Grubby Woodland Creatures In Second Growth Timber

 

When I think of my life in the years between 1954 and 1966, I think “spare” might be the operant term. It almost had a kind of elegance.

I was 6 years old in September of 54, the year my parents bought an unfinished two-bedroom house on three fourths of an acre, still covered with second growth alder and firs and maples.  The lot and the house cost $4000.00. Perhaps thirty or forty years before then this area had just been virgin timber, which was logged off. Years later he built three more bedrooms on the house.

The house had rooms framed in, but no walls inside.  There was no power to the house yet, or water.  I think we only lived without plumbing for that one summer.  But I am not absolutely sure about that.  I do know that my father made an outhouse.  I am that old, lol.  I lived with an outhouse. I remember bathing in a small zinc watering trough in that dark kitchen.

For household water we had a ten-gallon milk can that my father would load onto the Model A Ford, which was their only car at that point, and drive several miles over to where there was an artesian wellhead that was open for people to take water from.  Sounds odd, but that well is still in operation on 164^th, and you can still go there and bottle water if you like.

We had a kerosine heater, which I remember very well, and kerosine lamps. I do not remember what my mother was cooking on that first summer. Well, we ate, that I know.  Perhaps she was using a camp stove of some kind. Later, we always had a wood stove in the kitchen in addition to the electric appliances.

My parents were very young farm kids, in their twenties still at this point.  They had escaped being stuck on dad’s parent’s farm in southern Idaho and had come up here to make their fortune, lol, right? So, my father worked at Boeing.  It was the Seattle thing to do.  Mom stayed home until my youngest sister was old enough to go to school full days.

My mother was 24 years old that summer, and she had four very young children.  It’s hard for me to imagine what her life must have been like, but on the other hand, youth just gets on with it.

Birdsong, particularly robin’s calls, take me right back there.  I remember things from a short point of view. I think I might have been a bit feral, or maybe just a backwoods kid.  I have very strong memories of just the trees and the undergrowth.  When I was a few years older I remember being out there in the woods away from home picking wild blackberries where there was open country, and just sitting silently and listening to the silence punctuated by bird calls.  If I sat long enough sometimes small animals would come and look at me.  We had mountain beavers, and something that must have been a mustelid of some kid, like a weasel.

It did not take my father long to get the house finished inside.  He was hyper-active, I now realize, and unusually strong.  He could do anything. Being a farmer, he also removed the trees and old stumps from the logging in the old days, from our place.  I do remember a fair amount of dynamiting stumps!  We had to stay in the house and watch out a window as the blast went off and the stump jumped into the air.  I think he just burnt all those big stumps.  In fact, I should mention that places like ours out there were called stump farms by some people.

I always wanted to make things and learn how to do things.  I was a menace to some of my neighbors as a kid.  I found out who knew how to do such and such and I would go ask for help knitting or whatever. I remember carving my first knitting needles myself.  I feel like I must still have them somewhere.  I was hot to knit, I wanted to make sweaters. I think what started that was reading an encyclopedia called The Book of Knowledge, that was sold to my parents by a door-to-door salesman. It had directions for making a cardigan in it.  I remember those illustrations perfectly.

Mrs. Christiansen, a Danish grandmother, was probably my first victim.  But she was a good sport and helped me. I thought she was a million years old; she did have completely white hair.

Another one lived across the gravel road from our place.  She and her husband, who my mom was sure was oppressing this lady, whose name escapes me right now, lived in a mobile home of some sort.  She did colorful crocheted doilies and such.  You can see where this is going.  I remember sitting in her living room finding out how to make doilies!  She was tolerant also, and maybe she liked the company.

Our most important neighbors lived right behind us.  We kids grew up together. There were five kids there and their dad was an Indian from one of the local tribes.  I never knew which tribe.  He wore dark green uniforms and drove a green pickup and did something in maintenance for the school district.  He was called Woody.  The two older boys were from her earlier marriage, but the three little black-haired girls were his.  I remember having some strange snacks over there. Those kids liked to take slices of plain white bread, spread it with margarine, and sprinkle a lot of sugar on it!  Even as a kid, I thought that was gross. I think I had some breaded testicles of some kind over there too.  Just the truth.  My mom didn’t cook stuff like that!

I do remember that my grandmother sent us a goose, that must have been packed in with dry ice, all the way from Idaho.  By the time mom got the box the ice was gone.  I remember that goose just slithering out of the box!

My mother was what they used to call a good plain cook.  She got a lot of practice.  Every bite we ate was prepared by her.  There was nothing else. No cafés, no fast food, no commercial snacks of any kind.  In fact, when I encountered anything like potato chips, I hated them.  I remember even hating popcorn.

There was no ethnicity in her cooking.  Pure American style.  She didn’t know about chilis either! Lol We had pot roasts, burgers, potatoes, salad, soups, stews, meat and veg pie, plain cake cooked in a rectangular pan. She made cookies and pies too. Every summer we made quarts of jam.

 School lunches were made at home, in a hurry.  For as soon as I was big enough to be Mother to the younger three, she was always in a hurry to go to work. This is probably where I got my attitude.  I was in charge, and they needed me to be in charge. It is what it is.

We were grubby forest creatures. Really. Even as I got older, most of my life was lived outdoors. I helped garden. I helped my father repair cars. I took care of animals. I kept track of the younger kids out there.

The road past our place was kind of a metaphor.  It didn’t go through anywhere, but it wasn’t a dead end.  It was graveled, didn’t get paved until years later.  It was a loop.  It went past us and then around a big block.  That road, the loop, and the block it enclosed still appears in my dreams, in various disguises. I still have agates I picked out of the gravel.

I don’t know if this is interesting, but it is real.

In 1966 the whole world changed.  I went to a rented room up here by the college and began to grow up.