Trip of the Tongue (26 page)

Of all such communities in the nation, the Basques in Boise have perhaps taken this most to heart. Since 1998, the city has been home to the Boiseko Ikastola, the country's only Basque immersion preschool. The school's first students are now in high school, and the majority of these students are still speaking Basque. One school, however, can have only a limited impact. It's not part of a larger network of
ikastolak
, nor does it have the backing of a federally funded language academy. And though it's true that Idaho was the only state in 2000 to report Basque-speaking children between the ages of five and seventeen, their number was only fifty-five.

Still, the best hopes for the Basque language in the United States seem to lie in the enviable linguistic acquisitiveness of children. In Elko I met a man from Boise who was in town to participate in the festival's handball tournament. Unlike the other festival-goers I spoke with, he knew more than a few token words of Basque, and he told me how he and his wife were working to pass the language on to their son. They were, he said, having some success—more, in fact, than they had bargained for. One day he asked his son, in Basque, how he was doing; his son answered in English. The boy's mother admonished him. “If you want to learn, you need to speak Basque with your father.”

He replied matter-of-factly: “But Daddy doesn't speak Basque.”

That Saturday night I found myself back at the fairgrounds for Fourth of July fireworks. I was feeling particularly irritable. After watching the competitions at the fairgrounds I had caught a
pilota
match before heading back to Stockmen's and the two-dollar blackjack table. There I had met two self-described cowboys named Will and Clint (“Like Eastwood,” Clint told me, overenunciating in the way people do when they think you're very, very stupid). They had gone to a great deal of effort to let me know how despicable they thought New Yorkers were.

“You people think you know what's best for everyone. And I bet no one in New York even knows that we exist,” Clint announced at one point, apropos of nothing.

“Know that you, personally, exist?”

“No,” Will said. “That cowboys exist. That
real
cowboys exist, anyway. But that doesn't keep you from telling us what to do.”

They went on like this for a while longer before I tried to change the subject by asking Will where he was from. “A little place called Katonah,” he told me.

I just looked at him.

“What?” he asked.

“Katonah? In New York?”

“In New York state, yeah.”

“Isn't that the place that got into a fight with Martha Stewart?”

“I wouldn't know about that.”

“ 'Cause you're just a cowboy.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“A real cowboy.”

“That's right.”

“A real-life cowboy.” I took a breath, eyes narrowed. “From
Westchester
.”

I was still grumbling as I scavenged for a seat in the grandstand. I slid in next to a group of preteen girls who greeted me with warm smiles before returning to the serious business of scoping out new arrivals and outfitting themselves with glowing necklaces, bracelets, and headbands. I had no glow-in-the-dark jewelry, so I focused instead on lighting the candle I'd been given at the gates. It came in a flimsy paper holder I imagined was designed to collect stray wax. The way the breeze was blowing, I figured I'd be lucky if I made it through the night without setting my face on fire.

The crowd was larger than the one at the Basque games, but I saw many of the same faces, the same scattering of bright red kerchiefs. Off in the distance I recognized some of the
vascos
I'd met playing blackjack. From somewhere nearby I caught a fetid hint of
kalimotxo
, a foul concoction of red wine and Coca-Cola that was, inexplicably, wildly popular among locals. The speakers crackled to life with the sounds of country music, and the crowd surged to its feet, voices rising, pulling off baseball caps and berets and hoisting candles and lighters and neon-pink bracelets in the air. Amid the riotous swell of light and sound, I took off my own hat and joined the wild chorus.

Chapter Seven

North Dakota: Norwegian

Of all the places I visited throughout my travels, the destination I was the most excited about probably qualifies at the least exciting.

“I'm driving to North Dakota,” I remember telling my father that fall.

I heard a bark of surprised laughter on the other end of the line. “You know when I used to go home to B.C. from grad school?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, knowing exactly where this was going.

“I'd leave Minneapolis in the late afternoon. That way I'd never have to look at North Dakota during the day.” In a way, I understood where he was coming from. I'd driven through North Dakota myself.

For most people, North Dakota isn't a destination so much as a long stretch of highway. Many Americans, I suspect, view the landscape with the attitude of some sullen officer of the peace—
nothing to see here; move it along
. But this trip, I told myself, wasn't going to be like that, because this time I actually had a reason to be going to North Dakota.

For generations upon generations, most branches of my family were perfectly happy never to leave their chilly little northern European villages. But as soon as they decided to up and move to North America, they suddenly developed an inability to stay in any one city for more than a decade or two. So though there are only four places in Europe I can trace my relations to, there are dozens of cities throughout the United States and Canada that have some loose connection to my family, and few are able to inspire much more than a passing comment along the lines of “Oh, so this is where my great-aunt's brother-in-law used to live.”

North Dakota, though, is different. Three generations of the Norwegian branch of my family lived just outside Grand Forks, and countless cousins still live there. What's more, I heard all about it growing up, my mother telling me all the stories she could remember about my grandfather's exploits as a kid. How he designed a heli-sled to help deliver the mail in winter. How he somehow managed to get a horse and cart onto the roof of his high school. How he once won a contest by knowing the greatest number of varieties of gladiola. I never got the chance to meet my grandfather, but I rather thought I'd like to meet his hometown.

So I would seek out my Norwegian American roots, I decided, and see what I'd missed out on. And just as in Nevada, I'd plan my visit around whatever looked to be the region's biggest party. All I had to do was find one.

My search led me to a modest little city about fifty miles south of the Canadian border. I was headed to a place called Minot.

Minot—pronounced “MY-not,” as in “Why not Minot?”—was founded in 1886 when the men in charge of building the Great Northern Railroad decided to halt forward construction for the winter in order to build a bridge over a particularly inconvenient ravine. The company chose a location in the valley of the Souris River, named it after a friend of one of the railroad executives, and voilà: instant city. A tent city sprang up seemingly overnight, and within the first year of its creation, Minot's population had grown to 5,000. Ever since, the city has been known—to its own residents, at least—as the “Magic City.”

In its early days Minot was known as a lawless, wild place, full of criminals and ne'er-do-wells. Later days weren't much better: during prohibition, for instance, Al Capone used the city to smuggle liquor. The
WPA Guide to North Dakota
, first published in 1938, reported, “Many pioneer residents of Minot still remember a certain railway passenger conductor who would call the name of the station, “MINOT, this is M-I-N-O-T, end of the line. Prepare to meet your God!” Today, in contrast, Minot is a staid and respectable sort of place, home to a major Air Force installation and yearly host to the North Dakota State Fair, an event that attracts upwards of a quarter of a million visitors.

It is also the location of Høstfest, North America's largest Scandinavian festival.

Although I'd planned my trip weeks in advance, Høstfest is such a popular event that hotel rooms in Minot proper were already fully booked by the time I called around. (The town's relatively small stock of hotel rooms is no major hindrance for festival attendees, many of whom travel by RV.) So I ended up staying in Bismarck, about 110 miles south of Minot. This initially seemed like a preposterous arrangement, but I soon discovered that 110 miles is next to nothing in North Dakota. It's just a flat, uneventful trip up US-83, one of those drives where a single stand of trees seems noteworthy. The landscape is so uniform you never have a gut sense of how far you've traveled. I felt a bit like Lawrence of Arabia, heading toward Aqaba: I could have been 10 miles away, I could have been 1,000 miles away. Eventually, though, the low clutch of streets and buildings that makes up Minot came into view.

My first stop in Minot was the Scandinavian Heritage Park, a somewhat idiosyncratic assortment of structures on a well-manicured patch of land just off the highway. I wandered around the park, passing statues I'd expected (Leif Ericson, Hans Christian Andersen), statues I hadn't expected (Sondre Norheim, the father of modern skiing), and statues I really hadn't expected (Casper Oimoen, Minot resident and member of the 1932 and 1936 U.S. Olympic ski teams). I snapped a few pictures of the replica thirteenth-century Norwegian church, the Danish windmill, the Finnish sauna, and the Swedish horse statue. (Apparently that's a thing.)

Then I stopped in front of a giant granite map of Scandinavia. It was shocking, really, how unfamiliar the shapes were. Somehow, despite an early education that was overwhelmingly focused on European history and culture, I had never learned very much about these particular countries. I hadn't even known that Denmark and Iceland were considered to be part of Scandinavia until a particularly humiliating loss at Trivial Pursuit; I hadn't known that Finland is often
not
considered to be part of Scandinavia until about five minutes ago, when I read as much in the
Encyclopedia Britannica
. I was wholly unable, I realized, to identify in even the most approximate way the region my family came from.

I wondered, not for the first time, why I'd never felt compelled to learn about my heritage—or heritage language.

Norwegian is, all things considered, an extremely accessible language for English-speakers. For one thing, it's a Germanic language, which means that English and Norwegian share a number of lexical similarities. And the grammar of Norwegian is nothing scary. On a morphological level, Norwegian verbs are remarkably easy: the form of the verb doesn't change according to the subject. So instead of having verb forms like
I am
,
you are
,
he is
, and so on, Norwegian has something more like
I be
,
you be
,
he be
. This isn't a particularly unusual feature from a macro perspective, but for those used to struggling with French verbs it does cut down significantly on one's flash card time.

There are side benefits to learning Norwegian, too. For several hundred years, Norway was actually part of the same political entity as Denmark, and during that time government affairs were run out of Copenhagen and most official church and state documents were written in Danish. Over time, the political preeminence of written Danish had an impact on spoken Norwegian. Though the speech of rural Norway remained relatively unaffected by these developments, by the nineteenth century the educated urban classes had begun to use a Danish-Norwegian hybrid.
^ay
The modern form of Norwegian generally taught to foreigners is closer to this latter language, which means that if you learn Norwegian, you'll have little trouble reading Danish. As an added bonus, Norwegian-speakers are typically also able to understand a great deal of Swedish.
^az
Normally this sort of low-cost, high-benefit language would be tremendously appealing to me, but I'd never managed to get past even the first chapter of
Teach Yourself Norwegian
.

One of the reasons I'd decided to visit North Dakota was to learn why that was. After all, I of all people should have been beating down the library doors to learn my ancestral language. (Well, one of my ancestral languages.) And yet I'd never felt any particular urgency or need to learn Norwegian. Scottish Gaelic, maybe. Polish, certainly. But not Norwegian.

This was at least partially a result of growing up in St. Louis, a city not particularly known for its Nordic culture. Had I not been separated from my extended Norwegian family, surely I would have developed a stronger connection to the culture. But I suspected there were other forces at work, too. I had a feeling that, in sharp contrast to the attitudes of Basque Americans, the Norwegian American community had decided to stop fighting the loss of their language.

Or maybe I was projecting. Either way, I'd soon find out. With a last, wistful glance at the Finnish sauna, I packed up my camera and headed off to spend the rest of my day in the company of Vikings, trolls, and lutefisk. It was time to check out Høstfest.

The first Høstfest—in Norwegian, “fall festival”—was held in Minot in 1978. Compared to the spectacle organizers are able to wrangle today, this first festival was something of a slapdash affair, put together from start to finish in just under two months. Even so, it drew more than 5,000 people, and the crowds have been growing ever since. While Minot might not be the most Norwegian city in the state, it is home to something far more important: the state fairgrounds. As such, Minot is uniquely suited to accommodate the tens of thousands of tourists who attend the festival each year.

Høstfest is just one of a number of Norwegian and Scandinavian festivals throughout the United States, in both small, heavily Norwegian towns such as Decorah, lowa, or Spring Grove, Minnesota, and diverse urban metropolises like Chicago or Seattle. But nothing else comes close to Høstfest—or, as it is billed, “North America's Largest Scandinavian Festival.” The year I attended, the festival had booked acts including the Beach Boys, Kenny Rogers, and Randy Travis, and attendance was expected to be upward of 80,000.

With such large crowds you might expect a certain amount of chaos—particularly if the town only has a population of 40,000—but when I arrived on the fairgrounds, festival organizers had crowd control and parking down to a science. I was skillfully directed into a lot by a seemingly unending line of teenagers in reflective vests, and in no time at all I found myself on a shuttle that would take me to the main complex that housed the festival.

On the shuttle I sat behind a middle-aged couple. The man was literally rubbing his hands together in anticipation.

“I cannot wait for the lutefisk,” he said to his wife.

At this point I hadn't yet eaten lutefisk, so I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I found it difficult, however, to imagine that any whitefish-based dish could be good enough to merit the gleeful trot the man adopted as he leapt off the shuttle and hurried inside. I proceeded somewhat more cautiously, giving a wide berth to a man dressed as a troll and balanced precariously on a pair of stilts.

I bought a ticket and a map and took a minute to orient myself before heading to the main exhibition hall. I found what I thought was the right door, presented my ticket, and proceeded to stop dead in my tracks. I was confronted not just with a churning mass of people but also with a vast sea of Scandinavian tchotchkes. Admittedly, I shouldn't have been surprised. If you're going to attract 80,000 people to your festival, you probably have to offer some combination of the classic tourist trifecta of shows, shopping, and sustenance. But the festival brochure had focused heavily on the friendship and hospitality that was to be found at Høstfest. I'd read all about how polite and welcoming Norwegians were, greeting each other with
tak for sidst
—“thanks for the last time I saw you.” There was even a monetary incentive to be nice: you could get $100 if the person you introduced yourself to happened to be the “Mystery Viking.”

And to be fair, the atmosphere at Høstfest was exceptionally congenial. But the bulk of the festival in terms of both space and energy was dedicated to sales. Most stalls dealt in traditional Scandinavian arts and crafts. Hand-knit sweaters were popular items, as was anything decorated with the traditional Norwegian flower painting known as
rosemåling
. Also available was a wide range of books about Norway or by Norwegians, and I saw more than one travel agency advertising package tours to Scandinavia. Then there were the items of more general interest. One stall I walked past sold winter-weather gear. A yellow sign proclaimed “Diabetics Love Our Socks!”

The entertainment was similarly split. There were Scandinavian acts such as Norwegian country singer Bjøro Håland and Ole Olsson's Oldtime Orkestra, but the lineup was dominated by non-Norwegian acts, perhaps most discordantly the Peking Acrobats. I squeezed into a packed room to hear part of a routine by Bruce Williams and Terry Ree, two comics who play Høstfest so frequently there's a wood carving of the men on display in the fair center lobby. They were old hands, gauging the audience in nanoseconds, and they killed. (Granted, the large group from the capital of Saskatchewan ensured they would never have to reach too far for a joke.) No one seemed remotely disappointed that they didn't have anything to do with Norway.

Luckily, there were so many exhibitors that though only 50 percent or so seemed to be even remotely relevant to the festival at hand, there was still plenty of Norwegian culture to be found or purchased. There were even a few bits of Norwegian language scattered here and there.

There are, as I mentioned before, a great many words that English and Norwegian have in common thanks to their shared Germanic origins, but English has borrowed very few of these directly from Norwegian. The most well known are those relating to Nordic sport
(ski
and
slalom)
or the peculiarities of Norwegian geography
(fjord)
. But there are a few others, too. A kraken, for instance, was originally a mythological Norwegian sea monster. And the word
quisling
, a somewhat uncommon term for a traitor, acquired its meaning when a Norwegian named Vidkun Quisling collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.