A Lost Story

 

Lynnwood, WA.

            You know how sometimes you can’t get away from history, how things follow you to a new continent even, and there persist? This is one of those stories.
            Helga Olafson was a five-year old child when her parents and she migrated to the United States. They were tired of the strictures of village life in Norway where a person’s social status was set in stone and generations old. Her father, Peter, had heard that in America a man could be anything he wanted to be, based only on his own efforts. He wanted that.
            So, Peter and Elsa Olafson sold his dad’s farm after his death, and the two cows and the horse, took all the money and bought tickets on a ship heading to the east coast of the country. But they didn’t stay there, or move to any of the Norwegian communities in the Great Lakes area. They took the train to Seattle, Washington.
            It had been a long, tiring trip. But Pete and Helga knew a family named Wiprud, people from home, who lived in a small village called Bothell, also in Washington state. There were many other Norwegians there, so Helga grew up among her own kind, but also others, and even the exotic American Indians. Pete got a job with the Post Office, driving the mail around outside of town in a specialized Ford truck. He made fair money and bought a place outside of Bothell.
            So, Helga grew up as American as she could be while still feeling Norski too.
            Helga was a plain looking girl, with blue eyes, and straight brown hair.
            Her parents had married rather old, as they did in Europe sometimes, so that when Helga was 30 years old and still living in the family home, a tiny two bedroom wood frame building next to a local stump farm, it came to pass that her parents became elderly and then in the course of time both passed on. Helga Olafson lived alone.
            Now, like all good Norwegian ladies, Helga was a picker of wild berries. So, one day late in summer when the wild black berries were ripe, on their tangled low growing vines, Helga headed out to the stump farm, bucket in hand and sun hat on her head. A modest figure in blue jeans and a man’s shirt with leather boots on her feet. She was utterly alone.
            There were many berries that year, so she had nearly filled her bucket, thinking thoughts of jam for the winter, and perhaps a pie for the next few days when she noticed a strange thing. First there was the sound. A light electric buzzing where no buzzing should be. She stood up straight from her picking and put her hands on her hips, looking in all directions.
            Then she saw it.
            It was some kind of machine. Maybe fifty feet over the tops of the old stumps it hung suspended in the air. The brilliant late summer sunshine reflected off of its metallic surface. It was shaped rather like a fat pie, speaking of pies, with a bowl capped over its top surface.
            Well, as you can imagine, this was a great surprise to Helga. In fact, she didn’t know much about aircraft at all.
            Next moment the buzzing stopped, the machine tilted, slipped out of the air, struck a glancing blow to a huge ten foot tall cedar stump, and flopped onto the berry vines on the ground. There is sat, slightly canted, and silent.
            Helga didn’t run and hide. Not Helga, that sensible girl. She put her bucket of berries in a safe level spot and went to examine this oddity.
            Taking big experienced steps, she’d been here before, she approached the strange crashed object. It was bigger than she had thought, maybe fifty feet in diameter and ten feet top to bottom all taken together. As she watched, a pie shaped section of the bowl shaped top slid around the bowl revealing an opening.
            Out of the opening stepped a young fellow, not a kid anymore, but young. He had clear bright blue eyes, straight shoulder length brown hair, and a snubby nose. He was no beauty. He wore a strange snug overall of some sort of shiny material. All over the surface little rainbows glinted in the sunlight.
            “Hello!” said Helga, in English.
            “Hallo! God dag,” said the stranger in perfect Norwegian.
            “Why do you speak Norwegian?” said Helga. “Are you from Norway?”
            “No, Helga. It’s pretty easy to pick up languages if you know how. I got it from your mind. I’m from another planet,” said the stranger.
            Helga, looked at him, weighing a number of ideas.
            “I might believe you, though it’s a stretch,” she said. “What’s your name. I can’t read your mind. You’ll have to tell me.”
            “Brovel. Well, that’s the closest I can get it to something you can say. I’m not supposed to be here, and they aren’t going to come and rescue me. My ship is dead. I’m injured and I’m hungry,” said Brovel. He sat there on the outer edge of his fallen ship.
            “That will never do around here. We better give you a regular name. How about Lars Erickson?” said Helga.
            “It’s outlandish to me, but I can be Lars Erickson if I have to,” said the newly minted Lars.
            “Can you walk?” said Helga.
            “Yes, my left arm is broken above the elbow, so I can still walk,” said Lars.
            Helga, followed by Lars, picked her way over to her bucket of blackberries and the path.
            “My house is just beyond this field,” she said.
            Lars laughed when he saw her little wood frame house. Helga shot him a look, but knew when to talk and when not to.
            Once inside the house he seemed delighted and touched by how everything was so simple and manual. There were no gadgets there. It was as normal as a house in the backwoods of Washington could be in the 1940s.
            “You can’t wear that around here. Someone would think you fell off of the circus truck, Lars. You’re about the same size as my father. His clothing is still here. You better put on some of his clothing,” said Helga.

            Before getting dressed in her father's clothes, Lars pulled his overall down to his waist allowing Helga to splint the break with a section of an oak ruler and a long strip of cloth.
            She had to instruct him about buttons and zippers and boxer shorts. She looked out of the window while he struggled into the underwear and the pants. She helped him button the shirt because of his broken arm. He had to be told to tuck the shirt into the pants. Then there was the belt and then there were the socks and the shoes. By the time he was dressed he was very tired, but still hungry.
            Helga made him a ham sandwich on rye with mustard and mayo. She warmed up the morning’s coffee and gave him a cup of that with cream because she thought he looked a little thin. Lars thought the food was odd, but in some ways better than the food at home. He ate with appetite, quite happily.
            She got him some aspirin, because that’s all she had for pain, and put him to bed in her own bed. She figured she would sleep in her parent’s room.
            In the morning, she was sitting silently at the kitchen table, waiting. When he came out of her room awkwardly redressed in her father’s clothing it was her turn to laugh.
            “Tomorrow I have to go work at the school, Lars. But not today,” said Helga.
            She cooked eggs, and toast, and made fresh coffee.
            He was still favoring his arm, but it wasn’t displaced, so it seemed to both of them that it would heal on its own in a few weeks.
            Sitting across the small wooden table from him, she was thinking about cutting his hair and wondered if he would object. He looked up to see her studying him.
            “You may cut my hair, Helga,” said Lars.
            “That will make life easier for you. On our planet, men keep their hair short,” said Hega.
            “You know, I will never leave you,” said Lars Erickson.
            “I hope not,” said Helga.
            “I love you,” said Lars.
            And she believed him.
            His broken ship lay in the stump farm undiscovered until it was covered by berry vines. No one ever found it there. And his people never came for him.

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