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On a warm Oslo afternoon, as cotton ball clouds glided over the city and the smell of summer strawberries wafted from street corner vendors, Olav and I laughed together at his description of Alt for Norge (All for Norway), a popular Norwegian reality-TV show.
"A bunch of Norwegian Americans compete to meet their distant relatives here,” he said as we ate fiskesuppe, a creamy soup packed with fresh herbs and seafood, on a leafy café terrace. “They have to do crazy things that supposedly are typically Norwegian, like ski jumping and performing with a heavy metal band.”
I asked whether he'd ever done either of these. He replied with a you've-got-to-be-kidding look.
It was only natural that Olav and I would share a laugh about the show. I'm an American journalist whose great-great-grandparents Klemet and Marte emigrated from Norway in 1849 with three young children on a none-too-sturdy sailing ship. Olav is an English-speaking Norwegian with loads of American cousins, including me. Fortunately, nothing crazier than a phone call to a stranger had been required to meet him during my second trip to Norway.
A Norwegian fjord
cookelma/Getty Images
I hadn't known about Olav, nor much about Klemet and Marte, during the first trip, a brief detour during a college backpacking jaunt through Europe with my brother. But curious about our Norwegian roots, we'd spent a few days in Oslo — marveling at preserved Viking ships, painter Edvard Munch's masterpiece The Scream and other sights — before taking a train to a village two hours north. There, thanks to general directions from a genealogically inclined U.S. cousin and a letter of introduction in Norwegian, we'd located our ancestors’ hillside farm high above a lake and briefly met the people living there, who were related to us somehow but spoke no English. We smiled and pointed a lot.
In 2007, at age 53, I returned to Norway to write an article about the country's renewed interest in its traditional foods. Benefiting yet again from my U.S. cousin's research, I arrived this time knowing Olav's name and the fact that he lived in a particular Oslo suburb. Finding his telephone number online was easy, and when I called, he immediately invited me over. A day later, sitting at his dining table, Olav told me he'd grown up on the farm and that the people I'd met there 35 years earlier were his grandparents.
