My father sent mixed messages about the old country-Sweden
My Grandmother made up the genealogy on her side.
What I heard was, “your grandfather was the best woodcarver
in Sweden”
“He carved the Royal Barge”
“You go back as far as Alfred the Great”
I became a woodcarver myself and a “Builder Boy” ; as
Belle’s friend called her husband.
Having battled the family
disease,” the snake that is still in Ireland”, as Linda talked about it;
alcoholism which had devastated my grandfather’s brother and business partner
in their furniture business and now I had come out on the other end ; ready to see the world. So here I was; travelling to Norway, home of the “Good” Vikings; Stockholm, old home of grandfather Thorsten; Salisbury, home of
Stonehenge and the Roman Road, I became educated about these items. I always
pictured “the barge” to be a flat bottomed affair, like a super fancy skow of
some sort, that Alfred the Great was French and, to be honest, I didn’t much
think about the Roman Road at all.
Earlier, I had met a
young and talented Swedish woodcarver,
Jogge Sundqvist, in New Mexico and he
showed me with great heart, poetry and formality - how a Swede presented his
business card to another person; holding it with two hands and presenting it
and making sure to look the recipient straight in the eyes and then formally
shaking hands…..very impressive and civil, I thought.
So this is what I found
out:
The Norwegians thought very little of the Swedes, casually reserving all sorts of derogatory remarks just
for them and so, after spending a few weeks in Norway, my thinking was tainted. My father had also said that Thorsten left
Sweden to “get away from the Swedes”, so I was pre- prejudiced some, as I hung
on his words. He talked about how the
Swedes tended to be vicious fighters and eventually scared themselves so much
by the drenching themselves in blood that they decided to shift away from warlike
thinking. Some Swedes were though, in
fact, cold, from what I could see; I met
the head of the Vasa museum and he tossed me his business card from across the
table (I could not help but mention jokingly my artist friend’s instructions)
and he was not amused. I started to feel
like I stood out somehow. In fact my
visit was rare for other reasons; I am
the only person in my family to have ever seen the royal barge, the Vasa Orden
(my father was turned away from seeing it when he was there in the military in
the 50s; don’t forget this is the “Royal Barge” after all and exclusive, etc.),
and then I stood in front of tall steel
doors of the “Boat House” on Scansen Island on the one day it would be opened
to the public and heard the chains clank and rattle and stood in my suit coat
with a bolo tie with a silver burst pattern with a piece of turquoise in the
middle, first in line (though not much of a line) and gawked and took photos of
it until Belle finally dragged me out of
there. It was not flat but a huge, sleek
blue row boat with 19 oars and a fancy seat for the oarmaster and a very fancy
cabin with crystal windows and gilded rococo carvings all over. It sat there with a bunch of other vintage
boats and motors and other mariner-type museum objects. I presented the nearby Vasa museum with some
original writings by my grandfather; talking about what he thought and
experienced while he was carving the decorations, “with one hand on a chisel
and the other on a magnifying glass”; looking at old photo details of the
original which was carved in the
seventeen hundreds then it burned to the
ground, so to speak, in the early 1900’s.
He was chosen to carve the duplicate replacement and he was a Swedenborgian and he thought that
the ornamentation was reflective of the Swedenborgian religious symbols of the
Kingdom of Heaven and that the original design must have been influenced by Immanuel Swedenborg because he lived in that
era. I suspect the Protestant
establishment that I had presented the writings to were somewhat horrified to
hear this news. They were oddly
discourteous as they took my stuff and
did not return copies as I had requested till I called the Swedish consulate over
a year later. It was ……. surprising.
And I saw, in Stockholm, the magnificent and unforgettably dynamic and
beautiful woodcarving of St Michael slaying the dragon from his horse, on
Thorsten’s written recommendation, it being, “the best woodcarving in Europe”
according my grandfather. It was carved
in memory and celebration of the Swedes fighting off the Danes ……and I bought one of Jogge’s spoons.
Then we went to England and stayed in a 400 year old thatched-
roof cottage with a real live conservatory in the “quaint” little town of Pitton which
sported a magnificent Beech tree off a trail between some farmlands. And Stonehenge was a feast for my
sensibilities and I fell head over heels for that testament to positive and
negative space and massings in-the-round.
And our Norwegian friends and hosts had earlier suggested we
don’t bother looking up some relatives of our Santa Fe friends, being probably
a waste of time in view of all the fantastic sights we could see. But we opted to give them a jingle and then
took a bus to meet them, being met by a tall older man in slightly grimy white
jeans and on foot. He picked up bits of garbage
as we strolled back to his farm, which turned out to be a quintessential
British country estate complete with stables and gardens and marble all over
and , yes, another conservatory. And “Uncle”
Michael decided to give us a jeep tour of the 700 acre property where he showed
us the 30,000 trees he had planted over the last few years and the nearby town of Avesbury and
their big boulder “circle” and rich history.
As he drove along he mentioned that right here was the old Roman Road,
barely visible to the naked eye and discernible by squinting your eyes and
trying to find a straight line leading to a cluster of trees on top of the hill
and right here, he said casually glancing aside, “is the ditch where Alfred the
Great fought off the Danes”! “Stop the
car” I blurted as I went into a flurry of thoughts and emotions and wonder, of
course. So he stopped and I took a
picture of the barely discernible ditch (like an ancient abandoned grassed-
over acequia somehow) and I thought about the Danes being fought off by my
ancestors in so many countries ; about how I found out the Alfred was not
French and the Roman Road was right next to the ditch, the road that, perhaps, Jesus of Nazareth traveled on during his
mysterious years as he plied his trade of “tinsmith” (not carpenter) as some think (with a few miracles to prove it
and a claim that the tinsmiths around there chant, as they hammer and tinker
with their seams and bends, “Jesus was a
tinsmith”), perhaps going right here past Stonehenge and soaking his bones in
Bath. It was all too much and it turns
out he (Alfred, not Jesus) was a pretty
good king, as kings go, and had his own story about “Alfred the Great and the
Cakes”; it seems he went incognito and stayed in a peasant’s cottage during the
Danish warring time (near that aforementioned ditch) and the woman of the house
asked him to mind the cakes that were cooking in the fireplace while she left
the house on an errand and Alfred agreed but then was so engrossed in his
thoughts of battle and strategy and the like that he forgot the cakes and they
burned. When the woman returned, he,
like George Washington and the Cherry Tree story, admitted his mistake and
apologized for the misdeed. Well, this
does serve as a teaching tool for our family, I think, and we can be proud of
our shabby and humble little king and
his popularity and success in fighting off the Danes, right there in “My
Ditch”! I couldn’t be more proud of my
heritage as it unfolded in front of me, giving depth and breadth to our
mythology as it rubs up next to the heart wrenching beauty of our planet.
Finally, I remember standing in the cool darkness on a
lonely railroad platform outside of Stockholm right after we landed on the
plane and talking to a local Swede, quizzing him in my semi- tongue- in- cheek
way about whether this was my “Motherland” or “Fatherland” obliquely begging
the question of how the Swedes behaved during the Great War. He said it was both and added the non sequitur, “but you will be
‘surprised’”! And, again, he added that
I spoke with a Dutch accent. Later I
realized that he was dissing me because the Dutch, it seems, are famous for
being curt and brash and harsh. So I
guess I am glad that we left and perhaps, correctly, to get away from the
Swedes, somehow and also glad to see the fantastic barge, the beautiful (though
surprisingly bleach blonde) people and really surprised when I rushed outside one
evening to do some hurried photography as the sun was setting, as I often do
here at home; having often only seconds to catch that rare and special golden
light before the sun dips away and leaves the camera and me in darkness and
disappointed that I missed the shot; only to notice that something was
different, radically different, in fact; the sun was not setting. I was not in Kansas any more; to sleep at
this time of year, one must draw heavy curtains tight over the windows and
then, only then, one might dream of lions and dragons under some sacred beech
tree along the fork of the river Avon, just down from Bath and a hop, skip and
a jump from Stonehenge, where they seemed to understand the sun in a way that I
had not before. I heard that the coastline along the Fjords is in fact infinite due to the deep and profound
fingers of the Fjords, so that to comprehend them on first glance is naïve and
it is best to begin to see that the surface is just that; deceivingly
superficial. The strongest image, in
some ways, was when we went down south in Norway to the ancient family farm and
painstakingly started up the one-lunger boat in the little boat house on the
fjord. This boat belonged in the museum
in Stockholm in the adjacent room to the Vasa Orden. This boat was how people got around in the old
days; going to church, to market, to visit with the family. Rick put the Norwegian flag in the socket and
we headed for a town down the fjord, having jumped in the water earlier to
gather blue shell-mussells- and now wanted to have some hot chocolate in the
little town. As we approached the warf, there
were more boats; mostly younger and faster boats scurrying around. I noticed that just as some youngsters were
about to make some wisecrack about this ancient skiff and its pfutt pfutt pfutt
sound, they stopped dead in their tracks and realized they were watching the
proud history of a supremely rugged people float by and……held their tongues and
gave homage in silent acknowledgement as
we drifted by. We, the inheritors of
profound and proud history that is unfolding right in front of us like the
interplay of rocks and air mixed with the birds flying around the
Stone Henge as I gazed in wonder walking the circular trail……..
