Heltne Family Reunion

That's a Heltne. Mari Heltne. There are quite a few Heltnes, as it turns out, all descended from immigrants from Luster, far up the Sognefjord, in Norway, and off a bit to the west, on Lustrafjord. If you enter, "Luster, Norway" into Google Earth, you will find it; a small place, deep into the heart of Norway. It was from there that their name-bearers came by boat, down the Luster fjord, out into Sognefjord, and to the sea. Eventually, they found Lake Mills, Iowa, deep into the heart of America. They lie there, now.

The great-grandchildren, and their children met--some for the first time--in Lake Mills, and walked among the markers of their common bonding. They went into the musty churches, struggling now with time and the consolidation of their parents and grandparents farms into endless rows of huge farms; farms with fewer homes, fewer schools, fewer towns.

Paul and Jean Heltne--Jean, like many of us, having married into their story--did most of the work of pulling the scattered family together.

We drove down the roads that their founders had ridden down behind the teams of horses that once did what corporate machinery does today, finding in minutes what had taken hours behind the horses; finding only driveways where the farm houses had stood, where they grew up, or where their parents and grandparents had told them about.

The creek was still there, tamed.

Some of the houses were still there, disguised.

The barn on the farm where Wallace Stegner had been born no longer remembered what it had been to be young.

Mostly, the family was there, straining to remember what they could, laying their memories out side-by-side to find the earliest versions, putting together the jig-saw picture they each had pieces of, noting the missing pieces, wondering who might have them, and how many were probably lost.

They promised to meet again. Too much had been lost. There was much still to be remembered; much to tell each other.

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