I lost my driver’s license over a year ago. I lose stuff all the time. Credit cards, passports, car keys, cash, books, bags, laptops. It doesn’t worry me, they usually turn up eventually. The last time I was in New York, I left my backpack in a taxi. I had taken three of my kids with me, so I was a little distracted when we got out. All of our passports were in the backpack, as well as my laptop, where everything I have written in the last 20 years is stored. I never talk to taxi drivers, but this one had been so friendly that I ended up questioning him a little. At a red light he even took out a photograph of his children, which he showed me. When we got back to the hotel that afternoon, I asked the receptionist what we could do. He just shook his head and said I could forget about seeing my backpack again. This is New York, he said. But the driver was from Nepal, I objected. And he had two kids. I’m sorry, the receptionist said, I don’t think that will help much. But of course you can report it missing. At that point the doorman came over, he had overheard our conversation and said he knew some Nepalis, should he call them for me? So he did, and I met them outside the hotel a while later. Based on my description, they identified the driver, and the next morning the backpack was waiting for me at the reception desk.
These things happen often; in my experience they always turn out fine. There is a saying in Norway that he who loses money shall receive money, and I think that’s true, because when you lose things, it means you’re not on your guard, you’re not trying to control everything, you’re not being so anal all the time — and if you aren’t, but allow yourself to be open to the world instead, then anything at all might come to you.
I know that’s true, but at the same time I also know that the reason I say it is to turn all my faults and weaknesses into strengths. It’s good that I’m afraid to speak on the phone with anyone except my closest friends. It’s good that I always put off paying bills. It’s good that I never cash the checks I receive. That means I’m a writer, I think I’m not so focused on worldly matters, which in turn means that some day I just might write a masterpiece.
So when my driver’s license stayed gone, the loss went into the same mental category; it became part of the stuff a writer is made of. I could drive without it anyway. Where I live now in Sweden, there are seldom any police checkpoints.
When The New York Times Magazine contacted me in December to ask whether I would travel across the United States and write about my trip for them, at first I didn’t think of my missing license. The editor proposed that I travel to Newfoundland and visit the place where the Vikings had settled, then rent a car and drive south, into the U.S. and westward to Minnesota, where a large majority of Norwegian-American immigrants had settled, and then write about it. “A tongue-in-cheek Tocqueville,” as he put it. He also suggested that I should see the disputed Kensington Runestone while I was in Minnesota. It was on display in a little town called Alexandria, near where a farmer had claimed to discover it in 1898, and it could be proof — if authentic — that the Vikings had not only settled Newfoundland but made it all the way to the center of the continent. It probably was a hoax, he said, but seeing it would be a nice way to round out the story.
I accepted the offer at once. I had just read and written about the Icelandic sagas, and the chance to see the actual place where two of them were partly set, in the area they called Vinland, was impossible to turn down.
A few weeks later, I was on a plane flying from London to Toronto. I was running a temperature, and after battling my way through all the lines and security checks at Heathrow that morning with an aching body, I wished I could keep flying. I just wanted to sit and watch movies and doze, far from everything. Now and then I would pause the movie and switch to the map to see where we were. We flew over Iceland, then toward Greenland and then over the North American continent. It was more or less the same route the Vikings sailed a thousand years ago.
When we learned about Viking exploration in school, I never imagined that it had actually happened; not even when we went to see the authentic Viking ships in the museum in Oslo in ninth grade. It was as if the ships, with their solid timber, their carved dragonheads and their rows of oarlocks, belonged to the material world, while everything I had read about the Vikings, about what they did, belonged to the immaterial world of books and fantasy. In that world, Iceland was “Iceland,” Greenland was “Greenland,” and the discovery of America was a fairy tale. That the explorer Helge Ingstad in 1960 had discovered precisely where the Vikings built their houses, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, in a small place now called L’Anse aux Meadows, and that his wife, Anne Stine Ingstad, had led the excavations there, removing all doubt that the fairy tale was true — all this for me only added a new layer of legend. I had read a great deal about L’Anse aux Meadows, but not once had it struck me that you could actually go there.
Now I was on my way.
After spending the night in St. John’s, Newfoundland, I boarded the small plane for St. Anthony at dawn. The landscape beneath us was flat and barren and consisted mainly of scoured rock, with the occasional patch of stunted spruce. Small ice-covered lakes lay scattered here and there, many of them free of snow, probably because the winds coming off the ocean swept them bare. But not a house, not a boat, no sign of life anywhere.
Normally, I would have been excited. I love desolate landscapes. But now I was somehow distracted.
Christmas had been so stressful that I hadn’t had the energy to apply for a new license. Instead, I emailed the Swedish Embassy in Washington a few days before New Year’s Eve to ask if they could fix it for me. They could not. So I had figured on calling the Swedish Transport Agency when I arrived at the airport in Copenhagen, which would be the first day offices were open, and on them faxing the documentation to the embassy, which would then email me. That’s what I had done, and they had promised to send it two days ago.
But the liberating email, which would prove that I was in fact in possession of a driver’s license, still hadn’t arrived. What would I do if it didn’t?
I had 10 days to get from the Viking settlements to Minnesota, where my flight home would depart.
Without my license, the whole plan would be shot.
How could I have been so stupid that I hadn’t taken care of it before I left? How hard could that be?
I would just have to wait until Monday, I thought, looking down on the windswept landscape. It was no disaster, I would lose just one day, and still be able to catch my flight home from Minnesota.
When, after a 30-mile bus ride from the airport through endless rows of spruce, I arrived at my hotel in St. Anthony, I asked the woman at the reception desk if there was a taxi that could take me to L’Anse aux Meadows later that day.
“But it’s closed,” she said. “You want to go there now?”
I nodded. She grabbed the phone while she looked me over. She was in her 60s, wore glasses, had curly, reddish-gray hair and looked rather stern. “I doubt whether they can drive you all the way out.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
She was still holding the phone.
“And it’ll cost you. Did you want it to wait for you there?”
I nodded. At last she made the call. It didn’t seem to be a problem. They could do it for $200.
My room was big, and it had a kitchenette where you could do your own cooking. The shower enclosure was something I hadn’t seen before, the wall and the tub had been cast in one piece, and for a moment I stood there wondering how they had gotten it into the room; I couldn’t see any sign of a joint, but how could that be?
The phone rang, and I hurried out to get it.
“Hallo?” I said.
“Come on out to the reception,” the woman said.
It turned out that her husband could take me to L’Anse aux Meadows. He had a four-wheel drive car that could get us all the way there — if the site wasn’t closed, that is — and he wouldn’t charge me as much as a taxi driver, she said.
His name was Pierce, he was in his 60s and had a deeply lined face and kind eyes behind his glasses. He said that they were expecting a heavy snowfall the next day, and that this was probably the last chance to get out to the site for a long time. We walked to the car, the windshield sparkled in the light of the low winter sun.
“Nice car!” I said as I got in. He smiled and started the engine, then began driving up the gently sloping, barely snow-covered ground. To the left, on the other side of the main road that ran through the little town, lay a large, yellow-gray brick building, which I realized must be a hospital. The flag outside was at half-mast.
“Are you the owners of the hotel?” I asked.
Pierce shook his head and laughed. “Nope,” he said. I took that to mean that he was a kind of janitor or handyman there, but I wasn’t sure, because he spoke with a heavy accent that was difficult to understand.
A few minutes later we were out of town. Pierce talked the whole time, while I nodded and made noncommittal noises as I struggled to make sense out of the few words I could understand. He had lived in the area all his life, grew up in a nearby village and moved to St. Anthony a few years ago, he worked in the fisheries and in boatbuilding, possibly also at a car-repair shop, and he had had a pacemaker put in, that much I gathered.
–
The wind drove the falling snow into eddies as we drove through town. The snow formed strange patterns on the slippery roadway, got torn to shreds, hung like veils in the air. We drove beneath some skyscrapers, which were too spread out to give any sense of downtown, or maybe that impression was caused by all the empty lots, or the big office buildings, heavily tagged with graffiti and full of broken windows. It looked more like a periphery than a center, I thought. We kept driving down the empty, windswept main street, then turned right and entered a residential area. There wasn’t a person in sight or any lights.
“We’d better be careful around here,” Peter said. “There are a lot of carjackings in this area.”
He turned off to the side and stopped the car. A small flock of plastic flamingos stood on a lawn next to the road.
“Let me know if you see anyone coming,” he said and grabbed his camera.
“There’s someone right behind us,” I said.
He turned around and looked at the guy who had just come out of one of the houses and was now staring at us.
“Let’s go for a little drive,” Peter said, and pulled back onto the road again.
We drove around a few other ghostly blocks, came back, parked again by the flamingos. I had a smoke while Peter took pictures; when I got back in the car, I was shivering with cold. The cold was deep, somehow it lodged in the marrow and even after an hour in the warm car, I could still feel it, as if it was close by all the time and only needed a few seconds of ice-cold air to get activated, causing my muscles to contract, my teeth to chatter.
The guy was standing there again, a dark outline against the gray-black sky thick with heavy snowflakes.
“Shall we go?” I shouted.
Peter nodded and got in. He plotted in the address of the hotel while the car rolled slowly downhill.
“It’s right around here somewhere,” he said.
The hotel room was small, neat and beautiful, but ice-cold. I lay under the covers for a while without being able to get warm. The wind howled and whistled in the street outside, occasionally the walls creaked, snowflakes hurtled through the air in the glare of the streetlights. I took off my clothes and got in the shower, turned it to maximum heat and stood there, immobile under the stream of warm water, for 20 minutes. That helped. Then I brewed myself a cup of coffee, drank it and lay back down on the bed.
I’d seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I’d never seen anything like this. If what I had seen tonight — house after house after house abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster — if this was poverty, then it must be a new kind poverty, maybe in the same way that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a new kind of wealth. I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are replaceable and the products are identical. The identical cars are followed by identical gas stations, identical restaurants, identical motels and, as an extension of these, by identical TV screens, which hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment and identical dreams. Not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power had succeeded in creating such a unified, collective identity as the one Americans lived their lives within. When times got rough, a person could abandon one town in favor of another, and that new town would still represent the same thing.
Was that what home was here? Not the place, not the local, but the culture, the general?
When my mother went to school, her textbooks described Norway as one of the poorest countries in Europe. Her father’s brother Magnus immigrated to the U.S., like many others from that area and that time: Between 1825 and 1928, roughly 800,000 Norwegians came to America, nearly all of them to get away from poverty, cramped living conditions and unemployment. They adopted the new culture in different ways. Some gave their new towns Norwegian names, celebrated Norwegian feast days and maintained all of the Norwegian traditions. Others became Americans the moment they set foot on American soil. My grandfather’s older brother was one of the latter; he met a Norwegian girl on the boat, they fell in love and when they parted ways — she settled in Chicago and found work as a domestic servant for a wealthy family, while he picked up odd jobs farther north, in and around Grafton, N. D. — they wrote letters to each other in English. When they got back together, married and had children, they never spoke Norwegian to them, only English. Those kids were going to be Americans.
Magnus waited more than 40 years before he went back to the Old Country. That doesn’t mean he didn’t have feelings for his place of birth. In a letter he sent from Grafton to his family in Norway, in December 1928, he wrote:
This Saturday evening I went to the Cinematograph and saw the Norwegian motion picture “The Bridal Procession in Hardanger.” When I saw Bergen and Bygstad, Flatråker, etc., I felt such a powerful longing that I could not hold my tears back. There were many people crying at the Strand Theatre that night. . . . No one knows what Salbu and Åfjorden are like and what they are worth, until they are thousands of miles away. I have so many memories of home and the life of our village that I sometimes weep for joy when I think ahead to the day when we shall meet again.
I met Magnus only once, almost 60 years after he wrote that letter. He was visiting his brother, my grandfather, at my grandfather’s little farm back in Norway. They looked very much alike, both were talkative and merry, but at the same time, there was a gap between them. Magnus spoke with an American accent, and when I saw him sitting alone on the bench outside the house one evening, overlooking the fields, he looked like a stranger. It must have been Grafton he was longing for then.
Peter had done some research and found a bowling alley where they served food and also put on concerts. During dinner, we decided to leave Detroit the next morning and head for Minnesota. “We could drive up along the lake, that’s supposed to be a very scenic route,” Peter said. I was rather uplifted by the prospect. I was supposed to write about America for an American newspaper, and the last thing I wanted was to seem like an introverted European complaining about how awful everything was here. I wanted to see something magical, I wanted to see something beautiful; I wanted to write about being blown away by the power and freedom of this country.
I might even experience something representative this very evening. Three bands were playing, and what better place was there to experience American music than Detroit, the birthplace of Motown and home of Iggy Pop and the Stooges?
When the first band came on stage, I realized that it wasn’t going to happen. They played some kind of blues rock, with reference to the sound of early 1970s, Grateful Dead-ish, but in a high-school-graduation-party kind of way. The band knew how to play, but they knew how to play the way 14- and 15-year-olds know how to play.
Was this for real?
Weren’t we in Detroit?
After the show, we crossed the snowy street with our heads down and got into the car. As Peter pushed the ignition, I hoped he wasn’t as drunk as I was. On the other hand, it was just a couple of blocks over to the hotel. But apparently we weren’t going there; he continued down the road, looking for a liquor store. I stayed in the car and sat there smiling while he shopped.
We continued drinking in Peter’s room. He tore the phone loose and used it as a window stopper, so we could smoke without being fined, and handed me his book with photos of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which he had covered for a decade, and of the lives of the veterans back in the U.S. I leafed through it while I tried to come up with something to say to him. I ended up saying that he sought complexity, not the iconic, and that this gave his photos enormous distinction. The expression on his face didn’t change when I said it, so it was impossible to tell whether I had pleased or insulted him.
He put the book on the bed and opened a new beer.
“So what’s your position on the question of God?” he asked.
I got up, put out my cigarette and set the half-empty beer can on the coffee table.
“I think I’ll go to bed now,” I said. “It’s been a long day.”
The second half of “My Saga” will appear online on March 11, 2015.
Karl Ove Knausgaard is the author of the six-volume autobiographical novel “My Struggle.” The English translation of “My Struggle: Book Four” will be published in the United States in April. Translated by Ingvild Burkey from the Norwegian.
A version of this article appears in print on March 1, 2015, on page MM34 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: My Saga, Part 1. Today’s Paper|Subscribe
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