Peter Geye - The Lighthouse Road

The voyage had been more than a year in the planning. A year of strict saving and hoarding, of frugal and meager living. Thea's belongings were paltry. In her carpetbag she carried only an extra dress, two scarves, her summer bonnet, a pair of stockings, and her mittens. It was cold enough passing through the fjord that she already wore her winter cloak and hat. She also had a basket of food, one meant to last her entire voyage. It contained three jars of soused herring, lefse, pickles, a pound of gjetost cheese, two jars of sheep's milk, two jars of cloudberry jam, and a small burlap sack of pears already bruised and mealy. Who could say where the pears had come from? Sewn into the skirt of her dress was a secret pocket, and in this she kept her purse. It held fifty American dollars and ten Norwegian kroner. When she got to Kristiania, she was going to put her papers in this same secret place. Last was her handbag, woven in the last days by her mother. It was filled with essentials: her Bible, diary, English phrasebook, and a hairbrush.

Slight as she was, Thea had no problem carrying her belongings. When the N ordsjøen reached the dock in Tromsø she had already re trieved her baggage from her bunk. She stood at the rail waiting for the gangplank to be dropped from the dock, first in a queue of ten weary travelers.

By the time she debarked and stopped in a harborside café for bread and cheese and coffee, it was already time to find her next boat, which would bring her to Kristiania. She boarded the P ort av Kristiania at noon, two days of starts and stops along the western shore under steam ahead of her.

The P ort av Kristiania arrived at her final destination in the middle of the night. Thea was sleeping in her bunk when she felt the ship's definitive stop. She found her bags and joined the crowd and by the time she reached the main deck she was wide awake and consumed by a new awe: Kristiania— even at night, perhaps especially at night— sprawled all around her. The gas streetlamps flickered near and far, those on the yonder hillside a kind of greasy mirage that might not have been light at all, might have been only an impossible reflection. There were warehouses on the waterfront three times larger than the ship she was now stepping off. Everywhere the sounds of harbor life thrummed: the grinding and shrieking of train and trolley tracks, the clatter of horses' hooves on the dock's planks, the moaning of loading cranes, and above and below all of it the sound of human voices.

Before then, Thea had never seen more than one hundred people gathered together. But even in the middle of the night there were thousands of people here. In the next slip two steamships, each twice as long as the P ort av Kristiania, were loading, crowds of people tunneled into the shadowy quay. As Thea reached the gangplank, she noticed the taut ship lines crisscrossing the docks, the enormous nets hauling cargo onboard the steamships before her, and casks by the thousands ready to be loaded into ships' holds.

As soon as she was on the dock she was swept into a cordoned area where several nurses stood ready to examine and interrogate the passengers. One at a time they were led to tables. When it was Thea's turn, a grim-faced woman signaled her to come forward. Thea was asked to provide her ticket for passage. The nurse confirmed the ticket against a list in her passenger log and proceeded to ask a series of twenty-nine questions.

Aside from the routine questions regarding her final destination and place of birth and the promise of labor in America, she was also asked whether or not she was an anarchist or polygamist, if she was in any way crippled or had deformities, if she had ever been imprisoned. She spent fifteen minutes answering these and other questions, and when the interview was complete, the nurse took Thea into a curtained area and asked her to remove her cloak and hat.

The medical examination that followed was cursory. After the nurse listened to Thea's lungs with her stethoscope and checked her for a hunchback and diseases of the skin, she filled out a landing card and told Thea she could go aboard Thingvalla. As she ascended the steep gangplank, she could already feel the melancholy sea in the soles of her feet.

Thingvalla was a three-masted, single-stacked steamship already some twenty-five years old when Thea sailed across the North Atlantic. She had a third-class ticket and found her berth on the aft end of the tween deck. There were four canvas bunks in a six-by-eight-foot cabin, but it was late in the year and a ship made to carry nine hundred steerage passengers had only three hundred aboard. So she bunked with only one other passenger, a rawboned pregnant woman with a ghost's pallor and darting eyes. The woman's belongings were even more pathetic than Thea's: a filthy gunnysack not much filled and tied closed with a piece of balling twine. She had no foodstuffs and no purse and Thea, for all she'd seen, had never seen anything as sad as this.

Aside from the people aboard her, Thingvalla also held a cargo of barreled fish: brisling, anchovies, herring, cod. The casks must have leaked because the smell seeped through the interstices of the floor and on warmer days put a stink in the air impossible to ignore. The stench especially disagreed with Thea's bunkmate, who had trouble enough with the heavy seas and yawing vessel. Whole hours passed with a constant moan coming from the woman.

On their third day at sea Thea had had enough, and she ventured to the main deck for fresh air. The deck was slick and crowded and Thea could hardly bring herself to move. She stood on the threshold of the gangway, making a slow inspection of the panorama. Though Thingvalla was only forty nautical miles north of Scotland, there was nothing but the brumous sea and its slowly rising swells to see. Thea was used to long views, but this was otherworldly. In Hammerfest, the tundra was locked and still. Here the sea roiled and splashed and went on forever. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

She spent an hour walking from one vacant spot along the railing to the next, finally able to believe she was gone. In all the time she'd spent wondering what it would be like, she'd never envisioned a world this vast.

She was standing at the prow when she noticed the western horizon. It was approaching with greater haste than the ship's steady ten knots might have warranted. The swells were growing, too, and a stiff breeze came from nowhere and started sheering the tops of the waves. The gulls that had been careening above took a quick and certain refuge in the tangle of lines connecting the masts. A moment later one of the ship's crew told her they were clearing the decks.

By the time she found her cabin the boat was already bucking. The pregnant woman had lit the lamp and the shadows it cast on the wall swayed as if in a breeze. "I've had enough of the dark," the woman said. The words surprised Thea, but she grabbed hold of them.

" There is a storm coming."

"You mean it's not already here?"

"I guess it most likely is. I saw the thunderheads up on deck. I went for the fresh air."

The woman merely nodded. In the lamplight her pallor looked even more pale than normal. " Would you like something to eat?" Thea asked. "Or to drink? I still have a little sheep's milk."

The woman hung her head. Embarrassed but eager.

Thea removed her food basket from beneath her bunk and set it on the floor between them. The ship's motion made each movement difficult, but she managed to get the basket open and remove the milk, which she offered right away to the woman.

She drank with gusto, finishing half the jar before she realized what she was doing. She capped the jar, and handed it back to Thea, who offered the cheese in turn. The woman took only a small bite.