The Immigrants

Iceland is a cold, remote, volcanic land, rising in the middle of the North Atlantic near the Arctic Circle. Our group of stamp collectors rode a bus out of Reykjavik on a day trip to see glaciers, geysers, and waterfalls. All were spectacular. Yellowstone Park magnified. But as we rode across that barren, Arctic landscape, seeing fields of sparse grass devoid of trees, and passing cinder cones of volcanoes where trolls were said to hide, I wondered, “Why would anyone want to live in a place like this?”

Men first came out of Africa, before they learned to speak, searching for better hunting grounds. A tribe would find a new place and settle down, until drought killed game and hunting became difficult, or another tribe came and tried to push them out. Some fought to remain. Men have always been at war with other men. Archeologists found spear points in the sculls of some of the earliest human bones.

Most tribes moved on in search of better places to live. Some places were not much better than the place they left behind, but they stayed anyway. By 20,000 B.C. men occupied the Earth across Asia to Australia and down to Patagonia, on the tip of South America.

The Vikings struck out from Norway in the 9th and 10th Centuries. (John and I spent a summer in Ipswich, England, which was sacked by the Vikings in 830 A.D.) When the Norsemen arrived in Iceland, they discovered the land totally unoccupied by other humans. They ventured further westward and tried settlements in Greenland and on Newfoundland in North America. Those settlers starved, and the survivors (if any) returned to Iceland.

Today’s Icelanders think their island is the best place to live in all the World. But that is typical of every place I’ve visited or lived. Within a generation the people become rooted as if they were in the garden of Eden. My first husband’s family came from Denmark; he couldn’t speak a word of Danish and in college majored in American History. My second husband’s father fled Poland to avoid being conscripted into the Czar’s army in World War I; he was proud of his four sons who served in the U.S. Army in World War II.

As a bride in my first Northern winter, depressed by endless snow and cold and homesick for Texas, my Chicago friends said, “Don’t you just love Chicago? I would not want to live any place else.”

Now I live in Texas and wish I could return to New Mexico. My Texan friends don’t understand. New Mexico has a better climate and beautiful mountains. I had a spectacular view from the patio of my little house on Albuquerque’s West Mesa. More important of all, New Mexico has great, diverse people. Anglos and Hispanics in equal numbers, plus a large group of Indians (mostly “Native American” but some Eastern. Small minorities of Chinese and blacks. Everyone is accepted there, including homosexuals and nuts like me (hetero but crazy).

Texans say, “I am a Texan and proud of it. Texans are the best people in the World!”

Texas is not as bad as Arizona in wanting to deport illegal immigrants. Keep out the criminals, but let us keep those hard workers who clean our houses and mow our lawns. People forget that the ancestors of everyone in the U.S. (except Indians) were immigrants.

My mother’s people were among the first to build log cabins and plant cotton in North Texas. In the 1840's Comanches still hunted buffalo here. We tell stories about atrocities committed by Indian raiders in the 1870's, before they were driven back to reservations in Oklahoma.

History is written by the victors. They always say, “Our people are the Greatest.” Those hardy people, who live on that small island in the cold Atlantic Ocean, think Iceland is the greatest place on Earth. Maybe they are right. Iceland has no guns. No army except the Salvation Army. They won two “wars” with England without firing a shot from their fishing boats.