Tuesday, November 29, 2005

EQUUS REMEMBERED


EQUUS REMEMBERED
I can not personally recall my earliest association with those lofty creatures of the Equus genera that have dogged my footsteps throughout life. However, reliable family mythology has it that, when I had arrived at the advanced age of six weeks old, my mother took it into her head to surprise my father with a photograph of me sitting on a horse. To this purpose she enlisted the aid of my grandfather’s horse ‘Jap’ and Dad’s thirteen year old brother Don. The plan was for Don to conceal himself as best he could behind ‘Jap’ and then hold me up in a sitting position - on the horse - while keeping his hands out of sight of the camera (a green fake leather covered Brownie box camera being wielded by my mother).
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The plan did not execute well. I would be loath to suggest that my mother had a half-baked idea there … lest she rise from the grave and smite me for being ‘smart alecky’. But the way the story was told many years later, Don popped me up onto the horse’s back, ‘Jap’ shied violently away, creating a condition where Don no longer had hold of me and there was no longer a horse under me. I crashed. To the ground. On my head.
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No picture.
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I did acquire an abrasive wound to one side of my noggin, which I assume they attended to in some inept way or another. When my father came home from work that day, Mom told him that I had gotten my head wedged in between the bed and the wall … resulting in the observable wound. She was nineteen at the time and had aged well past thirty before my father (and I) ever heard the truth of that day.
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I do have this photograph taken about four years later … where I’m up on ’Jap’ with my Grandpa Charlie. I do have a memory that I associate with this picture, but it might have happened a couple years later - or maybe not. Grandpa had saddled the horse in preparation of something, maybe this picture … and he was riding around to get the horse in position. ’Jap’ had tricked him with the old inflated belly tactic and as they jogged in a circle, the horse ’deflated’, the saddle rotated to beneath the horse, and Grandpa crashed into the dust. My memory is an image of him hitting the ground and the dust flying up around him.
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When I was about nine, horseback riding re-intruded on my life. We had moved to Smyrna, a tiny town on the Milwaukee Railroad, ten miles east of the Columbia River. My closest friends and playmates were two sisters who lived on a cattle ranch four miles to the east of us. They would show up at our house on two horses and invite me and my brother and my sister to go riding. That entailed having three kids on the smaller horse, ’Topsy’ - because it was reasonably well behaved - and two on the bigger horse that was constantly trying to return ‘home’ to barn and feed. ‘Jess’ was his name and he had severe control issues.
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Things deteriorated for me when they acquired a third horse, ‘Bird’, but only had two saddles. They started showing up with the saddleless ‘Bird’ in tow and insisted on teaching us all how to ride bareback. I never mastered the technique. I couldn’t even ride bareback poorly. As soon as the horse began forward motion - almost always at a trot - I would bounce backward along his spine …. boing, boing, boing …. and fall off the back end. In those rare instances where I managed to stay aboard for a brief spell, I would part company with my steed at the first point where he changed direction. I had a tendency to slavishly follow the original line of motion.
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Thus I became a rider of saddled horses only. And as the number of available horses increased, I fell heir to old ‘Jess’. Tall and middle aged and behaving like a homing pigeon.
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When I was twelve, I cut a chunk of flesh off my left wrist in a broken window ‘accident’, and had to spend several weeks with it heavily bandaged and encased in foam rubber for protection from blows that might mess up the stitches. So I’m up on ‘Jess’ trying to control him one-handed, there’s four other horses, and we arrive at this single-wire fence across a canyon four miles west of Smyrna. One of the valley ranchers had strung this single strand of barbed wire about five feet off the ground to prevent wild horses from coming down the canyon and getting to the creek for water, while his cattle would just lower their heads and walk under.
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It was barring our way.
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Lou Ann, the older sister, managed to pry a staple out of a fairly tall fence post and lift the wire up to rest on the top of the post. I had the tallest horse, so everyone else led their horses under ahead of me. They were milling around on the other side and Lou Ann was the only one back in the saddle …. as I cautiously led old ‘Jess’ under the wire. Disaster! He was an inch too tall. The saddle horn hooked the wire and ‘Jess’ felt the tension, he bunched his horsey muscles and lunged forward. The wire ‘screamed’ as it tightened, stretched, and popped and I could feel him coming. I tried to run, but he hit me with his chest and rocketed me into a nearby sagebrush. All the horses raced away up the canyon. Lou Ann chased them down and grabbed the reins on two of them and led them back … the other two followed along.
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A quick inspection showed that we had created a hundred yard gap in the fencing. So, with the enthusiasm of un-apprehended culprits, we took off up the sandy canyon at a gallop. ‘Jess’ stepped on a post buried in the sand; it rolled; and he came down on his front knees, causing my bandaged left wrist to come whistling down with great force onto the top of the saddle horn. Oh, Great Pain! And incidental bleeding seeping from under the bandaging. The damage was minor and nothing came of it. A few weeks later, the rancher came into the post office (my Mom was postmaster) and told her that so-and-so had torn down a quarter mile of his fence so’s they could run their horses down onto his creek bottom. By the time the truth of the fence destruction surfaced, all us kids were middle-aged and the rancher was living in a nursing home somewhere.
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Actually I was the big-mouth that did it. Sitting around the dinner table with bothers and sisters at an ‘event’ at our parent’s home …. Playing that old “Do you remember when we ….” game. I spun the tale of how ‘Jess’ and I ripped out Mr. Boeh’s fence right there in front of my mother. She was a lot mellower than she’d been twenty-five years earlier … and thereafter always claimed she’d had to wait for her kids to turn forty before she found out what we were doing when we were children. I’m sure it’s best that way.
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By the time I was a teenager, I was a pretty decent rider so long as there was a saddle. I was not in the same league as the two Chadbourne girls, or my little sister Norma, or their friend Mildred …. not only could they all four ride bareback, they could all ride at a lope while standing up on the horse’s bare back. For a couple years there, I actually did occasional small jobs of cowboying … not much, but some. And during this time, my sister’s boyfriend and I went riding west from town on his horse with me behind him and the saddle. I would do a couple wraps of the saddle strings around my hands so’s I could snug down against the saddle and keep from bouncing off.
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We were three miles from my home (six from his) when he stopped and dismounted to relieve himself. While this was going on, I slid back onto the horse’s rump to stretch my legs … and crazy Dick whipped around and sent a stream of pee arcing towards his horse’s head. The horse went straight up in the air - and I went even higher, while churning my hands to get loose from the saddle strings. The Gods were with me and I became detached just before he hit the ground and went sideways. I made a magnificent three-point landing on my knees and forehead, except that my forehead came down in a greasewood bush and collected several thorns. The horse fled back towards Smyrna.
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The last horse I had dealings with was three million years old and came out of the Taunton fossil beds a bone at a time. He never gave me any trouble whatsoever.

Brrrrr!


I do not like this time of year, Sam I Am, I do not like it much at all!
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But Grandson Allie dreams of the dawn of a SNOW DAY!

Sunday, November 27, 2005

SleeplessInSudan


I've managed to add my first link -- 'Sleepless In Sudan' -- (see my Link List on this page) -- a great Blog by an Aid worker in Sudan, current site of genocidal activities. If only these people were Jewish, then someone's Government might notice and care.

Saturday, November 26, 2005

Just call me Demented!


I was walking around downtown Bremerton this morning, enjoying the burst of scarce sun and snapping shots for my yaFro photosite ... and I came across this fellow in the window of the 'Puppet Museum' over on Fourth Street. He reminded me of Stephen King's novel 'It'.

Friday, November 25, 2005

Onward and Upward!


Now that Thanksgiving has been folded into the history book, we can commence to stress out about Christmas and the New Year. My recommendation is that we celebrate Thanksgiving on even numbered years, except for the 'zero's, which would be the New Year/New Decade, and Christmas on odd numbered years.

Deja Voo!


"I was trying to escape. It didn't work."
...the Bushlet

I can't eat as much as I usta!





I remember many a Thanksgiving dinner where I went back for seconds on practically everything, but yesterday I found myself struggling to clean up one plate. I did notice, while trying to load the holiday plates into the dishwasher this morning, that they stood too tall and interferred with the rotating 'blades'.

There was a lot of promotion of the 'blast furnace' turkey-cooking method this year. Safeway was promoting the 'Two Hour Turkey', The New York Times Food Section published a slightly variant procedure, and Gourmet Magazine jumped on the bandwagon this year. So I thought "What the Hell, I'll try it." I went with Gourmet's method (to 170 degrees) because Safeway's finishing temperture (160 degrees) seemed a bit low to me. But Gourmet's time was for a 12 to 16 pound bird and mine was 21 pounds .... so I did a little tap dance on the calculator and figured I should go three hours and fifteen minutes (at 450 degrees) .... but check the temp at 3 hours. There must have been something missing from my calculations because the temp was 185 degrees at 3 hours ... a tad bit overcooked, wing tips blackened, perhaps a little dry. I'd cook it that way again, but start checking the meat temp 30 to 45 minutes sooner.

The six guests all brought food and drink and we laid on a lavish feast starting with ham wrapped asparagus appetizers at 3:00 PM and ending with pumpkin pie around 7:00 PM. If eight unexpected guests had crawled to our door, we could have fed them till they popped (on the leftovers).

[I guess if I want to sequence pictures, I should start with the last and work forward.]

Monday, November 21, 2005

Quote of the Day


"I was trying to escape. It didn't work."
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....George the Lesser

Friday, November 18, 2005

Intelligent Design, Proof of

The local news today carries the story of a woman who was a teacher in a Catholic parochial school for 37 years and much beloved. She retired recently and was living out on the coast. An asshole who killed someone in Pierce County went out there and murdered her. Because this was an event in the great interplay, by definition, it becomes part of Intelligent Design AND "Working HIS wonders in mysterious ways." Granted it is mysterious ... puzzling ... even baffling, but WHY is it a WONDER?
I really do wonder(?).

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

Six Horsemen of the Apocalypse


Editorial Opinion: As a result of centuries of indecisiveness, the timing is radically off on this Armageddon caper. The six horsemen (grandchildren to the 13th power of the original Apocalyptic Horseman Designates) were caught at an immature age AND four of the horses were unavailable, having been rented out to Halliburton as dray animals. As a result, the Horsemen were not as frightening as was specified in the Intelligent Design, they had to ride three to a horse, they had not yet received any training in their pestilential specialties, and they were uncertain as to how many of them were supposed to take the field during the Grand Opening.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Contract Awarded to Halliburton


Sources deep within the darkest corners of the Vice Presidential offices have leaked news of a post-Rapture salvage contract awarded to Halliburton. It is expected that the most demanding efforts will be required south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where an unusually high percentage of the future rapturees appear to be congregated. In addition to guaranteed reimbursement of cost over-runs, proceeds from recovered clothing, wallets, purses, watches and jewelry will be split between Halliburton stock holders and elements within the Administration.
These same sources suggest that, if Halliburton is conspicuously successful with the post-Rapture salvage effort, they may well have the inside track for the post-Armageddon clean-up contract.

Monday, November 14, 2005

THOUGHTS ON THE RAPTURE


The December 2005 issue of Vanity Fair has an entertaining piece entitled APOCALYPSE SOON! It contains considerable detail about the Rapture. I was surprised to find that those flying faithful who would be ascending during the Rapture, would be doing so in the buff. Clothes and worldly possessions would drop to the ground. Can you imagine looking up into the sky and seeing Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell dangling over your head naked?
I believe I shall have to give the Apocalypse and the Rapture some additional thought and later comment. There seem to be some lurking problems with the scenario envisioned by the faithful. Problems I need to think about and address.

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Unearthing a Life: Cle Elum and Whittier


My little brother and me with our parents, Othello, WA, 1936.

As you’ve gathered by now, I lived in Othello in my early years and in Smyrna during my grade school years (and the summers of my high school years).

My dad worked for the Milwaukee Railroad. Between 1938 and 1940, he began to get temporary jobs as a relief section foreman. I assume this was the temporary replacement of regular section foremen when they went on vacation, or when a section was "open" and waiting for the new regular section foreman to be selected.

During this period, we lived so briefly at Smyrna that I don’t even remember it. Perhaps we didn’t actually move there. Maybe Dad "commuted".

I do remember Cle Elum.

We moved there in April of 1939 for a three month "tour of duty" while the regular section foreman, Pete Genetsis (Jen-eet’-sus), traveled to Greece to visit relatives in the "old country". It was Pete’s misfortune that his vacation coincided with Adolph Hitler’s invasion of Greece, and he had a difficult time getting back to the good ol’ U.S. of A. He finally returned in November, which made our stay in Cle Elum seven months rather than three.

We made friends with a family by the name of Johnson who lived nearby. Mr. Johnson worked in the coal mines at Roslyn (site of the TV series Northern Exposure) and one evening we drove up there to pick him up after work. With a clanking roar, the men erupted from the earth riding on a "train" of little ore cars (probably being pulled out of the mine by a cable and winch system). There was so little overhead clearance in the tunnel that the miners were laying down in the cars. And they were black-faced and black-handed.

I still remember the shock of seeing all those sooted-down men emerging from that dark hole in the ground...and I remember being glad that my Dad got to work out in the open air and not in a scary place like that coal mine.

At some point after that, Neil, Norma, and I were playing in the corner of the yard when a black-faced, black-handed man came walking by along the railroad track. I should explain that we had a large-square, woven wire fence and at the corners of the yard there were two-by-fours nailed across the tops of the fence posts for bracing. This is only important as a visual aid to the imagination. The three of us scrambled up the fencing wire and did belly whoppers over the two-by-four brace. Three raucous magpies hangin’ on a rail!

Thinking the man was a coal miner, we began yelling questions at him, primarily repetitions and variations on the theme "Hey! Mister! How come you don’t wash?"

Mom must have heard the commotion we were making because she quickly appeared with a switch in hand and sent us all Ki!Yi!ing into the house with her switch nipping at our butts. Then she told us that the man was not an un-washed coal miner; that he was a negro; and that negroes had black skin and stayed black even when they washed. I can’t speak for my brother and sister, but I thought she was making it up as some unexplainably dumb part of our punishment.

During that summer of 1939, our family and Johnson’s (and multitudes of other "locals") went swimming in the Yakima River a bit southeast of Cle Elum. A railroad trestle crossed the river at this swimming hole and I remember the thrill of watching "older people" climbing up the trestle timbers and cannon-balling into the Yakima. That high in the Cascades the river is very shallow, so I suspect that this diving hole was likely created by the trestle or the trestle’s construction.

A salesman came by the house one day. He was selling hobby-horses for $1 each. Mom bought three. As I recall them, they consisted of a mop-handle-sized stick with a painted silhouette horse head on one end. The reins were a wide, orange, rubber band loop such as might have been cut from an orange innertube - and probably was. These were fine dependable steeds. They never tired before we did.

Dad had a bookcase with wood-framed glass doors. It held his vast collection of Zane Grey and Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, as well as Mom’s Nancy Drew books. One day Neil hooked his horse’s rubber reins over the arm of the couch, hauled back on the stick body, and launched his wooden pony across the room. He scored a direct hit through one of the glass windows of Dad’s bookcase. We tried to sell Mom on the idea that the horse had galloped into the window. She wasn’t buying and subsequently scored several of her own direct hits on the seat of Neil’s pants.

It was also at Cle Elum that we acquired our dog Hitchhiker (thereafter known simply as "Hitch"). I remember Dad "unveiling’ the puppy as it lay in a cardboard box on the back porch. It was a mostly white pup with a few scattered black patches. Hitch was Dad’s dog. We played with him once in a while, but he was relatively unobtrusive and spent the hot Smyrna summers sleeping under the house till Dad came home from work. When coyotes howled at night, stupid dogs charged off into the darkness to bark at them. Myth has it that coyotes would jump these stupid dogs and kill them. I never knew anyone to lose a dog to coyotes, but Hitch must have had an instinctive belief in this myth. He would charge to the edge of the circle of illumination thrown by the porch light and do his barking from there. I believe he lived till about 1955 -- three years after I grew up and left Smyrna for a job at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.

In May of 1940, Dad was sent to Whittier for two months as a temporary replacement for the foreman, who had bid on and got a job as a relief gang foreman. The fellow didn’t like his new job and returned almost immediately, turning our two month stay at Whittier into two weeks. It seemed much longer to me.

Whittier was about halfway (up) between Cle Elum and the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. A dirt road cut off the highway west of Easton and wandered, maybe a mile, through dense forest to a house that was a duplicate of the one in Smyrna. The remainder of Whittier was one tool shed for the "speeder", one roofed shed over the outdoor hand pump, and one outhouse. I think the section "hand" lived in the upstairs of the foreman’s house.

There were two wonderful things about Whittier.

First there was the pump house, a weathered, moss encrusted, partially un-walled structure built to keep the pump free of the six feet+ of annual winter snow accumulation. The pump was a little thing -- of the type that was usually found indoors. Mom’s Uncle John and Aunt Ruby had one like it mounted in the kitchen counter next to the sink (in the old Evans family farmhouse on the wheat ranch south of Rosalia). A long V-shaped wooden trough led from the Whittier pump and emptied out through a big hole in the back wall of the shed. The pump house was a kid-sized magical place.

Secondly, beyond the pump house was a "swamp". Glossy black water floated a tangle of old logs. Skunk cabbage and water lilies grew abundantly in and around the dark waters. Our favorite pastime was exploring along these logs, stepping or jumping from one to another. I think Mom may not have been aware of what we were doing.

Once Norma (from right beside me) slipped and fell into the water. My memory is that she went under and when she re-surfaced, I had a grip on her and "popped" her right back up on the log. I was six years old -- she would have been three -- so I suppose I could have done that.

One day Dad came home all excited because they’d seen a bear from the Speeder. He loaded the family on the contraption and we went Pop! Pop! Bang! back up the track to a high trestle that crossed a ravine with a stream coursing the bottom. They had seen the bear down along the stream. The critter had not waited for our return. What marks that in my mind is that Dad took the Speeder across the trestle and back. From a seat on the Speeder, that was like being a thousand feet in the air with nothing under you.

Friday, November 11, 2005

OIL-CAN BOYS ATTACK PUGET SOUND

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British Petroleum, via BP AMERICA's chief executive Ross Pillari, issued a threat to cut production at the Cherry Point refinery near Bellingham if a federal law restricting tanker traffic in Puget Sound is not repealed. Pillari is, in effect, demanding that Puget Sounders accept more and bigger oil spills or he will slap us in the pocketbook. The late, great Senator Warren G. Magnuson, Democrat - Washington was responsible for the restrictive "Magnuson Amendment' that has partially protected the waters of Puget Sound for past decades. We have had our oil spills here, but thanks to the Magnuson Amendment, they have been small. Now CEO Pillari's surreptitious shill, the unremarkable Senator Ted Stevens, Republican - Alaska, has quietly introduced legislation to kill the Magnuson Amendment and open Puget Sound to the ravages of Big Time Oil Spills. You'd think that after the Exxon Valdez rape of the Alaskan coast, Stevens would be slightly more enlightened. But NO! Now he wants to Share the Horror.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Unearthing a Life: Ice & Snow



My mother standing out in the snow at her future in-law's farm, Othello, WA, ca 1931.

The old wooden water tank in Othello, WA. It always leaked, but in the winter, the leaks turned to giant icicles and then cascades of ice.
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ICE & SNOW
Amongst the old family pictures is a photo of my Dad standing up to his belly button in snow -- in Othello. This was practically an historic event and known as "the Big Snow of 192_"(?).
Snow was not a major part of winter in the Columbia Basin of the 1940’s. When it did come, it came as a surprise and we fell on it with great enthusiasm. First on ancient sleds from our parent’s childhoods and later on "new" sleds that showed up one Christmas morning, we coasted down the hill between our Smyrna home and the railroad tracks with flair and daring-do. When the snow failed to show up and the weather was cold enough, we pumped buckets of water and poured them down the hill to make an "ice slide" which was even more thrilling (and faster) than the snow.
Maggie Vining, the mail custodian, had to traverse this hill afoot in the wee hours of the morning. Maggie was about five feet tall and weighed a couple hundred pounds. Her balance and agility were thus impaired when it came to icy hills. I might add, for no particularly good reason at this point, that she had both the face and the disposition of an aggressive bulldog.
I’d better stop and explain about mail custodians: Smyrna’s mail went in and out on the eastbound/westbound Milwaukee passenger trains that went through Smyrna sometime between 1:30 and 3:30 AM (the middle of the night). The trains did not stop unless there were packages. The incoming mail was flung out the baggage car door in a heavy canvas bag that tumbled along the ground and was collected by Maggie Vining for delivery to the Post Office at 8:00 AM. She hung the outgoing mail sack from an arm on a metal stand beside the tracks and the baggage man grabbed it with a hook as the train rolled by.
Our icing of this hill pissed Maggie off and she’d throw the ashes from her wood stove on our hill during the night. Come morning, we would be back at the gunny-sack wrapped hand pump, laboring mightily to ice over her ashes.
A few years back, Norma had a nostalgia attack and went down to Smyrna and looked for that "hill". She reported back to Mom that the hill was gone. Disappeared. Vanished. Childhood sledding hills have a tendency to do that. Those that don’t disappear -- shrink. I’ve looked at that old hill myself. There is a discernible slope of maybe three feet drop over thirty feet. Like Norma, I recall it as being more like four times that height. Maybe someone brought in a bulldozer and scraped most of it away.
Norma’s "missing hill" dilemma tickled Mom because she had once done the same thing....gone back to look at a childhood sledding hill, only to find that it had been somehow flattened.
When we got a little older, we would drag our sleds up on Saddle Mountain and there created some truly breathtaking, high-speed slides. On one of them, we would have to purposely crash headlong into a sagebrush at the bottom -- to prevent our continuing on over a little bluff with a boulder strewn landing. These hills, at least, still exist just as we remember them.
At Smyrna School, snow always brought on a game of Fox and Geese. We’d start out with the usual giant spoked wheel made by sweeping the pathways with our "overshoes" moving side to side. Once the formal game became too boring, we would start adding and extended area of wandering paths until most of the school yard became the game board. A NOTE: All us redneck Crab Creek kids wore "overshoes".....black rubber overshoes with little "buckles". No slip-on rubbers. No zippered "galoshes".
When the weather got really cold -- like zero to maybe 20 degrees below zero -- we had this dare game. We’d gather around the iron pipe flagpole in front of the schoolhouse and apply our tongues to the pole. The goal was to get your tongue froze to the pole enough that it would stick there, but still be able to pull it loose without losing any skin off it. The timing was critical. I always went to far and ended up with a partially skinned tongue. And it seemed as though every time I developed this "tongue wound", my mother would have prepared a pot of acidic Campbell’s Tomato Soup for our lunch. Sting and Zing!
We’d play the same game at home on the iron pump handle. I’m pretty sure that on one such occasion, Mom had to rush out to the pump with a kettle of warm water and "melt" Neil’s tongue loose.
Ice skating on Crab Creek was another occasional winter pastime. I never mastered the art of ice skating. My ankles would bend beyond belief....or I would do the splits....or my legs would shoot forward and my skull would bounce off the ice. Like our first sleds, our first skates were parental hand-me-downs. They were oversized for our feet even though we wore multiple pairs of socks for bulk. There was usually a brisk bankside fire make with chunks of old creosote-soaked railroad ties. That was my domain -- huddled around the fire while others swooped and glided over the ice.
Dad was a good skater. He would streak along the creek, bent low with sweeping strides, until he disappeared around a bend. Then return -- more upright now -- skating backwards. He skated circles and figure-eights frontwards and backwards. He was good. I was frozen.
I did love to run on the ice in my shoes and slide for whatever distance I could in that way. Much safer process! And I loved the sound of the ice....the popping and cracking that always gave me a twinge of fear about falling through. To be honest, falling through the ice on Crab Creek would leave the victim standing thigh deep (maybe) in water....more likely ankle deep.
Mid-winter presented us with unique problems, especially during those times when the temperature plunged below zero, sometimes as far as twenty degrees below zero. We didn’t have to worry about our "pipes" freezing -- we had no pipes. But the hand pump out in the yard was kept wrapped in gunny sacks and old blankets. And the air vent into the root cellar was stuffed with rags and a light bulb kept burning to keep the jars of canned fruits and vegetables from freezing. The critical problem, however, was figuring out how to lower your bare butt onto a wooden outhouse seat in sub-zero weather. My "trick" was to grip the sides of the hole and try to sit balanced on my hands. Given the lack of options, this was probably a universally observed "trick", not just mine alone.

Tuesday, November 08, 2005

My Oldest Family Photo


The younger children of T.M. and Rachel M. (youngest photo of granddad Charlie M.). Back: Delbert Loyd, Anna Vista, and Charlie Roy. Front: Simon Hays, Arthur Vernon, Martin Lester, and William Woodford.
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This photo was taken ca 1886, perhaps in Ritzville, Adams County, WA. My Grandfather Charlie was the baby of the family and was born here in Washington State.

Unearthing a Life: Travel


Me sitting on the hood of Dad's automobile ca 1937-1938.
Grandpa Charlie M. on his horse 'Jap'.
TRAVEL
When I travel to see my daughter in California, I usually leave home (in Puget Sound country, Washington) about 7:30 AM and arrive in Sacramento by noon -- assuming no delays in the schedule.
When my family first came to the Pacific Northwest in 1875, they had to come by boat out of San Francisco bound for Coos Bay, Oregon. Several days at sea! Now it’s a trip that can happen between breakfast and lunch.
The first time I went to California (from Smyrna, Washington) was probably about the summer of 1947. We traveled by car . It was a two-week round trip (the length of Dad’s vacation, not the driving time directly to California and back).
On a two-lane paved highway in the mountains near the Oregon/California border, we ran into a horrendous storm. The rain was like something out of a fantasy, worse than an Eastern Washington cloudburst! Mud was sliding down off the hillside onto the road. Dad was doing his tight-lipped, beady-eyed stare through the windshield (mostly obscured by the hammering rain) and zipping right along, skidding through all the little mud slides. Mom was yelling at him to stop before we were washed off the road. He didn’t stop.
I think there was some hail along with the rain. At one point a bolt of lightning struck a tree (pine? fir?) just as we passed it and my memory thinks that part of the tree fell across the road behind us -- but that may be an "enhanced" memory. Old memories sometimes add dramatic detail that may have come from somewhere else.
Mom was seriously pissed off royal! Dad’s explanation was that he had been afraid to slow down or stop for fear we’d get trapped between two mud slides and be stuck there. My father always had driving tendencies that enraged my mother. They were both oldest siblings -- two top-dogs, two know-it-alls, two five star Generals in a very tiny army. But I think Dad screwed up more often than Mom, which sort of gave her the edge as Chief of Family Staff. The moral high ground, so to speak.
Right after World War II (1945 or 1946 and still driving our old 1939 Chevrolet sedan) we were traveling with Chadbournes along a snake-like meandering dirt road through the mountains, or maybe the foothills of mountains, north of Spokane. I was riding in Chadbourne’s car and Dad was following us. Too closely. He was driving in the dust plume that Forrie Chadbourne was throwing up and I imagine Mom was in the process of speaking to him on that subject. Bitchin’ him out. Anyway we (Chadbournes) went around a tight curve and looked back just in time to see Dad emerge from the dust in a straight line. Off the road! Down into a grassy little valley strewn with barrel-sized boulders.
He never slowed that car down a whit. Down the slope he went, dodging boulders. Up the far slope he charged, dodging more boulders. Finally the old Chevy gave a leap and a bounce over the edge of the road and landed right where it should have been -- but early. Now he was ahead of us. A quarter of a mile of broken field driving put him in the lead. Mother was, as goes without saying, ripped, but he stuck to his philosophy, to wit, "To stop is to chance getting stuck." Traveling is a grand thing -- sometimes.
Gil’s Theory of Forward Progress: Your chance of getting where you’re going is directly proportional to the velocity with which you attack impediments.
This theory was always in play. In winter the old dirt road route to Othello sometimes had flooded spots. Mud and water fell victim to Pop’s acceleration. So did sand dunes blown across the road both near Beverly and down river where we’d go on Sundays to hunt arrowheads. I only recall one time that Dad was actually brought to a serious halt.
One day he loaded all of "us kids" up in the ‘39 Chevy and eased up the cliff road north of Smyrna and onto the United States Army Airforce practice bombing range. Mom was not with us. He found a bomb that hadn’t gone off when it hit. These bombs were about four feet long and filled with sand (for weight), but had a quart of black powder in a canister suspended in the tail-fin section. When they did go off, they made a hole about a yard across and a yard deep -- though some of that cratering ability was due to impact velocity.
Dad wanted that bomb as a curio. As some sort of small reminder or memorial of World War II. He loaded it into the back seat of the car and had us three kids sit on it so it wouldn’t fall off the seat. We were not on a road at this point. He was driving freelance out through the brush. BUT, as we jounced and clattered back towards what passed for a road, he managed to drive through the ashes of an old house that had been burnt to the ground during practice bombing runs.
Back in those "olden" days you not only carried a genuine spare tire, but also a tire pump and a kit of inner-tube patching stuff. We got back home quite late, but we got home with the bomb. Looking back, I think he took a crazy risk sitting us on that bomb. I seriously question if he really knew whether that bomb was totally "dead" or not.
I recall another time we were caravaning with Chadbournes -- must have been close to the time of Dad’s accidental shortcut across the bouldered valley . We were still in our pre-war cars and camping overnight in a gravel pit high in the Montana Rockies (on our way to Yellowstone Park). Mom and Florence Chadbourne put a huge pot on the campfire and began to boil up a stew for our supper. The sun set quickly and the evening chill set in. The stew boiled along merrily. But an hour and a half later, the spuds and carrots remained as hard as rocks. It was a great upset and a mystery until it finally dawned on one of the adults that water boiled at a much lower temperature on a mountain top. They finally got tired of listening to we five kids (me, Lou Ann, Neil, Harriet, and Norma) whining about starvation and fed us crisp stew.
Brother David was on the trip too -- as an infant. According to Mom, she spent most of her time in Yellowstone washing and drying David’s diapers. I don’t remember him being along, though I do seem to recall those diapers hanging on a rope strung between two trees in the Yellowstone campground.
I do remember him at that age though. One day Mom and Dad went to Ellensburg for groceries (about a 120 mile round trip) and left me in charge of "babysitting" him, I must have been all of eleven years old. I put him in his crib with a bottle -- for his scheduled nap, but he was "restive". He kept standing up and shaking the sides of the crib while howling at the top of his lungs. Always an inventive sort of child, I wrapped "diaper handcuffs" around his wrists and safety-pinned his arms to the crib mattress.
Then there was the Christmas morning I was carrying him down the stairs and I tripped at the top and flung him all the way to the bottom -- and came crashing down after him myself. No serious damage that I can recall. Too much excitement. Too big a hurry. But this is beginning to deviate from the topic. Travel. Well -- maybe not. Flying through the air is a form of travel. Right? Right!

Monday, November 07, 2005

Unearthing a Life: Othello: My Hometown



My parents and I, with our home in the background (1934). My First Grade class at Othello School (I'm second from the left, back row) .... Othello's Christian Church in the background (our family church for five generations).


OTHELLO
Othello as in Othello, Washington -- a town. My home of birth, though I was actually expelled from the womb in the Deaconess Hospital in Spokane, Washington -- April 21, 1934 -- round five o’clock in the morning.
The Othello of my early childhood (1934-1941) was mainly a town of dry-land farmers and railroaders. The Milwaukee Railroad maintained a track section crew, a train station, an ice house, switching yards, and a roundhouse on the western edge of town and was the major employer there. Most of the stores faced each other across a single block-length of Main Street. The sidewalks in this "business district" were made of wood planks. On the east end of the north side of this "block" was the U.S. Post Office. Mrs. Barton was the Post Mistriss and a pillar of our church. Knepper’s Variety store (the "Five & Dime") was in the middle of the block on the south side of the street. The Knepper’s had living quarters in the rear of the store building -- and were also pillars of our church. A dark and mysterious establishment, referred to, in tones of implied warning, as "The Pool Hall", was a couple doors west of Knepper’s. I think there was a grocery store and a meat market across the street from the "Five & Dime".
About a half mile east of town there was a little cluster of three houses with the usual accumulated variety of outbuildings. One was sometimes occupied, sometimes not. Another constituted the "farm" of my Grandpa, Charlie M. The last was the Gilbert Charles M. residence, my first home.
My earliest creditable memory would have to be of the day my folks brought Norma home from the hospital after her birth. That would have made me two years and nine months old. They had her in something with "bars" -- probably a crib -- that Neil and I could stand and look into. She had her face turned away from us and all I could see was the tiny back-end of a head covered with black hair. That’s it. My absolute earliest memory. Not "about" Othello, but "in and of" Othello.
When I lived there, Othello was maybe one-twentieth the size it is now -- "Population 310" sticks in my mind for some reason. From the vacant lot between our house and Grandpa’s, two dirt roads led into Othello (I guess it wasn’t actually a vacant lot. It seemed like a "big space" to me. It is now a street that runs north by south between the two houses.). Between the two roads was a "boardwalk" that also went to the edge of town. If memory serves me right, this boardwalk was made two planks wide and about halfway to town it had a bridge where it crossed a little swale (i.e., dip in the terrain). The planks were old and weathered and splintery.
One day I had walked into town with Grandma -- probably to get something at the grocery store. While we were gone, Neil got hold of some sort of grease from Grandpa’s tool shed and applied it to the boardwalk near this little bridge.
On the walk home from town, I ran ahead of Grandma and apparently slipped on Neil’s "grease spot" and fell on the planks, catching myself on the palm of my right hand. Shrieks of PAIN! I’d filled my hand with wood slivers. One hundred and thirty slivers according to Grandpa’s "post-operative" count! I assume that Mom and Grandma Lena M. must have pulled out all they could get a hold of, but I don’t actually remember that part of it. I do remember that evening sitting on my Grandpa’s lap while he worked slivers out of my hand with the small blade of his pocket knife. Then he coated my hand with his personally concocted "drawing salve" and bandaged it up. We had nightly sliver pickin’ sessions for about a week.
Somehow -- and I don’t have the foggiest notion why -- his "drawing salve" would purportedly draw the slivers back to the surface where he could see and extract them. Grandpa Charlie made this salve himself, as well as a couple other salves. How? I dunno! But my Mom, who was not a zealous fan of Gramps, swore by his salves and always used them on us for any kind of minor wound.
Grandpa also did family shoe repair out in his tool shed. A wonderful iron stand with changeable iron shoe forms....awls and big needles and new heels and scraps of leather. I recall watching him put new soles and heels on various and sundry family shoes -- and sewing leather patches over holes. Can’t say his work was pretty, but it was utilitarian. He wasn’t big on buying new things if old things could be "fixed". I think my mother thought he was somewhat of a penny-pinching miser. Probably just major frugality born of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.
He shaved with a safety razor that used a double-edged razor blade. Then he had another little box-like gizmo that he dropped the used blade into and honed a new edge on it by turning a little handle. His tool shed had bins full of old beat-up tools and a vast variety of reclaimed nuts, bolts, nails, and other used hardware. He never threw anything away. Neither did Dad, come to think of it.
When I knew him, Gramps worked at the Milwaukee Railroad roundhouse as an engine oiler. The roundhouse was, in fact, round. It held a huge round pit with a raised section of train tracks bridging the pit (a turntable). You’d move a steam locomotive onto the "bridge", then the bridge would rotate in the pit and turn the locomotive around so it could go the other way. Steam engines worked between Othello and Avery, Idaho. From Othello to Seattle they used electric engines (kind of like huge cable cars). I once rode an engine around the turntable in the roundhouse. Anyway, Gramps oiled steam engines. It was filthy work. His overalls and gloves and cap were always soaked with oil. I also got to watch him "wash" his work clothes. There was a small pit (with a thick trapdoor lid) that was used to steam clean engine parts. He’d throw his work clothes in the pit and blast the oil out of them with steam. As a child, I found this a noisy and exciting process.
It occurs to me that I spent a large part of my remembered childhood standing around watching my grandparents do this and that. But now I’ve totally lost track of my topic, which was Othello not Grandpa.
Recreational opportunities were spare in Othello, at least in the eyes of a small child. There was a city park on the eastern border of town. The park is still there, but now it’s "downtown" and bigger and better parks occupy "further out" locations. I have vague memories of attending large picnics there -- probably town, railroad, or church functions. What I recall most about that park was the wooden water tank perched high on seemingly spindly wooden legs. The tank leaked continuously, staining its sides and supports with dampness and moss. The structure of the underside of the tank was home to a large flock of pigeons. In the winter, huge icicles hung from the water tank. HUGE icicles! Maybe fifteen feet long.
Airplanes would occasionally land in a pasture a few hundred yards north of our house. These were few and far between and usually bi-planes (two stacked wings) with open cockpits. For a price, these "aviators" would take you up for a buzz around the area.
Once gypsies came to town, a slow procession of horse-drawn gypsy "house-wagons" coming out of the flatlands to the east (from the general direction of Ritzville, the County Seat). They caused a nervous stir amongst the Othello merchants who were of the popular opinion that gypsies would steal you blind -- especially the women in their long, flowing, volumous skirts, suspected of being cleverly designed for the concealment of purloined merchandise.
Grandma Katie R. also lived in Othello. Her house was along the southern edge of town -- a "white" house with a picket fence. Although I don’t remember them being there, the twins (Uncle Les and Aunt Lela) would have been high school teenagers during those years in the late 1930’s. What I do remember about that house is the kitchen and watching Grandma R. make homemade egg noodles and from-scratch Angel Food cakes.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Land of Oz: Dancing down the Yellow Brick Road


This just in as an e-mail attachment, original source unknown (to me). Placed here by special request of my 'friend' Bookworm.

Saturday, November 05, 2005

My Photo 'Blog'


http://jamesk.yafro.com/

I have a couple thousand photos stored here ... sort of a 'blog' in that I've been a prolific caption writer in some cases.

Unearthing a Life: The Grandmothers



I think 'Bookworm' believes I'll actually use this site to delve into my wildly exciting past. So here is a gesture in that direction:





THE GRANDMOTHERS
There were two. Grandma Lena (above left) and Grandma Katie (above right). They were probably both in their very early "forties" when I was born in 1934, the first grandchild for either of them. Grandma Lena still had one son at home -- Uncle Don. Grandma Katie was in worse straits. Grandpa John had died the year before, at the age of thirty-nine, and Katie had Mom’s four younger siblings still at home -- Mary, Albert, and Lela.
According to Mom (who went back and finished high school after I was born), there was a great deal of Grandmotherly competition between Lena and Katie. Mom, by her own admission, was not only "not much of a housekeeper," she was no housekeeper whatsoever. The two grandmothers would come in regularly and clean her house and wash up the accumulation of dirty dishes.
Geography gave Grandma Lena the winning edge in this battle. She lived within a hundred feet of us, while Grandma Katie was isolated down on the south side of town -- and did not have an automobile. To the best of my knowledge, neither of these women ever drove a motor vehicle.
Morning and evening, Grandma Lena would line Neil, Norma, and I up on a bench...."like three hungry little birds with your yaps hanging open," Mom recalls....and dose us with a spoonful of cod liver oil with a small glass of orange juice for a chaser. For winter coughs there was Lena’s "onion syrup", a concoction of sugar, water, and sliced onions that "lived" and percolated in a covered bowl atop the heating stove. If a cough got too advanced, one could fall victim to the dread Mustard Plaster.
One afternoon in 1939, Mom was suddenly laid out with "the shrieking pains" in her abdomen. Her appendix had burst. Grandma Lena dispatched Uncle Don to race across town to the railroad yards and fetch Dad home. Dad rushed her in to the hospital at Ellensburg -- which must have been a devilish ride for Mom because the first forty miles was washboard rough dirt and gravel road. So Mom had an emergency appendix operation and within hours my little sister Norma was also admitted with advanced pneumonia. Lena went along to "sit" with Norma.
The doctor’s didn’t expect Norma to live, so no one told Mom that her baby was there in the same hospital. Mom did see Grandma Lena and wondered what she was doing there. Sometime in the middle of the night a doctor came into Norma’s room and told Lena that they’d just gotten hold of a new experimental drug and asked if she’d let them try it out on the dying child. Grandma gave them permission (her’s, not Mom’s or Dad’s) and the Ellensburg hospital saved its first life with the original Wonder Drug, Sulfa.
My favorite story about Grandma Lena happened before I was born. She went out to the barn one day, around noon, to do some chore or other and when she opened the barn door to leave, she found herself face-to-face with a rabid (hydrophobic) coyote. Trapped in the barn with a "mad" coyote camped out near the barn door, she climbed up into the haymow and waited out the afternoon. When she finally saw Grandpa Charlie coming home from work, she hollered out and told him the situation. Charlie fetched his .22 rifle from the house, dispatched the coyote, and set Grandma free.
Food figures heavily in my memories of my grandmothers. Grandma Lena was a Primo chicken-killer (dead chickens subjected to appropriate heat are food). She sometimes provided "fryers" to the Othello meat market. She would haul several crates of these chickens out behind the woodshed -- to the vicinity of the chopping block. To the big pot of boiling water. To the stack of brown paper bags.
Heads flew with startling rapidity. She was so fast with the hatchet that sometimes there’d be a half-dozen headless hens doing flip-flops across the wood yard. Then a dip in the scalding water and feathers flew after heads. As the final touch, Lena would singe off the pinfeathers with a flaming brown paper bag. It was a dreadful spectacle. Headless chickens chased me in my childhood nightmares.
She made dill pickles which started "dilling" in a huge crock with a towel packed into the top. Sometimes she’d lift the towel and let me fish out a dill pickle "in the making". And sometimes when she wasn’t immediately present, I’d sneak a pickle.
And BUTTERMILK! Anytime I caught her churning butter, I’d hang close by for a little glass ("little glasses" came from the grocery filled with cheese-crap and/or jellies) of fresh buttermilk -- with bits of yellow butter still suspended in it. When I got big enough to crank the churn, I struck a bargain with her. I’d churn her butter and I’d be rewarded with a BIG glass of buttermilk. Once in a while nostalgia overwhelms me in grocery store dairy sections. I take home a pint of buttermilk in its little cardboard container. It’s just not the same. Not even in the ballpark.
I don’t have as many "thereby hangs the thread of a tale" memories of Grandma Katie. As I said above, she sort of lost the proximity battle. I do remember her wonderful angel food cakes and her plump succulent egg noodles. And the time Neil and Norma got hold of a bottle of black shoe polish and painted it all along the side of her white house.
About the time we moved permanently to Smyrna (1941), Aunt Lela got married and Uncle Les joined the U.S. Army (as did Uncle Don). With everyone gone, Grandma Katie left Othello and moved in with her mother, Great-Grandma Mary, in Rosalia, Washington. Rosalia is south of Spokane and only a few miles from the wheat farm where Katie grew up.
This does remind of a bit of a tale. Great Uncle Jim told me that his father was not only a wheat farmer, but also a baseball nut. His dad suspended a tire in the barnyard, marked off the distance to a pitcher’s mound, and made the kids spend hours every evening pitching to him through the hole in the tire (the strike zone). Jim went from the barnyard to the Baltimore Orioles in the Major Leagues. His professional career was short. The U.S. got into WWI and he joined the Army. His Division fielded a high-class baseball team that went around playing against other Army teams and did exhibition games with Big League teams. One day he pitched both games of a double- header against the Baltimore Orioles. He won both. But ruined his pitching arm for all time and, as a defunct player, got sent off to France to fight in the trenches.
"All us kids were damn good," Uncle Jim boasted. "I was the only one who ever got anywhere with it. But when we were kids back in school, the best damn ball-player in the family was your Grandma Kate."

SEE DICK JUMP! SEE DICK JUMP ON SPOT!


How would you like to have this man interrogating your child?
Richard the Lyin' Hearted
Protector of Medieval Family Values
Ironhanded Henchman
of
Bush the Lesser
The White House drive towards preserving our Gawd Givin' Right to attach electrical power sources to our 'enemy's' genitals gained significant ground this past week when Veep Dick Cheney caught Republican Senators behind closed doors and pointedly informed them of exactly where the bear was likely to shit in the bulrushes. John McCain dissented. Imagine that!
With the Administration's current bully-boy campaign to preserve the right to utilize torture, it is difficult to believe that prior abuses uncovered in Iraqi prisons were not smiled upon from the Oval Office ... and - Heaven Forbid! - actually ordered from on high.

Friday, November 04, 2005

PROFILE (semi-long version)

The "about me" part of the profile only allows 1200 characters(?). So here is a copy of the profile I used on my yaFro photo blog site:


Born April 21, 1934, in Othello, Adams County, WA. Went through grades 1 thru 8 at the Smyrna School, Smyrna, Grant County, WA -- one room, eight grades, eight to fourteen students, depending on the year. I "farmed out" to my great Uncle Jim to attend Leavenworth High School from 1948-1952. Immediately after graduating, I moved here to the coast and went to work at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard as an apprentice naval pipefitter and steamfitter. In '56 I married my 1st wife and we produced Kelly, Erin, and David. As soon as I could manage it, I left the "tools" behind and became an Engineering Technician in the shipyard's Design Division, where I worked and prospered for about 37 years and then retired in 1989 at age 55. Since then I have served as "office staff" in my wife Kay's business as a mental health counselor (bookkeeping, banking, billing, and fighting with insurance companies). Kay and I married in 1968 and have had a long and illustrious career together. That's the nuts 'n bolts. The fun parts are more varied. First I got into pottery (easy credits at Olympic College) and even had a show of my work in the O.C. Gallery. Then I followed Kay into Community Theatre, where I directed, stage managed, designed sets, etc., for maybe a decade. Then came my photography period, with a couple of "shows", a few sales, a minor award, and one book cover from a New York publisher. Next (1987), I got deeply into paleontology with brother Neil and we dug a large hole in the ground between Othello and Smyrna. In about six years we recovered identifiable bones of over 75 vertebrate creatures from three million years ago. I wrote and published a "paper" in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontolgy (1995) (describing a new species of extinct antelope that we had uncovered [pieces of]). Now I chase extinct ancestors


On the Wrong Foot Again

I apparently choose a template without actually making a specific choice .... now I will have to go search out how to change it .... maybe. Maybe I'll like whatever it defaulted to.

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