Travels of a Wannabe Cowboy: …Or How I Found Mesquite

By William Petersen

A delightful tale of an immigrants lifelong journey from the tiny village of Hornstrup in Nazi-occupied Denmark to the Mojave Desert town of Mesquite, Nevada, down on the Virgin River. On the way, he stopped off to enjoy a misspent youth in another little village, this time in Ireleth, in the beautiful English Lake District. Then it was off to America to spend a decade with a large conglomerate, before heading off to Utah for a thirty-year sojourn among the Mormons.
Full of enchanting depictions of village life in both Denmark and England, as well as life among the Mormons of Utah, its sure to captivate readers from both Europe and America.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453590768

William Petersen

William hails from Missouri and finds endless inspiration within the natural world for science-fiction, horror and fantasy... A proud member of the St. Louis Area Horror Writers' Society, William's writing has appeared in anthologies from The Bearded Scribe Press and JWK Fiction, as well as in Nebula Rift, Under the Bed, Far Horizons and Calamities Press Literary magazines.

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Copyright © 2010 by William Petersen.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2010915143

ISBN: Hardcover    978-1-4535-9075-1

ISBN: Softcover     978-1-4535-9074-4

ISBN: Ebook         978-1-4535-9076-8

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

DENMARK

One    We Begin—On the Vejle Fjord

Two    The Parish of Hornstrup

Three    Under the Heel of the Hun

Four    Meet the Parents

Five    Leaving Hornstrup

ENGLAND

Six    Land of Hope and Glory . . . and Millom too

Seven    The Petersen Boys Invade Ireleth

Eight    Boys, Girls, and Pubs

Nine    University Days . . . And a Jaunt to Denmark

Ten    So What Became of My Siblings?

Eleven    Carol . . . as told by Carol

AMERICA

Twelve    Coming to America—Schenectady, New York, 1964

Thirteen    Next Stop: Erie, Pennsylvania

Fourteen    Phoenix, Arizona—At Last

Fifteen    Bridgeport, Connecticut

Sixteen    Yippee—Back to Phoenix

Seventeen    Easterners Once Again . . . Medway, Massachusetts

Eighteen    Amongst the Mormons in Sandy, Utah

Nineteen    Mesquite, Nevada . . . End of Journey

Epilogue

Bibliography

To my Parents:

For giving me their love, and a free rein to chase my own rainbows.

And to Carol:

For her unstinting love and support, that allowed me to catch them.

Acknowledgements

I could not have written this without the significant contributions made by so many people, over the span of a couple of decades. I am especially grateful to Lene Rotwitt, who so patiently mined the storehouse of her mother Rigmor’s memories, and that of our aunt Ebba, and passed the nuggets on to me over the years.

And of course, I would have been lost without the stories my mother, Winnie, passed down to me, not only about the English folk, but also about my father Harald’s storied life and times in Denmark.

And let’s not forget Ole Friis’ pithy anecdotes of our Danish childhoods, back in the forties. Read on, you’ll see!

Little did they, and all the others, know that all their tales would be diligently recorded, and one day resurrected in the narrative that follows.

As for errors, there are obviously going to be a few, when one considers how many folk some of these stories were filtered down through, not to mention the inevitable losses in translation from Danish to English. But I take full responsibility for all mistakes, and welcome corrections.

As to veracity: I have tried to avoid being too cavalier with actual facts, beyond taking a wee bit of poetic license now and then, if for no other reason than to enliven the story.

And finally, I trust my British readers will forgive me if I tend to randomly murder the Queen’s English spellings with those wayward American versions!

Prologue

THERE IS a small town down in southern Nevada, in the great American Southwest, by the name of Mesquite. It started out as little more than a wet spot in the shifting sands of the Mojave Desert, clinging close to the Virgin River along the Old Spanish Trail. It lies perhaps seventy miles upstream from, and east of, what was to become Las Vegas . . . and if you were to make your way a further thirty miles or so up-river, struggling through the desolate Virgin River Gorge, you’d eventually arrive at the well-established southern Utah enclave of St. George, from whence came the Mormons who settled Mesquite. This was in the mid-to-late 1800’s, as the flock sought to expand its control of the West.

A little history perhaps . . . when Brigham Young, president of the Mormon church, first arrived in Utah in 1847, he initially intended to apply to the United States Congress for status as a territory, but changed his mind when he heard that California was about to seek statehood, which, if granted, would be sure to encroach on his territorial ambitions. He instead opted to hurriedly apply for statehood himself, to try to beat those impudent upstarts to it.

He put together an audacious scheme to acquire the bulk of the territory recently ceded to the United States by Mexico, intending to annex most of the land from Colorado to California, Idaho to Arizona. No fool, this Brigham fellow! He called his provisional state Deseret, and it held sway as the ultimate authority in the Great Basin region of the West for just a couple of years, until 1850. At that time, Congress abandoned the idea of a new state, and instead created the Utah Territory, with Young as its first governor.

But those Latter-Day Saints, as they dubbed themselves, weren’t about to relinquish control just like that. They formed a clandestine shadow government alongside the Territorial legislature, with the hope of eventually re-establishing their State of Deseret. This would naturally have a religiously-inspired constitution, and would continue to pursue Brigham’s ambitious dreams of dominating as much of the wide-open West as possible, while it was still there for the taking.

This surreptitious effort went on until at least 1872, and was no doubt on the minds of the handful of settlers from St. George when they founded the settlement few years later. They originally named it Mesquite Flat, establishing it as an agricultural colony in the rich bottom-lands of the Virgin River, around 1880. But when a flash flood wiped out their irrigation canals, they soon departed.

They were replaced around 1887 by one Dudley Leavitt and his five wives and almost forty children, but they didn’t fare much better either, giving up their endeavors less than half a dozen years after they first arrived.

Then in 1894, a few adventurous families from the nearby settlement of Bunkerville got a firmer toe-hold, initially growing raisins as their main crop, and the town began to attract new settlers. But growth was excruciatingly slow, until the automobile came along in the ensuing century, the pervasive tourists with it. And when the Interstate highway came through in the seventies, the motels and casino resorts soon followed.

And that’s the spot where Carol and I finally landed, early in this new millennium . . . but that’s the end of the story, and as needs must, I’d had better start at the beginning!

Denmark

ONE

We Begin—On the Vejle Fjord

A SINGULARLY IMPORTANT event took place in Denmark, back in the dark days of November 1940, amidst the roar of war.

I refer, of course, to my birth.

According to my mother—and she would be the one in the know—it was a wild, blustery, moonless night when I made my appearance in this topsy-turvy world, down in a little coastal village by the name of Bredballe Strand, tight on the Vejle Fjord.

How do women struggling with an impending birth remember such inconsequential and irrelevant details as the weather, years later? Beats me . . . I’m of the male persuasion, and thus not prone to giving birth, but I do suspect that it has something to do with the martyrdom of the moment, sort of like knowing just where you were, and what you were doing, when a major news event or personal trauma occurred.

I don’t know what they were thinking at the time, but my intrepid parents named me William Hodgson Pedersen. In Lutheran Denmark, in that day, that would have been a decidedly odd pair of Christian names, and would certainly have been seen as an audacious poke in the eye of the ecclesiastic authorities, charged as they were with keeping Danish names pure and unsullied.

The Hodgson moniker in particular would have been looked upon with an especially jaundiced eye. The fact that it would also have been quite unpronounceable to the Danish voice was just an added itch to scratch.

I don’t know how it goes in Denmark today, but back then, you see, you couldn’t just name your newborn after your stove, or your favorite ingrown toe-nail, as you might well do today, in this ‘enlightened’ age. But in those days, if a name was not to be found on the official listings, special dispensation had to be obtained before one could proceed with a baptism.

Perhaps they failed to get it, or maybe they didn’t bother—it was, after all, wartime.

This might also explain why I wasn’t baptized until I was six or seven years of age. Although I’d think that by that time, such trivialities as what you called your kid had probably been tossed aside in the post-war years, as a more permissive society emerged, and the powers of the church waned.

These peculiar names were also destined to become a bit of an embarrassment to me later, when I came to my senses, in this land of Lars, Jens, and Hans. Forget the Hodgson, even William shortened to Bill left me open to a bit of ragging when I eventually went to school, as this diminution is similar to the Danish word for ‘car’. Dust-ups with playmates would thus occasionally come into play.

Of course, playground confrontations of this nature would never happen today, as modern parents seem to trip over themselves to saddle their poor offspring with the most bizarre, misspelled names possible. Ergo, today’s differences are the new constants, and ridicule is more likely to be leveled at a kid named Mary or John.

But enough about me, if that’s possible, and on to locales . . .

BREDBALLE STRAND was a laid-back little village, located right on the edge of the fjord, nestled between two other sleepy little beach-towns, Brønsodde to the west, and Tirsbæk, off in the other direction. Population of all three was but a few hundred, I’d guess.

A two-lane country road meandered between the three, with a single railway line running alongside. A little steam engine could usually be seen chugging along it, spewing copious plumes of smoke and steam as it hauled passengers on a Sunday afternoon to the many beaches along the coast, or else freight, to destinations unknown.

During the war, however, I suppose it was more likely to be carrying troops and war matériel than happy beach-goers.

Competition as to who had the best beaches was usually claimed by Tirsbæk, but we had better sea-views in Bredballe, sitting atop a gentle slope as we did. From our perch, we overlooked a little wooden pier, set in a tranquil inlet that separated us from Brønsodde on its far side.

The pier is still there today, if a little reduced in size, but the beauty of the view over the water is now marred by a major highway bridge that spans the fjord, in plain sight, just beyond the inlet. Depending on your artistic point of view, this striking structure either adds to or detracts from your photo opportunity. But that’s progress, right?

Brønsodde itself was more of an elitist enclave, I’m told, with quite elegant houses sitting on a little peninsula, rendering their private sea-fronts pretty much inaccessible to the rest of us proletarians from up the road. I found a vintage 1943 photo taken from Bredballe, looking toward Brønsodde, that I was able to compare to an almost identical picture I found on-line. Other than the bridge in question, nothing at all seemed to have changed . . . well, the pier, as I said, may have gone down-hill a little.

This fjord, I should explain, is not really a fjord in the Norwegian sense of massive cliffs and deep, mysterious waters, but rather a pleasant little estuary, cascading into the Kattegat Sea, with soft sandy beaches. It lies on the east coast of the Danish mainland of Jylland, a flat, sandy peninsula which the Brits call Jutland. This in fact might well be a more appropriate name, since it literally juts up from the shoulders of Germany.

Every time I see a map of the country, it always reminds me of a surprised sea-horse, sans tail, caught in the act of birthing the islands of Fyn and Sjælland and all the rest of the surrounding islets. Grab an atlas, and Google a seahorse dispensing young, and you’ll see what I mean.

Or not . . . it could of course just be a figment of my whimsical imagination, like some Rorschach test on steroids. I’m sorry I even brought it up.

The new war was going full blast by that fateful November of my birth, and Denmark was already under the yoke of the Nazis when I came along. The Wehrmacht had simply bullied its way through the token resistance put up by the Danes at the tiny border, no blitz-krieg or Panzers required, and then marched lockstep into every decent-sized town in our small country.

This included the nearby seaport of Vejle, the county seat, which was located at the head of our pleasant little fjord.

At the time, we were renting part of a large house in Bredballe, which had a splendid location atop a hillside, overlooking the sea. It was home to my father Harald, mother Winnie, brother Tom, and the new moi, plus an aunt and uncle, as we shall see. Tom had come into the world the previous September, just as the war got off the blocks, up in the mid-size town of Århus, where Harald was from.

HARALD HIMSELF was a mostly self-taught maker of stringed musical instruments, predominantly jazz guitars in his early years, with the odd violin thrown in . . . but he was not afraid to tackle a banjo, mandolin, or even a ukulele, if the notion, or better still, a well-paying order, got the better of him.

My mother Winnie was from England. Having left school at the then-advanced age of sixteen, she went to work for a family in St Albans, near London, as a live-in nanny for their children. The head of the family was a professor at the London School of Economics, and while he traveled extensively on lecture tours, his wife, who just happened to be Danish, would go off to visit her family in Århus, Winnie and her charges in tow. The family lived across the street from Harald . . .

Serendipity!

But we’ll revisit these two gallants in more detail, in due course.

In the meantime . . .

BECAUSE OF fairly heavy Allied bombing up in Århus, Harald and Winnie, with three-month-old Tom, had initially moved to a very isolated farmhouse south of the town of Horsens, sharing the rented place with Harald’s brother Egon and his wife, Anna. But they were all sent packing by the landlord, when he accused them of swiping an old coffee-grinder of his.

As Winnie tells it, the grinder was not worth a sou, but the pigheaded farmer nevertheless refused to let the matter drop, and called in the politi. So when they showed up later in our newly rented Bredballe digs, looking for that worthless coffee-grinder, Egon and Anna hightailed it back to Århus, bombs or no bombs.

You’d have to think that the police would have had better things to do in the middle of a war. Either that, or there’s more to this innocent little tale than Winnie lets on!

But we stayed put, now just the four of us, enjoying the extra elbow room. But it wasn’t to be for very long.

We were apparently quite poor, and having sold that coffee grinder . . . no, no, I’m just kidding! Actually, we had neglected to pay the local Bredballe grocer, and no doubt the rent too, so we merely absconded in the night, moving a mile or two along the coast to Bybæk, which lies just on the far side of Brønsodde.

Apparently that was far enough away in those days for a person to escape the clutches of even the most ardent bill-collector!

HERE MY BROTHER Peter made his debut, in November of 1941, almost a year to the day after me. He, like Tom, was also given the added moniker of Hodgson. You know, I’ve often wondered what possessed our parents—or, more likely, just Winnie—to select such purely English handles. It smacks of an intention to return to the old sod at some point in the future. But that’s always been vehemently denied, even after it actually happened.

Incidentally, while Tom had the luxury of being born in the comfort of a maternity ward up in Århus, both Peter and I suffered the ignominy of being born at home . . . where a mother-in-waiting can look out the window, and get a view of the weather, and the state of the moon, for the future edification of her offspring. Cool!

Naturally, I remember none of these many events personally—that in fact would be quite a phenomenal feat—nor do I have recoverable memories of these seaside villages, but I’ve heard all the family chat about these early days over the many past years, and I’ve seen enough photos to know that it must have been quite a halcyon life, despite the fact that we were poor, and the homeland under occupation.

A sandy beach is still a sandy beach, war or no war, poor or not poor.

But, as they say, all good things must come to an end. After a year or so in Bybæk, it was apparently time to move on . . .

TWO

The Parish of Hornstrup

AND SO, in late 1943 we moved yet again, this time some six or seven miles inland, to the quiet little farming hamlet of Hornstrup. No more beaches . . . what a bummer that must have been, especially for us three kids. Harald, no doubt needing more room for his workshop, or perhaps tired of renting, bought a rather run-down cottage from the Danish author and playwright, Leck Fischer, for the sum of three hundred kroner—a paltry amount even in those days.

Perchance, was that where that grocery money went?

In an odd coincidence, I was looking through some old books recently and what should I come across but a first edition of one of Fischer’s books, all these years later. The book was entitled En Dreng fra Gaden—‘A Boy from the Street’—published in 1932. Written in Danish of course, but I was nevertheless able to muddle through it, despite all my many years apart from the language.

The parish of Hornstrup was split into three distinct enclaves. The old, central part of the village sat in a hollow at the crossover of a couple of rural gravel roads. One, running east-west, was named Gammel Hornstrupvej, and the other, running north-south, was called Fidalvej. At least those are their names today, according to GoogleEarth . . . I’m not at all sure they were even officially given names in the forties. Vej is the Danish for street or road, by the way, and gammel means old.

Scattered around the four corners of these two cross-streets were a few homes and a number of farms, but no shops or other businesses that I recall. All in all, quite rural and peaceful.

The requisite Lutheran church and its affiliated parochial school were well removed from the rest of the village, sitting perhaps half a mile south at the end of Fidalvej, atop a small rise, in what was called Kirkeby. No doubt strategically located there so the priest could look over his flock, and be on the watch for sinning.

I remember him well, and he me, no doubt . . . but we’ll not go there just yet.

It was a beautiful church, nonetheless, quite ancient, with white-washed exterior walls and a red tile roof, surrounded by an immaculately maintained graveyard, nary a weed in sight. Each grave was surrounded by a small, well-trimmed privet hedge or wrought-iron railings.

But then that’s quite typical of every picturesque church I have ever seen in Denmark, even though the pews inside are rarely filled nowadays.

There was yet a third part of the village, known as Mølleby, located at the east end of Hornstrupvej, where that road joined the main highway to Viborg. I remember that there was at least a small country store there, as well as a picturesque windmill—hence the name Mølleby—where the local wheat, rye, and barley crops were milled. I also seem to recall that there was a Kro—a country pub—there, but of course I had not yet fine-tuned an interest in such establishments . . . that was yet to come.

All in all, it made for a typical farming community in the Danish countryside of the thirties and forties. The people were hard-working, careful with their hard-won kroner, but not necessarily poor. True inhabitants of the land, they were kindly, yet reserved and often suspicious of strangers and the changes they feared they might bring to their centuries-old way of life.

And, they went to church every Sunday, fair weather or foul!

THE COTTAGE we moved into was quite old, small, and very isolated at the end of a long, winding dirt lane that branched off Gammel Hornstrupvej, to the west of Hornstrup . . . in the opposite direction from the school, incidentally, which made for a long slog when we eventually enrolled there, but we’ll get to that in due course.

It had a bedroom at one end, to the left as you faced the front, and a living room at the other, with a small kitchen in between at the back, and a little entryway at the front. Attached to the living room end was a sort of lean-to extension, which housed the kids’ bedroom, as well as a small wash-room.

There was also a dusty attic or loft above it all, accessed from the entryway by a rickety set of narrow stairs. In reality, they weren’t much more than a glorified ladder.

As to the exterior, the outer walls were of white-washed brick, and the roof was constructed of tar-paper ‘build-up’, set at quite a steep angle . . . as the roofer who fell off it one day will happily attest to.

Poking out of the center ridge was a single brick chimney.

But it did have a splendid garden, replete with fruit trees: plum, pear, and apple.

We’d often hop out of our low-set bedroom window in the autumn, when the fruit was ripe, for a clandestine late-night snack of apples or pears. We avoided the plums, however. They were way too messy to take to bed, and would have left too many tell-tale marks upon our bedding, leaving us open to questions of one stripe or another.

There was also a good-sized vegetable patch off to one side, well fertilized as we’ll see later, and large well-groomed stands of gooseberries, raspberries, and red currants. These I would pick—entrepreneur that I was—and sell to the local ‘købmand’.

That’s grocer to you.

As soon as we moved in, Harald fixed up the small attic as his and Winnie’s bedroom, improving the stairs of course, and then converted the larger downstairs bedroom to his workshop. He wasn’t about to climb stairs to go to work every day, wasn’t