We left our cousins in Honefoss as they were preparing to take their summer vacation trip to Florida...visiting a sister in Tampa. So we go, back and forth, across the ocean that once represented a change in one's life, one' destiny.
We drove south along the Oslo Fjord to the city of Skien, the largest city in Telemark. Yes, Telemark as in skiing...the bindings were developed here in the rural mountains of the province. Skien is the birthplace of Henrik Ibsen, the playwright, and the ciy contains a number of houses in which he lived as a boy (the family must of have had to move a lot due to the father's financial difficulties which may have contributed to Ibsen's deeply psychological plays). But Skien is more happily home to my cousin Gro who met us with her daughter for a cup of coffee. They were on their way to Oslo while we headed out further toward the coast. We promised each other further visits.
Our final stop in Telemark was Stathelle, meaning place of flagstone or flat stones, the town in which my father was born. He came from a line of sea captains on his mother's side (the Werge side)and from farmers on his father's side (Grotvik). He was sent to America when he was four years old in 1909, now 100 years ago. His father had died and he was sent to live with his grandfather, Thomas Werge, who had emigrated a few years before. After he arrived he took his grandfather's and his mother's last name. Economic conditions were difficult in Norway then and America represented opportunities now found in small Norwegian towns.
What struck me about Stathelle was how similar it was to the Highlands, the seaside community in New Jersey where I spent summers as a boy at my grandmother's house. The houses on the hill, the boats on the waterfront, even the bridge spanning the mouth of the fjord. Some things stay the same or emigrants find ways of keeping things the same when everything else seems to change.
