Giants in the Earth?

I’m a piker—having done it the easy way—but for many people, the journey from the Old World to the new was drenched in difficulty. It certainly was for Inge and Olaf, the young couple featured in the tender, poignant movie Sweet Land, the first full-length film directed by Ali Selim.

Much of the movie is what isn’t said, and yet what is clear; as well, for me, much of the movie is not what happens, but what doesn’t. Perhaps that’s why what seems to be a simple, did-anything-happen-in-this-movie is filled with subtleties and suggestions.

The plot is simple—Inge, a young German mail-order bride arrives in Northern Minnesota carrying two suitcases, a huge wooden-horned phonograph, and—critically—no papers. But she’s also equipped with a strong will: true, having closed the door behind her, there was no going back. But she’s determined to make a good life out of what she has come to. And that is? A community that deeply mistrusts her, a wedding that the minister calls off the afternoon of her arrival, a fiancé with whom she quarrels almost immediately and whose language she doesn’t speak. Right—if she didn’t have a backbone to start with, she was certainly going to have to order one quick….

Curiously, the movie is so strong in its characterizations—and so well played and shot—that it survives any bullets a rational mind might shoot. How, for example, did Inge get to Minnesota without papers? And were Inge and Olaf really threshing all that wheat by hand? Not to mention cutting it all by hand? What were the horses doing—smoking Gauloises and discussing Cubism?

Selim, the director, in an interview said that the feisty, stubborn character of Inge was probably not historically likely or true. Hmmm—to me, it made perfect sense: my father’s mother was second generation Norwegian-American, but no pushover. What child of the prairies could be? So what if the story of my grandmother ordering my father—who wanted a quarter to go to the movies—to move the woodpile from one side of the house, report back for orders, and then get told to move the pile back to where it had been…so what if that story wasn’t true? The point is that we all believed it, as anyone who had known her would have. Poetic truth is just as strong—I actually want to claim stronger—than physical or objective truth.

Which also means that one of the main characters, though it never rolls through the credits, is the land itself. The film is shot so beautifully that you can hear the crickets at night, and feel the heat shimmering off the wheat field late in the summer afternoon. But perhaps because the film is based on a short story, the specter of winter, with its arctic blasts and accumulations of snow for which the Norwegians—sheltered by the Gulf Stream—were completely unprepared, is never raised.

I came to the film through Taí, my much-loved Puerto Rican sister, who had happened across the film and had immediately thought of me. She had heard, as well as edited the print versions, of the stories of my father’s days in the Dustbowl in North Dakota, and knew something as well about the emotional landscape of the Scandinavians, and how it had interacted with their new physical landscape. Because by no means is the settler experience the story of how the newcomer arrives to change the land—it’s also the story of how the land molds the settler. Nor is it clear—at least in my mind—which is the greater transformation.

My father’s grandparents did that a century and a half ago, I did a truncated version a couple of decades ago. True, I arrived in Puerto Rico without a word of Spanish, but it was hardly the case that this most Americanized island of the Caribbean was going to be a familiar world to me.

Or was it?

Because I had left my aged parents behind, as well as my world. People spoke English, yes—but almost always as a second language: I would see the desperate looks of wonderful people I met at parties, they were eager to escape me. Or rather, escape the burden of speaking a foreign language. Parties at which I started several steps back, since at gringo parties the men all sit around on one end of the room and worry about politics and the economy, and the women are at the other end, worrying about society and their kids. But what are men and women doing at Puerto Rican parties?

Dancing salsa!

So I was still quite bug-eyed when, three or four weeks before my father died, he decided to visit me for the first time in Puerto Rico. It was unusual in several respects: unlike my mother, Jack hated to travel. Nor was he, temperamentally or experientially, particularly suited to Hispanic culture. So a stolid Norwegian-American encountering the exuberance of tropical, Latin culture? As I was learning, this oil and water was going require a lot of shaking…

But I had written him, in a moment of love and remembrance, and told him that he and my mother had been great parents, that they had done right by me when they were tired or frustrated or—especially—poor. I can see now my mother’s hand writing the check for $2500, the check that would buy me the cello that has accompanied me through my life, that has been and is my voice.

“Whew,” she said, “I’ve never written a check that big….”

They had met my cello teacher, he had played the instrument, and had said it was a fair price. He then gave the instrument to me, to try out for a week.

“Franny,” I overheard my father say to my mother in the kitchen, “we’re going to have to buy that cello for Marc…”

It hadn’t always been easy between my father and me, since the unspoken fact that I was gay made—as unspoken things do—a gap. But in the spring of his 84^th year, he traveled to the tropics; later that year, we winterized the house in the Wisconsin woods, and discovered post-it notes everywhere: turn off this valve, remove this screen. It was clear: he had known he was going to die.

We were living on Calle Sol in Old San Juan in a small apartment; above us lived Pablo, an older gay man, who was also a professor of Sociology. And he was astute as well, remembering Margaret Mead or whoever’s dictum that people are more alike than different. Even so, I was astonished when Pablo asked my father if he had ever read Giants in the Earth.

It was like asking a Chinaman if he had ever eaten rice….

Except that that would be an insult; Jack, however, was delighted to be asked the question, and replied that he certainly had, and had, as well, an anecdote about it.

Pat yourself on the back, Dear Reader, and count yourself well-versed if you’ve even heard of Ole Edvart Rølvaag’s trilogy, of which Giants is one part, but the book was well-known and often read in the early part of the 20^th century: it’s an account of the Norwegian immigrants in the Dakotas. My father, who had spent some dark years during the dust-bowl in Maxbass, North Dakota, had read the book, and was eager to know what an older neighbor—who had lived through the isolation, ostracism, plagues, cruel weather, lost crops, anything-in-short-of-Biblical-proportions—had thought of the book.

“Humf,” she sniffed, “he didn’t do nothin’ but write down what we lived….”

An example of what they lived? Well, according to what Jack told me, the early settlers had tried to get to the Dakotas as early in the planting season as possible, because—besides getting a crop in—you wanted to build your house before winter came. Otherwise, you’d be forced to do as many did: carve as much of a hole as you could in the earth, erect a sort of lean-to against the howling, frigid winds, and huddle for five months of a North Dakota winter.

Wait—is that story true? Or was it simply the kind of story that the old-timers told the newer immigrants: part of the you-don’t-know-how-easy-you-got-it drill?

Well, I remembered all this as I watched Sweet Land with Taí and Mr. Fernández—the cause of the most recent Newhouse immigration—and also with the shades of my immigrant grandparents, who were as present as they were invisible, and especially when the plot turned….

A good story requires a good villain, and here, it’s the banker, wearing his good suits, putting the screws on the farmers, inventorying their household goods, and threatening foreclosure. Great for the movie, but not so good in real life, since my grandfather, in addition to being a farmer out in North Dakota, was also the…

…banker.

It was acknowledged, but not embraced, this part of our history, and if I know anything about it, it’s from a cousin, who sent me some papers about the Gold-Stabeck Land and Credit Company of Land and Credit Company of Southern Minnesota, incorporated on 16 December 1901. The story is complicated, as families tend to be, but the essence of it is that a group of Norwegian immigrants who had settled in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin in the last half of the 19^th century were bankrolling immigrants in North Dakota who were coming slightly later.

Consider my great grandfather, who was born in Rollag, Norway, in 1841 and emigrated to the US in 1859—he moved in with his aunt and her husband who, their child having died, adopted him. (The husband had been in the States since 1842, which must have made him one of the first Norwegians to settle in the New World.) And what do we know of Niri Oleson (Naeset) Newhouse, my great grandfather? Well, in a letter he wrote in 1869 to his family back in Norway, two things stand out.

The first is extreme—at least to modern eyes—religiosity: he devotes half of the letter to his parents to moralizing on sacred themes: the need to walk the path of the righteous, the need to unite with brethren despite differences, etc. The news that he has had another son, and that the first is healthy—though hastily mentioned before all this moralizing—is almost an afterthought.

The second is more tantalizing; he writes a single sentence:

I often think about how nice it would have been if we had been not so far apart, so that we with our mouths could have spoken what is in our minds. Yes—even a handshake with you would have meant very much to me.

Then, a crack in the Nordic emotional landscape having erupted, he flies back into the moralizing, and finishes with a report on the crops, as well as worry about the national debt of two billion dollars, the result of the Civil War.

Niri’s oldest son, William, went to college, and then to the University of Wisconsin Law School; he was for some years the District Attorney of Rock County in Illinois. Then he joined the Gold-Stabeck Company, which was taking advantage of the opening of North Dakota.

The railroad had arrived, or rather was arriving, and speculators were buying land around the tracks. And the weather was good—wetter than it usually was, which was good for wheat. So the Gold-Stabeck Company seemed to do a little of everything: buying and selling securities, trading commodities, buying and selling land. And according to my father, his father spent a lot of time traveling from Clinton, Wisconsin—the family home—to Minneapolis—home of the Gold-Stabeck Company—and North Dakota. Remember the boom years of the 1990’s and the first part of the 2000’s? That’s what the first decades of the 20th century were: everybody was making money, everybody was sure the good times would go on forever, nobody thought that the weather would revert to the parched aridity that would kill the wheat.

And so my grandfather was catching trains west with some frequency; years later my father would say that the sound of a train whistle would plunge him into a deep sadness: it brought back too many farewells.

The good times couldn’t last, though in the good years my grandfather had acquired a couple of farms near Maxbass, North Dakota. And when, in 1922, the weather turned, the dust bowl started, the farmers couldn’t pay their mortgages, the bankers and the people who had sold the “safe” securities couldn’t pay the bondholders.

In  1992, according to my cousin, my grandfather and grandmother moved out to North Dakota, to try to make the land work, and to try to make good on the promises they had made to the people who had invested with them.

Nor was he the only member of the family out there: my grandfather’s Uncle Martin was there, and was also involved in finance—through the Maxbass Security Bank, of which he was vice president. He stayed there, the family records report, until his death.

That’s the official story. The unofficial story, whispered through the generations and disputed officially, was that Uncle Mart had spent most of his own money hoping to keep the bank afloat, hoping not to disappoint the people—his neighbors—who had trusted in him and invested with him. When the money was gone, he put up the “out of business sign” on the front door of the bank, and went home. He had failed.

It weighed on him: the people who had lost their savings; the widows who were now destitute; the neighbors and friends whom he would have to see at church and whom his wife would have to greet in the shops. It didn’t on his young children. Who decided to point, at the breakfast table, the spouts of the coffee pot, the creamer, the juice pitcher—anything that had a spout—directly at their father. He cracked, walked into the barn, and shot himself.

People remember the Great Depression, but forget that the boom years of the twenties were terrible for farmers. My grandfather and grandmother retreated back to northern Illinois, and sent, some years later, my father out to North Dakota, to live on the farm and work it as he could. My father described the trip in a letter to his cousin, to whom he had not been close.

So why write?

They both had ridden motorcycles, Jack, my father, had fallen for a lemon with a beautiful paint job. They spent, apparently, more time pushing the cycle than they ever did riding it, and were treated as only one step up from tramps. Did he spend the nights in jail cells, as so many itinerants moving west did? He’s not around to tell me, nor is anyone else.

But there are the stories I remember. The hailstorm that arrived, and wiped out the wheat field, ruined the crop, doomed them to a year with no income. My father and his father had watched the storm from the front porch of the small, rickety frame house. In twenty minutes, the ground was covered with golf-ball sized chunks of ice.

“Get some cream from the barn,” my grandfather had said, “and we’ll make some ice cream….”

There were sheep, which gave birth, and the newborn lambs required feeding. So there Jack was, in his early twenties, in one of the two rooms of the house. The lambs would be with him in one room, he’d grab one lamb, feed it, and then throw it into the other room, over a partition he had established. When the last lamb was fed, he could trudge off to bed.

The winters were long, fuel was scarce. In particular, firewood, which was the source of heat and cooking. My father once described how on clear days in Maxbass, close to the Canadian border, he could see down to the Turtle Mountains halfway across the state. It gave him, he said, a wonderful, exhilarating sense of being on top of the world; when he returned to hilly Minneapolis, he would feel claustrophobic.

Very nice—but it argues for a lack of trees, and those that were there tended to be dwarfed and wind-bent. Jack began to ponder the telephone poles that were being erected. And so he cut the first one down, and then learned: when you’ve succumbed once, how easy is it to sin again?

There was the time a cowboy—yes, a real-life cowboy, with a hand-rolled cigarette jutting from his teeth—dropped in, as my father was raising the bread dough. My father, embarrassed to be at the womanly task of baking bread, decided to leave the chore until the cowboy had left. But the man spotted the dough under the towel, and asked:

“Whatcha got there, boy?”

Jack declined to say. But the cowboy was having none of it; he strode over, whipped the towel off the dough, and stared at it.

“Jesus Christ, boy, you gotta punch down this dough,” and did so. He then started kneading.

My father must have suffered an isolation harder than the physical isolation, great though that was. It was no shame to be broke during the dustbowl, but what was it, to be the son and nephew of the men who had lent the money, foreclosed the properties, gone broke themselves, and left their creditors in ruins? It could be argued: my father had no part in the mess, even if his elders—though now impoverished themselves—had been at least partially to blame. But could the farmers or their wives remember that, as they saw my twenty-something father on the streets of Maxbass? And what did my father feel, as he looked into the eyes of those good people, who had bet on the weather and the good times, and had lost? Bawling lambs must have been the least of my father’s problems.

“North Dakota had a big effect on him; it marked him for life,” said my mother. And little wonder—never did he feel really safe, really secure. He worried about money and financial security and his kids and their jobs to his end.

What role had my grandfather played in the debacle that was the Dustbowl of the twenties? A century ago, he had been doing well, prospering, making money for himself and the people who trusted him. Then it all went west—and not in the good sense.

What can be said for him?

He went back to the community—and later sent his son to it—and lived with and faced down the neighbors who had trusted him. Who knows what that had cost?

Were any of them—my father, my grandfather, my great-uncle—giants in the earth? Certainly not completely: they were the victimizers and the victims, the victor and the vanquished, men who held up their world until it fell down upon them. What—if any—was their heroism?

They held on….