146. Hanging On

I’m reading Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, the first of a set of 1950s-60s novels that follow the lives of Swedish families as they leave what binds them in the old world to find something better to hang onto in the new. This first book describes shrinking landholdings as families grow, and the harsh laws that give government and church power over the lives of individuals—especially the poor. Some choose to leave. Moberg describes those who stay—rich and poor, and those who leave, mostly poor. 

The poor farmers and farm families who made the early emigrant voyages in the 1850s traveled on crowded sailing ships, adrift from land, at the mercies of sea law and the sea. They hung onto the rails above the sea, and when the sea roared they held onto their bunks in the locked hold. They were often sick, louse-ridden and doubtful of their consequential decision to leave the safety of home—which mid-journey appeared to some sweeter from a distance and the foreign life at sea. They hung onto religion—or despised it; held onto children and watched them die; blamed partners and blamed themselves for the journey; they practiced home remedies and used up the captain’s medicine chest. They hung on.

It might sound corny, but our pandemic is like a raging sea in a strange world—with an unknown world on the other side. Some of us get sick; some die. Children get left behind, and parents lose children. The weather and the Covid calms—and then surges again. No one knows whether it will be over in another six months or a year—or many more. Sometimes it seems a new variant might take off and kill millions before medicine, science, government and religion can make their next counter moves.

We all look for things and people to hang on to: partner, parent, friend, doctor, vaccine, diet, mask, religion, charismatic leader or soothsayer. The worst is to be alone—or to have a mother or grandfather trapped with Covid in a nursing home or hospital you can’t visit. Their aloneness is as bad as your own.

We hang onto the past—the way the world once was, or as we remember it. We hang onto a vision of normalcy, the way that things should have been and might be soon, the graduations, weddings, and trips we’re supposed to be on. And we hang onto dreams.

The guts of the grasping and the hanging on that we see on news shows and in social media, that erupt at school board meetings and in mandate protests, are all there in Moberg’s account of Swedes heading to an unknown world in 1850.

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