to deeply understand where you are. Sometimes you need to see your blue dot on Google Maps being somewhere away from home to let that sink in.
This is my I’ve arrived moment now, on the Norway-bound ferry from Hirtshals, Denmark. Now the land is all behind my shoulders.
And that means something since I’ve been right on the land for 2 days. I’ve touched every single centimeter that separated my home in Italy from this foggy port on the North Sea.
I took a train to Munich. There I saw the Christmast lights turn up one by one as the sun went down. In the night of the train station, a young girl was doing birdwatching with a pair of binoculars trying to spot the pidgeons on the steel roof. I kept thinking about that as I fell asleep on the night train to Hamburg.
I woke up in foggy Hamburg at 6am, starving. I had a few minutes to take my train for Copenhagen so I bought 2 cream filled krapfen and was still trying to finish my breakfast when I crossed the border with Denmark.
Denmark was all flat and grey all the way to the horizon. Dozens of wind turbines stood up from the thick fog every now and then.
Padborg. Fredericia. Aalborg. Here I met a young man with a bike, a surfboard, ski equipment and three backpacks. He’d been carrying everything on his own from his hometown in the mountains of Switzerland. I taught him an italian card game as he told the story of the time he’d been sailboat hitchiking from France to Brasil. Sailboat hitchiking. Is that even a thing?
Hjorring. Hirtshals. The fog was so thick I couldn’t spot the sea even though Hirtshals is nothing but a port. When the siren blew I checked in and walked up to the ship’s deck and waited for the I’m arrived moment.
The islands, the lighthouse. Norway.
…
but wasn’t it easier to take a plane?
…
That’s what they asked me.
Yes. Taking a plane would have saved me 2 full days of traveling. Away with the stress of missing a connection, away with the hassle of carrying a semester’s luggage all across Europe.
The reasons for traveling by train go well beyond rationality. Or at least the concept of rationality we associate with the maximum results with minimum effort framework. Planes obey that law, trains don’t. You know, it’s that the train gives you the sense of journey.
Flying allows you to wake up in the morning and find yourself having lunch at your destination. Marvellous. But where’s the journey?
It’s like climbing a mountain only to reach the top. You could do that with a cable car. Much easier. Climbing is not about going from A to B, more about what happens in between. It’s about the side of the mountain. That’s where you sweat and breathe and feel alive. That’s where trees grow. Not the top.
I took a train because I wanted to transform this need for going from A to B into a journey. That of course came with a cost: time, energy, planning, risk of cancellations (which happened indeed). Sometimes you can’t pay this cost, and that’s fine. Sometimes you really just need to go from A to B.
This time I could afford it. And I made the journey. Outside the window, I saw the landscape evolving. From the snow-capped Alps of Austria to the green plains of Germany, from the watery fields north of Hamburg to the sweet coasts of Denmark.
I heard the languages switch at every border-crossing. I noticed the people’s faces changing as I moved up North. I kept an eye on 235* travelers all traveling for different reasons I tried to interpret by observing their luggages and their shoes — you can tell a lot about someone from their shoes, where they’ve been, where they’re going.
*(I took 1 ferry with 25 people in my compartment, took 7 trains, on a train vagon there’s roughly 40 seats, on average 30 of them were occupied so that’s 7 x 30 = ~210 + 25 = ~235 people I had the chance to travel with and observe during the long hours of the journey).
These are all things that happen in between A and B. These are the journey.
I’ve noticed that the journey is what you get to experience when you try to be more sustainable.
I believe there’s a correlation between acting sustainably and a deeper, more journey-like experience of things.
Trains are obviously more sustainable than flying. According to the calculator on myclimate.org I saved ~300kg of CO2. So is walking instead of driving, or buying fruits and vegetables from a local producer.
If you think about it, you see that every action we do to reduce our carbon footprint also allows us to experience life more fully. Local producers not only save CO2, they also create a sense of community. Walking improves your mood. Taking the train adds all that journey feeling to the mere moving from A to B.
I didn’t travel by train to Norway only to be more sustainable, nor only to feel more adventurous and connected. I did it for both reasons, because thank God they seem to go together.
Yes, I mean that living sustainably is not only about the environment. It’s about taking it slow, allowing yourself to more deeply connect with the things and the people around you, and save you a breakdown from the hurry we all seem to need to have.
Now on this ferry I’m glad to breathe the fresh air of the North Sea. I’ve come to understand that what I do for the planet benefits me as well. Because we’re connected. The planet and I. And you.
