Austria: Why Yodel in the Bergs?
We spent a few cloudy days and few sunny ones in the Austrian Alps – on our way now to the Bavarian Alps and Munich, Germany. On one of the cloudy days high up in the Austrian Alps outside of Innsbruck, Austria (site of the 1976 Winter Olympics) Jodi and I were taking a short hike on a trail and I all the sudden had the urge to yodel. There was no else around (that I could see through the clouds) which helped to lower my inhibitions with respect to yodeling in public.
My high school friends might be surprised to hear this as on at least two occasions I remember, I yodeled big time in pubic at a school-wide assembly (a last week of school celebration event I think) and at half-time of a high school basketball game. This very public yodeling was accompanied by my high school buddies Bob Barnett (keyboard), Kurt Luber (tuba), Richard Grosse and Paul Hashim (I don’t remember what instruments Richard and Paul played – maybe there were back-up singers!).
Anyway, the others guys in the group would start their vocals with “um pah pah, um pah pah” (I remember Bob was really good at this part – in fact, I think he was the main person responsible for my public yodeling!), and then I would join in with a solo yodel that went something like this – “yoda lay he, yodel lay he, yoda lay he, yodel lay he, yoda lay a he, he hoo, yodel lay he, he hooo” (and kept going on like this for a bit in a similar fashion). To this day, I am not sure what my fellow Magruder High School students thought of this yodeling act – but, my friends and I did a lot of things in high school mainly for our own amusement anyway!
So, you may be wondering, where did a kid who grew up in Maryland (D.C. suburbs) learn how to yodel? I think part of the answer is that it is in my DNA. I recently did an Ancestory.com DNA test and the results showed that my DNA is 100% of European origin broken down as 66% Scandinavian (from my father Roger H. Bergstrom and paternal grandfather Ray G. Bergstrom), 15% Western Europe (from my paternal grandmother Mildred H. Bergstrom who had German roots), 8% Iberian Peninsula that includes Spain, Portugal (don’t know where this comes from, but I know my brother Corey got a lot of this DNA!), 6% Irish (from my mother Maxine S. Bergstrom and maternal grandfather John M. Steeves), and 5% other trace regions.
So, maybe one of my Western European ancestors lived in the Austrian, Bavarian (Germany) or Swiss Alps and was a classic yodeler!
The person who actually taught me to yodel when I was a teenager was my Great-Uncle Guy Andersen. Uncle Guy was married to my paternal grandmother’s sister Lillian (with the Germanic maiden name of Heaner). Sometime during his life Uncle Guy learned how to yodel (he was really good at it!) and I picked it up by listening to him yodel (especially when we happened to be riding with him in the car).
So, in a way, it seemed very natural for me to break out in a yodel when we were hiking in the Alps. Maybe one of my ancestors would have been proud of me and perhaps I will find out if yodeling is really in my DNA when I meet most of my ancestors (I hope) on the other side of the river in Heaven!
And yes, the European Alpine region of Austria, Germany and Switzerland is gorgeous – in addition to yodeling, I also love the mountains (maybe this is in my DNA too)! In my first post of this blog, I wrote how my last name, “Bergstrom”, means “Mountain (Berg) Stream (strom) in German and Swedish. So, there was a “Berg” or “Bergy” (a common nickname for people in or family)or traveling in the “Bergs” (mountains) of Europe (actually two “Bergs” – me and Jodi).
Jodi and I both thought it was a lot of fun seeing our name “Berg” all over the place in the Alps – when I give our name at restaurants for the waiting list in the U.S., I sometimes just say “Berg” because they always seem to get “Bergstrom” confused – here are some of the “best of the confused” variations of my last name people have used in the past: Bergstorm, Bergstrum, Burkstrom, Burkstrum, Birdsong and Bugstone (I am not making this up)! Everyone here in Europe seems to get my last name correct the first time – which is really nice for a change!
“So long, farewell” (yes, we did the typical tourist ‘Sound of Music’ movie tour in Salzburg) for now. John Mountain Stream.
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