Sample Pages

 JUST ABOVE BONE

a narrative book about family

by Jerrie Hurd

Introduction

My family owned a sheep ranch located in the foothills just above the town of Bone, Idaho. As a family, we used to describe ourselves as living “just above Bone.” We meant that literally. We were hardworking people, not much given to fancy figures of speech. All in all, it was a good place to grow up, but I never planned to stay there. By the time I was nineteen, I was studying in Salzburg, Austria, and trying to pretend that I knew things that were more sophisticated than how to stack hay and drive a farm truck with multiple gears.

My rough edges were many. I’d never seen an opera or been inside an art museum. I didn’t know how to hail a cab. The fact that I’d spent long hours of my childhood reading every book I could find wasn’t helping me as much as I’d thought. But never, not once, did I entertain the idea of giving up and going home. More powerful than the books I’d read were the stories I’d absorbed. I knew I came from a long line of strong women who’d succeeded in all kinds of difficult circumstances. Salzburg was no biggie by comparison. All I had to do was trust myself to figure it out. And I did.

Family stories are foundational. I relied on that as a student, but years later, I’d forgotten how important those old stories were, until it slapped me in the face one afternoon

I was critiquing manuscripts at the end of a three-day writers’ conference. Mid-afternoon, I sat down with a thirty-something writer who was working on a novel with three generations of women—mothers and daughters—who seemed to do nothing but increase each other’s misery. It was a well-written, if melancholy, book that readers, I suspected, would find a downer, so I asked the author, “Why did you want to write this story?”

That’s a deceptively simple question that I usually need ask several times before getting to the core. This writer is the exception. Without hesitation, she answers, “I wanted to understand why all the women in my family marry men we don’t love. I mean, God forbid one of us should break the cycle.”

I was startled, not because she was so clear-eyed about her central narrative, not because of her bitterness, and not because I didn’t believe her. Families run these kinds of patterns all the time. I was startled because I hadn’t realized the book was autobiographical. And—more to the point—I’d recognized similarities between the generations of her family and my own. Actually, I thought the similarities were nearly universal. Except for the particulars, she could have been writing about almost any set of mothers and daughters, mine included, with one huge exception. In my family, in addition to stories of overcoming difficult circumstances, we tell great love stories.

The author shook her head and continued. She felt trapped. Her family had a pattern of failed relationships. So why had she expected her marriage to be different? “It’s like they gave me a script. I can follow the family script or struggle against it. Either way, the script owns me.”

“The script owns you?”

She shot me an incredulous glance. “Isn’t it obvious? Following the family script means an incredibly strong mother-daughter bond because the women in my family are forever commiserating with one another about our failed loves. We never let anyone else in. On the other hand, if I took a chance on real love, I’d lose the support of my family, who got me through one bad marriage already. Given my family’s background, how likely is it that I would recognize real love even if I found it?” She shrugged. “How do you make some kind of Disneyfied happy ending out of that?”

I wasn’t used to being challenged quite so directly. Worse, I’m feeling increasingly uncomfortable. The more she talks, the more I wonder about my family and our love stories. Is that also a family script? If so, how have those stories—that family pattern—affected my life? At the same time, I’m mentally resisting the idea. Nobody takes family stories seriously. I didn’t. Or hadn’t for a long time. What’s more, I didn’t want to think about this, much less take the time to investigate it. I had other plans, other projects. And yet, another part of me is screaming: “PAY ATTENTION!”

The importance of family stories can be explained in Aesop terms. Take the famous Aesop fable of the ants and the grasshopper. The ants work all summer putting food away while the grasshopper fiddles. When winter comes, the hungry grasshopper knocks on the ants’ door looking for dinner. The usual moral is something like: Work hard. Don’t fiddle the summer way or you risk being hungry come wintertime.” Ok, fine, but I want to know who kept those ants from dying of boredom—all winter long—if not that fiddling grasshopper?

         Here’s the thing: If my family gave me an ant’s point of view, likely I will have to make a big shift to appreciate silly, seemingly slothful grasshoppers. On the other hand, if I come from a grasshopper family, likely I’ve learned to look down on steadier, plodding lifestyles that are just not cool. Now, think what happens when a grasshopper marries an ant, or an ant hires a grasshopper. Story is serious stuff—like it or not.

Before our scheduled hour was up, I tried to explain to the author that my family tells love stories—something very different from the pattern in her novel. I wanted to her to understand that, at some level, families and individuals choose how to tell their stories, and that she could change her novel and her life if she wanted to—but she shook her head. Her novel was autobiographical; therefore, she felt constrained by real events. She didn’t think she could lie about who she is or about her family’s history.

Maybe it goes without saying that we cannot separate who we are from where we came from. I can act all grown-up and tell myself that I’m my own person, but, like a reflex, when I cook, I cook the way my mother cooked. When I open my mouth to talk politics, I sound like my father. When I’m shopping for clothes, pink is not a possibility: my grandmother hated pink. Those are the little things. The big thing is my family’s love stories. I’d always considered myself luckier than most because my family tells great love stories, but there is a hazard. If I listen long enough, I could spend a lifetime expecting to be swept off my feet. What happens when our lives don’t turn out like the stories we’ve heard?

Several years ago, I took a class from the novelist Ursula K. LeGuin, who was a great believer in the power of story, but not the kind of story that dominates blockbuster movies and bestselling books. She preferred “carrier-bag stories,” her phrase. Even in pre-history, bringing down a mastodon was likely an event that demanded the telling of a story. But killing a mastodon didn’t happen every day. Gathering seeds and roots and berries and snaring small game in nets was the regular routine. For that you don’t need a spear, you need a carrier-bag, a place to put the things you’ve gathered including the medicine bundle, the talismans and the stories that transfer culture—the stories that literally tell the group how to get through hard times—this winter and next winter and the one after that. Even in the Twenty-First Century, most families tell stories that center on how they survived, started over, or managed to overcome great odds. The message is simple: our ancestors survived. We can, too, because we’re part of a long tradition of brave, resourceful people.

If you go beyond that central theme, there are other stories, told less often, but not less powerful. After that meeting with the young novelist who saw her family’s history as a script, I began to wonder what was in my family’s carrier-bag? Turns out, that’s not a question with a simple answer. I poked around, not really knowing what to expect. At minimum, I hoped to stop running patterns I don’t understand, like never wearing pink. Mostly, however, I wanted to understand those love stories. I’m pretty sure my family’s track record in the relationship department is no better than most. So, what do we gain by telling ourselves love stories?

 I had no idea where this project would take me. I traveled from that ranch in Idaho to an island off the coast of Denmark with various stops along the way. I talked to aunts, uncles, cousins and friends of the family, anyone who would listen and try to answer my questions. My understanding of story and the power of story grew and changed as I grew and changed. Along the way, I created a mantra for myself and my project: Why do we continue to tell that story? Why do we continue to tell that story THAT way? Those might seem like simple questions, but they aren’t.

This book is the result of those questions and that journey. I’m sharing my carrier-bag, my collection of the strange, wonderful, inspiring, heartrending discoveries that I made. I’m sharing them with the hope that others will be inspired to gather and examine their own stories. Let me be clear, I was not doing genealogy. Yes, I gathered some documents as I went along, but I wasn’t focused on names and dates—the things that I have to write down to remember. I was gathering stories—the stories that I can’t forget, even when I might want to—the stories that my family uses to explain who we are in a sense that is much larger, much more significant, than where we were born or when we died. And, yes, I know that family stories are often exaggerated and not always true. However, I was surprised to discover that most of my family’s stories were connected to real events. In some cases, the stories include details that the teller couldn’t have known were historically significant. The teller was simply repeating things he or she had heard from a previous generation or generations, but when I took the time to check, I was impressed at how accurate the collective memory is. That said, I don’t think family stories have to be historically correct to be powerful. They just need to be repeated and believed, which is why I kept coming back to my mantra, repeatedly asking why my family continues to tell a particular story with a particular slant or purpose? What, exactly, are we saying about who we think we are? Trust me, those questions will reveal layers and layers of surprises including the root reason a group of individuals continues to identify as a family. It’s the stories, more than anything else, that establish a set of core values, a strong sense of belonging, and a feeling of deep roots.

In the end, I came to believe that knowing my family’s storied background might be as important as knowing my family’s medical history. And I’m not alone in that belief. It has been documented that people who experience a genealogical void often have serious identity problems. Hence the drive for adopted children to find their “real” parents and for African Americans, who have a slavery background, to make a genetic connection to a particular part of the African continent.

         I’m lucky. No genealogical void. I have a rich and colorful background—plenty of stories, more than enough surprises, and lots of dirt. Doesn’t every family have at least one pirate and/or Mormon polygamist in their past? The trick is deciding the takeaway. Dirt is where things get muddy. It’s also where things grow. I uncovered stories I’d never heard before and stories I’d heard too many times in too many conflicting versions. In every case, I never assumed the first version was the right one. I always expected that if I turned the dirt one more time, I’d find a different perspective, something wiser or wittier. In that, the old stories never failed me even when some family members did.

         “What do you want?

         “Why?”

         “Who asked you to look into this?”

I sat back, surprised, at how protective some were of our shared history.

First lesson: old stories have a sacred quality. That doesn’t mean you can’t question them and, maybe, give them a new twist. It does mean that you will need to show respect. You will need to listen. I mean listen-listen and, maybe, listen again. That’s ok. It will be worthwhile.

So, let’s begin . . .

A Train-Stopping Love Story

My family tells one story more often than any other—the story of my great-grandmother Sophia and the railroad she took hostage. Around our kitchen table, Sophia’s story is told heroic-style, meaning we don’t just tell the story, we brag. My great-grandmother didn’t stop one or two trains. She brought an entire railroad to a standstill. No surprise, there are several versions of the story, and every reason to believe it’s exaggerated. Stories get better over time. That said, this one seems to be based on a real incident. And, more important, it’s a good story.

In 1879, when Sophia was fourteen years old, she ran away from home, because of her abusive stepfather, and got a job working for the railroad. She weighed less than a hundred pounds, a detail my family adds because, in this case, size matters. Working for the railroad was no easy town job. She began as a cook’s helper and later became a cook—part of a crew of women who fed the men who were laying railroad tracks across some of the last outposts of the American frontier. The job consisted of fixing dinner at night and breakfast the next morning in one place. Then, while the men were laying track, the women loaded their tent kitchen onto mules and moved four or five miles down the roadbed—the distance the men were expected to advance that day. Then the women unloaded their mules, set up camp, and had dinner ready by the time the men caught up with them. This was hard, backbreaking work, done six and a half days a week.

And it was dangerous.

The cooks were out ahead of the men at a time when marauding Indians were marauding mainly because they were hungry. Besides that, the job had its own hazards. Sophia knew a girl who got crippled when one of the mules fell on her, and another who was blinded when one of the stoves exploded. Those tragedies were felt keenly, because the women formed extraordinarily close bonds, constantly “watching out for each other”—a polite euphemism for the fact that one occupational risk was from the track-laying men who might not be a “gentleman” or who might ‘forget himself” while working in remote places. Add to that the usual hazards: sudden storms, bad water, medical emergencies, the list goes on and on . . ..

However, none matched the raw, unregulated competition between rival railroads that sometimes led to two companies laying track through the same narrow canyon. The company that finished first got paid; the other got nothing. In that race, both companies’ crews were typically guarded by armed men, who hardly needed an excuse to start shooting. What’s more, since everyone knew that crews worked best on full stomachs, kidnapping the competition’s cooks was considered fair game.

Those railroad-building details are interesting, but I’m not under the impression that this part of my family’s history is extraordinary. In times past, life was physically hard, and lots of people had to overcome all kinds of gritty difficulties. Does that matter? Recent research at the University of Graz, in Austria, has identified an “ancestor effect”: individuals who think about their ancestors just prior to a job interview or college exam boost their chances of success. Dr. Peter Fischer hypothesizes that thinking about one’s origins . . . provides people with a positive psychological resource. In other words, when I remind myself of the difficulties my ancestors overcame, I approach my own challenges with a greater sense of identity and self-confidence: If my great-grandmother Sophia brought an entire railroad to a standstill, I can do this. I’m made of the same stuff.  Evidently, that attitude can make a measurable difference, which is probably why most families continue to tell stories that emphasize how hard it used to be and/or what amazing, resourceful people we come from.

In Sophia’s case, she not only overcame the day-to-day difficulties, but she also stood up for herself. She was still young—nineteen years old—when she fell in love. He was the crew foreman, and, when he proposed marriage, she accepted with one condition: before they set a wedding date, she had to collect her back pay.

The railroad company was having financial difficulties, so all its workers were owed considerable back pay. Sophia was owed more than a year’s worth—which became the young couple’s first disagreement. George, her fiancée, doubted that she would ever collect all that was due her. Most of the so-called “skilled men,” like him, would eventually settle for less than what they were owed. As a lowly cook, Sophia would be lucky to get anything. George wanted her to forget the money and come away with him. They would make do, together, on hard work.

Sophia had great respect for hard work—she’d certainly done her share—but she’d been poor all her life. She was not going to start her married life with just the clothes on her back. On that point, she was adamant. She would marry George when she got her back pay and not one day sooner.

Word of their impasse spread up and down the railroad lines. In the five years that Sophia had worked with various crews, a great many railroad workers had met and come to like her. More to the point, they knew she was strong-willed. Most were not betting on George being able to change her mind. The story of the young lovers and their standoff changed to sympathy. And sympathy changed to action. The men in the camp where Sophia was working quit early one day for her sake. Once started, the strike spread quickly. Next day, it had jumped to two other camps. Three days later, it involved several more camps. Men, who were laying track in three directions, simply put down their tools and refused to go on—not because they hoped to get their own pay, but because they wanted to see Sophia married in style.

The railroad bosses fired her. Without an easy alternative, they must have thought she’d give up, get married, and move on. If so, they were wrong. Sophia stood her ground, the men refused to return to work, and the strike continued to spread. In fact, the strike went on much longer than anyone might have imagined in a situation where no one got paid unless they laid track fast and finished first. However, it was the bosses who gave in. They paid Sophia and her husband-to-be what they were owed. It is said that, at the wedding, the band played all night and the guests danced even longer “when they had to whistle their own tune to keep celebrating.”

Sophia and George’s back wages, combined with her savings, were enough to buy one hundred and sixty acres in southeastern Idaho. Those acres were the beginning of a sheep-and-cattle ranch that would include thousands of acres by the time I knew my great-grandmother—when she was in her nineties, and I was nine years old.

My grandma Melba ran the ranch after Sophia. After that, my mother was responsible for the largest remaining piece, a couple thousand acres, where she grazed cattle. Now, I live in a Colorado college town, hundreds of miles away, and yet that story hangs over my life, telling me, on a good day, that I can do anything, or chiding me, on a bad day, for not conquering the world. Until I started thinking seriously about family stories, I didn’t appreciate how often I thought about that story. I had assumed it existed mostly as deep background. I was a grown-up, making my own decisions, too busy—far too busy—to wonder why hundreds of miles didn’t insulate me from stories I’d heard hundreds of times. I suspect most people shrug off the family stories, not only because they’re just stories, but because they’re the same old stories. We think we know them, until we stop and really pay attention. In my case, I needed to take a deeper look at my family’s love stories. Sophia stopping the trains is only one.

We also tell the story of a girl rescued by a young man riding a white horse. I’m not kidding. The story is exactly that clichéd. That girl was Melba, my grandmother, the second woman to run the family ranch. I affectionately call her “Auntie Mame in Boots” because Auntie Mame was her favorite movie, and because she spent most of her life trying to be more madcap than the movie’s main character. It’s an oldie—1958—starring Rosalind Russell. Move the scene from a New York apartment to a sheep ranch in Idaho and you get the picture. Or, if you haven’t seen the movie, think Madonna or Lady Gaga.

Melba met Sophia’s youngest son, Irvin, at a summer dance. She was sixteen, living with an older, married sister who had children of her own and resented the extra mouth to feed. Melba remembers hard work and never having anything nice (meaning clothes) to call her own. Irvin, on the other hand, was handsome, funny, and he rode a white horse. Literally.

By that time, Sophia and her family had prospered and were known as “The White Horse Nielsens” because even their wagon horses were light-colored grays, notably well bred. All that next fall and winter, Melba watched for Irvin and went out to greet him whenever he rode past her house on his way to pick up a wagonload of beet pulp, a by-product of processing sugar beets that is fed to livestock in winter. Unfortunately, it is a notoriously fragrant by-product. Melba teased him about courting her while “smelling worse than vinegar.” In turn, he accused her of liking his horse more than she liked him.

Irvin was not the only one to notice that Melba had an eye for a good horse as well as a good man. The neighbors had begun to gossip. We usually tell this story with an attitude of mockery, as if pitying the neighbors for not understanding that any woman in her right mind would always choose both—the fine gentleman and the good horse.

Continuing our love-story tradition, my father supposedly proposed to my mother in the fourth grade. In the family photo album, there is a picture of the two of them and their fourth-grade class. Nothing out of the ordinary, it’s a school picture: three rows of schoolchildren lined up on the steps of their schoolhouse. Everyone is looking at the camera except my dad. He has taken a step back and is glancing sideways at my mother, who’s standing next to him. It’s such a fun, sweet picture; you want to believe the story of their fourth-grade love. However, when I studied the photo closer, I couldn’t help wondering which came first, the story or the picture? With that in mind, I asked my aunts, one by one, if my mother or my father had ever been interested in anyone else. They claim not. So, what can I say? Either the story is true, or the story has been repeated so many times it has replaced memory.

My sister, Sharen, an engineer with several patents to her name, has never been impressed with the family love stories. When I explain my new interest in those old stories, she rolls her eyes. “You mean the family fairytales?”

I draw a deep breath. Are they mostly make-believe?

Maybe.

Probably.

All stories are a mix of lies and truth. That doesn’t change the power—the hold—they have on us.

A hundred and fifty years ago, there was a legendary “tie yourself down” stretch of railroad that ran along Beaver Canyon, one of the places where Sophia worked. The road was so rough that a crew was stationed there with the sole purpose of cleaning up after the cars that lost their load on the rocks below because they weren’t tied down. “Tie yourself down”—meaning prepare for a rough ride—is a phrase I whisper to give myself courage. I whispered that phrase repeatedly long before I learned that the term originated with my family’s railroad background. Most of us have no idea how deep the stories go. We never question our family’s way of describing the world. “Tie yourself down,” we say and go on like that’s the only way.

Here’s the sad part of my parents’ story. My father served in World War II. Besides having his feet frozen in the Battle of the Bulge, he was one of the first paratroopers to jump into Germany across the Rhine River. I’m told that the survivors of that jump, few in number, talked about whether any of them would get out alive. In a sense, none did. It is the unanimous opinion of the family that my father “never got over the war.” To make a long story short, my mother married a young man who was different from the light-hearted boy she fell in love with in the fourth grade. Sophia’s love story didn’t end like a fairy tale, either. She was a widow longer than she was married. In both cases, however, these are not the stories we choose to tell most often.

Ironically, my grandma Melba, the one who married the fine young man riding the white horse, was skeptical of fairy tales. She read to me when I was a child, and whenever she got to the end of Cinderella, she always paused and added, “We like the prince. There’s nothing nicer than a fine, handsome prince, but YOU need to pay attention to the fairy godmother. She’s the one who got things done.”

At the time, I thought she was being silly. I knew that was not how the story was usually told. When I was a teenager, recalling her version of that story, I amused myself thinking she was talking about women, like herself, older and largely unappreciated. I liked the twist. I thought Good for her. We all need to get a dig in once in a while. Now, as I reconsider my family’s stories, I think she was wise—wiser than I knew. “Pay attention to the fairy godmother” means notice how the story is being told because, more often than not, that shapes how we see the world.

Here’s another example. My family has tales we call “Oh Dear Me’s.” As a child, I was allowed to tell an “Oh Dear Me” once, to rant against the unfairness of the world, but I was never encouraged to repeat one. The family attitude was that nothing would be accomplished by such a retelling, except to wallow in self-pity.

I know a family that handles hard times by referring to them as memories. “We’ve just made a memory,” they’ll say in the face of some new setback. That’s their way of creating an emotional safety net. According to their scheme of things, you have no way to lose. No matter what happens, you’re always rich in memories.

While spending several weeks in Ireland, I watched a mother and her young daughter stop frequently at the graveyard across the street from where I was staying. I asked and found out that they were visiting the grave of the child’s sister, her twin. The mother seemed to think it was important for the living child to share her memories, almost daily, with the stillborn sister. I couldn’t help wondering how deeply that ritual would affect the living child. Would she feel the burden of living for two? Or would she come to think that she was luckier than most because she had an unseen sister to share her life with? Either way, she would not escape the story of her birth. None of us do. And unless we make a conscious choice, our stories get stuck in our heads.

“We are the White Horse Nielsens.”

“We don’t tell “Oh Dear Me’s.”

“WE STOP TRAINS.”

“Yeah, right, and how many trains have we stopped lately?” my sister, Sharen, the no-nonsense engineer, asks.

Exactly.

In our Cinderella-imbued culture, when a woman marries the man of her dreams, she’s supposed to live happily ever after. My parents had one perfect moment. Right after my he returned from the war, my father, still wearing his uniform, took my mother to the local Saturday night dance. She was flushed with the happiness of having him home. When he took her in his arms and started to dance, everyone else stepped back and let them have the floor. And then, when the dance was over, everyone applauded. Moments like that are rare. And they don’t prepare us to deal with the disappointment that inevitably follows.

And yet, we keep telling stories, repeating them in countless variations because we love stories. I can’t imagine who I’d be without my stories. Who among us doesn’t stand, fight, walk away—or tell love stories—based on some notion of what the people in her family do? For reasons I have yet to understand, my ancestors decided that, to hold a family together, you need a good love story. And so, when it’s my turn, I tell the Porsche story.

My husband-to-be courted me in a brand-new Porsche 912. I didn’t know much about cars at the time, still don’t. I grew up on that ranch in Idaho, and on a ranch, you drive the kind of vehicles that handle dirt roads and lots of dust. Old pickup trucks, mainly. Of course, I appreciated the new-car shininess and the new-car smell, but I had no idea that a Porsche was more than just another German-made car. In fact, I thought it was just a flattened version of a Volkswagen.

That is, until I went back to college the fall after meeting him. The first weekend when he came to see me, my roommates’ mouths dropped. “He drives a Porsche?” they asked in near unison. I nodded, embarrassed to admit that I didn’t know I was supposed to be impressed.

Now, whenever I tell the Porsche story, I always add that whatever impressed me about my husband-to-be, it wasn’t his car. He’s never needed a fancy car or anything flashy to catch my attention.  I was smitten after our second date. Our love story, the one we tell at family gatherings, has taken a comic twist—me being too young and naïve to appreciate his fancy car. In private, that same story has deepened and distilled. Often, “Honey, you don’t need a Porsche” is enough said.

Touchstone Stories

Genealogy focuses on a timeline—births, marriages, and deaths. Stories center on a theme. No one doubts that families exist on a timeline. The idea that families also have a theme—a central story—can come as a surprise.

Buzzy Jackson, author of Shaking the Family Tree, thinks about it for a moment. Then she readily agrees. Hers, she tells me, is the grandfather who “took us out of the south and brought us into the modern world.” In a few stolen moments before her son’s school lets out, she explains that besides thinking “Jackson” was such a common name, she wondered if she could trace her father’s family; she was always curious about why her grandfather made that move from Alabama to Michigan. She also notes that she has a Russian-Jewish side of the family with a different story centered on how and why they came to America—immigration being a more common theme for most Americans, she suggests. I think she’s right. My mother’s family tells love stories, but my father’s family tells a more typical immigration story.

When I started this project, I had no trouble identifying my train-stopping great grandmother as the touchstone story central to my mother’s family. It is the story we repeat most often within the family and often the first story we tell outsiders. And, likewise, Jackson, who has written extensively about her family’s history was able to name her family’s central story—her grandfather’s migration north. But is that the norm? Are people generally aware of their family’s central story?

I began asking. For a while I am obnoxious, asking anyone and everyone who will listen long enough to consider my question: “Does your family have a central story?”  Many didn’t know what to say. Some didn’t want to be bothered. Others had to think before responding. Most found the idea a little puzzling. Clearly this was not the usual conversation starter.

Maria Krenz answered my question right away. Her central story is her birth and the problems that caused her family.

Krenz was born in Budapest, Hungary, during a 1944 bombing raid. She came six weeks early. That was lucky. A couple of weeks after that, Jews were not allowed to use any hospital, and her mother would have had no medical help. However, her lucky birth was not an auspicious beginning. A preemie, whose mother’s milk had dried up, she was burden on her family when food was hard to obtain—milk especially. It got worse. She was less than a year old when her family went into hiding and needed to keep her quiet while they hid in a walled-up room in the back of an aunt’s apartment.

When an older daughter, from her father’s previous marriage, asked if she and her baby could hide with them, Krenz’s father turned them away. The risk of keeping two infants quiet was just too great. Fortunately, the older daughter and her child survived, but turning her away, like that, haunted Krenz’s father. Even after the war, he never wanted to talk being forced to choose between his newborn and his daughter’s.

After the war, Krenz was still a young child when the Soviets arrived in Hungary and the whole nightmare replayed. Stalin began to deport anyone considered “an elite”—that included the college educated, former owners of businesses, and men who were military officers before WWII. Krenz’s parents fit more than one of those criteria. Deportation orders arrived on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On those days, her mother lived in constant fear of a knock on their door. Waiting every other day like that, expecting the worst, triggered the mother’s earlier memories. She told and retold the story of hiding in that small room with a baby that had to be kept quiet and having no milk. Krenz believes that’s why the story of her birth is the first thing she thinks about when she thinks about her history and her family.

Krenz also told me that as a child she learned to use her family’s stories.

To calm her mother, she would ask her to tell stories of the “good days,” when her mother’s family were high-placed financiers who lived in a fine house with lots of servants. In the “good days” her mother had studied at Oxford and regularly attended mass at the local cathedral having converted years before the war. Krenz told me that her mother loved telling stories of the “good days,” but for her daughter those stories seemed like fairytales—not real, just little diversions that she used to calm her mother.

         Today Maria lives around the corner from me and is active in the local Quaker congregation. She likes the Quakers, she told me, because they don’t force you to accept their catechism—their story as truth. At the same time, she is a serious student of Jewish culture and history, partly out of interest, and, she admits, partly out of fear that her mother might be right: that, in the end, “they” will never let you be anything but Jewish. That, she tells me, is how deeply the theme of her birth and her mother’s stories is buried in her life.

Bonnie Gangelhoff woke up March 24, 2015 feeling that time had taken a cruel, surreal twist. From her clock radio, she was hearing that Germanwings flight 9525 had gone into a steep dive and crashed into the French Alps.  On March 24, 1968, the plane Gangelhoff’s parents were on went into a steep dive and crashed in the Irish Sea. That morning, as she was waking up, no one was sure what had happened to the Germanwings flight. They would later decide that a suicidal co-pilot deliberately put that plane into a dive. However, no one has ever satisfactorily explained what happened to Aer Lingus 712, the plane Gangelhoff’s parents were on in 1968.

Not knowing what happened to her parents has haunted Ganglehoff her whole life. “Can a question be my central story?” she asked.

Here are the known facts. Aer Lingus flight 712 was traveling from Cork, Ireland to London’s Heathrow airport on a clear, sunny day. The last message from that flight’s co-pilot is garbled but seems to indicate another aircraft is in the area. There was no black box on the aircraft. The fuselage was never raised from the bottom of the Irish Sea. Most of the bodies, including Gangelhoff’s parents, were never found.

 One theory is that a rogue missile fired from a missile-testing site near Aberporth, Wales, hit the plane. That is officially denied. It was a Sunday. Supposedly there were no tests on Sundays, but independent investigators claim to have found inconsistencies in the logbooks. Second theory is that a special radar transponder on the aircraft failed causing a British warship, conducting tests in the area, to mistake the craft and shoot it down—also officially denied. There have been two investigations. The one in 1970 reached a vague conclusion that leaves open the possibility of another aircraft, perhaps a drone used for target practice, being in the area. The second conducted in 1998-2000 unambiguously blames mechanical failure, but those results are not widely accepted by surviving family members and disputed by all subsequent independent investigations.

Gangelhoff was in her last year of college when this happened. In 1968, young people, her age, were protesting the Viet Nam war, questioning authority. She joined them, protesting the war on the streets of Washington, D.C. And to this day, Gangelhoff remains highly skeptical of all authorities and all official reports. “Trust but verify,” she tells me repeatedly. However, that doesn’t help her when she considers her central story. She believes the facts related to the crash of Aer Lingus Flight 712 can neither be trusted nor verified.

When she shares that history with me, she also confides that she wants to write a book. She asks if I think her story would be better as nonfiction or fiction? She is leaning towards fiction because she wants to focus on the uncertainly that Aer Lingus Flight 712 inserted into her life without getting tangled in disputed facts.

I agree. The real story is her story. Facts are data. Story is how we make sense of facts. Something happens; it changes our life and sends us in a new direction. Trying to make sense of the senseless, most of us rehash and rehearse the events until we arrive at a satisfactory explanation—an important process. In some cultures, an event hasn’t truly happened until the elders decide how to tell the story. I suspect many families do the same thing, telling and retelling their central story until it settles into some sort of sense—a theme that they hope will be meaningful to future generations.

Gangelhoff, it seems to me, is in the odd position of having a central story that isn’t settled. She and her family haven’t decided how to tell the story, which leaves her living with uncertainty as her theme.

Most of us don’t choose our touchstone story. More like we learn to live with it. Krenz wonders what her life would have been if she had been born in a different time or place? Gangelhoff describes her life as “front-loaded,” meaning at a young age, when most of us think we’re invincible she had to deal with the fact that nothing is certain.

My family’s stories are not as raw as those of a Holocaust survivor. And, unlike Gangelhoff, I don’t have to wrestle with the details, trying to make sense of my central narrative. Long ago, my family decided how to tell our story—epic-style with emphasis on the grandmother who stopped the trains. That means it would be easy—too easy—for me to sit back, relax and go with the flow. Why not? We’ve been telling our history the same way for generations. What’s more, it’s a good story—a fun story. And, it’s about a woman-hero. There are few enough of those. I should be all set.

But narrative is never neutral. Every story comes with a set of values and a point of view. Krenz knows that. She can’t escape her mother’s conclusion that “they” will never let her not be Jewish. Ganglehoff knows that. She can’t escape the idea that “the authorities” can never be trusted.

And if I don’t pay attention, my family and their central story could roll over me like one of those trains my great grandmother supposedly stopped. Do I want that? Are the values in that story my values? Do I have any idea who I am without that story?

Not easy questions. Maybe, it's time I gave those questions some serious thought.

Never Doubt A Climbing Snake

Cherie Karo Swartz has spent twenty-five years teaching people how to record their histories. Her Saturday seminar at my local library seems like a no-brainer. I’m hoping she has a step-by-step outline—something that will make this project fast and easy.

 In the class, I learn that her own storytelling tradition goes back five hundred years to a famous Rabbi, known for the malech, or angel, that sat on his shoulder and whispered stories to him. And her respect for story, runs deep. Her grandmother, her bubbe, used to say, “Sit down, let me tell you a story, and make you a part of the family.” In short, Swartz believes family is story. Everything else is dust or soon will be.

I like her attitude.

As part of her workshop, she hands me a page of prompts. I’m supposed to pick one or two and start writing whatever comes to mind, just let it flow.

A remembered smell . . .

First time I smell tiger lilies, I am visiting an elderly friend of my mother’s who has a row of them growing along her driveway. Besides the smell, I am stunned by the brightness of their orange color.

 I want my mother to notice the flowers, but she is busy, doing adult things, I don’t remember what. I am six years old and might as well be living in a different universe from hers.

The lady notices. She makes my mother wait while she puts some bulbs in a box for me to take home. I keep the bulbs for years, tucked in a safe place, believing they are precious, but having no idea how to turn them into flowers.

A place with fond memories . . .

I loved going to my grandmother’s house because it was beautifully decorated. Sometimes I sat on the edge of her couch and studied her things, always being careful never to touch or disturb anything, because it all seemed so perfectly lovely. At the same time, even as a child, I knew my grandmother’s house was the subject of family gossip because it was so beautifully decorated. The family gossips whispered that she spent too much of my grandfather’s money on silly things. They believed she was trying to be uppity and maybe thought she was better than everyone else with all her fancy stuff. Blah, blah, blah . . .

As I’m writing this, I’m feeling confused. My grandmother died recently, and her furnishings look ordinary, almost shabby, in my mother’s house.

I stop writing—something I’m not supposed to do, according to the rules of the exercise, but it just hit me . . ..

My grandmother wasn’t a spendthrift; she was an artist. She took ordinary things and made them stylish.

Ok, the exercises were fun and more enlightening than I’d expected. Later, we go round the table sharing our stories. There are touching moments and some good laughs. I like that, too, but, at the same time, I’m feeling increasingly frustrated. I want to do more than write down the stories. I want to understand the grip those stories have on me.

After class, try to ask Swartz about that deep level to storytelling, but she has places to be and no time for my deeper issues. She does, however, invite me to her home where we can talk at greater length—a generous gesture.

She lives in an area of Denver that is unfamiliar to me. I have trouble finding her place and arrive late. No problem, she assures me, and then immediately begins fussing in the kitchen. She is a professional storyteller who believes we need stories more than food. Nevertheless, she must fix tea and find some honey cake to sweeten the talk. She’s a generous hostess, but I also realize she’s nervous—not sure about my questions or me. So, I start simple. I ask about families that don’t have a strong storytelling tradition.

         She shakes her head. “Oh, there’s never a last storyteller,” she assures me. “Someone is always told the stories, because we can’t live without our stories.”

         I tell her about a Native American blessing ceremony I attended where more than half the people were white. The elder, a friend of mine, whispered, “What? Have they forgotten to listen to their own old ones?” He assumed that the non-natives were borrowing his ceremony-rich tradition because they don’t think they had one of their own—or had forgotten it.

He’s not comfortable with that. Nevertheless, he goes out of his way to make the strangers welcome because, like Swartz, he believes we can’t live without stories.

Swartz listens, nods, but gets hung up on the part about not having a storytelling tradition. “Story is anchor, heartbeat, everything that’s family,” she tells me. “And the stories go on forever. There are stories upon stories, no end of stories. If you don’t know your own tradition you need to ask.”

That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, but I want to get past the cute stories. If there are endless stories, I want to know why my family picks particular ones and insists on telling those stories, not others—like my family’s love stories.

Swartz balks at the idea that families deliberately choose the stories they tell. She wants me to believe it’s the other way around. “We hear the stories we need,” she tells me. “Any story that doesn’t fit a personal need will roll off our backs like water off a rain slicker.” I think that might be true of casual, everyday stories, but if you are one of the “White Horse Nielsens” and have heard the grandma-stops-the-railroad story a hundred and three times, I suspect it has soaked-in.

         I have a friend who is into silent meditation. She attends ten-day retreats and tells me that silent practice is about getting beyond words, beyond stories. “You are not your story. If you are the daughter of an alcoholic father (her story), you need to grow out of that story, because you are more than that story.” Rather than dig up the old stories, she suggests meditation is the answer. She would have me shed the stories that are holding me back.

Another friend, who has been a psychotherapist for thirty years, thinks people can get stuck in their stories because they seem familiar, become a crutch, or because they just believe that’s what happened and so that’s who they are.

“Do they ever get unstuck?” I ask one morning over coffee.

“It takes an ah-ha moment,” she explains. “They talk themselves into a corner or something happens and suddenly they see things in a new light.”

“OK, but what keeps them from just slipping back into old habits?”

She looks at me like I haven’t been listening. “When you’ve had an ah-ha moment, there’s no going back. You’ve seen. You know. It’s all different.”

         After I share those conversations, Swartz seems to understand. “Ah, yes,” she says. Then she tells me about the mother who chased her daughter up the stairs insisting she listen to a story the daughter didn’t want to hear. Swartz calls these “shut-the-door stories,” as when someone in the family decides that a story must be told a certain way and shuts the door, so to speak, and says, “This is how it will be.” She explains that those more difficult stories are not material for a beginning class because most of her students aren’t ready to ask why their families insist that certain stories must be told a certain way. She wishes me luck in my quest but doesn’t have any advice other than being “respectful.” I’m not entirely sure what she means.

Later that week, I am having dinner with friends and repeat Swartz’s story of the famous Rabbi and his malech because I think it’s a good one. A physician sitting at the end of the table comments, “We have meds for that now, you know.” And just like that, he reduces a 500-year-old family tradition to a delusion.

That, I decide, is not being “respectful.”

At the same time, I am beginning to understand how little family stories rate. Laugh them off. Leave them alone. Meditate them away. Let medical doctors or other professionals take care of them. No reason to dig around in something as boring as how Uncle Henry survived the snowstorm of ’48. Or waste time listening to Aunt Susie complain about how much better things used to be.

Give me a malech to spice things up!

Or a love story!

This is important!

Lacking an easy guideline, I phone my mother’s older sister—my aunt Laura. She’s the most down-to-earth, no-nonsense person in family. I assume, I can count on her to give me the straight scoop. However, when I arrive at her backdoor, she greets me with a nonsense story about a climbing snake.

“It wiggled up and around the window where you’ll be sleeping tonight,” she tells me, then waits to see how I’ll react. I shrug. I’m a generation younger, but Laura and I both grew up on the same ranch where bunkhouse brag includes all kinds of fantastical stories of snakes, horses, coyotes, and other animals.

“A bird beat it back,” she goes on. “It was quite a fight. You should have been here last week. That was something to see.”

Birds have been known to attack, kill, and even eat snakes—eagles, for example, but she points to a nest tucked under the eave of her house. The size of the nest does not suggest we are talking about an eagle.

“That bird was protecting her babies,” Laura continues, “and she wouldn’t give up and wouldn’t give up and wouldn’t give up. After a while, you had to admire the way she wouldn’t give up. She beat the snake back. One minute it was a fight to the death. The next it was like that snake couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

I glance again at the nest. Laura lives on a hay ranch in the extreme southeastern corner of Arizona—a place so remote she drives fifty miles to buy groceries, a hundred and fifty miles to see a doctor. If climbing snakes exist, this is where they live. I will give her that.

“Turkey Creek’s running,” she told me, when I phoned from the motel where I stayed the night before. “You won’t get through that way, unless you’ve got four-wheel drive.”

         I didn’t.

“Then you’d better come round the long way,” she advised. “And you’re going to get dirty.”

That was ranch talk. She was telling me that my car would be the same color as the dirt road by the time I got to her place. The dust would be that thick, which, when I think about it, is why I’m making the trip. If anyone can help me sort out the saga of our shared history, it is Aunt Laura. For one thing she still cares about the depth of the dust. For another, she is a master of our family’s style of storytelling—exaggerated, larger-than-life, over-the top. Think climbing snake.

When I was growing up, Laura and her husband, Lloyd, owned a livestock trucking company that operated out of Billings, Montana. “We’re bullshippers,” she used to say because “livestock haulers” wasn’t colorful enough.

Her husband kept the trucks on the road. She handled the payroll and the paperwork. Truckers are the new cowboys—fiercely independent loners, who crisscross the open spaces of the American West, driving their rigs to the tune of country western songs playing on their radios. No accident that Laura transfers our storytelling style to her trucking tales.

One time a team of drivers are coming down a long hill in a truck loaded with cattle when the brakes give out. This is before highway departments started adding escape ramps. With no way to stop, the drivers faced a nasty choice. They can drive the truck off the side of the road, or they can try to keep it under control long enough to eventually roll it to a stop. The second option means riding at high speed through a small mountain town where they will likely encounter people, cars, and stop lights. They opt to drive off the road, jumping out at the last possible moment before the truck goes over the edge. Fortunately, the drivers escape with minor injuries. Unfortunately, the truck is totaled, and all the cattle die.

Next day, Laura gets a call from the National Park Service wanting to know what she is going to do about the mess. The truck had come to rest just inside Glacier National Park. They tell her that according to the law, she must remove the wreck or bury it. Since pulling the wreck off that steep slope isn’t an option, she hires a bulldozer operator, tells him to bury everything and thinks that is the end of a bad episode.

Two days later, the Park Service calls again. This time they want to know what she is going to do about the bears. Seems they sniffed out the wreck, dug up the beef, and are having a feast—lots of them. Worse, they have become a traffic hazard as people stop to watch. Not one to be intimidated, Laura points out that the bulldozer operator, who buried the wreck, was leery about working on that steep slope. He was going to be even more hesitant about working on a steep slope surrounded by bears. As far as she is concerned, she has met the Park Service’s requirements. The bears were their problem.

As with most families today, mine is scattered over great distances. Thanks to modern communication we stay in touch, but stories, like Laura’s big bear picnic, are more than staying in touch. Hearing her tell that familiar story is like eating comfort food. Problem is, not all comfort food is good food. My family’s idea of turkey stuffing is mostly wet toast seasoned with butter and onions. You love it or you leave it. Stories are similar. Some are prime rib; some are barely seasoned hash. I suspect one of the reasons more people don’t spend more time collecting their family stories is that it takes a lot of patience. It’s best not to ask too many questions at first. Listen. Take your time. Time, I discover, is key. If you want the good stuff, you need to hang around long enough to let the good stuff surface. Stories need to breathe. I’d driven several hundred miles and planned to stay three days.

Laura is fine with that, always happy to have visitors, but not impressed with the purpose behind of my current stay. Once past the climbing snake and the bear picnic, she tries to brush me off. “You can leave me out of whatever it is that you’re doing,” she says. “I’m not the family storyteller. I’m too busy. You should know that.”

I make no promises, as I follow her into her kitchen.

         “I’m not sure what you want, anyway,” she goes on.

         “The stories,” I repeat. We’ve been over this on the phone.

She grunts. “Who wants to relive the past? I’ve got better things to do. Haven’t you?” Then, less than two minutes later, she sits at her kitchen table and tells me the story that everyone in our family always tells. “Your great grandmother Sophia stopped a whole railroad, you know.”

         I know but want to hear her tell it.

Laura emphasizes how young Sophia was, when she ran away and got her railroad job. “It was a hard way to begin life, but she had bigger things in mind,” Laura tells me “She always had bigger things in mind. She was thinking and scheming and doing big things, even when she was older than I am now.” Laura was in her seventh decade. Sophia lived to be ninety-three.

Laura pauses and shakes her head. “It helps to think beyond today’s problems, you know, especially if you’re fourteen years old and have nothing but the clothes on your back. Ask me, that’s why, when it got down to a fight between her and that railroad, she couldn’t lose. For one thing, she had nothing to lose. As bargaining positions go, that one’s not bad.”

“And it makes a great love story,” I add because that’s the way I’ve always understood it.

Laura stiffens. “Sophia could never match her mother’s love story.”

“Her mother? I thought her mother encouraged her to run away and get that railroad job. I thought her mother was afraid her father would beat her to death if she didn’t.”

“Stepfather,” Laura corrects me. “Her real daddy died too young. It’s what happens to all the good ones, if you want my opinion.”

That last phrase implies more than what Laura says.

Laura is a tallish woman with auburn coloring—older now, but still striking in appearance. Better yet, she is and always has been self-assured; some say to a fault. In other words, Laura gives as good as she gets, which is at the core of her own love story. She and her husband, Lloyd, were not only well matched; they were even matched. Think Benedick and Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The fact that they never, ever stopped sparring, didn’t keep them from being a couple—so much a couple that, within the family, we are in the habit of saying “Laura-and-Lloyd” like it is a single name. Unfortunately, he died of a sudden, fatal heart attack a few months before my visit.

“I can’t believe that you never heard about Sophia’s mother,” Laura continues. “It’s a good story—a shipboard love story that could be straight out of a romance novel.”

She gets us some cold drinks from the refrigerator, sits down, gets up again, and looks for some crackers. “Her name was Anna Metta Jensen,” she says, rummaging in her cupboard. “We used to call her “Grandma Jensen” because her second husband, the bad one, was also surnamed Jensen. She ended up with the same surname as she started with—a variation on women keeping their names, I suppose. That’s trendy these days, you know.”

I nod.

She finds several boxes of crackers, and brings them all to the table, in case I like one more than another.

“That’s getting ahead of the story,” she pauses to reorder her thoughts. “Anna Metta and her parents were on a ship coming to America from Denmark. Only conditions on those immigrant ships weren’t the best, and this one had been at sea longer than usual. That’s a polite way of saying it stunk,” she tells me as she sits back down.

“That’s what happens when you don’t find favorable winds. Things start to stink,” she says with emphasis. “Anyway, Anna Metta was in the habit of going up on deck as often as she could to get fresh air and to freshen up. One day, she was washing her face when the soap slipped out of her hands. She lunged for it. If she lost it, she had no way to replace it. So, there she was, on her hands and knees, chasing a bar of soap across the slippery deck when a young man stepped forward and retrieved it for her. Of course, he helped her to her feet. He was ten years her senior, traveling with two younger brothers. He immediately apologized for his brothers. They’d been laughing at her and her soap-chasing plight. Then he sent the younger boys below deck and introduced himself as John Holm.

Laura pronounces it “Hol-em” with two distinct syllables. I’ve heard the name before—it’s Sophia’s maiden name—always pronounced that way. Laura puzzles a moment and admits she doesn’t know why we say it that way. Then she goes on to explain that most Danes are named after their fathers’ first names. They are called Jensen or Johnsen or Iversen—literally the son of Jens or John or Iver—the name changing with each generation. Holm is different. It is the name of landed people who took their name from their family holdings. Or, at least, they’d once been landed people. She adds that John Holm wouldn’t have been on that ship if his fortunes had been much better than Anna Metta’s or her family’s.

I nod and encourage Laura to continue.

She says, “After they landed in New York, Anna Metta and her family took a train to St. Joe, then rode a riverboat to Florence, Nebraska, where they outfitted themselves with oxen and wagons for the trip west. Only there was a problem. Anna Metta’s father spoke no English. He had to point to words in his English-Danish Bible to try to make himself understood, so, of course, the local traders took advantage of him. The oxen, he bought, were young stock, not completely broken to harness. They tipped the wagon over, more than once, before settling into the long overland journey.”

Laura smiles. “Guess what Anna Metta did during that long trip west?”

I shake my head.

“She walked beside her parent’s wagon, nearly the whole way. John joined her, whenever he wasn’t looking after his brothers. That means Anna Metta and her beau walked a thousand miles together—a thousand miles,” Laura repeats. “Some courtship, don’t you think?”

I agree.

“At Fort Laramie, where the wagon train stopped for additional supplies, Anna Metta married John. She moved her things from her parents’ wagon to his wagon and thus began her married life.”

It is a good story. Too good. I am waiting for the entrance of the mean stepfather. “Then what happened?” I ask.

“One of John’s brothers died—one of those younger ruffians who kept teasing John and Anna Metta. John was devastated. He blamed himself.”

“What else?”

“They settled on some land in Utah Territory and started a family. Sophia was the second their second child. She was barely past being a baby, six years old, when her father was kicked in the chest by a horse. The injury turned to consumption. He knew he was dying, but he kept working anyway, hoping to leave his family something to live on after he was gone.

“One day he was working on a fence when his neighbor rode by and sneered at his efforts. ‘Don’t know why you’re working so hard,’ he said. ‘I’ll get it all when you’re gone—your wife, too.’

“John warned Anna Metta not to have anything to do with that man, and she tried to avoid him. After John died, she hired a man to help her, but he wasn’t dependable. She couldn’t keep up with all the chores on the farm without help and selling wasn’t an option either. Where would she go? How would she feed her family? She was a widow, an immigrant who mainly spoke Danish, with five children.  So eventually she married the neighbor, but it was never a happy union. That stepfather is the reason Sophia ended up working for the railroad, scrapping for her money. She knew what happened when a woman ran out of options.” Laura sat back. “Now there’s a love story with both a good and bad ending. How about that?”

I nodded, feeling happy that I’d made the trip. I’d heard another love story. According to Laura, it was the love story that started our tradition of telling love stories. Not a bad start.

Next morning, over coffee, Laura returns to her climbing snake. “He’s still around here. I see him from time to time. On the ground,” she emphasizes. “You don’t need to worry about him. He stays on the ground now.”

I’m not worried about her climbing snake. However, I know that there were members of the family who were worried about her. Current family wisdom centers on the idea that, Laura ought to move “closer in.” Any emergency, like her husband’s heart attack, would find her far from medical help—too far. Never mind that her younger daughter, currently away for a few days, is living with her. Laura, of course, has other ideas. She wants to show me around. We pack a lunch and head out.

“Bet you never had a snake try to get up under your roof,” Laura adds, as she opens the door of her pickup.

That snake again.

She whistles for her dog. It jumps in and claims a spot in the back. Laura chuckles and says, “She’s a good dog, but she’s no Fannie”—a family expression I immediately recognize. We’ve been comparing our dogs to the legendary “Fannie” for as long as I can remember. A little later, riding along at eighty miles an hour (Laura doesn’t drive in anybody’s slow lane), it dawns on me that the story of Fannie is a continuation of the story Laura finished last night.

“Fannie was Anna Metta’s dog,” I say.

“Yeah, it was her baby girl they thought the Indians stole.”

She assumes I know the rest. I do.

Shortly after they settled in the American West, Anna Metta sits her first child, a daughter, down while she finishes a chore. A moment later, when she looks around, the baby is gone. Fearing the worst, she begins a panicked search. At the same time, she screams for her husband—the first one—the good one.

The two of them quickly discuss whether they’ve seen any Indians hanging around. They don’t think so, but they aren’t sure. Still new to the frontier, they rely on what they’ve been told are the local dangers, mainly Indians. Mainly horrible stories about Indians stealing babies like theirs.

         Half an hour later, when their search has reached a fever pitch of desperation, the husband notices that the family dog is also missing. He whistles for her. The dog, named Fannie, barks but won’t come. Following Fannie’s barks, Anna Metta and her husband find the baby sleeping under a large bush near a dry streambed. She’d toddled off and then fallen asleep in the shade, while the family dog faithfully stood guard. Or that’s how we tell the story a hundred and fifty years later.

Here’s where things get tangled. Recent scholarship has determined that Native Americans were not in the habit of stealing white children. In fact, it was never reported in the area where my family lived. Those fears were largely the result of sensationalized stories over-reported in that day’s tabloid press and passed on to every new settler. Before Indians, it was “gypsies” who supposedly stole children.

 Without much effort, I can imagine families, like mine, telling stories like that one, since the beginning of time. We misjudge the real hazards but know we need good dogs, like Fannie, to help us keep watch. If only we could find another dog “as faithful as Fannie,” my family says, again and again, never mind that the underlying fear is exaggerated at best, prejudicial at worst.

What, I ask myself, am I going to do with stories like that?

Meanwhile, having arrived on the far side her ranch, Laura gazes across the landscape and returns to her climbing snake. “It never had a chance against that bird,” she tells me. “That bird wasn’t going to quit and let it have her babies. You got to admire that. That’s real bravery”

And what am I going to do it with that snake story?

To change the subject, I ask Laura if she remembers our trip to Disneyland. When I was growing up, every kid, I knew, wanted to go to Disneyland  even though no one from my part of rural Idaho had been there. That is, until my aunt Laura, put her three kids into her car, left Montana, stopped in Idaho to pick me up, and off we went. At the time, that was the biggest adventure of my life.

“I must have been crazy,” she tells me. “You kids fought every mile of the way.”

I don’t remember that. I remember being the envy of every kid at my school that fall. I’d been to the Magic Kingdom.

Yes, ok, I know, stories of family vacations are boring—no exceptions. That said, stay with me. There is a point to be made here.

Much, much later, after I’d talked to lots of my family and am close to finishing this project, I realize there is a curious dimension to Laura’s Disneyland trip. Consciously or unconsciously, she had recreated an earlier family vacation. The earlier trip happened in the 1930s—a long time ago—but in interview after interview I keep hearing about that 1930s trip. The second, third and fourth times I hear the story of that California trip; I think, oh, no, not that again.  The fifth time, I go back and re-read my notes from the previous interviews, trying to understand what it is about that trip that had left such a lasting impression on so many lives.

         Here’s what I’ve pieced together.

For years, my grandma Melba had been telling, her husband, my grandpa Irvin ,that she wanted to go to California. And she had the kids working on him. “Please, please, can we go to California?” they’d all learned to repeat on cue. Then one day, in the middle of winter, he came home and said they’d go, but only if they could be ready by morning. Everyone started to scramble, except Marjorie, Laura’s same-age cousin who lived next door. She sat down and started to cry.

She wanted to go, too!

At first my grandfather told her that there were already too many people for the car, but she kept crying. Worse, Laura and her sisters started crying. They wanted Marjorie to come. She was like another sister. Finally, my grandfather relented. Next day, they stopped at a hardware store and bought a stool that they placed between the seats for Donna, the youngest sister, to sit on. That way, Marjorie could go.

When Marjorie told me about the trip, she emphasized how lonely she would have been if she’d been left behind. When Donna told me the story, she emphasized, with obvious pride, how, as the youngest, she sat on that wooden stool all the way to California and back so that Marjorie, the oldest, could come. Young Irvin, the only boy, sat in the front with his parents because he was always causing trouble. Everyone agrees on that fact.

On their way to California, the family stayed the first night with relatives, who explained that they didn’t need the bedding they’d packed. Roadside cabins provided bedding. They unpacked their blankets, which, fortunately, created more room in the car, and left their blankets on the relative’s back porch. Then they continued. Evidently, in the late 1930s, even a family of some privilege had not traveled enough to know about motels—a detail I found interesting. And, possibly, that’s what made the trip so important. It was a real adventure. More like Marco Polo setting off for fabled places than current family vacations.

         Of course, it's also possible that the trip was on everyone's mind because young Irvin, the little troublemaker who sat in the front seat, had recently died in a fiery, mid-winter highway accident on his way to another vacation. However, that does not explain why thirty years later, my aunt Laura piled her kids in her car and set off for California to see Disneyland, re-creating the earlier trip, right down to including a close cousin—me, instead of Marjorie.

After I piece it together, I call and ask Laura if she is aware of the similarities between the two trips.

“Oh, they’re not the same at all. Have you seen the pictures?” she asks.

I had, but don’t get her point.

“In every picture, we’re wearing our heavy winter coats,” she explains. “It’s like we drove all the way to California and never noticed the sunshine. When you and I went, I told your mother to pack plenty of shorts and sandals.”

That’s one way the truth of our stories eludes us. We get lost in the details when we should be paying attention to the patterns. Think about it. If we unconsciously repeat—relive—events from our family’s past when we’re planning a family vacation, is it a large leap to assume we will also do that when we’re making life changing decisions? Until we start paying attention to the power of our stories—even the seemingly boring ones—we are at risk of being ambushed by our family’s traditions.

If you ever doubted the importance of family stories, give that a second thought!

When we return to the house that afternoon, Laura’s daughter, Linda, is there, having arrived with supplies and three carpenters. She is remodeling the little house behind Laura’s bigger house. Almost every ranch I know has a big house and a little house. The little house is always older—the original home of the first settlers. The big house came later, after they prospered. In this case, the little house is an old stone structure—very sturdy—that hadn’t been lived in for decades. Remodeling it was a major undertaking.

Laura, who hadn’t said much about her daughter until now, seemingly can’t contain her feelings. “I lived in the same house with the same man for half a century. Two women can’t make it under the same roof for half a year.” Then sensing that she’d said too much, she retreats into her kitchen.

Linda, who heard everything but knew enough to ignore the comment, waits until the back door slams. Then, without mentioning her mother’s outburst, she invites me to look around her project, no halfway endeavor. By whatever means she and her mother had arrived at this solution, once they’d decided what to do, they’d obviously decided to do it right—new plumbing, new wiring, new floors, new windows. And style. An adobe finish on the outside. Window casements that accentuate the thick rock walls. Open beams in the ceiling. There is a sense of excitement as Linda shows me around. At the end, she adds, “I have a great mother, but I need my space if I’m going to keep thinking of her that way.”

I have nothing to add to that.

Later, when Linda and I go inside, Laura looks up from where she is chopping vegetables and says, “She already knows about the climbing snake.”

Linda rolls her eyes.

“I told her all about it and the bird,” Laura continues.

“How about the javelina pigs?” Linda asks.

“The javelina pigs?” Laura returns.

“Yeah, they’re at least as good as the climbing snake,” Linda continues

“I don’t agree,” Laura says. She stops chopping and begins and picks up her phone. When she scrolls until she finds a photograph of two wild javelina pigs crossing her front lawn. “The pigs are almost as good as the climbing snake,” she continues tossing the words in Linda’s direction. “Almost. Not quite.” Then she finds pictures of the snake crawling up and around the guest room window, the snake battling the bird, the snake retreating from the roof.

  That story is true!

And, in that same moment, I realize the snake story is more than true; it’s truth. I get it. I don’t know why it took me so long. My aunt Laura lives on the wild edge of life—always has. From the moment I arrived she has been trying to tell me that she still lives there. She has snakes climbing her walls and javelina pigs cavorting on her lawn. What’s more, she has the photographs to prove it.

 I got distracted. I think I’ve come to Arizona to gather stories, but, in fact, the last thing my mother said to me was that she wanted a “full report,” meaning an assessment of how Laura is doing. “I don’t know why she doesn’t move into town,” my mother says, expressing the family sentiment.

I know why. Town is too tame. That is not to say that Laura is conscious of why she keeps telling me about the climbing snake. More like she is anxious about her situation, and what I’ll make of it. Every time that anxiety rises to the surface, she remembers the climbing snake, and tells me about it again . . . and again . . . and again.

I am going to have to apologize to Cherie Karo Swartz. She’s right. We tell the stories that we need. And, unless we listen carefully, we may only hear the stories that we want to hear. Looking back, I suspect I may have annoyed Laura with my intensity. I was going to get to the guts of my family’s stories. No climbing snakes. No embarrassing moments. Don’t bother me with dog stories or boring 1930s vacations.

Wow was I wrong. The funny, nonsensical, climbing snake stories can be as important as the epic train-stopping ones. Figuring that out is a major step.

Next morning, I notice that none of Laura’s neighbors pass her place without stopping. Her routine includes getting up early, making coffee, and putting biscuits in the toaster-oven. From dawn ‘til noon she runs a regular deep-in-the-desert Starbucks. She has more people go through her kitchen in a morning than I have in a month.

And what do these people do while they drink her coffee?

They tell stories.

With one exception.

One of her morning guests, a rancher from the next mile over, shows up with a cell phone in his shirt pocket, a pager on his belt, and a laptop in his hand. He is as wired as any caffeine-based urban-type and about as laconic as any sheepherder who’s been out in the hills too long. I mention that because Laura is called outside, leaving the two of us in an awkward silence.

To break the tension, I ask, “Have you heard about Laura’s climbing snake?”

         “That would that be the one she’s always talking about?”

         I nod.

         “Nothing special,” he adds. “Round here, we got lots of snakes.”

         He’s speaking literally. As a story, that climbing snake is a whole other animal.

According to one of the oldest storytelling traditions, there is a Bone Woman who spends her days gathering the neglected bits that others leave behind. She takes them to her cave, piles them high, and, when the time is right, usually during a long winter night when the moon is full, she sings them back to life. Every family has a Bone Woman. Or several. The trick is to get her to talk.

Here are some simple rules:

1.     If she tells you a story, assume it’s important.

2.     Never doubt a climbing snake, or any other seeming nonsense, because stories are not about climbing snakes; they’re about deeper things.

3.     Listen, listen, and listen harder because it’s easy to miss the good stuff.

4.     If she offers a variation on an old familiar story, puzzle out what’s changed. What did the Bone Woman think needed to be adapted to current circumstances?

5.     Don’t get lost in the details; the larger patterns are what matter. Look for patterns.

And when the Bone Woman says, “I’ve got better things to do. Haven’t you,” the appropriate response is a shrug. That’s a test. She wants to know if you’re serious. When it comes to family stories most people aren’t.  I am.

Description of remaining chapters:

Deep in Sheep

I introduce the grandmother who successfully ran the family sheep ranch while trying to live as madcap as Auntie Mame, the main character in her favorite movie. Her daughters, embarrassed by their mother’s wild antics, want her remembered as “just a regular mom.” Her granddaughters, including me, love her because she gave us permission to break all the rules. Nobody wants to talk about the gin bottles hidden everywhere. Stories depend on who’s telling them. Question: while gathering my stories, am I looking for the truth or something else?

No Matter Where You Roam

I go home. My mother hates my version of our history. She thinks I’m making heroes of the three generations of women who ran our family ranch. She views the women—herself included—as trapped. “What were they going to do? They were all widowed so young,” she tells me. Am I obliged I tell the stories her way? Or are the stories wiser than both of us?

The Family Photo Album

In my preteens, an elderly aunt repeatedly forced me to look through her photo albums while she named all the people in the pictures. She believed that when families forget their ancestors’ names, we toss the photos. Her albums were among her most precious things. She also claimed that the family was related to pirates. She had no pictures of pirates, so she was forced to tell me pirate stories. I remember the pirate stories, not the names. Do we save the wrong things? What will I remember longer, the fancy wedding photos or the great love story?

The One That Got Away

Every book about family stories in my local library is based on guilt. I know. I checked. According to these books, you need to gather your family stories before your elders die or you’ll be sorry. As the granddaughter of “Auntie Mame in Boots,” I’m not much motivated by guilt. Then a friend tells me about her mother, who was likely a US spy in South America just before World War II, but the daughter can’t be sure because she never asked, and her mother remained tightlipped to the end. Now my friend is haunted by what she wishes she knew. I share the tantalizing parts of this forgotten story because I realize the regret can be real.

My Father’s War

A nephew visits. He asks about my father (his grandfather). He’s been told that he looks and acts like his grandfather, but he never knew him because my father died before my nephew was born. I find some old photos, and we agree that my nephew looks like my father before he went to war. Before he went to war is the key phrase. Like many World War II veterans, my father rarely talked about what happened “over there.” I find the love letters he wrote my mother. Reading those letters, I sense the change coming over him. In one letter, he admits: “Darling, I’m not the same man I was.” Like my nephew, I begin to wonder whether I really knew him. When we tell war stories, do we acknowledge how our battle-scarred soldiers come home to haunt their families?

Lost Luggage: The Immigrant Story

My father was three years old when he arrived in America with his parents. They escaped Germany in the 1930s, not because they were Jewish, but because my German grandfather had been politically active and needed to escape. My grandfather’s friends knew how to get him out of the country, but getting his whole family out was more difficult. Then someone told him that the Mormons were helping families go to America, so he joined the Mormon Church. My grandmother, also described as a peace activist, planned to stay with friends in New York City. However, when she arrived in America, US immigration officials told her that, since she and her family were being sponsored by Mormon missionaries from Idaho, they had to live in Idaho for the first five years. She refused and sat in a jail for three days. But she couldn’t go back. Reluctantly she and my grandfather moved to Idaho, a semi-arid plateau so different from Germany that my grandmother never acclimated and slipped into early Alzheimer’s. Most immigration stories are like that. Everything gets lost along the way. A generation later, immigrant families begin their story with how they came to America as if there was no time before that event. This is also true of my mother’s Danish immigrants, who immigrated a couple of generations earlier.

My Religious Heritage

On my mother’s side, I am a direct descendant of one of the survivors of the Martin Handcart Company. When it comes to the Mormon settlement of the Salt Lake Valley, stories of the Martin Handcart Company are among the most hallowed. I visit the place in Wyoming where the survivors took shelter. I listen to the guides tell their version of this story. I have more than one religious heritage, so, later, I also visit a church in Virginia built in the 1600s by some of my family’s Huguenot ancestors and discover that the story shared by the guides at that site is also sanitized —no mention of slaves. By now I’ve come to believe that I need story (my history) the way I need love and connection. Sanitized stories don’t meet that need.

The Fairy Folk

Like religious stories, tales of fairy folk are mixed with my family’s history. I come from generations of no-nonsense, hard-working people who don’t suffer fools but nevertheless leave drops of sugar-water in fancy teacups for the fairy folk. Then I uncover a mystery. A generation after leaving Germany and Denmark, land of storks and forest elves, my family switches to folk tales featuring Old Man Coyote and Raven—stories drawn from local indigenous cultures. I wonder why. I don’t think my family is consciously appropriating Native American culture, so why the change? The answer comes from a surprising source.

Old Man Coyote and Deep Story Traditions

By now, I’ve learned a deep respect for the power of story. Storytelling is a tradition older than recorded history. I pause to discuss story itself. And because there is no way to talk about story without telling a story, I share my own Old Man Coyote tale.

Just Above Bone

Three generations of women ran my family’s ranch. We describe that ranch and ourselves as living “just above Bone,” meaning a few miles beyond the little town of Bone, Idaho. Because of that ranch, my mother’s family tells a great many stories anchored in a sense of place. In an increasingly mobile world, I find that reassuring. I also know that a similar sense of place cannot continue. What does that mean for my children and their children?

The Barefoot Guide to Summer and Every Little Thing That Matters

I visit an aunt in Virginia, who works at the DAR Library. It’s her job to check the genealogies of applicants seeking membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. She tells me that I’d be surprised how often people falsify their genealogies, hoping to be accepted into that venerable organization. I also discover that my aunt has collected a stack of life stories written by various family members. It is a Mormon tradition to write a life story. Many of these are written late in life and average less than five pages. So, what do people write about themselves when they are writing less than a page a decade? Surprisingly, they write about kindness. They will include the basic facts of their lives, but then write at length about someone—sometimes a stranger—who helped them or was kind to them. Evidently, at the end of life, being a member of DAR matters less than small kindnesses. 

The Love Letters in My Garage

I am the keeper of my sister’s love letters. The letters are from an old boyfriend, not her husband. They are in my garage because she never, never wanted her husband to “get his hands on them.”

When she dies, I read them. First, I am surprised by how much I didn’t know about my sister. Next, I am haunted by the idea that she couldn’t escape an abusive marriage for all the usual reasons but also because of our family stories. How do you fail at love in a family that tells love stories?

Warning: “Happily Ever After” Is a Long, Long Time

On her eightieth birthday, the great-grandmother who stopped the trains and built our family ranch is finally mentioned in the local newspaper. It is the only mention of her, except for her obituary, that I’ve found. The article highlights the arrival of numerous family members and my great-grandmother’s merriment while opening her birthday gifts. She’s described in that newspaper article as a beloved, cheerfully sweet little old lady. If she didn’t gag when she read that, I did. Joseph Campbell, the great guru of mythology, thought that women kept the home fires burning so that men would have a reason to return from their great adventures of self-discovery. He didn’t think women had important stories of their own. Obviously, he never hung-out in my family’s kitchen. My family tells female-centered stories. Does that make us unique? I doubt it. However, I am troubled by a lingering question: Is it possible that we don’t know how to tell women’s stories? I illustrate this problem with an “ever after” fairy tale and a list of the important but often ignored details from my great-grandmother’s life. Those details are ignored in our storytelling, I decide, because we don’t know how to include them in the usual story structure.

Travel Alert: Pirates in Your Past

I return to the old country—a tiny island off the coast of Denmark. My mother’s family immigrated from this place so long ago, I’m not sure what I will learn from the trip. I am surprised. I discover far more than I expected, including the fact that the island was once a haven for Viking pirates. My elderly aunt with the old photo albums was right. We are related to pirates! What’s more, I realize that my family still honors traditions that started here even though we no longer know the origin. Our storied past shapes us even after we’ve forgotten most of it.

Secrets of a Skunk Chaser

I take a pottery class from a famous Pueblo potter in New Mexico. I’ve never tried pottery before. I’m taking the class because I’ve been told that stories are part of making traditional clay storyteller dolls. I want to know the storytelling part. I’m not disappointed. Our teacher insists on telling stories as we work, but not “bragging stories” about where we’re from or what we’ve done. In fact, she insists that we use only our first names until the class is over. That way, we can concentrate on the clay. Halfway through the week, she gives us teasing names—an old Native American tradition. I am Skunk Chaser. “Now, Skunk Chaser, tell us who you are?” She means that in a storytelling/mythic sense, not my usual bio. I struggle at first. How do I tell my story as myth? Turns out, this is a surprisingly satisfying exercise.

The Three Musketeers

When Covid-19 hits, my two sisters and I agree that we will text each other every evening just to make sure that everyone is ok. We call ourselves “The Three Musketeers” because we’ve always watched out for each other like that—always had each other’s backs. Understandably, when my son dies of Covid-19 the same week that the vaccine becomes available, I find myself relying on my sisters as I’ve never done before. As I’m preparing his memorial, I realize my son has lived in fourteen different places from Seattle to Berlin. He liked Chicago and Baltimore because of the music scenes there, but he never had any real connection to the family ranch or the little town of Bone, Idaho. Likewise, my other son has spent his adult life in California, I doubt either of them have ever thought of themselves as being “just above Bone,” so what, I wonder, is the point of my gathering all this family history stuff? Then, I also remember that my great-grandmother, the one who stopped the trains, buried her husband and a grandchild during the Spanish flu epidemic. Because of that story, I realize that she knew what I’m going through. And she survived. I begin to think I can, too. And ultimately, that, is why stories—our stories—matter. Because we need them!