22 juni 2023 The Evaporation of Inga Einarsdottir

  

Part 1: The Introduction: 

 

     The introduction of Inga Einarsdottir as a character in the Sven & Ula story series, as The High Point Boys, began in ‘Rural Roads’ newspaper published by Rural Road Press, a now-defunct newspaper publisher in Warroad Minnesota in 1998. THE RAVEN took a year-long sabbatical from 1998-1999, during which RAVEN co-founder Steve Reynolds wrote for them in an exchange for training on Mac computers and QuarkXPress desktop publishing. In the story that Reynolds wrote, “The Search for Albert Woolson,” Inga was introduced as Sven Guyson’s best friend, Ula Josephson’s wife. An excerpt:

   "PUUSSHTT!“PUUSSHTT!” irreverently broke the silence of the hilltop cemetery as the two friends each opened a can of beer and took a sip from it. “Ah, dat tastes good!...Very good, “ said one of the men as he pushed up the bill of his cap with the index finger of his free hand, then tipped his head toward the other man and asked, in a humorous and exaggerated Scandinavian brogue, 

   “ Yah, shud ve go and pay our ‘spects to Albert den, eh Sven? T’ink ve vud find dat ol’ dam Yankee in da dark?”

   “It’s entirely possible den dere, Ula,” the other man replied in not quite as good of a fake brogue. Somehow Sven tended to sound a bit more Irish in his phony accent, than Scandahoovian, even though he was of Swedish & Norwegian heritage on his mother’s side and Scot-Irish on his father’s.

        Ula was 100% Irish and always more punctual, more articulate, more grammatically correct than Sven, who had had long ago accepted his inferiority. Ula was also linguistically gifted, a confessed bibliomaniac, and, a maker of great homemade pizza, abilities all of which Sven sorrily lacked. Once, while engaging Ula’s wife Inga in a quiet conversation about her mother Grunhilda Ivansdotter, who had to be taken to a North Dakota hospital by ambulance a week or two earlier, Sven enacted a comedy of errors that exemplified his ill-defined speech patterns. Grunhilda seemed to have recovered nicely from her ailment, but it was her husband, Olaf's  son of Einar, health she was worried about. Olaf had been experiencing some sleep disorder that caused him to just fall asleep wherever he was, so Grunhilda didn’t like the idea of him driving at all.   

   Inga tried to remember what the sleep disorder was called, so Sven offered a word he thought it could be, though it just didn’t seem quite right...“Necrophilia?“ he queried. To which Ula, the grammatically correct man, who was just around the corner in the dining room, answered with a shriek, “Olaf, son of Einar, doesn’t ‘ave sex vit dead people! Vat are you saying?“   

   “Oops,” Sven said, cringing once again in ignorance. ”I meant some udder “N“ word. I know Olaf doesn’t sleep vit pre-interred people of a ‘ceased nature. Sorry, Inga.“   

   “ ‘e meant narcolepsy, Inga. Vasn’t that it, Sven? Narcolepsy?“    

   “No, I don’t t’ink so, Ula. I’m sure it vas something else.”
However, despite the many times Sven had ever put his foot into his mouth, or twisted the “O” and “U” of differently accented words the wrong way around, it was he who had found the historical figure Albert Woolson."

   Inga was re-introduced in THE RAVEN's first full color issue Volume 5 Sans-Winter Issue in Broken Records and Soft Asphalt: Not So Tall Tales From The Third Annual North Shore In-line Marathon, 2001 by Graf L. Rhodes, an early pseudonym for Wannaskawriter. 

    Although the full color issues of THE RAVEN: Northwestern Minnesota's Original Art, History & Humor Journal actually began in 2000, the volumes were dated a year ahead of time in a tongue-in-cheek effort to never fall behind a publishing deadline again, but it didn’t work.

    “September 12, 1998 was the day of Duluth, Minnesota’s 3rd Annual North Shore In-line Skating Marathon. Palmville Township neighbors and friends Sven Guyson and Ula Josephson, and Ula’s lovely wife, Inga Einarsdotter, and their sons 15-yr.-old son Oskar and 12-yr-old Edwardo were nearing the location of the starting line just south of Two Harbors, Minnesota, 26.2 miles north of the finish line in Duluth. Inga and  Oskar were both entered in the marathon that year; it was Inga’s 2nd in-line skating race and Oskar’s first.

   “Sven and Ula were there on a RAVEN assignment, a pictorial essay of the first  no-holds barred competitive race between Inga and Oskar to the finish line. Oskar had boasted all the way to Duluth he would win  the race, hands down. He told Inga she never stood a chance of even finishing the race should she try to get in his way. 

   “Peering through his telephoto lens, Sven saw Inga and Oskar skating close together. They waved at him the best they could, then began grappling for the other's helmet strap and trying to force the other off their feet as they neared the camera. Inga was doing her best to upend Oskar and send him sprawling across the asphalt. 

   Ula knew he and Sven had plenty of time to get back to the finish line before Inga and Oskar got there, so after showing Sven the city and shoreline, he included a stop at Fitzger's Brewing in the tour. “We’ve got all the time in the world ...” Ula said, confidently knowing Inga’s finish time of her first marathon two years earlier.

   “Sven was concerned about getting to the finish line before Inga got there even if Ula wasn’t. He knew the wrath of scandahoovian women was something to avoid at all costs but after a few heady glasses of Fitzger’s great beer he simply forgot...or maybe it was the ambient historical environment and the company he was in that soothed his thinking. 

   “Suddenly Sven and Ula remembered why they were in Duluth in the first place. They bolted from their stools, ran out the door and down the hall of the complex. They careened off the stairwell walls and leaped up the steps two, sometimes three,  at a time. Out the double doors Sven and Ula burst shoulder to shoulder toward Ula’s car parked along the curb, only to collide with another group of race enthusiasts who were heading into the historically significant pub after the race. 

   "When they said their times were shortened by the strong wind at their backs, it added the utmost urgency to Sven and Ula’s goal of reaching the finish line before Inga did--at all costs. Stealing sideways glances at exhausted skaters who had finished the race bandaged and bleeding and being assisted to their vehicles by friends or family, Ula and Sven arrived breathless at the finish line praying they had arrived before Inga did.
However, Sven and Ula began to have a sinking feeling that Inga and Oskar would never cross the finish line while they were standing there -- because they had crossed it before they got there and were somewhere in the convention center milling about looking for Ula to be looking for them. 

   “Sven and Ula decided to get their stories right before their interrogation thinking maybe they ought to run back to Fitzger’s Tap Room when they heard, “‘Dad! Where were you?’” from out of nowhere.
“Ula turned around to see Oskar hobbling toward them from the door of the DECC. He was bandaged on his leg at the knee, and his arm was still bleeding through the several wraps of gauze bandage it had around it and he had a huge black, blue ‘n green bruise on his back. 

   "He said he had crossed the finish line in one hour forty-four minutes and nineteen seconds, and that Inga had crossed the finish line in one hour fifty-seven minutes and nine seconds, only thirteen minutes behind him.
“Oskar said Inga managed to force him off the road near the pumping station at the 17 mile marker much to her credit, earning even more  respect when Oskar regained his footing and angrily returned to the race, although he had blood streaming from road burn lacerations on his right elbow and right knee. 

   “At mile marker 22, at the crest of Lemon Drop Hill, he flew up behind her without warning and grabbed her by her left arm. Whirling her around backwards, he squatted down for the hammer throw  and hurled her with all his might against a large Norway spruce that would have certainly decommissioned a normal recreational skater intent on a leisurely skate to Duluth, but not a woman born on a farm south of Roseau in Stafford Township in the early 1950s. No panty waist, weak sister type this one, Inga Einarsdotter had been kicked against the barn wall by many a big ol' Holstein in her milkmaid career. Totally undeterred, she shot back off the knot-scarred spruce trunk like a steel ball in a pinball machine, speed skated two miles uphill, and drilled a winded and unsuspecting Oskar in the back with her fist as she flew by him no worse for the experience. 

   “Bent backwards by her sudden blow, Oskar careened out of control and into the one hundred, fortunately empty, folding chairs of the Duluth Harbor Local No. 5 Drum & Bugle Corp that had set up along the roadside east of Fitzger’s. Rethinking his game plan, Oskar, figured if he couldn't out muscle her, he'd have to outskate her despite his all his aches and pains. He knew the finish of the race would be anti-climactic for him because even though he would blow her away at the clock, there was the still the matter of the long ride home in their small car. 

   “Well, you can’t say you didn’t have it coming, Oskar,’ Ula said with some contemplative space between sentences for effect. ”You can’t expect to brag about what you did to her and not pay the price, her being your mother or not. Sven, you got any breath mints? 

   "Just then Ula thought to ask,  FWSB (Fitzger’s Wildly Strong Beer) slowly started to catch up to them again, “By the way Oskar, where is your lovely mother? At the First Aid station?” He had started to lose his apprehension about being so late to the finish line when Inga’s voice shot through the crowd as from a bullhorn--but wasn’t. 

   “ULA JOSEPHSON! VERE IN DA DEVIL VERE YOU?”

     "Sven and Ula froze in their tracks as though they had been caught robbing a liquor store. 

    “Cajoling is said to be a lost art, but when you’ve been married for 25 years to the same Scandahoovian woman, dead art forms become second nature to your marital survival especially if they are proven to work in dire circumstances. This was to prove to be one of those times. Sven heard that hand wringing and pandering can also be utilized when no amount of cajoling will work, but he couldn’t remember who told him that.