LIGHT TRAFFIC

At home in Montreal, people love to tell me I look Scandinavian. You Swedish? After a few days in Norway, I can confirm that is the biggest fallacy since creationism. My suspicion this was the case arose in Heathrow’s Terminal 5 where my brother and I waited, jetlagged and vaguely bewildered for British Airways flight 0766 to Oslo.

In the vicinity of gate A13, where my brother and I made our way after he napped in fits for an hour, doubled over his knapsack, and I sleep-purchased (it’s like sleep-walking but more expensive) snazzy sunglasses from the airport’s Gucci store, I started noticing a different breed of people.

Decidedly blond – the kind of blond most people who consider themselves blond stopped being around age 2 – tall and fit, they seemed blessed with iniquitous concentrations of good looks, good-naturedness and good taste. All great posture and gentle smiles, they appeared to belong and evolve in this world without doubt, apprehension or effort. Just looking at them made me immediately regret the several (free!) scotch-and-sodas merrily ingested at 35,000 ft over the Atlantic and feel very very tired.

The female representatives were especially remarkable. Tanned and relaxed-looking after some tropical holiday, a mother of two in a teal button-down shirt with frills around the bust, thick blond hair, and turquoise eyes, positively beamed. Taller than me by at least a couple inches and svelte like a triathlete, she was also somehow the mother of the two young kids – equally blond and tanned – pulling a tiny Mickey Mouse suitcase behind her.

Minutes before the gate closed, the archetypal Norwegian amazon floated by. An apparition. Hers was the kind of beauty so fierce you suddenly have compassion for men and can easily imagine yourself stuttering if you were for some reason stuck asking her for the time.

Wearing a black trench coat over a loose-knit ivory top, million dollar legs gently encased in black designer jeans and book-ended by fine beige suede ankle booties, all she carried were a soft, caramel-coloured leather purse and a giant diamond ring. She was perhaps 35. Her face, a languorous mix of Audrey Hepburn, Danielle Richards and Giselle Bundchen was lightly freckled on the cheeks and came with the kinds of eyelashes you could’ve fanned Cleopatra with. When she moved, you moved – if only to get a better staring angle.

As the plane carried my gently snoring and twitching brother and I toward the land of fjords and Vikings, I couldn’t quite get her face out of my head. Before falling asleep myself, somewhere between the breakfast tray and the Independent‘s impossible crossword puzzle, I thought that “being born under a lucky star” perhaps had a lot less to do with race, creed or social status than with the height of one’s cheekbones. Hers were sky-high.

Once in Oslo’s airport, my heart missed a beat when I saw the woman, radiant and unruffled, take the line for non-Norwegians at customs. How could she not be Norwegian? What about this entire narrative I was weaving in my head? Could she be Croatian? Finnish? Suddenly, she looked up from her iPhone and realized she was in the wrong queue. She blushed almost imperceptibly, flashed a dizzying smile at the short Asian man standing next to her, and with a shampoo-ad swish of her thick blond pony-tail she was gone.

Oslo. Women with dog.