Proof of Life

Decade birthdays can be unsettling. This first occurred on my 30th birthday, and I found my 40th, 50th, 60th & 70th to also be perplexing. Each new decade was like leaving my country and emigrating to another land, a land I knew nothing about. But then at 31, 41, 51, 61 & 71, it was always just another ho-hum day. Strange really. Now I find myself just past my 80th, once again cast adrift in uncharted waters with no land in sight. I can’t imagine what it will be like to be in my 80s. Guess I’ll find out. Hope so. If and when I’m 81 I expect to have a handle on this Octo-man business. Just for today though I’m grateful for a long and storied life and all the good fortune that’s come my way. There was plenty of bad stuff too, but it’s all history now and I prefer to place my thoughts in the treasure house of fond memories.

Families have their own cultures and their own traditions. My middle name is Anton. My father chose that name in honor of his great-uncle Anton Bresnik whom he deeply admired. Anton passed away not long after my birth so I never got to know him. In his younger years, like his brothers and cousins, he was an entitled European playboy. For generations his extended family were great land holders in Central Europe. Then towards the end of the 19th Century, European markets crashed and great fortunes were lost. For the most part the Bresniks were dispossessed. 

Three of Anton’s cousins committed suicide. Of his two brothers, one was a priest while the other gained a commission in the Austro-Hungarian Army. In those years the  Bresnik clan began it’s diaspora, mostly to the Americas.

Then in his forties, Anton left with the clothes on his back and made his way over the Alps to an Adriatic port where he signed on to a tramp steamer bound for the west coast of the United States. Along the way the ship put in to several ports, both before and after rounding Cape Horn. In the late winter of 1897 the three-month voyage ended at the Port of Seattle. 

Anton soon found work in the local coal mines. For the next two years he worked hard and saved his money. As time went by he became involved in union activities, which resulted in his being blacklisted by the mine owners. With funds he’d saved he travelled inland to the town of Black Diamond, Washington. There he purchased 40 acres of forested farmland and began a new life.  

At occasional community picnics Anton met a Dutch woman named Tanta. She was born in Amsterdam and while still a little girl went with her family to America. In the mid 1870s the family traveled west over the Oregon Trail. At a camp on the upper Columbia River a cholera epidemic swept through the wagon train. Of her entire family, seven year old Tanta was the only survivor. As fortune would have it she was taken in by Quakers in a nearby town on the River. Many years later, when she met Anton, Tanta was a widow with no children. The two knew each other for nearly a year when Tanta moved in with him at the modest farmhouse he had built. Together they worked the farm with cows and crops and they prospered. Unable to have children of their own they took in orphans and castaways and as years went by raised ten children. They never married.

In the late 1920s, when my father was a teenager, he spent his summers working on the Bresnik Farm in Black Diamond. His parents were also immigrants and were mercantile city dwellers. In his relationship with Uncle Anton my Dad experienced a rugged and robust world he hadn’t known. It changed his life. He often told me stories about Anton and Tanta, which is Dutch for Auntie. Whenever she would give him the business about something he would say, “Is it my fault you’re getting old?” There was one occasion, when Dad was 18 years old and Anton was 78. They had come to the end of their workday and were way out in the fields when Tanta rang the dinner bell. “C’mon John, I’ll race you to the house,”  said Anton. “Are you kidding?” said Dad. “No, let’s go.” Uncle Anton won the race. There were so many stories about the old guy.

Now, what does Great Uncle Anton have to do with my turning 80? Well aside from giving me a certain pride in my heritage Anton also lived to be 93, working his farm until the last days of his life. As such, I don’t feel quite so old and decrepit today. But then everything is relative, I suppose.