A review of a book of photographs called  Norwegian Footprints.  This appeared in The Norseman in 2005.

Ghost Towns

The rapidity with which the American wilderness was turned into a civilization is a miracle that still inspires awe. In North Dakota, that miracle was largely the work of Norwegian immigrants – and was also, writes Knut Djupedal, director of the Norwegian Emigrant Museum and Research Center, “probably one of the hardest tasks ever attempted by any group of people.” Yet today North Dakota is undergoing a drastic population decline: “farms are gone, houses stand abandoned, many small towns are vanishing, and the descendants of the people who built this society have left for the cities and an easier life.” This, observes Djupedal, “is an American story, certainly, but it is not solely American. It is a Norwegian story as well.”

Djupedal’s words appear in his foreword to a remarkable new book called Norwegian Footprints, in which photographs by Jan Johannessen, a Norwegian text by Espen A. Hansen, and an English translation by the Norseman’s own Harry T. Cleven combine to create a richly evocative portrait of the North Dakota of today.

In this book’s pages we meet “two-year-old Jenna…probably the last child to be born in Alkabo,” a hamlet that will soon become a ghost town. We’re taken into a barbershop in the town of Hatton where all the elderly patrons understand Norwegian – and then down the road to the town’s American Legion Hall, where elderly women play bingo. Farmer Kevin Watterud sits in the cab of his combine, his face glimpsed only in the rearview mirror, tiny against an immense backdrop of flat farmland. At a bar in Epping, a bride and her bridesmaids take slugs of beer while watching a game of pool. In Crosby, a young couple witness their baby’s baptism – a rare event in a region where the newspapers contain far more obituaries than birth announcements. Jan Watterud sits alone on the bus that he rides for three hours a day as it bounces across the barren prairie, taking him to school and then back home again. “Sometimes,” a small-town mayor says, “I think that living here is like living at the end of the world – that we balance on the brink of the abyss and that it’s just before we’ll fall over the edge.”

On page after page, Norwegian Footprints depicts humanity in a way reminiscent of the classic 1941 portrait of sharecropper life, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with photographs by Walker Evans and text by James Agee. Like Evans and Agee, Johannessen and Hansen capture the poetry of everyday life. Their deeply reflective, deeply decent book pulsates with a respect for the dignity of “ordinary” people, the preciousness of simple things, the importance of remembering the past and honoring the hard work of one’s forebears. Throughout, they treat the people they meet with sensitivity and understanding, celebrating these “stubborn, hardy, proud, honest, hardworking” men and women for their lack of “self-complacency, conceitedness and self-righteousness.” They know, Hansen writes, “where they come from, who they are and where they belong.” They suffer, but are stoical, defiant; they prize their freedom; they will not give up. If they are a “dying breed,” they are also a noble race.

Johannessen’s photographs portray these individuals in all their nobility. Other pictures, however, focus not on the people but on the harsh landscape in which they live – a landscape at once beautiful, unsettling, and mystical in its flatness and emptiness.  In various photographs, high grass begins to swallow up an abandoned farm; an Amtrak train speeds indifferently through Tioga (pop. 1600); a cropduster flies low over a field of sugar beets in the Red River Valley. One haunting picture shows Short Creek Lutheran Church (its steeple a “lighthouse on the prairie”) under a stunningly orange sky. “This is the Dark Continent,” Hansen writes. “At night you can drive mile after mile and hardly see a single light in the dense darkness that embraces the prairie.”

Johannessen and Hansen are surprised by the strong Norwegian identity of the North Dakotans they meet. Hansen calls them “a lost tribe”: they “came from fjords, mountains and valleys” and, at first, felt ill at ease “in this empty, flat, barren and windswept landscape.” But they stayed to farm the land – and make it their home. They are 100% Americans, proud and patriotic – but they are also Norwegians. “We had to travel to a remote corner of North Dakota,” Hansen reflects, “to see that you don’t have to be born in Norway in order to feel that you are Norwegian; that you don’t need a red passport with the seal of Norway to demand acceptance as a Norwegian.” He concludes: “Identity is a strange thing.”

But how much longer will it last? In Tioga, the authors visit a Sons of Norway lodge where the meeting begins with the singing of “Ja, vi elsker” in Norwegian. Yet the members’ average age is 70, and unfortunately, says the lodge president, “the young people are not interested in this kind of activity.” Indeed, the running theme in this book is North Dakota’s sad and seemingly irreversible decline. Some pictures bring you to tears: a man hugs his dog, seeking comfort after the forced auction of his family’s homestead. “A feeling of responsibility for the farm was sown the day I played in the meadow [back in Norway] where my grandfather had run as a boy,” he says. “His toil is not going to be in vain.”

Yet what is to be done? North Dakota, Hansen reminds us, “is losing its most important resource” – its young people. We meet two teenage girls who, bored with their lives in what they perceive as the middle of nowhere, love The Osbournes – a television series that depicts a life as different from theirs as one can imagine. Which life is truly emptier? But therein, alas, lies North Dakota’s problem in a nutshell: how do you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen MTV?

THE NORSEMAN, 2005