The Valhalla of hockey arenas, the Camden Yards on ice, the place Wayne’s World should copy by first moving a mountain to South Florida-it all starts 20 feet under the Pedersen family’s basement atop Mt. Hovdetoppen.
That’s right. They don’t need game tickets. They need a Batpole. It’s so close to their living room they can clap to the game music wafting through the mountain.
They don’t clap, of course. They never do. When Odd and Aud Pedersen-yes, the Odd Couple amid this Odd Olympic Story-moved here in 1970, they were middle-aged parents with three boys who fell in love with “the most beautiful house in Gjovik,” as she says.
“Look at the woods we have around us. Look at the neighbors not too close. Look at the view from our home.”
All true. All House Beautiful material, from the 1911 Georgian architecture structure, to the wood floors covered with Norwegian rugs, to the postcard view overlooking the snow-covered city and across frozen Lake Mjosa.
But as Aud Pedersen talks, she stands in a cracked doorway leaning against a cracked door that can’t close completely. The ceiling is cracked. The walls are cracked.
“Dynamite,” she says.
She doesn’t say it like Jimmy Walker. She means how they created the cavern inside the mountain five times a day, six days a week for nine months. Dynamite.
“The house goes like this,” she says, grabbing the door and shaking it like a paint mixer.
Down below it was just rock being cleared. A cozy, quaint arena was built to go along with a swimming pool, which Odd Pedersen notes sits directly under the apple tree out back.
The arena’s price tag: $20 million to Norwegian taxpayers, plus a pending lawsuit from the Pedersens . Their home’s damage is estimated at $37,000, and the city gave them roughly half of that.
“When they were doing dynamite, they’d phone us and say, `In eight minutes we start,’ ” she remembers. “We would stand and hold pictures or furniture or lamps. We’d guess what would fall today.”
It wouldn’t help much. China cracked. Crystal cracked. Windows would regularly be blown out into the flower garden. Odd Pedersen says they replaced “50 or more.”
A British couple visiting the family moved out. Friends refused to come over. The Pedersens became celebrities, in some sense, by refusing to move. They asked the city to find them a temporary home, then decided against it.
“We could eat dinner, but the table would be shaking, and the food would be moving on the table,” says Aud, 65, two years older than her husband, a retired oil executive.
But the Pedersens think the arena is beautiful. They are sometimes proud of it. They like hockey, too, and saw a game under their house a few months back, which is more than they’ll get to do this Olympics.
“No tickets,” Odd says.
He shrugs. He smiles. What else can he do? The family that lived through the work parts of the arena now can’t even enjoy the best times.
It’s all very odd to Aud and Odd.
Very odd indeed.
