I had not thought a lot about the consequences of living in a small city, in a small country with a small population before I moved to Bergen. None of that entered my mind. What kept me up at night was the possibility of getting trapped there in winter. That the airport would be closed due to the snow and ice and below freezing temperatures. The irony is it was only ever a volcano that closed the airport, for a couple of weeks. Which was a surprise to me who thought of volcanoes among a thousand other natural disasters (tsunamis, earthquakes, fire, mud slides) that could turn a holiday in Indonesia into a level 5 disaster.
No, I was an urban girl. I came from a city that had a population of under one million but represented 10 million people in a country of over 300 million people. I hadn’t calculated into the move how small the world would get by moving to Bergen. I didn’t think about how few ice cream flavors would be in the freezer. I didn’t think about the possibility of friends seeing a man I had a no strings attached relationship with locking lips with another woman in public, something he never did with me. And I didn’t think I’d meet anyone famous, at least not anyone famous outside of Norway famous.
Then one day a former American president came to town. I’d known for a couple of months Bill Clinton was scheduled to give a seminar in Bergen. Some kind of strange publicity tour (because it was an international circuit) for Hilary Clinton’s run for president in 2007. I wasn’t so interested in what he might have to say. I never found his speeches inspiring – they were too long for that –, but I thought his visit to Bergen would be my best chance ever to see a US president in the flesh. The price of a ticket? The equivalent of 300 dollars.
I wasn’t interested in handing over so many of my hard-earned kroner to the Clinton Foundation. I blew off the idea, and when the day came, I took a walk the long way home through a mountain path above the city at about 400 meters. Spring was the best in Scandinavia. The days were long and on the spring side of midsummer, still getting longer. The gods bathed Bergen in daylight for most of the 24 hours. The light until so late was so distracting, I would often forget it was time to go home to go to bed.
My work building at the university was situated at the foot of Ulriken, one of the seven mountain peaks Bergen is famous for. In late spring and summer, I ran up to Ulriken with two Norwegian men from the lab who made it up to the peak and back in about 45 minutes (not me). I often took another path with a start point also near the university leading to one of the other peaks, Fløyen, which rose up over the center of town where my apartment was. The day Bill Clinton came to town was sunny, so I lollygagged home on the path to Fløyen. The hike was more effort and would take longer to reach my apartment, but chance had delivered the best of spring days in Bergen.
I started off on my hike, shaded from the sun by the trees tricked out in their full green dress, letting my mind work the kind of magic that happens only when you’re out in nature. I reached Fløyen and zigzagged my way down to sea level on the path that winds through the streets lined with picturesque white wood-paneled homes overlooking the fjord Bergen is built upon. I stopped in the center of the city, waiting at a light to cross the street where a crowd had already gathered. My mind registered “unusual” because most in the crowd were dressed in black suits and white shirts. But my eyes were drawn to the man in the center. That man was former President Bill Clinton, in a Polo shirt and golf pants. After playing a round of golf, he had set out on a walking tour of the city escorted by his secret service.
A few locals were there, including a mother with a baby taking pictures with the president. I’m shy, but I’m an American and I thought, it’s my only chance. I need to introduce myself and shake his hand.
“My name is Janice Nigro and I’m an American living in Bergen,” I said, as we shook hands.
He put his arm around me and said, “Bergen is a beautiful city.”
I followed his comment up with something drippy like, “It’s a nice place to go for a hike.”
I didn’t have a question ready to ask the president. I could have thought one up after a few decades of life on this planet, but I hadn’t. And even if I had, I never would have framed it in the context of meeting a president on the streets of Bergen, Norway. The closest I ever thought I would get to a president was through my father, a chest surgeon, who was put on call for Nixon while visiting Chicago in case of an emergency health event. That’s as close as I thought I would ever get to a person of power.
When I think back on it, Clinton is a president I had always thought was intelligent. I didn’t agree with most of his policies, or his personal behavior, but I thought he was intelligent. On top of it, he had some “it” factor because he managed to get people to the negotiating table who otherwise threatened to smoke each other. The “it” factor didn’t transmit to me through the TV screen. He gave long winded speeches, and unlike other females, I didn’t find him to be physically attractive. I never understood why women lost their minds over him. He wouldn’t have been a man, even as governor or president, I would have “Lewinskied.” Apparently, I was wrong about that. One of the women I worked with for a few months claimed she would have performed a Lewinski on him if she had been his intern.
When I met him, I got it. His voice quality automatically puts you at ease. There’s something about an Arkansas accent. While you can imagine that it maybe got a lot of women to do things they might not have otherwise, it was also an important tool at the diplomatic table. I realized when I met him that his combination of intelligence and physical attributes made him into the leader of the world that he was.
I thought I was in Bergen to learn about all things Norwegian, and brain tumors, not to come to a realization about a former US president.
Clinton had to give the seminar, so his secret service was moving him along to the hotel he was staying at where a crowd had congregated.
Police were everywhere. Norwegian police don’t carry guns, and while I watched as they monitored the crowd, one pulled a diet coke out of the pocket of his fatigues. Later someone told me, “Don’t kid yourself. They have sharpshooters sitting in positions where they could take you down before anyone knew what was happening.”
I waited. I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I decided to wait with the crowd of a couple hundred strangers. Over an hour later, Clinton emerged from the hotel smiling and waving. He spent a few minutes with his fans, even in this small town in Scandinavia, handing out some signed copies of one of his books before his secret service forced him into a black van and drove off to his seminar.
I texted some of my friends, moments after his van took off for the symphony hall for at the most 500 meters down the road. Another American, a Russian by birth, texted back, I felt it, I felt you would meet him.
I heard the organizers never sold that many tickets and that they were giving them away to fill up the auditorium.
A couple weeks later I was reading a Norwegian tabloid magazine while getting my hair cut. Reading not deep material was still a good way to learn useful Norwegian words. I learned the word for masturbation while I was reading an article in a woman’s magazine. I guess I didn’t feel invested while reading articles in another language about topics you would never get caught dead reading in public in your own language. Maybe not well thought out because the woman cutting my hair could read those articles too.
The reason I had picked up this tabloid over the others lying there was the cover story was reporting an alleged Bill Clinton affair. I told my sister, “I looked to see if my name was in there.” The only news coverage I got was that my hair had blown into the corner of a photo the local newspaper had taken when I met Bill out on the street.
“That’s my hair!” I told a colleague at work when we were looking at the photos. And I thought for a moment who am I going to meet next, Elvis?
About a year and half after Clinton was in Bergen, Barack Obama, the new president of the United States, was on his way to Oslo to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded.
I never quite understood why he received the award. I had a cynical view of the award process and suggested it was Norway’s two minutes in the news every year. Norwegians and other foreigners alike rejected my theory on Obama winning the prize. At dinner one night I said to a group of Europeans, “I don’t get it. I think he’s right now deciding whether to send 40,000 troops to Afghanistan in just a couple days. And anyway, what could he possibly have done in the two months he was in office to be nominated.” On top of it, I thought of all the other regular people who gave up their possessions or their freedom fighting for the poor or oppressed. The committee decided to give the money and recognition to a man who already had an outsized ego, maybe deservedly so, but he didn’t need the Nobel Peace Prize to prove it.
“It’s for what he will do,” a French woman said at the dinner party.
I had high expectations for the man – young, smart, respectable – although I wasn’t in agreement with his attraction to big government. At that point, I had been living in Norway for four years, and if it hadn’t been clear to me before, I now knew more big government was very un-American. But Europeans loved the man and were proud that America had elected a biracial person to the highest political office in the land.
I complained about the fact that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for no reason for months. And I joked again and again that the committee picked him just to promote the country.
“Norway’s one minute in the international news every year,” I’d whine.
One night the Norwegian girlfriend of one of my friends from Norwegian class said, “Oh, they awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize just to meet him. There were heated discussions about who would get to go to the parties.”
“Thank you!” I said.
I had thought about going to Oslo myself to at least get a glimpse of the man who was running my country but didn’t. Two presidents in Norway, who would have ever thought that could happen?
After the Bill Clinton incident, I thought I had the chance to meet anyone famous who might be roaming the streets of Bergen. When the Rolling Stones came to town, I believed I might meet them out on the town having a beer at Verftet (a drinking spot) or somewhere else on the fjord.
Nope. None of that happened, but it gave me a different sense of the way life worked in a small quiet town in a small quiet country. I never would have had the opportunity to get that close to Bill Clinton in the USA. I might have seen him rolling by in a James Bond Q-designed bullet and bomb proof flying car, but that’s about it.
I didn’t hang up a blue dress in my closet. I don’t even remember what I was wearing, but his voice, I’ll never forget Bill Clinton’s voice.
Books…
Norwegian Lessons in Indonesia (2023)
An Accidental Artist: Discovering Creativity through Scuba Diving (2018)
Art for sale at AnemoneWatch on Square
Janice Nigro 
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