Ride, ride, ranke

“Ride Away, ride away
on Blanke
our dapple-grey mare.
On Blanke's back sits Sigfrid
our little maid so fair.”

Prologue - Ride away, ride away

There wasn’t much holding her to the world just yet, but her grandfather’s lap was like an anchor. His old hands were tough like willow bark and soft like the wool from the spring sheep, and she always felt safe there, wrapped in his vast, steady comfort.

– Ride, ride ranke, hesten heter Blanke –

His voice carried the scent of fish, smoke from a camp fire, and evening calm. He told her the same nursery rhyme every time, and every time she laughed, even though she knew how it ended. She leaned her forehead against his coarse wool jacket, breathing in tobacco and old wood.

Beyond the parlor window, the Eidsnes fjord lay broad and still. The ice had loosened its grip a few weeks ago, and snow still clung in patches on the hillside. It was spring, but her cheeks were cold. Grandfather wrapped his wool coat tighter around her.

– You must remember this nursery, little one, he said, bending down toward her. – There are days when only old words can hold memory in place.

Sigfrid didn’t understand what he meant—not yet. But she nodded, and she took it in.

She didn’t know she would soon lose this great, warm sense of safety. That a faraway country was waiting. That everything familiar would soon become memory.

But she knew this: Grandfather loved her, and "ride, ride ranke" was their secret bond to something safe, something old, something eternal.

One day, she would sit alone and recall the sound of his voice.

Then she would close her eyes and say it out loud, just for herself:

– Ride, ride ranke...

Eidsnes – Childhood and Daily Life in the Fjord Village

They grew up between mountain and fjord, where the mountains loomed and the water lay still. The houses stood close together but silent. Eidsnes was little more than a circle of life, spun together by bonfires, church bells, and wool yarn.

Sigfrid had seven siblings, and each of them had a name that could be shouted into the wind without losing its ring. Her mother, Ragnhild, was a short, strong woman with a look that could silence quarrels and hands that never rested. She milked the cows, made cheese, picked berries, and sang evening songs with the same quiet strength. Every year she had a new child, and every year her face grew a little thinner.

Her father, Ivar, was away more often than home. He worked in Bergen, wrote for newspapers, spoke of things the children didn’t understand. He could be witty and warm, but sometimes his eyes were empty, like someone who was looking inward.

Sigfrid herself was light on her feet, with eyes that seemed to be waiting for something. She ran between forest and boathouse, tossed stones in the air and caught them on the back of her hand, laughed with her whole body. With her brothers she fished in the fjord, played with wooden boats, and built houses from stone and driftwood.

She started school at the age of seven. On her first day, her sister Inger and Inger’s friend each took one of her hands and led her through the door. The teacher was young, serious, and sat with his hands spread wide on the desk. He asked her to write a number, a 4. She wrote it upside down. He didn’t smile, but said:

— In this school, we do it this way.

She was given a slate and a stylus. It felt like treasure.

They went to school six days a week, Saturdays included. The teaching was strict, with little room for laughter. They memorized catechism, Bible history, arithmetic, writing. Sigfrid got up early to study, sat under a wool blanket and mumbled the lessons aloud. She wasn’t the best student, but she remembered.

On Sundays, the neighbors would row them across the fjord to church. Four men at the oars, a boat full of people in their finest clothes. The service was long, cold, and quiet. The children sat on the floor behind the high-backed pews and played silently. Sigfrid nestled against her mother’s skirt and felt her warmth through the wool.

In the evenings they lit bonfires by the shore. On May 17th, Norway’s Constitution Day, they marched two by two, with flags in their hands and dreams of something big. But the world was still small.

Shadow Over the Home – Father Disappears

It began like a whisper. Not a gust of wind, but something that moved between the walls, a low murmur that made her mother glance out the window more often than usual.

Her father, Ivar, stopped coming home as expected. Days turned to weeks, and the letters grew fewer. When he finally appeared in the doorway, his eyes weren’t fully present. He talked a lot but answered little. There was something unsettling about his smile—a smile trying to smooth over something he could no longer hold onto.

He was full of ideas, plans, words. But the money was never enough. The debt grew. Rumors and warnings arrived ahead of him. Sigfrid didn’t hear it directly, but she noticed. Her mother’s steps were on the floorboards. Grandfather came upstairs more often. The slate was put away more frequently. Meals grew quiet.

One evening she sat by the woodbox carving. Her father came in, buttoned his coat, and went straight to her mother. They spoke in low voices. She only caught fragments: “pawn... bank... debt... leave...”

The next morning, he was gone. No one said anything, but Inger cried at the table. Mother pulled herself together. Her hands didn’t shake. She gathered the children and said:

— We’ll get through this. Don’t be afraid. But you must help out.

That was when Sigfrid understood he wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Maybe never. Her mother carried it in her back, but not in her face. She did what she always did: tightened her belt and kept things going.

They learned later that Father had fled. The law was after him. The house was at risk of foreclosure.

That was how the packing began. Without drama. Without tears. Just a quieter mother and a home slowly emptied of things and warmth.

One country unraveled beneath them. Another waited across the sea. Sigfrid felt something tear loose. She had to hold on to what remained.

An Uncertain Future – Farewell and Departure

It was as if everything had lost its meaning, but not its value. Mother began to sort through what should be kept and what could be let go. In the hayloft, she hid the saddle. Other things too, though Sigfrid didn’t know what. She only knew that her mother had begun to leave traces behind that no authority could follow.

The sewing machine was wrapped in wool blankets, the spinning wheel tied with rope and wrapped again. These weren’t just objects. They were threads connecting who they had been to who they might become.

Her sister Inger and brother John left first. They were thirteen and sixteen. Envelopes had arrived from America, from her mother’s brothers. Tickets and money. The farms in South Dakota needed help.

One morning, the house felt quiet in a new way. As if it was waiting to be left behind.

Sigfrid didn’t help carry things to the boathouse. She slipped away between the houses, barefoot down the path to her friend. She couldn’t leave without saying goodbye. She needed to hold onto something, a softer ending.

When she returned, her grandfather stood by the shore, hands behind his back. His face was heavy.

— I know I’ll never see any of you again, he said softly.

Sigfrid said nothing. She couldn’t.

He turned and walked back up to the house, tears running down his cheeks. A whole life was left behind there—under the beams, in the chairs, in the songs they didn’t take with them.

The boat arrived. Neighbors rowed them across the fjord, just as they had to church so many times before. But this wasn’t a holy day. This was departure. Escape.

They spent the night in Bergen. The next day, they boarded the ship that would take them across the ocean. And once the sea lies between you and the place you come from, it isn’t just the land that disappears. It’s the language, the smells, the names, the small paths in the grass. Everything you don’t know you’ll miss.

But Sigfrid didn’t know yet what awaited her. She only knew that everything she knew was growing smaller with every pull of the oars.

Between Lands – The Journey to America

It began with fjord and boat. Neighbors rowed them to the landing, oars creaked against the wood, silence settled on their faces. Bergen was just a stop along the way. A city of cobblestone streets, rain, and waiting. The next day they crossed the North Sea by ship, everything salt and motion.

There wasn’t much space below deck. Body against body. Suitcases, vomit buckets, voices in foreign tongues. The smell of meat, cabbage, and fear. Mother stayed close to her children. She became ill, and Sigfrid brought her water, wiped her face with a cloth dipped in murky drinking water.

Sigfrid often sat by the railing, listening to the voices. Some flowed like brooks, others struck like stones. She was curious about who these people were, where they were going, what they had left behind. But every time she got too close, her mother pulled her back.

When they reached Boston, it felt like a flash of light after long days below deck. Land! Trees! The scent of something new, and at the same time, a pang in her chest. They were led through a building where men in uniforms asked questions and took notes. Stern eyes, long shadows.

A young woman was traveling with them. She wasn’t part of the family but had been given a ticket by a bachelor in South Dakota. Immigration officers demanded to know her intentions—was she planning to marry him? She became angry. Said she would pay him back. She wasn’t looking for a husband. Sigfrid heard her voice tremble and thought: there are many ways to flee.

They boarded a train heading west. In Chicago, during a stop, a man with a beard approached them, smiling, arms half-open.

Sigfrid didn’t recognize him. But her mother did. It was her father.

He had hidden behind the beard, fled Norway, fled the law, fled everything. Now he wanted to take some of the children. Mother tightened her jaw. But he took Olaf and Reginald with him.

It was another split. Another crack in what had once been whole.

The train moved on toward the prairie. And with every wheel that sang against the rails, Eidsnes grew farther away. The fjord, the mountains, the rhymes, the songs. They weren’t gone. But they no longer lived in the landscape. Now, they lived only in the memory of a girl who was soon too old to be a child.

Loneliness and Labor – A New Start in South Dakota

The land was flat, and everything felt unfamiliar. The sunlight was sharper, the sky higher. The prairie rolled in silent waves, as if waving a partial welcome.

They arrived at her mother’s brother’s farm. He was a bachelor, with cows and tools, and had sold his soul to the soil. Mother took to it immediately. She kept house, cooked, milked, hauled water, sewed, chopped wood. And the older children helped.

Sigfrid felt like a stranger, but not without worth. She knew how to milk a cow, how to keep her hands warm in the winter wind. She understood what it meant to work yourself weary and still not be finished.

School was different. The language even more so. The teacher forbade Norwegian. Sigfrid had to start in the first grade, even though she knew more than many others. But she had an ear for sounds, a memory for words. After four years, she was in sixth grade.

She got to know American children. Some smiled, others laughed at her. But she learned quickly. Grew used to new rules, new prayers, new foods. Still, inside her, the hills of Eidsnes kept singing.

Mother received letters. From Olaf, from Reginald. They were doing okay, they said. Living with their father—the man who had forgotten what it meant to be a father. But she knew they needed each other. She didn’t force her tears, but at night she would sit for a long time at the table, as if waiting for something.

Sigfrid was thirteen when she got her first job outside the home. Room and board, no pay. But she could be her own person, if only in the quiet hours when everyone else was asleep.

There was no longer room for children. No place for play, only usefulness. She bore it without words. Because that was simply how it was.

One night, she wrote her siblings' names in the margin of an old notebook. She wanted to remember their order, their voices. Because she knew: what isn’t written down can disappear. And she didn’t want to lose any more.

A New Border – Homestead Life on the border to Canada

There was a place where the world didn’t quite know what it was: not fully America, not quite Canada. That’s where her brothers found land. 160 acres each. Reginald, Olaf, and a cousin built a small cabin where their plots met in one shared corner. Three boys, three young men, three pairs of hands and one empty prairie.

They needed help. And Sigfrid, only fifteen, was sent there.

Mother no longer needed her at home. There were other mouths to feed, other chores. Her brothers needed her to care for the calf—the first one. The newborn animal needed warmth, food, rhythm. Just like she did.

At first, she was housed with a newlywed woman on the neighboring farm. But the woman's husband came home early from threshing. He sat at the table a long time, said little. His eyes were like ice water in the shadows. Sigfrid felt the unease crawl under her skin.

That night, she packed her few belongings and walked across the fields to her brothers' cabin. She told no one. She didn’t want to explain. She just couldn’t stay there.

The cabin was cold, simple, but it was her choice. She cared for the calf, cooked soup, washed dishes, read old Bible verses in the flickering light of a kerosene lamp. She was fifteen, no longer a child. But not quite grown. She lived in between. Between duties and dreams.

Those who lived out there helped one another. Men traveled far to thresh. Women cared for each other’s children. Borders existed, but not between those who needed each other to survive. They worked on both sides of the line, until customs posts and fences reminded them what was inside and what was outside.

At night, Sigfrid thought of Eidsnes. She missed the fjord, the mountains, her grandfather’s voice. But she didn’t write it down. Not yet. She carried it with her, something to be remembered when the time came to recall where she was from.

Loss and Transformation – A Woman in a New Land

Time no longer grew through play, but through labor. Sigfrid helped build a life from soil, sweat, and will power.

She completed her basic schooling while earning her keep in Portal, North Dakota. She sat at tables that weren’t hers, bathed in ponds that didn’t know who she was, while holding on to herself. Her mother cooked for miners near the state border, and her siblings scattered like seeds in the wind. They took root where they could, but never all in one place.

Sigfrid married young. He was of German descent, a man with quiet hands and a dream of something more. They had four children. She bore them one by one, as if her body knew the way without asking.

During the war, they moved to Bremerton, Washington – site of the United States Naval Shipyard, established in 1891. Like many others during WWII, they found work there: her husband at an ammunition depot, and Sigfrid in a rundown hotel. She scrubbed floors, made beds, cared for children, and welcomed travelers whose eyes searched for something that felt like home. She was tired, but steady.

She knew now how to hold a family together. How to build something without tears, without complaint. She no longer sang the old songs, but she still knew the tune, somewhere inside.

Her children's names were English. The language of the house was American. Sigfrid couldn’t give them what she had grown up with. She could only give them what she had created. And that was plenty.

She had become a woman under open skies, between meetings with strangers and work that never ended. But every time she milked a cow, held a calf, made cheese, or sliced potatoes with quick, practiced hands, she knew: everything she carried with her was still there.

It had simply changed form.

America Takes Over – Language and Identity

It didn’t happen suddenly, but slowly, like a river that changes course without anyone noticing until the path is new.

Her children spoke only English. They didn’t know the prayer she and her grandfather had said, didn’t know the nursery about the horse named Blanke, didn’t know what lingonberries were, or how snow smells in the mountains.

They were good children. She loved them. But they weren’t Norwegian.

She hadn’t had the time to keep the language alive. After age fifteen, she hadn’t lived at home, and her mother—who never learned English—had become a memory, not someone to talk with. The language lost its footing. What wasn’t used slipped away, like snow melting from your shoes without you noticing.

Her husband was German. Their house didn’t carry the scent of cloves, no trace of salted meat or flatbread. They celebrated Christmas with American songs and waved flags on the Fourth of July. No one cared about May 17th.

Sigfrid carried a quiet sorrow. She hadn’t brought Norway with her; she had left it behind. Not out of spite, not intentionally, but out of necessity. Out of work. Out of survival.

She didn’t speak much about the past. She knew memories couldn’t be eaten, and that those who came into the world after her needed the tangible: food, safety, schools, a future. But at night, when the house was quiet, she would sometimes have moments when she almost remembered the melody of a hymn, or the smell of peat burning in the hearth.

One evening, she found an old notebook. In the margin were her siblings' names, written in thin, crooked letters. She ran her fingertip over them. Read them aloud like a prayer.

She thought: Once, we were all Norwegian. Now, only I remember.

Homecoming – Norway 1971

It had been seventy years since she crossed the fjord with her mother. Now she sat on a plane, her sister beside her, hands folded in her lap, heart heavy with something she couldn’t name.

She hadn’t known what she would find. Or what she needed to find. Only that something needed to be put in place, a loose thread in life still waiting to be stitched.

When they stepped out of the taxi in the village, the flags were flying. A childhood friend still lived there. He had never moved, only grown older, like the landscape.

He had suffered a stroke just days before they arrived. Lay in a bed with eyes that still knew, but a body that couldn’t rise. They took his hand, said their names. He nodded.

In the room where they once sang Christmas carols, they now sat in silence. But their eyes were full. A whole life had passed, and yet here they were again, even if just for a brief visit.

One evening, Sigfrid stepped outside and stood by the fjord. The water was just as she remembered. The mountains still stood, holding their silence. She pushed her hands into the grass, felt the soil, smelled what she thought she had forgotten.

Her sister said the table prayer. And in that simple, rhythm-rich Norwegian, something stirred inside Sigfrid—something she didn’t know still lived in her. She didn’t speak aloud, but she remembered it. Every syllable.

Later that night, in a small guest room, she sat by the window, opened a little notebook, and wrote down just one memory:

— Ride, ride ranke.

She had returned. Not to stay. But to remember what she had carried with her all her life, even though she may often not have thought about it.

Epilogue – A Life's Journey

She sat in the chair by the window in her house in Bellingham, with a cup of tea long gone cold, and eyes that looked more inward than outward. The garden outside had lost its color, and she knew she had too.

Memory was not a line but a quilt of images, sounds, smells. It came in bursts, like a loosened spring, like waves that refuse to settle. She didn’t think much anymore—she remembered.

Eidsnes. The fjord. Grandfather’s voice. Her mother’s strength. The sister who took her hand on the first day of school. Her father’s beard in Chicago. Her dreams still smelled of cabbage and saltwater.

She had lived a full life in the new land. Learned the language, raised children, paid taxes, kept a house, been a woman who carried what needed to be carried. And she had done well. So they said. But something inside her had always stayed quiet. Like a prayer she could no longer recite.

It wasn’t longing, not regret. Just a quiet ache for what you don’t know you’ll lose until it’s gone.

She nodded to herself, as if acknowledging it. She wasn’t just Sigfrid Ohrt, mother and wife and hotelkeeper. She was the girl who sat on her grandfather’s lap and heard:

— Ride, ride ranke, hesten heter Blanke...—

— Ride away, ride away, on our dappel-grey mare… —

She smiled. Closed her eyes. Held onto the sound.

And the world fell silent around her.

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Sigfrid Ohrt (1891–1985)
Born in Eidsnes, Norway, as one of nine children in a small farming family. Emigrated to the United States in 1901 with her mother and siblings after her father fled the country due to financial difficulties. Grew up in South Dakota and North Dakota, where she worked on farms and completed her basic education. Married young and had four children. During World War II, she ran a hotel in Bremerton, Washington. Later lived in Tacoma, Lynnwood, Seattle, and Bellingham. Returned to her hometown in Norway in 1971. Her language and connection to Norwegian culture faded over time, but the memories endured.

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_{Source:
Rasmussen, J. E. (1993). He slipped out of the country [Interview with Sigfrid Ohrt]. In New land, new lives: Scandinavian immigrants to the Pacific Northwest (pp. 43–46). University of Washington Press / Norwegian-American Historical Association.}

_{Ohrt, S.(1983). Personal and family papers [Archival collection, Box 11, Files 15–15B]. New Land, New Lives Oral History Collection. A courtesy of the Pacific Lutheran University Archives & Special Collections.}

_{Cover image: Girl on rocking horse circa 1900 / East Riding Archives}