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Thrashing In a Bad Year

The marine climate of Whatcom County is mild compared to the Midwest, but it does not guarantee that every crop succeeds. This time of year, late September, my father, Ted, and my grandpa, Gus, worried about rain. A heavy thundershower or a few consecutive days of steady rain could destroy the grain crop, meaning less milk to ship to the dairy, fewer eggs from the chicken house to sell to the grocery stores, and the pigs would not fatten up the way Grandpa liked. A farmer who is not prepared to face a bad crop doesn’t last long on the farm.

Dad and Grandpa never complained about a bad year in my hearing, but I could see it on their faces. One year, probably mid 1950s, the oats were ready to harvest. It had been a good year: the oat heads were heavy and drooping. In those days, Dad and Grandpa grew a traditional mixture of oats and vetch.

Dad went out into the fields after breakfast to check on the oats. I went with him. The days had begun to shorten, the air was cool, and the morning dew was heavy, but the sun burned into the back of my neck. A stiff breeze rattled the dry stalks. Dad thrashed out a head or two of oats in his hand and bit down on a kernel to test its hardness, then spat out the hull. I copied him. He said the oats were ready to cut and we had better get back to the barn and grease the binder.

I know it was the fifties because it was one of the last years Dad used the binder and a thrashing machine. By 1960, he was using a combine and the binder was relegated to the back of the machinery shed until he finally hauled it off for scrap.

I helped Dad by handing him wrenches and the grease gun when he asked for them. By noon, the binder was lubricated, a sickle that Grandpa had sharpened while we greased was mounted, a fresh ball of twine was threaded into the knotter, and the canvas apron that carried the cut grain stalks into the binding mechanism was tight and ready to go. Mom had called a few neighbors on the telephone. They arrived, and we all went in to noon dinner. The bundles from the binder would sit in the field a day or two before the thrashing machine arrived. I seem to remember it was Sorenson’s outfit from Everson.

While the men were eating and drinking coffee, the clouds began to come in from the West, rain clouds coming through the Strait of Juan De Fuca and over Georgia Strait (now called the Salish Sea) from the Pacific where they had loaded up with moisture. Dad cut the back swathe, the first cut around the field in the reverse direction and right up to the fence.

I helped the men pick up the bundles as they came off the binder and set them upright and to the side in shocks, so Dad wouldn’t drive over them when he began cutting in the right direction. All the while, the clouds were darkening and piling up against the hills to the east.

As I remember, Dad cut the back swathe and two rounds before the thunder cracked and rain came down like the clouds were emptying buckets from the sky. The rain flattened the standing oats already bowing under the weight of heads fat with heavy grain. Within a minute, the binder was jammed up with the wet straw that wouldn’t feed, and Dad had to stop. All the crew could do was go home. A few went in to Ferndale to the Cedars Tavern for hands of cutthroat three-hand pinochle in the back room, something Dad or Grandpa never did.

The thunder storm crashed and poured all night. In the morning, the oat field was flattened. The sun didn’t come out for a week and by then grass was growing through the straw and the oat crop was a total loss.

Dad and Grandpa were lucky. They also had a field of wheat that was shorter and a week behind the oats. Dad had wondered if he would have to cut the wheat before it was ready because we would have the thrashing machine for a few days before it moved on to the next job. The shorter stalks stood up to the rain and were not flattened. By the time the sun returned, the wheat was in prime shape and delivered a good crop that didn’t make up for the lost oats, but averted disaster.

It wasn’t the best year, but we made it through.

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Digging Potatoes

I saw a truck load of potatoes in a hopper truck pass through Ferndale yesterday. Somebody must be digging potatoes. From my fleeting view, the potatoes looked good—not too large, uniform size, smooth, clean. U.S. No. 1s, washed and graded in the field and ready for the warehouse. That’s not the way it was done on Waschke Road.

Potatoes on Waschke Road

My grandpa, Gus, was called the Potato King of Whatcom County in Roth’s History of Whatcom County in the 1920s. I don’t know much about the way he raised potatoes in those days, but I have good memories of my dad, Ted, and Grandpa raising potatoes in the 50s and 60s while I was growing up. Like many things on the homestead, planting and digging potatoes was a community event.

Planting

Planting in the spring began with preparing the seed potatoes. Grandpa would choose the best-looking potatoes to set aside for seed for next year. When Grandpa quit selecting the seed, Dad switched to buying certified seed potatoes—White Rose, Netted Gems, and Kennebecs as I remember.

There is an art to cutting seed potatoes. Sprouts start from potato eyes. A whole potato usually has many more eyes than needed for planting, so cutting seed potatoes can double or triple the yield from a sack of seed. Grandpa liked three to five eyes per potato piece planted. Dad, Grandpa, and sometimes my mother, would cut potatoes for several days in late winter getting ready for planting. To speed the work, Grandpa built two “seed cutters,” hoppers with slanted floors he filled with whole seed potatoes. The potatoes exited through an adjustable door that controlled the rate they rolled out onto a tray, which had a fixed vertical knife to slice the potatoes into chunks with the right number of eyes. The chunks fell into a sack and were dusted with sulfur, ready for the potato planter. The knives were kept sharp and I remember cutting myself badly on one when I tried my hand at cutting.

We had a two-row potato planter that required three men to operate. A tractor or team of horses pulled the planter. A set of disks opened trenches into which seed potato chunks dropped. My dad drove the tractor. Two men riding on seats behind the planter regulated the flow of potatoes into the trenches. Sometimes, when help from neighbors was short, my cousin Dave and I got to ride the planter and distribute the falling potatoes, a job that required more concentration and dexterity than you might expect. Another set of disks closed the trenches. It took a full day to plant five or ten acres of potatoes. We planted potatoes in early spring and more often than not, finished planting in the rain.

Dad cultivated the potato field several times during the growing season. The rows were spaced so he could drive the cultivator between the rows and eliminate weeds.

Digging

I looked forward to potato digging in the fall. Dad and Grandpa said that potatoes grew best near the woods, maybe because potatoes prefer acid soil, which meant bright fall leaves, especially the bigleaf maples, were always close in the background. The weather was cool enough for jackets and the air was moist with the fall scent of ripe oat and wheat fields and fruit orchards.

We had a single row potato digger that was pulled by the tractor. The digger was a blade that sliced a foot or so into the ground under the potatoes and vines. The potatoes, vines, and dirt went onto a wide chain belt that shook the dirt off and deposited the potatoes on top of the ground behind the digger. Our digger started out as a horse-drawn implement with a seat for driving the horses. When the potato vines were heavy, someone got to sit on the seat above the chain belt and use their feet to push the dry potato vines along and out the back of the digger. That job often went to a kid with legs long enough to push the vines, usually me or one of my cousins. That job was easy and fun.

The rest of the crew of relatives and neighbors “cleared vines” and “picked potatoes.” The vine clearers threw the vines to the side with pitch forks and the pickers followed, dragging burlap sacks between their legs, and tossing in the potatoes. The star pickers had heavy belts with hooks for the sacks so they could pick with both hands. When a sack was full, the picker would stand it up and grab a new sack from a pile of empties on the flatbed hay wagon.

While my Dad operated the digger, one of the neighbor’s tractors would pull a hay wagon through the field and the men would load on the sacks of freshly picked potatoes. When the wagon was filled, we’d haul it to the house and roll the potatoes down chutes through the basement windows where the potatoes would rest until they were graded and sold on “the route,” Dad and Grandpa’s weekly trip with the pickup truck to a string of small grocery stores and homes in Bellingham. In big crop years, the potatoes that would not fit in the house basement were stored in pits dug into the ground in protected spots in the woods. They lined the pits with cedar rails and straw, then covered the pits with dirt so the potatoes would not freeze.

Grading and selling

Grandpa and Dad sold Washington Combination 75% U.S. No. 1s on the route. As I understood it, we only sold U.S. No. 1 potatoes, but by calling them Combination 75% No. 1, we did not have to pay to have the spuds inspected. We might have gotten more for 100% No. 1s, but not enough to make up for the inspection fee. In any case, Waschke potatoes had a good reputation; the grocers on the route paid Dad and Grandpa a good price no matter what the grade. They also sold potatoes and eggs to Pete Vike, a purchasing agent, who provisioned the galleys of freighters that docked in Bellingham Bay in the 1950s.

Most of the potatoes were stored in the basement of the house. Grandpa and Dad did the grading. A No. 1 potato is smooth and evenly shaped, not small, has no knobs, rough spots, or scabs, and, above all, is not hollow. Large potatoes often have an inner chamber lined with skin. I don’t know why this is a defect. I like baked potato skin and an extra skin on the inside sounds to me like an improvement, but, no matter, a hollow potato was a cull. Any potato large enough to risk being hollow, Dad and Grandpa fed to the animals.

The potato grader was a chute, about thirty inches wide and six feet long built by my grandpa that sat in the basement. The bottom was slats and it was inclined downward at about a 20 degree angle. Potatoes were dumped onto the high end of the grader and they rolled downwards, dirt falling off through the slats. Dad and Grandpa would inspect the potatoes as they rolled downwards and toss any culls that didn’t make the grade into a bushel basket destined to the cows or the pigs. Potatoes that made it all the way to the lower end of the grader went into a burlap sack. When the sack was about filled, it was shifted onto the scales and was filled to exactly one hundred pounds for sale on the route.

This all sounds like a lot of hard, boring, manual labor. I suppose it was, but it didn’t feel that way. The crew of relatives, friends, and neighbors were on a mission. Not a dollar changed hands for the work of in the potato fields. Those who helped got potatoes on their dinner tables, help with haying, cow dehorning, a share in the offal at butchering time– help whenever they needed it. That’s the way it worked on Waschke Road.

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Fish Fry

This week, I will write about another Waschke family tradition: the Fish Fry. The Waschke Fish Fry was nothing like the hundreds and thousands of Fish Fries held all over North America. I’m not sure why the Waschke Fish Fries were even called by that name. They did involve fish, but the fish was always salmon slowly roasted over an open fire. The fish was never fried, never dipped in batter like fish and chips, and always a whole salmon.

I have been told that my great grandparents, Gottlieb and Bertha Waschke started the Waschke Fish Fry tradition. Gottlieb and Bertha had six daughters to marry off. One of our old neighbors told me that my great-grandparents hosted many large parties in search of suitable husbands for their daughters.

The generation that attended those parties is probably all gone now, but I remember occasionally running into folks who remembered my great grandparents’ parties when they heard my name was Waschke. Whether the Fish Fries were part of a scheme to marry off daughters, I do not know, but all my great aunts were married eventually, so it could be true.

But I also think my great grandparents, especially Gottlieb, liked a good big party. I think I have pictorial proof of this that I will bring out someday.

I mentioned in my last blog, Hog Butchering, that my grandpa, Gus, sometimes fed wheelbarrow loads of salmon to the pigs. From that, you might surmise that the Waschkes did not think much of salmon as food, but you would be utterly wrong. Salmon was a delicacy that rivalled my grandma Agnes’s cinnamon, raisin, and apple stuffed Christmas goose.

I don’t remember that my grandmother ever cooked salmon, except maybe in her spicy and vinegary fish soup. I once tried aalsuppe (eel soup) in a bierstube in Germany and I was shocked to discover that it tasted exactly like my grandmother’s fish soup, which she called “fisch stip.” I believe “stippen” is low German for “to dip”. I don’t quite understand Grandma’s name for the soup, but I loved it when she made it, although I also seem to recall that neither my grandpa Gus nor my dad liked it.

I had a similar surprise when I happened to read this excerpt from James G. Swann. The Northwest coast; or, Three years’ residence in Washington Territory. New York : Harper & Brothers, 1857. Pp. 108-109.

We did not wait till the fishing was over for our breakfast, but, when the sun got up high enough to shine clear above the peak of Mount St. Helen’s, old Brandy-wine [a white settler] called us up from the beach, and gave us a glorious repast of salmon, just out of the water, cooked in real Indian style by his Indian wife.

The choice part of a salmon with the Indians is the head, which is. stuck on a stick, and slowly roasted by the fire. The other part is cut into large, flat slices, with skewers stuck through to keep them spread; then, placed in a split stick, as a palm-leaf fan is placed in its handle, with the ends of this stick or handle projecting far enough beyond the fish to be tied with a wisp of beach grass to secure the whole, this stick is thrust in the sand firmly and at the right distance from the fire, so that the fish can roast without scorching. Clam-shells are placed underneath to catch the oil, which will run from these rich, fat salmon almost in a stream. Neither pepper, salt, nor butter were allowed during this culinary operation, nor did I find they were needed; the delicate and delicious flavor would have been spoiled by the addition of either.

I was so much pleased with this style of cooking salmon that I never wish to have it cooked in any other form, either boiled and served with melted butter, or fried with salt pork, or baked with spices. The simpler a fat salmon can be cooked, the better; it retains its flavor with perfection, and is more easily digested; and the only style is to roast it before an open fire.

Son of a gun. Swann’s (or Brandywine’s wife’s) recipe for Fish Fry salmon and the Waschke family recipe for Fish Fry Salmon were the same.

The Fish Fries in my memory were presided over by my uncle Arnold. His method was almost identical to Brandywine’s wife’s recipe moved forward a century in time.

My uncle began by starting a wood fire and topping it with green vine maple logs. He fastened the salmon to chicken wire netting with wires in a steel angle iron frame rather than sticks and suspended the rack over his fire. The salmon roasted slowly in the vine maple smoke. Vine maple sap and wood is sweet and gives salmon a unique flavor. Ivar’s Salmon House on Lake Union in Seattle is not the place it was when Ivar was still alive, but it made alder smoked salmon famous. However, for me, alder is a poor substitute for vine maple. I think my uncle would differ with Swann on seasoning: he used brown sugar on his salmon, but he would have agreed with Swann that the point of seasoning salmon is to taste the salmon, not the seasoning.

In the old days, according to my dad, Fish Fries often were inspired by the arrival of a member of the Lummi tribe with salmon. Later, we would get the salmon from fishermen off the dock in Bellingham or Blaine or a fishing neighbor would drop off a salmon. Still later, we bought it from one of the fish markets.

I often think that there must be a link between Waschke Fish Fries and the Salish potlatch tradition. The classic anthropological discussion of the potlatch tradition is found in Marcel Mauss’s book The Gift. Claude Levi Strauss also studied and wrote about Salish nations.

I know that in the fifties, my grandparents had occasional visitors from the tribe, sometimes bearing salmon, and, of course, I mentioned before that my father was delivered by a Lummi mid-wife. I also know that Grandpa traded potatoes and other produce with the Lummi. Exactly how the salmon tradition made the jump from the Lummi tribe to the tribe of Waschke Germanic interlopers, I don’t know, but I do know that the salmon at a Waschke Fish Fry and at the Lummi Stommish would be hard to distinguish in a blind fold test. And I have searched for German roasted salmon recipes that might have inspired Waschke Fish Fry and have found nothing. The most important similarity is the intent: the essence of potlatch is generosity and reciprocity among friends and neighbors. This was the spirit of the Waschke Fish Fry. The more partakers, the better.