The Church of Prairie Home Companion

What is the lure that pulls people halfway across the globe to spend 10 days on a ship with a troupe of performers most have never met except through the medium of radio, a medium that is widely regarded by many as nothing more than the last refuge of holy rolling preachers, outdated old folks' rock album music and trash talking, hyperventilating shock jocks? How does a program that is to radio drama what The Daily Show is to broadcast journalism -- a clever, well-maintained satire that seems like the real thing but isn't -- inspire such loyalty among listeners that they weekly set aside other activities and obligations and tune into a public radio program sponsored by ersatz products like BeBop Areebop rhubarb pie, Powdermilk biscuits, duct tape and ketchup?

Being aboard this cruise is an immersion into the deeply loyal audience that Prairie Home Companion has created and nurtured for more than 30 years of regular weekly broadcasts from the make-believe town of Lake Woebegone. Garrison Keillor, 6'5", gawky, wearing trademark red sneakers and socks with suits, tuxedos and casual wear, sporting nerdy black eyeglasses and a soothing bass voice, presides over this enterprise. He's surrounded by a community of performers who appear on most, if not every show. He's funny, but not howlingly so, more wry than sharp. His observations are delivered in a mellow, almost hypnotic voice whose cadences have been carefully practiced in a finely honed storyteller's pace. The punchlines are rarely delivered with a punch, but instead seem to slip, slide, and ease their way out of the monologues and skits. It seems scripted and practiced, but when you see these shows live you realize how much improvisation goes on between the performers as they embellish this mythical prairie universe.

These are really talented people, musicians who shift effortlessly from one style to another, comedic actors who use voices alone to create enduring and memorable characters, and a man who does nothing but create sound effects, mostly with his mouth. They seem to genuinely enjoy working with each other, and they have worked really hard throughout this 10 day trip. Keillor is up most mornings at 7 to join passengers for coffee, or to preside over a writers' workshop where he listens to writers talk about their problems and commiserate or offer solutions. He's still up past midnight, singing with the performers and sometimes the audience, or presiding over a storytelling session with passengers, coaxing personal stories from them with a reassuring touch or comment, and then sending them back to their cabins. The musicians are in constant rotation among the ship's bars and lounges, or in larger performance venues, and often join one another as impromptu guests to improvise their way through songs they haven't rehearsed together. Throughout the day they are around the boat, in the cities, on the tours. Their patience with their fans and their engagement in conversations of adulation, commentary or simply curiosity would put many politicians to shame.

Most of the passengers I've talked to came on this cruise first because it was a PHC cruise with the cast, and only secondarily because it was a trip to Norway. In his final show Sunday night Keillor joked that next year's cruise would be on the upper Missouri River in North Dakota where instead of 10 days of luxury passengers will live in tents and spend 30 days working on a massive public works project to create a fjord that will be a tourist attraction. It's not hard to believe that many of the audience would sign up for that, too, if Sue Scott, Fred Newman, Tim Russell, the Shoe Band and Keillor would promise to be there, too.

As the cruise progressed, the seductive power of this culture grew. It felt more and more as if we were all part of some community of shared values, that we were all residents of Lake Woebegone, that the people on the stage weren't professional actors and musicians but friends, neighbors, people we knew and liked and who knew and liked us in return. It was like joining a church or a synagogue where you gain instant community, where shared values are assumed and reinforced by repetition and ritual.

In the end, are these cruises and the constant touring to cities around the country part of building and maintaining this community, or more a clever strategy to build and maintain the brand? Are Keillor and his crew nourished by this week of fan immersion, do they look forward to it as the chance to connect with their community the way so many of the passengers appear to do? Or is this how a performing troupe builds and keeps an audience so that the show and the gig go on? Are they working us, are we working them, or are we working one another in a communal and symbiotic relationship?

I can't answer these questions. I was surprised at how drawn to these performers I was, at how much it seemed they were part of my adventure, not props adorning it. Though I could feel myself consciously resisting it, I could feel the pull of saying "hi" to the performers and other staff, to begin calling them by their first names as if we were friends, to excuse the inevitable glitches in their performances and empathize with them even when the routines fell short or flat, as I thought they did in the final performance on Sunday night. Nearly everyone I asked said they would sign up for another of these cruises no matter where it was headed if another was put on. Most clearly will continue to make PHC a centerpiece of their weekend lives.

I won't be among them. But I can't avoid the fact that in some way I've become associated, if not fully invested, in this community. Like participation in any organized religious activity, I find it makes me uneasy but somehow included. And maybe this is the secret of PHC's longevity and startling fan loyalty. An ongoing set of stories about make believe people in a town that never existed , where people are flawed and quirky, but are familiar, archetypal and endure, and the future is assumed and assured, with familiar and reassuring rituals upon which we can depend...where the women are all strong, the men are all good looking, and the children are all above average...welcome to the Church of Prairie Home Companion.

A Summer Day in Kristiansand

Our Friday stop in Kristiansand seemed as much a delay in our steady march to Oslo as a necessary port of call on our tour. The city once was known for its pollution, but today has cleaned itself up and appears like nothing so much as a Norwegian version of Newport, RI or Nantucket. It is southerly enough that nice weather enhances its seaside ambiance. Its fishmarket is larger and more impressive than Bergen's.

Alan and I had signed up for our second and last organized tour off the boat, following the success of our kayaking adventure in Geiranger. We were given group stickers on the ship and then followed directions to a series of motorcoaches that would take us on our "typical Norwegian forest walk." While it was a pleasant stroll through a lovely park dating to the 1800's, this excursion reinforced my conviction that I'm not cut out for these large-scale organized explorations.

I got off the coach on the way back into town rather than go back to the ship and spent the rest of our time in town wandering around. I finished up back in the port/harbor area where my guidebook promised a lovely waterside bistro that served the best fish soup in Kristiansand. I was not disappointed. I sat on the deck in the wonderful warm sun and enjoyed a light but creamy collection of perfectly cooked salmon and whitefish, small shrimp, a few small mussels and clams, topped with an herbal garnish. The place was full of Norwegians who seemed to have taken off the day to enjoy the sun after so much bleak, cloudy and rainy weather. Across the small waterway were scores of other similarly laid back folks. Many were on board small pleasure craft while others just sprawled or lolled on the steps enjoying the afternoon. I wandered through the fish market and then joined the crowds across the way. Before heading back to the ship I indulged in another insanely rich cone of soft ice cream that tastes like real ice cream, coated with cocoa powder. Probably enough calories to power a small city, and enough milk fat to spike my cholesterol big time, but one of the best ice cream cones I've ever had.

Bergen

Bergen is Norway's third largest city, and judging by the traffic the day we stopped there, it is the biggest cruise ship destination in the country. No fewer than 6 ships were in port at the same time. This led to Times Square-like crowds as they arrived and passengers swarmed into the small inner harbor and downtown area.

I was lucky enough to get off the ship early in the morning and have the main downtown area mostly to myself. One of the big attractions of this area is the fish market. It's held out of doors in stalls under tents. The multi-lingual sellers tout their fresh salmon, roe, smoked whale meat (!) and other delicacies in most of the EU languages and in English. Nearby stalls sell reindeer and elk sausages, seal skins and wolf pelts, and more sedate souvenirs such as knitted sweaters and caps, along with the ubiquitous refrigerator magnets, stickers and shot glasses.

The town is dominated from above by Mt. Flojen. The old town crawls up its flanks surrounded by a park. I wandered up through the old town early in the morning and was enchanted by the small houses, the breathtaking views over the downtown and harbor, and the lovely touches in the way people had decorated their doors and windows.











The hills are so steep that there is a funicular travelling up and down constantly. Most people sensibly use it to get to the top of the hill, then walk down through the park and the old town. I missed finding the station and kept wandering further and further up the slope. By the time I found the tracks and a station, I was too stubborn to pay the tariff for just a partial trip and resolved to walk all the way up. It didn't seem like a long hike. It turned out to be a very cheap trip to the gym.

Once at the top, I enjoyed watching a group of young children on a field trip play on the climbing equipment in the park. I was less amused by the realization that while I'd been climbing, hundreds of tourists from our ship and others had ascended the funicular. The summit was a frenzy of multilingual, camera toting, tour-label wearing folks jostling for a shot at the panoramic view below. That is when they weren't lined up for the pay toilets, the souvenirs or a snack.

I got on line and rode the funicular down. The quiet little downtown corner where I'd started was now full of people. The line to go up the funicular ran out of the terminal and more than a city block down the street. Tour guides struggled like sheep dogs to keep their flocks in line and the funicular ran nonstop ferrying the next load up the mountain.

Down at the fish market the scene was even more of a contrast. Where the early morning had offered a calm dockside scene, midday produced a jampacked mass of people jostling past and among the stalls yammering in many languages. There's a kiosk offering fish and chips, calamari and chips and mixed seafood and chips. It looked so good I had to try it. After a 30 minute line, I grabbed my plate and found a seat with two folks from the UK who had travelled to Bergen via Sweden and the fjords by car. These are the folks who (it seemed to me) enjoyed pointing out to me that the dollar is sinking faster than a stone while the pound is doing just fine, thank you very much. Their smugness was tempered by their distress at having paid way more than they wanted to regardless for a plate of fish that the husband wouldn't eat after one taste. He ended the meal with an Alka Seltzer chaser before leaving. I followed my very mediocre calamari with a large plastic cup of fresh strawberries, which are very much in season here now. They were possibly the best, sweetest strawberries I've ever had.

Then it was hustling back to the ship for our mid-day departure.

The Jews of Trondheim

Trondheim plays a big role in Norwegian history. It was the civil capital before Oslo. It was the ecclesiastical capital as well, known then as Nidaros. The defining structure in the city is the cathedral, which was erected on the site of St. Olav's grave. Olav was the Norwegian king who brough Chrisianity to Norway back in the 11th century. He was martyred for his trouble by the Nordic chieftains who weren't quite ready to give up Odin and Thor. He got the last laugh, though -- his cathedral has burned several times and arisen even bigger and grander each time.

While the cathedral draws the attention and dominates the town, Alan and I spent our most interesting time in Trondheim at the synagogue. It's located across the street from the cathedral compound in what once was the train station.

We learned there that Trondheim is home now to a few hundred Jews. Their community came from the Baltic states, Latvia and Lithuania, in the late 1800s after the Norwegian constitution's prohibition against Jews entering Norway was repealed. They followed the traditional path of many Jewish immigrants. They were peddlars, merchants and as their community grew they became doctors and lawyers as well. The community grew to about 750 by the time of the Nazi occupation. Those who could fled to Sweden, whose neutrality gave them shelter. The rest were rounded up by the Norwegian police and shipped off to concentration camps. We were told that of those who were shipped off, only 4 returned after the war.

Norway today justifiably enjoys a reputation for liberal social democracy and progressive government. It is an active proponent of human rights around the world and does much good work through its foreign aid and liberal refugee policies. But for the Jews of Trondheim, all this came a little late. Our guide's dry comment on the occupation policies was "our police were very efficient and enthusiastic enforcers of the laws that the Nazis adopted."

The government did provide some reparations to returning families, some of which was used to restore and refurbish the synagogue. We were told that the government doesn't dwell on its treatment of the Jews during the occupation, but that it also has tried to acknowledge the past and provide some compensation as a result.

The synagogue today is both a community center and a museum. We spent about an hour with a young docent, a Jewish woman who grew up there. She was studying music in the UK and had just decided to switch over the medicine. She was a great guide to the history of the community as well as its current practices. We were joined later by another young woman who is studying medicine in the Czech Republic. They explained that the community today is mostly a cultural rather than a religious one. Services are held only every other week. More often, they said, and they don't get a minyan. It was built as an Orthodox sanctuary, and women still attend in the gallery. They described the community's approach as conservative. There is no rabbi in town, although there is a cantor. For the high holidays they "order out" to Oslo for a rabbi. Given the nature of the community and its small size, most young people marry non-Jewish Norwegians. Our guide had met "a nice Jewish boy" in the UK, but the young women both agreed that this is not a big issue for most of the families in the community.

Trondheim also has a lovely old city across the river from the Cathedral. There are old, old warehouses fronting the river and small, tidy homes on cobbled twisting streets. Cafes and trendy little boutiques have sprouted up there, but it still provided a calm and interesting stroll after the ponderous bulk of the cathedral and the somewhat melancholy story of Trondheim's Jews.

This marked the northernmost part of our trip. The sun had come out after days of low clouds and intermittent rain. That evening we were treated to the full Midnight Sun, with twilight enduring through the night as the Veendam departed late in the afternoon and steamed south for our next port of call.

Gerainger Fjord

Gerainger is a UN World Heritage Site, nestled at the very end of Gerainger Fjord between towering mountains. Cataracts pour off the walls surrounding the town and a torrential river pours out of the mountains into the fjord . Alan and I signed up for a kayaking trip in the fjord and disembarked early on Wednesday morning, July 18. A tender took us to the town dock where we were met by a guide who took us around the small harbor to the put in point.

Gerainger has a camping ground beside the small docking area and it was full of camping vehicles and tents. There is a toilet and wash room for the campers and it was full of folks washing up after breakfast. The camper vans ranged from small, primitive truck-bed style ones to larger and more sophisticated versions, complete with TV satellite dishes. Our guide wryly noted that the town had provided 2 or 3 toilet facilities and then promptly permitted upwards of 100 vehicles and campers to use the grounds.

Our crowd included experienced kayakers and total tyros, so the multinational group of guides spent a good deal of time explaining how kayaks work, how to paddle and how to avoid tipping over. We all donned skirts to keep the steady rain out of the boats and after much jostling we all managed to get our crafts into the water.

The perspective of a fjord from water level is completely different than from the deck of a large cruise ship. Alan and I found a rhythm, he in front and me in back steering as well as paddling. The guides took us out to the first turn in the fjord, and as we came around the point we caught ou first glimpse of the Seven Sisters waterfall. There has been a record amount of snow and rainfall in this are this year. The result is a spectacular display of waterfalls thundering down the fjord walls.

We lingered a little bit at the far end of our trip soaking in the view. As we did, a very large cruise ship from Genoa hove into sight and glided into its anchorage. We were forced to gather together and wait until it had settled. Our little kayaks bobbed in its wake. We could feel the rumble of its huge anchor as it slipped into the water and the chains rattled down. These fjords are hundreds of meters deep, although at this end it is probably much shallower. But it seemed like an awful lot of chain tumbled out of the big ship until it was steadied.

Two hours after we launced we were back at the landing. Alan went on back to the ship while I stayed behind to explore further on foot. I followed the footpath alongside a raging river swollen by the rain, then followed the switchback road up to the Fjord Museum and a hiking trail beyond. The museum is a striking, modern building nestled among small but very impressive homes with astounding views down the fjord.

The entire landscape of this region is very much like New Zealand's West Coast. I found that hiking in the steady rain also was very much like our tramping in NZ. The trail rapidly became too slippery to navigate alone, so after several slips and falls I perched on a bare outcropping, ate the food I'd slipped from the breakfast buffet on board, and soaked in the rain and the scenery. I had to scramble a bit back down. When I finally returned to the town it was overwhelmed with passengers from the newly arrived cruise ship, swarming with mostly Italian tourists.

Before returning to the ship I tried the soft ice cream I'd read about in my guide book. Wow! This is real ice cream, not the ersatz Dairy Queen chemical concoction. Coated with cocoa powder it made a wonderful treat for me as I sat on a cafe porch out of the rain and watched the fjord and the tenders chugging back and forth to the 2 ships anchored there. I waited until the very last tender for Veendam before heading back to the ship.

We left shortly after and it seemed as if every passenger on our ship was out on the various decks to watch our passage back out. We'd arrived in the middle of the night, so for most of us it was the first chance we'd had to see the cliffs and waterfalls. Cameras bloomed on deck as we swiveled from one astounding view to the next. The ship gracefully turned to follow the twisty fjord until it emerged into a much larger channel and headed back out to the ocean.

How much did you say?

I'm reeling from the prices here! There was an article in the NYTimes while I've been travelling with a headline like "Americans Touring in Europe Hammered by Falling Dollar." Hello, thanks for the news!!!

A British couple I shared a table with in the Bergen fishmarket responded smugly to my query whether they were finding the prices high, "not as high as you." Nyah, nyah, nyah. Then the husband allowed that they fish and chips he found inedible were also the most expensive he'd ever purchased....anywhere, any time.

I'm sure the falling dollar is increasing the shock value of Norwegian prices. But I suspect they would be high no matter what the exchange rate. A sampling from my shore excursions:

• A large pizza and Coke, advertised at $40
• A half pint of draft beer, $10
• A small bowl of admittedly delicious fish soup (voted best in Kristiansand, where fish soup is a speciality), with a glass of beer, with tip, nearly $50

I know that Scandinavia always has been expensive, absolutely and relatively. But this seems way more so than I remember from many years ago.