Warming Up - Exercise 4

Dare to Dream

You may already know that I grew up in Minnesota.  And for all 21 years that I first spent there, I dreamed of getting out.  Why, you may ask?  Because frankly, I considered life in Minnesota to be, well, boring.

I finally did leave Minnesota.  In December 1969, within days of graduating from one of the three colleges in my hometown, I made it to California because my dreams were . . . out there.  I just couldn’t imagine my dreams coming true in Minnesota.  But then one day in 1976, I met up with a surprise.

That year, on a trip to visit my parents, the three of us went to see my grandmother who still lived in the same town where she had raised my mother, two uncles and two aunts, my mother's siblings.  On the way out of town, my father asked if I wanted to stop by the shipyard.  Now my grandmother lived 21 miles from the Red River of the North, and Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes, but there is no body of water anywhere near Hawley, Minnesota, big enough to accommodate a vessel large enough to be called a ship.  So my response was a surprised, “Shipyard!  What shipyard?”

My dad drove down Hawley’s main street and pulled up in front of a building that I recognized, except for the sign above the door.  I knew this building – it was the potato warehouse where my grandfather worked when I was a kid.  But the sign above the door, in the shape of a Viking ship, announced, “Hawley Shipyard.”  And that’s what was being built inside the building.  My eighth grade science teacher, Robert Asp, and my dad’s 12^th grade basketball coach, Willard Pierce, were inside that building adding planks that formed the frame of a replica of a Viking ship.

Building that ship was Robert Asp’s dream, a dream that began in 1971, just months after I left Minnesota for my dream.  That summer, Robert fell from a ladder and had to spend most of the summer recuperating.  During that time, his brother Bjarne took Norwegian language classes at a local college.  And together with Robert’s reading about Norwegian Viking ships, the dream began.

By 1974, Robert had located a source for timber.  He thought he would need 15 oak trees – eventually he needed more than 100.  By 1974, he had found a place to build the ship, the abandoned potato warehouse that the city of Hawley agreed to rent to him for $10 a year, with the proviso that he would demolish the building when he was finished.

By 1980, the Viking ship replica, christened Hjemkomst, Norwegian for Homecoming, was completed, the front wall of the warehouse had been removed so the ship could be extracted, and the ship reached Lake Superior, just outside Duluth, Minnesota.  Robert was able to sail on his ship that summer.  But he had been diagnosed with leukemia back in 1974, just as the construction began in earnest, and in December of 1980, he died.  His brother Bjarne also died before Robert completed the Hjemkomst.  The task was left to his children to complete the dream – to sail the Hjemkomst from Minnesota to Norway.

In 1982, four of his children, plus friends and a Norwegian sailor and square-rigged long boat captain, sailed the more than 6000 miles from Duluth, through the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence Seaway, and across the Atlantic Ocean, to Bergen, Norway.  After a year of storage in Oslo, the Hjemkomst returned to Minnesota where it now resides as the centerpiece of the Hjemkomst Heritage Center in Moorhead, Minnesota, my home town.

I left Minnesota in the last days of 1969 in search of my dream.  Just a few months later, Robert Asp began work on his dream.  Within a dozen years, his dream transformed not just one, but two towns in Minnesota – my mother’s home town of Hawley, Minnesota, which had adopted the Hawley Shipyard, and my hometown, Moorhead, Minnesota.  Robert Asp’s dream made me realize that being a descendant of Norwegian immigrants isn’t necessarily something to run away from – it might just be a reason for celebration.