Boxed out
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The ancient pine box had probably sat in the upstairs closet of my parents' farmhouse since the Late Mesozoic Era.
At least that's how it appears. The box's wood has oxidized into a deep nut-brown and bears more than a century's worth of scars. It reminds me of a grizzled old cowboy who has spent too much time in the sun and the wind.
And like a grizzled old cowboy, there's nothing fancy about the box. It's held together with nails and dovetails with iron straps reinforcing its corners. But its builder had skills. The box is still tight enough to hold several cubic feet of darkness.
Painted in cursive on the front of the box is an address: N Skugrud, Volga P.O,. Brookings Co., Dakota, North Amerika.
The box had been used to ship one of my ancestor's stuff when he immigrated from lush, green Norway to the barren prairies of Dakota Territory in 1884. It's sobering to consider that all his worldly goods fit into a box that's just 38 inches long and 27 inches wide.
It's impressive that the box reached its destination with such a rudimentary address. The box was probably placed in the cargo hold of a steamship. After crossing the Atlantic, it was placed in a railroad car that made its way to the frontier town of Volga which, at the time, was nothing more than a smattering of wooden buildings on the edge of nowhere.
This was long before FedEx and UPS were available to be blamed for botched or late deliveries. Although it seems like overkill to have included the "North Amerika" part. How many Dakotas were there at that time and on which continents?
I was puzzled by the Skugrud part of the address. I mentioned it to my cousin Jeanie, who is well versed in our family's ancestry. She explained that Skugrud was the name of our ancestors' farm in Norway and that locals would have known exactly who you were talking about if you mentioned that name. It would be similar to having lived on Muttonhead Road and being known forevermore as the Muttonheads.
My siblings and I played with the box when we were growing up. Even though it looks like it might contain some sort of mysterious treasure, it was mostly used to house cancelled checks and a hodgepodge of mundane household detritus. Disappointing.
A few years ago, I decided that the box deserved to be displayed instead of languishing in its lonesome closet corner. My son and I hefted the box over the stair rail and began to muscle it down the narrow stairway. When we reached the bottom, we discovered that the box wouldn't fit through the doorway even after we had taken the door off its hinges.
I later did some measuring and realized that the only way the box could fit through the doorway would be if I removed the entire doorframe. It appears that the pioneering ancestors who constructed the house had built the house around the box. I was afraid that getting it through the doorway might be the kind of project that looked deceptively simple but would end in a dusty jumble of debris and a thunderstorm of cussing.
With the adroit application of a hammer and a prybar - OK, maybe more like "recklessly impatient" than adroit - I was able to deconstruct the doorway. A couple of strapping young neighbors came over and quickly and easily eased the box down the stairway and through the door. There was exactly a quarter of an inch of clearance on each side.
The box saw daylight for the first time in 130 years. I took a moment to admire the address, which is as elegant as a decoration. Its author displayed a level of handwriting skills that are all but lost nowadays. I wonder what he might think to know that someone would be admiring his handiwork more than a century later.
The brothers who homesteaded our Oslo Township farm were my dad's great-uncles Ole and Jens. I'm aware that there are innumerable Norwegian jokes that involve an Ole and a Jens. Perhaps there's a reason for that. One example might be building a house around a homemade shipping box.
Family folklore has it that Ole and Jens would send money to family members back in Norway, and that the recipients would use the funds to buy steamship tickets. They would then stay with Ole and Jens and work for them until they had paid for their passage.
So, there should have been several shipping boxes in the closet. Probably none of them would fit through the upstairs doorway.
-- Jerry's book, "Dear County Agent Guy," is available at Amazon.com and in bookstores nationwide.