I’m reading a fabulously interesting book by Sarah Hrdy called “Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species”. One passage stuck me as being particularly relevant to my personal situation. Granted, I’m not a mother, but still:

Large maternal contributions to subsistence would have meant that mothers had more freedom to come and go, with important implications for whether females stayed among kin or left home at marriage, all critical, as we shall see, for for how much autonomy a woman retains over reproductive decisions, how free she is to choose when and with whom she will mate. Female autonomy depends on the availability of support from her kin. This is true for all well-studied primates as well as most human societies in which one sex is more likely to move at marriage. When mothers remain among kin, they retain more autonomy than when they travel far from their natal place to live among their mate’s kin. (p. 102)

♫♪…filled with loathing and bile… ♪♫

This is a picture of the main street in the most trendy area of town, right by where I live.
Images are stolen from Aftenposten.

Jason asked what the previous post was all about, and Johannes posted a link to an automated translation (that one was good for several laughs). I’m not going to go through the trouble of translating the whole thing, but here’s the long and short of it. I missed yoga class yesterday because:

1. The sidewalks were too icy and covered with snow for me to walk there as I usually do due to the fact that the city refuses to take responsibility for their care during winter.
2. The tram was late because the streets were poorly plowed. The trams that the city purchased can’t run in snow that’s more than an inch or so deep.
3. The new and much-lionized realtime information system was incorrect. I wasn’t able to see that the tram wouldn’t be able to get me to my destination on time and thus employ another form of transportation.
4. When the tram finally did go by, it was so packed that I wouldn’t have been able to stuff myself into it anyway.
5. Although the public transportation authority has a guarantee that pays for your cab if delays on their part would have made you more than 20 minutes late, I was not able to get a cab because there were none free (which is extremely weird around where I live). Probably all the cabs were taken up by people using the guarantee.

That’s the short of it. Here’s the long of it:

I am mad because despite the fact that Norway has had snow and ice since the dawn of time, Norwegians apparently don’t know how to or don’t care enough to maintain the sidewalks so that they’re passable in winter. They refuse to plow or sand the sidewalks, saying it’s the building owners’ responsibility to do this outside of their buildings. This year the city is really proud of itself for instituting a fine for building owners who don’t maintain their sidewalks: 500 kr, or about the cost of a dinner for two at a pizza joint. Neither does the city have anyone going around to check for breaches of this ordinance; citizens are supposed to call in and report slick sidewalks, and then someone from the city goes out to verify that there’s a problem. Of course, it’s cheaper for the building owners to pay the fine than it is for them to maintain their damn sidewalks! And what about the parts of sidewalk that the city, or eve no-one at all will claim? They just get ignored. Not to mention that Norwegians look upon it as a character flaw to complain. They feel that falling on your ass on icy sidewalks is just a part of living in Norway (kind of like getting dysentery is just a part of visiting Mexico, I guess). So anyway, the sidewalks are extremely poorly maintained in winter, to the extent that most people just give up and walk in the streets.

We’re not just talking about snow here. See, Oslo’s temperature hovers around freezing in winter. This means that we’ll get lots of snow over the course of a few days, so it really piles up when no one shovels. Since we have so much pedestrian traffic, the snow gets compacted into a wavy, slick surface. Alternatively, it gets churned up into this weird sandy texture that’s really hard to walk in because the snow shifts under your weight so you can’t get any leverage to move forward. Then the weather will get a little warmer, and the precipitation will turn into rain or sleet, melting the sandy snow into slush and further compacting the wavy snow into ice. Then it gets cold again, and the snow freezes again, leaving very hard, uneven, and slick ice on the surface. Over the course of the winter this ice gets extremely compacted and polished–what Norwegians call “stålis”, or steel ice. It sticks around for the entire winter, and is extremely slick, worse than trying to walk on a hockey rink. Plus the unevenness, of course–even if someone does toss gravel on this ice, it just collects in the valleys. Then, when the weather turns a little milder again, some of the ice melts, leaving a water slick over the rest of the ice. So the sidewalks end up being covered with hard, wavy ice slicked by water. Nice to walk on, eh?

Were it so simple as that (real simple, huh?), people could just wear spikes on their shoes. But some people do maintain their sidewalks, and those are usually nice and clear. Ever hear the sound of someone walking with spikes on bare asphalt? Plus a big part of living in the city is going out to do your errands on foot, and you can’t wear spikes into stores–spikes ruin the floors. There’s nowhere to take off the dirty, wet spikes, either, so you’re basically SOL. Spikes aren’t really an option, living in the city.

Walking on ice is not easy, particularly if your center of gravity is so high as mine. So I don’t walk much in the winter. This depresses me a lot, as one of the things I like most about living in the city is the ability to walk everywhere. Not to mention that it’s my primary form of exercise. In order to walk on the ice at all, I have to walk very slowly in a very measured, short gait, sort of like the way you see little old arthritic ladies walk. I have to keep my gaze pinned to the sidewalk at all times, because my gait must be adjusted for the particular kind of ice I’m walking on. So not only am I not able to walk as much, I’m not able to enjoy the walking I actually do. More than that, though, going out to walk in Oslo in the winter makes me feel like an inept, clumsy idiot. Particularly when Norwegians, who have been walking on ice since they learned to walk at all and thus don’t even have to think about it, go flying past me. The sidewalks are also significantly narrowed by the snowbanks that have been kicked or plowed up on the sides, so I have to constantly take care not to take up too much place, and move out of the way onto the even slipperier and less flat edges so that people who want to walk faster than me can pass. This whole situation just makes me feel disabled and pathetic. Nothing fills me with more loathing for Norwegians than going out of my apartment in the winter.

On a more societal level, the problems are even worse. From an economic standpoint, the policy makes no sense. The city has complained that taking care of the sidewalks would cost them too much money, and they just haven’t got the budget for it. Several people have done the math, however, and have figured out that the cost involved in the treatment of broken bones attributable to icy sidewalks exceeds the estimated costs of sidewalk maintenance by a couple of orders of magnitude. Being laid up with a broken leg in winter must be a major pain in the ass; for old people who might break a hip, this might mean pretty much the end of their lives. Few old people weather broken hips well.

The policy is also extremely hypocritical in several ways. The city is actually spending money on the roads in order to take better care of them than the sidewalks, when they’re constantly boasting about their commitment to increasing spending on public transportation in favor of cars. Then there’s the fact that the newspapers are increasingly covering the issue of “obesity” and its costs to society. How, then, is it sensible policy to render impossible many people’s favored form of exercise, walking? Particularly odd in a country that’s so proud of its love of physical activity and the outdoors. Norway is constantly crowing about its commitment to improving the environment, but they’re hardly contributing to this cause when they make it so difficult to take advantage of the most environmentally-friendly form of transport that exists. The city has forsaken precisely the population that uses the sidewalks most: those of us who live in the city’s core. Oslo Kommune is happy to do their duty in the outer parts of the city, however–the places where sidewalks are less used and cars are used more. Finally, the raison d’�tre of Norway as a social democracy is to help the weaker and more marginal members of society: the old, the sick, immigrants. Yet it is precisely these populations who are most likely to be most affected by impassable sidewalks.

So I’m mad. Winter used to be my favorite season, but now I’ve come to dread it. Solely because of this one issue here–icy sidewalks that make walking a chore. This situation is just pure idiocy on the part of the government. The winters here are five months long. I’m very mad indeed.