Tuesday, November 13, 2001 4:47:29 PM
Tycho Brahe

I've been sick lately, some flu that drags a body already too used by the years through fits of shivering alternating with sweating, twisting pain and groaning as the innumerable cable TV channels manage to run and rerun uninteresting movies, programs and Lord, pulease no more, talk shows that reveal the truly unappealing lives of unprepossessing people. (How did it get to a point where there are commercials about erectile dysfunction on TV?)

At a bookstore, I took a bleary eyed Saturday jaunt with a hard lump in my stomach and my nose temporarily cleared by medication; I came across a book about Tycho Brahe. Tycho lost his nose in a duel and had one fashioned out of metal, strapped to his face. No help from decongestant there. In a flash and a partial delirium I was transported back to the ferry that ran from Copenhagen to Aalborg.

I left New Experimental College, in the high north of Denmark, one spring break to visit Copenhagen. A back pack, my guitar (very hip) and a pumping arm, proper for European hitchiking. I got a little distance south, when I realized that by the end of summer with some luck I could probably mange to hitch the entire way. I stopped a NATO soldier and asked if there was a bus to Copenhagen. He said, or so I thought, “Oh, yes, there are many, many buses to Copenhagen.” The real translation was, “Oh yes, but it takes many, many buses to get to Copenhagen. You should take the train.” Wise advice that shortly I followed.

After a ride to the next town in a belching Mercedes Diesel Truck, I managed to convince the guy in the train station ticket window that I only wanted a one-way trip to Copenhagen. At least I think I only paid for a one way trip. Since I only spoke and could understand the most rudimentary Danish. I would point and gesticulate at what I thought was the train schedule. It could have been the breakfast menu; for all I know I ordered a bowl of Sugar Pops. It did quite a dance, and it did, after all, get me to my destination.

Copenhagen, I moved in a whirl. I walked passed Kierkegaard’s house. I imagined him pacing frantically the night with lights a blazing thinking about Regina. I smiled at each person on the street, convinced that I knew them intimately. I rubbed polsers, thin red skin hot dogs with a gray interior, in yellow mustard and red ketchup smeared on wax paper. Downed them in big gulps as I walked down to Nyhavn. Tivoli bright in old world amusement.Yes, even the little mermaid chaste and naked in the water. I walked and walked for days. And then I took the overnight Ferry from Copenhagen to Aalborg. I couldn’t afford a sleeping cabin so I found a seat in the cafeteria. Read, drank coffee, listened to the buzz of a familiar yet incomprehensible language. The ship traveled in a dense fog and I gave in to it. Got into that twilight world between sleep and waking that can only come when you are traveling.

A fog horn, honest to God! Bellowing like the creature in the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (yes it was from a Bradbury story called The Fog), sounds out into that good Oresund night. And somehow I arouse myself from the demi-slumber that engulfed me and I know that we are passing the Island of Hven, and the vestiges of Uraniborg, where Tycho and his crew labored on clear nights plotting accurate paths in the heaven, collecting monumental bits of astronomical information. Kepler, good assistant, eventually used the data to come up with his elliptical approach to the course of the planets. Tycho, Mr. Brahe, communing with the celestial orbs, face worn like the specter from the attic of the observatory, and his naked eye crew of regulars on that wet island, writing and observing and calculating. And me passing in the shroud of fog out to sea on my way to Aalborg. In the morning we docked to clear skies and I road the train north.