23,000 Americans Call Scandinavia Home : Emigration: For the most part, it’s family history that pulls them back to Sweden and Norway. But there are many reasons they stay.

Erik Means may sit on the edge of a majestic fiord someday and regale his grandchildren with tales of the old country--the United States.

Viking blood stirs in a few people every year, calling them to their ancestral homeland. A New Yorker settles on a remote Norwegian farm, a Coloradan in an arctic village, a native of sunny California in chilly Stockholm.

They are descendants of the 2 million Scandinavians who went to the United States in an exodus that peaked around 1900. Like Means, 27, they may have grown up hearing from their parents that Scandinavia was really home.

Some seek roots, others economic opportunity, as their forebears did in leaving. Some married Scandinavians.

“I finished college in Canada and didn’t have any experience,” said Means, a dual U.S.-Norwegian citizen reared in Hamilton, Canada. “My only real edge was that I was fluent in both Norwegian and English. The only place that was any good was Norway.”

About 12,000 U.S. citizens live in Norway and 11,000 in Sweden, but no record is kept of how many of those have roots in this region.

On the other side of the ocean, Americans of Norwegian descent outnumber Norway’s 4.2 million people. There are 4.3 million Americans of Swedish ancestry, roughly half Sweden’s population of 8.5 million.

“A lot more would come, at least for a while, if the opportunity presented itself,” said Hans Eiyvind Naess, who directs a genealogical center in Stavanger, Norway. There are strict limits on immigration.

In the poor years of the late 19th Century, about one person in four left Sweden and Norway for North America. Now, powerful industries and North Sea oil give Scandinavia one of the world’s highest living standards.

Romanticized tales of Scandinavia or hand-me-downs from homesick ancestors don’t prepare the immigrants.

“They seem to expect people to ride around in horse-drawn buggies, wearing traditional costumes,” said Arthur Svennevik, a New Yorker now living on his ancestral farm in south Norway.

“They expect things to be the way they were in the States 50 years ago and arrive to find that it is probably a more modern country than the United States,” said Svennevik, who often spent summers in Norway as a child.

Nor are regular visits much help, said Knut Dybdal, a folklore researcher born in Norway and reared in Compton, Ohio.

“It’s one thing to be a guest,” he said. “It’s another to settle. You can play by U.S. rules as a visitor. When you settle, you are expected to learn and play by Norwegian rules.”

One American called Scandinavia “deceptively familiar,” seeming similar to the United States but fundamentally different.

Steve Strid, a Swedish-American living in Stockholm, said the adjustment passes through phases.

“At first, it was like being in a giant amusement park; everything was fun because it was new,” said Strid, 31, of Sacramento. After a couple years, everything seems wrong and annoying, then acceptance comes, he said.

Strid and others tried at first to assimilate, speaking only Nordic languages and associating with Scandinavian friends.

Eventually, like their fathers who sought fellowship among people from their own countries, many hunger for the company of other Americans and seek each other out.

Apathy about baseball can become a passion for it. Lukewarm patriots may become fierce defenders of their homeland.

Few are ready to return to the United States, but just as few say they have settled in Scandinavia for good, although the years pile up quickly.

“I came here for a year or two, 13 years ago,” said Svennevik, whose parents were Norwegian.

“I don’t know if I’ll stay forever; forever is a long time,” said Means, father of a Norwegian-Danish-American infant son.

Despite high taxes, an unfamiliar and sometimes meddlesome welfare state and a daunting cost of living, most people interviewed said they are better off in Scandinavia than they had been in the United States.

“My friends think it’s propaganda when I tell them about my lifestyle here,” said Strid, a free-lance writer. “Most Americans seem to have a short circuit when I tell them I live in Stockholm. They just don’t understand it.”

Dybdal, whose home overlooks a magnificent fiord, said, “If I could have the house and the kind of lifestyle I have here, I’d probably move back to Oregon.”

The concept of home changes.

“Once you move across the Atlantic, you never really have a home again,” Dybdal said.

“I don’t know where home is,” said Victoria Hybert, a native of Denver who moved to arctic Norway with her Norwegian husband in 1969.

Hybert had one Norwegian grandparent and was only vaguely aware of Norway, but “now I can’t imagine moving back to the States.”

“Here it’s safe, and people still do things like go for walks in the park on Sunday afternoons,” she said.

The immigrants don’t forget being Americans, but some watch their children become Scandinavians.

“My three boys are more Norwegian than American,” Hybert said. “But I’m always telling them stories about the States.”