Back to the Root

White Pine, Itasca State Park

I recently returned from northern Minnesota, where the root, trunk and many branches of my family tree are located. My parents are second generation Scandinavians from Norway and Denmark, all born in Minnesota. I was born in Thief River Falls, only 70 miles south of the Canadian border. Several of my siblings live in Minnesota and the cabin near Laporte is ground zero for family gatherings.

This year, there was a lot of discussion about trees! All three of my sisters were reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I have it on hold at the Los Angeles Public Library and cannot wait to read it myself. But it isn’t as if I need to. My parents deeply loved trees and planted them everywhere. In the front yard of the home his parents built in Renville, Minnesota, Dad planted a dogwood which grew quite tall. To me it was an exotic. I had never seen one anywhere else, except in Yosemite in the spring, when the dogwood flowers bloomed white and ethereal between the dark trunks of the forest.

At the parsonages I grew up in, Dad often planted apple trees. I remember several across northern Iowa. Planting an apple tree has no downside. When we began to go up to the lake cabin I mentioned above, he would stop at the Badoura Nursery in the spring and collect the seedlings he had ordered (you could not order less than 500 if you wanted a mixed pack of seedlings), planting them on the property. I remember being on at least one of these spring trips, when the air was still quite cold, and I was happy to spade up soil, insert seedlings and tamp them down to keep warm!

I’ve been amazed to learn how few seedlings survive and grow to maturity. Peter Wohlleben describes in The Hidden Life of Trees how prolific tree seedlings must be to get even a few trees to make it. Partly it is a matter of photosynthesis, young trees fighting for light, though they live under their “mothers,” who share nutrients with them. He points out that slow growth is good for a tree. But also it is a matter of animals eating the fresh, tender shoots, the salad of the forest. So I was impressed that my sister had broken up the ancient stone firepit my Dad built at the edge of the lawn. She was afraid using it would damage the two white pines, grown from Dad’s seedlings, which now towered above the cabin at that spot.

White pines are fluffier, my brother pointed out, with five needles to a clump. Red pines, what my parents called Norways, have two needles per clump and look stiffer, not as wispy as a white pine. They are all native, and looking up at the red pine at the edge of the lake, we thought that some of them were certainly over one hundred years old. Perhaps two hundred. When Dad established the dock, more than 50 years ago, he built it in among these favorite “Norways.” Mother loved them. I didn’t count them, but there seemed to be at least ten along the shoreline.

As a group, we went over to Itasca, a Minnesota State Park which was only the second in the country, after Niagara Falls. It was established because logging was ferocious at the time, and Jacob V. Brower got the state legislature to pass, by one vote, a bill establishing the park in 1891. Brower wanted to save some of the stands of red and white pines still thriving at the time. We visited a protected 300-year-old white pine, and noted the loss of the crown of an ancient red pine nearby, along the “wilderness loop” running through the park. I have very early memories of this park, as my aunt, Esther Frost, worked at the lodge during the summers when she was a young woman. She rented cabins for us to vacation in for a few summers also, before the cabin at the lake was established.

Everyone knows, by now, that trees take carbon from the air and process it, helping to cool our over-heated planet. Forest protection, regeneration and cultivation mitigate the inroads our comfort-seeking cultures have made on the earth. Families too thrive in an atmosphere of conservation and care. I was thrilled to visit the roots of my own.

A New Context

Ceramic wall at White Adventist Hospital

This month I have finally gotten back a usable personal computer and my writing materials, packed up since October. During the intervening months, among random reading and lots of physical labor on the townhouse we were renovating, I paid attention to two writers who, in their quest to reboot and renew Western culture, hark back to Nietzsche. Jordan Peterson, holding up Beyond Good and Evil, from which he proposes to read in one of his many Youtube videos, says, “This is a book, but every sentence in it is actually a bomb.” One of Nietzsche’s ideas which Peterson uses is that “there is something about the body that is integral to being. … It’s not really possible to have a disembodied being."

James Hans takes this further. In The Sovereignty of Taste, he writes: “Nietzsche believes that lives are built on an ongoing awareness of the rhythms and patterns of which bodies are a part. Humans become who they are through careful attention to the dynamic interchanges with the world that constitutes their lives, a form of attention that prompts them to note that their lives are always tied to a context.” He goes on to say that human lives are aesthetic engagements with the world long before they become encounters with the social world. Thus, there is a mechanism within people, taste, which they hardly notice, but which constantly reminds them to seek out ways to adapt to the rhythms of the world so as to feel comfortable in it.

I am quite aware of my own physical rhythms, mostly through tai chi study, and I knew that moving 400 miles south would have some effect! Though we are still in California, our new home in Los Angeles is quite different from the Bay Area. Before I can settle down to write (and I am very anxious to do so!), I have found myself orienting to the new. Los Angeles is a vast campus of creativity and it will be quite a while before I feel that I know it at all. But I am making a space for myself in which my body is happy!

First I need to know the cardinal directions, where the sun is going to come up and go down with relation to our apartment, how it is going to lay its late afternoon slanted light on the bed, whether there will be enough to plant a bougainvillea beside our back window. I would like to know the same of the moon, but we have only been here three weeks, and almost every morning and evening have brought light fog, locally known as June gloom. These atmospheric conditions keep the place cool, but I haven’t seen much of the moon.

I get used to the noises, which are city noises. There is plenty of birdsong, but also helicopters, planes, yapping dogs, our neighbors’ music and smoke alarms (as well as our own!), people coming and going, children’s feet running on the floor above, even the occasional domestic brawl. The street sweeper comes through twice a week, as well as civilized garbage trucks. In the afternoon, the ice cream vendor plays its sappy little tune and another man honks a horn as he bicycles by, to see if you want fruit drinks.

I walk the wide, and often empty streets, looking at the houses with their southern plants, succulents, aloes and palms, bougainvillea, hibiscus, datura, jacaranda and brilliant red poinsettias. Most are enclosed in grills and fences, with more stones and concrete than lawns, reflecting a landscape where it rains seldom. The nearby hospital complex has beautiful murals and sculptures as well as a weekly farmers’ market. There is also a well-watered park close by, lush with grass and trees, where I do tai chi near a children’s playground.

I’m timid about transportation so far, given my limitations, but there is plenty of it, both buses and the Gold Line train within a few blocks, which can be used to travel all over the city. The central library downtown is on a direct bus line from our house and the local library is within a 15-minute walk, oriented more to Spanish speakers. My favorite grocery is a Whole Foods smack in the middle of the newly-branded DTLA (downtown LA), but I also like to go to Little Tokyo, only ten minutes away on the train. We’ve found many restaurants nearby, and a few coffeeshops where I can stop in to write or read.

It’s quite a different context than I am used to, just across the Los Angeles River (i.e. trickle) from the city itself in an old part of town. I found bricks under the asphalt on a nearby street. I am trying to be open to everything at the moment, though my own needs and rhythms are strong and emerging. I have never doubted that people are primarily aesthetic creatures. We express it in many ways, in sport, in music, art and dance, but I was also thrilled at James Hans’ statement: “I conceive of the great literature of the world as the ongoing testament to the taste that drives the species.” Very soon now, I will get back to Line, Marty and Paul.

The World As It Is

"The duty of literature is to fight fiction. It's to find a way into the world as it is, to open a road we can glimpse for a second or two before a new fiction has covered it again," said Karl Ove Knausgaard in an interview with Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker on November 11, 2018. This week I read his novel Spring, which presents a day in his life as told to his youngest daughter, a baby as he writes. I quite loved it, and especially the epiphany he describes in the evening, when he takes his children to a community bonfire on Walpurgis night.

My husband and I are renovating our house over the winter and have shipped our things, including all of my writing materials, to Los Angeles where we plan to move. I didn't know it would take this long. I've been missing my work and my characters, but I am taking a writing hiatus for the duration. It is a chance to step out of this project I have been working on for a long time and open up my thinking. In walks Knausgaard, among others.

Knausgaard is one of the few writers working in what I call "long form." He has completed six volumes of  his book My Struggle, writing of his life in intimate detail. In a process quite counter to the Norwegian norm, he wasn't interested in taking a giant "selfie." Rather, he thought his work would illuminate the world around him. By all accounts, he has been successful.

I have always liked long form. Once one is committed to a set of characters, why not stick with them. Not that it's necessary, but one learns from sustained attention. They may also surprise you. Tolstoy, in response to those who wanted him to write European novels, said, "War and Peace was what the author wanted and was able to express in the form in which it was expressed."

It is what I would say of my own work. It is not what most people want. It is not an entertainment. It is definitely "long form!" But working closely with Don has shown me the limits of my perception! I tend to fly at 10,000 feet and then swoop down to pick out poetic, representative details. He is much more able to work doggedly on the details in front of him. But I think I can say for both of us, we know there is an objective world ripe for depiction and are passionately committed to the world as it is.

That Moment When ...

China Camp 2008

You all of a sudden realize that the kids have grown up! It’s pretty sudden. You’ve planned your life around them, and then all of a sudden, they turn 18 and have their own lives in front of them.

In our case, we had one son, Jesse. He lived with his mother two states away during the school year, so Don programmed the holidays and vacation periods when he was with us solidly. Don wanted to give Jesse a sense of what Don was already calling IRL, or what it was like “in real life.” In February, for Jesse’s birthday, we usually went skiing and snowshoeing up in Idaho. One spring break we went to Europe. In the summer, we camped on Angel Island. We went to Minnesota to stay on the lake or out to Merced, where Don grew up. We planned Thanksgiving cookouts and Christmas hunts, one of which ended up in Hawaii! Planning began at the beginning of the year, so as to get reservations and include others.

Then, all of a sudden, just before he graduated from high school, Jesse turned 18. From then on, Don thought he should make his own plans. We did at least one more epic camping trip to the top of Angel Island that summer, but Jesse began to be involved with friends and in college anticipation. Don turned back to his own career, which he felt needed stoking. And I turned my attention to writing and publishing.

I am an inveterate writer. There’s really no help for me. While I was still working full time, I wrote blog pieces about our family life and other things for Living in the Flatlands. The Flatlands project seemed to be over when Jesse turned 18 and everything changed. When I was able, I collected the pieces into a book with the same title. I also self-published two novels I had written years ago. And then I “retired,” and was able to start the work I had been hoping for many years, So Are You to My Thoughts.

We were still going to northern Minnesota each summer, to the cabin owned, in the end, by a partnership of my siblings. In my journal I write: “8.27.07. I sit in family, and it is never stronger than when I come here in August. Amidst all the stresses, the strengths Florence and John set up so long ago, the strong pull toward Minnesota and the place they managed, against all odds, to make, remains in place. There is a painting of them on Ann’s studio wall, done during Dad’s last days. Mom’s loom is against the wall. She is reading to Dad in the picture. He holds a cup of tea, an afghan around his weak shoulders.”

“8. 28.07. On the plane I make up the characters for So Are You to My Thoughts, at least the first book. Thinking about the sisters, brother, cousins and others I know. I can see all the tensions about how much one relates to the world. The tensions of whom you marry. I imagine my three main characters, Line, Margie and Paul, and how they hide the situation, keep it from the ‘little kids,’ and why. How the parents’ desires are thwarted, but also how they are fulfilled. That intense time between 1968 and 1972, which lingered long in everyone’s memory.”

By the next year, I had developed an outline for seven books. The first six have been finished. You can find them here. The last one is more than half finished. I thought at first I might vary the structure for each of the books, moving in on the points of view of other characters. But in the end, I have stuck with Line, Marty and Paul.

Line has her four kids early and they are grown by the end of my seven books, some of them with kids of their own. Marty, oddly, has no kids, but her second husband has four. She is thrilled that Doug’s family needs her and steps up into the role, though she is older than most women would be with such a family. Paul has no kids either, but his wife has a daughter who has five. They live close to the lake on which Paul finally settles, so he gets to be involved with them. All three of the Mikkelsons have the good health to enjoy their later lives, though Line has begun to wonder about her own. The arcs of each of their lives is different, though each of them has a chance to experience that moment when the kids don’t need them so much anymore. The family story goes on, however, rich in meaning.

Alkalize Your Body

I first understood the need to balance one's diet between acid and alkaline in about 2005. In researching it, I came upon The Wolfe Clinic, a Canadian website which promoted the ideas of Dr. Darrell Wolfe. By this time, Dr. Wolfe is no longer associated with it, but they still have on-line the three articles he wrote about the importance of our digestive systems to our over-all health. His premise was a revelation to me, a way of preventing the diseases which came up as one grew older, or at least holding them somewhat at bay.

Dr. Darrell Wolfe

In researching Dr. Wolfe now, I find he is in British Columbia and has his own website. He is, if anything, more adamant than ever that one can take responsibility for one’s own health: Joy is the most important component of radical health. People who focus on being sick are usually sick. Cancer is a frequency, a fungus. Acidosis in the body starts it. Alkalize your body to get rid of mold. Society will try to get you to buy anything they can. The “functional medicine” side of things is as bad as our medical systems, insisting that you buy all kinds of supplements. But Vitamin D from the sun is better than any supplement. Your food should be your medicine. Even more than his website, I find this interaction with the father of a young child with cancer, useful.

My Dad was an iconoclast. Upholding the traditions of the Lutheran church and small town America, he was only slightly facetious when he used to say of Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, “This is God’s country!” But he looked askance at power and its designs on him. He made up his mind about things himself, well aware that corporations, society may take you down a primrose path, insisting that you buy whatever will increase the GNP. He was a child of first-generation Norwegians in farming country, as well as of the Depression, a time when your own resources made all the difference. He believed in taking responsibility for himself and taught his kids to do the same. Though all about him were smoking, Dad believed that if he didn’t smoke, he could put himself through college. Not smoking helped do that, and seminary as well.

My father’s parents lived in southern Minnesota at the margins of the economy in a house they had built themselves. I knew them when they were quite a bit older, but still working a large garden, using it to feed themselves throughout the year. I especially remember my Grandmother’s pickles, the crabapple pickles seasoned with cloves which I adored. Though my Dad was felled by cancer at 63, his parents lived to be 89 and 86. I find that my Dad’s cousin, Ruth Mickelson (for whom I named the Mikkelsons of my series) was born in 1899 and died in 2001, at 101 years of age. She had taught kindergarten in Thief River Falls (the town of my birth) for almost fifty years.

As represented in my characters, many health ideas have come and gone during the years of my series. The Mikkelsons were victims of a Northern diet which relied on meat and potatoes, frozen vegetables except during the summer, lots of dairy and baked goods. But all of them make changes in this diet as they grow older. They resist processed foods and, in particular, the large quantities of sugar they were used to had to be reduced! During the first decade of the new millennium, it seemed to me doctors were finally going to admit the importance of an alkaline, anti-oxidant diet.

Line is the one most involved in health care her whole life, working as a nurse in community hospitals and finally as a hospice nurse. She sees bodies as a whole, and gives particular attention to a hands-on practice which allows the resonance of one person’s energy to be transferred to another. Marty knows that natural health welling up in the body is what all of nature sees as beauty. She is lucky enough to find tai chi, a movement-based meditation, which wakes up her sedentary life. Despite a healthy diet, Paul’s wife fades from an aggressive cancer. He learns that only if he takes care of himself can he take care of anyone else.

As we have all learned about journalism, in navigating health caveats and research, one must triangulate between the available knowledge. The evidence of one’s experience and one’s senses is essential. Information becomes wisdom only with a few grains of salt, one’s own common sense.

On Beyond Letters

Christmas, 2015

Our family members are good at living their lives, but not at keeping in touch! Letters are few and far between. We are also spread across the continental US and in Yorkshire, England. In the past, we were also not apt to call each other just to shoot the breeze, as we didn’t want to pay for long distance phone calls.

During the first ten years of the 21^st century, the World Wide Web bloomed with many ways to communicate simply and economically. Because I lived with Don Starnes, who is particularly tech savvy, I was often on the “cutting edge” of these new ways of communicating. (We joked that Don himself was on the “bleeding edge,” suffering because he often tried to do things with computers that were theoretically possible, but not quite available.)

In 2001 I put up an MSN community for the Kronlokken family. It was intended to replace a newsletter I had been editing called The Intercoastal Hobbit. The children of my siblings were the first to sign up. I wondered why others didn’t, but my brother reminded me that I was surrounded by high-speed DSL lines. Others weren’t! It did limp along for a few years, however.

By November 2002, Don made a space on his website and wrote the HTML code for us to begin a weblog, or blog. We called it “Living in the Flatlands,” because we wanted to write about our daily lives and some of the ideas we had about them. I did most of the writing, though Don edited each essay, trying to make them more universal. It was an exercise in learning how to write for other people, though I loved the freedom of not caring who read it, or when. When Jesse, Don’s son, graduated from high school and our lives changed, I stopped writing for the blog and published the articles as a book, which you can see here.

My nephew Peter Taylor, who lived with us during the early 2000’s, wrote down his experiences in a weblog he called “The Random Englishman,” thus keeping his family and friends in England posted on his exploits.

Google came up with its Blogger software in about the middle of the decade, which gave anyone the space and ability to post a blog. It came in handy for all of us when my sister Ruth and her husband Don Evans rebuilt the family cabin in Minnesota. They used a Blogspot to keep us posted on what was going on. The original cabin was bulldozed in 2006 and a fine new log home was built in its stead. In my journal for June 27, 2007 I wrote, “The rafters are going up on the cabin at Kabekona today. Every day I look at the new photographs Ruth and Don put up. The progress is dramatic; they are ahead of schedule. ‘We just love to go over and smell the wood!’ Ruth says.”

In May of 2008 I “succumbed” to Facebook. It was the easiest way to communicate with a friend in Hong Kong. I loved it at first, as more and more of my family signed on. It was thrilling when new family photos showed up in living color. Facebook still retains some of its ability to disseminate family news, but you do have to plow through a lot more ads and re-posts than at first.

About the middle of the decade, I began to call my sister Solveig in England using Skype. We set up a schedule for speaking each week correlating our time zones. Solveig hasn’t been able to travel much, and it has helped immeasurably to keep in touch with that part of the family. We even read books to each other on Skype! I used Skype for other phone calls, of course, enjoying the ability to see into someone’s life with a camera.

Don and Jesse got their first iPhones about 2008. In the summers, I often drove Jesse from place to place, so I got a little Korean pre-paid phone on which I learned to text (taught by Jesse) and keep in touch. At least ten years later, I still have this little phone, which has faithfully worked ever since. It can’t connect to the web, but it also doesn’t cost an arm and a leg every month!

Other amazing uses of the web began in those years, including wikipedia.org and youtube.com. It is now hard to imagine the world without these knowledge-bases. By 2008, I had published two of my books with iUniverse, and was outlining the characters for the series of books I called So Are You to My Thoughts. This blog details the background and progress of this series, which, at this writing is within sight of completion. I have just finished a first draft of Chapter 10, with fifteen chapters to go.

I’m grateful for the advances in inexpensive personal communication over the web in recent years. I believe the Kronlokkens are in better touch with each other. And I am very happy to be able to use Createspace to publish my family saga. Don is still out there, ahead of the pack, helping me at every stage. It would be nice if I could help him. But, “I can’t be helped,” he tells me.

Somewhat Sideways

Virginia Madsen and Paul Giametti, Sideways, 2004

From the year 2000 to 2010, I worked at Turrentine Brokerage, which assisted wineries in purchasing grapes from various vineyards and also sold bulk wine between wineries. From my perspective, it was a decade when California wine widened its horizons, becoming the drink of "the people" and not just the elite. Above and beyond the things I learned about wine (knowing very little before I started), the business was full of stories! The stakes were always high, and required larger than life characters, many of whom came from backgrounds of philosophy and literature!

Bill Turrentine, my boss, had inherited the fledgling company from his father. When I started there were only eight of us. By now, there are three times that many. I did database work, entering vineyard and sales data and working with statistics and copy editing our newsletter. But I also answered the phone. The people that created sales were important to us and I quickly learned their names!

In the early part of the decade, we spent a lot of time finding grapes for Dennis Hill, a perfectionist winemaker and the magic behind Blackstone Merlot. Derek and Courtney Benham had spent the previous ten years developing the brand. Derek was a genius at it! Blackstone was so popular it was thought that Millennials might start drinking wine rather than beer. In 2001 the Benhams sold the brand and Derek Benham began another venture, determined to bring the elusive Pinot Noir grape “to the people.” He had another great success with this project. Dennis went on to found his own venture, Cannonball Wines.

Bill Turrentine and Ron McManis of McManis Family Vineyards helped each other in many ways. The vineyards are near Ripon, a bit south of Lodi, with a California appellation. Bill found the great winemaker Jeff Runquist for the rapidly growing company. Jeff now has his own operation in the foothills near Plymouth where he carefully selects the vineyards to go into his mostly red varieties, Jeff Runquist Wines.

When you heard someone answer the phone and then break up in giggles, we all knew that Paul Moser of Greenfield Wine Company, was on the other end. Paul’s wines were deliberately European in style, more refined, and not as “big” as some. His wines got high ratings from Robert Parker, but the company was always under-capitalized and no longer exists. You might still find a Moser-Scharding wine, but don’t count on it. Gale Sysock of Delicato Vineyards was also good for a smile and some good grape deals. He is now Vice President at the large Delicato operation.

We didn’t have much to do with the Gallo organization, but in the early years of the decade, harvests were often huge. Grape growers called us begging us to find someone to purchase their grapes before they had to let them dry on the vines. Fred Franzia, of Bronco Wine Company would come in at the last possible minute and sweep up whatever vineyards were still available at the lowest possible prices. Fred, a nephew of Ernest Gallo, was behind Two Buck Chuck, or Charles Shaw Wines, which came to prominence during the decade, sold mostly at Trader Joe’s.

Later I worked with Chris Smith and Eric Aafedt who make the wonderful Bogle wines. Though I learned to appreciate many wines, most are beyond our price range. Bogle wines are not! We drink them often. Don, my husband, has a favorite brand too: Bonterra. Bonterra wines come out of the Fetzer family’s commitment to organic and sustainable vineyards. The great Paul Dolan began this tradition, before moving on to Mendocino Wine Company.

During the years I was at Turrentine, three movies came out which also boosted the idea of wine drinking “for the people.” In 2004, Sideways depicted an adventurous wine-drinking crawl through the Central Coast. Several of its characters talked eloquently about wine, and memorably put down Merlot in favor of Pinot Noir! (Hmmmm, could Derek Benham have had a hand in that?) The movie was said to have quite an impact on wine consumption.

In 2005 came Mondovino, a documentary which quizzed critics and tastemakers, trying to find out whether wine was losing its typicity to global market demands. And in 2008 came Bottle Shock, a dramatization of the so-called “judgment of Paris” in 1976 when, through a series of misadventures, Chateau Montelena’s Napa Valley wines were judged better than French wines in blind tastings.

The world wide web is full of stories about wine production. Stories move us. They drive the culture. These stories are just the tip of iceberg of those I heard at Turrentine Brokerage, where I was lucky enough to work with great people, taste many California wines and get paid for it.