SEPTEMBER 5, 2020 – I never met him but was shown photos in his prime. He looked the part he’d assumed in life. His name was Bernard, and I knew his parents, Carl and Nellie, and his three sisters, who stayed close to home.
Nellie was my grandmother’s cousin from Småland, back in Sweden. On one of my visits to Sweden, another cousin drove me past Nellie’s rustic, childhood home.
Nellie was as reserved as my grandmother and spoke the same lilting Swedish dialect. The two were much at home here among the woods and lakes that resembled their place of origin. Carl loved the Northwoods too. He hailed from Dalarna—the province next to Norway halfway up the length of Sweden—where the famous Dalarna hästar (“horses”) are hand-carved and painted to this day. He spoke “old” Swedish—so peculiar, my Swedish cousins could barely understand it when they met Carl here in the mid-1970s.
Soon after coming to America, Carl found work at Minneapolis Moline, a farm implement manufacturer. After a spike struck him in the eye one day at work, he decided he’d had enough of city/factory life. With Nellie and infant son Bernard in tow, Carl fled to Hayward in the Northwoods. There they bought land on Spring Lake and built a resort, which he and Nellie managed for decades.
The resort was four miles from my grandparents’ cabin on Grindstone Lake—off County Road E, which snakes up and down and all around past thick woods on the way to town. “E’s” been paved forever, but Dad told me it was dirt road well into the 1940s. Today the speed limit’s 40.
“The way to drive this road,” Dad told me once on our way back from town, “is to adjust your speed with the curves and hills so ya never have to touch the brake—avoids wear and tear on your pads, rotors.”
He then told me about his rides with Bernard down the same road during the summer of 1940, when Carl was building my grandparents’ cabin. Dad was 17; Bernard, 21. “Bernard would drive us to town in his Model A,” Dad said. “He’d get it all the way up to 60. Can you imagine that? Sixty miles an hour in that car when this was a dirt road! And he’d have only one hand on the wheel with his elbow stickin’ out the window!
“But Bernard wasn’t a wild sort,” said Dad. “He was as cool as a cucumber.”
That “coolness” and Bernard’s penchant for speed explained why someone reared in the wilds of northwest Wisconsin would become an overseas TWA 747 pilot. His home during his long career was in Kansas City—TWA headquarters.
When in the kayak plying the waters of Grindstone Lake in front of the cabin Carl built, I’ll often see a high-flying jet overhead on its route between Chicago and Asia. The contrails remind me of Bernard and his journey from Northwoods Model A to trans-Atlantic 747.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
