Transportation and prostitution go way back. Travellers going from one place to another needed a place to rest, a bite to eat, a pint of ale and… Besides, the travellers were a long way from home and nobody back in the village would ever know. The picture of home, so far away in a world where distances were measured in days, had in fact taken on a faded and unreal quality. Perhaps home didn’t even exist.
That great salt river, Sognefjord, that brings the ocean into the middle of Norway has a logical stopping point where the tide turns and the current quickens. In the days when men pushed and rowed their salt water catches deep inland, they stopped at this point, at an Inn of dubious reputation, now the site of Kviknes Hotel.
In the New World, where one of the Kviknes brothers learned how to run a proper hostelry, the association of ‘the boardinghouse’ with women of ill repute could hardly be stronger, inherited and amplified by the Irish and the English.
Epidemiologists trace sexually transmitted diseases along highways and shipping routes. In Africa, the history of AIDS runs along the roads, pooling at the truck stops.
And in our own clockwork societies of Europe, prostitutes hang out near the train stations.
They aren’t the only ones hanging out near the stations, of course. Along with prostitution comes drug selling and consuming. If anything, the drug addicts are the most visible signs of vice in the area. Pale revenants clustered together, shoulders hunched against the cold. Compared with the addicts, the Nigerian street walkers a block or two away seem almost jolly, rolls of smooth brown flesh falling out of pink shorts and ruffled shirts. But it is their trade to seem so.
But what about our traveller? Where is he? There are no more farm boys coming in to sell livestock or milk or cheese. No more travelling tinkers and hardly a sailor at all unless you count the crew of the cruise ships docked at Aker Brygge.
The travellers are at the airport, at Gardermoen, whisked past the station on the airport train, hustled into taxis and shuttled to glass windowed hotels. There are women of easy virtue there too, I suppose, dialled up on demand or sipping slowly on a cocktail at the bar.
Meanwhile, back at the train station, the shoulder blades of the addicts lift their thin jackets off their backs, the street walkers laugh and shout to keep their spirits up (customers being few since the new law criminalizing the purchase of sex went into effect), and men of vaguely criminal intent slope around making quick sideways eye movements.
Time to take the train back to the airport.
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