Denmark

The story begins the same to each new Dane we meet.

"Yeah, my parents were born here Well, near here, in Bjedstrup, near Skanderborg. My dad came over in '27, and my mother left Denmark in '39, just a few months before the Germans invaded."

The Americans in front of us on the plane overhear, and nod. It's a very American tale.

"My mother and father actually met on the boat coming back to Denmark. She was coming home from a visit to her mother, and he was going back to find himself a wife."

The hotel receptionist in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, looks up and smiles. She knows that Danish girls are the best for marrying.

"Well my father had sort of settled in a place that actually looks very similar to Denmark--namely, Racine, Wisconsin." He chuckles, "the fields, the farmland, even the trees look so much like Wisconsin. It looks just like Wisconsin!"

"Around the corner is the entrance to your room," the receptionist says. "This key gets you in the door, this one for your room."

Both the hotel receptionist and the waiter at the cafe (clearly a local college hangout) seem confused that a man named Eric Pedersen, who looks 100% Danish, doesn't speak the language.

"My dad would've been happy to teach my sister and I to speak it," Eric explains, "But my mother wouldn't let him. 'You're in America,' she'd say, 'speak English!'"

I have the most European driving experience, but taking the wheel of our rental in Denmark, where rules are followed (even, it seems, not so much out of fear but out of some, rather foreign, sense of communal goodwill, completely absent in Italy), I am nervous I'll break six inviolable laws before breakfast. We're meeting Lennart Frederiksen, a curator at a local museum and researcher of local Danish genealogies (check his website at http://www.fredenslyst.dk). Lennart lives in Skanderborg, where Eric's mother was born, and we meet at the local McDonald's to follow him the last few miles in our pilgrimage to the home of Eric's ancestors.

"This place DOES look a lot like Wisconsin," we say as we follow Lennart and Eric, who has chosen to ride with the one so connected to his past.

First stop is Dover Kirke, the church where Eric's father was baptized. It sits in the middle of three fields, its cemetery full of gravestones with "Pedersen" on them. "I don't know if any of these are my relatives," Eric says with some sadness. "It's such a common name, and I've lost contact with any living relatives."

He perks up in the inside of the church. "A spitting image of the one I went to as a kid," he smiles, walking up the pews to the altar. We pretend to baptize Aryn and take some pictures. Aryn picks up a Danish hymnal and proceeds to belt out two full verses of Amazing Grace. This small church, somewhat unremarkable in appearance (much like the Old North church in Boston, really), feels like it's built on sacred ground. Two if by sea, without whom Eric, Julie, and now Aryn would not exist.

The house where Eric's father was born is about fifty meters inside the town limits of Bjedstrup. No one in Aarhus had heard of this town, and that may be because on the map there aren't even any intersections to speak of, let alone a posted population.

"The house used to have an attached barn," Eric explains to Lennart, pointing to where now an in-ground pool sits, covered. "Those trees weren't there when my grandfather lived here, either.
He made a path up to the top of that hill, where he had a table and chairs." The owner isn't at home, but we gather from the signs outside and the laborer's truck that pulls up as we're leaving that she owns a pool installation company.

The school is about 200 meters away, but has expanded quite a bit in the past 100 years. Lennart points out the building that would have been the one-room schoolhouse a century ago, then invites us to his house for Aebelskiver (a kind of Danish pancake about the size and shape of a golf ball).

"Normally we only have these at Christmas," he explains, "but we'll have some today."

"Sue makes those," brags Eric. "Of course, we have them all the time, for any big family
gathering. She also makes frickadilla, kleiner…" he goes on, listing the Danish culinary delights of Racine. Lennart seems to recognize few of the foods, but we do find many later in the supermarket. "By the way," Eric asks, "do you have kringle here?"

Lennart looks confused.

"It's a pastry we have in Racine," Eric explains, "thin, with a filling, shaped like a racetrack."
Lennart thinks for a moment and shakes his head. He's never heard of it. Many of the Danes we encounter seem slightly bewildered at, if not to say uninterested in, those portions of century-old Danish culture their far-flung forefathers decided to preserve in the New World.

We take one turn after the school, leave the town a moment later, and at no time does it look like we are anywhere but a tiny cluster of houses amid farmland.

"Wow, look at that horse farm," we exclaim, coming over a hill. It's so pastoral, such a postcard Danish farm. Lennart turns in the driveway, and Aryn waves to the horses as we follow. His wife and daughter greet us at the door, exclaim over Aryn's appearance (for once, not for its uniqueness but for its similarity to their own families). They show us the pictures of children who could all be related to Julie's family.

"For this whole time I've felt almost like I was among family," Eric tells them, which certainly explains his abnormally loquacious mood these past 24 hours. "It's like Racine used to be, with such a concentrated Danish population."

Two enormous but shy dogs eye us suspiciously as we sit down to coffee, cinnamon roles, aebelskiver, and long talk.

"There are so many Danes in Racine that the queen herself came once," Eric says. "Marguerite came to Racine!"

I'm privately reminded of the comical Lake Wobegon anecdote about the King and Queen of Norway, who do a whirlwind tour of the Norwegian enclaves of Minnesota and Wisconsin singing songs their parents had never even heard of, eating terrible food in VFW after VFW and looking at endless black and white photographs of dead ancestors from the Old Country, and when they return from this grueling trip they look at each other and say, "now who were those people?" I smile from the humor, not the condescension.

The Frederiksens are impressed by Eric is saying, but, like everyone else, confused that with such a strong heritage he doesn't speak the language.

"I studied some of the Rosetta Stone," Eric admits, "but what understanding I do have comes from when I was young. My aunt [he says a word that sounds like festerolavia, which doesn't jive with my translator] came to visit when I was young, and she didn't speak any English and expected us all to understand her. If I didn't understand what she asked, she just said it again, louder! She wanted her sugar cubed and her tea leaves loose. She stayed for a year and a half."

The story continues on the train to Copenhagen, through that great city (if you want to see Amsterdam but are indifferent to pot, go to Copenhagen instead), and in the airport. Every Dane is family, though we met none related by blood.

"All the family I knew in Denmark has died," Eric tells the souvenir shop lady, who is actually from Australia but moved to Denmark for her husband. "My father was 48 when I was born, and he was about the youngest in the family so all my aunts and uncles had grandkids my age. I've lost contact with all of them." Sue buys souvenirs for everyone at home, many of whom may never come over here.

Will we return together, a new contact with a living relative made and strengthened? Will we walk the streets of Copenhagen in the balmy summer, not the wintry November winds? Will the Little Mermaid be there when we come back, instead of on loan in the Far East?

Garrison Keillor would be proud of this visit, but so would T.S. Eliot. Old men ought to be explorers, the poet said. And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time. Eric, an indifferent traveler at best, may not agree with the former sentiment, but we have now lived the latter.

As the plane first touches down in Copenhagen, I see Eric's face as he peers out the window and murmurs "Never thought I'd make it here. I never thought I'd make it to Denmark."
"And here you are," say the Americans in front of us on the plane with a smile.