Pioneers – Vine Maple Farm

April 7, 2026April 7, 2026

The Shop

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.

December 13, 2025December 14, 2025

Floods

This morning, for the first time after several days of heavy rain and thick clouds, fog blanketed the fields. The fog gradually thinned, and the sun shone on Mt. Baker, Komo Kulshan, wrapped in glittering white snow. Flood waters have been retreating since yesterday morning.

This flood is said to be the product of an atmospheric river, a phrase my mother’s parents would have thought outlandish, even silly. Nothing like a river crashing down from the mountains laden with precious rock flour.

My mother’s parents owned a farm near the Nooksack River downstream a few miles from Lynden. They expected their fields to be underwater for several months in the year, which they gladly traded for well-watered and fertile soil for their crops.

Their house was on stilts until they bought a parcel of high ground for their dwelling, barn, chicken coops, and machinery shed. When my mother was born during a March flood, my grandfather fetched the midwife in a row boat, a mode of transportation he knew well.

My mother’s father was born on the polders of the Netherlands and grew up in the Dutch community on Whidbey Island where he learned to live on the water. This was before the Deception Pass bridge was built. He courted my grandmother in Lynden. To visit my grandmother, he and his brother rowed across the notorious whirlpools and tidal rips of the pass. I never heard what motivated his brother, but I like to stretch the point and say that I was born to the product of a daredevils in rowboats and spring floods.

I’ve gotten emails from all over asking if my family is okay in this much publicized flood. I answer that like most longtime Whatcom County residents, we have learned to live with the fall and spring floods that arrive most years; this year’s flood is was higher than usual but not unheard of.

Lest anyone doubt, I agree that the climate is changing, but climate is averages and statistical norms; weather is the events of a single day or week. Climate change can be detected with objective answerable questions, like ‘was the average July temperature at a give spot between 1950 and 1980 the same, higher, or lower than the same average between 1980 and 2020?’ Consult the records and you have an answer.

The folks who do those calculations say climate has changed. With all the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime, I’m not surprised, and I don’t think climate change is a hoax. However, a lot of the talk I hear about climate change is, in my opinion, uninformed and not as factual as I would like it to be.

We should all feel sorry for the sufferings of those driven out of their homes by the floods and do whatever we can to help, but I still enjoyed the weather this week: heavy rain splatting in my face and rising waters revealing the contours of the earth in ways that are unseen on lesser days.

The weather service predicts the atmospheric river will return for a reenactment next week. The meteorologists know more than I do, but this morning, looking at the sky and the mountain, I have doubts.

We’ll see. I’m used to being proven wrong.

December 5, 2025December 6, 2025

Throwing Down Hay

This morning, looking out over brown fields and drizzle from leaden skies, my thoughts ran to climbing up the long wooden ladder to the top of the haymow to throw down hay. Good thoughts for the first week in December, the beginning of Advent, the ascent from the deep pit of a woeful world to the birth of new life.

Throwing down hay is a symbol for winter that begins long before the short days of December. Bales of hay stacked high in the barn are the remains of summer. On the hottest days of the year, farm families, their neighbors, and distant friends gathered to mow down the grass that springs up in the gentle spring rains and mild early summer sun. The crew exposes the cut blades to the piercing mid-summer sun, then stashes away the sun’s rays absorbed in the dry hay into the high loft of the barn. Mortally hard scorching work.

Haying was the first harvest on the farm. The second harvest came when the green fields of wheat, oats, and barley turned into seas of white and gold in September. Unlike haying, which began in late June and trailed into August, cutting and thrashing small grain took only a day or two. Baling up the straw into bedding for the cows was only another day– golden straw bales are light and easy to handle compared to hay.

The third harvest was potatoes in late September and early October. We only raised a few acres of potatoes, enough to supply ourselves, our friends, relatives, and a few small grocery stores on Dad’s weekly farm produce route.

Digging and picking was a one or two day gathering of friends and neighbors. No sweating under the summer sun. By potato digging time, the weather was cool and we wore jackets and boots. Some wore gloves to protect their hands, but soaking mud-caked gloves did not warm fingers. No matter: true warmth comes from the heart.

When all the potatoes were stored in the basement under the farm house or pits under redcedar boughs that nearly touched the ground in the woods, harvest was over and winter began.

The barn in December was not the hot place it was during summer haying. The hay mow was freezing in the pre-dawn; a single light bulb cast a weak yellow light; cold stung and stiffened fingers on the long ascent into the mow.

Throwing down hay was more than shoving fifty pound bales over the edge to fall thirty or forty feet to the deck below. The bales had to be tossed carefully. If they did not land squarely, the twine holding them together broke, imposing two or three times the work, picking up the loose hay with a pitch fork and carrying it in to the milking barn where the cows were moving impatiently, nervous low sighs and belches rising from empty stomachs.

A well thrown hay bale soared in glory, sailing in a smooth arc from the perilous edge of the stack, a brave swoosshhh downward, and a satisfying thwummppp when it hit the deck below. Repeat that performance four times, scramble down the ladder to spread the hay in the cows’ mangers in the milking barn, and, in December, wait another hour for sunrise and its daily winter blessing.