Another Way

My older sisters spoke circles around me as a child while I struggled to string sentences together. At 4 years old, my mom helped me find another way and gave me color crayons and paper to help me express myself and describe my world. It was because of her and the old basement of our house that I was able to find, make, or imagine anything. She made the other way always possible.

At 22, she boarded a train for Navajoa, Mexico leaving her home of Minot, North Dakota. She later left for Oregon, joining her brothers who had left for the CCCs and the farming fields of Yamhill and Newberg. She was leaving Seattle to start her speech clinic in Minnesota when she met my father. She then left her professional life to be a mom and raise us. “They weren’t my plans,” she would say, “I was just following my life.”

She came from homesteading Norwegians, a grandmother who grew the sheep, carted the wool, spun the yarn, and knit the sweaters to send the kids to school. I grew up hearing her stories and love of her family. She was the youngest of 8 kids, the last and littlest of the twins born on the kitchen table at home. She laid kicking in the after-birth when she was discovered and picked up by her aunt Thea, the midwife, who said, “This little girl wants to live.”

Her father could afford to send only 4 of his kids to college. He sent the girls. The boys could find another way.

Being Lutheran was the only way for her. My father converted and I learned to love potlucks and youth group, church picnics and singing the doxology in 4-part harmony at Grace Lutheran Church, where the women were strong, the men were good looking and all of us kids were above average.

She loved her life. By 90, life meant that she had lost all of her beloved family members, including my sister and father, eventually her home, her car, and her independence. She caught a debilitating infection and I thought this was it. But, it had just landed her in a wheelchair. Then she caught pneumonia in the nursing home that year, and I thought “THIS is it.” But she bounced back. So I finally asked her, “Mom,” I said,” if you had an exit sign, would you take it?” “Oh no, Carla,” she said.  “But why?” “Because I would miss this conversation with you.” And later that year, after more struggle, I asked, “Mom, is it really worth it?” “Few things are worth it, Carla. Living is worth it.” At the base of her life was what grounded her all along: her way of loving relationships.

We look onto a public park in Central Seattle and the remains of a turn of the century concrete bridge built that carried rail cars from the city hub to a small Coney Island-type beach life on Lake Washington. It’s now  Leschi Park, named after Chief Leschi, another of the Native legacies that lie hidden beneath everything built, forged,  and identified in the City of Seattle. My great grandfather, Carl Jonas Erickson, was a part of doing just that.

I knew some of CJ’s work because as a child, my father would point out his grandfather’s projects as we travelled around Puget Sound and the Olympic Penninsula. The Montlake Cut was called Erickson Ditch at the time, and connected Lake Washington to the water systems of Lake Union to the Locks and Elliot Bay, lowering the fishing lands of the Duwamish - a whole other story.

CJ used the cars of the trestle that I see out my window to carry dirt from downtown at night when the horses were tired. He re-graded streets, back filled the bay, and laid trestle that loaded trees from the Cascade Mountains and the Olympic Penninsula.

My great grandfather was an uneducated Swedish immigrant who walked the streets after the Seattle fire in 1889, looking for work. His way was a driven one: tireless, idealistic, creative, resourceful. A man of few words and large action. He couldn’t speak the language but was an opportunist, they say, energetic, hearty, self-serving, ambitious. CJ was known by other Swedes as “Black Erickson.” He had dark hair and an olive complexion. He was short, stout, and wore a goatee, derby hat, and gold chained watch. I read that he wore tails and top hat to church, made an entrance and paraded down the center aisle every Sunday morning, finding his seat in the very front pew of the First Baptist church that he built.

I was fascinated with this guy, that I knew nothing about. My father never spoke of him. I sensed my father was nearer and dearer to his mother, a gentle and elegant person, artist, with a beautiful mind, whose post partem led to schizophrenia and treatments at Western State hospital. My father and his sisters were raised by my grandfather in the depression, who had left the city office to run the last of CJs saw mills in Preston, Washington, where they called my dad “new kid.” He cut off his city knickers to fit in and skipped piano lessons by way of the swimming hole. His boyhood was spent along the Raging River and the deep, growth forest of the Cascade foothills, where he grew up  in awe of huge trees and giant fish.

My father loved the classical piano music that filled our home when my sister practiced. It seemed to console the pains of his earlier life. He clapped loudest at our school plays and concerts and he loved to laugh, was silly and playful. But I remember his quiet way, a gentleman, introverted, prayerful, who loved the Bible.  “Car,” he’ld say, “it’s a good book.”

My way was working on a boat as a deckhand, camp counselor, and lifeguard during the summers of my college years. It was a converted fishing vessel that took Lutheran youth groups onto the waters of the San Juan and Gulf Islands of Canada where I grew more deeply a part of the Pacific Northwest: the water life, tide pools, and whales; the mountains, sky, and islands at sunset.

If this boat life is being Lutheran, I wanted more.

I was re-directed to another way, from intended plans of theological studies in Chicago, and my inclinations to do international service work in Africa, back home to these big water and woods, the last place I expected or wanted to be at 20 years. Being pulled away from my call, towards my brilliant sister, now struggling as our grandmother had with treatments that never took.

I found another way. It was slower, stiller, a listening way. I was following, not leading, returning to a familiar, quiet place of being known and loved.

And now, I find my way alongside others who are wanting to spend time in the quiet places where they are surrounded by something bigger and more than they can fathom, where they are known and loved in their whole persons, and can sense it in their own, small bodies, sometimes, led there with color crayons or seeing it with black ink pens, or painting it with a single color, or created it with collage or found objects. They name it with their own words, describing the unknown, the mystery, which is always new, emerging in their lives, at every precious moment of it.

He we are and find ourselves, learning as we take our first steps after first steps, alongside one another, each of us and our own and other, ongoing way.