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Norway’s Fjords: Up Close and Magnificent

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There is something distinct about boarding a cruise ship. An airplane, after all, no matter how big, is essentially a long, metal tube that flies. You can dress it up for international flights, but when all is said and done, you are simply spending a few hours in the air in a seat, where you may be served half-way decent food (or not). You can talk to a few people around you, you can watch a movie on a small screen in front of you, but your options are limited.

My wife, Jean, and friend Carolyn Torma relax in the lounge on the MS Nordnorge.

Boarding a cruise ship is more like joining a small, floating city. Once aboard, you can wander the decks for fresh air, you can chat with hundreds of people, converse with crew members, and take in sights both near and far away. You can break out that camera you just bought. And you can visit coastal cities for a few minutes or a few hours, depending on the itinerary.

Welcome to my final blog post on our trip to Norway in July 2017. I have promised and teased, but I am delivering after three prior installments about our flight to Norway; our time in Oslo; and most recently, our train trip to Bergen and our visit to its intriguing and highly edfying art museums.

When the day visit of our gang of five to the center of Bergen ended, we gathered our bags at the Clarion Hotel Admiral and boarded a shuttle bus to the dock where we checked our bags with Hurtigruten, a wonderful cruise line dedicated to sustainable practices, watched an instructional video on cruise safety, and boarded the ship. Perhaps I am a bit romantic but crossing the gangplank into a ship stirs more ancient memories of human experience than flying ever will. Humans have been sailing for thousands of years, traversing seas and oceans, and the only serious difference is that the ships have grown larger and more mechanized and, these days, electronic as well. But you are still floating close to the water and the weather and nature.

You also know that you will be aboard this behemoth for several days. That makes accommodations important. In our case, in order to join the same cruise as our friends, my wife and I had to lose our inner cheapskate and splurge on a state room because the lower decks were sold out. Our friends were on Deck 3, but we were on Deck 6, in a room that had a nice television screen and a bed for two, plus a decent bathroom. Admittedly, things still seemed a little cramped, but how much time do you want to spend in your room? Especially as the ship moves north and the summer nights grow long above the Arctic Circle, the idea of sitting in a room seems almost absurd.

Wander the decks! There is a whole world of Norwegian fjords to see out there. There was a promenade on Deck 5, one level below us, and the stairs with their gold-colored railings seemed like a grand way to get there, far more inviting than the elevator. There was the entire lounge on Deck 7, with an outdoor viewing area at the front of the ship, where you could sit outside and monitor the ship’s progress through passages that offered stunning scenery on every side. More than once, I sat there in a deck chair with the movie function turned on for a new Sony camera I had bought in anticipation of this trip. At lower latitudes near the beginning of the trip, this was often great fun. Later, as temperatures grew cooler farther north, it sometimes became less comfortable—but no less impressive.

Inside, we soon also discovered an entire world of Scandinavian cuisine that was previously not part of our daily experience. It’s not that my wife and I have not tried a wide range of international food. We simply had not visited Norway, nor spent nearly a week investigating buffet options for breakfast and lunch in the remarkable dining room on Deck 4, which offered a range of Norwegian pastries, dark breads with savory cheeses, herring, salmon, ham and beef, and all manner of vegetable dishes and soups. Dinner was served at assigned tables and times but allowed us to get to know an interesting and intellectually curious family of educators from Seattle. The food was one of the bigger surprises for me because I had not previously learned to regard Norwegian cuisine highly. Never mind all the stories you may have heard about lutefisk. After this trip, I stand corrected. The best of Norwegian cuisine is a salivating safari for sophisticated palates.

View out the front window of the lounge.

Amidst it all, relaxing in the lounge with a view of the shore in the distance or nearby, I plowed through my tome. On a long vacation, I like to take a long book I have wanted to read but never found the spare time to immerse myself in. For this trip, I tackled Doris Kearns Goodwin’s magisterial Team of Rivals, a 750-page exploration of Abraham Lincoln’s political genius in managing a team of strong wills and egos through the shoals of the Civil War. It filled the hours when I wanted to take a break from sightseeing and just enter another world and time. I chose well.

Viewing the Fjords

It is difficult to do justice to the scenery in words alone, but the beauty of the blog is that I can insert photographs to enrich the story. I had a small, aging Fuji digital camera; my iPhone; and a newly acquired Sony digital with zoom lens enhancements and movie features, all of which I was still trying to master on the fly. It often offered more options than I intelligently knew how to manipulate or had time to learn, as breath-taking scenery was often just around the next bend in the fjord.

There is nothing subtle about the Norwegian coast, but there is much that is sublime. It is not hard to imagine the awe of nature and the gods that must have filled the hearts of Vikings sailing along the coast or returning from their overseas explorations. Islands dot the sea lanes; some are inhabited, and many are not, usually because the terrain does not offer much solace. Shoreline communities occupy modest niches of flat land below hills and towering cliffs.

No two fjords are ever the same. Each has its own unique topography, its own paths to sheltered ports, its own dramatic waterfalls crashing off mountainsides into the seas, its own snow-capped peaks above the humble human intrusions below. Norwegians at times are remarkable engineers, but there must still be a sense of our own puniness in the face of such lofty natural beauty. We could never replicate the work of millions of years of geological transformations of earth’s landscape. It is better to sit back, gaze in admiration, and appreciate it.

What is remarkable, nonetheless, is the mastery of coastal navigation, even if modern ships benefit from a range of electronic wizardry to avoid danger. In a part of the coast known as the Trollfjord in the Lofoten Islands, it is my recollection that we were told we were crossing a passage with only 450 meters between rocky outcrops hundreds of meters high. On a cruise ship housing nearly 500 passengers and crew members, that does not leave much room for error, but the passage, admittedly in calm seas, seemed effortless and very precise. Our ship approached the passage in the evening; I was captivated by the scenery for the entire time and filmed it for 12 minutes. I cannot recall anything I have seen that compares.

Passing through the Trollfjord.

Trondheim

Ports of call are a routine feature of cruises. In Norway, these are port cities along the coast, often away from the ocean itself within fjords, the long arms of the sea that often shelter such cities. On our second full day of the cruise, the MS Nordnorge docked in Trondheim for a 3 ½ hour visit. We disembarked and began a journey on foot to find Nidaros Cathedral, the oldest cathedral in Norway and the northernmost cathedral of its size in Europe. Trondheim was also at one time the capital; moving the capital south to Oslo, formerly known as Christiania, was a modern innovation. Nidaros Cathedral remains the scene of coronations for the nation’s constitutional monarchy.

The walk to Nidaros, which was under a half-hour, took us along the Nidelva River, lined by some colorful apartments on the far side, with some interesting urban architecture on our side as we moved into the heart of the city. The site of the cathedral became apparent as we drew near because the building is surrounded by impressive grounds and fencing. The soaring worship space was completed in 1300 but begun around 1070, with much of the construction occurring after 1190. Tours require tickets at a modest price, which visitors can obtain in the nearby gift shop, whose sales help support maintenance of this massive space. The cathedral sits above the grave of St. Olav, the nation’s patron saint, a tenth-century Viking king who converted his subjects—and himself—to Christianity after learning about the faith in England, which experienced numerous Norse raids in the Middle Ages. One must marvel at its height and size given the lack of modern tools, but a tour guide informed us that masons were in the habit of leaving their initials on the bricks that formed the foundation and walls. The building has both the sense of inner darkness typical of buildings lacking modern Illumination and a sense of spaciousness emanating from its massive ceilings and the size of its sanctuary. Originally, it was the seat of the archdiocese, but suffered a demotion to a huge parish church for Trondheim following Norway’s turn toward the Reformation, when Lutheranism became the state church.

Between its history and majestic architecture, my own judgment would be that, if one had time to visit only one thing in Trondheim, this would necessarily be the default choice. That said, we had a little time left after our tour. Jean and I, in touch with our friends by cell phone, wandered through a large, modern urban mall back toward the ship but stopped for a few minutes at a serendipitous discovery, a flowery pocket park inhabited by birds, where we simply imbibed the relaxing atmosphere in the middle of Norway’s third-largest city. Then we bought a couple of souvenirs at a shop atop the bridge we crossed as we made our way back to rejoin the cruise late in the afternoon. We still had a couple of hours to relax with our friends over drinks in the bar before dinner and another evening of scenery consumption.

Bodø

The next day, our long stop was at Bodø, a smaller city whose second syllable is pronounced somewhat like the “oo” sound in the English word “foot.” (Pronouncing that will give English speakers a vague sense of that distinctive sound of Scandinavian languages.) A slightly longer stay in a smaller city gave us ample opportunity to explore, but without the obvious choice of anything like Nidaros. One intriguing aspect of the day was passing beneath a tall bridge lined with spectators observing the passing of our ship beneath. Norway has plenty of bridges, no surprise, but this sort of welcome was a pleasant surprise.

In Bodø, one indicator of the changing cosmopolitan nature of Norwegian cities was the sign that greeted us not long after we became urban pedestrians again—Istanbul Kebab. Like other European nations, Norway has acquired its share of Middle Eastern immigrants, and restaurant options have diversified. No doubt, these newer options have also thrived as Norwegians seek a change of pace, just as Americans, Brits, and others have done. Still, even the shopping district near the shore affords an unhurried, uncrowded atmosphere that let us soak up the afternoon sun in peace and quiet.

Tromsø

Tromso Cathedral

Our fourth full day took us ever farther north with a four-hour stop at Tromsø. This is the last major city on the journey north, and not hard to wander. With my interest piqued by Nidaros, I sought out the Tromsø Cathedral, just a few blocks from the shore, only to find that it was closed and undergoing renovations—signs of which abounded with construction equipment parked just outside on the somewhat spacious Kirkeparken that surrounds the building itself. Reduced to simply looking at the building from the street, we instead joined our friends in a visit to the nearby Tromsø Gift and Souvenir shop, which sported a stuffed bear outside that was a magnet for tourist selfies. It was a great place to look at gifts that someone back home might want, as well as those souvenir mugs and hot pads that line one’s cupboards.

Once that novelty had worn off, however, we quickly discovered the Northern Norway Art Museum, which had a wonderful display of indigenous Sami clothing and handicrafts, with some explanation of the Sami culture that produced them. Here, I should note that one of the more moving lectures aboard ship, amid other daily offerings, was a presentation by a young Sami woman who was part of the Nordnorge crew. She shared stories of the discrimination suffered by Sami people at the hands of Norwegians, including herself in school and elsewhere. Things are looking up, and the king and queen offered an apology to the Sami on behalf of the nation, but racial and ethnic prejudice takes many forms and is not easily or quickly rooted out from any society.

The Sami number perhaps a modest 50,000 in modern Norway, a number larger than in any other Scandinavian nation or in Russia, where a small number also live. One of their traditional occupations has been herding reindeer, which are produced for their lean and nutritious meat, a result of consuming native grasses and herbs. The Sami, however, faced a serious public health crisis after the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power accident in what is now Ukraine, as the released radiation dispersed westward over northern Scandinavia and contaminated the ground and the reindeer who roamed it. Many Sami, including the speaker, suffered some degree of radiation poisoning, which in her case produced red blotches across her back and shoulders. Her story offered a dramatic example of the environmental jeopardy facing indigenous populations around the world. To call it sobering is to understate the case. She indicated that, over three decades, those radiation levels have receded significantly but were not always regarded as a matter of concern by the Norwegian government. The Sami relied on their reindeer and suffered with them. Not everything in Norway involves love and kisses, and history must be accounted for. I had to respect Hurtigruten for offering such a heart-felt, sobering presentation amid a cruise meant largely for entertainment. If people did not hear this story here, when might they ever hear it?

Jean’s birthday dinner, complete with reindeer steak entree and cloudberry dessert.

On the last night of our voyage, our gang of five enjoyed a complimentary upgrade to a private three-course meal on Jean’s birthday. One of the entrée options was reindeer steak, which Jean and I chose. It is a dark red, very lean meat, but very tasty and tender. I may never have it again, the supply in places like Chicago being almost nonexistent. But it was well worth finding out. I also recall that Jean tried a dessert involving cloudberries, a species unique to northern Norway, mostly grown above the Arctic Circle. Hurtigruten is very good at local sourcing of agricultural produce for passenger consumption. They have identified small, sustainable producers along their route from whom they can obtain these products during the numerous short stops at ports of call, a practice that also supports the many small, struggling farmers in rural Norway.

Honningsvag

Our last full day involved a stop at Honningsvag, a small city in the North Cape area above the Arctic Circle as the shoreline bends east along the Arctic Ocean toward the Russian border. Honningsvag is at the southeastern edge of Nordkapp, translated as North Cape in English, actually a rugged island off the northern coast of Norway. By now, I was getting used to the possibility of waking up at 3 a.m. and peeking out our cabin window to see sunlight diffused across the seascape. Summer above the Arctic Circle can be disconcerting in that respect. It upsets your normal biological rhythms.

We visited the North Cape Museum, a small but key attraction in the city that sits at the water’s edge near the Hurtigruten dock.

Honningsvag destroyed by German troops in the autumn of 1944. Photo taken in the museum exhibit.

There is one extremely sobering exhibit in the museum. To understand it, one must realize that all of Norway was occupied by the German army during World War II, after the country was betrayed by its own Vidkun Quisling, whose surname has become a synonym for “traitor.” Hundreds of thousands of German troops were pinned down in Norway because of fears of an Allied counterinvasion. As the war neared its end, Adolf Hitler also feared an invasion across the northern end of Scandinavia by the Red Army moving from Russia. Russia and Norway share the Arctic Ocean coast; Sweden and Finland reach only to the southern bounds of those two countries above the Article Circle. Hitler, to prevent such an incursion, ordered a scorched-earth policy for the German army in retreat.

Honningsvag in 2017.

Several hundred soldiers had been stationed in Honningsvag. Very late in the war, they were ordered to torch the city, which they did. More than 20,000 citizens were evacuated to the mainland before that happened. When the war was over, and the residents of Honningsvag wanted to return home, a small contingent was sent to evaluate the state of their city. The museum’s photographs document the heartbreak they saw. With one notable exception, which was Kirkegata, the main Lutheran church south of the bay where the museum is located, everything in the city had been burned to the ground. My guess is that the church survived not because the Nazis spared it, but because the flames simply did not leap across the surrounding cemetery to the building. That church became the temporary home for the initial volunteers who helped rebuild until, step by step, the people of Honningsvag were able, with support from the national government, to rebuild their city and provide new, modern homes for thousands of displaced persons. It is a stunning reminder of the high cost of war and hatred but also offered insights into the heroism of the persistent and courageous Norwegian resistance, to which several museums throughout the nation have been dedicated.

Going Home

The next morning, at 9 a.m., our ship docked in Kirkenes, a small town that abuts the Russian border to the east. It was the end of our cruise, punctuated with a short bus ride to the local airport for a flight later that day to Oslo. On that flight, we had the chance to converse with a retired Norwegian airline pilot and his wife, who told us about an occasion on which the Russian government, seeking to dispose of Syrian refugees, had put them all on bicycles and sent them across the border into Kirkenes to let the Norwegian government deal with them. With a hint of sarcasm, he noted that the bicycles had to be destroyed once the refugees were taken into custody because the Russian vehicles did not meet Norwegian bicycle safety standards. I will let the reader make of this curious story what you will. I have no reason to doubt its veracity, but if true it certainly smacks of cynicism on the part of Russian officials.

Our three friends caught an earlier flight back to Bergen, where they chose to spend two more days. Jean and I stayed overnight at the Radisson Blu Airport Hotel, awoke for an early breakfast the next morning, and walked back across the pathway for a flight to London’s Heathrow Airport. There, with only a 75-minute layover to dash through the long halls of a monstrous facility, we made our way to a United flight back to Chicago. Our lives were about to return to normal.

Jim Schwab

Words That Move America

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Chicago, a city that has spawned at least its fair share of writers and attracted many more, has spawned a national museum dedicated to people who propagate the written word. The American Writers Museum (AWM) opened May 16 at 180 N. Michigan Avenue, situated amid a dense ecosystem of museums, parks, and other cultural attractions that make living in Chicago such a stimulating experience. Let me just state the basic premise up front: If you live in Chicago, or you are visiting, and you care about or have any curiosity about literature, this is worth a visit. It is not a huge museum, at least not now, and you need not worry that it will take all day. You can spend all day, but you can get a great deal out of it in two or three hours if you wish.

Literature, in the context of AWM, does not only mean fiction or poetry. One point that was immediately obvious to me during a visit last week was that the museum takes a broad view of both “writers” and what constitutes “writing.” Communication comes in many forms, and the museum seeks to explore how those forms change in response to numerous changing conditions in American society. AWM President Carey Cranston reinforced that point with me during a brief walk-through when I arrived, before turning me loose to make my own assessments of the exhibits. Thus, in the various displays one can encounter Charles M. Schulz, the author of the “Peanuts” comic strip, which made points about life, love, and laughter just as surely as Jane Jacobs, discussing the status of urban planning in the 1960s in The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Jean Toomer in Cane, an intriguing mix of fiction techniques that shed life on African-American life in the early 20th century. Creativity is not bounded by genre. It helps define genre.

Hold that thought for a minute while I explore with you the big question that drove me to visit in the first place. It is obvious enough how some other museums dedicated to natural history (Field Museum, e.g.) or technology and science (Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, or the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.) make their subject visual and sometimes even tactile with displays of dinosaur skeletons or space capsules, accompanied by videos that help patrons relive the experience of exploring the moon. How does one take the words of poems, novels, memoirs, and other types of written expression and make them come alive in an institutional setting? After all, any library can create a display of the ten best novelists by simply stacking the books along a display counter to draw attention. As readers, we engage with these works by buying or borrowing the books and, well, reading them. So, what makes an American Writers Museum a vivid encounter with its subject matter?

One answer lies in the timeline that greets you just to the right of the front desk after you enter. Running from 1490 to the present, it is not, as Cranston noted to me, a display of the best writers America has ever seen, but instead provides an emblematic display that allows you to see the relationship of major themes in American history to the writing American authors have produced. The United States of America, an independent nation for only half of that time and a maze of Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian, and British colonies as well as native societies at various times before and since, is rich in historical themes that have inspired literary responses. The vastness of a continent new to Europeans . . . . the interaction of cultures . . . . Civil War and its aftermath . . . . the struggle for civil rights . . . . the fight for dignity and identity for American Indians . . . . immigration and the assimilation of new peoples and cultures . . . . industrialization and its impact on a formerly agrarian nation . . . . America’s emergence on the world stage. One could go on, and one could navigate the endless subthemes and nuances of each topic, which is precisely what American writers, whatever their origins and perspectives, have done for more than five centuries.

Opposite the timeline, and complementing it, is a wall with the names of prominent writers on small boards built in that one can turn for additional information. Many, though not all, feature short videos one can launch with a finger touch that illustrate important points. I played with one for Ray Bradbury, one of my own favorites dating back to high school. The video quotes part of Fahrenheit 451 while showing a pile of books being consumed by fire. Alongside Bradbury’s name is a theme, in his case, Dystopian Literature; this occurs with each writer to help show the range of genre that American literature has produced, how it has responded to both contemporary and larger issues, seeking to excite the visitor’s imagination. Whether intentional or not, it excited mine simply by introducing me to writers previously unfamiliar to me, which is saying a lot. There are American writers of whose work any of us may know little or nothing but who have the potential to stir our thoughts and prod our consciences. That has always been the mission of good writing.

Near all that is a current, periodically changing exhibit, the Meijer Exhibit Gallery, which demonstrates some of the most potent creativity the museum has on display. Its first exhibit displays the work of poet W.S. Merwin, about whom I confess I knew nothing, but who is now a source of fascination for me. The small room one enters for “Palm: All Awake in the Darkness,” features a haunting 12-minute video with no human presence except for the soft voice-over of narrators reading from Merwin’s work dealing with the complex and problematic relationship of humanity and nature. The video features the view from inside a cabin in the Maui rainforest, redolent with the sounds of birds and insects and the abundance of life beneath the forest canopy. You may stand or sit on a simple bench and contemplate this immersive adventure into the mind of a poet. Merwin, now 89, has produced more than 50 volumes of poetry, according to the brochure that complements the exhibit, which discusses writer Gregory Bateson’s concept of an “ecology of ideas,” the network of impressions and perspectives that form our conscious and subconscious minds. Since the late 1970s, Merwin has lived in Hawaii on an old pineapple plantation he has restored to its natural state.

As a Lutheran, I found one other thing haunting. Merwin is a practicing Buddhist, and the brochure contains a typewritten, hand-edited draft of a poem called “Place.” It begins:

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

Curiously, for years, I have known that Martin Luther is reputed to have said, “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” The 500th anniversary of the Reformation is upon us, and I know these two men came from very different places to express the same thought. But if a 16th-century religious reformer and a 20tt-century Buddhist poet can reach the same conclusion about the resilience of our commitment to the earth and the stubbornness of faith, perhaps there is hope for us all, after all.

AWM will be sponsoring events in a modest meeting room that features another challenging exhibit, “The Mind of a Writer,” which explores the connections between writer and audience. Professional writers clearly cannot earn a living without an audience, and the practical questions are both how to define and shape that audience and how to reach that audience. The “reach” forces us to explore the role of technology and institutions in facilitating those connections, which clearly have evolved over time. Displays make us think about the evolution of the book shop, starting with the Moravian Book Shop, launched in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in 1745, largely to import religious publications, but continuing into such modern innovations as Oprah’s Book Club, using the medium of television to connect viewers with writers; bookstore chains such as the now defunct Borders; and Amazon, allowing people to order books through the Internet. Of course, writers have also used periodicals, which in their heyday relied very much on the efficiency of the U.S. Postal Service, as well as other media. Playwrights do not expect people to read their writing, but to hear it on stage. Screenwriters reach people through televised performances of their scripts, and so on. All of that got me wondering whether AWM missed a beat by not discussing the Internet not only as a mechanism for selling printed works but as a medium in itself for digital publishing. After all, the very premise of my visit was to review the museum not in print but online, by blogging. Maybe I missed it, but where was the discussion of blogging as one of the most modern innovations in audience creation? Anyone out there? Judging from the list of subscribers on my admin site, it would seem there are thousands. In the aggregate, probably hundreds of millions. It’s a brave new world. But I suspect it may not be long before AWM addresses this phenomenon.

Just beyond this area is a section where you can sit at an old-fashioned typewriter and play. The staff each day places sheets of paper in a tray with the opening lines or fragments of famous quotes. Your job: start pecking away to fill in the blanks with your own thoughts about how the quote should end. For writers like me who are almost preternaturally oriented to the computer screen, it is slightly disconcerting to hit keys that sometimes skip, but the experience is indisputably tactile, though arguably less so than perhaps using a quill pen. In any event, there is a wall with clips. You are invited to hang up your work when you are done. I did not get around to asking what the staff does with these at the end of each day. Maybe you should ask when you visit.

I hope you are more dexterously agile than I appear to be with one other exhibit that allows you to move any of a number of drifting images across a screen for a surprise exploration of an individual writer’s work. One of several lines of inquiry allows you to hear a short oral reading, but I had trouble triggering that feature because my index finger seemed not to hit the precise part of that line that activated the recording, at least not on the first try. I found myself a little frustrated, but a generation that has become adept at using its thumbs to tap out smartphone messages may be more adept in this respect. I was never very skilled with video games, either. We all have our limitations.

There are other features, including one on Jack Kerouac that includes the “scroll manuscript” he pasted together for On the Road, and a room on Chicago writers, since the museum lives here. I am sure there will be more in the future. The museum leaders appear to have built out their infrastructure of sponsors and board members, and if you’d like to know more, you can visit the website. That is not my mission here. As an active American writer, I hope I’m offering you reasons to visit the museum itself.

 

Jim Schwab

Charleston Charm

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DSCF2878There is something mildly disconcerting about visiting an intriguing city several times without having the spare time to go tourist. I first visited Charleston, South Carolina, in 2003, for a business meeting with the National Fire Protection Association, for which I led an American Planning Association consulting project evaluating the impact of NFPA’s Firewise training program. I wandered a few blocks from the hotel but got only a cursory impression of what the city had to offer. In more recent years, I have been there repeatedly for various meetings and conferences connected to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric  Administration’s Coastal Services Center. This led to considerable familiarity with some of the local hotels and restaurants but still did not afford many opportunities to simply wander.

This year, I decided to fix that problem. My wife, Jean, had never been there. We chose our 30th anniversary (June 8) as an excuse for a four-day visit. Besides, it was time for a vacation. Proposals, projects, meetings, and budgets could all wait.

Even as a vacation, it was a view of Charleston through the eyes of an urban planner. None of us leave our experience, knowledge, or even our biases behind. Mine lean toward intellectual inquiry and a fascination with history. Charleston is chock full of history and geographic challenges, which make for interesting environmental history. The old city sits on a once marshy peninsula facing the Atlantic Ocean with the Cooper River to one side, and the Ashley River to the other. Plantations and a thriving rice culture were once built on those foundations. The rice culture, however lucrative it may have been, was built on one other foundation that vanished after the Civil War: slavery. With its demise, and the rise by the late 19th Century of agricultural machinery for rice growing in Texas and Arkansas, rice died as a central feature of the South Carolina economy.

DSCF2872The story is told vividly in the South Carolina Lowlands exhibit in the Charleston Museum, a two-story building on Meeting Street along what is known as the Museum Mile. As that sobriquet suggests, the city has a great deal to offer in this respect, most of which we did not have the time to visit. The offerings include a Children’s Museum of the Lowcountry, the Confederate Museum, and the Gibbes Museum of Art, currently being renovated, among several others. The Charleston Area Regional Transit Authority makes these attractions readily accessible to visitors with three free trolley lines that come together on John St. in front of the Visitor Center, which sits between King St., largely a commercial corridor, and Meeting St. Of the three, the Green Line (#211) runs the length of the Museum Mile.

From our perspective, the history of the South Carolina Lowcountry makes up the best piece of the exhibits the Charleston Museum offers, and clearly the most extensive, using a combination of glassed display cases and short videos to tell the story from prehistoric Indian tribes to European settlement and Indian displacement, to colonization, the American Revolution and Civil War, to modern Charleston. Another exhibit, for those more biologically inclined, details the flora and fauna of the region, and two other, smaller exhibits display both the clothing of the area over time, and the furnishings and metalware of the early American presence. It is enough, if one is diligent about it, to occupy the better part of a day. The museum also contains an auditorium for special events.

The Joseph Manigault House, viewed from the Temple Gate.

The Joseph Manigault House, viewed from the Temple Gate.

The museum also owns two old houses that have been preserved and are open to the public. The Joseph Manigault House, named after a French Huguenot descended from religious fugitives to America in the 1600s who became wealthy planters by the early 1800s, was designed by the owner’s brother and completed in 1803 using Adam-style architecture. Among its features is a Gate Temple that was left intact in the mid-20th Century even as an Esso gasoline station operated on the property before the museum finally acquired it well after World War II. During the war, it was used by the USO to entertain service men stationed in Charleston. It is on Meeting St. across a short side street from the Charleston Museum.

The Heyward-Washington House, on the other hand, requires either a long walk down Meeting St. or a ride on the Green Line to the corner of Broad and Church St., at which

Backyard gardens of the Heyward-Washington House.

Backyard gardens of the Heyward-Washington House.

point one hikes a block south to a home modestly tucked between other buildings in an area that was urban even when the house was built, just before the American Revolution in 1772. It belonged initially to Thomas Heyward Jr., among other things a signer of the Declaration of Independence, but it never belonged to a Washington. President Washington, during a tour of the southern states in 1791, simply stayed there for one week in June as a guest of the Heywards. More interestingly, the home later became the property of John F. Grimke, who with his wife produced two daughters, Sarah and Angelina, who developed profound differences with their rich, slave-owning, planter parents. The daughters became radical abolitionists. Needless to say, they became less than welcome in South Carolina, which posted a warrant for their arrest. That never happened because they resettled in Philadelphia, where they became Quakers, allied themselves with other abolitionists, and continued their activities, speaking and writing widely for their cause. There is no doubt they remained a thorn in the side of their southern kin until the day they died.

DSCF2828But by now I am well ahead of, well, our trip. Neither the Charleston Museum nor the two historic homes were among the first things we saw. In fact, we arrived on Sunday, relaxed over brunch at the eminently affordable yet well-managed Town & Country Inn & Suites in West Ashley, a quieter part of the city west of downtown across the Ashley River, and finally made our way across not only the Ashley but the Cooper River, traversing the magnificently attractive Arthur Ravenel Bridge to Patriots Point in Mount Pleasant. The dock is home to the U.S.S. Yorktown, a World War II aircraft carrier now preserved as a museum for visitors. We did not happen to buy tickets for that while we were there, but it does look impressive from dockside.

DSCF2836We did have tickets for a dinner cruise that evening aboard the Spirit of Carolina, a much smaller vessel designed to provide a pleasant experience for those who like to eat a fine dinner while watching the waves and the birds and the pleasure boats in Charleston Harbor. Both of us enjoyed a well-prepared meal of rib-eye steak, foreshadowed by she-crab soup and a house salad, accompanied by a bottle of champagne provided for our anniversary, and topped off by key lime pie for dessert. To DSCF2831be honest, I do not expect the absolute best of cuisine on dinner cruises; there are some natural limitations built into the format. The cruise is the point of it all. But this was excellent nonetheless. We both came away satisfied. With the help of some gentle guitar music and the breezes that greeted us during our short visit to the upper deck, it was an enjoyable way to celebrate an anniversary. By 9:15 p.m., as our boat pulled ashore to let everyone out, we felt our hosts had treated us to a very pleasant evening.

The next day our target was the South Carolina Aquarium. Given the geography, and aquatic and maritime history, of Charleston, this aquarium is a natural feature of the city. It is situated on the eastern waterfront of Charleston, a few blocks east of Meeting St., but also accessible by trolley. (It also hosts a parking garage.) One can easily DSCF2841spend a day there, and we spent most of a day there, absorbing the living exhibits of sea life that give patrons insights into aquatic life of all sizes and the ecological challenges facing much of it today. With such scientific powerhouses as NOAA nearby, one has high expectations of the aquarium for its scientific content, and by and large it delivers. One unusual feature, somewhat removed from its context, is the Madagascar exhibit, including some lemurs in a tree. I do not profess to know how that fits with the rest of the material, but it is edifying nonetheless. One learns of the utterly tiny amount of paved roads on an island nearly the size of Texas with nearly as many people but a declining rainforest. More related to the region, we discovered to our surprise an entire section devoted to piedmont ecology, examining the river life and aquatic ecology of the foothills of the Appalachians. If you can afford the time, the aquarium is well-endowed with such pleasant surprises. We arrived late in the morning but did not leave until about 4 p.m.

DSCF2834Although we did not find time to undertake the tour to Fort Sumter, we did visit the Fort Sumter National Monument, a modest building next to the aquarium that houses some displays pertinent to the battle that launched the Civil War when Confederate forces shelled the Union fortress on a small island in Charleston Harbor. Tour boats depart from the piers behind the building, and it is probably worth a visit. I hope to accomplish that on a future trip. The Fort Sumter National Monument, unlike the tour, is free and open to the public, and managed by the National Park Service.

DSCF2860That evening, we cheated, but who cares? We engaged a second establishment, Stars, in helping us celebrate our anniversary, this time on the actual date. I have previously reviewed Stars on this blog. So why not try something new instead? For starters, Jean had never been there; I had been there with colleagues during business trips. After reading my most recent review, Jean insisted she wanted to try the place herself, so I made a reservation. Upon arrival, after checking in with the maître d’, I took her upstairs to see the rooftop bar, where we were promptly served Bellinis, after a short explanation of a drink new to both of us. We loved it. Back downstairs, we got the royal treatment from a waiter who one of the owners subsequently informed us was “Big John,” as opposed to “Little John,” also working there, who was at that moment at the front of the restaurant. Big John had migrated from up north but, for the moment at least, found Charleston to his liking.

This time, we diverged in our orders, Jean getting steak (with black truffle grits and bacon braised mushrooms) while I ordered sea scallops. But neither entrée, while excellent, stole the show, at least in our estimate. That honor was reserved for a special share plate that featured cauliflower and broccolini roasted in a cheddar cheese sauce that was as good and succulent as any appetizer I can remember in a long time.

DSCF2868On Tuesday, our afternoon visit to the Charleston Museum followed a morning visit to the Waterfront Park, much closer to the Battery at the end of the peninsula than to the aquarium and most of Museum Mile, but still accessible by trolley. The park is simply a wonderful outdoor setting in which to view the ocean, complete with fountains, palm trees, and walkways along the water’s edge. It is a very pleasant place to pass some time, especially on a warm summer day. It looks like a wonderful venue for an outdoor wedding and has been used that way. For those who simply want to use their laptop or mobile device while occupying one of many park benches, it is also fully equipped with wifi, courtesy of Google and the Charleston Digital Corridor.

Hiking up the street past the old Custom House and turning left at Market St., we reached the popular City Market, a stretch of airy long buildings containing booths featuring numerous local artists and jewelry makers, among others. From one of them I eventually bought a small matte painting of a tropical seashore for my office. It will serve me well on cold Chicago winter days. We also ate lunch at an open air restaurant nearby, the Noisy Oyster, which offered commendable seafood at very reasonable prices. (By this time we were looking to limit both our food expenditures and our caloric intake.) From City Market we took the trolley back to the Visitors Center, where we had parked in the garage for the day, but first took our detour into the Charleston Museum, across the street.

After leaving the museum to get our car, however, we noticed the ominous, heavy gray clouds gathering overhead. Something told us the better part of wisdom lay in returning to our hotel, where we could read our books. (I was working on the H.W. Brands biography of Ben Franklin, The First American. I like to tackle the 700-page heavyweights during vacations.) By the time we arrived at the hotel, the rain was beginning to drip but not coming down very fast. Soon enough, however, the lightning and thunder mounted, and the rain pounded. On the television, we saw news reports from King St. showing cars struggling through several inches of water. I soon learned that much of downtown is either below sea level or at very low elevations with poor drainage, making for a chronic problem of urban flooding. Charleston, also subject to tropical storms such as Hurricane Hugo, which devastated the area in 1989, was not quite the seaside paradise we had enjoyed until then. It is, in fact, one very vulnerable coastal city that also experiences occasional tremors from a fault that triggered a major earthquake in 1886. Charleston needs good disaster plans.

Charleston needs a few other things as well. On our final day, after visiting the Heyward house, we took a long stroll up King St. back in the direction of Stars and the Visitors Center. On a hot day, that can be challenging, so we tried our best to hew to the shady side of the street, though at noon in June, there is a period when no such thing exists. What does exist is a wide variety of old and new storefronts, and we ended up buying some flip-flops and shoes in an H&M store, lunch at the 208 Kitchen, a pleasant little lunch establishment with good sandwiches at single-digit prices, and delicious Belgian gelato at a small store called, well, Belgian Gelato. Eventually, Jean, having finished off her murder mystery, wanted something new to read and found out there was a Barnes & Noble bookstore around the corner from the Francis Marion Hotel, a charming historic place where I have stayed on several previous trips to Charleston. She decided to try Identical by Scott Turow, a Chicago-area writer and fellow member with me of the Society of Midland Authors.

So what does Charleston need? As helpful as the trolley is, and although there is bus service provided by CARTA, it is clear that the creaking, older part of the city is ultimately facing a challenge of mobility as a result of too much dependence on the automobile. Light rail would help, and some people told me it had been discussed, but the big question is how to retrofit it into the existing fabric of this historic core of the city.

DSCF2880With all the tourism the city is now attracting, it is also facing the classic challenge of most such aging urban magnets of maintaining affordable housing for the workforce it needs to support such attractions within a reasonable distance of their employment. Already there is an obvious outmigration of the working poor to areas like North Charleston, a suburb that has very recently experienced toxic racial tensions between citizens and police, particularly after the shooting of Walter Scott this spring. When we researched hotel prices in preparation for our trip, it became obvious that the downtown area is experiencing significant price escalations. Charleston can easily allow the old city core to become a playground for the affluent, a tax generator as such, but it cannot afford to lose its character in the process. Charleston has come a long way since the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960 and the segregationist politics of Strom Thurmond. The challenge now is to preserve its well-earned reputation by honoring that progress in a progressive fashion. A cursory reading over breakfast of local newspapers told me that issue is far from settled in the development debates that are currently underway.

Jim Schwab