Nowhere to run to

And so it happened again, a major earthquake that generated a devastating tsunami—this time off the coast of northeast Japan. The horrific images of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami that rolled in over Thailand and Indonesia are still vivid in my memory. This quake in Japan was a major one—a magnitude of 8.9 on the Richter scale is being reported, and that is scary enough. Just as disturbing are the video footages of the tsunami sweeping across coastal farmland carrying boats, cars and burning houses in its wake. Other videos show submerged cars and boats being pushed toward a highway overpass, and it is both terrifying and amazing to see how boat masts are just crushed like plastic toys. I watch such scenes and cannot help but think of the Mayan prophecy that says that the world will end in 2012 (more precisely, the Mayan calendar ends on the Gregorian calendar date of December 21, 2012 which has led to intense speculation about what this means for the planet). And if you have seen the film 2012 (not very good except for the special effects for earthquake scenes and subsequent destruction) you will understand that there really is nowhere to run when these types of things happen, because there is usually very little warning. I am glad that we do not live in a geographical area that is prone to earthquakes. My thoughts go to the Japanese people—I hope and pray that there will not be a huge loss of life as there was in Indonesia.

The power and fury of nature and of water never cease to amaze me. I just wrote about the Akerselva river and how its fish and insect life died in the space of one night due to a chemical spill. But the river itself keeps running down to the sea and hopefully always will. Back in November 2000, unusually large amounts of rainfall in Oslo resulted in extremely high water levels in the Akerselva that threatened to flood surrounding areas. We live about a five-minutes’ walk from the river, at a point where there are small waterfalls. When we opened our apartment windows facing toward the river, we could hear the river as it roared past. We joined many others who stood watching from a safe distance as this ordinarily peaceful river roared mightily past us. The spray from these falls was so intense as to take your breath away. I have never seen so many people out late in the evening, watching the river, photographing and filming its wildness. We are drawn to that which scares us. We watch even though we don’t want to. Even in the current video footage from Japan, there are motorists on the highway overpass who got out of their cars to see what was going on, in spite of the huge danger. I would like to think that I would have floored my car and sped off. But who knows, perhaps it was smartest to stay on the overpass bridge. It seemed to be made of solid cement and to be able to withstand the onslaught of the ocean water, and it was not submerged, at least not at the time point that the video footage was shot. I hope so anyway. The tanker truck that stopped on the bridge remained there. Perhaps the driver understood that there was nowhere to go. That must be the scariest thought of all—that there is nowhere to go, nowhere to run to. The digital age, with the ability to send live footage in the space of a few seconds via iPhones and cell phones generally has brought with it the possibility of literally stepping into another person’s shoes, for better or for worse. We know how they must feel. We see how horrific it is and know what they face. Nowhere to run to—a sobering thought that pulls us out of ourselves for some minutes and makes us see what is happening elsewhere. We are forced to face our mortality. And it is not war but nature that does this to us. 

The night the Akerselva River died

“Nesten alt liv er borte i Akerselva”—this was the front page headline in this morning’s edition of the Aftenposten newspaper. It translates as follows: ‘nearly all life is gone in the Akerselva river’. Apparently one of the pipes in the Oslo water purification plant up in Maridalsvannet developed a crack Tuesday evening of last week that was not discovered until early Wednesday morning. By that time, about 12 hours later, 6000 liters of highly-concentrated chlorine had leaked out into the river and taken the lives of most of the fish, crayfish, and river insects along the river’s approximately six-mile length. Scientists who have evaluated the river during the past week have found no signs of life. River life was annihilated in the space of one night. These are the kinds of headlines that make me want to scream and cry. Scream in frustration and cry from heartbreak. I simply cannot understand how such accidents can happen in 2011, and yet they do. There will be a police investigation and blame will be placed somewhere, but it will not bring back the fish and the other life that died without ever knowing what hit them. I only hope that the many mallard ducks that live along the river, even in the wintertime, are unaffected. I really don’t think I could take knowing that their numbers were also decimated. I feel so sorry for the fish and the other life that died before they had a chance to live out their short lives on this earth, and also for the ducks, because all these wonderful creatures are completely at the mercy of humans. I feel sorry for us too, the humans who love this river, who walk along it in all seasons, marveling at the ducks who tackle the ice and snow and cold, hardy birds that show us that it is possible to survive these winters. I never tire of watching the ducks and the bird life in general along the river. But it’s hard to imagine that the ducks or any of the other birds will stay without food in the river. I dread the thought of what the river will look and sound like in the summertime—empty, lifeless, dead, silent.

What happened to the Akerselva river last week is a tragedy. Our lives go on, but a beautiful living river died in the space of one night. Scientists say that it will take two to three years before the river comes alive again. But right now, all I can focus on is the loss--the immense loss of life. We are not doing our jobs as caretakers of this earth when we let animals and birds die due to chemical spills, oil spills and pollution. They cannot talk, cannot tell us what they need, and cannot tell us that they are sick or dying. So we need to pay attention to them. We need to interpret for them; we need to ‘see’ them, to see how valuable their lives are. We need to ‘see’ so many things. We have to start living as though our lives depended upon the happiness of the lives we have been charged with protecting. Because the reality is that our happiness does depend on this. Without animals, birds, fish and plants, we are nothing. They may provide food for us, but mostly they provide beauty and another way of looking at the world, a better way. They remind us that all life is precious and should be respected. They are a constant reminder that all life is sacred.  


(Some links to Norwegian news articles about this environmental tragedy:
http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/03/08/nyheter/innenriks/miljo/akerselva/forurensing/15728369/
http://mobil.aftenposten.no/article.htm?articleId=4048980
http://mobil.aftenposten.no/a.mob?i=4050464&p=aftenposten)

http://www.newsinenglish.no/2011/03/09/catastrophe-hits-historic-river/

A poem about death by Rainer Maria Rilke

On Hearing Of A Death 

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death
does not deal with us. We have no reason
to show death admiration, love or hate;
his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us


a false impression. The world's stage is still
filled with roles which we play. While we worry
that our performances may not please,
death also performs, although to no applause.


But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you disappeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.


We keep on playing, still anxious, our difficult roles
declaiming, accompanied by matching gestures
as required. But your presence so suddenly
removed from our midst and from our play, at times


overcomes us like a sense of that other
reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed
and play our actual lives instead of the performance,
forgetting altogether the applause.

This is for Liza Kravik, rest in peace.

Saying goodbye to a colleague and friend

A colleague and friend passed away early this morning after a seven-year battle with breast cancer. Her death was peaceful. We visited her yesterday afternoon, having had some idea of what might happen this week. We got a chance to say goodbye since she recognized us even though she could not talk. Her life the past five years has been a roller coaster ride that is almost impossible to describe. We who witnessed her fight know how much she went through, how many rounds of chemo she endured, the different drugs that wore her down, made her lose her hair, affected the nerve endings in her hands and feet, changed the taste of food, and so many other things. Cancer is a horrible illness and she was the first to admit that. She bemoaned how it altered her physically. Mentally was another story. It seemed to motivate her in a way that I found surprising. She was a fighter to the end. She focused on living and not on dying; she kept on working as much as she was able to, almost right up until the end. It kept her going and she was honest about that; she did not have much immediate family around so the social environment at work was also uplifting. She and I often commented on the irony of her situation—she had metastatic cancer that showed tendencies toward becoming resistant to the different drugs she was taking, and she was working on projects at work that had to do with how cancer becomes resistant to chemotherapy. She was very interested in all the new studies and data showing that this or that drug might help improve prognosis. She was an active participant in her treatment programs and was not afraid to discuss her illness or to challenge her doctors with new knowledge that she had found on the internet. She was stubborn and it was that trait that kept her going and instructed those around her about how she wanted to be treated. Except for one or two occasions when she told me that her cancer had again spread and we shared a good cry together, she did not want pity nor did she want anyone to feel sorry for her.  

I knew her for many years, since I moved to Norway. She was an American who married a Norwegian and moved to Norway in the 1970s. Both of her children were fluent in Norwegian and English from a very early age. She saw to that. She did not travel each year back to the USA as I have done since I moved to Norway. It did not seem as important to her as it is to me to do that. But she had weekly contact with her father (a widower) via email, and as he got older, daily contact. When he developed lung cancer, she went to stay with him as his nurse and companion for a few months until his death. She told me that her mother had also had cancer and had died shortly after she moved to Norway. She was proud of the fact that her mother had briefly been a movie star in Hollywood; she had starred in a movie together with Ronald Reagan, but her career was a brief one and when she married she left acting.

She loved to read and her interests were in historical biographies and modern fiction. She and I enjoyed reading the Harry Potter series together and going to the Harry Potter movies with work colleagues. She wasn’t as avid a moviegoer as I am but she would occasionally join me for trips to the movies. Her family and my family managed a trip to the local concert stadium to see Riverdance in 1999. She loved Riverdance. We also shared a Thanksgiving together at another American friend’s house and that was an enjoyable time. When my stepdaughter was young, she and I and my friend and her daughter went strawberry picking together. That was a lot of fun; both girls ate more strawberries than they picked. It is one of my most vibrant memories of being together with her. Her husband’s job took them to Africa when her children were small, and that was an experience she never forgot. She loved being in Africa and we always used to wonder why she didn’t join her husband there in later years when he began to work there more often and was away for months at a time. But she didn’t. She would visit him there during vacation and talk about moving there if she decided to quit working. But she never did.

My memories of her are of a person who was kind, hard-working, patient, selfless, nurturing and supportive. She rarely complained. She made you see the other side of impossible situations even though you didn’t want to. She did not have many goals or ambitions for herself, and I for one wish she had. She expressed a desire once to pursue a Master’s degree but it never became more than that even though there were several opportunities that came her way. She was smart and interested in science and could have managed it without problems. She worked on my research projects for the past nine years, and was a great support to me. Her work was consistent, reproducible and high-quality. She also supported her children in all ways, listened to them, gave advice, helped them financially, and was always available for them. I was glad to see that they were there for her when she needed them, especially the past few months. Her daughter is pregnant and will give birth next June; it is very sad that she did not live to see the birth of her first grandchild. She would have enjoyed being a grandmother. We watched how she was with the son of another friend and work colleague. She really enjoyed him and being around him.

I realized yesterday after having visited her for the last time in the hospital, that it was good that we had said all we needed to say to each other before yesterday. As colleagues, I had already thanked her for her help and support at work so many times, and she had thanked me for giving her the chance to do some of her own research on projects that she was interested in. As friends, we spent countless hours over lunch talking about life and relationships and women’s rights and injustice in the world. I was probably pretty confrontational at times when it came to women’s rights. She was less so when I first met her but became more so during the past few years. I think she understood that it was important that her daughter have the same opportunities as a man would have in the work world. I am nine years younger than she was and I think she thought sometimes that I still had a lot to learn. She was probably right. There were things we did not talk about, and during the past few years there were more things that remained unspoken. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was her illness that crystallized the meaning of life to her, or perhaps we both realized that we could complain about the state of the world but we still had to live in it. In any case, we knew how to agree to disagree when we did not share the same views about the world or specific situations. I am glad that her passage out of this life was peaceful. She deserved that after her long battle. I will miss her. We will miss her.