My mother had told me about a distant cousin

My mother had told me about a distant cousin, Danny Isakson, who I had never met who lived in or near Hettinger, North Dakota. She didn’t have an address or phone number for him. I thought it would be interesting to drop in and say hello.

We had to get off the Interstate and travel many miles south on narrow country highways. When we arrived we looked for someone who knew how to contact him and one person connected us with another person who connected us with another until someone told us he was working on a farm and that he was driving out that way and would get word to him that we were in town looking for him. So we settled down on the side of Main Street and waited. Our rig attracted the usual amount of attention and even a small town newspaper reporter who did a story on us. Several people noticed the “Bike Repair” signs on the side of our rig and brought bikes to us to fix. I set up my repair stand and went to work right there on the sidewalk. I raked in over a hundred dollars and as night fell I was thick in the grease of bike bearings and carrying on a dialog with several friendly people in a crowd of maybe ten who clustered around me in a semi-circle. That was the situation when my second cousin Danny arrived. I greeted him and we tried to talk a little. I had an obligation to fix the two bikes I was working on so I talked to him while I worked. Naturally I was a strange sight to see for him and everyone else in the town. He left before I finished the repairs and when I tightened the last bolt and collected my bread Ellie and I rolled on out of town feeling tired.

We continued south into South Dakota. The way I saw it this would probably be the only time I might have a chance to visit long-lost relatives. My parents had moved to California from Minnesota in 1963. I was thirteen years old at the time. Most of my mother’s kinfolk lived in the Dakotas or in Minnesota. My Norwegian great-grandfather, Torsten Uglem had come to America and raised his large family in Lake Preston, South Dakota. So that was our next stop.

A feeling swept over me as I rolled the Bike Bus down the town’s roads, to think my great-grandfather and my great-grandmother had traveled along those same roads so many thousands of times. The roads almost felt familiar to me; the old houses too, and the old churches.

The cafe felt strange. The old equipment and tables and chairs... I asked and was assured it had been in business way back when the Uglems lived there. Word passed who I was and various people came up to me to say hello. One old codger told me he had been a boyfriend of one of the Uglem daughters back when WWI broke out. He was trying to remember her name. My grandmother would have only been about ten years old so it was probably Sylvia or Tena or Anna. Anyway, he had got on the troop train and never seen her again.

I strolled through an old city park. The benches were ancient. I knew my grandmother had played among those trees. What a feeling... And there was a museum. My mother had told me to check it out. She had visited Lake Preston the previous year. My great-grandmother’s spinning wheel was inside the museum. They had brought it with them from Norway.

The caretaker opened the place up and let us wander around. Her name, “Johanna Uglem” was printed in beautiful letters on the wood of the spinning wheel. Torsten must have been a bit of an artist. He wrote a small book which has been passed down in our family. Mainly it tells about his circumstances when he came to America and also the manner in which he was swindled out of his savings.

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They had a farm in a tinier town to the south, Oldham. And there Ellie and I attended church, feeling weird and conspicuous in our appearance. Everyone was so quaint there. We ran into some distant relatives, the Lee family. Verna Uglem had married Duane Lee. Verna was the daughter of Julius Uglem, an older brother of my grandmother Mabel. We spoke after the service. Then we drove back to Lake Preston figuring it was time to continue on towards Minnesota.

We came to the crossroads where the main highway passed east and west through town. Suddenly there was a large explosion and the interior of the Bike Bus filled with thick white steam. I couldn’t see a thing and had to stop the car as best I could in the middle of the road. Thick white clouds billowed out of every window and door. Twenty minutes later I was able to move it slowly past the town buildings and park it beside the town park where I took a better look at the engine to decipher the nature of the problem, which turned out to be that the intake/exhaust gasket had totally blown out.

I was stuck. There was no way I could move the Bike Bus until I put a new gasket in it, and in that part of the country garages sure weren’t open on Sundays. It looked to me like there was a power that didn’t want us to leave the home of my ancestors quite so fast. Furthermore, I would by necessity to stuck amidst them -- on the Main Street -- all Sunday and all night until Monday morning. I would be meeting people and they would be meeting me. I mean, I hadn’t really wanted anyone to get too close.... I felt uncomfortable being as different as I was. I’d wanted to shake a few hands and then skedaddle. I wouldn’t be allowed to do that now. The old saying comes to mind: When you live beside the road, you hang your dirty laundry out in the street... Well, we were vulnerable and obvious. What would happen next?

Next? Well, the next thing that happened was that a cop car cruised by real slow and checked us out. Groovy. Well, I sure couldn’t hide. I stood and waited. He circled around and came back and parked behind the bus.

I went up to his window and greeted him and kindof explained about the blown gasket. He asked to see my identification. I dug it out and handed it to him. He looked gruff, a real genuine meat and potatoes country cop. Big. My intuition caught the way I appeared to him with my long hair and hippy clothes and all the bikes all over the Bike Bus. He didn’t know what in the hell was going on in his little town but it sure looked suspicious and crazy. I felt the hairs standing up on the back of my neck. He sat there studying my Washington driver’s license and radioing in information. He had a real serious look on his face. Man-oh-man it felt like trouble was abrewing. Then I noticed the name on the plastic above his shirt pocket, “Lee”. I asked him if he was related to the Lees in Oldham. His eyes caught mine and he answered that he was indeed. Something comical jarred loose inside my brain and I broke into a grin.

I explained to him how we had just come from the Oldham Lutheren church and how we had met the Lee’s there, and how my mother’s grandfather was Torsten Uglem of that area. A Lee had married an Uglem daughter way, way back. He seemed to notice the irony of the situation too and he smiled. I held out my hand and he shook it and introduced himself.

We talked a little about the Bike Bus and I told him I intended to have the gasket fixed Monday morning for sure. He bid me fair well and good luck.

Then a guy came along and asked me if I was interested in getting’ some old Army bicycles. He took me in his car out to his farm where we dug four rusty old things out of his barn. They were covered with chicken droppings. But they were the heaviest duty coaster brake bicycles I had ever seen. And they had built-on racks over the rear wheel, strong enough to carry an adult passenger. He sold them to me for five bucks each. We washed them off with a hose and loaded them into the back of his truck’ and brought them to the Bike Bus.

I had a plan for those bikes. You see, motor driven vehicles are not allowed in Rainbow gathering sites. Supplies have to be carried in. Bikes are allowed though. And bikes for carrying supplies are always in demand. It was my intention to rebuild and paint all of those bicycles and donate them to Rainbow Supply.

Since I had nothing better to do that Sunday I began working on them right away. I set up my video camera on a tripod and videoed myself as I worked. I wanted to remember that Sunday, working on bicycles beside my Bike Bus in the hometown of my ancestors.

The fellow who owned the dairy saw me working on the bikes and brought me a couple more bicycles to repair. I made thirty bucks if I remember right.

Then late in the afternoon I noticed a fellow sitting on the grass, leaning against a tree, watching me work. He smiled and said he figured he aught to introduce himself -- said his name was Tom Nelson, and that he was a cousin.

Tom was interesting. He had had long hair for years, although he wore it short now. And he’d done a bit of hitchhiking too! Now he was settled down on a beautiful farm and he had a wife and two kids. He invited us out to visit after we repaired the bus.

The next day I met the guys in the garage and they ordered the gasket and did the repairs. The bill came to $47. Tom showed up and we followed him ten miles out of town to his place.

He raised foxes. One of the wierdest things I’ve ever seen is a wild fox raised in a cage, nothing but wire surrounding him, never touches his feet to the Earth one time in his entire life. He can kind of look at it through the mesh—but he or she can never touch it.

Tom was touchy about his foxes. He guessed rightly that I might feel sorry for them, although I kept my emotions to myself. I listened when he told me they were better off in a cage than living wild. They ate better and were free of diseases.

I guess…

Tom and his wife Carol were kind folks. They fed us a great home-cooked meal.

We had a flat just on the other side of Laura Ingall’s home town of Walnut Grove, Minnesota. We put on the spare and continued on to Springfield where I stopped at a tire place and haggled with the guy about a good used tire. $45.

While I waited a fellow came along to have a close look at the Bike Bus. He told me he collected antique bikes and that he had several of them from the turn of the century, with wooden wheels and handlebars. He took me out to his place to see the antique bikes he had restored. I was blown away by his collection, so beautiful. He said if I liked them that much I aught to have one to restore. He gave me a rusty 1894 Crawford, that was complete except for handlebars. He just gave it to me! Wow.

Back at the Bike Bus we met a news reporter who wanted to do a story about us for his paper. While he was writing two Minnesota state troopers drove up and asked to see my registration and driver’s license and proof of insurance. They were incredulous about the bus. At one point one of them told me I couldn’t drive it until I unloaded, most of the bikes. I managed to show them my scrap book of newspaper clippings and news photographs and letters from chiefs of police asking me to return to their towns. They mellowed a little when they finally realized that I drove the bus everywhere and that I had never had a moving violation or any trouble of any kind. They had their department telephone back to Oregon to verify that I was insured. Whew! I was sure happy I had followed my intuition and secured a policy before we left on this jaunt.

After detaining us for an hour they wrote me a warning ticket and let us go. The one cop had even mellowed enough to ask me to stop and fix his daughter’s bike when I passed through Minneapolis. I didn’t tell him but I really didn’t want to see him ever again. Nothing personal.

We hurried out of Springfield and were soon closing in on Minneapolis/ St Paul.