So this morning I loaded up some snacks,
programmed google maps, and set out on about a 2
hour hike to the approximate location of my family's
historic roots. This hike included traveling down a
steep dirt road that had a 'closed' sign that looked like
it had been there for years, but I pressed on regardless. After about 1 hour and 45 minutes of walking, only
occasionally checking my map to make sure I was
on the right track, I was beginning to get close. As
I rounded the corner of the final dog-leg, I spotted a
couple out walking their dog, the first people I'd seen in
nearly 2 hours.
I was thinking to myself "this is a dead
end road, so these people either live very near to, or
actually on the property I'm trying to get to." I decided
to hang back a little bit because I assumed they spoke
no English like everybody else in this area. But dogs
have great senses of smell and the very large poodle
became aware of the American following him, he
turned and barked. Then his mom and dad also turned,
and I can only imagine what they were thinking as the
watched a short kid wearing a black shirt, a full back‐pack, and sunglasses strolling up to them on an empty
road in the middle of nowhere-norway on the opposite
side of town from the hiking trails.
I remove my shades, try to look friendly, and mentally practice my favorite Norwegian phrase:
jeg snakker ikke norsk (I don't speak Norwegian).
I
approach and the man says something, I don't catch
it. I quickly utter my get-out-of-jail-free card and am
met with justified looks of confusion. I respond in very
basic Norwegian that I am from the US, have been
studying in Oslo, and that I am looking for my great
grandma at the end of the road (that's about as close
as I could get on the fly). Slightly more confusion. But then the man asks me "where are you going?" in English.
I'm shocked.
I say again, in English, that I am looking for
this particular house on this street and I show them
the picture my cousin had taken two years prior. They
look at each other and in unison say
"ahh, Storbaklia!" (The actual name of the property) Apparently they
live in the property next door.
 |
| (L to R) Tom, Åsk (dog), Bjørg, Ivar |
They say they would
be more than happy to show it to me, and they invite
me to their home for coffee. I gladly accept and on
the walk they ask me exactly how I know this place. I
respond that my great-great-great grandfather, Hans
Hansen Baglien, and his wife lived there before they
moved to the US in 1870.
A huge smile spreads across
the man's face and he says "oh, Goro (Hans' wife)! That
means that you two are related!" as he gestures to his
wife. (Goro's brother is her great great grandfather).
We enter their house, originally built around the same
time as Storbaklia. They have recently reconstructed
and modernized the interior slightly. It was a beautiful
place, basically a functioning antique cabin with grass
growing from the roof and good wifi.
We sit and drink
coffee and discuss our shared family history and the
general history of the area. Turns out Ivar (the man) is
somewhat of a historian. He has made family trees for all the
families from this area, some going back 400+ years.
However, he explains, he has had a hard time
keeping up once people moved to America, he is fascinated by the limited knowledge I have of my relatives
in the States, he is even more intrigued by my mention
of the famous 'Baglien Book,
' a book put together by
another relative which basically starts with Hans and
traces the family tree to very recently. This book also contains an old map and some information about the area.
'Ivar,' in Norwegian, is pronounced 'Ee-var'.
Eventually they
take me over to Storbaklia and show me around. The
main building had been reconstructed and remodeled
in a similar way to their's only a year or so ago, and is
now for sale. Spread all across the neighboring properties are
remnants of other buildings, some are still standing,
some have recently collapsed, and others are nothing
but foundations of rocks stacked with no mortar. Ivar
knows who built each and every one of them, when,
what they were used for, and who else owned them.
It's incredible; and he tells me that I'm related to nearly
all of the people who lived in them, in some distant way or another.
 |
| One of the many little shacks on the property. Built in the late 1800s |
Then his wife, Bjørg, asks me how I got to the place I
met them.
"I walked," I said with a little smile.
"From where?"
"Skåbu," I say and I point across the valley to the
opposite hill where the main part of town is.
She asks
if I walked along the roads and I said that, yes, that
was the way I went. They both think I'm crazy. They
said it was a shame the path wasn't in better condition
or I could have taken that. I inquire further because I
have no knowledge of such a path and I would walk
just about anything if it was faster then the route I
had taken. Ivar says that the original path connecting
this side of the valley to town is an old foot/horse
path that cuts right through Storbaklia and various
other properties, including their own. I say that I would
maybe take that way going home. They respond that
it would be hard going because it had not been cleared
in a long time, lots of logs and rocks have fallen on it.
Then Ivar asks,
"do you want to see some of it?"
"Sure!" I reply.
We take off down the hill we're standing on, trekking
over rocks and matted tall grass. I ask where the
pathway was and Ivar replied that we were on it.
Oh.
We continue a little ways until we reach a fairly new
wooden bridge over a little waterfall. Ivar explains
that there are four such bridges on this path and the he
built all of them himself. He explains that there is an
article in the contracts for every property that touches
the path that the owners are responsible for the
maintenance of the trail. If there should be a mudslide
on the main road, the trail would be there only way into
town. But, they have not been out to clear it since
the snow melted.
We walk a little ways further, Ivar is
telling all kinds of stories about the people that used
to travel that road every week. I paused to peek off the
edge, looking down at the water below, and Ivar tells
a story about a little boy in 1954, visiting his family at
Storbaklia, who was running along the path playing. He slipped and fell down to the water below where he
died. Apparently he slipped off the rock I was standing
on.
I took a fairly large step back.
 |
| Storbaklia, home of Hans and Goro (restored) |
From there we walked back up the hill. On the way
I learn that the earliest record of the trail is from the
1730s, but it likely existed long before that. On the way
back to their house, Ivar tells me that once their son
Tom comes back to visit, all the neighbors are going
to get together and clear the path. Tom is their only
child, we bond over this coincidence. He works in the
oil industry on the western coast of the country and he
has no family of his own, I have basically become Ivar and Bjørg's grandchild at this point.
We get back to their house and Bjørg asks me what
my plans for the rest of the day are. Originally I was
going to walk to the farm, take a picture, and walk
back to town where I was going to visit the Skåbu
church which is well known for it's very intricate wood
carvings. I tell her that I was going to head back to get
to the church and Ivar says "oh but it's closed today."
I was surprised because I double checked their hours
before I had left. He says that those are the tourist
hours, but it's not tourist season, so the church is
only open Sunday morning for service.
I was a little
disappointed, but I joke saying that that was just
another reason to come back.
"Wait a moment,
" Ivar said and stepped away.
He comes back about a minute later and says "here
is the plan: in 20 minutes we'll drive to the church,
then I'll take you to to see a mill we installed yesterday,
then I'll show you some more places where you have
relatives, and then we'll come back here for lunch?"
This caught me off guard, today is shaping up to be more than I ever
expected it to be.
I accept.
We drive to the church, essentially turning my 2
hour walk into a 13 minute car ride. Along the way
it seemed that Ivar pointed to every other house
and shack and knew who lived there and how
we were all related.
We arrive at the church and a group of caretakers
are in the yard working with some of the headstones,
this is who Ivar had called. One of them comes and
unlocked the door and tells me all about the church,
honestly more than I really wanted to know. The
building was neat and the wood carvings inside were
incredibly beautiful and ornate. We then head outside
and walk through the graves a little bit, I recognize a lot
of the names from the stories he'd been telling all day.
After that we drove to the location of an antique
corn mill. It was basically a little shed that straddled
a stream. Ivar opened it up and showed me how it
worked and told me a little about it. It was pretty neat.
Then he took me to a little wooden farmhouse that
didn't look particularly special. This, however, was the
home of Rønnaug. A particularly tough Norwegian
woman who lived by herself in this tiny two-room
wooden house until the age of 99 when she died in
1994. The interior of the house was left basically as
it was and the rest of the property has been repaired
and restored to be as it was.
After that fun trip, we returned to Ivar's house where
Bjørg had made some soup and lefse for lunch. After
Bjørg refilled my bowl twice and insisted I eat all the
lefse in her house, we finished lunch and helped clean
up. She asked me what my favorite food in Norway
is.
Well, since I've first had them in Oslo, I've been
absolutely in love with the waffles; I think I just drooled
a little bit typing that. Norwegian waffles are thinner and softer than American waffles, served usually with strawberry jam, sour cream, and a Norwegian cheese called brunost. So good.
After we clean up a little, Ivar and I go outside and he
shows me the old food storage/drying house built
in 1838. The first floor has a chest freezer and lots
of storage space. The upstairs is the drying room
where they have about 45 homemade bloodsausages
hanging to dry, as well as two lamb -- bits. I don't really
know exactly what it was. It was maybe a leg and
some part of a back, I couldn't see. All the meat there had been bought and slaughtered no more than a
half mile away, sometimes it was traded in exchange
for Ivar's carpentry skills.
 |
| Food house door "IPS 1838" |
Then he showed me 'the
little house.' The little house is exactly what it sounds
like, a little house that the original family lived in while
they were constructing the main house. It has all the
amenities one could need: a single oil lamp, an old
fireplace, a wood burning stove (with a cast-iron waffle
iron), and a full collection of old furniture. Oh, and no
electricity or plumbing.
Now they use it as a card room.
Ivar and I then sat on the porch of that building for
about 2 hours and he just talked and talked about
anything and everything. I tried to soak up as much
as I could, but there were so many names and
places and relations.
This whole time, Bjørg had been inside. Right as
the stories began to blend together she stepped
out and called us to come inside.
This wonderful
Norwegian lady had made from scratch about 18
waffles, complete with all the toppings. I'm still
not convinced that I didn't get hit by a car on my walk
that morning and this was what heaven looked like. I
personally downed probably 8 waffles, Bjørn insisted
I have more but I just couldn't. We sat around and
talked for a while longer, and we probably could have
much longer, but I was exhausted and so were they.
Before I left I showed them some pictures my mom
had sent me from The Book. The Book has pictures of
Hans and Goro and their children and of many, many
other people as well. Ivar was shocked, he said he had
never seen some of those photographs before, most
of the families took what photos they had to the US
with them when they moved. We exchanged contact
info and he made me promise to send him any and all
photos of the family that we had.
I hugged my new
Norwegian grandma, said goodbye to the poodle that
started all this, and Ivar drove me back to town. On the
way he stopped and pointed out that you could see
both their property and Storbaklia from the main street
in town, something I never would have noticed before.
The amount of things that went into this day is
astounding. Had I gone a day earlier or later, they
would have not been at home at all. If I had set out at 9 in the morning instead of 8 like I had originally planned to, or if I left even 10 minutes before or after when I did, or if I had simply gotten
lost or otherwise delayed, then my story would have
been walking 2 hours to find an old empty building,
taking a picture, and walking walking 2 hours back. And, honestly,
that's all I expected from today; I would have been
just fine with that. Ivar and Bjørg would have watched
from their kitchen as some weird dude walked into
their neighbor's yard, took a selfie, and walked away as
their poodle barked at him.
I came to Norway to find a building, and I found family.
