My grandfather, Gustave Waschke, was an inventor. The remnants of his inventions are all over Vine Maple Farm. The latch he made for his pig barn was a sliding bar moved by a peg in a slot on the door instead of the usual wooden turn button on a nail.
In our age of the computer network, dozens of examples of this kind of latch appear online, but a century ago, he had to imagine and fashion a sliding latch without the aid of a picture in a magazine or a video on YouTube.
My grandpa put a lock on his smokehouse, which was filled with rings of summer sausage, slabs of bacon, and hams as big as tom turkeys suspended on poles threaded in the rafters.
A rusty old hack saw blade hung on the right side of the door, as high up as my short grandpa could reach. If you knew which crack, where to poke, and the exact sequence of moves with the old saw blade, the door would swing open to reveal the smoke house treasures. A curious six-year-old boy and his twelve-year-old cousin looking for illicit snacks could fiddle around for an hour failing to open the door.
The physical center of my grandpa’s inventiveness was a shed called “the shop.” I spent many hours with my grandpa in the shop.
The shop was my grandparents’ first house in a little clearing in the brush in the northeast corner of Vine Maple Farm when my grandparents were first married. Grandpa built their house about a hundred yards from my grandmother’s parents’ house and another hundred yards across the Aldrich Road from my grandpa’s parents’ house. They later moved it to the west side of the farm where they built a new farmhouse and the road now called Waschke Road.
The old house walls were vertical cedar board and battens. Half the floor was dirt. My grandparents replaced it with a story and a half farmhouse shortly before their second son was born. My dad and my grandpa slept their last night in the old house while a midwife, probably from the Salish Lummi Nation, helped my grandmother give birth in the new house. My dad said they ate bread soaked in milk and sugar for their last meal surrounded by cedar board and batten walls.
We stored potatoes in the basement of the farmhouse. Dad and grandpa would grade and sack the spuds in the basement, then carry the sacks up the stairs to the truck to take them into Bellingham to sell.
My grandpa’s final invention was an elevator which would pull the sacks of potatoes up from the basement with a rope and an electric motor. While he perfected his elevator, I fiddled with building a wooden road grader. He went to the hospital and died of cancer before he finished his elevator and I never again touched my road grader after grandpa quit going out to the shop.