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Smokin' Mirrors!

A Google Map of Norway
Norway, up in the northwest corner of Europe, is shaped something like a long, raggedy teardrop.  The first time I ever visited Norway, arriving on a ferry from Denmark, I saw its southern coast, and I remember thinking:  "It's a damned rock!"

My father, and my mother's parents, were born in Norway, rather to the left side of the wide bulge below the name, "Norway" on the map; my father, right on the coast, and my maternal grandparents a bit north and back from the coast.

In the middle of the wide part of the country, and farther south, is a small town, Rjukan, up in the mountains, but deep down in a narrow valley; so deep that in the winter, the sun is too low in the sky to shine down on the town.  In winter, the people who live in Rjukan have to take a tram up the mountainside to see the sun.  Until recently.

Recently, the town built a complex of computer-controlled mirrors up on the mountainside to reflect winter sunlight directly down into the town.

The waterfall outside town is called, "Rjukanfossen":  The Smoking Waterfall.  At about the time my father was born in Norway, at the beginning of the 20th century, a guy named Sam (Sam Eide) proposed to another hydroelectric company that they build a power generating plant there, at a cost equal to twice the Norwegian national budget.  They generated electricity, extracted hydrogen from the water, and almost to their own amazement, produced heavy water as a byproduct.

Heavy water?  Right!  Do you smell something nuclear?  The Germans did when they occupied Norway during World War II.  As a result, Norwegians and the Allies, both, sabotaged the power plant.  You might remember the movie, The Heroes of Telemark, and one of those episodes.

But now there is a bank mirrors up on the hill, reflecting winter sun down into the town square.  One of the news stories showed two young women, tossing off their parkas, to sit in the reflected light.  "Do you have sunscreen?", someone asked them.  "Oh, yes!" they replied.  "Level 50!"

(Actually, they said, "Brrr . . . 50".  And that was not the temperature.  It was cold!)

Norway really is a rock; not a pile of rocks:  a rock.  A really steep rock, carved into furrows by ancient glaciers, and invaded by the sea (fjords).

To be "born on the sunny side" in Norway, is to be born on the south-facing side of the mountain that drops down into the fjord, or valley.  That was also the prosperous side of the fjord, catching the sun, encouraging crops, brightening the attitude.  But geography is not destiny.  In Rjukan, they put up some smokin' mirrors!

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