Preface — Of Water and Wood

Let’s say the desire for change starts as a trickle, among mountains, there in a crevice, between leaves. Say it begins there. Say “That is where I will go” – to the beginning of the desire for change.

Say it began far off; too far to get there from here. Say that the place has so morphed over the centuries that you wouldn’t recognize anything, that the people who stayed put would laugh in confusion at your questions. That the ones who died still speak. Say you would sense them inside yourself, that still small voice between leaves. Say that something inside you, recognized by something outside you, would know.

Of the ten-week trek, the first half I explored Switzerland. My Switzerland. Meine Schweiz. “Guten tag, ich bin Amerikaner! Meine Mutter’s-Mutter’s-Mutter kommst von Zürich und mein Vater’s-Vater’s-Vater kommst von Basle und der Emmental.” In addition to not being completely genealogically accurate, this wasn’t even correct Swiss-German, but it did help me gain instant common background in order to then discuss my family’s more particular Swiss origins with kind, interested folks in the areas from which my mother’s family names and my father’s family names come. A few of these interested folks even shared a last name or two with me, and consequently we knew we shared ancestors.

I began my journey in Switzerland in order to find the farthest back to when and where my family lived. In leaving the European continent from the early 1730s to the 1860s from the port of Rotterdam, many of my ancestors traveled along the Rhein River. Since the Rhein starts in the Swiss Alps, as a few coalescing trickles in the region now popularly known as “Heidi Land,” I wanted to get in touch with that place, to return many centuries later and see what of me was still there, at the trickle and all along its flow to Rotterdam. I needed to know what of meine Familie is still present, both near the origin of the Rhein, and in the current places my relatives who stayed put in Schweiz still live. To a limited extent, I also wanted to study the ancestors who left.

We were émigrés, every last one of us. We’re Mennonites; a sect of the Anabaptist movement that grew out of the Protestant Reformation of the 1520s. Anabaptism: A sort of afterbirth of that Reformation, or perhaps a grafting onto, depending on one’s perspective. My Anabaptist ancestors in Switzerland, reviled both by the Catholics and the Reformed Protestants, either fled for their lives or for freedom to new harbors, or stayed on the farm and were captured and staked or held down singing in rivers near city squares. This lasted for upwards of two centuries.

Stories survive of sisters smiling while the skin peeled from their faces, staked like witches to a pile of burning faggots, their faces smiling married to their faith in the same God as those lighting the fires at their melting feet. Sisters in Christ sang hymns in the wind, which was the heat from the flames in the pyre along the river near the city square. Brothers in Christ sang out hymns to their Father in Heaven, encased in wooden cages lowered from bridges built just for the purpose of dangling their heretical Anabaptist bodies above the wind which was the cold river flowing underneath their unrepentant mouths; their wives held transfixed and not fainting in the crowds leaning down watching the heretics go under singing praises to the same God they all believed. They all believed. All those drowning or being drowned or watching the drowners drown the drowning. They all believed this same God would bless them after they left this cage which is human consciousness which is the world of church and state.

That something inside you, recognized by something outside you, would know.

Some of my ancestors left the area just north of Zürich back in 1680. On August 17, 1733 a descendant of those who left arrived after solo travel across the Atlantic at age eighteen on the ship Samuel, disembarking into the Colonies. Friederich Alldörffer is the first ancestor on both sides of my family for whom we possess written proof of arrival in these United States. Fifty-three years of voyage from Zürich to the port city of Philadelphia; three generations worth. It is not beyond my limited knowledge to see the connection between his Philadelphia and mine. He arrived in 1733 at eighteen, an upstart greenhorn, married a like-minded Swiss emigrant within five years. Some two-hundred and fifty years later, at twenty-seven I left Philly after letting something die. After five years that port city for me was situated not as a welcoming station but something equally joyous and risky – a pushing-off place.

Of all the last names in my family, I find it genealogically appropriate and poetically attractive that the “Alldörffer” in “Friederich Alldörffer” means “from the old village.” It is to that place I wished to return, to explore my roots as it were, though that metaphor is not completely apt. I do not only come from a tree: Ich kommen von Wasser.