Traveling

My friend Claire was raised in Jamaica. She likes to talk about an end of life experience the Jamaican people call “traveling.” Claire explains it this way. When people are rounding the corner and it’s clear the end is in sight, they begin to travel back in time. People at the bedside of the traveling person will hear strange things. If the dying person was a teacher, chances are they’d hear the person talking to a student or explaining a math problem or asking a question that belongs in the classroom and not in the hospital bed. Or, if the dying person was a car mechanic, his mind might travel to a crank shaft or to a new set of tires. Traveling, Claire says, is a sure sign the end is here. Almost always in the traveling stage, there are dead people floating around the room, talking to the ill person as if the veil between life and death is slipping away like fog pierced by burning sunlight. Traveling, it seems, allows a person to flip through the pages of life’s scrapbook one last time before closing it for good and putting it on the shelf.

For some reason, I think of my great-grandfather when I hear the word “traveling.” I never knew the man, since he died in 1926. But I grew up on stories about him from my grandmother who fed me these stories like the butter bread she’d put on my plate at supper time. His name was Bernard Wilde. The name, at least to my ears, sounds strong, like it would be uncomfortable on anybody who was not made of hard wood. It belongs with somebody who has calloused hands and big knuckles. Granted, the boy may not have been as strong as the man he would become, since we all start out as cry babies, but I suspect Bernard the boy grew quickly into Bernard the man. He was born in Ludinghousen Westphalia, Germany on November 11, 1842. His story, as far as my grandmother related it, began when he was a young man of 21 years. Perhaps he didn’t share stories of his boyhood with her or, more likely, his boyhood years were not seen as exceptional enough to pass on to others. What is known–thanks to a vigilant genealogist in the family–is that Bernard was the second of six children born to his parents who had married in 1830. He was named after his father, who was a farmer. Although the family history doesn’t say it, the elder Bernard died an early death, leaving his widow and six children behind.

My grandmother’s version of her dad’s life starts when he was a young man in Germany trying to escape conscription into the German army. His country, like many other European countries at the time, was afflicted regularly with regional conflicts and popular uprisings. It was a tumultuous time that would lead in France to the French Revolution. It is no less severe in Germany. Bernard’s mother, not wanting to sacrifice her firstborn son to a cause without end that had already devoured too many young men, hid him in the Black Forest so that the passing army couldn’t grab him up and draft him into service. How long he hid in the forest is not known, at least to me. In time, when it was safe to bring him out of the forest, she sent him on a ship to America, where she hoped a better life would be his. I remember Grandma occasionally would bring out a folded and fragile piece of paper that she kept in a old pouch that had served as a hand purse at an earlier time. The paper was the record of his entry into America when he stepped off the ship in New York harbor.

He was not alone in his migration. There was a flight from Europe for the same reason or other reasons, such as crop failures. What often distinguished German immigrants were two things: First, they settled in German communities already established in America, preferably where other relatives lived or where other people from the same area in Germany now lived. This fact often resulted in their being thought of as clickish or stand-offish. But in this way, they kept their language, their religion, and their culture. The second fact about the German immigrants was the higher skill set that they brought with them. Many were craftsmen and skilled in carpentry or in farming. They were considered hard workers. As a result, they found better employment than the Irish or the Italians who had to suffer in low-end jobs such as railroad construction or canal diggers or road workers. Their women often worked as chamber maids or in sweat shops in congested cities on the East Coast. On the other hand, three-fifths of the German immigrants settled in rural areas where they would become farmers.

Bernard Wilde was one of those farmers. He found his way to Wisconsin, probably because other relatives already lived there. Once there, he began farming. And, as with so many other immigrants, he saved every dime he could to send back home to his mother and siblings. In time, they also immigrated to America and would settle in Hollandtown, Wisconsin, as had Bernard. Bernard’s mother would die in October of 1891 at the age of 83. Two of his sisters would marry in time, as did his two younger brothers. Another sister entered St. Agnes Convent in Fon Du Lac, Wisconsin and would take the name Veronica. Bernard, for his part, would marry Petronella Heesacker on January 4, 1871 in De Pere, Wisconsin. He was 28 years old.

Bernard and Petronella would have twelve children, seven girls and five boys. My grandmother, Caroline, was the tenth child born to them. The first three children were born in Wisconsin. Then the family moved to Platte County, Nebraska, where the remaining nine children were born. The German immigrants, having come from small parcels of farm land in Germany where land was scarce because of the density of the population or because it belonged to the blue bloods , were enamored with the much larger parcels of land available in America. So, with a vision towards more farmland, they tended to go where more acres could be had.

Bernard’s story takes an interesting turn in 1897 when he moved his family to New Mexico. At this point in his life, he was 55 years old. His youngest child, Ted, was five years old. My grandmother never gave an explanation for the move to me, a move which now seemed odd, given the two oldest children of Bernard and Petronella already had married in Wisconsin and had begun their own families. Later family anecdotes provided by my older aunts suggested Bernard had developed a drinking problem in Wisconsin and it was hoped a new place would rid him of old vices. While the Irish were known for “the Irish curse,” the Germans were not immune to alcoholism.

But the new place called New Mexico carried other dangers. While I do not know where the family settled in New Mexico, it had to be in the southeastern part of the state. I know because my grandmother enjoyed telling the story of how as a young girl of nine she and her family would see colonies of bats flying through the night air. They could not understand why the area had such a density of bats. Unknown to them, a few years earlier, in 1885, a young man named Ned Shattuck, along with his dad, were searching for a stray cow when they saw the same bat colonies fly from a cavern. They said it looked and sounded like a whirlwind. Stories of such a cave slowly spread. But it would be some years before “Carlsbad Caverns” would become known and explored. Imagine a little boy of five–as I was at the time–hearing my grandmother tell the story of those battalions of bats at night that startled them, but which they knew not where or why they came. It makes an impression. I still think bats are eerie creatures. I never liked Batman, for that matter and for the same reason.

But the greater danger was not the bats. The greater danger came in the strong anti-Catholic sentiments among the locals that were directed at this German Catholic family living among them. It was an anti-Catholic fever that had spread across the United States during this same time period–likely because most of the European immigrants were Catholic–and it took ugly forms in the Know Nothing Party and in the Klu Klux Klan. My grandmother said that the hatred became dangerous when her younger sister, Maggie, came home from school with a bleeding gash on her head where classmates had hurled rocks at her because she was Catholic. That was the final straw for Bernard Wilde. He had to move his family to a safer and a more hospitable place.

At the time, there were several well-known German newspapers published in the United States specifically for the German-speaking population. These newspapers often carried advertisements for available lands or new communities being founded. It was through one of these newspapers that Bernard Wilde found an advertisement for a new German-Catholic community being established in the neighboring state of Texas. And, coincidentally or providentially, the place carried the name “Rhineland.” The name alone had to have been enticement enough for Bernard, having grown up near the Rhine River in Germany. He probably saw the hand of God pointing him to this place called Rhineland, like Abraham of old who was told to leave Ur for a new place that would be promised to him and to his descendants by God himself.

So, Bernard’s traveling did not end in New Mexico. Now, fifty-six years old, he packed up and headed to Texas. The family moved in two covered wagons, with their livestock alongside the wagons. The women slept in the wagons at night. The men slept on the ground. My grandmother–ten years old–said she helped drive one of the wagons. She explained it as owing to her “always being a tom-boy.” They covered the most miles on Christmas Day, 1897, as they crossed West Texas. I recollect it was 25 miles for that day’s journey. I also remember Grandma telling me that they stopped along the way to visit her sister, Lizzie, who had been sent by train ahead of them to a boarding school in Stanton, Texas operated by nuns so that Lizzie could learn enough of her catechism lessons to receive her First Communion. After visiting with Lizzie, they continued on their way and arrived in Rhineland, Texas in 1898 after almost two months on the road.

The new community had been started three years earlier by a priest, Fr. Joseph Reisdorff, who wanted to provide communities where the Germans could retain their religion and their ways and be safe from persecution or hostility. The early years of the community–like any start-up–were difficult ones. One of the early settlers to Rhineland said that, given the choice, he’d rather rent out Rhineland and live in hell. Some newcomers stayed. Others left because of the same sentiment. Bernard Wilde stayed.

He bought a section of land, 640 acres, and did as he always had done. He farmed. Two crops were farmed in the area–cotton in the fall and wheat in the summer. Bernard’s and Petronella’s older children moved from Nebraska to join the family in Rhineland, where some would stay for the remainder of their lives and others would move on to other places. My grandmother chose to live her life in Rhineland. Bernard, by all estimations, was a good farmer. He made enough to support his family. One of my grandmother’s stories that she liked to tell was how her dad would walk to the Brazos River each morning, maybe a mile or less from the farmhouse. And along the way, if it was summertime, he would pick a handful of wild ripe plums from the thickets that grew along his path to the river. This would be his breakfast. Grandma always liked to add that her dad ate the whole plum, never spitting out the pit, but swallowing it as well as the fruit. Those wild plum thickets still grow in the same place. I never eat one that I don’t take care to spit out the pit. I choose caution. So it rightly can be said I’m not the strong man that my great-grandfather was. At the very least, I don’t have his strong stomach.

As Bernard and Petronella grew old, they would move the two miles from the farm into the community of Rhineland so that Petronella could walk to Mass each morning. That was the sole reason for their move. My grandmother says that her dad divided his farm among her and two of her brothers, with the stipulation that she had to live in between the two boys because he was sure there would be fierce fighting if the brothers lived side by side. Apparently Cain and Abel isn’t just a story in the Bible. As Bernard grew old, he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him confined to his bed for the last year or so of his life. My grandmother would go from the old home place to visit him each afternoon. On the wall of Bernard’s bedroom where he laid immobile was a wooden clock–not the cuckoo clock so synonymous with Germans–but a clock that had metal discs that provided music. This served as an alarm clock. It came with six “records,” or disks. These so-called disc boxes” were popular from 1890 to 1910 especially as music boxes and later were similarly built into clocks. As we know, they would be replaced by the phonograph.

During her visits, my grandmother would wind up the wall clock every afternoon so it would play one of its six tunes for her dad. One carried the title, “For Me and My Girl.” Another, “Blaze Away.” Still another, “Wrap the Flag Round the Boys.” Germans love their music and Bernard would lie in his bed listening to the music from his wall clock. He died on January 14, 1926. It was a Thursday. A Google search would show that nothing of significance happened on that day. But as we know, Google can be wrong. Bernard Wilde was buried in the Catholic cemetery behind the Catholic church in Rhineland. He was buried next to a beloved pastor, Father Columban Schmucky, who had died the year before. Bernard was 83 years old when he drew his last breath. My grandmother would name her next child Bernard, a son born three months after her dad’s death, after the dad she loved dearly all her life long. I am confident the feeling was mutual between the two of them.

As I think about my great-grandfather–and I do often–I wonder where he traveled those last days. Did he return to the Rhine area of Germany, where he grew up? Did he travel again on the ship that had brought him to a new country, a ship filled with danger and always the possibility of death? Did he travel to Wisconsin where he had met Petronella, who would become his wife of fifty-five years? Or did he return to New Mexico, a place that had been for him a haven of bats and bat-crazy people? Did he travel again alongside a covered wagon, bringing his family to still another new place? Where, I wonder, did Bernard Wilde do his “traveling?” At some point, I know his traveling back to the past ended and he set his eyes to what lie ahead. For a man who had traveled so far in this life, the next step into eternity must have seemed like a hop and a skip.

Bernard Wilde’s wall clock stays now on my wall. It still works, although I don’t use it as an alarm clock. I like to wind it up and play one of the discs for visitors. As a small boy of five, I always begged my grandmother to wind it up for me so I could listen to its music. As she did for her aged father, she did for her young grandson. She’d wind it up and she’d let me listen to the music as long as I liked. Sometimes, I’d have her play each of the six discs. Before she passed away at the age of 86, she let it be known that the clock would now be mine. Maybe she understood that I would be the one who remembered all the stories she had told about her dad. And maybe she knew that I would carry the music of his life in my heart till the day when I also would do my own “traveling.”

— Jeremy Myers