Trip of the Tongue (27 page)

Of course, these are words that you can encounter in any part of the country. The Norwegian you encounter in Scandinavian communities in the United States is more distinctive. The most common Norwegian you'll hear is
uff da.
This phrase is one of those interjections that never seems to have a truly satisfactory dictionary definition, but a good general rule of thumb is this: if you know when to use
oy vey
, you know when to use
uff da
.

As with
oy vey
, the use of
uff da
is also a kind of cultural signal, and it's the only Norwegian many Norwegian Americans know. So not only will you hear it fairly frequently when traveling throughout historically Scandinavian areas in the United States, you'll also see the phrase emblazoned on mugs, T-shirts, and other mementos. It's essentially the Norwegian American equivalent of I♥NY. In Iowa I once bought a dish for my cats that had, on the bottom of the bowl, a picture of a cat gazing woefully at the skeleton of a fish.
Uff da
, thinks the cat.

In fact, an entire genre of Norwegian American jokes revolves around
uff da
and the best time to say it (typical example: “seeing Swedish meatballs at a lutefisk dinner”). There's only one joke template you'll hear more often from Norwegian Americans, and that's the Ole and Lena gag. In an Ole and Lena joke (sometimes their friend Per also makes an appearance), the punch line inevitably exposes the innocent stupidity of one or all of the characters involved. For instance, Ole and Lena go to the ballet. At intermission Ole turns to Lena and says, “I don't understand why they're all standing on their toes. Couldn't they get taller dancers?”

Or: Ole and Lena finally get married. As they're driving to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon, Ole puts his hand on Lena's knee. She giggles. “We're married now, Ole. You can go a bit farther than that.” So he drives to Syracuse.

You get the idea. If you don't, there are about a dozen Ole and Lena joke collections you can buy.

The vast majority of the Norwegian I heard at Høstfest, however, was culinary Norwegian. I could hardly walk two feet without seeing meatballs, dumplings, and potato sides. People couldn't get enough of it. Almost every food stall sold some kind of
lefse
, one of the most characteristic Norwegian dishes and something you'll find at grocery stores throughout North Dakota and the Upper Midwest. Typically made with potato and flour, lefse is called flatbread, but the emphasis should be on the flat rather than the bread. It's really more of a tortilla, just without quite so much flavor. It can be used to roll up meat or fish, but often it's just eaten on its own with butter or sugar to taste. I saw more than one person at Høstfest dumping whole packetfuls of Sweet'N Low on their lefse.

Then there's lutefisk. There is no more capital-
N
Norwegian dish than lutefisk, which is really unfortunate for all the other Norwegian dishes hoping to make a good impression on the world. Here's how you make lutefisk: first you take some fish, usually cod or a relative of cod called ling. Then you dump that fish into cold water for about a week. Next you add lye—as in the corrosive alkali used to make soap, clean ovens, and clear drains. As in the stuff Brad Pitt dumped on Ed Norton's hand in
Fight Club
. Lye.

Finally, you soak the fish some more (on account of all that lye having made it caustic), cook it, and eat it.

Lutefisk, like lefse and
uff da
, is a cultural touchstone for Norwegian America. Anytime a group of Norwegian Americans come together, you're going to find lutefisk, whether it's at the event itself or part of a nearby church function. Madison, Minnesota, has even gone so far as to declare itself “Lutefisk Capital USA.” Lutefisk is to this vast stretch of farmland what barbeque is to Kansas City or Memphis, what gumbo is to New Orleans—if barbeque and gumbo were incredibly disgusting.

I can say this because I lined up with the rest of the crowd to get my own hunk of lutefisk, lovingly prepared by members of Minot's Bethany Lutheran Church.

I sat down at a picnic table with three chatty festival-goers, one who lived in Minot, two who used to live in Minot. As they wondered aloud to each other whether Sarah Palin's frequent use of “yah, you betcha” would lead people to believe she was Norwegian—and whether such a thing was desirable—they scarfed down their food. I just stared at my tray: a scoop of sweet corn, equal parts mashed potato and gravy, two meatballs, two rolls of lefse, and two huge, shiny pieces of lutefisk. My tablemates asked me if everything was all right.

“Of course!” I said brightly. And then I tucked in to my meal.

If you haven't eaten lutefisk, allow me to describe it for you. As the fish soaks in the lye it swells and acquires a characteristic gelatinous consistency. So what you get is basically a thick, fishy Jell-O. The flavor of mine was fairly insipid, and I understand that this lack of flavor is actually a hallmark of a well-made lutefisk. If only the texture were so unobjectionable. The only way I can describe the feel of it is to say that it seemed a little bit like something was decomposing in my mouth. Like it had died on the side of the road and swelled in the sun and then I'd decided to have it for dinner. That's about how it felt.

Of course, it did once make some sense to prepare the dish this way. Back in the day fish was salted so it would keep longer, and the lye treatment leached some of the salt from the fish, making it more palatable. I have yet, however, to hear a satisfactory explanation for the continued existence of lutefisk given modern methods of refrigeration and food preparation.

As much as I relished the opportunity to learn a few words of Norwegian, my time in the Høstfest food hall was, from a linguistic standpoint, mildly depressing. I didn't need a sociolinguist to tell me why I'd never tried lutefisk or learned of lefse before. I was pretty sure, in fact, that the reason I'd never heard any Norwegian food terms before was because Norwegian food sucks. For every
kransekake
(a pyramid-shaped cake made with almonds and egg whites), there's something like
rømmegrøt
(a sour-cream dinner porridge occasionally topped with bits of meat or hard-boiled egg), which is said by Norwegians to be delicious. After my experience with lutefisk I think I'll just take their word on that.

Throughout my trip I was thinking, always, about models of cultural change, weighing variables and gauging effects, trying to figure out in my own anecdotal way the mechanics of the melting pot. I thought about geographical isolation and demographic concentration. I wondered about the differences between agriculture, manufacturing, and service-based industries. I cataloged institutional pressures and social compulsions. It wasn't until I went to Høstfest that I began to think about the marketability of culture and ethnicity and how that might affect the rate and scope of assimilation.

I kept thinking about a particular turn of phrase I had come across recently in a book by historian Odd Lovoll, an examination of Norwegian American towns in western Minnesota in which he discusses the idea of “chamber of commerce ethnicity.” I had grasped his intended meaning almost immediately, recalling with an end–of–
The Usual Suspects
–like parade of images all the towns and cities I had been dragged through on road trips as a kid in order to take in an “ethnic,” “historic,” or otherwise country-specific “Guinness World Record–holding” sight. Towns that were otherwise almost impossibly generic would dig up a few dimly remembered traditions from the old country, print up a brochure, and hope the tourists would come.

Here, for once, was an economic incentive that favored the retention of distinctive cultural practices. Naturally, of course, this would particularly incentivize the preservation of marketable traditions such as food, drink, and ridiculous dances. Even speaking as someone with an unfussy and irrepressible interest in all things linguistic, I don't see any way that language might be used to drum up tourism.

As I struggled not to gag over the mucilaginous lumps of flesh I was gamely shoveling into my mouth, I realized with some horror that in the business of ethnicity, language was no match for lutefisk.

After two days wandering the stalls and booths of Høstfest, I decided I needed a change of scene. I couldn't think of anything more Norwegian than lefse and lutefisk, and I couldn't think of anything more American than an exhibition hall full of small businesses, but I wasn't getting a particular sense of what it actually meant to be Norwegian American. I was mostly learning what it was like to be a tourist from Manitoba. Something about the festival rang false.

It wasn't just that Høstfest was a clusterfuck of commerce. It was that Høstfest was a clusterfuck, period. North Dakota is a state with a population density of 9.3 people per square mile. If you're palling about with 80,000 of your closest friends, you're probably not getting the most accurate impression of the state. North Dakota isn't defined by its cities; it lives and breathes in its negative space.

So I spent a few days driving. Sometimes I had specific destinations in mind—the scenic drive through Killdeer, maybe, or the tiny downtown of Devil's Lake—but more often than not I would just follow a meandering, impromptu route down dusty two-lane highways and unmarked county roads. I rarely encountered other cars (much less other people), and I made frequent stops along the side of the road to take pictures or, sometimes, just to look. It was late fall when I was there, and so I missed what many would probably consider to be the state's best season, the time of amber waves of grain and whatnot. But I think I preferred the fields the way they were, preparing for the winter, lying in wait.

Already I could smell the frost on the air. It is so remote up there and so sparsely populated, yet nearly every acre of land is planted, tilled, cared for. The sheer amount of physical work represented by the bales of hay, the miles of barbed-wire fence, and the first fledgling stalks of winter wheat is incredible to me. Even when I take into account modern machinery, it still seems an impossible feat. It must have been brutal, I thought, to have lived here in the nineteenth century. It must have been brutal to have lived here in the early twentieth century. I began to suspect that my grandfather had given us a slightly unrealistically rosy view of rural life in North Dakota.

Norwegian immigration to the United States is traditionally dated to July 4, 1825, when a ship called the
Restauration
left for New York from Stavanger, a city on the southwest coast of Norway. These first immigrants initially settled in Kendall, a small town on Lake Ontario, but many of them eventually made their way west to Illinois. For the next forty years a slow influx of Norwegians dispersed from here throughout the American Midwest, settling primarily in Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa. Some years would see only a thousand or so new arrivals from Norway; other years—1849 and 1850, for example—the number would rise as high as 8,000. But even in these boom years, immigration from Norway was still fairly limited. By the end of the 1860s, out of almost 40 million total Americans there were only about 77,000 thousand Norwegians living in the United States.

The decades to follow would tell another story. Between the 1860s and the 1920s, more than 770,000 Norwegians came to the United States, and by 1920, the Norwegian population in the country had risen to 1.2 million. This massive demographic shift was the result not only of economic stagnation in Norway but also of increasing economic opportunities in the United States—opportunities that were largely concentrated in agriculturally driven pioneer states such as North Dakota. So even though Stoughton, Wisconsin, claims to be the “most Norwegian city in America” and even though Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, used to have more Norwegians than Oslo, North Dakota is today the state with the highest percentage of residents with Norwegian ancestry.

North Dakota is the nineteenth-largest state in the United States and has the third-smallest population. In the west are the Badlands and the Missouri River, to the east is the Red River of the North, and there's a heck of a lot of sparsely populated farmland in between. Most of present-day North Dakota was acquired from the French as part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803; the rest was handed over fifteen years later by the United Kingdom under the terms of the Treaty of 1818. But it would be another forty-two years before the area was incorporated into the Dakota Territory and thirty-eight years after that before North Dakota became the thirty-ninth state in the Union.
^ba

There just wasn't an urgent need to make North Dakota a state—it wasn't a particularly popular place to live in the nineteenth century, either. In fact, the government actually had to find ways to encourage settlement of the area. The first of these was the Preemption Act of 1841, which gave heads of households on government land the opportunity to buy up to 160 acres for $1.25 an acre. But apparently even this price was too high, because in 1862 President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which reduced the price of federal land in the Dakotas to next to nothing: all you had to do was be twenty-one or older, pay an $18 filing fee, and live on the land for five years. If the land was undeveloped, you had to build a house larger than ten by twelve feet and cultivate at least ten acres of land. Additionally, if you were an immigrant, you had to become a U.S. citizen.

The institution of the Homestead Act coincided with a period of economic and agricultural decline in Norway, creating the perfect conditions for a population transfer between the two countries. But even so, many in Norway were reluctant to leave. They simply had difficulty believing the stories were true. What kind of country gave away land for free? In 1869, a Norwegian journalist named Paul Hjelm-Hansen visited the Red River Valley and sent back to Norway not only reports of the quality of the land but also verification that it could be had for free. The subsequent surge in immigration was further enabled by the construction of the Great Northern Railroad and the development of new milling technology that increased demand for the hard spring wheat that grew so well in the area. Between 1878 and 1890, the population of North Dakota increased from 16,000 to 191,000. And of those 191,000, more than 25,000 had come from Norway.