Finding my roots (written after listening to my friend Linda’s poems of Ireland)

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……..