I considered the strangeness of that: That everything Norwegian, all that was particular to the west coast of Norway and to the Hatløy family, had been completely obliterated in just two generations in the U.S. If it had been my grandfather Johannes who had emigrated instead of his younger brother Magnus, I could have been the one sitting there, up in North Dakota, an American waiting for my Norwegian relative who was roughly the same age as me and to my surprise had announced his arrival this very Sunday.

I told Peter. He laughed and said he had never met anyone less American than me.

Magnus Hatløy was a Norwegian when he emigrated to the United States in 1926. When I saw him for the first time, more than 50 years later, his name was Magnus Hatloy, and he was an American. Some years ago, I was sent copies of several letters from my mother’s family, among them some from Magnus’s first years in the new country. He had no education, no money; he left home with no clear plans or prospects, going alone by ship to New York. Everything must have seemed uncertain and precarious to him. He went northwest, to Grafton, where he did odd jobs and saved money to buy his own land. The first years were rough. In one letter from 1929 he writes that he has been cheated out of $400. He had spent two summers working for a man by the name of John Hopperstad, who, it turned out, went bankrupt and was unable to pay his wages.

I have never heard of a worse man. After I found out there was nothing left to take, I went over to him and told him what kind of a man he was, and since then I turn my face away whenever I see him coming.

When Magnus wrote this, he was working on a farm. He wanted to quit, but times were so hard that there was no other work to be had. He wrote home that he was attending “correspondence school” to become a railway man and hoped he would be hired in the spring. He also wrote that he hadn’t seen Martha, the Norwegian girl he met on the Atlantic passage, for eight months, but she sent him a letter twice a week.

She is a splendid girl and she is pure. I just received a very fine birthday present from her. It was a coat or “bathrobe” that one wears when one takes a bath on a Sunday morning. It cost many a dollar. . . . Oh yes, there are plenty back home who think, they sure live well over there in America, but there are more of those here who think they live better in “the Old Country.” It was annoying to lose the money, but I am young and strong and while I am in good health, things can only get better. Certainly times will improve now that we have the new president, Hoover. He is a good fellow to the common man.

In the summer of 1932, times were still bad. Now, Martha wrote home. She was working as a domestic servant for a rich family in Oak Park, outside Chicago.

Here the trees are very green and give a lovely shade, there are stately gardens with a great many flowers. . . . Only rich people live here, . . . and if one only has enough money, one can get everything one wants. I will not mention hard times, it seems it is the same everywhere, not just here. It is rather terrible, and when the rich lose their wealth, it is bad for those of us who have nothing, too. . . . And I do see things in a fairer light now than this winter. Magnus has work, and even if it is only for the summer, it is better than nothing. He doesn’t earn much, I don’t think, just enough to survive. . . . For the time being, marriage and farming must remain up in the air. When one has no income, I suppose it is better not to be married.

In fact, within a year Magnus and Martha would be married and have their first child, David. They lived in two rooms with no furniture of their own, but they had bought a radio, Martha wrote, and it lightened up the place.

David was my mother’s cousin, and it was his son we were now on our way to see, presumably on the same farm where Magnus and Martha lived until they died.

Late in the afternoon, the landscape began to change, for the first time in three days. It happened gradually and almost imperceptibly. A snow-covered field might appear among the trees to the right, a snow-covered meadow among the trees to the left. There was more open land, and eventually the clumps of trees became the exception, and farms appeared, with big barns and towering silos. Soon the plains stretched out endlessly on both sides, an utterly flat, utterly white landscape. The sun burned soundlessly in the lofty blue sky. It was enormous, and I glanced at it now and then. I had never seen the sun that big.

A factory appeared in the distance, its white smoke a long ribbon across the blue sky, immobile as a photograph. Nothing moved except the little cars speeding along the highway. As if burdened by light, the sun slowly sank toward the horizon. The blue of the sky, which all that day had been open and full of light, seemed to contract, as if the light were being sucked out of it.

We crossed an old iron bridge and entered North Dakota. In the little border town we turned right, and for the next few miles we had the sun at our backs, until it finally sank out of sight and the darkness back east rose like water in a tank, from the ground up into the sky, where the stars appeared one after the other. For long periods, the darkness extended unbroken to both sides, occasionally perforated by small clusters of lights from solitary farm buildings or homes.

It felt as if we were driving into the depths of something.

Around 7 p.m., we drove up to Mark’s house. It lay by itself far out on an empty plain, surrounded by darkness. When we got out, the cold seemed to grab hold of my cheeks, digging its claws into them.