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Thanksgiving On The Farm

We ate our last Thanksgiving dinner on the homestead in 2017. This year, we had family in at our new Ferndale house. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, not German, but Germans never pass up an opportunity to celebrate a holiday. Thanksgiving was nothing compared to Christmas on the Waschke Homestead, but it was an event nonetheless.

I remember celebrating Thanksgiving on the homestead while Grandpa and Grandma still lived in the downstairs part of the house. After Grandpa retired and they moved across the road, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I began going to Lynden for Thanksgiving with my Lynden grandparents. My cousin Denny and I could never stop ourselves from roughhousing on the floor. Someone would have to break us up. I don’t remember that we ever hurt each other, but we rolled around on the floor, each trying to get the upper hand. That must have caused some heartburn among the parents, but there was no real aggression involved. I could not tell you why we wrestled, but we did until we became self-conscious adolescents, had little to say to each other, and replaced wrestling with the awkward silence.

My Waschke Road grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner was, as I remember, a version of Christmas dinner in which the Christmas goose was replaced with a turkey. My Waschke cousins may correct me on this, but as I remember the menu was turkey with sweet cinnamon bread, apple, and raisin stuffing, sweet and sour red cabbage with apples, and mashed potatoes with turkey pan gravy. The crisp turkey skin was like candy.

The Lynden menu was more in the American tradition: turkey with a savory sage stuffing, boiled sweet and white potatoes, green beans, and pumpkin pie. The star of the day for me was sweet potatoes. I could have filled my plate with sweet potatoes.

Grandma Schuyleman was a not a bad cook, but a plain cook. She had neither time nor inclination for anything fancy. She seasoned her turkey with salt and pepper and roasted it. She peeled her sweet potatoes and boiled them with salt. Her turkey was neither over or under roasted. She took her boiling potatoes and green beans off the fire when they were done. Her table was predestined to be just what it was: plain cooking with all the nonsense reformed out, undisguised food to strengthen the body, not satisfy the senses.

How I loved her sweet potatoes. The custom was to cover them in butter on the plate and I followed the custom, but if the butter took its time getting to the kids’ end of the table, plain unbuttered sweet potatoes were good enough for me. I could finish half the sweet potatoes on my plate before the butter arrived. The turkey was fine, as is every variety of poultry when it is cooked but not dry. Green beans and white potatoes were part of practically every meal I ever ate on any farm. Since my mother learned to cook from her mother, no big meh on the Thanksgiving beans and white potatoes. But the sweet potatoes! Allow me to say, my dear wife Rebecca to the contrary, yams are okay, but they taste a lot like squash, which is good, but starchy sweet potatoes are king.

Sweet potatoes and turkey on Thanksgiving were exceptional because they were not grown on the farm, either in Lynden next to the Nooksack River or on Waschke Road.

I once asked my dad about The Depression. He graduated from high school in 1932, before Franklin Roosevelt was elected. At the graduation ceremony, the principal gave a speech in which he told the graduates that they couldn’t expect much: no jobs, no prospects, their diplomas were almost worthless. Dad said he was disappointed and disgusted.

Other than that depressing speech, Dad said the Great Depression was barely noticeable to his family because the farm was self-sufficient. They scarcely needed cash. What little cash they needed to pay the electric bill, buy gasoline and coffee grounds, they could always get by selling farm produce directly—people always eat—but he pitied the shingle and saw mill workers, loggers, and the miners that depended on jobs that disappeared when the economy went sour. The situation didn’t change on Waschke Road until the war.

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Artist Point

The road to Artist Point was completed in 1931. My friend Bill Merrow and I made it to the point on a Monday afternoon in November 2018, 87 years later. It was Bill’s first visit. The first time I visited Artist Point was at least 60 years ago. When my mother took this photo, I was as yet unborn and the road to the point was only 15 years old.

The elegant rock work at Artist Point was laid down around 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC built or improved many of the campgrounds and trails in the national forest along Mount Baker Highway at that time. Mount Baker Lodge was built earlier, opening in 1927. The original lodge burned to its foundation in a few hours soon after it was opened, in 1931, the same year the road to Artist Point was completed.

During the winter of 1934-35, The Call of the Wild starring Loretta Young and Clark Gable was filmed at Heather Meadows. The movie crew was put up in the Heather Inn, which was built to house the workers at the luxurious lodge and survived the fire that destroyed lodge.

The Call of the Wild on location Mount Baker set was a disaster and a scandal. When the crew arrived, a blast of air from the Canadian Arctic hit the Northwest. Filming was difficult. The actors and crew were forced to stay nine weeks, but the cameras rolled only six days.

The Heather Inn turned into an unholy mess. Clark Gable was always a heavy drinker, and Hollywood of that era was not known for temperance. The crew was continually snowed in and alcohol was plentiful. One of our neighbors in North Bellingham had the contract for keeping up the plumbing at the inn. He told my dad that keeping the plumbing working during the filming was hard because the toilets were clogged with smashed beer bottles. Our neighbor was a tough old guy who would tear into an overflowing septic tank or open up a clogged waste line and laugh about it. He said he had never before or since seen anything like the scene at the inn.

Many years later, Loretta Young revealed that Clark Gable date-raped her during the filming on Mount Baker. She became pregnant. She and her family staged an elaborate charade to hide the scandal and prevent MGM from forcing her to have an abortion. Frankly, I don’t know how to evaluate this gossip. Read about it here.

There were no scandals when Bill and I set off from the Heather Meadows parking lot. The parking lot was scraped clear, but the gate on the road to Artist Point was closed and pavement was covered with six or eight inches of snow.

I had some trepidation about the 5-mile walk. I have a congenital heart condition that causes “exercise intolerance” and I quit hiking in the hills a couple decades ago when shortness of breath and chest pains got daunting. I had some surgical work done on my heart at the Mayo Clinic several years ago and I’ve been getting stronger and the symptoms have diminished. I have been itching to get back above the tree line. I proposed a visit to Artist Point and Bill agreed to let me set my own pace. When we arrived, the sun was shining, and the air was in the bracing mid-forties.

Off we went. I suppose I have been to Artist Point a dozen times at least: driven it, snow-shoed, hiked it, I even rode my bicycle up the road once before my heart caught up with me, but I have never seen it more impressive than Monday. The light covering of snow accentuated rough terrain and sharpened the edges of the ridges. This photo shows Goat Mountain, Yellow Aster Butte, and Red Mountain.

The views of Mount Shuksan on the way to the point appears all over on calendars, advertisements, and posters, so this photo may look familiar, but it shows Shuksan at its best.

Notice the steep rock around Hanging Glacier. On the other side is Price Glacier and Price Lake where Price Glacier used to calve off miniature icebergs. I hope it still does. I gathered tufts of mountain goat hair in the heather and bushes around Price Lake, maybe 50 years ago.

During the hike up, I had to stop several times, and I am sure Bill was impatient, although he never showed it. But a little shortness of breath is nothing when you can catch it again after a minute’s rest. I thought of a solo hike up to Hannegan Pass. My heart was still good, and I had a pair of well-broken in logging boots with Vibram soles on my feet. I felt like the trail was flowing under my feet. I passed several parties on my way up to the pass. At the top, I looked up towards Hannegan Peak and wished I could go on. But I had things to do in the lowlands, so I turned around and returned. That was a pre-heart condition high point of my life.

Mount Baker is not visible from Heather Meadows and it remains hidden during the hike up the road to Artist Point. At the top, Baker jumps in your face. Knowing that Mount Baker was coming kept me going on Monday. I admit that the trail did not flow under my feet. I relied on the stick that Bill leant to me. But I made it to the point. In the rough times of a pre-surgery impaired heart, after a strenuous day, I plunged into lassitude. Getting out of bed was a chore, I felt like I was living in molasses. On Tuesday, if I have to admit it, I could scarcely stand up, but it only hurt. No molasses. Get beyond the stiffness and I was fine. Knowing that I can hike again is everything.

Bill Merrow took these pictures, with the exception of my mother’s old snapshot of Table Mountain. This blundering old guy hauled his camera but left his SD card at home. Next time, and I am damn glad there will be a next time, and for that I thank my friend Bill.

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Cutting Wood

Gus Waschke, my grandpa, included a state-of-the-art wood furnace in the house he built in 1916. I have not found any records of the original installation, but the firebox door casting bears the inscription “Mt. Baker”, which suggests that the furnace was a Whatcom County product. The furnace consists of a cast iron firebox surrounded by a sheet metal housing that conducted heat emanating from the firebox upward to a heat register immediately above the firebox and a heat duct that directed heat to the old master bedroom and bathroom.

In the old days, a fire in the furnace marked a special occasion. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, birthdays, and anniversaries warranted starting up the furnace, but an ordinary day was heated by the wood kitchen range. The only warm room in the house was the kitchen; the bedrooms, bathroom, dining room, living room, and library were all unheated. When the northeaster howled and threatened frozen pipes, Grandpa might fire up the furnace for a few hours, but for its first forty or so years, the furnace was only for special occasions.

When my parents, Ted and Thelma, took over the house in the mid-50s, the furnace began to be used daily in the cold months. My mother was not content to live in the kitchen from October to May. The television, which materialized in 1955, was in the living room, located so it could be watched from the dining room table. Instead of a cozy family gathering snugged into the kitchen breakfast nook, the evening meal became an event dominated my Walter Cronkite and the evening news. That lifestyle required a fire in the wood furnace.

Writing about these events causes me to think about my family in ways that I have never considered. My mother and father often bickered, but never argued. My father was more sentimental than my mother and she often called him on improbable sentimental stories. My mother was quick to judgement and Dad did not hesitate to point out her errors. But I did not notice how they decided to change the pattern of heating the house. Both Mom and Dad must have agreed that more of the house had to be warm.

Changing the heating pattern was significant. My dad had to cut more wood for the furnace. Stove wood for the kitchen range was cut sixteen inches long. Dad and Grandpa cut furnace wood to three feet. The furnace was large enough to burn traditional four-foot cord wood, but Dad said three-foot lengths were easier to handle and burned more completely.

Dad and Grandpa cut stove wood with the buzz saw powered by a flat belt from the tractor. Through the spring and summer, they would gradually build a pile of ten to fifteen foot poles cut from branches and small trees. The poles were usually crooked and not more than five inches thick. The buzz saw had a three-foot circular blade and a sliding table. One man would place the poles on the sliding table, usually several at a time, and push the sliding table into the spinning blade, cutting the poles into sixteen-inch stove wood. A second man would catch the stove wood and toss the sticks onto a flatbed hay wagon for transport to the woodshed. Two men and a buzz saw could cut several ricks (a stack of wood eight feet long and four feet high and one stick wide) in an hour. A full day on the buzz saw produced enough stove wood for the winter.

The buzz saw was the easiest and fastest way to cut stove wood, but not all wood could be cut with the buzz saw. When a bigger tree fell, or Dad and Grandpa decided it was time to drop a mature tree, the main trunk would be too thick and heavy to cut with the buzz saw. Limbs could be cut and trimmed for the buzz saw, but the main trunk had to be cut into usable lengths and split. Dad preferred to use the trunks for three-foot furnace wood, but when he had a surplus of furnace wood, he’d cut the trunks into stove wood lengths.

Wood from the trunks had to be split with an axe or maul and wedge. Cutting the wood was relatively quick and easy. Splitting wood was harder and took more skill. By the time I was in junior high (middle school), I was splitting wood regularly. Smaller pieces with straight grain and few knots can be split with an axe, which is quicker and easier than using a maul and wedge. With some practice—not more than two or three years—you can learn to judge which fletches can be split with an axe. The trick is to make a few quick and light chops to start the split and then a hard final stroke that finishes the job. If a fourteen-year-old delivers a hard stroke that is not hard enough to split the block, the axe gets stuck. Unsticking an axe takes a lot of energy and the splitter soon gets tired, which is bad because judgement sags and the axe sticks more often in a descending spiral.

A maul and wedge takes less skill and more energy. My Dad’s technique was to use both axe and maul. First a few strokes with the axe to direct the split, then drive a wedge with the maul until the wood splits. If you plan the first strokes right, taking into account the twists in the grain and knots, his technique works well. I haven’t used a hydraulic splitter much, but from my experience, my dad or grandpa could split more wood per hour than the machine. Fifty years ago, I could too, but not today after spending most of my life sitting in an office.

My grandpa didn’t like chain saws. My dad loved chain saws and used them as much as could for falling trees, limbing, and cutting up trunks. When my grandpa retired and moved into the place across the road from the farm, he owned a chain saw, but he bought a Swedish bow saw and a one-man five-foot crosscut saw, both of which are mounted on the wall in my office. He built a saw buck. His new house had electric heat, but he planned to heat it with hand cut stove wood.

My grandpa’s plan failed. My tobacco chewing grandpa was wracked with colon cancer and never filled his woodshed with enough wood to heat his new house. He tried, but in the three years between moving to his new house and dying, he never heated his house with hand cut wood.