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Stephen Arnold Waschke

Stephen Waschke.

My cousin Steve died last week. He fought a long hard fight against heart disease and I believe death came to him as a release. Steve was taken care of by his son Jacob and his son’s partner, Shasta. Steve was the son of Arnold and Dorothy Waschke, who both passed some years ago. He left behind his two sisters, Deanne Watt and Dlonra Eitner, his brother David Waschke, his son Jacob and many, many friends and other relatives.

Steve was a skilled welder most of his adult life. He apprenticed at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton and served in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve. He built and repaired boats and worked turnarounds at the oil refineries. He could lay down a flawless bead standing on his head, tell a good story, and, having taken lessons from his father, roast a perfect salmon on an open vine maple fire.

A Steve exploit with barbecued salmon.

In later years, when his failing heart forced him to hang up his hood and leathers, he taught welding and other construction skills at Northwest Indian College.

I have many stories to tell about my cousin, most of them from the glorious days when he was the leader of our band of cousins on Waschke Road. Steve seldom got us into outright trouble, but he deftly pressed the limits, from requisitioning fence posts to build a replica of Fort Apache to digging underground chambers where the cows wandered, big and deep enough to be death traps. He led us to jump out of the haymow onto scant piles of loose straw, high enough to break a limb; he egged us on to swing on precarious ropes suspended in the barn.

Last week, those exploits ended, but Steve will lead them forever in our memories.

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Vine Maple Arches

Vine maples arched over trails in the woods in several places. The arches were formed by a half a dozen or so four to six inch vine maple trunks that started on one side of the path, rose up eight or ten feet and then descended again to the ground. Often, a single trunk was rooted on both sides of the arch. From base to base, the width of the arches were about double the height of the arch– sixteen to twenty feet. That was ample room for a cow to walk under and just high enough to drive under with a small tractor.
For no particular reason that I knew, Dad favored tractor routes through the woods that went under the arches, which may be the reason the arches went over the trails. Or maybe cows favored walking under vine maple arches because the arches came in handy for a good back scratch on the way through the woods. In any case, arches over trails were more frequent than would have occurred by chance.
The kids climbed all over them, jumped from them, and above all else, claimed them. Like many other things, vine maple arches have the ineffable independence from their surroundings that qualifies them as a fort. A vine maple arch could be a Sherwood Forest hide out, a guardhouse at Fort Apache, or the rampart of a crusader castle. They were ideal for planning ambushes and the famous confrontation between Robin Hood and Little John was reenacted time and time again by daredevils carrying quarterstaves and balancing themselves eight or ten feet above the hard ground on a tangle of vine maple trunks.
No one ever admitted to a broken a bone. but there were hard falls that knocked the wind out of a kid and scratches and scrapes beyond counting that were beneath notice. Of course, you must know that my cousins and I were a bunch of thugs who could not separate fun from physical peril. With that mindset, as danger went, vine maple arches were no worse than hay stacks, cedar trees, or even open pasture.