A non-holiday holiday

An old Danish friend came to visit.

He came with his wife and two boys aged 9 and 13. All except the younger boy are tall and speak English fluently but with a characteristic lilt.

We spent a couple days at the beach in Carlsbad and had a few barbecues on the back patio of a small place I have down there.

Over the course of ribs and wine, it was as though I was the one traveling instead of them, as they told stories about their lives in Aarhus, a city in the north of the huge Danish province of Jutland.

The nine-year-old rides his bicycle to the local soccer club where he practices and plays. His mother Anne rides her bicycle to a private counseling clinic that she runs. And my friend Simon, who long ago worked at Courthouse News, takes the train into his work at a Danish startup that was bought up by an American company.

Anne also belongs to a women’s swim club that is owned by the city. She takes short, cold swims in the icy Baltic and then relaxes in the sauna. 

She said the women’s club works as a place where women hang out on the pier in summer and talk to friends. The waiting list to get in is now quite long. To enter for her swim, she uses an electronic pass card that allows her through a turnstile.

Both parents have survived life-threatening illnesses where the cost of treatment was entirely covered by the Danish health system. Their university educations had also been covered by the Danish state.

At one of our barbecues, Simon was telling me a story about how policies of his American company came up against the Danish system that protects workers. It is now common for American startups to give their programmers vacations on an “as-needed” basis, which means there is pressure to not take vacations or work while on non-declared vacations.

When his company put those terms into Danish work contracts, the union representative for the programmers (everyone in Denmark belongs to a union, even freelance journalists) came back and said the vacation terms were irrelevant and could safely be ignored.

Every full-time worker is required by the national “ferieloven” or holiday law to receive a minimum of five weeks vacation every year — and also required to actually take the time.

Thus Simon’s vacation continued as I read about the recovery of his employer CrowdStrike — a computer security company that released a patch that blue-screened computers when it was installed.

The Danish family of four had gone on a grand tour of California, heading first to see the giant trees in Sequoia National Park, then up to Yosemite, over to San Francisco, then down the coast to Monterey and Santa Barbara, on to San Diego and its zoo, and then a few days at the beach in Carlsbad, before driving to Las Vegas and finally flying to New York and then home.

Seen through eyes new to the city by the bay, Anne told me, “San Francisco is very beautiful.”

But it led naturally to a discussion of the homeless population. Simon described a woman walking down the middle of the street in San Francisco clothed in almost nothing.

“In Denmark, the police would come.” He said the woman would be given health care, counseling and help in getting her life as close to normal as possible, with housing as part of the package. In essence, in Denmark, you are not allowed to fall outside the social system.

Their final day, as beautiful a SoCal beach day as you will get, with a light breeze, small surf, and clear, cool water, was spent in the great Pacific. The boys and Simon learned to ride the waves with boogie boards.  In the late afternoon, we walked into town for pizza and then, as we stood in line for ice cream, the nine-year-old said he wanted to go swimming as the sun set.

So he gave up his chance for ice cream and, with his mother, double-timed it to beach so he could take a swim before it was dark. Simon and I and the 13-year-old walked back with our ice cream and we could see them from the bluff that looks down onto the beach. The younger boy jumped through the waves as the sky grew dark, a sliver of a moon rose in the west, and pelicans in single-file skimmed along the face of a wave.

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