I had a window seat on the morning flight to Minneapolis. I’d never been to Minneapolis before, but one branch resembles the next. I sat comfortably in my seat. Far below me, a lake of oceanic proportions, and the rivers ran, as rivers do, like thick arteries across the terrain. Through slitted eyes I regarded my hands on the armrests. The bones of each hand looked like bone beads; the tendons were milky, and the red was what Mom called pluckmeat. The plane’s narrow porthole opened out onto the clouds and, seen between them, the prairie below, and I dropped off. I was woken by the usual announcement that we’d begun our descent. Far beneath me, a watercourse was doubling on itself like a large intestine.

Upon landing, I drove straight to the branch office, where I presented targets and lifted the veil on future projects. They’d bought pizza for after. Then we sat there—I with the staff list, they with scarcely concealed discomfort in their faces. “How Nordic,” I said, referring to the Scandinavian surnames on the list. “Vestergaard, Dahl, Svensson, Moller,” I read aloud, and then they smiled. While these descendants of the Scandinavian exodus gnawed the last soft dough from their pizza crusts, I set their names in historic perspective. “Your name means the western farm, your name’s a valley, you’re the son of the guy called Sven, and someplace in your relatives’ distant past, a man walks around as a miller. My own name is a town by the German border, and I grew up in farm country. When we were going to have a chicken for dinner, my father chopped its head off, and afterward my mother put the entire chicken in a great big pot of boiling water. Then my mother plucked the feathers.” I demonstrated with my hands how she did it. “Feathers everywhere, especially the steaming down on 43her fingers. She couldn’t get the down off her fingers, it was a chore,” I explained. They were watching me closely, and I imagined some ruddy-faced peasant from a village south of Sæby staring back at me through their emigrant eyes as if I were the parish clerk.

Later, when I was checking in, I noticed the big river I’d seen from the air. It flowed along the foot of a slope here, north of the hotel. “Oh, there’s the river,” I said to the desk clerk, because I like a friendly atmosphere between me and a hotel. She looked at me suspiciously and said, “Yeah, the Mississippi,” and I said, “Really? The Mississippi?” And she said, “Yes sir, the Mississippi.” And I said that that came as a surprise, that I hadn’t had a clue. In my mind, the great mythic river ran through a sweaty Southern lowland. “This far north?” I asked the clerk, who handed me a key card. “Even the Mississippi has to start somewhere,” she said.