I'm Back! (Jan. 6, 2004)

I'm back from my trip and will have a new post up soon. I took the Empire Builder from Oregon to Minnesota, as I have done at least twenty times before in one direction or the other. I highly recommend this experience if you have the time. You don't get the luxury of the trains of yore, but it's cheaper than air travel and you get to see the country and can also walk around and chat. (As I get older, though, sleeping in my seat becomes harder and harder, and next time I might get a sleeper, which would still be no more expensive than air travel).

Beside the landscape itself I saw a bald eagle, lots of deer, a herd of about twenty pronghorn antelope, and dozens of pheasants and grouse hopping around in the cold like fleas.  This was mostly around Malta, Montana, a town I've been through so many times that I really should stop there sometime. (In Minnesota I also personally experienced the traditional -20° Fahrenheit cold for the first time in a decade or more, proving that I can still do it even though I'd mostly rather not.)

The Christmas reunion with my grueling 23-member 4-generation family was a big success, with none of the potential Jerry Springer events actually taking place.  A high point was successfully Googling my 85-year-old-mother's still-living 91-year-old-ex-boyfriend, whom she hadn't seen for 65 years. (He has a very distinctive, Google-friendly name). But as far as I could tell, the fire is out.

I also went through a lot of family papers, including my father's genealogy research, and found that a direct ancestor was hanged (on the testimony of a ghost seen in a dream) for killing his mother and burning the corpse, and that as collateral ancestors I have two murderous sisters, one of whom was an Indian-killing heroine, and the other of whom was hanged for infanticide and whorishness after unsuccessful spiritual counseling by Cotton Mather himself. (Still another ancestor, a great-great-grandfather who kept a saloon and brewery, was implicated but not charged in the killing of a temperance preacher.)

Yes, the vast majority of my family have led ordinary, boring lives; but isn't that what genealogy research is for -- to find stories to tell?

From my grandmother's papers I also found that the speaker at my father's 1932 high school  commencement in small-town Iowa (town pop. ~500) was a Gandhian named Bose, and that all through WWII a neighboring town had a Japanese-American high school principal who was accepted by the community. Not what you'd expect from the caricatures.

The real high point of the week was meeting a newborn grandnephew, the first of his generation. At times like this I often revert to my political-hack mode, and think pityingly of the poor family-values conservatives, sitting alone in their sumptuous mansions and grumbling about the servant illegals who are the only ones who care about them.

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All original material copyright John J. Emerson 

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