On Mermaids

1.

Undine is a mermaid.  A mermaid is a sea creature that looks like a woman.  (Or, conversely, a woman that behaves like a sea creature.)  

There are many different kinds of mermaids.  The most famous are shaped like lissome, beautiful young women.  But others are grisly and monstrous.  Grendel’s mum, who lives at the bottom of a murky tarn, is described as grund-wyrgenne / mere-wif mihtig – that is an “abyss-dwelling woman, a mighty mere-wife.”  Her lair is so deep under the water that it takes hwil daeges (either “most of a day” or “days”) to swim down to it.  Beowulf accomplishes this feat – therefore, I assume that he can either hold his breath for a long time, or may be a mere-man (or merman) himself.  

2.

Undine’s story appears in literature in 1811, embodied in the short novel Undine by the Prussian writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouque.  Born in 1777, Fouque was the descendent of French Huguenots who had fled to Berlin in the previous century.  A member of the Prussian nobility, he amused himself by writing literary versions of old European legends.  Before composing Undine, the only of his works read today, he wrote tales about the Norse gods, including a version of the Siegfried legend that influenced Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungs.  He seems to have been prolific and published many poems and stories, although by the time of his death in 1843, his fame was waning and his romantic fairy tales were regarded as relics of a literary sensibility that had gone out of style.

In translation, Undine was popular in the United States and is mentioned with some enthusiasm in Little Women by Louisa Mae Alcott. (The English translator was no less than Thomas Carlyle.) The tale was adapted as an opera on several occasions – by E.T.A. Hoffmann in 1816 and, later, by Tchaikovsky (Undina 1869) and, then, Dvorak (Rusalka) in 1901.  In 1938, Jean Giraudoux, a French writer, composed a play on the subject Ondine – this play is reputedly impressive and, sometimes, revived.  A list of works inspired by the story would fill many pages with pointless notations, probably culminating in a reference to the Disney film The Little Mermaid (1989) and the logo on Starbuck’s coffee cups.  

There’s a more sinister application of the legend in medicine.  In one version of Undine, the mermaid says that she will be “the shoes in which (her beloved) walks” and “the breath in his lungs.”  Since the story of Undine is inevitably one of betrayal, she curses her faithless lover by extracting the breath from his lungs, leaving him to drown, as it were, in the sea of air like a fish out of water.  Ondine’s Syndrome is a chronic condition in which the autonomic nervous system fails to regulation breathing.  To live, we must breathe and this function we perform without thinking or volition, that is, by virtue of autonomic nervous impulses.  If, for some reason, those impulses fail, we cease breathing and die.  Perhaps about 1500 people today suffer from this syndrome and their lives must be maintained by mechanical ventilation.

3. 

Fouque’s Undine is a variant of the old European legend of Melusine.  Melusine is a beautiful young woman who entices men into marrying her.  She imposes a curious condition on these men – namely, that they should never see her while bathing.  This wasn’t too much of a burden because medieval people bathed rarely.  Melusine’s problem seems to have been that, when exposed to water in her bath, her legs would fuse into a single fishy tail, a condition not conducive to connubial bliss.  

Melusine is considerably more fearsome than Undine.  When exposed by her oath-breaking husband, she was wont to thrash about wildly and, then, become an enormous winged serpent that would fly away from her faithless spouse.  Martin Luther knew the story and thought that Melusine was a succubus, a demonic spirit that sexually molests men in their sleep.  Goethe prints a version of the story in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the text appearing as “The New Melusine” in the 1808 first edition of the book.  Melusine gets confused with Undine and appears in various operas (including one by Mendelssohn) and ballets throughout the 19th century.  

4.  

There are different ways to think about the soul.  (Of course, one way is to deny that the subject has any meaning at all.)  Undine represents a certain way of thinking about the soul.  Undine’s love for Huldbrand, the knight that she meets in the story, results in the water creature becoming “ensouled” – that is, beseelt in German.  The novella is about how this happens and its consequences.  

Undine’s encounter with Huldbrand, the somewhat dim-witted knight who is the love-interest in the story, results in him becoming enraptured, smitten, with her.  A wandering priest, Pater Heilmann (the name means “Father Healer- or Salvation-man) consecrates their union by marrying them.  Marriage poses a problem.  In the Catholic Church, marriage is a sacrament – dogs and sparrows don’t marry because they are “soul-less”.  Marriage is a sacrament and, therefore, available only to those creatures with a soul.  Although Fouque, as a Huguenot, probably didn’t believe marriage was a sacrament (the rite doesn’t have that significance to Lutherans), he was a committed medievalist antiquarian, and, in the context of his tale, Undine requires a soul in order to be properly married.  (Lutherans don’t bring their horses and goldfish to church to be married either – so, although the issue is a bit blunted by Fouque’s Protestant beliefs, nonetheless, the writer requires that the soul-less sea creature acquire a soul to be properly wed to Huldbrand,.)

Undine’s ensouling raises a “chicken or the egg” problem.  Does her love for Huldbrand, and his reciprocal affection, implant a soul in her?  Or does Huldbrand’s love, that is the love bestowed by a creature with a soul, somehow create her new-born soul?  Fouque opts for a sacramental answer: the rite of marriage makes Undine’s soul.  (From a logical perspective, this seems problematic since the prerequisite for the rite seems to be that both participants possess souls – but it’s quixotic to search for logic in a story about a mermaid and her lover.)  

Undine is fearful about being invested with a soul.  She says to the priest: “There must be something lovely and terribly fearsome about the soul.  Pious man, wouldn’t it be better not to be involved with such a thing?”  The problem with having a soul is two-fold.  Once the soul is embedded in you, it is ineradicable.  And many vibrant creatures, clearly the majority of existence, get along perfectly well without a soul, a spiritual quality that turns out to be an encumbrance. 

Late in the book, Fouque shows us Undine sitting at the bottom of the Mediterranean sea.  (It is an article of faith in the novella that all of the bodies of water in the world are connected to one another, by rivers that flow into seas that overlap with one another or, perhaps, by subterranean channels.  The aquifers deep in the earth are part of this network of world encompassing waters.)  Huldbrand is half-asleep and has a vision in which he sees Undine in her underwater palace, beneath its “crystal vaults.”  She is weeping inconsolably for her lost love.  Undine is accosted by her kinsman, her sinister Oheim (“uncle”) Kuehlborn, who can’t understand her grief.  She says:

“Even though I am living here, under the water, I have, nonetheless, brought my soul into the deep with me.  Therefore, I weep even though you will never understand the what such tears mean.  And those tears are holy just as everything is holy in which there is a soul.”

The soul, therefore, is related to love and sorrow.  It is the soul that causes beings to weep.  Tears, which are salt, however, partake of the water.  Indeed, perhaps, the sea is salt because of the infinite number of tears poured into it.

Before she became ensouled, Undine understood herself to be an “elemental” – that is, a blithe spirit associated with the element of water, just as gnomes and dwarves embody the earth and salamanders, who bathe in flame, represent fire.  The elementals enjoy their existence and are fearless.  They have no souls and, therefore, nothing in them remains after the wind and the rain destroy them.  They are forever in the process of becoming and have no fixed being –being is a characteristic of the soul.  Nonetheless, they have essence for the elementals are the essential components of earth or air or water or fire.  Elementals are neither evil nor good.  Undine describes herself, before becoming ensouled, as part of the natural cycle of nature and, therefore, immortal in a certain way:

“...unlike you others (humans) who wake to a purer existence, we remain wherever sand or spark or wind or wave remain.  Therefore, we have no souls: the element animates us, often obeys us, as long as we live – reduces us to dust as soon as we die, and we are happy, without ever being troubled, just as the other sweet children of nature, the nightingale and the goldfish, are free from worry.”

This happy state, however, is subject to a Hegelian rule:

“But every being desires something higher than its state.”  (This is the concept of Aufhebung or “transcendence”) So my father, who is a mighty water-prince of the Mediterranean ocean wished that his only daughter participate in being ensouled and, therefore, she must experience the many sorrows that those who have souls endure.  Our kind can gain a soul only through the innermost union in love with one of your species.  Now I have a soul, for which I must thank you whom I love with inexpressible love, and I will always thank you for my soul so long as you don’t make me miserable for my entire life on that account.  Because what would become of me if I were to seem repellant to you and, thus, be cast away?  If you betray me, I won’t remain.  And if you plan to cast me aside, do it now – I’ll go alone back to the bank of the brook and dive into this stream, which is my uncle.  Here he lives as a miraculous lonely pilgrim, far from his friends.  But he is mighty and has the worth and value of many great rivers and just as he led me to this fisherman as a frivolous, laughing child, he will bring me home to my parents as an ensouled, loving, and suffering wife.”

So we understand that Undine’s father, a mighty merman, desired that his daughter acquire a soul.  For this purpose, he dispatched Undine’s uncle, Kuehlborn (“cool spring-source”) through the rivers of the world, bringing his daughter to the lake where the child was granted a human (if incomplete and soul-less) existence with her foster family.  The world is the “vale of soul-making” as we are assured by another Romantic poet, greater than Fouque, John Keats.      

5.

There is a peculiar pagan underpinning to the idea of the soul.  The etymology of the word “soul” discloses a fundamental paradox.  Perhaps, the elementals, without human souls, embody the only real soul in existence.  Perhaps, there is an universal world-soul in which all creatures participate.

“Soul” derives from precursor forms siola, seula, and sai waila – each of these words contains the concept of water, that is, the sea or lakes.  (This etymology is very different from that of the Greek word psyche which seems to refer to a butterfly – that is delicate, winged being within each of us.  Greek theories of the soul have an Egyptian and Mesopotamian origin in which the soul is part of an intricate economy of spirit, intellect, and passion.)  In northern European languages, soul means that which is “water-born”, something that comes from the lake – this is the proto-Germanic saiwaz meaning “from the lake.”  This etymology is also obvious in the German word for soul – Seele which seems to mean (in a literal sense) “lake-ish”.  In northern pagan religions, souls were imagined as coming from bodies of water and returning to those places after death. 

So there is another way of reading Undine, albeit contrary to Fouque’s understanding – the elementals are, perhaps, the only beings with soul.  The knight and the other humans don’t own souls.  Only Undine, whom the book posits as being initially without a soul, is, in fact, ensouled.

6.

Fouque’s tale also interprets male - female relationships.  The hero’s encounters with women (or women-like beings)   The component of the story requires a summary of the narrative that Fouque presents. Clearly features of this narrative  strike a chord even to this present hour.  (As I write, the German film-maker Christian Petzold has just directed a film called Undine, a version of the story set in contemporary Berlin.)

Fouque initiates his story with descriptions of an obviously symbolic landscape.  An old fisherman is mending his net on the edge of a big lake.  Fishermen mend nets, of course, but the artifact suggests motifs of entrapment and escape from entrapment, “catch and release” as it were that animate the story.  Creatures with souls are trapped, it seems, in a certain way – that is, they have a destiny; the soulless elementals are free as the wind and the rain, but exist within nature’s futile and endless cycles of birth and death.  The fisherman has a cottage at the tip of a “tongue” of land enveloped by the “loving” waters of the lake  – the way that the land penetrates the water and is clasped in an embrace by the lake is pretty schematic.  Fouque isn’t a subtle writer and it’s pretty obvious that he starts his novella by equating the male principle with land and the female with the watery element.  

Along comes a knight, gentil and parfit pricking his way through the dark forest to the peninsula where the fisherman.  The forest is full of monsters that, apparently, won’t molest those who are perfectly virtuous.  For this reason, the old fisherman can cart his fish to market in a city on the other side of the woods without being overly oppressed by the various evil spirits that live in between his hut and the town.  The forest creates a sort of narrative quarantine, isolating events that occur in the city from the fisherfolk – this is required by Fouque’s narrative.  Fouque’s binary imagination also devises a series of contrasts between city and country that are also important to his symbolic system.  The city is full of erotic temptation, pernicious class distinctions, and governed by money; the country operates according to a simpler economy and is as virtuous as the city seems depraved.  

Huldbrand is the name of the knight, described in elaborate detail with respect to his cloak and waistcoat.  We are also provided with an account of his steed, not really a war-horse, prancing lightly over the green meadows on the point of land, doing them “not the slightest injury.”  Oddly, Fouque doesn’t tell us anything about what the Knight looks like other than his colorful garments.  (I may be mistaken but don’t recall a single description of his face, height, or other features in the book.)  Figuratively speaking, Huldbrand is “an empty suit” – just a vessel on which others act.  He’s not much of a character, really more of a caricature of a medieval knight than a successfully drawn character – his name, Huldbrand, by the way, means something like “honored or valorous sword.”   Like the spit of land, he’s pretty much just a phallus – in this case, a penis on horseback.

Tired from his journey through the scary forest, Huldbrand asks to spend the night with the fisherman and his wife.  He’s just settling down for supper when water suddenly splashes upon the window to the house.  The water is Undine’s calling card.  She is described as blonde, beautiful, and mercurial – about 17 or 18, she darts around the cottage, precociously flirting with the knight.  The knight learns that the girl has a strange background.  About fifteen years earlier, the fisherman and his wife were blessed with a beautiful baby girl.  One day, when the child was a toddler, she lunged out of her mother’s arms and fell into the lake.  (The child was reaching for something that glinted in the water, a “wunderschoenes” object.)  The little girl apparently sinks like a stone beneath the waters of the lake and, notwithstanding the best efforts of the fisherman, her little corpse is never recovered.  Then, a few months later, another beautiful toddler appears, a little girl who is richly dressed when she stumbles through the door of the cottage and, also, soaking wet.  The mourning man and woman adopt the child and raise her as their daughter.  She babbles incoherently about an undersea palace with crystal vaults.  The fisherman and his wife select a name for her but she rejects it: she demands to be christened as “Undine.”  

A terrible storm now intervenes.  Huldbrand and the fisherman search for Undine.  In the raging tempest, Huldbrand glimpses a tall white man standing on the other side of the stream that flows down to the tip of the peninsula and spills into the lake.  The tall white man seems sinister and makes menacing gestures.  Later, we will learn that this is the merman, Kuehlborn, Undine’s uncle, a water-creature or elemental associated with streams and springs.  Huldbrand sees Undine in the tempest standing at the very point of the tongue of land.  The lake rises up and breaches the peninsula, isolating Undine on tiny, freshly formed islet.  Huldbrand wades out to the island, rescues Undine (who truth to tell, doesn’t need to be rescued from anything watery – in fact, she may be the efficient cause of the tempest.)  Men like to rescue maidens in distress, even those who aren’t really in any danger at all.  There’s a kiss and Undine’s fate, as well as that of Huldbrand, is sealed.   

The narrative is now ripe for us to learn a bit more about Huldbrand.  Returning from the island to the spit of land, Undine is reunited with the fisherman and his wife.  Huldbrand, then, tells them how he came to be traversing the notoriously haunted forest.  Eight days earlier, Huldbrand attended a jousting tournament in the Reichstadt (presumably medieval Vienna).  After acquitting himself succesfully in the tourney, Huldbrand encounters a young woman Bertalda.  (As soon as she is mentioned, Huldbrand squeals with pain – Undine has sunk her “pearly teeth” into his finger.)  Bertalda, proud and imperious, flirts with Huldbrand and tells him she will bestow upon the knight a love-token, one of her handkerchiefs, if the hero dares to penetrate the dark woods surrounding the lake.  Huldbrand sets forth and immediately encounters various monsters and wood-sprites lurking in the forest.  His horse is spooked and gallops wildly through the woods, stopped only a swift-flowing brook that bars the animal’s passage – and keeps the beast and rider from plunging off a cliff.  This brook coalesces into a tall pale man, Kuehlborn, whom we later learn to Undine’s uncle.  Continuing his trek into the woods, Huldbrand discovers that he can somehow see through the earth’s surface, peering through a sort of greenish crystal into subterranean caves where dwarves (“earth” elementals) are laboring in their mines.  A bit later, possibly shepherded on his way by Kuehlborn, Huldbrand meets the fisherman mending his nets on the shore of the lake, thus, bringing us up to the present moment in the story.  

Huldbrand, then, marries Undine in a ceremony conducted by Pater Heilmann.  She explains that she is an elemental, a water creature, but now has become a human woman since Huldbrand’s love has created a soul in her.  Huldbrand and Undine, with Kuehlborn tagging along, make a honeymoon trip to the Reichstadt (the imperial city).  There Bertalda is trying to convince other young knights to venture into the spooky woods to search for the missing cavalier, Huldbrand.  (Fouque drily notes that none of the other knights were willing to risk their lives for a mere kiss from Bertalda, particularly since their quest would be self-defeating – if they were to rescue Huldbrand, of course, they would immediately lose their claim on his fair lady, Bertalda.)  Bertalda and Undine meet and, oddly, becomes fast friends.  Kuehlborn retreats into a fountain in the townsquare, becoming embodied, as it were, in the splashing, plashing water.  Undine and Bertalda feel kinship – this is not surprising for within the mythos of the story, the two figures seem to represent differing aspects of femininity.  It’s the standard opposition of the blonde lady to the dark, the maternal to the dangerously seductive, the humble handmaiden in contrast to the proud and arrogant great lady.

Bertalde’s name-day arrives, a festive occasion in which the beautiful maiden is richly dressed, accoutered with jewels and flowers, like “the goddess” of Spring, a sort of Primavera figure.  The name-day is a bit problematic because Bertalda has been raised a powerful duke and duchess, her foster-family, and doesn’t know the identity of her real parents.  (The Duke came upon the toddler one day while riding his horse by the lake.)  Undine attends the party with Huldbrand and she brings a lute with which to accompany herself as she sings a ballad recounting the circumstances of Bertalda’s birth.  The child, she sings, was born to the poor fisherman and his wife.  However, she was lured into the watery depths of the lake (presumably by Kuehlborn) and conveyed by the waves to the lakeshore where the little girl was found by the Duke.  At that moment, the ragged and humble fisherman and his wife appear at the party.  Undine says that she was a changeling, substituted for the fisherman’s lost daughter, separated, as they say, at birth and that Bertalda was raised by the Duke in great pomp and circumstances.  Her true lineage is a horrible blow to Bertalda’s pride and she denies that the story could be true.  But there’s a birthmark hidden on her person, known only the fisherman and his wife, and so Undine’s story is corroborated.

The rather kinky threesome involving Undine, Huldbrand, and Bertalda persists.  After a while, Huldbrand with the two women depart from Vienna, the emperor’s city, and return to the knight’s ancestral castle, a place called Ringstetten.  At that castle, of course, the three encounter a lean, pale man who says that he is the “master of the fountain” in the courtyard in the castle.  Kuehlborn turns out to be well-nigh inescapable.  The trip to Ringstetten turns out to be disastrous for Undine.  Gradually, Huldbrand loses interest in her and begins to court Bertalda.  Undine, who seems to have expected this betrayal, tells her husband to seal up the fountain with a great stone.  If her father’s loyal henchman were to grasp that Undine is about to be abandoned, he would rise in fury from the well, flood the place, and drag the mermaid back to her father’s crystal palace at the bottom of the sea.  This would be fine with Bertalda and, in fact, she contrives to have the stone rolled away from the mouth of the fountain.  A enormous jet of water pours out, flooding everything, and washing Huldbrand away.  Somehow, Undine rescues him and Kuehlborn is once again confined in the plugged-up well. 

The threesome, then, decides to flee Ringstetten Castle and return to Vienna.  While sailing along the Danube, a strange phenomenon, an impaled head, keeps pace with the boat on which Huldbrand, Undine, and Bertalda are traveling.  At a stop along the river, Huldbrand adds insult to injury, buying an expensive gold necklace for Bertalda.  A little later, Bertalda is idly playing with the necklace, drooping it into the river current, when a giant hand arises from the depths, seizes the jewelry and drags it into the depths while a peal of inhuman laughter rings over the river.  Huldbrand is outraged and angrily says that this theft is Undine’s fault, cursing her as a siren, a witch and a nixie.  Deeply aggrieved, Undine fishes around in the water and pulls to the surface a beautiful necklace of sea-coral that she humbly hands to Bertalda.  Again, Huldbrand is outraged.  He shrieks that Undine should leave human beings alone and that she is a damnable conjuror and witch.  Then, he pitches the coral necklace back into the river.  Undine dives overboard and the little wavelets breaking over the ship’s prow seem to sigh: O weh!  O weh! Ach bleibe treu! O weh!  (“O woe! O woe! Stay true to me!  O woe!”)   Huldbrand, regretting his cruelty too late, swoons.  (This chorus may remind readers of Wagner's Rhine Maidens melodiously lamenting the loss of their treasured Rhine-gold in The Ring of the Nibelungs.)

Huldbrand recover from his sorrow with unseemly haste.  He and Bertalda return to Ringstetten.  While preparing for his nuptials with Bertalda, Undine appears in the knight’s dreams and warns him about getting remarried.  He ignores those premonitions and summons a priest to perform the wedding.  Pater Heilmann is lurking around the castle.  He has arrived on the eve of the wedding and, even, built himself a little hut, “made from tree-branches bent over together and furnished with moss and twigs” – this is a very odd detail and I can’t quite assimilate this image to the story.  Why does Fouque pause to show us this peculiar little wigwam pitched in the forest near the walls of Castle Ringstetten?  When consulted about the wedding, Pater Heilmann makes this ominous remark: “There are sacraments other than holy matrimony and, if I’m not invited to this wedding, it could be that I’ll be needed for another ceremony.  We’ll have to see what happens.  But, in any event, Trauen (betrothal) and Trauern (mourning) are not that dissimilar and one, who has not willfilly blinded himself, should be able to see this for himself pretty easily.”  Here, Fouque seems to reflexively slip into the motif of the wedding guest wrongfully disinvited from the ceremony – in fairy tales, evil stepmother’s who are slighted in this way, tend to put a curse on the proceedings.  The German can’t be exactly translated.  But Heilmann is noted that only the letter “r” separates Trauen (“betrothal” or here “wedding”) from Trauern – that is “mourning”.  It’s like saying “wedding” isn’t that remote from “weeping.”

No one pays any attention to the hermit-priest in his rustic wigwam.  The marriage is celebrated and, then, consummated.  Bertalda rises from her wedding bed and is thirsty.  Out of an excess of pride, she demands that she be brought a cup of water from the well plugged-up again with the big stone.  The stone is pushed aside and a geyser of water spurts forth. This column of water takes the shape of a veiled woman.  Huldbrand rises from his wedding-bed and is told that the well has been re-opened.  There’s a knock on the door.  It’s Undine standing in full watery majesty, a veil puddled over her face.  Huldbrand is afraid to look at her, terrified of how she will appear behind the watery cascade covering her features.  Undine says: “I’m as beautiful now as I was on the spit of land in the lake where you wooed me.”  “If that’s true,” Huldbrand says, “then, I want to kiss you.”  Undine lifts her veil and she “kisses him with a heavenly kiss”.  This turns out to be lethal.  Huldbrand drops back on the pillows (Kissen in German), a corpse.  (Fouque seems to be impressed so much with his ghastly joke about trauern and trauen that he repeats the effect, rather farcically, with the words Kissen - “pillows” - and Kuessen - “kisses”.)  

Fouque has one more trick up his sleeve.  Pater Heilmann appears and presides over Huldbrand’s burial.  He leads the funeral procession to the church cemetery.  Of course, Bertalda accompanies the body to the grave, but there is also a watery presence taking up the rear of the funeral march.  At the grave, Bertalda demands that Undine depart.  But, then, in a peculiar turn of events, Bertalda recalls how Undine replaced her lost golden necklace with the coral jewelry.  Tears fill her eyes and she falls to her knees next to the open grave.  After the grave is closed, a spring bursts through the sod and the waters rise to create a Weiher (“pond”) surrounding Huldbrand’s tomb.  Thus, the “poor spurned Undine, in this manner, will always embrace her darling in her loving arms.”  

Fouque ends his novella with a landscape symmetrical with the topography at the outset of the story: a bit of land is surrounded by water.  However, the narrative has shifted the meaning of this landscape – it’s like one of those optical illusions in which the profile of a duck becomes a rabbit.  At the beginning of the story, the land was a spear penetrating the water – “the tongue of land,” out of love stretches out into the lake which embraces.  The focus is on the land, the grassy sward, the flowers and the trees that cast their wind-tossed shadows onto the water.  At the end of the book, the emphasis is on the pond, Undine’s lagoon, that embraces the islet on which the grave is located – Fouque is a little vague as to this terrain: the pond is said to be beside the grave, but also embracing it with watery arms.

It’s important to grasp that Undine is not a creature that lives in water.  As an elemental, she is water, associated, it seems, with ponds and lakes.  It would be seductive to argue that Undine as an elemental represents nature and Huldbrand signifies culture, but this is too simple and false to Fouque’s presentation of his supernaturals.  Kuehlborn, who is decidedly male, is an elemental constituted by running water, streams, brooks, and floods.  Presumably, Undine’s father, ensconced in his undersea palace, is Oceanus or Neptune, the embodiment of the ocean.  The earth elementals, dwarves, are clearly male.  Therefore, Fouque’s system doesn’t ascribe a particular sex to the elementals – they are both male and female.  

However, Fouque implies that the two women in the story are, more or less, fungible – one can be substituted for another.  This is literally true: Huldbrand enters the dark forest in a quest compelled by Bertalda; he is fickle and replaces her with Undine.  Then, when Undine vanishes into the Danube as a result of the contretemps on the river-vessel, Huldbrand replaces her with Bertalde.  The three characters form a triad – Bertalda and Undine are glued together when it comes to Huldbrand; the three are inseparable.  In the book’s economy, as far as Huldbrand is concerned, the two females are sufficiently alike that one can stand for another – this attitude on Huldbrand’s part turns out to be lethal to him.  Although the dullard knight seems to think that one woman is as good as another, this isn’t true and, in fact, the sea creature has her revenge on him, correcting the erroneous notion that a mortal woman and sea monster can be simply exchanged according to the whims of male desire by murdering him, albeit, perhaps, unintentionally and with love.  (Perversely, most crimes of passion are committed out of love and Huldbrand’s death is no exception.)

The masculine perspective of the author, and the gendered system of linguistic signs, participates in this economy of substitution.  I have pointed out the peculiar pairing of words that, in German, differ by only one letter: Trauen - Trauen (marriage - mourning), Kuessen - Kissen (kisses - pillows), and Weiher - Weihen (pond - to consecrate or dedicate).  These words imply the error of Huldbrand’s thinking – one woman differs from another only in specific details: there is an iota’s difference between women, signified in the story’s language by the substitution of one letter for another – the words look similar, but the difference of a letter makes all the difference in the world, a lesson that Huldbrand learns only too late and with fatal consequences.  (A similar economy of exchange manifests in the curious detail of the golden necklace that is switched for a necklace made of sea-coral.  Huldbrand doesn’t accept the validity of this exchange on the boat floating on the Danube – but Bertalda seems to confirm that the exchange was legitimate at the end of the novella when she recalls the sea-coral necklace, appreciates it, and allows the watery phantom of Undine to follow the funeral procession to Huldbrand’s grave.) 

Although Fouque is not in complete control of some of his effects, the contour of the novella suggests a certain plasticity of sexual identity and response – “fluidity” of sexual identity intending the pun.  Desire is liquid; it flows, surges, floods, and spurts.  Huldbrand, as a knight, can be conceived as armored.  If he were to fall into water, he would sink like a stone.  His castle, Ringstetten, is armored as well – the name for the fortress suggests circular walls (“rings”) surrounding a central castle-keep.  But Ringstetten is also equipped with a urethral opening in its center – the well that Huldbrand closes with the stone.  On her wedding knight, Bertalda unclogs this drain, as it were, with dire results.  The well ejaculates a foamy white geyser into the air that contains Undine.  Despite his armor, the knight has Undine’s watery stuff inside his fortified castle – that is, within his own body.  His discharge brings Undine back into the novel so that she can have her revenge on her faithless lover. 

8.

In Philadelphia, on the green, wooded banks of the Schuykill River, you will find a miniature castle built of heavy ashlar blocks.  The castle has a turret and flies a colorful pennant.  This is the Castle Ringstetten, the boat-house for the Undine Rowing Club, founded in 1856.  The Castle has a tavern and ballroom within its heavy rock walls.  For more than 160 years, the rowing club has sponsored competitions in double scull, and sweep rowing – on the evidence of several very beautiful videos at the Undine Rowing Club’s website, the organization has fielded (“rivered”?) coxless and coxed quad teams and, even, octuple coxed quad shells.   

  

9.

Minnesota is a watery State.  Freeways traversing Minnesota enter over bodies of water.  On the East, Interstate 94, the freeway from Chicago, reaches across the border on the St. Croix river in a dramatic, steep-sided gorge pressed tight around the water.  Sailboats glide over taut expanses of wave between shaggy bluffs and there is an ancient prison in the hills and, at a bend in the river, a power-plant. Interstate 94, the freeway that crosses Minnesota’s southernmost tier of counties, spans the Mississippi river, several bridges stretched tributary waters and big oxbow lakes fringed with dead forests, a higher iron span rising over the main channel.  If anything, the landscape at this southeastern corner of the State is more dramatic – high bluffs loom over the valley spotted with marshes and vast wetlands through which geese and ducks migrate twice a year and, in some places, the hill sides are sheer, with bald meadows towering over the river valley and broken cliffs from which artesian springs well forth, freezing into immense ice scimitars in the Winter.  Interstate 35 bisects the State running from Des Moines to Minneapolis – in fact the freeway extends between Houston and Duluth, in effect, bisecting the continental United States.  Immediately upon crossing the Minnesota border, the freeway swoops down into a shallow valley where a long, windy causeway crosses a blue lake cupped between rolling wooded hills.  I have driven I-90 from Seattle to New York and the Mississippi River crossing is one of the most spectacular features on the highway, similar to the Delaware Water Gap on the border of New Jersey – for rest of the way, the road runs prosaically through corn and soybean fields mostly flat land until Pennsylvania and, even, among the long blue parallel ridges of the Appalachians there is nothing quite so impressive as the valley and bridges over the Mississippi.  The same is true of I35.  The road runs flat across the farm land for a thousand miles and there is only one place, so far as I can recall, where the interstate actually crosses a big, blue body of water – and this is Albert Lea Lake, seven miles or so, from the Iowa border.  It is as if the rivers and the lake at Albert Lea are signposts announcing that one who enters Minnesota is entering the land of lakes and rivers. 

 

10.

Of course, the question that this poses is whether there are mermaids in Minnesota waters.  The gorge of the Mississippi near Minneapolis is adorned with graceful bridges and waterfalls are hidden in the deep, rocky ravines dropping down to the river.  The waterfalls churn night and day with ceaseless, futile energy in pits shaped like big stony pots.  Probably, water-monsters hide behind the veils of falling stream, but they are hard to see, even at night, when the falls are luminous with an eerie phosphorescence, moonbeams and starlight caught in the plunging water.  Lorelei haunt the dams and locks on the river, but nothing is known of them – you only see a Lorelei and hear her song in the instant before your canoe or sailboat plunges over the concrete rim of the lock and you are lost.  The innumerable lakes in the North are too cold for naked mermaids (and mermaids are almost always naked).  Icy waves slosh against basins of bare granite and tiny islets, red with iron ore and, sometimes, bearing a tiny pine or fir tree, like a display of Japanese bonsai, dot the lakes that stretch in long, lonely corridors toward the Canadian boundary.  From the air, the chains of lakes occupy more terrain than the feeble forested isthmuses between them and the place is an enormous, silent wilderness.  Sometimes, camped on rib of stone dotted with orange and moss-green lichens, an explorer in this enormous solitude will hear the wild cackle of a loon in the fog – an uncanny sound that chills the heart and makes the hair stand on end.  But a loon, notwithstanding its sinister cry, isn’t a water-monster.

11.

Even states with relatively little open water can host a water-elemental. In west Nebraska, the country of the Oglala Sioux, a crooked dog-leg of water stands among pine ridges and sand hills.  This is Hay or Alkali Lake.  I’ve driven to the edge of the grey shallow water, an anomaly in the arid country.  There’s a picnic table in the grass and the trash barrel of filled to overflowing with beer bottles and cans.  Supposedly, the lake is haunted by a water-horse, an eel-like creature that is sometimes seen, usually by drunken local teenagers after midnight, disporting itself in the open water beyond the fringe of reeds and cattails.  The creature has a body like a long broad snake and, sometimes, it shows coil upon coil, writhing exposed over the limpid, grey of water that smells like bleach.  The head of the water-horse has been described variously as that of a stallion or a woman or a lynx.  In Winnebago, Nebraska, a small museum maintained by the Hochunk Nation (an Indian tribe previously called the Winnebago) displays a facsimile of a stone carving of a water monster.  The provenance of the carving is uncertain.  The rock is soft yellow sandstone, marked with neatly incised lines that show an elongated beast with its head turned to look out of the rock.  The beast is hatched with marks to represent scales and so the trunk of the animal is, apparently, serpentine, The creature’s head is engraved as a small diamond-shaped hex with tiny eyes and wearing a weird cowl-like hat, something like a Bishop’s miter.  The water-monster has four tiny legs extruding beneath it’s long scaly body and seems to be smoking a  calumet or pipe. (There is a similar image pecked into a stone at Mesa Prieta in New Mexico – it shows a water serpent with buffalo horns, a Pueblo Indian avanyu, apparently, playing a flute.  It may be that the creature in the Hochunk museum is musical and the elongated form is a flute.)  It’s impossible to know whether this stone is an ancient artifact, chiseled off some crumbling limestone cliff, a folly carved by a madman, or simply a hoax.

    

12.

The City of Albert Lea, Minnesota is built on a ridge of land between three lakes, Albert Lea Lake, Pickerel Lake, and Fountain Lake.  (Three other smaller lakes are also within the boundaries of the City.)  There is a mermaid in Fountain Lake.  She is not Undine, but, rather, the sea creature described in Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-story, “The Little Mermaid.”  

13. 

German critics derided Fouque.  One said that the writer’s characters were just “stuffed” armor and that the only psychology in is works was equine – he has “mastered” the psychology of horses but not human beings.  Heine said that Fouque’s knights were composed of “courage and iron” with no trace of “flesh or reason”.  

Hans Christian Andersen’s fables are too dire to be readily dismissed.  If Fouque has no psychology, Andersen’s Maerchen are all psychology – and abnormal psychology to boot.  

14.

Undine is narrated from the point of view of its human characters: the story is about humans who encounter inscrutable supernaturals – that is, the water-elementals with whom the humans transact business.  Fouque’s perspective is prosaic and land-bound; his narrative is grounded, as it were, on terra firma.  By contrast, Andersen’s “Little Mermaid” is told from the perspective of the sea-creature.  Andersen is resolute in narrating his story from the point-of-view of the mermaid.  The mermaid is a fully characterized being whose psychological states are carefully delineated.  The humans inhabiting the tale are caricatures, cardboard cut-outs, mere types – a prince, slave-girls, a temple-maiden.  None of these humans has any heft or depth.  The only figure worth caring about in Andersen’s morose tale is the little mermaid.  

Andersen’s decision to remain within the mermaid’s point-of-view has consequences for the story.  “The Little Mermaid” is not grounded – it contains abysmal depths, bizarre digressions and non sequiturs, weird shifts in tone.  The story is watery and, at the end of the tale, the plot literally dissolves into thin air: the text ends with air elementals, sylphs, rising like champagne bubbles up through the prose toward heaven.  In effect, Andersen’s tale simply evaporates like sea-spray.  Nothing has any lasting substance: the sea dissolves ships and drags them to the watery depths, human beings are dissolved in skeletons and their bones used to build houses, mermaids suddenly perish, transformed from vibrant beings into a scum of sea-foam.  Water signifies death and transformation, the “sea-change” that Shakespeare says happens “full fathom five”.  The only perdurable substance in Andersen’s fable is soul-stuff – but to have a soul means to risk damnation and the fate of those ensouled is to suffer.  

15.

“The Little Mermaid” is a sexualized carnival of masochism.  The little mermaid, who is “quiet and pensive,” falls in love with a prince that she has rescued from a tempest.  She is beautiful, has a wonderful, euphonious singing voice, but, instead, of legs, of course, has a fish’s tail.  (The tail makes her agile and seems to symbolize the freedom of her maiden state – she can move in all dimensions with great alacrity and grace.)  Like Undine, the sea-elementals are blithe spirits but soul-less – they live for 300 years and, then, painlessly dissolve into sea froth.  But the little mermaid, inspired by her love for the prince, wants to acquire a human soul.  This can only be accomplished by experiencing union with a human being who, forsaking all others (“loving her more than father and mother”) joins himself to his beloved so completely that his soul somehow spills over into her piscine body.  As in Fouque, the concept derives from the Bible in which marriage is portrayed as two persons becoming one flesh – and, presumably, therefore, sharing one fused soul.  But Andersen reverses Fouque’s order: in Undine, the sacrament of marriage seems to create a soul in the water-elemental; in “The Little Mermaid” the water-elemental borrows the human’s soul that flows freely, an ejaculate, as it were, into the supernatural being’s flesh.  (For Andersen, the sacrament of marriage seems secondary to the union by which the soul-stuff is injected into the mermaid.)  Implicit to Andersen’s conception is the requirement that the mermaid be prepared for copulation – that is, divested of her fishy tail.  This process involves terrible suffering.  The mermaid must be mutilated by a sea-witch.  The witch cuts off the mermaid’s tongue, rendering her mute.  (There’s an explanation in the story for this gratuitous act of torture – but the reader won’t be able to remember it.  I’ve read the story several times and, by the end, can never recall why the horrible sea-hag cut out the mermaid’s tongue.)  The witch provides her mermaid supplicant with a potion made from her own blood – the witch draws the blood from her breast, substituting this mutilating poison for maternal milk.  (Apparently, mother-figures, at some point, require their daughters to be mutilated just as they were themselves mutilated a generation earlier – the nurturing breast becomes a source of disfiguring poison.)  The poison-portion, when swallowed by the mermaid, rips open her fishy tail, dividing it as if “a double-edged sword passed through her delicate body.”  The mermaid can’t speak any longer – her tongue has been amputated –but she can dance to seduce her lover.  Unfortunately, when the mermaid walks and dances, she suffers enormously – her legs feel like raw stumps to her and, “every time her feet touch the ground, it feels as if she were treading on knives.”  Sometimes, Andersen enlivens his gory descriptions by saying that the mermaid’s human feet experience walking and dancing as moving on “pointed awls” and her gait on dry land causes her to bleed, apparently to the amusement of the other “slave girls”.  

The mermaid’s love and her yearning for a soul require her to embark on a course of violent mutilation.  From a free natural being, she becomes corseted – tongueless, split open by a “double-edged sword”, and walking on razor-edged knives until she bleeds.  From the maternal sea, the little mermaid has entered a phallic world of knives and pointed awls.  (Andersen who is determined to spare his readers none of this horror shows the mermaid standing ankle-deep in the sea to cool her burning feet.)  Rape is the rule of the prince’s world – the price of admission is the loss of your tongue.  (East African women have their clitorises removed to prepare them from marriage.)  The amputation of a tongue is a longstanding metaphor for rape – rape silences women; we see this motif in the classical myth of Philomela raped by her sister’s husband and, then, transformed into a nightingale.  Of course, Shakespeare reworks this motif in Titus Andronicus in which a rape victim has her tongue removed to keep her from reporting the crime as well as in The Rape of Lucrece.  The excision of the mermaid’s tongue means that she must satisfy her prince, not by discourse or words, but through the motions of her dancing body.  The mermaid is reduced from a speaking being into mute, suffering flesh.  

In Undine, the water-elemental, at least, enjoys the love of her prince and, even, is married to him.  Andersen’s mermaid suffers a far more disturbing fate – she is never joined to the prince and, in fact, is rejected by him.  (He marries the Temple Maiden.)  So the mermaid’s complete destruction accomplishes nothing – she doesn’t have sex with the prince, can’t embrace him, never gets married, and, for all her strenuous exertions, ends up without a soul.  Even more humiliating is the detail that the mermaid’s rival for the affections of the prince is her own Imago – that is, the Prince’s idealized vision of her.  When his ship, sailing on a birthday cruise, sunk in the tempest, the little mermaid embraces the drowning man and carries him to a spit of sand on the shore.  The Prince has glimpsed the mermaid’s face through his swoon but confuses her with the Temple Maiden who later appears to succor him on the sand-bar.  In effect, the Prince is in love with his image of the rescuing mermaid, but has substituted the Temple Maiden for his true love.  As in Undine, female figures are fungible in the terrestrial world –all women are, more or less, alike.

Of course, the transaction between the Prince, who really loves the mermaid but can’t recognize her (and she can’t explain the misprision) is profoundly unfair.  On the land, male-female transactions proceed in only one direction.  It never seems to occur to Andersen that if the prince’s love bestows a soul on mermaid, the prince should also get something from the water-elemental: for instance, gills or the ability to breathe water.  The Prince can pump his soul into the beloved; but there’s no reciprocity – except for her suffering, the water-elemental has nothing to give in exchange.  Not surprisingly, the mermaid’s misfortunes enrage the sea-supernaturals.  The mermaid’s five sisters rise to the surface of the ocean and hand the mermaid a knife so that she can kill the Prince.  (You can’t really call him “faithless” like Huldbrand in Undine – although he loves the mermaid as the image of his rescuer, he rejects her from the outset in favor of the bland Temple Maiden.)  The mermaid still loves the man and can’t kill him – she lingers sword in hand over the sleeping couple (they’re in a tent on the Prince’s ship) but, then, pitches the weapon overboard and immediately feels her body “dissolve into foam.”  This substance is variously designated as “foam on the water” or “deadly cold sea foam” that I interpret to be a post-coital scum of spilt semen – something that is lifeless and “without even a grave.”  Readers may protest the vulgarity of this interpretation.  Consult the story, assess Andersen’s hysterically morbid imagery, and decide what you think.  

16.

On first reading, “The Little Mermaid” might be construed as presenting two realms that mirror one another, albeit defined in terms of gender.  It is tempting to read the sea and water as female and the earth as masculine.  But this dichotomy doesn’t survive closer study.  In fact, the mirrored realms and land and water are, more or less, completely female.  The mermaid lives with her five sisters in her father’s castle – he is described as a “sea king” but lives as a widower in a palace maintained by his elderly mother.  The sea king, who is a shadowy figure, never described in the story and without any real agency, seems to be the only male entity in the ocean – there is a sea-hag, the six mermaids, the sea king’s mother, but no other men (or mermen).  The little mermaid cherishes the figure of “a lovely boy” carved from “clear white stone” that has sunk from a shipwreck to the bottom of the sea – a rather creepy detail: the statue of the boy sunken to the sea bed is said to resemble the prince on the ship with the mermaid falls in love: it’s possible that the mermaid is conditioned to love the prince by her experiences cuddling the statue.  In any event, the stone boy, like the “sea king”, are inert male figures.  They don’t act.  Indeed, the prince himself is essentially inert as well – in his two most important encounters with the mermaid, he’s unconscious (that is, when half-drowned in the tempest and later sleeping with his bride when the mermaid approaches with the knife.)  The little mermaid’s affection has a necrophiliac aspect – she loves only someone (or something) incapable of returning her affection.

As I have noted, it would be convenient to regard the sea as female and the land as male.  But the realm of terra firma turns out to be equally female.  There is a prince, to be sure, but everyone else seems to be a woman or girl.  On the land, the prince lives in a palace filled with slave girls.  The only other figure of any significance on solid ground is the “girl of the holy temple” who becomes the prince’s wife.  The fact that the sea and land have similar gender values is a consequence of Andersen’s mirroring imagery.  The undersea realm and the land, to the limited extent that it is described, possess all of the same features.  Andersen takes pains to point out that the forests and deserts on dry land are mirrored by barren terrain and polyp-groves in the sea.  The sea is full of meadows of “blue sulphur” – this is a bit hard to imagine, but, apparently, some volcanoes produce blue sulphur lava that has a neon aspect.  There are meadows and weeping willows on the bottom of the sea.  “You mustn’t think,” the writer admonishes, that there’s nothing underwater “but a white sandy bottom”; rather, he describes submarine “trees and plants” that move with the rippling water and “the fish, big and small flit through the branches like the birds up here in the sky.” Andersen describes the sea king’s palace in terms nearly identical to his account of terrestrial palace where the prince lives.    The terrain in the tale is not heterosexual – that is binary with male and female aspects; rather, the landscapes are homosexual – both sea and land have the same features.  (This is not an aspect of Andersen’s own conjectured homosexuality.  Fouque’s novella has the same feature: whatever we find in the sea exists on the land as well, albeit in a slightly different form and Undine is noteworthy for the figure of Kuehlborn, the sea-king’s lieutenant, an aggressively masculine sea-elemental.)  

Although no real gender distinction exists between sea and land, Andersen implants some differences that are arguably more significant.  Solid ground is characterized by “churches and cloisters” – because landlubber humans have souls, they also have places of worship.  The prince will wed a temple maiden raised in a cloister “where she...learn(s) all the royal virtues.”  (Land also has picturesque birds, for instance swans, although these are described as similar to fish swimming in the luminous sea.  In addition, there are fireworks, fountains, and sunsets.)  Andersen begins the story with a dramatic image: to illustrate, the depth of the sea, he tells us: “Scores of church towers would have to be set on top of each other to reach from the bottom up to the surface of the water.”  This is an important concept: the sea is the place where churches are drowned.  The piety of the humans with their immortal souls gets submerged in the pagan, soul-less waters of the ocean.  Andersen’s measures the depth of the sea by the number of drowned churches you can stack underwater.  And, of course, the real ruler of the sea is not the wan invisible sea-king but the sea-hag or witch.  She embodies the “bad mother” (or stepmother), a familiar figure in fairy tales.  The sea-hag is a master of poisons and potions.  The enemy of humans, she lives in a cottage made from the bones of drowned sea-men.  She wears a belt of writhing fat sea-snakes marking her as a medusa figure.  As a parody of the nurturing mother, she has “big spongy breasts” and makes her mermaid-mutilating potion from “black blood’ drawn from her bosom.  Andersen takes pains to relate the sea-hag’s mutilating potion to maternal advice that women must suffer for beauty.  In a bizarre detail, mermaids clip oysters to their tails for adornment.  The little mermaid’s grandmother is a “wise woman” but also “proud of her noble birth” to the extent that she affixes 12 oysters to her own tale – although other nobles are “only allowed to wear six.”  (The oysters, of course, bear pearls within them “any one of which would be a great jewel in the crown of a queen.  Integral to these images is the notion that the oyster transmutes its pain or irritation into a beautiful jewel.)  When the little mermaid prepares for a ball, her grandmother “made eight big oysters oyster clamp onto her tail”.  “Oh how that hurts!” the little mermaid says.  The old woman says: “Yes, but do have to suffer a little for our finery.”  Being beautiful requires pinching ear-rings and, I suppose, mutilating corsets.  The advice from the grandmother as to suffering “for finery” turns into the nightmare disfigurement inflicted by sea-hag.     

Throughout the tale, Andersen imposes a curious double perspective on the romantically described landscapes and accoutrements in the Maerchen.  Features of both land and sea are described with naive, open-eyed astonishment.  But we have seen that these things are, in fact, eerily familiar to the reader – the wonders of the undersea world are astonishing, but they mirror quite precisely the sorts of wonders that we see on dry land.  Similarly, the mermaids are amazed at the beauties of terra firma and the human world, but, in fact, the sea creatures are only beholding idealized aspects of the world familiar to his readers.  The bottom of the ocean is exotic and wonderful because unknown to us – but it isn’t really different than what’s on the land.  From the perspective of the mermaid, the terrain of the shore with its palaces, sailing ships, and temples is also uncanny and remarkable – but it contains the same fixtures on the bottom of the sea.  Andersen’s uncanny skill is to make everything seems wonderful and, yet, also familiar at the same time.  This includes the entire story with its elaborate mise-en-scene – we have always known this story even before reading it: it is part of our cultural patrimony, something experienced through countless repetition in the from of denatured story books, popular legend, and, even, Disney cartoons.  Andersen’s Little Mermaid is perverse and strange in its details, but also something with which we have been intimately familiar all our lives.  

17.

The story of the little mermaid has some kind of personal meaning to Andersen.  Critics have argued that the story is an allegory about Andersen’s own identity and, therefore, represents a sort of lesion on his imagination – an itch that he has to scratch although it injures him.  This is evident by Andersen’s peculiar approach to the narrative – the actual plot is so morbid and painful that the storyteller appears to delay reaching that part of the story.  The little mermaid has no fewer than five sisters, all older than her.  As a rite of passage signifying their sexual maturity, the mermaids upon reaching their 15th birthday ascend to the surface of the sea to behold the wonders of the land – this seems obligatory.  (The notion is that sexual maturity compels a broader and more complex understanding of reality – one puts away “childish things.”) Fairy-tales operate in patterns of threes – so one might expect their to be two (or, perhaps, three) sisters who swim to the surface and report on proceedings on dry land or among the humans.  Anderson has no fewer that five mermaids who each, one after another, surface on the sea, inspect their surroundings and return with gaudy accounts to the deep.  About a fourth of the story is devoted to detailing the adventures and observations of the little mermaids five sisters.  This feels like preliminary “throat-clearing”, a delaying tactic – Andersen seems loath to get to the sequence with the sea-witch resulting in the little mermaid’s mutilation and, then, the misery that follows.  The reader expects a detailed account of the mermaid’s adventures with the Prince on land – but this part of the story is handled very economically and briefly.  The little mermaid can’t really lament her relationship with the Prince.  She has no real relationship with him.  Before she consults with the sea-hag, Andersen provides a lavish description of an undersea ball.  It’s as if he can’t bring himself to depict the disfigurement of the little mermaid and the cruelties that the endures among the “slave girls” in the prince’s harem.  

Andersen published the story in 1837 and it was one of his first widely successful works.  He composed the tale on the island of Fyn, a place to which he had retreated to avoid the wedding of a friend, Edvard Collins.  Letters written by Andersen show that he was in love with the young man.  Although he wrote ardently to him, Andersen’s most explicitly romantic letters were never sent – he suppressed them as too overtly homosexual.  Andersen’s sexuality is ambiguous.  Although he aspired to romances with women, the writer generally selected objects of affection that were clearly off-limits or unattainable – for instance, he later wooed the famous singer, the “Danish nightingale,” Jenny Lind while carrying out an affair with a male Danish aristocrat.  In 1836, Andersen wrote, but did not post, love-letters to Collins.  When Collins married, Andersen, like his “little mermaid” was devastated and he seems to have expressed his sorrow in the fairy-tale.  An amphibious creature, the mermaid, can not express her love – she has lost her tongue.  Similarly, social convention prevented Andersen from forthrightly proclaiming his love for the young man that he desired.  Required to dance on the bleeding stumps of her feet, the little mermaid may represent Andersen’s sense that he had to perform and entertain, transmuting his sorrow into art. 

The unsatisfactory ending to “The Little Mermaid” seems consistent with the notion that the story encoded a sorrow beyond words, something too painful to admit.  Andersen redeems the mermaid from the dissolving froth of sea foam.  She is lifted above the clouds by air-elementals – sylphs who are allowed to earn an “immortal soul” by doing good deeds for humans.  (These good deeds seem strangely inconsequential – the breezes waft the scent of flowers to humans and cool them when they are warm and suffering from “pestilent air”.  Of course, air-elementals as zephyrs also blow the stench of death and corruption into our noses and the miasmic “pestilent air” is an aspect of these beings as well.  Andersen’s concept of the sylphs or air-elementals is not worked-out, sketchy, and strangely inconsistent.)  As if grasping that the metamorphosis from mermaid to sylph is inadequate to the horrors and sorrow earlier depicted, Andersen then grafts a moralizing coda onto the story.  Good deeds and obedience shown by virtuous children “shortens the time of trial” of the air-elementals aspiring to their immortal soul.  Obedient acts performed by good children reduce the air-elementals purgatorial service “by one year.”  Conversely, bad deeds and wicked intentions punish the sylphs, each disobedient act adding “one day to (the) time of trial.”  None of this makes any sense and the notion that Andersen would preach morality on the basis of the profoundly perverse and, even, kinky, tale of the little mermaid is both appalling and mawkish at the same time.  The degree to which these last couple paragraphs falsifies the rest of the story shows how Andersen experienced the subject of his fable as both dangerous and disturbing – he ends the story running away as fast as he can from its implications.    

18.

Hans Christian Andersen is an important figure in Danish literature whose fame has only increased since his death in 1875.  (Arguably, after Disney’s mermaid cartoon in 1989, Andersen’s posthumous fame worldwide has far eclipsed his not inconsiderable glory during his lifetime.)  Indeed, many Danes are pleased to be identified with Andersen and his most famous creation, the little mermaid.  A small bronze mermaid graces Victor Borge’s grave in Greenwich Cemetery, Massachusetts.  A recent poll showed that almosts 40% of Danes surveyed thought that their nation should be represented by an image of the little mermaid.  And, of course, an iconic image of that sort exists, den lille Havfrue perched on a boulder along the Lanelinie promenade in the harbor at Copenhagen.

The Copenhagen mermaid was unveiled on Augusts 23, 1913.  The bronze figure is a little more four feet tall and weighs 385 pounds.  The sculpture is affixed by two plates to a large boulder, a jutting outcrop of the sort that the Germans call a Fels, that is a cliff-face.  The Fels is part of a tiny promontory of smaller stones culminating in the large upright boulder on which the mermaid rests.  

A Danish sculptor named Edvard Eriksen cast the bronze.  A celebrated local ballerina Ellen Price served as the model for the figure’s face.  Eriksen wanted to model the figure’s torso on Price’s body – apparently, she was a celebrated beauty.  Price was unwilling to pose in the nude and so the sculpture’s shoulders, breast and arms imitate the figure of Eriksen’s wife.  

19.

Three times in his story of the little mermaid, Andersen describes his heroine as “quiet and pensive.”  Eriksen’s interpretation elegantly embodies these values.  The mermaid’s face is classically serene, depicted in repose and reverie as she seems to scan the watery horizon, lost in thought.  Women in Oaxaca (and the Mayan world) sit on the ground with their legs flexed to the side.  (This is a singularly graceful way of sitting.)  Similarly, the mermaid rests on the rock with legs (or tail) tucked partially under her but extended to her left.  Eriksen has chosen to depict the mermaid in the process of transformation: her lower extremities remain outlined by her tail and she has no feet, but rather a complicated assembly of sleek fins at the bottom of her legs – this part of the statue is abstract, grooved overlapping flippers, a bit like something invented by Gaudier-Brzeska.  The mermaid’s thighs and calves, however, are rounded and fully developed, curving up into her human torso.  The mermaid’s shoulders are rounded, almost hunched, and her left hand, resting on her thigh, grips some sort of brawny looking, rope-like cord that runs across her lap, veiling her pubis, and ending at her right hand.  This part of the sculpture is ambiguous – probably, the eel-like cord, which seems braided, is supposed to represent sea-weed.  No one really notices this part of the bronze sculpture but, once seen, it is a wee bit uncanny, even unpleasant, as if the mermaid is clutching a muscular whip or flail.  The mermaid’s hair forms a helmet-like halo around her face, an aerodynamically practical swimmer’s coiffure.  The creature’s eyes and nose and brow are polished into obscurity, as if the action of the waves were in the process of smoothing her features into a schematic, ghostly mask.  (If she has eyeballs, I can’t see them in the cool, dark sea-caves of her eye-sockets.)  The figure’s color depends upon the light and the color of the adjacent sea.  In some photographs, she looks seal-black, and, indeed, could be mistaken for an animal of that kind – pictures taken in brighter light, show her nether flippers and her shin and knee-caps glowing with a mirror-smooth golden radiance.  

Like all successful sculptures – and, clearly, Eriksen’s “Little Mermaid” must be so accounted – the figure looks radically different depending upon the angle from which it is photographed.  From some vantages, the bronze has a stoic, philosophical aspect; from other angles, the figure seems abject and crouched, withdrawing into herself; viewed in profile, the bronze form is serene and classical in form.  However, if you look into her face, from beneath the miniature cliff on which she reposes, the creature seems alien, blurred, like a slick of oil blazing with iridescence before the water dissolves it into discolored foam.   The most placid and pleasing perspective on the mermaid, unfortunately, opens onto the ugliest view of the harbor – over her shoulder, we see big warehouses with stark, planar surfaces, smoke-stacks, and, even, several crane-shaped aerial hoists.  Another angle shows the estuary under her Fels with a round boulder like a turtle’s shell in the shallow water under her tribune-shaped cliff.  An excursion boat, lined with tourists passes along the promenade, a couple hundred feet from shore.    

20.

The little mermaid bronze is readily accessible.  This has resulted in a long history of vandalism.  In some ways, the mermaid’s repeated mutilation is consistent with Andersen’s tale – after all, “The Little Mermaid” chronicles the horrific mutilation of its principle character.

In 1963, Situationist’s staged a Happening in Copenhagen harbor.  There were a lot of naked people, chanting and thrashing about and, in the chaos, someone took a hacksaw to the mermaid and sawed off her head.  The City Fathers of Copenhagen were appalled and the homicide investigation team was deputized to solve the crime.  The head was never recovered and the perpetrator ever arrested.  (On his death bed, an elderly hippie named Joergen Nash confessed to the crime – if he knew where the head was stashed, he didn’t say.)  Around this time, the family of the sculptor took custody of the original bronze (or, perhaps, had always had custody of that object) – a replica was posed on the rock.  The whereabouts of the original casting remains undisclosed to this day.  The figure was beheaded by vandals in 1969 as well, although in the latter case, the head was discovered in the bushes in the park a few days later.

In 1984, the figure’s right arm was amputated.  A couple days after the mutilation, some school boys returned the severed limb.  Someone painted the bronze figure white in 2003.  No sooner had the white paint been blasted off the bronze, then someone drenched the mermaid in blood-red paint – this gesture was to protest whaling in the waters of the Danish protectorate, the Faroe Islands.  2003 was a bad year for the mermaid.  Explosive charges blew her off her perch on the rock and the mermaid was found shattered in the shallow water at the base of her boulder – this attack occurred at three a.m. on November 9, 2003.  Again the mermaid was restored and some city officials suggested moving the boulder out into deep water so that it would be harder to vandalize the figure.  The Danes are humane people and I assume they reckoned that most of the vandals were pretty far into their cups when they assaulted the mermaid – drunk people have always been wont to clamber all over the boulder and pose for pictures of themselves embracing the stoic little mermaid.  If the boulder were in deep water, undoubtedly, like her sister the Lorelei, she would claim more than a few victims by drowning.

If anything the pace of desecration has increased.  We live in iconoclastic times.  The mermaid was covered from head to foot in a burqa to protest Turkey’s planned admission to the European Union.  Feminists painted her pink in March 2007.  Someone strapped a dildo to her belly and painted the date March 8 on her boulder – March 8 is International Women’s Day.  In 2017, the mermaid’s rock was defaced with the enigmatic graffiti Befri Abduli, an inscription said to reference a Somali woman who had fled to Denmark in the context of a child custody case and, then, been arrested.  Later that year, someone decorated the boulder with the words “Free Hong Kong.”  In June 3, 2020, Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Copenhagen, hundreds of people marching in remembrance of George Floyd, a drug addict and grifter, murdered by the Minneapolis police.  Someone in the crowd of protestors painted the words “racist fish” on the little mermaid’s boulder.  Danish media was bemused.  How was the little mermaid racist?  And what exactly is a “racist fish”?    

21.

Ninety years ago, the Professional Women’s Club of Albert Lea paid to install three fountains in a shallow cup-shaped lagoon in the lake that divides the city’s downtown from its well-to-do residential neighborhoods on the opposite shore.  The lake is sizeable, often graced with white sails or turbulent with the wakes of speedboats and the body of water funnels from its broad northwest lobe to the southeast, opening into a narrow channel that cuts through the isthmus on which the commercial buildings rise.  Beyond the channel, spanned by low concrete and iron bridges, a forlorn and shallow appendage to the lake spreads its grey sheet of water between marshy mud-flats.  Once a meat packing plant stood on the far side of this desolate pool of water, but the place burned down many years ago and nothing remains except some scabrous slabs of concrete on a low barren terrace grooved with old, abandoned railroad tracks.  The two aspects of the lake are an emblem for Albert Lea – the industrial pond servicing the slaughter-house and, then, the stone-lined canal dividing the isthmus and leading, beyond to the perpetual jet and shimmer of the fountains in the corner of the big lake, everything green and shady on that side of the water with big houses bending down over the shoreline, gleaming bays with woods around them, and the height of land where the city pitches up its small, masonry skyscrapers, downtown trailing off into lake-side parks with running paths and copses of old trees and the hospital and alcohol treatment center occupying the center of the ridge above open water broad and long enough for speedboats to accelerate to full-speed as they bounce and crash across the waves.  

Facing the fountains, blasting white jets up that, then, fall to form pale splash patterns where the water rains down onto the placid lake, a bronze mermaid sits on a big rock.  The mermaid is almost life-sized and she raises her right hand to wave at the pale plumes of the ninety-year old fountains.  Beyond the lunging and splashing water, a tiny round island sits in this corner of the lake, sides curbed with pale retaining walls.  An arched wooden bridge riding on iron trestles spans the space between the lake shore and the island.  Set like flag-like masts on the center of the island, a half-dozen pines grow out of the earth.  At the corner of the lake, water laps and makes musical sounds against the boulders carted there to line the shore and keep the flood from oozing into the green lawns.  The mermaid turns her back to the channel opening a water-corridor to the slaughterhouse-lake.  She faces the fountains and the little island, where in the summer, in fine weather, sometimes weddings take place.  Unlike her counterpart in Copenhagen, this mermaid rests of a boulder that stands half-sunk in the bay, four or five feet or so from shore so that vandals have to wade over slippery submerged rocks to reach her.    

22.

Here is an odd thing, a trick memory has played on me.  As long as I have known Albert Lea, a town 16 miles from where I live in Austin, a mermaid has graced the southeast corner of Fountain Lake.  I don’t recall a time when she wasn’t resting on her rock, a little apart from the shore, lifting a raw-looking bronze paw toward the lake.  When I first came to Austin in 1979, I tried a half-dozen or more cases in Albert Lea, at the old courthouse for Freeborn County.  I visited clients in various parts of the town, surveyed accident scenes near Fountain Lake, and recall marveling at the bronze mermaid.  But, in fact, memory serves me poorly.  The mermaid on the rock at Fountain Lake was riveted to her stone in 1994 – that is, fifteen years after I came to southern Minnesota.  So, contrary to my recollection, the mermaid is much newer than I thought.  Indeed, it was my assumption that the mermaid was an artifact of the sixties or, even, the nineteen fifties.  But, apparently, there was no mermaid in this park on the lakefront when I made my first appearance in town, even though I can’t recall a time when she wasn’t bolted to her boulder.  

Another dressed boulder on the shore-line advises that the mermaid was placed in the municipal park in 1994 by Danish Brotherhood Lodge #75.  Names are embossed on the metal plaque, a list of donors.  The mermaid was forged by George Bassett for a place called “Lincoln Park” – that is, the old name for the lawns, gazebo, sidewalks, and the bridge to Katherine Island on this edge of the lakeshore.  Today, the park is named “New Denmark Park,” in recognition of earlier Danish settlers in this area. (None of the metal signs record when the name of the place was changed.)  The contribution of these Danish pioneers is acknowledged by another statue, a three-quarters life-size bronze of a sturdy-looking young man, a bit like the redoubtable Hans Brinker, the famous Dutch skater.  Like Hans Brinker, the lad wears a leather cap tightly screwed down on his bronze head.  He steps forward with one large square-shoed foot, appearing both resolute and, also, a bit timid.  The youth has a suspenders holding up his bell-bottomed, vaguely nautical-looking trousers.  His coat is slung over his left arm, falling as drapery along the side of the figure.  The proportions are not quite correct: viewed from a certain angle, the Danish immigrant has arms like Popeye the Sailor man: his biceps balloon out above his elbow, but his forearms seem pitifully puny.  The Danish boy stands on a cylindrical plinth in the middle of another fountain, empty, with yard-high walls of chipped white stucco surrounding the dry basin.  The bronze immigrant seems strangely unaware of the mermaid lurking at the edge of his perspective.  His face is dull, bovine, placid and not particularly alert – if he sees the mermaid, he pays no attention to her.

23.

On an afternoon in late June, the air is very warm and humid at New Denmark Park.  Prevailing winds have pushed a thick bloom of algae up against the boulder rip-rap at the edge of lake.  The algae is moss-green and floats in slimy rafts around the base of the rock on which the mermaid rests.  Indeed, the algae carpets the water as far out as the plunge-pools where the jets of the Professional Women’s fountains are splashing back into the lake.  

Although it’s rude to make mention, the mermaid stinks.  There is a fishy odor in the air, a stench of rot like earthworms decaying on a sidewalk after a hard rain.  Probably, the smell wafts up to me from the algae bobbing in the water, filling in the shallows behind the mermaid on her rock with a thick green mat.  The bronze mermaid is not as elegant as her sister in the Copenhagen harbor.  She has a haggard-looking face, sharp as a weapon, and her arms seem long and simian, disproportionate to her torso.  Viewed from behind, the mermaid has a fat ass – her hips are much wider than her slender, sloping shoulders.  Her breasts are Hollywood-sized, bigger and more voluptuous than those on the Copenhagen mermaid.  George Bassett didn’t dare the bravura craftsmanship required to show the little mermaid mid-transformation.  This sea-creature is unabashedly half fish.  She has a long tubular fish’s tail that ends in flukes such as you might see on a whale.  Her legs are welded together with a shingling of fish scales beginning at the middle of her thighs and, then, becoming a solid sheath from her knees to the split fins cantileverd out over the bloom of algae.  The mermaid is more alarming than beautiful, a frightening apparition on her granite boulder.  She has long straggly hair, falling straight and wet-looking over her ragged-looking shoulders.

24.

Why did the Danish Brotherhood opt for this grisly design, something more akin to a mermaid by P.T. Barnum than Hans Christian Andersen’s little sea-nymph so “pensive and quiet”?  Probably, it was a matter of economics.

There are, at least, thirteen copies of Eriksen’s statue scattered around the world.  One of them is located in Greenwood, Michigan and was installed in 1994, the same year that the mermaid was cast and erected in Albert Lea.  That copy was unauthorized and Eriksen’s grandchildren, acting as the so-called Little Mermaid Foundation sued the Michigan city for a licensing fee.  In Denmark, copyright exists for seventy years after the death of the person holding that right.  Eriksen was long-lived; he didn’t die until 1959.  Accordingly, his heirs possess the sole copyright on the mermaid design free and clear through 2029 when the sculpture will enter the public domain.  The lawsuit in Michigan involved a claim for licensing fees sought in the sum of $3800.  Greenwood’s lawyers said that their version of the mermaid was only 30 inches high, had bigger breasts, and a different face – whether these variants on the original design would be sufficient to defeat the licensing claim is uncertain.  Apparently, the case wasn’t tried and may have been settled – in any event, the suit was dropped.  (Vancouver wanted a copy of the mermaid as well.  But negotiations with the Eriksen family and the Little Mermaid Foundation stalled.  So the Canadians settled for a buxom girl in a wet suit, half-reclining on a boulder in Stanley Park, looking out over a fjord-like inlet of the Pacific Ocean.  The girl invokes the Little Mermaid but is sufficiently different to avoid copyright problems – she has a snorkel-mask pushed up over her forehead.)  Greenwood’s mistake was erecting a plaque identifying the mermaid as “identical to” the statue in Denmark.  Another town, Kimballtown in Iowa, has a bronze mermaid on its lakeshore.  In 2009, the City raised $12,000 to renovate the mermaid.  The City Manager noted that she hoped that no one in Denmark would become aware of their replica.  In an interview, that woman observed that there “is a town in Minnesota” with a similar mermaid (presumably Albert Lea) but “ours is much prettier.”  

The Little Mermaid Foundation offers exact replicas for sale.  A nine-inch bronze mermaid costs $3120; a three foot mermaid can be purchased for $35,700.  If you want the big version, five feet long, the charge is $90,500 – considerably higher today (2021) than $55,820, the charge stated in 2009.  

25.

Albert Lea has three famous natives.  Eddie Cochrane, the fifties rock and roll star, came from the town.  (The City celebrates Eddie Cochrane Days each summer).  Marion Ross, most famous for playing a role from 1974 to 1984 on the sit-com Happy Days, is claimed by Albert Lea as a daughter and, in fact, there is a community theater in the town named after her.  But, in fact, she was born to Canadian immigrant parents in Watertown, Minnesota and lived in various other places in the State before moving to Albert Lea.  She completed her sophomore year of high school in Albert Lea and, then, moved to Minneapolis and, then, ultimately, southern California where she was “discovered” and performed in Hollywood movies and TV shows for many, many years.  Richard Carlson was indisputably a product of Albert Lea.  His father was a Danish immigrant and well-known as the town’s dentist.  Carlson, who had chiseled Aryan good looks, worked in Hollywood as well after graduating with a theater degree from the University of Minnesota.  Carlson had the sort of blandly handsome features that qualified him to play courageous men of science in 1950's horror movies.  He was often stranded in the desert, expressing alarm about alien invaders or giant insects.  In The Maze, directed haphazardly in 1953 by William Cameron Menzies, Carlson investigates strange events at a Scottish castle.  (The place has a sinister topiary maze, very much like the garden labyrinth in The Shining).  The laird of the Scottish castle turns out to be a giant frog.  Carlson is most famous for playing the scientist in The Creature from the Black Lagoon; the creature is a gill-man or merman if ever there was one.    

On the Succession of Ages, Plants and Populations in Two Northeastern Counties in North Dakota

 

1.

It’s a perfect day, a bit cool with sparkling sunshine and bright blue skies.  Philip Larkin in his poem “High Windows” describes such a sky this way: “the deep blue air that shows / Nothing and is nowhere and is endless.”

2.

This little corner of creation is full of many things: history, botany, geology.  I am referring to Pembina and Cavalier counties in North Dakota, a place where no one goes intentionally and, therefore, all the more exotic for being remote and, even, inaccessible in its own way.  The place is, indeed, a corner.  The Canadian border is shut fast across the top of this country, screwed down like the lid of great grey coffin.  (In late May 2021, when I visited, the border with Canada was closed except to certain kinds of commercial truck traffic and, so, there was a sense that the terrain to the north was hidden behind an impermeable barrier.)  The Red River of the North bounds Pembina County on the east and that stream’s tightly woven meanders mark the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, another sort of seal closing off this territory.  To the west, the Pembina escarpment rises, a ridge fully three-hundred feet high, running roughly north and south, although on a slight diagonal that tilts toward Minnesota.  The escarpment is the bank of the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, a vast body of water that once filled a basin extending from northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan south into central Minnesota where the continent divides into north (flowing to Hudson Bay) and south (flowing to the Gulf of Mexico) watersheds. 

This area feels like a nook or cranny.  The 49th parallel, the border with Canada, runs west from Lake of the Woods (with its isolate Northwest Corner above that meridian) all the way to the Pacific Ocean.  This boundary was established by the Treaty of 1818, a sequel of the War with Great Britain in 1812.  The Treaty established the border west of the Lake of the Woods to the so-called “Stony Mountains” – now the Rockies.  In the months before the War of 1812, British warships stopped American vessels and confiscated cargos including slaves.  The Treaty of 1818 is sometimes also called the Treaty for the Restoration of Slaves, meaning that the British agreed to pay reparations for slaves confiscated before and during the conflict.  This fact reminds us of how inextricably slavery is woven into the fabric of American history.

The north country confined between the Red River, the 49th Parallel, and the Pembina Escarpment is open to the South.  But nothing is there – the land is empty, crisscrossed by slender, storm-beaten shelter belts running to the flat horizon.  Along the runway-straight highways, cold marshes spread their lobes into the sides of very slightly higher wheat fields.  A vast airforce base shuts the door to the south, although several counties south of the Canadian border – this is the military facility near Grand Forks, North Dakota.  In the south part of Cavalier County, sixty miles closer to the Border, another airforce base is gathered up around a 110 foot high silo, a structure said to house the most highly advanced radar equipment in the world.  The towering radar shed is tuned to the north, a sentinel watching for Russian missiles and bombers bringing with them the end of the world.  These bases, encircled by miles of fence and wire, enclose our nook of land from the south.

3.

Strange flights of birds soar over the highway.  The geese are flying westward and not organized into an aerial chevron.  Instead, they make a diagonal line advancing toward the setting sun.  Apart from that rank of birds, there is another column, flying in a rough single-file also from the east to the west.  I estimate the birds are about 400 feet above highway.  In a cup-shaped lagoon, encircled by grey-yellow reeds, a couple of small, brightly feathered ducks are bobbing on the water.  The birds overhead take care not to resemble Russian bombers or planes would be scrambled and surface-to-air missiles deployed to shoot them out of the skies.  

4.

Icelandic State Park is about 15 miles from the Canadian border and west of Cavalier.  The North Dakota State Park is named after Icelandic-speaking settlers who migrated into this area in the 1880's.  Iceland was devastated by volcanic eruptions and crops failed, calamities leading to the evacuation of a quarter of the population beginning around 1870.  These refugees came to Ontario and, then, spread west, founding Gimli on the shores of Lake Winnipeg a few years later.  (The place was decimated by a horrific smallpox plague in 1875).  Some of Icelanders in Gimli fled south to the area around Cavalier settling in small, isolated communities.  Many of these people were said to be Mormons.  Others were Lutheran and built small churches with square towers rising to a pointed cap like a witch’s hat.  The churches were white-washed with structural timbers exposed on the walls and shutters around the windows painted black.  Some modest stained glass was inserted in the windows.  In the museum at the State Park, there are mattocks and some hand-drawn plows and old brown bibles, the color of fallen leaves, printed in old Norse, the language spoken in Iceland.  Ancient photographs show dour-looking families standing in front of sod houses or wooden shacks.  The people are formally dressed in what seem to be black garments, but, probably, this is misleading: people dressed up for photographs in the 140 years ago and, perhaps, their clothing was dark green or cranberry-colored (Gogol’s hero in Dead Souls, Mr. Chichikov wears a cranberry-colored coat and vest) or, even, some kind of velvet blue.  These sorts of hues are invisible in the old black-and-white photographs that have now faded to sepia.

5.

Icelandic settlers lived in Akra, a town that no longer exists, although a meeting hall from that place has been dragged onto the premises of the park.  On Highway 39 south, the Icelanders founded another town, called Mountain.  That place still exists although just barely.  Mountain is a hump of high ground jutting up above the table-flat prairie – geologically, the place is a pile of sand, an ancient beach remnant from Lake Agassiv.  This bump in the flat land is like a widow’s hump or the round pillow of flesh between the shoulders of a hunchback.  

Mountain is at the center of Thingwalla Township (the “Thing” is the Icelandic parliament).  In 2009, the Prime Minister of Iceland visited Mountain and was so enthused by the welcome that he received that he vowed that he would return to the old country and raise 1.3 million dollars for a community center in the North Dakota village.  The economy in Iceland suffered setbacks and only $75,000 was forthcoming.  The community center was scaled back into a couple of simple pole-barn-style buildings but it was erected.  On the internet, you can view pictures of local farm wives wearing garments with elaborately embroidered bodices and horned Viking helmets.  The women brandish fearsome-looking axes.  

Mountain was settled in 1879.  Once there was a small, but elegant Lutheran church in the country, a square-cut white-frame building with steeple clad in dark shingles guarding a little graveyard.  The church was one of the oldest in the area.  Pictures show firemen gazing helplessly at the flaming ruins of the structure, a knot of black cinders outlined in orange fire – the picture was taken in 2003.  The parish was small and had only a few elderly members and so the church wasn’t rebuilt.  The land where the church had stood was planted in prairie flowers and a statute of Jesus the Redeemer was set on a plinth overlooking the cemetery.  

6.

In the county historical society collections, there is a confirmation picture, possibly taken near the Church in 1915.  The photograph shows a girl in white wearing lacy, diaphanous angel wings.  She is gesturing toward a little boy who looks up at her.  Beside the angel, there is boy with a carnation boutineer with a big, white ribbon tied around on his arms.  The boy is wearing a bow-tie and he looks down at the smaller child.  

Perhaps, the picture depicts the visitation of an actual angel.  The girl seems unearthly.  The sun is vertical and it makes her wings glow with a bright, unnatural radiance.  Deep shadows fall across the eyes and faces of the children in the picture.  Angels probably stopped visiting North Dakota around the turn of the last century and, so, it is likely the picture commemorates the older boy’s confirmation, possibly at the church near Mountain in Thingwalla Township.  

7.

The Akra MWA meeting hall sits behind the Visitor Center to Icelandic State Park.  A half-dozen pioneer era structures have been relocated and set in a row on the edge of a steep wooded slope that drops down to the Tongue River.  A grassy meadow separates the Visitor Center from the antique buildings and the effect is a bit like a parade ground at an old Midwestern fort.  At one end of the lawn, a country church has been installed, a white-frame balloon with a steeple outlined in black timber.  The Gunlogsen homestead on which the park is now located is at the opposite side of the field, a small wooden house and several modest outbuildings.

The church is padlocked, but the side door opens into the meeting hall where there is a big room facing an elevated stage about four feet above the timber floor.  The stage has a painted curtain rolled into a tight scroll over the platform on which there is a piano pushed against a wall.  The scroll of the curtain shows a strip of bright colors, possibly a landscape of some kind.  There is an insignia above the stage:  MWA – that is “Modern Woodmen of America.”  On the walls framing the stage, commercial signs that are handsomely lettered advertise various small businesses in the nearby town of Cavalier – hail insurance agencies, cafes, a haberdasher and an implement dealership.  (The wall facing the stage is adorned with similar signs, but modern – these are the sponsors for the building’s removal from the village of Akra a couple miles away and its renovation – “Akra” is Icelandic for “fields”; the word is cognate with “acres”.)  The shell of the MWA hall was built in 1901 but the stage was added a generation later in 1928.  The signs are the work of a painter named Armann, a man said to have lived in Gardar, North Dakota and obviously talented on the basis of the crisply lettered signs on display.  Armann also painted the canvas curtain, apparently depicting a range of mountains graced by a waterfall – the canvas is brittle and the paint unstable and so it is unfurled only  on rare occasions.  

Stairs lead to the basement, a place that is surprisingly light and airy, although with a strong odor of mildew.  A pot-bellied wood burning stove occupies an annex to the main hall where long tables stand, set with vivid green table-cloth.  Folding chairs are stacked against the walls.  The kitchen is framed by an open counter over which hot food can be served.  Behind the counter, an ornate, rather baroque-looking oven stands – it’s the kind of instrument in which wicked children are baked alive.

Although the old meeting hall is musty and seems an artifact of an earlier era, the Modern Woodmen of America are still very much alive – albeit primarily as an insurance company.  The MWA was founded in Lyons, Iowa by a businessman named Root, principally as a fraternal association providing life and death benefits.  Although open to all in the States where it was licensed, the MWA didn’t insure people engaged in unhealthy occupations (professional sports, brewing, bartending) and wasn’t active selling policies in big cities – places deemed generally deleterious to the well-being of those condemned to live there.  Further MWA, sold benefits only in the healthiest States, defined as the Dakotas, Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan and Missouri.  For a time, the MWA, founded in 1883, was affiliated with the Temperance Movement (and, therefore, also with the Suffragettes).   The “Woodmen” were synonymous with “pioneers”, hardy stock that cleared the forests for settlement and agriculture – at least, this was the initial concept.  During its heyday, the MWA sponsored drill teams called “Foresters” that were renowned for their showy precision marching – one of them was featured at Herbert Hoover’s inauguration.  

Quaint as the organization seems, the MWA owns a bank in the Quad Cities and has its present headquarters along a leafy stretch of the Mississippi River.  The insurer is rated A by Bests and has assets worth 15.4 billion dollars under management.    

       

8.

You can peer through the windows of the Hallson Lutheran Church removed to the park 1994.  The church has windows frosted green and blue in lieu of stained glass.  The steeple rises from the corner of the building where simple white walls wrap around the tower.  God blasted the church with a lightning bolt that knocked down the high steeple and, out in the country, the parish rebuilt that part of the structure, but with a lower tower to avoid heaven’s wrath.  When the church was rebuilt at the park, the tower was restored to its original height, probably about 40 feet above-grade.  A star-fish-shaped turnbuckle in the center of the sanctuary holds walls and ceiling together.  The building’s facade is decorated with black five-pointed stars affixed above windows, most of which are round lunettes.  Gothic (pointed) frames enclose two smaller Gothic windows with frosted glass below a similarly colored lunette.  The windows looking into the sanctuary are dusty but, peering within, one can dimly descry pews, a carved wood pulpit, and an old altar with pronged finials like little, serrated steeples.  

Hallson was never more than a crossroads where a family once of that name owned a general store.  The place lost its post office in 1960.  

9.

Between a country school and another white-frame shed, a trail drops down steeply to a broad wet terrace above the Tongue River.  The terrace is a couple hundred yards wide, attesting, it seems, to the capacity of the little creek to flood when its mouth at the Red River 20 miles to the east is blocked by ice.  (The Red River flows north and, accordingly, during the spring-melt, the stream is often occluded with ice in Canada and can’t flow freely into Lake Winnipeg into which it disgorges.  When the Red River is ice-dammed, it sprawls over its banks and inundates the flat plain, reversing the flow of tributaries which, then, in turn hemorrhage over their banks and drown the land.)  The terrace above the river is 30 feet below the lawns and grounds where the historic buildings have been planted and, again, fifteen feet above the meandering course of the Tongue which flows in tight curves and bends between house-high turf banks.  A trail winds through the woods on the terrace.  Many seeps form tubs of swampy water on the flat terrace and, between the trees, there are lush stands of fiddle-head ferns with their top scrolls tightly clenched at this time of year.  The ferns and, even, the trees are under assault by an invasive vegetal growth that looks like bamboo.  Green woody tubes rise about waist-high and the stems are surmounted by very beautiful, conical-shaped buds.  These buds (called Strobili) are comprised of alternating scales of honey-gold and black, a bit like the elegant skin of a snake, but hard, symmetrical and coming to a point like the tip of a pine cone.  The Strobili have a peculiar manufactured-looking quality –they seem somehow engineered by human intelligence, although, in fact, the truth is that these plants are very ancient.  They are called “horse-tails” or Equiseton vegetation, a living fossil on which the dinosaurs dined.  Clearly, the horse-tails are aggressively colonizing the sunny patches of the terrace, the places between the old maples and oaks, and they have supplanted, it seems, some of the forest and crowded out most of the pretty, delicate-looking ferns.  One population succeeds another – it is the law of life.

A foot-bridge, Cherokee-red and built from iron, crosses the river.  The trail loops through woodland.  In the underbrush, two deer are startled and they slip through the glade like a knife cuts butter, effortlessly, flashing their white tails like sparks of light in the green dapple.  Near the bridge, my son, Martin, launches his drone and it rises smoothly straight up between the shadowing trees.  On his control monitor, we can see the taut meanders in the river crowding one another, the mud banks, and, then, the little drone slips up out of sight, something a bit unsettling because we can still hear the rotors turning in the motionless air (wind velocities are only 4 mph) but the tiny frame of graphite-colored metal and spinning blades has vanished into the blue.  On Martin’s control screen, we see the river twisting toward a field of bright light that is unintelligible, a shield of white radiance that we later learn represents a lake impounded behind a long dam.  Some birds cry out at the drone.  Martin brings it back to the earth from 400 feet.  The drone shudders a little and lands on the dry dirt next to the trail.  

The loop leads back to the bridge and the narrow braid of water between the overhanging mud banks.  The track up from the wet terrace to the prairie meadow where the antique buildings are displayed is steep and moist.  

10.

The lake impounded behind a long earthen dam spreads its lobed sheet of water away from a little beach, glittering with wavelets.  (The wind is now blowing with palpable force – only a half hour after, Martin recorded the breeze of only 4 mph at 400 feet above the river – typically wind increases by ten miles per hour for every hundred feet of elevation.)  The beach has been plowed or harrowed and the wet sand is overturned and dark next to the water.  A dock sticks its tongue into the water, flanked by tube-shaped trough for launching kayaks.

There’s a hydro-electric installation enclosed in cyclone fence perched on the edge of big earth dam.  At the center of the dam some coffers of concrete run like a spine across the embankment.  The dam seems very long, high, and ponderous given the slender groove of the river, a mud slit where a couple feet of water flow, but, I think, the massive size of the structure is testimony to the width of the Tongue River during the March and April flood season.  

11.

The village now called Walhalla (pronounced with a “w” as in “Wally”) is about 20 miles west of the State Park and Cavalier.  (We have now traveled about forty miles into the State from I-29, the north-south freeway running from the Canadian border down through Grand Forks, then, Fargo and, then, all the way to Sioux Falls in South Dakota.)  The town occupies a sort of dog-leg at the foot of wooded ridge of the Pembina Escarpment.  From the distance, the escarpment is metal-blue but, as one approaches, the face of the ridge is incised with ravines all overgrown with woods that open, here and there, to tilted prairies of tall, bleached grass.  The dog-leg is evidence that the town is very old, indeed, the second oldest inhabited place in North Dakota.  At one time, the town had a different orientation with respect to the overhanging escarpment, but, as the place evolved, or as one population supplanted another, this succession was made apparent in turning the place’s main street at right angles to its original position.  On a little traffic island where main street changes directions, the City Fathers have planted a big moose made from corroded iron wire, not exactly abstract, but stylized, a sharp-looking assemblage that, it seems, one would touch only at hazard: the twists and edges of the wire are angular and could bite.

12.

A rippling gravel lane leads to a windy meadow northeast of town where two old buildings stand on a knoll overlooking a plowed field.  The buildings are unprepossessing, one of them paneled in whitewashed lathe and the other weathered, unpainted, a big shed the color of a log cabin but erected from flat hewn timber.  About a dozen plaques are planted around the buildings explaining their history and, from the number of markers, it seems pretty evident that this was once an important place.  

The sky is high and blue and there are little white and yellow flowers growing in the sod.  My grandson, Lucas, runs far out into the furrows of the plowed field, kicking up dust and threatening to disappear like the drone, not into the radiant sky but the brown and blue distance.

13.

The historic site is the Gingras Trading Post, now reduced to a rough-timbered warehouse and the home where the owner, Antoine Gingras, lived.  Gingras was born around1821 in what is called the Red River Settlement or Colony.  He was a Metis (‘may-tees’), that is, a half-breed.  The Red River Settlement is not a specific place, but rather a vast tract of land, the so-called Selkirk Estate or Assinbonia – this territory stretched from Fort William in Canada across the Boundary Waters country through what is now upper North Dakota and across Manitoba to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  Gingras was industrious and, after spending a few years hunting and trapping, he founded his trading post.  There, he prospered – ultimately, his wife had 15 children.  Gingras was politically active and served in the Dakota Territory legislature in St. Paul in the early 1850's.  His business flourished and, u he opened a chain of stores at Winnipeg, Pembina, and St. Joseph, the town that he founded near his first trading post in the cove of a valley in the Pembina Escarpment – the steep rampart was called the Hair Hills in those days.  

When the first Metis uprising against the Crown failed in 1869 - 1870, the leader of the rebels, Louis Riel, fled to St. Joseph.  Riel was a wanted man in Manitoba and spent a few months with Gingras, a political sympathizer.  Although the border is only 8 miles north of St. Joseph (now Walhalla), the Mounted Police couldn’t pursue Riel into the Dakota Territory, part of the United States.  In any event, it was reported that Gingras had raised a mounted posse of 150 men and was prepared to defend Riel if necessary.  Riel moved to Montana, taught school for a few years, and a decade later was back in Manitoba, fomenting another larger and, even, more unsuccessful Metis rebellion.  (In the aftermath of this conflict, Riel was hanged.)

Beginning in 1851, Gingras was a so-called “free trader” – this means, he was not an employee of one of the big fur companies operating in the Selkirk Estate.  (Gingras worked primarily as a contractor for the Hudson Bay Company.  Rivalries between the fur trading enterprises were fierce and, sometimes, led to murderous fighting, but Gingras stayed out of these frays.)  At his trading post, he exchanged high-quality pemmican for furs that he, then, sold at the agencies to the north near present-day Winnipeg called Fort Garry at that time.  Periodically, Gingras would organize a freight expedition down to St. Paul.  These expeditions, involving dozens if not hundreds of men and Red River oxcarts, were called “brigades.”  Gingras was a faithful son of the Roman Catholic Church – his local parish was St. Boniface in St. Joseph, the town that grew up alongside his trading outpost.  On one “brigade” to St. Paul, a priest accompanied him – the commerce was an exchange of fur pelts for pork and salt.  The priest wrote a memoir in which he described Gingras as “very fat and jolly”.  He apparently knew only one tune which he sang incessantly during the long trip – the priest remarked that the song worked its way into his brain and, as he was penning his memoirs, he could hear it sounding.  The priest didn’t know “prairie French”, the language in which the melody was sung, and never figured out what the song was about.  

Gingras was friends with other notable fur traders – including Henry Sibley, Norman Kittson, and Joe Rolette, all figures of importance in Minnesota’s territorial history.  A photograph shows a big man with a bushy black beard sitting stiffly in a rigid-looking black suit and vest.  (Perhaps, his vest is made from colored fabric, but the contrasts in the old photograph aren’t adequate to show this.)  Gingras has prominent eyebrows and his chin and mouth are concealed in the furls of his dark beard.  His big hands with stubby, blunt fingers rest on his thighs below the silver caternary of a watch chain.  Apparently, Gingras liked bright colors – the interior of his house at the site has been restored to its original hues.  The floors are dandelion-yellow and the moldings around the fireplaces and doors are a vibrant green.  The ceiling is bright pink and the walls blue.  (I know this from photographs.  When we were present, the buildings were both padlocked shut.)  Wind buffeted the prairie grass and the insides of the buildings, viewed through the dusty windows, seemed dark and remote, a fat spider crawling away from the shadow of someone peering through the glass.  The frame exterior of Gingras’ house was fire-house red with a dentillated trim under the eaves painted the color of yellow mustard.  

Gingras died in 1877.  Depending on when you think he was born, he was either 56 or 57.  In his Will, he appointed the Parish Priest as guardian of his surviving minor children.  He is buried in the St. Boniface Catholic cemetery.     

14.

The history of this corner of the world can’t be understood without considering the Metis people who once lived here.  (The traditional Metis territory was central Manitoba; the settlements at Pembina and St. Joseph were the sole outposts for these people in the United States.  St. Joseph, however, was for a time, the largest Metis village in the Northwest.)   “Metis,” as I have noted, simply means “mestizo” or half-breed and refers to people who were the product of (mostly) French fur traders and Indian women.  The term has two applications.  In general, “Metis” can refer to anyone who is mixed blood, part Indian and part European – for instance, Gabriel Renville, the man who translated the Bible into Lakota in 1837 was Metis, although he lived in central Minnesota and not what is presently Canada.  There were Metis reserves as far south as Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas – for instance, a Metis reserve for half-breeds associated with the Sac and Fox tribe was established in western Wisconsin and eastern Iowa in the 1820's followed by other reserves for mixed blood people connected to the Pawnee and Omaha Indians.  However, the name “Metis” is most often used to refer to the people living in the Red River Settlement, the old Selkirk Estate.  This group originated in marriages between French-speaking fur trappers and traders and Cree, Assinboine, and Chippewa Indians.  By 1700, there were enough Metis to represent a distinct cultural group.  In 1801, modern Metis history begins with the invention of the Red River cart, a particular form of transportation that characterized the population’s mercantile ambitions.  

The Red River cart was devised at the Pembina trading center.  The cart freed the fur trade from dependance on canoes and river traffic.  Manitoba and the Red River valley is very flat and the carts were designed to be drawn by oxen in caravans (“brigades”) between Winnipeg and other northern settlements and St. Paul.  The carts had large wheels wrapped in rawhide.  The wheels were about five feet high and supported wooden beds on which commodities could be loaded.  Mud poses difficulties in the Red River valley and the wheels were built to float over the mire without cutting through surface sod.  The big wheels could be readily removed so that the cart bed could be floated across rivers and lakes as a sort of raft.  Indeed, the carts were so versatile that their beds also could be used as horse-drawn sleds in the winter-time.  A Red River cart could transport 800 pounds with ease – the freight was mostly furs and pemmican as well as other trade goods.  The ubiquity of these carts made Metis culture nomadic – people could easily move from place to place, carrying their households on the carts.  The result was that the Manitoba Metis followed the buffalo and, generally, lived in encampments that were moved on a seasonal basis.

Metis culture was a unique blend of French and Indian influences.  As trade intermediaries, the Metis spoke a number of different languages, typically “prairie” French, English, and even some Scottish and Gaelic as well as Cree, Ojibway, and Assiniboine.  Tribal groups within the Metis spoke “Michif French”, “Michif Cree,” and a language now extinct called “Bungee”.  (Bungee was a Gaelic-based dialect).  The word “Michif” in this context means “mixed” and is another word for “Metis”.  The curious thing about the “Michif” dialects is that they are not pidgin – in other words, the dialects don’t have simplified grammar and vocabulary but, instead, adopt the full complexity of the parent languages from which they are formed.  This means that “Michif” speakers were fully competent (fluent) in both “prairie” French and the indigenous languages forming the dialects.  Metis were primarily Roman Catholic and, like the Cajuns, enjoyed fiddle music.   They were the politically dominant tribal group in southern and central Manitoba.  When settlers from other European countries, particularly Scandinavia, flooded into Manitoba, the Metis were disenfranchised, a condition that inspired the two uprisings led by Louis Riel.  

In the United States, after 1849, Metis who had adopted European customs, that is, “civilized” Metis, were allowed to vote.  In the second State gubernatorial election in Minnesota, a Metis trader named Joe Rolette (sometimes spelled “Roulette”) swung the vote to his friend, Henry Sibley, a fur trader who had established operations during the territorial period at Mendota.  The story was that any Metis who owned a pair of trousers was considered “civilized” and, therefore, entitled to vote.  Rolette owned several pair of trousers and the rumor was that he loaned out the pants to his cronies, one after another, so that the men could vote in Pembina and Cass Counties.  Needless to say the vote was one-sided in the State’s far northeast, a landslide for Sibley who became Minnesota’s second governor.  There is a tavern named after Rolette on the grounds of the Minnesota State Capitol.  The hotel is in an old Holiday Inn that has lost its franchise – I think it may now be a Kelly Inn.  In the old days, when the hotel was a bit more swank, politicians cut deals in Roulette’s, the bar on the premises.  In the last few years, the place has been mostly frequented by Canadians come to St. Paul for hockey games at the Excel Energy Center.

  

15.

A road leads uphill from the traffic island decorated with the rusting wire moose.  The highway is straight, passing wooded slopes at the edge of town, and, then, rising in a modest asphalt ramp to the top of the escarpment.  A sign marks the local cemetery, pointing down a shady lane where there are some old commercial buildings crumbling alongside railroad tracks.  Although I don’t expect that there could be much of interest in the graveyard, I tell my son and grandchildren that we will stop at the cemetery to explore when we return to town.  We are now bound up the hill, an undramatic slope that ends atop the escarpment.  It is entirely level beyond the top of the rise, flat land stretching away from the line of the two-lane highway in three directions.  After a couple of miles, a sign directs us from the blacktop, along a crooked gravel road to where the ground drops away into the Pembina Gorge.  There’s a big parking lot with a couple of horse-trailers and four flatbeds, apparently equipped to haul ATVs.  

The gorge reminds me of a coulee cutting down from the prairies above the Mississippi River.  The valley has steep green sides, all cloaked in forest, and seems to be about a mile wide.  On some of the bluffs, the turf has fallen away, exposing big crumbing murals of grey shale and pale yellow limestone.  The rivers in this area are narrow and tightly meandered, like coiled springs, and the vegetation at the bottom of the gorge conceals the stream.  The hillside by the parking lot is shaggy with foot-high prairie grass, a great expanse of meadow that falls down to where the slope dives into the tops of the trees.  Birds are singing.  A couple of trails twist down toward the wooded depths of the gorge.  The trails have been built to appeal to sportsmen riding ATVs or dirt-bikes and so the paths are broad, but complex with unnecessary switchbacks.  Four-hundred yards march along the winding trails advances the hiker only a few hundred feet down toward the shadowy green forests lining the gorge.  It’s an inefficient way to proceed and, after a while, we turn back.  The kids shortcut the path by running through the tall grass.  Around here, there are only a few people and all of them, apparently, are equipped with motorized dirt bikes or snarling ATVs.

16.

Back on the main road, we return the six or seven miles to Walhalla.  A side road advertises that it runs to Brick Mines, certainly a place with an interesting name, and, so, we take that gravel lane for a mile to where it dives down a steep slope into the valley.   These roads drop abruptly and without any kind of advance warning – the flat plain atop the escarpment is dissected by deep ravines that drag melt-water from the prairie down to the river in the gorge.  At the bottom of the long hill, an iron bridge colored Cherokee red spans the Pembina River, about thirty feet wide here and flowing between eroded clay banks.  The watercourse is littered with big black boulders that seem to have been polished by the current, today just a faint corrugation of sun-splashed ripples.  A quarter-mile from the bridge, the lane gathers its breath and seems about to start uphill toward the tree-lined rims of the deep river valley.  At the foot of the upgrade, another gravel track leads under a sinister-looking gate hung across its top with twenty or more bundles of rusting metal, weird-looking hardware shaped a bit like jagged, defunct chain saws.  Above the arch from which the metal dangles like perverse, jagged fruit, some tin letters are nailed to the wood frame: Brick Mines Ranch.  An antique-looking shed, scratched together from old lathe salvaged from a demolished barn somewhere, displays a rack of antler horns.  There’s another nasty shack, built from the same splintery blackened wood, and, then, down the track, I can see that the entrance lane twists to the side among other small, wretched-looking out-buildings. On the side of the entrance gate, a faded sign reads: If you can read this sign, you’re within range.  This puzzling message is helpfully illustrated by an image of a round gunsight with a target inscribed within it. The place looks like a location where someone might film a sequel to a sequel to a low-budget sequel of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  I’m not willing to venture any further onto this property, although it seems wholly deserted, and so I back up and we drive along the river bottom to the red bridge spanning the river.  The gravel road back to the bridge opens onto a good view of a very impressive cliff, a high vertical badlands suspended above the valley next to the wooded gulch that we descended to reach this place.  The cliff is striated with the grey shale, veins almost as dark as anthracite, surmounted with pinkish-yellow bands of eroded rock.  (The light-colored layers are Niobrara formation; the dark shale is Carlille formation.)  

We stop by the bridge.  It’s dry and cool in the gorge this day with a limitless blue sky overhead.  The red bridge looks like a child’s toy, an erector set, perhaps.  The iron angling up to the overhead span on the bridge is labeled with a sign that says that this is a Pratt Overhead Truss bridge circa 1905.  Martin and the kids climb down the slope to stand on the heaps of rounded black boulders lying along the edge of the stream and, indeed, strewn at intervals, like big, unstable stepping stones in the middle of river.  It looks to me as if the stones may have been manipulated to create several enclosed lagoons downstream, perhaps weirs where the Indians or Metis might have spear-hunted fish.  Between the boulders, in shadowy pools, there are some black bones, femurs and smaller skeletal parts, that Martin fishes out of the water.  After a few minutes, Martin and the grandchildren clamber back up the slope.  (It was too steep and muddy for me.)  Someone has obligingly left a carefully whittled walking stick propped up against the red side of the iron bolted girder of the bridge.

(Later, I see advertisements for a competition called the Brick Mines Hill Climb.  The pictures show young men in helmets urging their motor bikes up the sheer escarpment, tails of flailing gravel spewing out behind them.  A prize is offered: as much as $10,000 although the sum will be dependent on registrations.  I can’t tell if the contest will occur in a couple of months or happened two years ago, before Covid shut everything down.)

 17. 

Another side road, just above the sharp straight descent into Walhalla leads to the Tetrault Woods overlook.  The gravel road runs level across a flat field a mile long before narrowing into a sketchy track.   The track is gouged into the prairie and cut with culvert-shaped erosion ditches in some places.  A dignified grove of pines, all the same height, grow in a plantation above deep drifts of red needles.  The pines make an unnatural colonnade crossing the prairie. 

The ever-narrowing gravel track ends at bald hilltop overlooking the gorge.  From this place, several limpid-looking stretches of river are visible below, bends and curves emerging under low brown clay cliffs from a deciduous forest filling most of the valley and climbing a bit reluctantly up the sides of the valley, cut open here and there to reveal grey-black and yellow strata.  It’s a pretty vista and, apparently, renowned for Fall colors when the hardwood trees filling the valley are red and amber-colored with the advance of Winter.  The people who maintain this prospect over the gorge (it has a little belvedere and a picnic table) have commissioned someone to pose stylized autumn leaves, hacked from sheet metal, along the fenced path to the overlook.  The leaves are the size of hubcaps but look very sharp and dangerous to touch.  In the center of the path, a metal column is entwined in jagged looking steel wire, rusted like the flanks and belly of the moose in town, and more of the leaves with their hacksaw-edges hang in the iron coils.  This all seems more than a little dangerous to me.  

Local histories recall that Tetrault was an old fur-trader who had a cabin around these parts.  Tetrault fancied himself an old voyageur, smoked a clay pipe, and dressed in brightly colored trousers and vests.  Either he lived a few years before the present or a long time ago.  The accounts are unclear on this point.  

Tetrault’s friend was a man named Cyril Dumas, also a colorful local celebrity.  Dumas also acted like a voyageur from the 18th century and was reputed to be a great liar.  Dumas said that he had traveled for many years by canoe in the far Northwest.  He had fought polar bears and been harassed by packs of hungry wolves and seen the Northern Lights more times than he cared to remember.  Once, high in the Arctic, he canoed on a river of black paint past a sulfur mountain

18.

Within a few miles of Walhalla, the Scandinavians founded two villages, Olga and Vang.  Each possessed a tavern, store, and a Lutheran Church. Vang, I think, even had a newspaper, although local histories say that the man who founded that enterprise was probably mad.  Neither of these towns exists any longer and no trace of them remains.

A little south of Walhalla on Highway 9 another iron truss bridge crosses the Pembina River next to a hoary trestle bearing train tracks.  In this area, a local girl, a farmer’s daughter, was seduced by a Syrian peddler.  She had the peddler’s child out-of-wedlock.  When the peddler didn’t return as promised the girl hanged herself from the truss bridge. Not content with this revenge, the girl rose from the dead as a ghost and rambled along the asphalt right-of-way, soliciting rides from terrified motorists.  This is the White Lady Ghost said to haunt White Lady Road.  An old oak tree standing near the bridge is called “the hanging tree,” a name that evinces some uncertainty about the facts of the tragedy, obscure to the point of being non-existent.  It’s not clear to me whether she has been seen in this area recently.  

19.

The Walhalla Protestant graveyard is very large, a big tract of old stone markers scattered across a wooded hillside indented with several shallow ravines.  A passable dirt lane runs from the road at the edge of town up the hill, looping around the several acre site.  On top of the hill, it’s sunny and there are new stones pitched here and there on the well-groomed grass lawn.  The older graves are strewn among the shadows of the old oaks and maples.  

As we wander among the graves, my granddaughter, Hannah, leans against a slab of engraved stone set atop a big block plinth.  Nothing holds the slab in place and it pitches onto the turf with an awful thud.  It appears that many of the older graves, consisting of square pedestals on which carved columns or upright obelisks are set, are very unstable.  The mortar previously gluing the stones to their plinths has failed.

Near the top of the ridge, we find a curious example of synchronicity.  A thigh-high monument, cut from time-eroded chalk-white limestone, displays a little tree.  The stone tree has been mercilessly chopped down so that only a stump remains studded on its sides with branches also brutally pruned away.  At the base of the mutilated stump, a dead dove has been chiseled in deep relief atop the pedestal supporting the pale limestone tree.  The grave remembers a child who lived for only nine days in July 1894.  The unique feature of this gravestone is the forlorn dead dove displayed next to the desolate little tree.  A few yards from this monument, a lightning bolt has shattered a real tree and dropped it to the sod.  The custodian has used a chain saw to cut up the broken tree, leaving a bare stump pillowed by wood dust, and some thick branches, from which side boughs have been pruned, lying athwart two other old, heavy graves cut from granite.  

Downhill from the smashed real tree and its limestone-carved correlate, the hillside ripples between two ribs of more prominent hillside cupping a little gloomy ravine.  In the ravine, in the deep shadow, there is a massive stone enclosed in terraces set step-wise in the slope.  A cast-iron fence armed with lance-points runs around the big stone, a block standing as high as a man’s chest, among several other very old graves, covered in red and grey lichens.  It’s hard to read the words on the old grave-stones, although one of them talks about a missionary “boring among the Indians” – evidently, the word is “laboring” but the “l” is chipped away from the stone legend.  A peculiar flat slab lies rooted in a short pier of limestone.  The words on that tablet are easier to read and have something to do with a woman who died of “quick consumption” – the “consumption” doesn’t seem to have been too expeditious since the slab, cracked across its center, says that the woman was afflicted with the sickness for ten years.

The big monument has rusticated sides and back, bearing a polished scroll on its front that reads WALHALLA MARTYRS.  What can this be about?  

20.

Around 1500 people lived at St. Joseph (St. Joe) in the early 1850's.  (By contrast, the population of that place, now called Walhalla, was less than a thousand in 2010).  The inhabited place was the center of Metis’ commerce south of the 49th parallel.  The village is described as comprised of 30 neatly built log cabins faced with flat, hewn timber occupying a park-like wooded valley where the Pembina River flows out of the steep, forested escarpment.  The Gingras Trading Post was on open country to the east, erected on a low hillock.  Along the Pembina River, the Kittson Trading Post was closer to the center of the village.  When trader Gingras founded the town, two church bells were hauled to the place by Red River cart and suspended in one of the trees at the edge of the Hair Hills.  (One of those bells survives today and is located in the belfry at St. Boniface, Walhalla’s Catholic church.)   Most of the residents at St. Joe lived in buffalo hide tents with Red River carts at hand for transportation.  After a couple years, Gingras with the local Catholic priest built a parish church, a small school, and even a wood-frame convent.  The parish of St. Joe was prosperous and equipped with a small cemetery in the shadow of the church.

There weren’t any Protestants in town – or, at least, no churches of that affiliation.  The Metis were comfortably Catholic.  To the East, at Cass Lake in what is now Minnesota, beyond the Red River, there was a small Baptist Mission to the Ojibway.  An interpreter at Cass Lake, a half-breed named James Tanner, visited relatives in St. Joseph and thought that the relatively populous and thriving village might be a fertile field in which to sow the Gospel among the Metis, ignoring the fact, it seems, that these people were already Roman Catholic.  Tanner hiked down to St. Paul and, then, traveled to the East Coast where he raised money for his Mission among wealthy Baptists.  With a man named Benjamin (or Elijah – the record isn’t clear) Terry, Tanner returned to St. Joseph in the Spring of 1852 and the two began proselytizing among the Metis in the village.  There are several accounts of what next occurred, varying in some details.  Tanner decided to build a log cabin and small school – apparently, the two Baptists had been living in a buffalo-hide tent.  Terry went into the woods along the nearby Pembina River to fell some trees for this enterprise.  In some accounts, Tanner was with him; other accounts say he was accompanied by a Frenchman.  In any event, the logging expedition didn’t end well.  Three Sioux men encountered Terry and shot him dead.  If Tanner was there, which is, perhaps, doubtful, he escaped.  In any event, the Frenchman either coming upon the mangled corpse or having seen Terry killed, sounded the alarm.  Terry had two arrows embedded in his chest and had been disfigured with a hatchet.  (One account says that he was scalped.)  Terry’s corpse was hauled back to town and, then, a dilemma arose: the local Catholic priest didn’t want a heretic in his cemetery and, so, there was no consecrated ground in which to deposit the mutilated body.  Finally, the priest relented to the extent of allowing Terry to be buried in the corner of the Catholic cemetery allotted to suicides, a sort of Potter’s Field.  The author of the chronicle of the Walhalla Martyrs, one Mrs. Ed Moritz writing on October 6, 1941, seems to have been a pious Protestant – she notes that poor Terry was buried in a grave “unmarked, uncoffined, and unknown,” faulting by implication the Parish Priest for lack of charity.  James Tanner is said to have pronounced a few words of scripture over the unmarked grave of his friend and fellow apostle.

The next year, Reverend Alonzo Bernard with his wife and four children appeared in town, also arriving by Red River cart after departing the Cass Lake Mission to the Ojibway.  With Pastor Barnard, was another missionary, P.B. Spencer, also married with three children.  It’s not clear that Mrs. Ed Moritz remembered the first names of the two wives, although evidence of their identity is clearly visible at the grave markers in the local Protestant cemetery.  From the gravestones, the names of the women were Cornelia Leonard Spencer and Sarah Filena Bernard.  Kittson, the fur trader, and other leading man in St. Joe apparently represented the Scottish Evangelical (Presbyterian) persuasion in the area and he is said to have welcomed these Baptist missionaries who joined James Tanner in his endeavors.  Sarah Bernard’s health was fragile – she had ruined her constitution ministering to ailing Indians in Cass Lake.  (At least, this is the understanding.)  She became extremely ill due to the difficult frontier conditions at St. Joe and her husband decided that she would die unless treated professionally at Kildonan, a larger town in the Selkirk Estate in Manitoba.  (Kildonan is a “riding” – that is, an electoral district, located in what is presently the northwestern part of Winnipeg.)  Parts of this story seem garbled or implausible.  Mrs. Bernard didn’t improve, no doubt due, in part, to being hauled across great tracts of the empty northern steppes.  Rather, in Kildonan, she was diagnosed as suffering from “Quick Consumption”, seemingly some kind fulminating pneumonia.  It was obvious that Mrs. Bernard would not recover and, so, she asked to be taken back to St. Joe so that she could be buried in a poplar grove near the Baptist Mission.  Obedient to her wishes, Reverend Bernard supposedly set forth with his cart, hastening toward St. Joe about ninety miles away.  The party was trapped in a violent blizzard and Mrs. Bernard almost froze to death on the open prairie.  Accordingly, so the story goes, the travelers reversed course, waded through the deep snow, and returned to Kildonan where Mrs. Bernard died.  Reverend Bernard commissioned an elaborate grave stone for her and had the body transported back to St. Joe, a journey undertaken (Mrs. Ed Moritz tells us) after “streams were well-bridged with ice.”  (This detail suggests that it was cold enough to keep Mrs. Bernard from becoming too noisome during the trek back to the Mission.)  En route, the elaborately carved gravestone was dropped and split into two pieces.  The separate shards of the stone were retrieved and later set over the grave in which Sarah Filena Bernard was interred.  The grief stricken Reverend Alonzo Bernard waited until Spring (apparently not concerned with “streams being well-bridged with ice”) and, then, traveled with his four children back to Ohio where they were left in the care of a relative.  Rev. Bernard, not dissuaded from his mission, then, set forth, after reaching St. Paul, following the Red River trails back to St. Joe.

Meanwhile, more trouble had ensued at the Baptist Mission.  On May 31, 1853, another party of renegade Sioux, said to be three as well (perhaps, these stories overlap in some details) attacked the cabin where the other missionaries, the Spencer’s, were living.  (None of the outlaw Indians seem to have been much concerned with Tanner, who was, after all, a Metis himself.)  Mrs. Spencer had risen to nurse her seven-month old infant and lit a lantern.  She heard a noise outside the window and, when she rose to inspect, the three Sioux fired their guns and knocked her down.  Mrs. Spencer was hit in the chest and bled to death.  Her husband barred the door and watched until dawn.  The Indians were gone and, at first light, he hurried into the village for help.  The records don’t exactly explain where Mrs. Spencer was buried, but, one account, says that she was laid to rest next to her friend, and fellow missionary, the unfortunate Sarah Filena Bernard.  Tanner again conducted obsequies, now for the third Baptist victim, associated with the Protestant Mission.  Probably, the bodies were buried in the poplar copse where Mrs. Bernard had asked to interred.  

Left with three small children, Mr. Spencer arranged for a kindly local woman, Marguerite Latraille (nee Joliebois – “happy woods”) to nurse the infant.  Latraille was a Metis woman married to Felix Latraille, the local government Indian agent.  Undoubtedly some of the details of these stories originate with Mrs. Latraille who lived to be 104 years old.  She is buried in the nearby township of Leroy in a Catholic cemetery.  (Mrs. Latraille knew how to cure buffalo hide, make tents, and produce pemmican, the staple of the Metis diet – she was an important source of this kind of lore until well into the 20th century.)  In the Fall of 1853, presumably with the infant baby girl weaned, Pastor Spencer left the Mission, sadly wending his way by cart south to St. Paul.  (Mrs. Yeardo’s story of the Walhalla or St. Joe martyrs provides the picturesque detail that children too small to walk were slung in cradles under the heavy metal axle of the Red River cart and transported in that way – this sounds like a bit of local legend annexed to the story.)  Curiously, Spencer ran into Reverend Bernard somewhere along the trail.  Bernard was returning to the Mission.  Mrs. Ed Moritz, who writes in a pleasingly florid style, remarks that the two men “were strangely permitted to mingle their tears.”  

Reverend Alonzo Bernard persisted at the Mission for a couple more years but gave up on the endeavor, supposedly due to more raids by the hostile Sioux.  But there are a couple of observations that must be made: the Sioux didn’t seem to bother the Metis or their Catholic priest and nuns.  Therefore, a suspicion arises that no one really wanted Protestant missionaries in Roman Catholic St. Joseph.  I am not claiming that the Catholics had anything to do with the two murders, although it is curious that the Sioux showed no interest in harassing any of the local people except the Cass Lake missionaries.  Clearly, significant hostility existed between the Catholic priest and the Baptist missionaries – the recollection of this animus is reflected in the account that Elijah (or was it Benjamin?) Terry had to be buried in the unconsecrated corner of the Catholic cemetery.  

At the time of the commemoration of the Walhalla Martyrs monument in 1881 the Catholic population at St. Joseph, a place now bearing the pagan Scandinavian name of Walhalla, was on the wane.  A couple decades earlier, around 1870, the Metis population at St. Joseph was said to have declined to only 50 although a priest was still ministering to the flock.  Apparently, an Icelandic politician briefly visited the area around 1877 and remarked that the deep Pembina river valley was a suitable site for the mythological “Valhalla” – the politician seemed to be influenced by the notion that the townsite was in a valley (a “dal” in Old Norse, the language spoken in Iceland.)  But, of course, “Valhalla” means “hall of the dead” or the “chosen ones”, warriors collected from battlefields by the Valkyries and resurrected in a celestial feasting hall and, perhaps, the suggestion for the new name, was sardonic. (There’s little in the record on this subject; most local histories suppress the name St. Joseph entirely and are written as if the town was always called Walhalla).  The new Protestant ascendency seems to have been celebrated by the installation of the massive monumental stone commemorating the “Walhalla martyrs” (who were, of course, people who died when the town was called St. Joseph.)  Scandinavian and northern Europeans were now in control of the village and its religious and political institutions.  The Metis had retreated into Manitoba and, indeed, were being driven far into the north in the wake of Louis Riel’s second unsuccessful uprising.  What remains of the Metis culture is now confined to reservations hundreds of miles north of Winnipeg in the wilderness of sub-arctic Canada.   One population had succeeded another.  In the Quasquicentenniel souvenir brochure, published on the 125th anniversary of the 1843 founding of the town, the local Metis, only a fading memory in 1973, are described as “fond of good times, light-hearted and gay, they sang and danced and were never know for their industry...”  The Metis delight in bright colors, particularly shades of red, is also mentioned.

In 1888, Mrs. Latraille (nee Joliebois) still knew where the bodies were buried.  She and the Catholic priest guided the Protestant town fathers to the poplar grove where the two women were interred.  A corner of the Catholic cemetery was dug open to retrieve the skeleton of Benjamin (or was it Elijah?) Terry.  The bones were deposited under the looming rusticated monument to the Martyrs.  Mrs. Yeardo, in her account, describes a picturesque photograph showing the commemoration of the monument, a ceremony attended by Mrs. Spencer’s children, now grown to adulthood.  I haven’t been able to find that photograph said to be made on June 21, 1888     

21.

There is a sad sequel to the tale of the Walhalla (or St. Joe) martyrs.  Serious warfare between the Sioux and the United States erupted in 1862 with the Dakota uprising.  That war was fought, to some extent, in North Dakota in 1863 when General Sully pursued the unrepentant Dakota war parties across the plains.  Small scale skirmishes occurred for several years thereafter and, of course, the whole tragic story ends at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in January 1891.

As it happened, homesteader named Delorme lived in a cabin a little south of St. Joseph, also on the Pembina river.  Delorme’s household consisted of an old couple, their son and daughter, a son-in-law and several children.  A war party of Dakota Indians attacked the cabin – this attack is supposed to have occurred in July 6, 1871.  Another son-in-law, said to be half-breed (that is Metis), lived apart from the cabin and happened upon the murder scene while gathering berries.  The Indians had killed the son and son-in-law living at the cabin with two well-placed shots.  They had clubbed the old man to death and used a ceremonial sword that they were carrying for some reason to hack his face apart.  The man was mortally wounded and lived for only a few minutes after he was found.  The young woman living in the house hid under a bed with her small children.  Parts of the story are unclear or garbled.  An Indian apparently tried to pull one of the babies out from under the bed, but the child and mother resisted.  The Sioux, then, fled.  It seems that the children were found unmolested in the cabin.  The young woman, however, abandoned the scene, possibly thinking her children had been seized, and was found three days later wandering about in the woods.  She was suffering from severe inanition and couldn’t provide a coherent account of the incident.  Her own mother, described as an old woman, had been dragged by the Indians and hit with various clubs in an attempt to “break her back.”  She played possum, however, and survived, despite receiving several nasty injuries.  

The day after the murders were discovered three companies of cavalry were dispatched.  (The story doesn’t tell us where the soldiers originated.)  The cavalry followed the trail of the Indians down toward the Devil Lake area where there were some large encampments of Indians engaged in the buffalo hunt.  The account, then, peters out, indicating that the cavalry couldn’t identify the hostile Indians.  Most likely, the cavalry encountered many Indians, all of them angry about the genocidal outcome of the Minnesota Uprising and other fights with the White men, and deciding that discretion is the better part of valor abandoned the pursuit.  

(The Internet makes information otherwise buried in archives now readily available.  For the account above, I have relied upon Ms. Diane Yeardo’s narrative on the Walhalla city web-site.  However, there are additional details provided elsewhere on the internet – these materials are to be found among the papers of A.B. Welch, a friend of the Dakota tribes and former military officer, who compiled a oral history of these Indians, supplemented by many interesting pictures and official records, including correspondence between soldiers and officers stationed at Devils Lake.  Here is what can be gleaned from written documents provided by Colonel Welch.  

In November 26, 1877, a party of eleven Dakota Indians – four men, four women, and three children – appeared at the Devils Lake Agency.  The Indians were recognized as associated with the Delorme massacre.  This was suspected on the basis of earlier contacts with these people.  Apparently, a party of four Indians was earlier encountered at the Agency in July 3, 1874.  The Indians, most notably Wapepa (“Brave Bear”) and another man named Ishakiyapi (spelled in different ways) said that they were headed north to visit relatives in St. Joseph, although it was generally thought that the expedition was for stealing horses.  The party was encountered a couple days later by “freighters” – presumably teamsters – near Devils Lake.  At that time, the Indians displayed a fresh scalp and said that they had ambushed and killed some Chippewa.  In fact, they had come from killing members of the Delorme family the day before – although this wasn’t known at the time.  Although the account is somewhat unclear, Wapepa was later arrested and confined to a guardhouse at Fort Lincoln, near Bismarck.  However, Wapepa seems to have escaped and made his way west to the Crow Creek Agency.  From that place, he went to Standing Rock and, then, returned to the Devils Lake region where he camped near the Agency in November 1877.  Another Indian recognized Wapepa and informed authorities that he had killed White settlers at St. Joe – that is, the Delorme family.  The Agent at Devil’s Lake wrote to the Court Commissioner in Bismarck, requesting a warrant to arrest Wapepa and Ishakiyapi.  This letter dated February 2, 1878 was received in Bismarck and the Commissioner authorized the arrest of the two Indians, part of the eleven member group who had arrived in the area a couple months earlier.

On March 2, 1878, a warrant for arrest was served on Wapepa and Ishakiyapi.  Both men were taken into custody and imprisoned at Fort Totten. At a preliminary hearing, a few days later, other Indians gave testimony implicating the two prisoners in the murders at St. Joe.  Ishakiyapi somehow contrived to escape and ran from the building where the military commission had arraigned him, fleeing across “the open prairie”.  A guard shot him in the thigh and he fell down about 300 yards from the place from which he had escaped.  As the military police approached, Ishakiyapi is supposed to have drawn a knife, stood up, and, then, charged at his captors.  They shot him two more times, resulting in his death.  (The story seems suspicious to me – why hadn’t Ishakiyapi been disarmed?  Was he carrying a knife in during the Commission hearing?)  

Ishakiyapi’s parents came to collect the body.  His brothers professed peaceful intentions and were, even, given an ox so that they could pursue ranching and agriculture.  (Again, this suggests some anxiety about how exactly Ishakiyapi had come to his end.)  The record doesn’t disclose what happened Wapepa.  Two other Indians who had been part of the war party to St. Joseph were arrested but they predictably claimed that the murders had been committed by Wapepa and Ishakiyapi, who, of course, was dead and, therefore, couldn’t refute their claims.  The military authorities expressed confidence that the other two Indians could be convicted but it is not clear what happened to them.  

In the course of these proceedings, it was revealed that the four member war party, led by Wapepa, went to the Delorme cabin on July 5, 1874.  There was discussion about a horse trade and the Indians went with the three men into a stable, ostensibly, to examine an animal and discuss the transaction.  In the stable, the Indians shot and killed Joseph Delorme and his son Louis Delorme as well as Joseph’s son-in-law Baptiste Moran.  The Indians clubbed Joseph Delorme’s wife (maiden name Isabelle Gurneau) and the settler’s daughter married to Baptiste, Nancy Delorme.  The two women were said to have been “stunned” but “shortly afterwards recovered their senses   One of the men was scalped and the Indians stole eight or nine horses.  They were seen driving their stolen horses south by another Indian in the area the next morning, July 6, 1874.  Apparently, the herd of horses excited interest.  The next day, the Indians met the “freighters” and tried to sell them some of horses, said to have been taken from the Chippewa – at that time, the scalp was brandished and one of the Indians showed the teamsters a bloody sword.  It was very hot and the scalp smelled foul and so it was thrown away.  The sword was later recovered as evidence.  

This information, some of which is contradictory, is contained in a series of letters between the Indian agent at Devils Lake and the Court Commissioner at Bismarck.)

22.

Not all of those buried among the Walhalla Martyrs died tragically.  Reverend Oliver Goldie, said to be born in Scotland in 1831, immigrated to Canada when he was around fifty.  A non-denominational preacher, he tramped around the Pembina country, apparently, haranguing anyone willing to listen to him.  Homeless, the man lived in the homes of pioneer settlers, “for sometimes as long as a month at time” – at least, so reports Diane Yeardo.  (She is quick to note that Goldie was “liked by all”.)   Goldie spent considerable time with the Ojibway at the Turtle Mountain Reserve and acquired Indian habits – he slept on the ground in the open and “rode his pony (named) Billy Buttons”. (It’s unclear to me how riding a pony named Billy Buttons is an Indian “habit” – but I am following Ms. Yeardo’s chronicle.)  Oliver Goldie was a tall man and his feet dangled down to the ground when he rambled about the north country on his diminutive horse.  He was an extravagant-looking fellow; his hair was “died” (sic) bright yellow.”  

Reverend Goldie’s pony was his best friend and the pastor said that he wanted to be buried beside Billy Buttons.  But the beast died five years before the Reverend.  Goldie bought a cemetery plot in the Protestant graveyard (apparently, ponies are Protestants, possibly, even, Lutheran).  Diane Yeardo tells us where the loyal horse is buried – he was interred between three trees forming a triangle ten feet north of brick building that was still standing at the corner of the cemetery when Ms. Yeardo wrote her account.  

Reverend Goldie died in March of 1898.  Contrary to his express wishes, the local gentry buried him among the dour Walhalla Martyrs and not next to his faithful pony.  Mrs. Yeardo says that the Reverend Oliver Goldie was the “cousin of Robert Burns” known as the “Bard of Scotland.”  I am unable to verify this family relationship.  However, Burns wrote a poem in 1785 called “Epistle to John Goudie, in Kilmarnock”.  John Goldie (or Goudie) was a skilled cabinet maker and wine merchant.  Goldie was interested in theology and wrote several treatises on the subject.  Burns knew Goudie, borrowed money from him, and satirized his religious convictions in the poem.  It begins: “O Gowdie, terror of the whigs/ Dread o’ black coats and rev’rend wigs”.  Burns who thought that Goudie’s religious views were questionable, accuses him of “(s)our bigotry” that “girns” (makes grotesque faces) at the pious cabinet-maker and wishes the ten “Egyptian plagues” upon him.  It is certainly possible that Oliver Goldie (an alternate spelling for “Goudie”) was related to this man, perhaps his grandson.  Homer nods on occasion and so does Ms. Diane Yeardo – she tells us that Goldie died on March 19, 1898 at the age of 78; in fact, if Goldie were born in 1831, as Yeardo claims, he would have been 67 at the time of his death.  (He would have been 78 in 1909). 

I’m not critical of Ms. Yeardo.  The past is hard to know and filled with confusing legends and unconfirmed facts.  We don’t even understand that much about the present.  Life is lived by approximation in a fog of uncertainty. And we wouldn’t know anything about Oliver Goldie but for Ms. Yeardo’s industry.  

23.

The land south of Walhalla is featureless, flat and empty.  Ragged and disheveled shelter belts mark ghost farmsteads.  Nothing remains of the farmhouses or barns.  Sometimes, far from the highway, a remaining farm may be glimpsed, but these inhabited places are few and far between.  In other places, the road runs between big wet-lands, where dark canals zigzag through the marsh. 

A four-lane highway crosses the level prairie, running toward Grand Forks – this is about forty miles south of Walhalla.  At a rest stop, we see a two couples standing next to their SUV feverishly smoking cigarettes.  For some reason, they aren’t able to smoke in their vehicle and so they are making up for lost time here in the parking lot next to the toilets.  It’s a long holiday weekend and the trash containers are already overflowing with garbage patrolled by fat black flies. 

The smokers light new cigarettes from the fags they are about to discard and inhale deeply.  One of the women walks a poodle.  The dog is smoking a cigarette as well.

24.

The four-lane road to Grand Forks runs flat and straight across the bed of old glacial Lake Aggasiv.  Twelve miles from the city we pass a row of three light blue water towers set within a long quadrangle of big, new office buildings.  This is the Grand Forks Air Force base.  There’s not much of a GI strip outside the gates to the huge military base –there’s just one pay-check cashing storefront that seems to be abandoned and a Domino’s Pizza.  (Presumably, the flight crews for the SAC bombers and their commanding officers order pizza to be delivered during the long nights standing sentinel over the continental United States.)

At Grand Forks, a huge billboard announces that Zebra Mussels are here!  The billboard shows a fanged bouquet of mussels next to an outboard-motor-equipped fishing boat.  The public service announcement warns North Dakotans to clean their boats before putting them into the waters of the State, a measure that is supposed to keep the mussels from infiltrating local streams and lakes.  Zebra mussels are an invasive species.  In the early 1980's my brother-in-law earned his doctorate in conservation and zoology by spending a summer scuba-diving in Minnesota creeks and lakes, counting the razor-sharp mussels studding the bottoms of those bodies of water.  The mussels had not yet spread everywhere but their population was certainly on the rise.  Twenty years later, this scientist,  Dr. Rick Hart, was invited to dive once more in some of the places where he had surveyed the mussels two decade before.  He found that the mussels were now ubiquitous, growing in great spiky masses in the depths of Minnesota lakes and rivers.  The mussels had annihilated all of the indigenous molluscs.  No longer were there any traces of the mussels that had once populated those waters.  In effect, the indigenous species were extinct.

June 4, 2021