To America

 

Excerpt 6         -from The Comfort Bird by Hylke Speerstra

 

It’s around seven in the evening of May 1905 when someone’s at the door.  A young man.  Did Ytsje really go so far as to respond to that small ad in Hepkema’s paper? [a Dutch regional newspaper, Nieuwsblad van Friesland, but often called Hepkema’s paper after the editor]  A “decent milk hauler” asked for a place to board in the area of Bolsward.  Yes, they had become subscribers to the paper, and mother didn’t skip a word.  “A decent milk hauler,” she had said aloud while reading.  Now that the oldest boys were out of the house, there was room for “a tame sheep.”  Where is the ambitious young man who dares to cross the ocean with daughter Geartsje to take up quarters on the other side?
   A boarder makes his appearance.  But will that be the one?  Geartsje, sent by mother to the door, opens the door slightly at first, then wide.  For the moment she is speechless.
   “Douwe Hiemstra!”
   “Come on in.”
   She shakes hands with him but forgets to identify herself.  She feels the firmness of his handshake.  And callouses.  This could well be the milk hauler.
   “I’m Geartsje of Hizkia and Ytsje,” she hears herself say.  The old man in the arm chair has the appearance of an old patriarch with his snow-white hair and beard, but it doesn’t take the guest long to realize who’s the one that waves the scepter.  Mother!              “And how old is Douwe,” the wife wants to know.
   “Almost twenty-two, Mrs. Namminga.”
   “As if foreordained, Douwe is not much older than our Geartsje!”
…

   “Board and room.”  Mrs. Namminga doesn’t want to skirt the issue anymore.  She’d been thinking of four and a half guilders a week.  Bed, meals, laundry – everything included.

   “Let’s go with that.”  Douwe had really regarded his mission a success already at the door.  Who knows but there could be more included than board and room.

…

   On the first Monday morning after Douwe’s arrival in Hichtum, a long new-fashioned snow-white underpants is dancing in the spring breeze right next to Geartsje’s flesh-colored panties.

   “Oh gosh, this is going to be trouble,” Meindert Birdie calls out right after twelve when passing on the church path.  “Watch out, Geartsje girl, all you need is a clothes pin letting go and the new boarder has you pregnant with child.”

…

   Not a half year after Douwe entered the backdoor, he leaves with Geartjse through the front door.  On Saturday morning, 20 May 1905, they marry in Witmarsum.  And it’s high time.  They quickly rent a room in the neighborhood.

…

   In the cruel cold of February 1906, after a long and difficult delivery, Geartsje gives birth to twin boys: Jabik, named after Douwe’s father, and Hizkia.  … .  After a day and a night filled with worry and empty doctor promises, both boys die. 

…

 

It’s a half year later when an informational evening is held in Bolsward about emigration to America.  “This is where all of us need to go.”  Ytsje succeeds in taking Douwe and Geartsje, her son Nammen with his Lysbeth Struiving, and her still single son Lolke along.  Douwe even gets his peer Johannes Boorsma to join. 

But Johannes challenges the speaker: “People, don’t let anybody mess with your heads, what we’re hearing here is nothing but gospel, syrup and honey.  You can also earn good money on the German dairies, you can travel in one day from Leeuwarden to Cologne by train, but even there by Ruhr and Rhine it’s not rice and raisins every day.  Except that from Germany you can go home for a few days for the egg hunt or celebration of the Bolsward Fair.”

…

A good four months later, on Friday 21 September 1906, Hizkia Nammens Namminga passes away.  The cause could have been a strangulated hernia.  When the immediate family gathers in the mortuary in Hichtum on Saturday 22 September, the oldest son Sibbele looks his mom straight in the eyes when he says: “It was out of respect for my dad that I didn’t go to America as quartermaster.  Only in Hichtum could this man be happy.” 

…

   It is the third son who not much later is the first to board the boat to New York.  As bachelor he wants to prepare the way for those to follow. 

…

Four years later, Ytsje gets her way: she will travel under His care to the new world.  Accompanying her will be Nammen, his wife Lysbeth Struiving with their five children, and daughter Geartsje with her husband Douwe Hiemstra and their three small children.  On the night of 16 to 17 February, 1911, the steamship Noordam will be ready for sailing – regardless of weather.

Letter to my newly ordained daughter.

Dear Cindy,

 

 

I think you began this journey early in life, soon after you were born.

Even as an infant, you knew who you were.

When sisters and brother joined you, you welcomed their company.

And you were prepared.

You organized and entertained their little lives with quiet confidence and goodwill.

 

And when I watched you some years later discuss a story with a select group of other 6^th graders, I knew the gift would flourish.

It did, to the glory of the Giver.

 

You shared it as counselor at Camp Tall Turf, learning and leading, walking with and caring for those with troubled lives.

You shared it in a classroom of your own when you became a teacher and could talk about stories and meanings all day long.

You shared it as Chapel Coordinator with students and apprentices, still learning and leading, all the while moving closer to the spiritual nature of the human journey – God’s purpose and meaning for our lives.

 

When the work in the Chapel ended, there was pain.

You grieved, for you had loved your work.

We grieved too, and prayed new paths would show.

 

Something had been growing within you, something that had been part of the Giver’s gift all along:

the desire for a greater immersion in the Word and devotion to the Word made flesh.

God’s gift had flourished, and now grew into a calling.

It was like a trickle from a well of living water that turned into a stream.

It was like a faint whisper that slowly drew closer till it became a voice that settled in the soul.

You were not surprised, I think.

You listened, though there were other voices too.

But you embraced the one that was embracing you.

 

We watched as you studied Greek and Hebrew, Systematic Theology, Apologetics –

we prayed that you would be blessed with fortitude and steadfast faith.

The work was hard, the days too short.

But you persevered, and learned, and grew – the gift still flourishing.

 

And one summer you were back at Tall Turf, as chaplain now.

And it felt right.

You practice preached in places and in your own church too.

And you were affirmed.

 

Graduation came, hearts filled with joyous gratitude when you filed across the platform for the degree in divinity.

Then came Synod.

I remembered the Synod years ago where I as delegate pleaded with others for allowing women to preach.

I did not know then that I was pleading for my daughter too.

But it was in vain.

Or was it?

For now Synod welcomed, applauded, and embraced you.

And feelings would not be suppressed; but the tears were not the same as at the Synod of my memory.

 

But then the waiting and the wondering began.

Would the inner call connect to an outer one?

Weeks passed, then months. 

More prayers, and pleas.

And doubts, but not despair.

You made sermons, you preached, and you were praised.

 

And when your church needed you, you were there.

You had served as elder the needs of parents losing their only daughter.

All through the valley you were there for them, sharing their tears and pain in their torn hearts.

You were still learning and leading, in Jesus’ name.

Now they needed you, for a time, for the pastoral care of the congregation.

Your heart was in it; your gifts flourished; and you were loved.

We thanked God for that wonderful blessing.

 

Meanwhile, some signals went back and forth, with long pauses in between.

Was God using those testing times to train?

At last, the signals grew into one steady sound, the outer call:

the call to Lakeside Church.

Not sure at first this was your place to go, it grew on you till you felt sure:

this was God’s call for you.

The classis met, its questions challenged you, but you sustained it well.

Their warm approval and embrace confirmed to you the rightness of your path.

 

At Neland your pastoral ministry ended with pastors and elders encircling you,

laying their hands on you, and sending you out with their love and blessings.

That holy moment, when I too joined that circle, filled your father’s soul with the Spirit’s joy.

Did you feel it too?

Yes, there was a strain of sadness too—your church family would miss Ed and Cindy who had meant much to the church for so long.

And we would miss you too, sharing the “family bench” with us on many a Sunday.

 

But then came the service of your ordination at Lakeside Church.

Your anticipation must have been intense.

Children and family and friends would come from near and far to witness the end of one journey and the beginning of another.

If you felt a kind of holy excitement within and around you as people began to arrive, I felt it too. 

It was a spirit of celebration, for you and for all who came.

A celebration of the “Light that Goes Before Us,” the theme you chose for this service.

A celebration of your spiritual trajectory that led at last to these people longing for a pastor.

To a small congregation --yes, but very much alive.

And on this Saturday night its numbers swelled with Neland members and others from Fremont Second, the calling church.

 

There was much in that service that moved us profoundly. 

Yes, the singing of “Bless the Lord, O my soul”; of “Praise and glory, wisdom and thanks/honor and power and strength/be to our God forever and ever”; of Ed and Amy singing “Cause your Word to come alive in me/give me faith for what I cannot see/give me passion for your purity/Holy Spirit, breathe new life in me”; of voices swelling on “Love divine, all loves excelling, Joy of heaven, to earth come down.”

Your gift of liturgical sensitivity was evident in the way the service was put together.

But there was also the ringing affirmation of your calling in Dale Cooper’s memorable message “Sent to Bear Witness to the Light.”

And to a parent’s heart there is something very special in hearing the congregation promise to “welcome Cindy as their minister and pastor, to take to heart the Word of God as she proclaims it, to promise to pray for her, to share in the work of her ministry, to encourage her in her tasks, and to respond to her work with obedience, love, and respect.”

 

But what is indelibly imprinted in my memory, and I think that true for all who witnessed, was your face as you took your place before us. 

Your face spoke the feelings that words cannot express: your whole being’s participation in the weight and the glory of the moment - sometimes stirred by emotions arising from deep within, sometimes radiating a heavenly joy.

The tears that welled up in us were tears of love and joy and praise.

When we stood at the end, joining hands, and sang “My friends, may you grow in grace…to God be the glory, now and forever…, I choked on the words sometimes, overcome by God’s glorious presence among us.

And I fought tears again when you spoke at the end, thanking God and others who had blessed and shaped you in what “I am becoming.”

 

By God’s grace, you are becoming what you already began when you were but a little child.

Watching that little-child-become-pastor for the first time raise her hands over the congregation in the closing benediction was a blessing my heart could hardly contain.

 

May your gifts flourish at Lakeside, dear Cindy, as you continue to learn and to lead.  

With much love,

Dad

 

 

  

 

 

Letter to a sixteen-year old daughter

 
It was only months after I wrote this letter, that the police came to interrupt the worship service we were attending.
The news: Lisa had been in a roll-over accident on the way to our service. Her injuries were life-threatening. (This traumatic story, "The Accident," is included in Through Dark Places, Exxel Publishing.)
That's twenty years ago today, a day we rejoice that healing came, and an education, and marriage, and motherhood, and godliness.
 

March 12, 1994

TO MY LYSKE ON HER SIXTEENTH BIRTHDAY

I think now of you, my teenage daughter

the one whose unexpected birth

surprised by joy already 16 years ago,
and I feel my heart well up with love
and gratitude for the life that became a part of mine

and made it fuller than it was before.

I think now of the many times I've watched your face:

first when you were a tiny fuse of dynamite,

asleep at last after a fierce fight against the dark,

your face turned up, its pages open like the book

beside the bed I'd just been reading from,
all icy traces of the Snow Queen melted now,

dissolved in dreams of little Kai & Gerda,

leaving the soft glow, like embers, of

noble thoughts and deeds that fill the heart

with goodness, truth, and love.

And often since I've gazed at you

to watch the Snow Queen's quest for domination,

the ancient ritual played out on the human stage

of Lisa's life--a serious play of lights and shadows,

of shards and splinters that can freeze the heart

and blind the eye.

Sometimes it nearly took my breath away

in awful recognition.

I've also seen the goodness in your heart

through words you said and wrote,

through acts of love and through the

stirrings of your feelings when you watched

the helpless, needy orphans on TV

reach out to friendly strangers for a home,

a heart to take them in and care for them.

There's so much promise in you, Lisa,

that I'm grateful for,

this world has need of you:

the gifts of your imagination

your intellect, your heart

offered to serve there with your Maker

and all he's made that's broken,

that hurts, that needs a helping hand.

You too will hurt sometimes, my dear,

from which I'd like to spare you, if I could,

but this Dad's arms no longer have the reach

to hold you close; I must learn to let you go

and trust that you always will

beware of trolls that carry mirrors recklessly,

beware of dragons in disguise

that gorge themselves on innocence

and trust betrayed;

I must learn to trust the Father's arms

to hold you close and never let you go.

Learn to love the Lord, my Lisa,

more than all that comes your way,

when you hear his voice

(who knows how exactly)

listen to it closely and let it take

you places where you ought to go,

let it change you and empower you.

Don't be afraid of caves or castles,

of uncharted paths through deep dark forests,

but fear the easy rides through Disney Worlds

that feed the senses but starve the soul.

Growing up is high adventure, Lisa Joy,

It has been and will be more so still.

Enjoy it as God's gift with passion and good sense.
I'll be watching as long as I'm allowed,

I'll be praying for your needs,

And I'll be loving you even more than I do now.

Happy birthday, dearest daughter!

Happy Life, and Love, and Joy!

Dad

 

The struggle intensifies

Excerpt 5        -from De Treastfugel by Hylke Speerstra

 

In the chapter “Like King Hezekiah,” Hizkia and Ytsje encounter a series of setbacks after initial progress from much hard work.  The economic recession of 1879 shows no mercy. Ytsje keeps pushing for emigration, but Hizkia drags his feet.

 

By 1881 the recession slashes so deep that more than 700 residents from the municipalities of East- and Westdongeradeel, It Bilt, Ferwerdereel, Barradeel, and Wunseradeel decide to emigrate.  Between 1880 and the onset of WWI in 1914, some 10.000 people from the North-Frisian agricultural region eventually risk the big step.  (Annemieke Galema: Frisians to America, 1880-1914.) Meanwhile Ytsje runs out of patience.  She approaches her oldest son Sibbele who lives away from home as a farmhand: “Son, it’s time, we sail under Jesus’ protection to America.  That is the land of deliverance for people like us.  I want you to take the boat to America as our forerunner.”

   “I’m not ready for that,” is Sibbele’s response.  Sibbele Namminga doesn’t want to waste any words on the subject; he wants to go his own way.  For his mother there’s no solution but to peddle bakery goods for a local baker.

   And so Hizkia’s Ytsje trudges from door to door with two baskets on a yoke, from Bolsward to Burgwerd, from Wommels to Witmarsum.  The yoke of the recession and the discipline of the free market weigh heavily on her shoulders; in one year the number of bread peddlers has more than doubled.  Besides, it seems as if there are only Dutch Reformed bakery goods in her basket.  Her honey bread may be the best, but the more conservative Reformed, the Mennonites, and the Catholics stick to their own taste.

   But Ytsje is not easily defeated.  She decides to take a chance on the Reformed farmer with the large family in the hamlet of Pankoeken near Witmarsum.   After an hour and a half of slogging underneath the heavy yoke, she hears: “We stick to our own town; the widow Zylstra has already been here.”  When she comes home, she finds a husband who’s struggling with depression.

Nearly a decade later there’s some improvement.  But Ytsje will not let go of her dream.

 

“I have good news,” Hizkia says.  “The heifer has calved, so we added a nice little heifer calf today.”

   It is the “golden calf.”  She doesn’t come up with this herself, no, it just comes to her.  “The golden calf that will lead you and me finally to the land of justice, Hizkia.”  She wakes her husband up in the middle of the night and tells him that she was shaken awake just now.  “Through Him I was shown a moment ago the path to a world without troubles.  I have to take Sibbele aside again and present my vision of this night; this time I’ll get him to go as our pioneer to America, like the oldest son of King Hezekiah who was sent ahead to the other side of the ocean as quartermaster.” She looks at her husband, counting on his bible ignorance not to catch her fib in her run-away imagination.

   “The ocean.”  Hizkia is cruelly disturbed out of his sleep. “The ocean, you say it just like that is nothing, but you don’t know how much I dread it, those newfangled steamboats forged out of iron that will sink like a brick.”

   “You have to trust me and the Lord, Hizkia.”

   “But my dear, the times will get better here too.”  Hizkia, anxious now, sits up: “We just got a heifer calf, and now this.”

   Do the times improve?  …it’s a matter of what one wants to believe or not believe:  Ytsje heard that Jetse Feenstra from Allingawier says farewell in a newspaper notice to all his family, friends, and acquaintances with this announcement: “We’re going to America.”

 

Excerpt 4

Excerpt 4

Ytsje at age 12 is placed with a farmer.  Farmers show no mercy; life is hard, but young Ytsje is spunky. 

She meets her friend Meindert Birdie again briefly and learns that he takes no guff from anyone, including mean, miserly farmers.
The excerpt traces Ytsje’s journey to adulthood and motherhood.

… When after the bitter cold February of 1863 the last snow has finally disappeared, the mail brings three letters especially addressed to Ytsje. 

The first one is from an uncle who proves to be the writer for her Dad Sibbele Wytsma:

 

   “Due to the last stage of consumption your Father’s weakness has already called him to be bedridden, thence it appears advisable not to come home, however dearly your father would have you with him once more.”

 The second saved message is one with a black border around it: Dad’s death notice.  The third letter comes from the village Rommerskirchen right beneath Cologne where the young Meindert “Birdie” is earning a good monthly wage as milker.

    “Nevertheless the year passes too slowly, I desire more and more intensely to return to my Fatherland, where the first lapwing egg will well-nigh have been found. […] In view that I am a free man here, I do wish that I, accompanied by lapwing and godwit, could return to Hichtum, where I should also very much like to see you, worthy wool-seeker friend, to ascertain  your present condition.”  

 Ytsje, with her religious inclinations, sometimes comes out with the strangest stuff.  One day she informs the farmer’s wife that a divine mission is awaiting her.  “I received the prophecy that I will travel to the New World.  America, that is for me the Promised Land; my stay here is but temporary.”

   The farmer’s wife pays little attention, for where would such a half-grown girl get the money to pay for a trip to America. …   

   On the first of November 1870 a new farmhand appears in Sieswerd.  It is a tall young man, not a run-of-the- mill kind of appearance, especially not in Ytsje’s eyes.  And then the man’s name: Hizkia Namminga.  This man bears the name of the biblical king Hezekiah.  Ytsje thinks: there must be a higher purpose behind this, she’s destined to marry this Hizkia, and with him she will find the way to the New World.  The intensity of Ytsje’s faith is rivaled by her flaming passion for this handsome fellow. There is no stopping it now. …

 When the farmer and his wife discover in the spring of 1871 that Ytsje is pregnant by the new farmhand, both are fired that same evening.  … All of Ytsje’s worldly possessions as live-in farm maid fit inside a wheelbarrow, and there’s still room for Hizkia’s bundle as well.   …

   On May 13, 1871  – a civil marriage.  … “We were married in dry spring weather,” it says in Ytsje’s diary which she begins on May 1.

 [They land a job with another farmer.  Hizkia dreams of becoming a farmer himself, while Ytsje talks night and day about America.]

 … thus Ytsje Namminga-Wytsma gives birth to a healthy boy on the shortest day of the year 1871.  It is not likely that the procreator was present at the birth, because giving birth was exclusively for female attendance.  Contrary to tradition, the boy is not named after the late Grandpa Nammen Namminga, but after Ytsje’s early deceased father Sibbele Wytsma to whom she had such a loving attachment.  Hizkia approves all of it; as far as he’s concerned, this will not be their only child.  Ytsje is of the same mind: after all, the biblical king Hezekiah had a whole bunch of sons.

   At Pigskin on the 5th of January, a memorandum appears in the margin of Dr. Staring’s almanac from great-great grandma Ijbeltsje.  By then Ytsje no longer has the services of the midwife; she’s very much back to milking.

    “Now that the winter weather is tempering and it is thawing hard and foggy the ice is not to be trusted so that Hizkia’s Ytsje can walk again through the fields, Jan together with Sjoerd has laid  boards for her across the Klooster Canal so that she can be here on time.”

 Though Hizkia may be the accommodating kind, each time he manages to postpone Ytsje’s emigration plans.  Ijbeltje Mensonides-Faber:

   “Ietje is full of emigrating to America while her husband seems more sensible, Hizkia is very fond of  Hichtum.”       

 

 

Excerpt 3

…about the need of a “comforter”

 

The young Meindert Boorsma is not only named after this grandpa, he also bears his nickname: Meindert “Birdie.”

   On the day that the old Meindert became Grandpa, he made a very special bird whistle for his namesake.  The material consisted of an ancient cow rib from the Hichtum terp,*  a couple of tin copper plates, and a nail-hard knot of ebony wood.  From that wood he carved the mouthpiece.  When he tried it out he knew that it was good.  The old man was already known then as the Stradivarius among bird whistle carvers.  The little instrument was placed in the cradle of the little boy with the hope that he would become just as sharp a field man as his forebears.  …  

When the old man first heard how his grandson could imitate the lapwing so lifelike and later also the godwit and the redshank, he didn’t believe at first that he wasn’t listening to a real, living meadow bird.

For Ytsje and the boy Meindert the day of wool gathering comes to an end.  It turns toward evening when the two saunter toward home with a bagful of sheep’s wool.  And then Meindert hears in the distance the call of the golden plover.  “Come, they must not see us, let’s crawl behind the field gate over there.”  The boy digs up his bird whistle and gives a kind of shy answer to the plover.

   “Ytsje, I pretend to be a kind of uncertain plover.  I say that I don’t dare to travel alone, that I’m a lost soul in need of help.  I want them to take me along on their flight.”  Again Meindert puts his whistle to the lips, and then quite another song emerges.

   “What are you doing now,” Ytsje whispers sharply.  “You’re not imitating the golden plover but the lapwing.  Why did you all of a sudden become a lapwing?”

   “It’s like this, with the bird migration another kind of bird accompanies nearly every flight of golden plovers.”  He’s hardly got the words out of his mouth or a whole flock of birds streaks over them.  “Look, this time there’s a lapwing among them.  Such a solitary one goes along as a comfort-giving bird.  It’s like Grandpa said: ‘On dangerous travels one cannot do without a comforter.’”

 

* In Friesland, an artificial dwelling hill is called terp (plural terpen). Terp means "village" in Old Frisian and is cognate with English thorp.
Historical Frisian settlements were built, as far back as 500 BC, on artificial terpen or mounds up to 15 m height to be safe from the floods in periods of rising sea levels. During the 18th and 19th centuries, many terps were destroyed to use the fertile soil they contained to fertilize farm fields.  But some are largely preserved to this day.

Excerpt 2

Excerpt 2

 

Meindert introduces Ytsje to what he has learned about nature and birds from his grandpa; and that knowledge will apply to migrating people too, as the story unfolds.

 

“Ytsje, pay close attention to nature.  Notice how the lapwings at the end of September begin to flock together.  Does the girl know why the birds do that?  They gather to make plans as migrating birds.  They pose the question to themselves: Where shall we spend the winter, where and when should we commence the big journey?  Today or tomorrow they will depart from us, and we from them.”

   “And next spring they will come back,” adds his little female friend.

   “Exactly.  You’re right.  Listen, Ytsje.  In the beginning of March we will see the first lapwings returning, then they will entrust to us their nests and the first laying of their eggs.  They do that because we as people of the field protect and take care of the meadow birds.  We really are the housekeepers of the whole business.  Do you know, Ytsje, that the first lapwing egg is always laid here before noon on March 19? That has to do with the light; the days are lengthening then.  In March, winter will still try to stay on its throne, but the springtime can then no longer be held back.”

   “How does the boy know all that?”

   “I learned all these kinds of things from Grandpa.  Right after the terrible hard winter of 1837 he found the first lapwing egg in the whole country, and do you know where it lay?  Between two small ice floes in a ditch.  It was in the field of Mensonides, and that's a man who records everything that happens through the weeks.”

   “Oh, my goodness.”  It’s been as music to her ears.

   “Well, my girl, that’s enough for now.  Yes.  I like it too, you don’t learn these things in school.  This is how Grandpa thinks of it: the behavior of persons has much in common with the migratory bird; both dislike short days and long shadows.  But all right, a person is not a bird; a person cannot take his soul along like the migratory bird on long journeys across the ocean.  That is why Grandpa avoids long ocean journeys.”

 

The Comfort Bird

The Comfort Bird by Hylke Speerstra  [tr. H J Baron]

 

This is how the book starts, way back in the 1860s, when emigration promised deliverance from the bleakness of poverty and prejudice.

 

Excerpt 1

 

“Your mom passed away.”  Ytsje Wytsma is six when she hears these words from a neighbor lady.  The children in the village explain to her what that means:  “Your mom is dead.” 

A couple of days later the old squat tower tolls the bell indicating a woman’s death.  …   That evening her dad puts her to bed for the first time.  He promised to tell her a fairy tale, but it turns into a story without beginning or ending.  “My dear girl,” Sibbele Wytsma stammers while he tucks her in, “fairy tales aren’t real.  Our work is going to have to pull us through.”

 

“After the death of my mother, who in the end was suffering from severe cramps, I fortunately found a very good father,” Ytsje would describe it much later.

 

 

   All of this is part of the grief of Hichtum in the extremely wet, late winter of 1861.  The Leeuwarder paper reports that the high waters took thirty-seven lives.  It is the year that serfdom was abolished in Russia and President Lincoln took the first step in abolishing slavery in America. 

 

When Ytsje is ten, Wytsma takes her out of school in Burgwerd.  Now she can be her dad’s little housekeeper.

 

   She doesn’t get many carefree and sun-drenched days coming her way, but a few she will long remember.  Take that mild and bright September day in that same year of 1861.  In between her work she goes poaching through the fields for tufts of sheep’s wool that are hanging on field gates and barbed wires.  It amounts to little more than fouled little pieces of wool, but the freedom in an open field and the collecting and gathering yields such sweet satisfaction. At home she washes the wool, spins it into thread, and is even able to knit it into underwear for herself and Dad. 

 

   “What are you standing there dreaming!”  It is the child’s voice of Meindert Boorsma, her friend from Hichtum who was her classmate.  “Come on, Ytsje, two can do more than one.”

   Meindert is an orphan who has adopted the old people language of his grandpa and grandma who are raising him.  “Or are you not inclined to look for sheep’s wool together

with a neighbor boy?”

   “Yes, of course.”

   “Actually, a charming girl like you should be going to school!” the boy said like a little adult.

   “And what about you!”

 

   “A boy like me can learn a lot from nature, from the birds of the field, says Grandpa.”  The little man comes from a family of bird catchers.*

   And that’s how the boy and girl spend the whole beautiful September day searching for sheep’s wool. 

* In Friesland, trapping Pacific Golden Plovers was a century-old tradition.  These plovers, coming from Scandinavia and NW Russia, would take a breather in Friesland’s mild winters.

For some Frisians, catching them would become a passion and an artful sport, not unlike fly fishing for others.  They would use a unique device, called the wilsternet, a drop-down net.  These were large but light nets, approximately 4 x 25 yards with an arrangement of pivoting poles and tension ropes that released the net over the capture area when the pull string was tugged by the wilsternetter who sat behind a wind screen at a distance of about 32 yards.

The wilsternetter would attract passing flocks with a whistle that imitated their call, and birds were lured toward the net by stuffed decoys or a life, fluttering bird.

When the attracted birds were about to land into the wind, the net was quickly flipped over with the help of the wind.

For many a wilsternetter this supplemented his livelihood; he would sell the birds to a poulterer for about 50 cents a piece, who would then export the meat to England where it was prized as a delicacy.

When Facts Are Stranger Than Fiction

Literature lovers know that they are expected “to suspend their disbelief” when immersing themselves in the writer’s world of imagination.

Yet, unless the fiction offers “verisimilitude,” the semblance of truth, the reader’s disbelief will kick in and short-circuit the aesthetic literary experience.

The events of De Treastfûgel really happened, though they often sound like fiction.

It’s written by Hylke Speerstra, a Frisian author who also wrote the bestseller It wrede paradys (Cruel Paradise), the stories of Dutch immigrants scattered around the globe.
I translated that book almost a dozen years ago now, and now am translating De Treastfûgel (The Comfort Bird).

 

It’s the story of two families and their descendants who in the 1800s start out in the same small village of Hichtum, Friesland, then find themselves nearly a century later not only on two different continents but, shockingly, on two opposing sides in WWII. The families are bonded by a common metaphor: the figure of the “treastfûgel,” introduced early in the book when Meindert Boorsma, the bird lover, tells young Ytsje Wytsma: “In every flight of migrating birds another kind of bird flies along to lend comfort, for they have a long and difficult journey ahead of them.”  For Ytsje, in her long and difficult life that ended as a migrating widow in disaster-plagued S. Dakota, her treastfûgel was her faith.  For the original Meindert Boorsma’s grandson Meindert, as an unwilling German SS soldier struggling desperately for survival in the disastrous siege of Leningrad and subsequent retreat, his treastfûgel was his father’s bird whistle that doubled as a guardian angel.

 Ytsje Wytsma-Namminga long nurtured what she perceived as a divine mandate: to emigrate to America.  In the early 1900s, as widow now, she with her descendants set out for South Dakota, where floods, disease, fatal accidents, drought, and the great depression made life more cruel than kind. 

Sometime after Ytsje’s death in 1934, her son and family move to Wisconsin for a brighter future.  It is there that Ytsje’s grandson Nanno is drafted into the Army, takes part in the hell of WWII’s D-Day and every major battle after that, then in the “liberation” of Germany, including a concentration camp, inexplicably living through it all without incurring a scratch.

Though the reader knows that sometimes fact is stranger than fiction, there is nonetheless some incredulity when the diverse paths of Meindert Boorsma and Nanno Namminga cross among the ruins of Hitler’s land, Meindert a deserter from the defeated German army and Nanno a corporal in the conquering U.S. army.  They revel in their survival and their common Frisian ties and origins.

I hope to share some excerpts from The Comfort Bird in the weeks ahead with the readers of this blog.

“to love that well”

                                                           

I had seen death before.
But I hadn’t felt its dagger slice into me like it did when my dad died.
He was alive one day.  The next day he was dead.
Death became shockingly personal, and when it does your world stops.
Oh yes, the world goes on, outside of you.  Its apparent indifference stuns you. 
Like the grieving mother in Robert Frost’s “Home Burial” you want to say: “…the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so/ If I can change it./ Oh, I won’t, I won’t.”
The sudden death of someone close freezes your mind into disbelief.  And it silences your tongue.
Weeping and groaning are the language of mourning. 
You dig your nails in the earth, bury your tears in the pillow at its finality.

Only poets plumb the depths of overwhelming feelings and sometimes find words to express them.
I think I brought something of that painful, personal encounter with the sudden death of a parent to my teaching later on.  In literature one is never far away from death; often, too often, as Ernest Hemingway observed, “…the death of the very good and the very gentle and the very brave.”

When I joined the Calvin College English department in 1968, I did not expect that the death of the very good and the very gentle and the very brave would strike so terribly close, again and again.
But it did.
Prof. Henry Zylstra, chair of the department, had collapsed in 1956 on the streets of Amsterdam from a heart attack at the age of 47.  But he would not be the last.
Harmon Hook died in 1974 from a brain tumor at age 39.
Stanley Wiersma, while on a Fulbright as Henry Zylstra had been, died in 1986 at age 55 in Amsterdam from complications following emergency surgery.
Howard McConaughy, in his first year at Calvin, died in 1992 of liver cancer, only weeks after diagnosis, at the age of 34.
Kenneth Kuiper died in 1998 at age 68, before he could enjoy the rewards of retirement, from a lingering illness.
Lionel Basney, a man of profound knowledge and wisdom, died in 1999 at age 52 from accidental drowning.
William Vande Kopple, vibrant with life and laughter, died in 2013 at age 63 shortly after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer.
Anne Schmidt, beloved wife of English professor Gary Schmidt, died at age 55 not many days after a diagnosis of liver cancer.

These were good people who were taken before they or we could anticipate such a final farewell.
And they left huge holes, precisely because their lives had been such an important part of our own.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” said Dylan Thomas.
And we did.  Students too. 
Students spoke fondly of Henry Zylstra’s classes as “a revelation.”  He gave all of us “more to be Christian with.”
They remembered Harmon Hook as one who gave joy and light to others, who taught as a person, not professor, teaching them as people, and not as students.

The reality of someone you knew and felt close to suddenly disappearing from your world stuns the mind into incomprehension and plunges you into the dark valley of grief.  A treasured relationship is cut off.  You realize, maybe for the first time, that there was love in that relationship, and your heart aches with its absence.  Perhaps none of us ever gets used to someone special being gone.  Deep down, the loss is always felt.  And the admonition of Shakespeare inhabits our being more forcefully:
   “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Yes, we mourn the losses in our life.  We stumble in our sadness, sometimes we fall.
But the words that Stan Wiersma left behind in a sealed letter stir us to rise: “There is work to be done and a lovely world to be inherited more fully….”

Thus we rise again, for God gives us, the living, work to do.  As Tolkien reminds us: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
And God gives us faith – the faith of Kenneth Kuiper who wrote: “The most important tombstone for us … is the round one … which was rolled away by the angel of the Lord from Jesus’ tomb…. chiseled into our hearts and minds are the words of the young men in long white garments, ‘HE IS RISEN.’
And so shall we be.”

Therefore, “let evening come…don’t be afraid…God does not leave us comfortless.” (Jane Kenyon)