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A Man, a Cigar, and a Plymouth

My great grandfather, Gottlieb Waschke, like most men from the turn of the century, smoked cigars, but he was not good at driving automobiles.

Pear tree planted by Gottlieb Waschke
Pear tree planted by Gottlieb Waschke

He had a nickel silver match case with a cigar end clipper and an engraving of a stag on the front. My grandmother said he brought the case from Germany.

After he married off six daughters and more or less established four sons, he bought a Plymouth and drove it around some, but he never learned to drive well. A man with six married daughters was under no  compulsion to drive any better than he felt like, and the state had not gotten around to traffic laws or requiring driving licenses. In photographs, Great Grandpa resembled his contemporary fellow Prussian, Otto von Bismarck. My father remembered him as stubborn with unshakable self-confidence, even arrogance. Those traits could not have been mellowed by his success with managing family affairs.

Dad rode with Grossvater a few times. He overheard the old man muttering “Recht, recht,” and “Links, links” (German for “right, right” and “left, left”) as if he were driving his German speaking team of horses, when he wanted the car to turn. Dad, who was not more than six or seven at the time, said he wanted to laugh, but did not dare.

John Schaefer, a family friend whom I have mentioned before, told me a story about my great grandfather’s driving. One sunny Friday in September,

Large pumpkin
Large pumpkin

when all the farmers were in Bellingham shopping, paying bills and selling things, Great Grandpa decided to drive in to town. John Schaefer saw him in his Plymouth on the corner of State (then called Elk) and Holly, a busy spot in town. In its way, as busy as any intersection anywhere. Great Grandpa was stopped waiting for traffic. When traffic started, he popped the clutch and killed the engine. Horns started honking, and one driver, probably having just left one of the taverns that were everywhere before and after 1919, shook a fist menacingly.

John Schaefer was a self-professed no-good at that time, probably just out of one of the taverns himself, watching from a safe vantage on a bench on the sidewalk, smoking a scant teaspoon of Bull Durham tobacco wrapped in wheat straw paper. John said Gottlieb gave his harassers less attention than he paid the smell of cow manure in the barn, took a six-married-daughters stretch, and searched his pockets for a cigar, which he eventually found. With great care. he used his nickel silver match case trimmer on the end of the cigar. The crowd gathered and more drunks got word that something was up. They began to creep out onto the street as Gottlieb trimmed his cigar exactly as he liked it, stopping to test the draw and admire his work.

John began to fix himself another smoke as Gottlieb lit a match. The first match blew out in the breeze before Gottlieb got it up to his cigar. In those days, before the landfills and regrades had leveled and molded the geography, Elk street was closer to the water than it is now and John said there were a few oysters to be picked up right in town. On a tough day, you could go out on the tide flats and gather a meal, and Jake at the Waterfront Tavern would let you eat it at the bar if you could afford one of Jake’s watery and short nickel beers to go with it.

All the old settlers, Gottlieb included, learned to go to the water when food was short, to treat the sulfurous stench of the tide flats as a comfort that could be relied on in tough times. Gottlieb no doubt smelled the tide flats of Bellingham Bay and took comfort as he calmly lit his cigar and took a few puffs, feeling very satisfied that September afternoon.

The horns honked and a few more fists were raised, but John Schaefer pointed out that Gottlieb Waschke was known to have four sons and six sons-in-law, three or four of whom were always ready and eager to take offense, possessed fists like stones, and had arms as hard and tough as a vine maple trunk. This thought kept the crowd in check as Gottlieb got the fire burning nicely in his cigar, started his Plymouth, and drove on.

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Speaking Chinook Jargon Like a Northwest Native

There are estimates, more likely wild guesses, that a 100,000 people spoke Chinook Jargon in the old days, which were sometime around the turn of the century. The charm of Chinook Jargon is in its illegitimacy. The inventors of Chinook Jargon were simply up to no good. The traders of Nootka Sound, the Straits of Juan de Fuca, the Gulf of Georgia, Puget Sound and the mouth of the Columbia were out for quick profits, not to confer the blessings of high culture. They wanted prime sea otter and seal skins they could convert to mountains of cash in China. When the Chinese market for skins petered out, they went for salmon, timber, coal, gold (never much of that), whatever was available and selling. They were more interested in cheap whiskey than grammar and not likely to waste their breath on anything more abstract than “hyas makook” (big sale, expensive) or “tenas makook” (little sale, cheap.)

Concrete and unadorned, Chinook Jargon did not garner much respect among the representatives of high culture. Christian missionaries did not make much progress with the native population and some of them blamed the jargon.

J. G. Swan was notable among early observers of the northwest because he became fluent in the Indian languages, like Makah and Clallam, as well as the jargon. Swan settled on Willapa Bay in the 1850’s and later moved to Port Townsend, wrote monographs on Pacific Northwest natives for the Smithsonian, and was schoolteacher to the Makahs on Neah Bay.

Swan said the missionaries failed because the Indians were never shown any advantage to taking on the white religion. The Indians, according to Swan, were fascinated by white ways. They were quick to adopt iron tools and fire arms. They listened to the white clergy’s stories with great interest and they took to singing hymns with the same alacrity that Europeans picked up jazz a century later. But believe that preposterous nonsense? Not on your life. Swan said several times that the Indian could be converted, but first he would have to be convinced and that would take a generation of education. Swan advocated a long game for the Indians: education without conversion. For all his sympathies for the Indians, Swan did not doubt the superiority of white religion and civilization. He expected conversion would automatically follow a generation of education.

But other missionaries were not so diligent in their language studies or patient with the natives. For example, Reverend John H. Frost arrived at the Columbia in June of 1840 from New York via Hawaii as part of the “Great Reinforcement” from the Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Frost met with more difficulties than he was prepared to face. The whites were selling rum and whiskey to the natives and the Chinooks were more interested in trading than religion. Frost gave it up, putting a good share of the blame on the inadequacies of Chinook Jargon. He said “Their language is so defective that thereby, it is impossible to acquaint them with the law.” With that pronouncement, Reverend Frost sailed from the Columbia in August of 1843.

Swan’s point is not difficult to understand. Frost may have been frustrated by the jargon, but it is easy to imagine that lack of empathy was more of a barrier than the language. What were the Indians to think of a tribe that sold lumpechuck and piahchuck, then threw them in irons for consuming it?

How do you speak Chinook like a native northwesterner? You must understand that it is the language of a disappearing underclass: manual laborers who don’t get inside enough, will never be well paid, and are working on permanent joint damage. Only use the jargon in the most everyday situations. Reach for a Chinook word when your message needs the smell of the tideflats, the ambiguous warmth of huddling around a warm up fire in a steady rain, or the howl of a Northeaster at dawn.

What? You never need these nuances? Then you will never need Chinook.

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Uses of Vine Maple

The day of a fish fry begins with a trip to the woods to cut green vine maple for the fire. My grandpa was not much of a cook. His contribution to a fish fry was a wheelbarrow load of vine maple cut early in the morning while the dew was still on the grass. He also built a fire in the pit where the salmon would roast. Grandpa cut lengths of vine maple two to two and a half feet long, thickness ranging from five inch logs to finger size twigs. vinemapleHe would split the larger logs. In my memory, Grandpa used an ax and a Swedish bow saw to cut fuel for fish fries. He had a bright yellow McCullough chain saw, but I don’t recall him ever using it. After cutting the fuel, Grandpa would start the fire with newspaper, a little kindling, and dry stove wood from the wood shed and later throw on the fresh cut green vine maple. When the fire was going well, sweet and pungent smoke billowing, snow white ashes juxtaposed to black charcoal, flames barely visible in the bright sunlight, responsibility went to the cook, usually my uncle. Grandpa died when I was eight, taking with him, I believe, more secrets about vine maple than I can tell.

Vine maple is harder, denser, and closer grained than big leaf maple, but its trunk does not grow large or straight. There is not much lumber in a vine maple tree. I have seen vine maple grow to a foot in diameter and straight logs ten or twelve feet long but logs like that are exceptions. A typical vine maple trunk is less than six inches in diameter and curves sinuously. Trunks that soar upward twenty feet before branching are common, but they are typically so twisted that you would be lucky to cut straight four foot boards from one of those logs.

I once overheard John Schaefer, who survived treatment in an army hospital ward for pneumonia contracted in the flu pandemic of 1918 and knew something about life in the shadow of Mount Baker, suggest to Dad that he find two curved vine maple logs to replace the worn out runners of a stone boat Dad used for spreading barrels of aged cattle urine over the fields, a nasty job, still nasty but now replaced by more elaborate technology. Dad and John talked it over. Yes, vine maple was the right wood for stone boat runners. It would last forever. But finding two logs with the same curve was too difficult. If I knew what I know now, and had the resources currently at my disposal, I would have proposed that we find one log and rip it down the middle with a chain saw. I could do that. It would have been a perfect solution. But that was fifty years ago and I could not have said that then. Ten years ago, I could have split a vine maple log with a chainsaw, but today, perhaps not.

Vine maple wood is tough, not brittle. When I was a kid, John Schaefer taught us to make bows from vine maple. They were easy to make, find a a nice length of vine maple; a four foot length and three quarter inch diameter would be about right. Cut it green and whittle notches for the string at each end. We used cotton sack tyeing string for bow strings– they wore out quickly, but when we were sacking potatoes to sell in Bellingham every week, replacement strings were always close at hand. For arrows, we used fine-grained first growth cedar. Most were not fletched and had no arrowhead, just a notch for the bow string, although during a period when I was obsessed with Robin Hood, I made a few arrows with chicken feather fletches and arrow heads made from fragments of copper water pipe. The Indians made usually made their bows from yew, like English long bows, but they used vine maple for the bent wood frames of fish and bird nets.

The Indians also wove long thin and tough vine maple wands into baskets for carrying heavy loads like camas roots and clams. My great grandfather wove baskets which he sold in Bellingham in the early days before we had much cleared land and he had to rely on ingenuity instead of farming to buy coffee and pay the property tax. We still have one of his baskets and I think the frame work is made from vine maple wands, although my grandmother said the basket was woven from willow.

Vine maple sap is sweet. One spring, I tried to make maple syrup. I had no luck with big leaf maples, but I gathered a half cup, probably less, of sweet sap from a vine maple by cutting a half dozen vee-shaped gashes in the bark, driving a nail at base of the vee, putting a little wire bail on a tin can and hanging the can on the nail. The sap collected at the base of the vee, ran down the nail and dripped into the can. The sap was clear and colorless as water and tasted distinctly sweet. The sap stopped running before I got more than that half cup, and I did not try to boil the sap down to syrup. My mother was more impressed by the bugs and dirt that collected in the tin can than with the sap, but I drank it and thought it was pretty good, yet I never tried to gather sap again. Still, in the spring, when I think of it, I cut off a vine maple twig with my jack knife and chew on it, sucking out the the sweetness like a farmer chewing on a stalk of sweet grass.