A Viking Row?

"This is dumb," I thought, the first time I saw the Viking Row. A stadium full of grown adults sitting down in formation, miming an oar stroke, chanting "ro." This isn't a Norwegian thing. We've never done this. I didn't grow up rowing anything. At best, we waved our flags and sang the national theme. Then it showed up a second time. And a third. Then one day my daughter wanted to watch Norway vs Brazil, and she wanted to do the row.

I was eleven when Norway played Brazil in the 1998 World Cup. I don't remember the score without looking it up. I remember the room. I remember who was there. I remember it being a big deal. I remember it was a night where everyone was watching TV at the same time, no matter where you were.

And now, my daughter, ten years old, watched Norway play Brazil at the World Cup. Twenty-eight years later, and Norway won this time too. History was repeating itself. My daughter was experiencing the same thing I was. Same tension. Same air in the room. Same shared connection with her friends who were not even in the same house. But she did one thing I never did. She rowed.

So I watched another video of people doing the row, then a compilation by the police, army and marine also joining in, and then I saw a photo of the crown prince doing the same, together with hundreds of people in central Oslo. And dumb turned into fascination. There was something special watching several thousand strangers move in perfect unison in an unspoken agreement that this was how we showed support. Apparently, this was what Norwegians did. We used to be Vikings after all. It might have been made-up by some football supporter, but it did its job in uniting the country.

Back then it was something dark, a tragedy, that pulled us together. Such a shame we could not have accomplished it without that. But I'm noticing something similar now, as the country rows in unison. Not the same thing, as this time it is an active choice, not a reaction. We are one people again. But more than that, the silly Viking theme to it all says something more. We're more than just one people. We're one tribe. A pack.

Which I think is why this resonates so well for me, and maybe for others too. Humans are pack animals, but we don't live in packs anymore. Most of us live in units of two parents and however many kids, sealed off in our own houses, managing our own logistics, largely alone. "It takes a village to raise a child" is a saying we all nod along to and then go home to a house with no village in it. We've made raising children an almost impossibly isolated task compared to how humans did it for most of our existence, and then we wonder why it feels so hard. Maybe the row, and the accompanying sense of unity, reminds us of something we have lost, and maybe should reclaim?

This line of thought is no stranger to the world of sci-fi. James Holden, in The Expanse, has eight parents: five fathers and three mothers, all of whom contributed DNA, sharing the workload of raising a child. In Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed we see how children on the anarchist moon of Anarres are raised communally, in shared dormitories, by something closer to the whole community than any single set of parents. In neither of these depictions is the solution painted as ideal. In The Expanse, Holden's parents did it to save on taxes. While in The Dispossessed a mother who insists on keeping her daughter is judged as selfish, and the community punishes her by keeping her partner away for years, long enough for their daughter to forget his face.

Yet, I still think the concept of something beyond the nuclear family is worth pursuing. I don't think any of us are about to give up our houses and move into communes together, I certainly am not. But maybe we can start small. Maybe it is enough to start with a row, even if it is just a few weeks of togetherness until Norway is eliminated from the cup, or even win, and we all retreat back into our sealed-off houses. I’ll take anything that reminds us what we actually are. A tribe. A pack. Not thousands of households of four, quietly managing alone.

-- Amir