Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [66]
When Helga ventured forth on this public walk away from home, she clearly saw herself as “fit to have her own head,” to make up her own mind. Then Helga came home with nothing but additional flimsy promises from a sponsor whose word had already proved untrustworthy. When she returned to her isolated, grieving, and angry family, her own grief and guilt caused her “to have a sort of breakdown. She assumed a very different personality and withdrew into herself and kind-of lost her mind.”5 Helga had spent every day since she was sixteen years old bearing, nursing, nurturing, and raising children, and then she risked her life in a determined quest to save their family’s home. It must have been unimaginable that her mother’s heart could be questioned.
Helga and Clara did not write the book the next summer or give any illustrated lectures. Helga no longer wanted to present their adventures to the public, subjecting herself to more scathing disapproval. Beyond that, her walk across America became a taboo topic within the family. This family story was silenced, simply never talked about again. Ever.6 It was as if their experiences could be erased from the family’s history—a shameful act of a mother—never to be remembered. It is likely that the combination of Helga’s own grief, the stinging criticism questioning her devotion as a mother, and the family’s anger merged to erase the story. If it took silence to preserve the fragile bonds within her family, and restore friendships and respect within her cherished community, this was a cost she was willing to pay.7
What Helga imagined would be a tragedy, instead became a new start for the family. On a bleak day, March 28, 1901, the family’s cherished farm was foreclosed and sold at a sheriff’s sale.8 The economy had improved by the time the Estbys moved back into Spokane, which allowed Ole to utilize his carpentry skills again. He entered into a successful contracting business with his son Arthur and eventually built the family an even finer two-story home on Mallon Street in another neighborhood where many Scandinavians lived. Clara attended a business college and began a lifelong career in the financial world.
Helga, a resilient woman, regained her emotional health. Although Helga came home to Spokane without an external prize, the walk across America gave her inner perspectives and resources that shaped the remaining half of her life in significant ways. If the circumstances of her life before the trip reinforced a more monolithic view on women, her broader experiences made this no longer possible. Not only was she exposed to ideas on America’s “new woman,” she and Clara were perceived as such by others. She had not only forged through swollen rivers and mountain passes, she had forged an identity that proved ordinary women could be physically strong, economically independent, and mentally tough.
Her travels across the continent also introduced her to crosscurrents of political attitudes toward women and awakened her belief that women deserved full citizenship, including the right to vote. Living back in the city, she became actively involved in the nation’s suffrage movement by attending meetings and marching in the city suffrage demonstrations.
(following pages) The Estby family, around 1910, after they had moved back to Spokane and Ole had established a successful contracting business. Ida, Arthur, William, Lillian are in the back; Ole and Helga in the front. Clara is absent. By then five children had passed away.
Courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection. Detail of this photograph on this page.
After her walk across America, she no longer sought all her satisfaction within her private sphere but instead gave her energy to issues in public