Short Days—Long Nights

Mid-December days in Ferndale, stranded on the northern edge of the continental U.S., sunlight is in short supply. When Albert, the border collie, takes me out around the Gardiner pond in the morning, the sun is barely risen, and he has trouble herding me out there before sunset in the afternoon. In all this gloom, I was looking for adventure last week, so I drove to Montana and back again.

Our daughter completed her first semester of law school in Missoula last Friday. She and her sons could have traveled by train or airplane, but I was in adventure mode, so at 5:30 am Friday the 13th, I fired up my wife’s SUV that wouldn’t make it up the little hill to our house in the snow last winter and went off in the darkness to pick them up and bring them back for Christmas. December isn’t the most interesting month to drive I-90, but it gets close.

In these short days, the trip began and ended in the dark, both coming and going. That’s about how I feel in 2019 in general, so there was nothing special there.

The path from Ferndale to Missoula threads over three mountain passes: Snoqualmie, Fourth of July, and Look Out. Our house on Vista Drive in Ferndale is 154 feet above sea level; downtown Ferndale is only 36 feet. Snoqualmie summit is 3,022 feet, Fourth of July pass in Idaho is 3,081, and Lookout Pass on the Idaho-Montana border is 4,711 feet. Missoula is higher than the Snoqualmie at 3,209 feet. In other words, I had my ups and downs last weekend.

The adventure was tame, as befits an arthritic geezer. Both Snoqualmie and Fourth of July were bare wet pavement both coming and going. Mid-morning Friday, the sunshine revealed two beached and dug in semis that must have slid off the road on ice around Cle Elum, but that happened hours before I sailed through. Lookout Pass eastbound was slushy and busy. No real danger. Coming down Lookout, boxed in by big trucks front and back, squeezed between the concrete jersey barrier and another truck, and dirty slush flying everywhere, barely evoked philosophical thoughts on the fragility of these carcasses we carry around. It was snowing hard when we left Missoula, but Montana snowplow crews know their business. Maybe next time will have more adventure.

I like the freshwater flyover country, as the vast tract of the U.S. that is not on a seacoast is called by disrespectful coastervators. I’ve always liked it, and I like it better now. My Dutch and German ancestors established themselves in Michigan and Minnesota before coming to Whatcom County. When I was growing up, I heard stories about “Back East,” which referred to the Midwest rather than the east coast. When neighbors got together to talk, the east coast, New York, New England, the southern eastern seaboard were seldom mentioned, but the conversation often drifted into reminiscing on life in the Midwest. People occasionally took trips to see relatives back east, but seldom did that mean seeing the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve been on the east coast many times because I worked for a New York company, but I still get north and south confused when the ocean is to the east.

Fifty years ago, I went to college and graduate school in the Midwest and I soon noticed that Midwesterners were behind the west coast, even dear old Ferndale. The fonts on street signs were not as modern. The buildings were older, stores were laid out like throwbacks from decades in the past. I knew nothing of New York then, but a lot of New Yorkers were among my fellow students, and they all said Chicago was way out of step. Of course, there never has been and never will be anything as in step as New York, in the opinion of a New Yorker.

I think it’s the internet.

I poked around Missoula during my one day there. I discovered that Missoula has more local breweries than Bellingham or hop city Yakima. I sampled several Missoula IPAs that proved that their brewers know distinctive hop flavors and how to blend them. A far cry from the watery “fire brewed for the flamin’ a—” Stroh’s and Iron City Pittsburgh beer that I remember from college.

I visited the University of Montana Law Library and the Missoula Public Library. The law library was sleek and new; the public library was nice, but crowded, the carpets had seen better days, and the furniture was worn. However, the staff pointed across the street to a large new library under construction. Missoula’s computer network is fast. I was told that they are almost entirely fiber. A city on the move as fast as New York or San Francisco.

I am getting old, but I think something is happening in this country that has not been noticed. Computer networks and the social media, other new forms of communication, have been excoriated for causing divisiveness and polarization, but I have begun to suspect that these vicious trends are being whittled away from the ground up by the very means of communication that are condemned as the cause.

I remember how isolated I felt before computer networks connected everyone. Today, no one has to wonder what is going on with the hipsters of Brooklyn— you can easily find out firsthand by following them on Twitter, Instagram, reading their blogs, or friending them on Facebook. (And see how silly they can be.) Like the proverbial canine, on the internet, no one knows you’re from Ferndale, Missoula, Austin, New Orleans, or NYC. In Missoula, people on the street, the streets themselves, could have been in New York, or the Bay Area, Boston, or Austin. I discussed hops with bartenders and library trends with Missoula’s library staff; we shared a base of knowledge that would have been impossible even ten years ago. This was not bland leveling, more like everyone being their best selves.

The days are short now and the nights are long. But winter solstice is close. The days will get longer; we will see more sunshine. Winter won’t be over, but spring is on the horizon.

Getting Ready for Christmas

My neighbors in Ferndale are putting up ambitious displays of Christmas lights and decorations. I’ve only gotten as far as getting some holly trimmings from the Waschke Homestead and wiring together a wreath for our front porch. My neighbor’s work reminds me that Christmases sixty years and more ago were quite different.

Whatcom County settlers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were mostly northern Europeans: Scandinavians, Germans, and Dutch. My great grandparents were born in Holland and Germany, migrating to Whatcom County via Michigan and Minnesota in the Midwest. They brought Christmas traditions with them.

My Dutch grandparents were stern Calvinists who preferred their holidays on the solemn side, but German Lutherans reveled in Christmas tradition, an occasion for noisy family gatherings and extended visits. I grew up in the same house and later across the road from my German grandparents, so I know their traditions best.

Christmas trees are a German custom. My dad told us about Christmas trees in the old farmhouse decorated with burning candles and balls of cotton. Grandpa would cut a fir or hemlock in the woods and put it up on Christmas Eve afternoon. First lighting of the tree was after Christmas Eve church. They kept the tree and lit it regularly until Epiphany nearly two weeks later. Without water. Yikes! The rest of Christmas was less hair-raising.

My German grandmother was born in Germany, arriving on Ellis Island when she was twelve and travelling with her family directly to Whatcom County. She was my most direct connection to German Christmas traditions.

Grandma had cookbooks, but I never saw her using one. She cooked by taste, instinct, and practice. At Christmas, her talents flowered. Christmas dinner was a roast goose, not a turkey, stuffed with a sweet stuffing made from dry bread, apples, raisins, sugar, and cinnamon.

One secret of her roast goose was her bread, which she always baked herself. My mother baked bread too, but I liked Grandma’s better. Grandma saved the water from boiling potatoes for bread baking in a large Horlick’s Malted Milk jar that we now have on display in our living room. She may have used some milk also, and I am sure she used ordinary white flour. I remember watching Grandma bake bread, but the only other detail I recall is that she used a yeast cake that she would soak in water on baking day mornings. She had a combination wood and electric oven and she had a fire burning in the fire box when she baked, which may have had something to do with her results.

I’ve never had bread like hers anywhere else. Her loaves were rounded, and the crust was crisp like a French baguette, but not as tough. The texture was coarser and dryer with larger air holes than my mother’s bread. The taste was floury without sourness. Grandma would give me thick slices with butter as a snack. For herself, instead of toast, she cut bread into cubes and fried them in butter in a cast iron frying pan. I still remember the smell.

Few days before Christmas, Grandma put bread slices in a large sky-blue enameled steel basin to dry. Early Christmas morning, she would crumble the bread and add sliced apples, raisins, and a sprinkling of cinnamon and sugar. She would also lightly fry the chopped giblets in butter with salt and pepper and mix them into the stuffing. If she decided the mixture was too dry, she’d add milk. At this point, the scent of apples, raisins, and cinnamon began to whisper that Christmas dinner was coming soon.

Unlike folks today who are cautious about contamination, Grandma stuffed her goose rather than bake dressing on the side. She sprinkled the goose with sugar, cinnamon, and crumbs from the stuffing before putting it in the oven. The smell of goose roasting with my Grandma’s stuffing is the smell of Christmas for me. Add to that sweet and sour red cabbage with apples and you have the tastes and odors of Christmas day.

Before Christmas, Grandma baked Pretzel. Her Pretzel was nothing like the pretzels you buy in sacks at the grocery store or the soft pretzels they sell at the mall. It was a sort of plump raisin roll made with her homemade bread dough. She would pat out her dough in a round maybe an inch thick, spread it with butter, raisins, and sugar. Then roll it up like a big cinnamon roll and bring the ends together and cross them. Sprinkle with sugar and bake. Grandma’s Pretzel was a bread and not sweet enough to be called a dessert. She would serve it sliced for breakfast or with coffee. I think it was a variant of German Neujahrsbrezel, New Year’s Pretzel, but Grandma’s was special for Christmas breakfast.

She also baked Springerle cookies and her variant of Lebkuchen. Her Springerles were similar to many recipes you can find. She had the usual carved rolling pin to mold them. They came out, like all good Springerles, hard as stone and strongly flavored with anise. Her Lebkuchen were also flavored with anise and hard, so hard that slamming them down on the table to shatter them into dipping size for dunking in coffee was a good way to avoid cracking a tooth.

She began baking her Lebkuchen early in December. After mixing the very stiff dough, she let it rest to develop flavor for a few days. Then she rolled out the spicy mixture in a thin layer and cut it into two to three-inch squares and rectangles. My mother made them also, but she used Christmas cookie cutters in wreath, star, Santa Claus, and, for me, cowboy shapes. After baking, Grandma frosted them with a hard and shiny powdered sugar glaze. When they were dry, she put them in a crock with a towel on top to age, to soften, in theory, I suppose.

We called them Christmas cookies, not Lebkuchen. There are many variants on Lebkuchen in Germany. Most of them are more like a soft gingerbread than ceramic tile. One variant I know of is Aachener Printen, which are hard like my grandmother’s. Another variant is baked on communion wafers to prevent sticking.

When I was young, I didn’t much care for Christmas cookies. Even the cowboy shaped ones. They were too hard, not very sweet, and I preferred chocolate and caramel to anise and spices. But today? My grandmother’s hard Christmas cookies with coffee on a winter mid-afternoon after throwing down silage and mixing a batch of feed for the cows, or cutting stove logs in the woods, sounds closer to perfection than I will ever approach again.


 

The Farm

This is a post that is long overdue. Something new has happened on Waschke Road. Readers of vinemaple.net know that my partner and wife, Rebecca, and I decided over a year ago that we had to put the Waschke homestead on the market. The homestead had become an overwhelming burden. Rebecca and I share between us arthritis, diabetes, heart failure, and multiple back surgeries. We simply couldn’t take care of the homestead any longer and neither our son nor daughter were interested in taking over. I hated that, but life is life. I was never much of a farmer to begin with and hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, diabetes, and arthritis just meant that taking care of the homestead was impossible.

Long ago, our son Paul established a deep bond with my dad while he was growing up, and he is as deeply tied to the Waschke homestead as I am. I knew when we decided to put the homestead on the real estate market that Paul would be deeply affected, but I saw no alternative. Paul has had severe health problems for a number of years. I won’t go into the details, but they made it impossible for him to seriously consider taking over the homestead.

For me, this was heart breaking. The homestead is not just a few acres of land. It is the embodiment of a relationship between a plot of land, a layer of topsoil, and a family, which is a body of love and trust. Times change and relationships change. The connection between the Waschke family and the land on Waschke Road has changed as generations change. My own relationship with the Waschke land is tenuous. My wealth, such as it is, is mainly derived from my efforts for a dead billionaire on Long Island, New York, not the land on Waschke Road, but my spiritual worth, equally such as it is, comes from the acreage that my father and grandfather built in a century of tending the land. When we decided to put the homestead on the market, that spiritual worth crumbled. I was pained, but I saw no alternative. I could not carry on. You take your knocks.

Several months ago, what I consider to be a miracle occurred. Paul started on a new medication that changed his life. Suddenly, severe limitations disappeared, and he and Lanni, Paul’s wife, could contemplate taking over the homestead.

Now, I am so proud to say that Paul and Lanni Waschke, with their son Dario, are taking over the Waschke homestead. Paul and Lanni have many plans and I am excited to watch their plans unfold. This is so much better than selling the homestead. Paul and Lanni are the fourth generation on the homestead. I have hopes that Dario will be the fifth, but I am content to wait for the future.