The Last Hunter: An American Family Album

Chapter One

My mother, Arlys, was born in 1920. Her parents, Oscar and Sarah Swenson, came from North Dakota and landed northeast of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, on one of the last patches of the Great Plains. Locally the area is called the Ponsford Prairie; geographically it has the empty feel of North Dakota. The farm had a narrow white house, white barn, wooden granary, chicken coop, machine shed, and well house; a windbreak to the west; a thin scattering of imported trees, including a row of lilacs in the yard. North Dakotans tend to cut down trees in order to name streets after them, but on my grandfather’s farm there were no trees to fuss about: unbroken fields stretched in all directions as flat and wide as God’s dinner plate. However, four miles to the south were the Smoky Hills, their rounded crowns blurred by hardwood and aspen, and just east of the farm the beginning of pine and lake country, with forests that stretched across northern Minnesota and Wisconsin and into Michigan. If my mother paused on the front steps of the farmhouse and looked about, a dark tree line would have circumscribed most of her little prairie.

In the fall, when Canada geese came through and when partridge season opened, she heard the far-off thudding report of shotguns, and in November the heavier poom-poom! of deer rifles in the hills. However, hunting seasons were not important to her or her two brothers. On the Swenson side of my family, there were no guns.

Oscar Swenson, my grandfather, was born in the south of Norway in 1894 and emigrated with his family in 1898. One of his earliest memories was of delivering water to rich men on the deck of the passenger ship. I imagine him as a Dickensian boy, hat in hand, wearing a rough wool shirt as he carries a water pail toward a man in a deck chair. The man is wrapped in a blanket against the salt chill; perhaps he wears muttonchops below a tall hat and is having a bowl of tobacco. Maybe he is reading. There’s a good chance he is annoyed at the little boy offering a wooden ladle full of water, or perhaps he is seasick, as the ship leans through heavy seas and the seagulls bark overhead and, grateful, he fishes out a coin for my grandfather. This is the ending I prefer, but the encounter itself is the thing—a transaction weighted with issues of wealth, class, and privilege.

In 1989, when I was thirty-nine, I heard the Hjemkomst call. I had a sabbatical from teaching, and my children were eleven and eight years old, ages that felt like a momentary respite from close parenting. Carrying with me information provided by my mother, who is the history keeper in our family, I flew from Minneapolis to Oslo. From there I continued by train to Kristiansand in the south of Norway; then by bus twenty kilometers northward along the narrowing Otra River, which flows to the sea; and finally east a jog to the village of Vennesla.

The morning after my arrival, and following a fine Norwegian breakfast of smoked salmon, scrambled eggs, lingon-berry jam on rye bread, and dark coffee, I explained my quest to the innkeeper. Arny was a thinning-haired blondish fellow—like most Scandinavians, older than he looked—and when I showed him a faded, black-and-white photo of my great-grandfather Carl Swenson’s house, his pale blue eyes lit up. In Norway (and in Ireland, my wife says), there is no greater way to create a stir and make friends than to arrive from America in search of family. Facebook has nothing on an original photo of the home place.

Arny made some calls, and distant relatives showed up within the half hour and carted me off for a couple of whirlwind days of eating: smørbrød (open sandwiches), gravlaks (raw, cured salmon with dill), sliced and dressed cucumbers, sild (pickled herring), Jarlsberg cheese, and all manner of sweets—krumkake, kringles, and rosettes. No lutefisk, thank God. After the initial hum and buzz, and as I got to know my long-lost relatives and hear their stories, I came to the conclusion that I knew in my bones: my great-grandfather had left Norway because of the rich men. They who controlled the rights to salmon fishing in the rivers and streams. They who owned the precious five percent of Norway’s arable land. They who hunted and, of course, owned guns.

Anton Chekhov, the Russian writer, was also a physician. But he came from peasant stock on one side of his family and wrote of squeezing the slave from himself drop by drop—with the implication that he never quite succeeded. My grandfather became a landowner and a modestly successful farmer in the American Midwest, but he never owned a gun. Guns were for other kinds of men.

His family arrived at Ellis Island in 1898. My great-grandfather shepherded them by train east through Chicago and Wisconsin, bypassing the rich farmland of Iowa and southern Minnesota as he made his way to northeastern North Dakota, where there were sufficient rocks, trees, and Norwegians. My great-grandfather’s homestead farm was four hundred and some acres, including most of a small lake, on the eastern edge of the aptly named Turtle Mountains. While nothing like the steep cliffs and fjords of Norway, the rounded, pine-covered hills with their feet mudded into small lakes and sloughs must have been of some comfort to him.

Emigration has a different affect upon different generations, but in terms of mental health it has to be toughest on the first. Friends and family members have been left behind. There is a new language, new manners to learn, plaguing second thoughts about the wisdom of the decision to leave home, discouraging New World days filled with sorg and lengsel—with sadness and longing.

Among midwestern Scandinavians, the second generation, in its drive to assimilate, forgot the old country in a calculated, even determined manner. Children of immigrants wanted nothing much to do with the old ways. They were embarrassed by their old-fashioned parents, their ears were stopped against the old language, they wanted to dress like—wanted to be—American children. As adults, they kept the battered steamer trunk in the attic and did not make rosettes or lefse or celebrate Norwegian Independence Day. This pattern seems different with modern immigrants—the Hmong in Minnesota, for example, who keep their cultural traditions brightly at hand no matter what the generation—but the Norwegians in my family turned their faces resolutely forward until they, suddenly, were middle-aged. Then they made a late effort to remember. Some took lessons in Norwegian for their trip back home; the steamer trunk was brought down from the attic, painted on the outside and lined inside with flower-patterned, adhesive-backed paper, and displayed in the living room (trunks are great places to store quilts). At least one person in the family took a rosemaling class. Rosettes returned to the Christmas dinner table. My sister Judy took my mother, then in her eighties, to Norway; it was their first visit to the Old Country, and for my mother it filled in important pieces of family history. Better late than never, she remarked of the trip.

The third and fourth generations (me, depending upon how one counts) make well-meaning attempts to remember, but the going gets tougher. Against the tide of telephones, television, and consumer culture—the homogenization of America, as Eric Sevareid described in his essay Velva, North Dakota—it is increasingly difficult to hold on to an inherited cultural past. For my children, Norway is a faded family mirror of story fragments, keepsakes, and tattered photos of narrow houses and workhorses and people without names. As each generation passes, the hard edges of the emigrant experience, like stones washed by waves, are buffed smoother and more featureless. The drafty farmhouse, the kerosene lamps, the low-ceilinged barn, the winter slop jar in the bedroom—all of it recedes behind modern times, which is midwestern-speak for indoor plumbing. A toilet inside the house came only after the arrival of power and light, but unless you have sat upon the cold, wooden seat of a sagging, outdoor biffy and smelled the dank pit below, it is not fully possible to imagine life without running water, or electricity for that matter. The harshness of early farm life softens under the layering on of time and becomes sentimentalized—call it the Terry Redlin Effect—but I remember well the Swenson homestead farm in northeastern North Dakota.

It was a lonely place in hill country, well out of sight from the gravel road. A few small outbuildings, some built of logs. A pinched, sharp-roofed farmhouse, its white paint long gone gray. A kitchen window, its thin curtain held an inch to the side by someone behind it peering out. If he was in the yard when we arrived, Great-uncle Emil scuttled into a shed or the house as if to hide or secure something. Though they had been notified (one might say warned) that we were coming, no one in the house came out to greet us. After my father had shut off the pickup’s engine, we always lingered in the yard by the truck so that the old Swensons could get used to the fact that the Minnesota relatives had arrived.

To the west, just visible through the trees was Jarvis Lake, small and shallow and lined with wild rice beds. It was a perfect place to hunt ducks and geese, but my father never brought along a shotgun—which was a puzzlement to me. They don’t really hunt up here, my father explained once as he looked around the tumbledown yard. They’re kind of different.

Eventually, one or the other of the two unmarried sisters appeared in silhouette behind the screen door and peered out—our signal to approach the house.

My grandfather had five sisters and three brothers. Leonard died as an infant and was buried just east of the driveway, near the old, three-stick gate, in a small pine coffin made by a neighbor, my mother says. Another brother, Arnold, caught the measles and a chill besides and was never right afterward; he was willful and stubborn and hard to handle; eventually he went to an asylum in Jamestown. Mildred went off to teach but never married and eventually returned to the farm, where Emil and Magna and Selma, all of whom also never married, lived out their lives. Selma ventured out briefly in service to a doctor and his family in a nearby town but was taken advantage of in a scandal that is still not talked about in my mother’s family. Afterward, she came home to stay. Only two sisters, Ida and Hannah, married and left the farm for good, though they only went to Cando, ten miles away, and Fargo, about a two-hour drive. In real ways, then, few of my grandfather’s immediate family went very far in life. In 1925, my great-grandfather, Carl Swenson, beaten down by the emigrant experience and exhausted by his large family, waded into the lake and drowned himself.

As a kid, I visited the old homestead out of duty on enforced family trips, but later, as an adult, I went out of curiosity. A need to know more about the Old People, as we called them. My grandfather had worked out on nearby North Dakota grain farms and eventually broke away to Minnesota—his own emigration—where he married and started a farm. From there, a couple of times yearly he made the long trip back home, hauling a pickup load of oats for Emil’s workhorse; canned goods, jellies, and produce; or perfectly good clothes (mended by my mother) and perhaps new dresses for each of the girls—though there was always a question as to whether Magna and Selma would wear anything new. As my mother describes it, they were slaves to Emil, who ruled the roost. I remember him, my great-uncle, as a lean, bent-over, squinty-eyed man who wore his boots until they had to be wrapped tightly around and around and around with baling twine and who, when he cut down a tree, felt compelled to remove the stump from the ground before he felled another. These tendencies did not accelerate the manifest destiny of the homestead farm.

My mother’s family always thought of Emil, Magna, and Selma as charity cases, if stubborn ones. One October in the early 1970s, my parents purchased and delivered to the homestead farm a gas-powered refrigerator. They arranged for the local gas company in Rolla to deliver and hook up a propane tank. After my father made sure that everything worked correctly, my parents returned from North Dakota greatly pleased at this giant leap forward—until two days later, when the fellow from the gas company in Rolla called.

I went out to the Swenson farm and took back the tank, he said.

But it’s all paid for, my mother said.

I know, he said, but they asked me to take it away.

But why? my mother asked.

Said they were afraid of the gas, the man replied. Said they couldn’t sleep at night.

I remember, at our Minnesota Thanksgiving dinner that year, how the gas tank repo had caused a good deal of head shaking and muttering and eventual laughter. My grandfather, when bemused, had a habit of tilting his face to the side and drawing a big thumb across his leading temple as if the gesture helped him think: what, after all, could a person do about the Old People? The joke, finally, was on my grandparents and parents. When the last of the three recluses died and the house was inventoried, among Emil’s things was a steamer trunk packed with thousands of dollars in cash.

In the end my grandfather, the most soft-spoken man I’ve ever known, was the most outgoing member of his family. As an eighth grader, his last year in school, he walked fifty miles south to Cando and waited on Main Street with other grown men