day and a night out of Hammerfest, and those few on board were cold and tired. The captain and his three-man crew were busy at the rigging, dodging the skerries and shoals, slogging through frazil ice and fog. When the sun began its burn the high fjords and their plunging ridges on either side of the boat came into view.
At first she mistook the tree line for a lowering storm, some sharp front from the east. As the good boat slipped forward, though, she saw it was no storm at all. For all her short life she’d lived in Hammerfest, had never, before yesterday, been out of view of it. The hills in Hammerfest were gradual and bare — arctic desert — and what green there was came by way of the cloudberry boscage and lichen for a few summer months. Now a forest of spruce cascaded down the mountainsides, each minute the lifting of the fog revealed more forest. She’d been told of trees, but not these. No, the trees she’d heard of were still more than a month before her, in Amerika, on the shores of a lake said to equal any ocean.
Strictly speaking, the voyage between Hammerfest and Tromso was the second leg of her journey. Early the morning before, she’d stood on the rocks while her papa had loaded her belongings into his fishing boat. They had an hour before the ferry would leave Hammerfest quay, and her mama was busy finding anything else she could send. They lived in a sod house on Muolkot, an island in plain sight of Hammerfest. Her papa had a few sheep and a potato garden. He had a skiff that was safe along the shore and in the harbor but not equipped for open water. He was a decent and pious man, a mostly quiet man. He played his
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
By the time she debarked and stopped in a harborside cafe 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
The P
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
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
Aside from the people aboard her,
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
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