Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [1]
Every day we make decisions about which events are important and which are not. In fact, our historical record begins right now in the present with this daily process of inclusion and omission. In her conclusion to Helga Estby’s story, Linda Hunt invites us to think about the different kinds of omission she calls silencing. In that contemplation are some hard lessons that bear directly on our sense of history. Several lessons occur to me; doubtless each of you can add to the list. First, we expect the already great and famous to do great things, but we easily overlook the achievements of the more humble among us. Second, we prefer predictable stories with easily understood motivations; unexpected actions undertaken for uncertain reasons make us uncomfortable. Third, people who act too far from their expected norms are embarrassments to those around them. How much truer is this likely to be when the historical actor is poor and female?
Throughout history, silencing has been the fate of most women. Thanks to Linda Hunt’s interest and extraordinary persistence, Helga Estby has escaped that common fate. Finally then, this is not just Helga Estby’s story but Linda Hunt’s as well, for in the following pages she shows us just how much silenced history can be recovered when we really want to know.
—Sue Armitage, Washington State University
Preface
It was late one evening in 1984 when I read eighth-grader Doug Bahr’s seven-page essay entered in the Washington State History Day Contest. This farm son from Wilbur, through the encouragement of his mother, Dorothy, and older sister, Darillyn, told a stunning story in “Grandma Walks from Coast to Coast.” This brief family story of a mother and daughter’s walk captivated my imagination and curiosity. Who was this Norwegian immigrant, Helga Estby? Whatever gave Helga and her daughter Clara the courage to attempt such a journey? I recently had read Peter Jenkin’s observations and experiences on his contemporary cross-continent trek in A Walk Across America, a story that attracted immense national interest. I felt certain a mother and daughter’s observations and experiences across an unsettled continent almost one hundred years earlier would prove compelling. Was there more to the story?
In subsequent investigation, I found that little was known about Helga’s audacious gamble to earn the $10,000 wager offered by unknown sponsors for completion of the journey. Behind on paying taxes and the mortgage, she was desperate to save the 160-acre Mica Creek farm and home built by her husband, Ole, for their family of nine children. Hers was a woman’s story, and like most ordinary mothers of her era, her active participation in life was not valued as part of America’s historical record. Even more telling, Helga’s choice to leave home, and the subsequent tragedy of loss, led to such anger in the family that they did not value her remarkable story either. Her walk across the United States with her daughter Clara remained a silenced topic within the family for over seventy years.
Because of this lack of recognition, the most difficult aspect of rediscovering Helga Estby’s life is the paucity of primary resources. For example, no diaries, letters, or art sketches remain from Helga and Clara’s trip, although Helga wrote many letters and kept a diary. Nor do the hundreds of manuscript pages she wrote still exist. Her children are all dead. Furthermore, the children’s lifelong condemnation of their mother’s actions led to fateful choices about her memoirs. It was unfathomable to them that Helga’s writings might contribute significantly to a fuller picture of American history. Like the history of most women at the end of the nineteenth century, her life story became silenced partially by what I call “negation through neglect.” But it was silenced also by intention.
A short poem from a Scottish psychologist, R.D. Laing, in Vital Lies, Simple Truths, addresses this neglect