The Lighthouse Road(30)
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 Nordsjøen 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 Port av Kristiania at noon, two days of starts and stops along the western shore under steam ahead of her.
The Port 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 Port 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.