According to the calendar, it has been fall for over a month now, but I have not been willing to accede the passing of summer until this week. Wind and rain have stripped the trees and the maples are done with releasing their helicopter seeds. The only green left is the dark green of the firs and hemlocks. There are still a few red and yellow leaves in patches on the maples.
Fall is hard to pinpoint now because we don’t perform many of the fall rituals anymore– no shocking and threshing wheat and oats, no fall silo filing, no hog butchering, no hauling fire wood into the wood shed. I picked the corn two weeks ago and Rebecca froze it. Yesterday, I dug our few potatoes, nothing compared to the acres of potatoes my grandpa dug when he was declared potato king of Whatcom County.
Next weekend, if the weather is not too nasty, I’ll put the mower on the tractor and mow down the corn stalks, then hitch up the rototiller and turn them under.
Leaves are only patches in the wind break.
I hope that all works out. In the old days, we would have fed the cornstalks to the cattle and put their manure on the field. I intend to skip a step and put the cornstalks directly back to the soil with the equipment I have. Dad sold the flail chopper he used to use to clip pasture and send the clippings back to the ground. I would use that now, if I had it. Instead, I’ll use the hay mower, which cuts, but does not chop. If all goes well, the rototiller will chop up the cornstalks and work them into the soil where they will decompose and release their store of nutrients. If all does not go well and the cornstalks just tangle up in the rototiller, I will have learned something.
To accurately imagine the sound of a drag saw, hike into the mountains as far from roads and habitation as you can get, then listen. Eliminate all sound of motor vehicles, airplanes, the hum of rubber tires on paved roads, the drone of factories, and the myriad sounds of human occupation.
A drag saw on Orcas Island, ca. 1917. Orcas Island Historical Museum
Then imagine the steady chug, chug, chug of exploding petroleum in a heavy cast iron single cylinder engine and the shhh, shhh, shhh and ring of the saw slicing away through green wood. Add the clatter of a drive mechanism with a little slack.
Drag saws cross cut big timber. They were replaced sixty or seventy years ago by chainsaws. We had a drag saw on the farm that Grandpa left leaning on a five foot diameter Douglas fir log in the woods the year Dad bought a chainsaw. No one ever fired up the drag saw again. By the time I was old enough to notice it, the drag saw was covered with bright green algae and its wooden rails were beginning to rot. Today, the fir log has rotted down to a little rise on the floor of the woods and the saw is a scarcely recognizable lump of moss-covered iron.
A drag saw blade looked like an old fashioned two man cross cut saw, but heavy enough not to bend when it was pushed through the cut on the forward stroke. Imagine the man on one end of a cross cut saw replaced by a gasoline engine with an eccentric crank like one on the side of a steam locomotive to convert the rotary motion of the engine to the reciprocal motion of the saw blade and you have a drag saw. The single cylinder air-cooled cast iron engine was mounted on a wooden frame that leaned against uncut portion of the log. The saw pivoted downward as it sliced through the log.
Drag saws were impractical for anything but cutting stove wood from logs that only a tall man could see over. Setting up for a cut required stopping the engine, moving the saw, and restarting the engine. Noting the weight and awkward shape of the saw, the altogether cussedness of starting those ancient single cylinder gas engines, and the disappearance of giant trees to cut up for firewood, it does not surprise me in the least that Grandpa left his drag saw to rot the day the chain saw came along.
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
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
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.
The only green left is the dark green of the firs and hemlocks. There are still a few red and yellow leaves in patches on the maples.
