Bold Spirit - Linda Hunt [68]
Around sixty years of age, Helga enjoyed attending musical and cultural events in the city of Spokane, and she worked actively for the suffragette movement.
Courtesy Portch/Bahr Family Photograph Collection.
When Thelma heard the wonder of what her grandmother had accomplished, she took to heart Helga’s charge, given to her forty-four years earlier when she was a young child, “to take care of this story.” Now a mother and grandmother herself, Thelma vowed to fulfill her grandmother’s request to keep this once-silenced story alive.
No longer would shame, silence, or neglect prevent the Estby grandchildren from knowing their own distinctive heritage. Thelma became the storyteller and began the tradition of keeping this grand history alive in her family to pass on to the next generation. Thelma’s granddaughter, Darillyn Bahr, found her great-great-grandmother a source of inspiration when exploring her story for a school research paper. “She was one woman who kept on growing as a human being and never stopped.”17 It was Thelma’s eighth-grade grandson, Doug Bahr, who entered the Washington State History Day Contest with his story “Grandma Walks from Coast to Coast.” After telling what he knew about his great-great-grandma from the two Minnesota articles and oral family history, the fourteen year old concluded with a young person’s instinctual understanding of why family memory and story matter. “I do not know if this story matters to others outside the family,” he writes. “But no matter what adventures the future may bring for me, I know I can always count upon the determination, courage, and talent that is part of my heritage.”18
Doug does indeed use these skills that are a part of his heritage. In his early thirties in 2002, Doug works as a firefighter and emergency medical technician in a suburb of Seattle. As part of a first-response team to fires, traumatic car accidents, suicides, drug overdoses, and deaths in the home, he needs to stay calm and level headed, use his analytical skills to think quickly, and recognize and adapt to problems in a proactive way. He still remembers his feelings while learning about the self-reliance, courage, and adventuresome spirit of his great-great-grandmother.
Helga’s story does matter, and because this family became story keepers, her walk across America can now endure in the growing legacy of once-forgotten vibrant women in American life.
A REFLECTION ON THE SILENCING OF FAMILY STORIES
All families tell stories that are repeated to the next generation; sometimes stories even develop mythic qualities. Folklorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists have long seen the importance of family stories in shaping how we sense ourselves and our place in the world. “All of us, long after we’ve left our original families, keep at least some of these stories with us, and they continue to matter, but sometimes in new ways,” claims Elizabeth Stone, author of Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. “At moments of major life transitions, we may claim certain of our stories, take them over, shape them, reshape them, put our own stamp on them, make them part of us instead of making ourselves part of them. We are always in conversation with them, one way or another.”1
Yet personal, family, and cultural forces contributed to the almost total silencing of Helga’s stunning story. Helga’s written memoirs of her journey, if read to the following generations of her large family, would have offered a rich