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.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. Even when all they wanted to do w

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there

SmokeSound

Search This Blog