SAFETY

One of the things I dearly love about Norway is how safe it is for my son to wander.  It’s like when I was a kid growing up in the 60s, gone from home all day and my mother only saw me at dinnertime.  America has changed so much that my son would otherwise never get to experience that kind of freedom, except for the months we spend in Norway every year. 

I freaked out the first time I saw a little girl, no more than three years old, walking alone down a sidewalk. She was probably just heading over to a friend’s house, and it was all I could do to not stop and help her find her way, but I knew better.  Kids in Norway learn at a young age how to be self-reliant and very responsible in this world, and they have no worries about being kidnapped.  It just doesn’t happen there.

When I first visited Norway by myself in the early 80s, the travel books said it was the safest country in Europe for women to hitchhike alone.  With the influx of foreigners in the last twenty years, unfortunately, that may not be completely true today, but for the most part, Norway is still a very safe place.  The tragedy there last summer certainly took away their innocence, but the only dangers I’ve ever encountered are the non-human kind.

I’ve driven on many one-lane roads cut into the sides of mountains with no guardrails. One tiny distraction or slight turn of the wheel, and the car would go careening over the edge.  Yet, I’ve never read in the newspaper about people dying on those roads.

I’ve stood on top of many lookout peaks with a sheer drop-off below that doesn’t even have so much as a rope to mark the danger zone.  Norwegians love to walk right up to the edge and take daring photos.  Sometimes I can’t even watch.  All I think about is that at any minute the rock could crack or they could lose their balance and that’s the end of them.  But Norwegians have a confidence I’ve never noticed in Americans – one that says they know they won’t fall, trip or slip.  They know it’s dangerous but they know how to handle it.  I think Americans have lost that inner strength.  We, for the most part, have become dependent on others to protect us.  Someone else is responsible for our safety.  Someone else should pay for our scraped knee or accidental death.  The lawsuits that now run rampant in America have done much to take away our own sense of personal responsibility.

Every year people die in Norway doing risky things like base-jumping or rock climbing.  Norwegians have an attitude that if someone is stupid enough to do such things, they deserve to die.  They only want the smart ones to survive.