In search of the wild dala.

“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”

— Diane Arbus

Little Sweden USA.

It’s an unusual title to hear no matter where you happen to be in the States, but perhaps even more so in a place like Kansas.

But such is the claim to fame held by Lindsborg, a little town in the center of America’s heartland where 30% of its residents are of Swedish heritage. Located about a fifteen-minute drive from my brother’s town of McPherson–which is then another hour from Wichita–we’re talking seriously close to middle-of-nowhere territory. But we’d been told to check it out by our parents, who had visited earlier in the fall and were swiftly taken with its small-town charm.

Within minutes of walking the streets of Lindsborg, where signs were posted reading ‘No J-Turns,’ it was easy to see why. The flags of each Scandinavian country flew above the Swedish Country Inn. A sign outside the Swedish Pastries and Emporium advertised “Swedish pancakes all day.” And inside a gift shop called Hemslöjd–Swedish for ‘crafts’–there were shirts for sale that read “I ♥ Being Swedish”–with the heart itself colored in with the design of the Swedish flag.

I thought I’d said goodbye to quirky small towns and their adopted personalities in New Zealand, but Lindsborg instantly took me back to a little place called Foxton, not far from Wellington on the North Island.

Foxton caught my attention for one reason–by the slow-moving sails of a Dutch windmill drifting over the town’s one-story skyline. I had to stop, of course, and was both bemused and perplexed by the magnets and postcards for sale in the windmill’s giftshop–all of them with ‘Holland’ printed across them.

And so it was in Lindsborg, the same kind of place where you can buy kitschy items for countries 5,000 miles away. The thought that I could send a postcard from Sweden or Denmark or Norway in Kansas seemed almost devious. Shame about the postmark.

But it was the dalas that won my heart, waist-high replicas of the distinctive Swedish horse icon with their rounded heads and tail-less bodies. The town’s main street was lined with them, and each had been painted to reflect the nature of the individual business it represented, with a brass plaque in front reading its title.

‘Follow the Dala Brick Road,’ read the City of Lindsborg’s. The Senior Center’s ‘Old Grey Dala Mare’ stood next to the surreal ‘Salvador Dala’ and a lavender-hued ‘Herd it Through the Grapevine,’ and ‘Yankee Doodle Dala’ featured the designs of the Swedish and American flags weaved together.

And so I did what I often do best when travelling–I went on a quest. Dragging my brother all across town, there was hardly a dala we didn’t spot. But whether or not I had the photos to prove we’d found them, I was still left with one question: Why?

I found my answer in the Wild Dala Winery, drawn in by the barrel full of stick horses in its front window–each horse’s head painted in the style of a dala.

“Oh, yes, every summer there’s a big round-up,” a woman named Linda explained. “All the dalas are herded together, given a fresh coat of paint and then released.”

She went on to tell us about a man named Epsing whose Swedish relatives once sent a small dala figurine. Being a big businessman in a small town, he was in the position to start putting the shape everywhere and by the early 1960s, a vote by the town’s elders had decided: The dala was here to stay–as the official logo of Lindsborg.

There are now thirty of these painted creatures all over town, a number that doesn’t include all the dala-shaped signs hanging over families’ doorways or the tiny figures incorporated into many a business’s logo.

As my brother and I began to head back down the sidewalk to the car, a voice suddenly asked: “Wanna see the dala no one ever knows about?”

It was then that we noticed a guy standing in the recess of a shop’s entrance, the kind of character in the movies who’s always lurking in the shadows, stepping out of the alley at just the right moment and saying, “The man you’re looking for went that way.”

“It’s outside Bethany Home,” he told us, referring to the town’s nursing care facility.

We thanked him, somewhat confused–had he been watching us? how did he know?–and started walking again, but after a second or two, something popped into my head. I stopped, and turned around. “Well how do you know about it?”

“I work there.”

Of course. I shook off any temptation to feel like the victim of a stalker, and chose instead to be thankful for the tip. As we then made our way to Bethany Home, the thought came to me–why else do we travel? To take the quirky with the classy, to search out odd histories, and be pointed in the right direction at just the right time…

Oh, and to find the dala-no-one-ever-knows-about.