Slow Boat on the Göta Canal

THE Göta Canal is the slow, expensive, antique way to travel from Goteborg to Stockholm. It is so utterly impractical, in fact, that the authorities threaten, every fall, to put an end to passenger service on this line, a possibility which distresses tradition-loving Swedes. When I took a cabin on the Juno, I did not know that her survival is a matter of annual suspense.

We — boat, captain, crew, and sixty or so passengers — edged away from the dock and chuffed off up the Göta River with no ceremony. Sea gulls screamed at us, lumber boats hooted at us, and a small sailboat made disrespectful maneuvers alongside. The stout, stubby little Juno was obviously the least important vessel in Göteborg’s busy harbor.

A few miles up the river, beyond long level reaches where grass swayed in the wind, and past the ruins of a tower built by the Norse in some ancient border squabble, our position changed. We came into a district where houses stood along the waterside, each with a garden running down to the river and a gazebo overlooking it. Spring cleaning seemed to be in progress in the first house. Winter coats swayed on the clothesline. One woman was hanging quilts out a casement window, another was shaking a mop on the back steps, and a man in overalls was doing minor carpentry on the veranda. They all stopped work to wave, flourishing quilts, mop, and a keyhole saw with obvious pleasure. The boat crew waved back, the astonished passengers waved back, the Juno whistled and sent up a plume of steam, and a yellow dog rushed out of the shrubbery, barking, to race us to the turn. He won. Any dog in reasonable health can do better than five knots.

Since Swedes have the reputation of being reserved, cautious, and undemonstrative, all this flaunting of mops and saws, while flattering, was a puzzle until the guide explained that we were making the first trip of the season. The appearance of the Juno, painted white as a snowball and bulging with passengers, assured the dwellers along the canal that summer was really coming and that the boats would survive for one more season. It’s not often that a mixed bag of returned immigrants, dawdling exchange scholars, antipodean journalists, and plain tourists can pose as the first robin. As greetings continued from every house along the route, we became much set up in our own estimation and made heavy inroads on the Juno's beer.

The number of people accommodated aboard this chunky little boat was a continual amazement to me. More kept turning up, and I finally calculated that the Juno carried, in addition to the captain and his first and probably only officer, a couple of engineers, four or five youths to manage mooring lines and lock gates, two stewardesses whose chief task seemed to be keeping the cabins provided with full bottles of drinking water, a trio of pert waitresses in the dining saloon, and at least one invisible magician in the galley. There was also the guide, a pretty girl who spoke three languages, in all of which she explained, regretfully, that she knew nothing whatever about the canal, being merely a substitute for the real guide, who was still busy at the university. Then there were, naturally, the passengers, in spite of whom the line has been a notorious money loser for years.

The stowage of this army was accomplished by the utmost economy of space. Everything on the Juno seemed slightly less than life-size, and to turn over in its berths was to risk falling out. Baggage was theoretically limited to 175 pounds per ticket, but I never saw a single piece weighed. Barricades of luggage consequently accumulated outside the cabin doors, and progress through the corridor was made Indian file, with much courteous dodging. Since nobody was in a hurry — the average age of the passengers hovered around sixty — these impediments were no matter.

THE first leg of the canal is simply the Göta River, suitably dredged, widened, and fitted with sufficient locks to raise ships up to Lake Vänern. The river is wide enough for the passage of small oceangoing vessels, and wanders northeast in a series of shallow blue curves through a shallow green valley. Although the Swedes began fiddling with a canal here in the early seventeenth century, this section of the route was the last to be opened to modern shipping and is now the only stretch capable of handling ships of any size. A clock tower, a black wooden box on tall timber legs, commemorates the finish of the job in 1916. This clock tower is board-and-batten construction, like many of the houses along the canal, and carries on its peaked roof a roughly cut dragon’s head which glowers down the valley toward Göteborg.

Vänern is large, about the size of the Great Salt Lake. The Juno reached it late in the afternoon, and by ten o’clock the shore had disappeared, although the guide claimed it would have been visible on a clear day. We moved across limitless dull silver water under a dull sky mottled with opalescent blue and violet. A dim pink sunset streaked the West, and ahead of us the full moon hung, pale orange, thin and transparent as a disk of tissue paper. A scatter of low, bald islands lay to the north ; they were no more than black streaks in the luminous water. A few sharp-winged birds circled over them, black as the islands. For the first time, Sweden looked Northern — an empty, strippeddown landscape under a thin, too-distant sky. It would be easy enough, in the loneliness and the long ambiguous twilight, to see trolls in the rising swirls of mist.

I was awakened in the morning by metallic clankings and loud, musical Swedish bellows. The branch of a fir tree was sticking through the porthole. As I watched, it slowly withdrew, moving out and down. Evidently the Juno was in a lock and rising. It was all of five o’clock.

Everybody else was dressed and out on deck, too, where we watched the crew, sunburned boys in their teens, working lock gates by hand. They wore heavy gloves and heaved slowly on enormous levers which moved circularly, like a windlass. This was the old section of the canal, overhung with thick fir trees and light, drooping birches. Sunlight through the trees splashed the water with green and gold as the Juno nosed among leaves and needles.

Breakfast, like luncheon and dinner on the previous day, involved a wondrous variety of foods — but fruit was not among them. Since Scandinavia is well supplied with prosperous fruit shops, the natives must eat the stuff, just as they must occasionally drink a little water. But both these substances are treated like secret vices; I never saw any local consume either in public.

On second thought, that is not true. I saw a large family party, celebrating something or other in a Göteborg hotel, openly eat strawberries and whipped cream. The berries were the final item, following one of those Swedish desserts that look, to the foreign eye, far too beautiful to eat — a castle of frozen and whipped cream with a moat of spun sugar and turrets of chocolate wafers, the whole eaten under a flood of chocolate sauce. A small boy in the party had three helpings and finished with two of strawberries. I thought this child, now visibly cream-logged, would be ill, but I underestimated Swedish youth. He staggered out triumphant.

The Juno rose through lock after lock, climbing up to Lake Viken. This section of the canal is narrow, winding, and almost scandalously picturesque. Woods overhang it, wild flowers bob along the towpath, and occasional fields rise green to distant farmhouses. In one of these glades, two animals were observed. The inevitable loudmouthed know-it-all (they’re the same from every country, but this one happened to be Swiss) identified them as fawns, but a splinter party insisted they were large hares. Unless Swedish fawns hop, they were.

The canal became difficult, and one of the crew was put ashore with a line to maneuver the Juno by hitching to a succession of worn stone bollards. It was slow work, and I had time to watch a small boy fishing in a pool alongside the canal, which at this point seemed to be intruding on somebody’s millpond. He caught nothing, having his attention on the Juno and her problems, but his luck had been good until we arrived. A plastic bag containing at least two dozen pale golden fish lay under a tree behind him.

Lake Viken produced a variety of channel markers — sticks, lights, buoys, and orange-colored poles with bunches of brush tied on top like misplaced juniper bushes. Sea gulls inhabit these tufts, and so do ducks and slim-necked spotted birds resembling small loons. The bird watcher aboard called them black-throated divers, and kindly loaned her glasses to anybody who wanted a close look at ducklings or divers or a nest containing spotted eggs of a strange greenish-liver color.

East of Viken, the canal drops, having made its way over a ridge 300 feet above sea level. The first lock down was exciting — we arrived on a balcony from which the Juno seemed to fall much faster than she had previously risen. Besides, we were holding up traffic on two drawbridges, one for vehicles (three farm trucks and a bicycle) and one for pedestrians (none).

VÄTTERN is another large lake, although no match for Vänern. The Juno entered it at a small summer resort with a harbor crammed full of pleasure boats, whose owners were busy with paint and varnish. Sometime after lunch, an irregular streak of green vapor on the eastern horizon announced Vadstena, the only town on the route where it is possible to go ashore and look around.

Seen first as a green mist with a splash of white at the left and a red hump in the center, Vadstena slowly solidified into a town. It is an old town, with a row of large green trees topping a stone-faced waterfront, and behind them, low buildings of gray stone. The bronze-tipped towers of a Renaissance castle bristle at one end of the waterfront, a pointed ecclesiastical spire rises at the other, and a stumpy red tower sits in the middle.

The Juno worked her way daintily up a slip already occupied by floating timber and a couple of midget freighters, and tied up opposite the turn into the castle moat. The moat was full of sleek, pretty little powerboats, and the tree-shaded park along the breakwater was well sprinkled with people picnicking, rambling, riding bicycles, or just basking in the sun. A boy and girl with a portable radio waved at us and hospitably turned up the volume.

Arrangements for coping with sightseers at Vadstena were dependent on the Juno’s flustered little guide and several local entrepreneurs, one of them with a bus. Mistrusting the lot, I set out on foot across the park for what I took, because of the red tower, to be the center of town. It was, although the tower was not at all what I had thought it to be, turning out a church rather than the town hall.

Vadstena is quite small; I suspect it can be walked end to end and side to side in half an hour, and nearly one fourth of the area involved is the waterfront park.

This park contained, along with all its trees, historical plaques, monastery ruins, flowers, and loungers, a life-size statue of a nude nymph. She stood on a small plinth surrounded by a bed of fading tulips in which two old coots with shovels were supposedly working. When I came up, they were hearing an oration from a third man, a fellow clothed in a black business suit and an air of authority. The diggers stood on opposite sides of the statue, each with his shovel thrust into the ground, one foot propped on the plinth and one elbow braced on the shovel handle. The tulips waved around their feet, and the nymph, blowsy and blank-eyed, simpered between them. When I laid my hand on the camera, the tableau dissolved into hardworking Swedish propriety.

There was no other hard work visible in Vadstena. The streets are lined with low stone buildings which, if not actually survivals from the original fifteenth-century town, have a proper look of medieval indolence. Lilacs blossomed around these structures, and the inhabitants idled along the narrow sidewalks with the look of people who had never hurried in their lives and never expected to. Some modern souvenir and camera shops have been discreetly inserted in the old buildings, and the proprietors of these proved to be far from idle. I went in to buy film and barely escaped the acquisition of a vast quantity of handsome handmade lace. (I think it was a tablecloth.)

Down a side street I found the grocery store, not self-service but otherwise American, even to familiar labels on the cans, and went mad in the fruit department. I reached St. Birgit’s Church encumbered with apples, pears, grapes, and oranges. I thought I had done well to resist the bananas.

St. Birgit was a formidably pious lady, whose posthumous influence spread far beyond her native Sweden. She founded the monastery at Vadstena, and in the fifteenth century the town was a flourishing center of pilgrimages. The church was not finished in Birgit’s lifetime, but it was completed with respect for her orders. She wanted a church “plainly made, humble and strong.”

Zigzagging through the foundations of vanished cloisters where rambler roses frothed over the old stonework, I reached the back door of the church and found it locked. The main doors were open, however, and to my surprise, I had the place to myself. There was no custodian to collect the posted entrance fee, or sell the historical pamphlets, or prevent vandalism to the saints and angels which stand among the austere Gothic pillars. Silent, simple, its high clear windows shimmering with the water-reflected light that gives all Vadstena the look of something not quite solid, St. Birgit’s Church was infinitely pleasant. It proved to contain very little in the way of royal tombs and military memorials, and a considerable number of medieval carvings, statues faded to the umber and smoke colors of the old wood. Some were naive and some sophisticated, and the great crucifix hanging from the rood arch had a grave authority that justified its guidebook name — the triumphal crucifix.

I walked back along the waterfront and reached the dock in time for a quick look at the outside of the castle, red-brown stone in an eclectic Renaissance goulash, one of those buildings where a muddle of anachronistic details has been miraculously united into a single coherent style. A fine castle, in short. The inside is supposedly seeable, but no custodian could be found and no unlocked door. Some kind of repairs were under way on the walls and outbuildings backing the graveled inner court. The guidebook I had picked up in town revealed that the correctness of this enterprise was already the subject of historical dispute, which may explain why work seemed to be in abeyance rather than in progress. A workman trundled an empty wheelbarrow across the bridge and through the great carved archway, set it down on the gravel waste, sighed, and went quietly away.

So did I, joining the line of passengers boarding the Juno, which was whistling for its wandering cargo. About half the party carried paper bags from the fruit shop, and the rest were licking juice from their fingers and faces. Everybody had been struck by the same enthusiasm, including, we discovered at dinner, the Juno's chef, who served up a Goblin Market of every fruit to be had in Vadstena.

Despite the visual charm of Vadstena and the concessions of the cook, most of the Juno's passengers were feeling abused. The town was not as innocently drowsy as it looked. My colleagues had been charged seventy-five cents apiece by the local guides for a glance at the castle, a look at the church, a spiel that told nothing of interest about either, and delivery into the hands of the lace shop. Moreover, the bus seats had been harder than rock. Complaint was particularly loud from the returned emigrants — Swedish-Americans from Minnesota and Wisconsin — who thought the affair a poor welcome home. The Australians took it philosophically. “We’ve been touched all over Europe,” said one; “Why not here?” “Touched?” roared his friend happily. “Face it, man — we’ve been mauled. That’s what travelers are for.”

They won no converts. Discontent seethed on the Juno throughout the evening, and there were only seven candidates for sightseeing at Berg.

THE Berg locks, which we reached a little before eleven, briskly lower the canal 132 feet into Lake Roxen. The descent is made through fifteen locks, none of exceptional length, and as the Juno arrived at the uppermost gate, the view down the hillside suggested an immense staircase of mirrors descending into some ominous, shadowy underworld.

The nightlong twilight of the Northern spring does curious things to perspective. All shadow turns indiscriminately black, but pale surfaces seem to reflect light by some intricate balance of color, texture, and angle. The yellow blossoms of a field of rape glow like neon, establishing their whereabouts immovably, but a girl in a yellow dress, standing on the near edge of the field, may fade and become a giantess looming dimly on the far side of it. At Berg, the sandy towpath obligingly descended with the canal while various whitepainted posts and benches hung spookishly in midair.

Going through the Berg locks is tricky as well as spectacular; there is time to go ashore, walk half a mile to an old nunnery and its restored church, examine both, and catch up with the boat in the lowest lock. The Juno's captain emeritus, making the run for the last time, brought around a little woman with a flashlight as guide for anybody who wished to make the excursion to Vreta Kloster.

The Juno was already beginning to lower as we scuttled ashore, not on the regular gangway but via a single narrow plank with cleats on it. The flashlight shook in the guide’s hand. The poor woman was plainly scared, not of the gangway but of her assignment. She explained apologetically, as we sloshed through long grass heavy with dew, that her English was inadequate to the business.

I gathered (it was necessary to ask her to repeat everything three times) that she had been blackmailed into the job with exhortations on the cultural glory of Sweden and the honor of the Gota Line. She was a gentle, timid lady, the local librarian or possibly a schoolteacher, and would have been far happier at home. Our guide, she said sadly, should have been a university student — “but they get tired.” I could see why. We were trotting toward the church tower, visible as a pale streak above thick black trees, through a wet field in the middle of the night. The Diana, the return boat from Stockholm, was already under way and would come in at five the next morning, when the same guide would be expected to turn out and prattle of antiquities.

The nunnery proved to be little more than foundations, rough stone nearly invisible in the thick grass. The guide’s flashlight picked up part of a wall, a heap alleged to have been a stairway, and the trench which accommodated, in a wooden pipe from a nearby spring, the oldest known running water supply in Sweden. It was laid down in the eleventh century, certainly a respectable age for plumbing.

The church was intact but somewhat difficult to enter; our guide was uncertain where the key was hidden. A girl materialized out of the shadows and delivered the key, which had not been hidden at all, and we stood in the dark doorway while electrical switches snapped uneventfully. The guide, almost in tears, gave up and announced that we must make do with the flashlight. We prowled around the church, seeing things in long blurring vistas and sudden concentrations of detail. The stone paving clicked under our feet, and the echoes fell back, softly, from the high invisible arches above us.

There was much wall painting to be seen in this church; diaper patterns, flower medallions, and holy figures that had survived whitewashing by Reformation zealots and removal of the whitewash by modern restorers. Vaults and side chapels ran to the predictable royal relics and tombs of local lords, with one unexpected addition — a vault belonging to the Douglas family, descendants of an adventurer who sold a good Scottish sword on the Continent during the Thirty Years’ War. Nat Gordon went home to hang in Edinburgh Castle, but Robert Douglas died a field marshal and a count of Sweden. Or, depending on which guidebook one chooses to trust, a plain decent colonel. Great black banners hang above his tomb, and the walls of the octagonal vault are covered with the arms of this Douglas and all his connections, violently carved in wood and bright with paint and gold leaf.

Since the restoration of Vreta Kloster Church is a matter of some pride, the guide was making a strong effort to tell us how it had been done. Her English was shaky at best, and unforeseen questions threw her into inarticulate panic. I had foolishly tried to find out where a group of statues — crude but powerful figures in wood — had been concealed during the years of Protestant severity. “They were here all the time,” said the guide, while a young Danish passenger whispered, “She’s wrong. They had to be hidden somewhere. But it’s no use asking. She doesn’t understand me either.”

It was the question of dates that finally brought us to catastrophe. The church was restored between 1914 and 1917, but it was built over several centuries — begun in the eleven hundreds, with changes and additions occurring into the eighteenth century, when the old tower had to be replaced. Our guide, weak on figures, became wildly entangled in her attempts to distinguish between modern restorations, ancient alterations, and additions of any period. Her troubles were complicated by a man with four cameras and a suspicious mind. Gimlet-eyed, he pursued the age of this vault and of that statue, getting increasingly unlikely answers from the guide. At last he pointed threateningly at the woman and demanded, “Is any part of this church more than one hundred years old?”

The guide gasped helplessly, shrugged, and then turned her flashlight straight up toward the roof, where unknown saints peered down from a stiff Gothic paradise. There could be no doubt of the age of those images, and Thomas was reduced to an acquiescent grunt.

But the guide was no longer acquiescent. She marched straight out of the church, leaving the whole ungrateful troop of us to blunder after her in the dark.

The Juno was sinking into the last lock, all lit up and looking like a chandelier at the bottom of a well. Our guide was paid off with apologies, and we jumped aboard (there was no nonsense about a gangway this time) without incident. I was sorry. I had truly hoped that the man with the cameras would fall into the lock, as fair reward for abusing a defenseless guide and plagiarizing Mark Twain.