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Geese and Travelers

The Waschke Homestead is no stranger to long-distance travelers. My grandparents and great-grandparents were immigrants. Grandma Waschke was born in Pomerania, Germany. Grandpa Schuyleman was born in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My great grandparents were all born in Northern Europe. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries they all travelled to Whatcom County. I went to college and graduate school in Chicago. When I was in the computer industry, I had customers all over North America and the globe whom I visited occasionally. Most of my career, my office was on the Seattle Eastside and my boss was in New York.

Canada Geese and assorted ducks on Gardiner Pond, 20 Jan 2019.

But the human inhabitants of the Homestead are as sessile as oysters compared to the geese grazing in the cornfields this time of year. Most of the geese that graze on the farm now are Canada Geese. Fifty years ago, I remember more white Snow Geese than gray Canada Geese. At my Schuyleman grandparents’ farm in Lynden on the Nooksack River, I often saw Trumpeter Swans in their fields.

Before I retired, I flew to New York at least once a month, sometimes more often, around 70,000 miles a year. Canada Geese, Snow Geese, and Trumpeter Swans travel from the arctic of Alaska and northern Canada to the southern U.S. and Mexico each year. Each goose probably flies 5,000 miles a year, so I had each goose beat for distance. But if you consider the number of geese, they win. I have often counted flocks of four dozen geese in the cornfield. Collectively, each of those flocks flies 240,000 miles a year. In my most traveled years I had a gold frequent flier card. The birds would be a step above platinum.

I understand that both Canada and Snow Geese are more populous now than they used to be. I haven’t seen many Snow Geese on the Waschke Homestead lately; they are around but I see them closer to the Nooksack. Canada Geese certainly are more common now on the Waschke Homestead than they were in the 1960s. According to the ornithologists and wildlife experts, the goose population, especially Canada Geese, has increased in the last decade or so for several reasons, including a decline in predators and hunting.

Canada Geese prosper among humans. One summer, fifteen years ago or so, I found myself eating lunch regularly in the executive dining room of the Allstate Insurance data center and office complex in a northern suburb of Chicago. That summer, a pair of Canada Geese hatched and raised a handful of goslings on a rooftop patio next to the dining room. They appeared to thrive on a diet of executive table scraps tossed out by the lunching actuaries.

Last summer, on the pond close to our new house in Ferndale, another pair of Canada Geese raised five goslings. My border collie, Albert, and I watched them parade to the water and paddle gracefully around the pond. When fall came and the goslings were nearly indistinguishable from the parents, they disappeared, presumably flown off to feeding grounds to the south. Obviously, these geese know how to live in small towns.

The flocks of Canada Geese on the Waschke Homestead arrive after fall harvest and graze in the fields until spring. I assume they fly north to their arctic breeding grounds. I imagine the geese on the pond follow the same pattern, but their northern breeding ground is the southern wintering territory of the Waschke Homestead geese. The southern wintering ground of the summer pond dwellers may be Mexico.

There were ten geese on the pond this morning. They’ve been paddling around for three days now. The morning they arrived, Albert and I visited them a few minutes after sunrise. All but one of the geese were resting in a cluster on the pond with their heads tucked under their wings. One goose was awake and watching, either an insomniac or designated sentry. Albert and I only visit the pond twice a day, so those wily geese could be switching places on us, but we expect this group will be gone in a few days, to be replaced by another clutch after another few days.

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Hawks and Eagles

Silent Spring was published in 1962. Alida, the daughter of a neighbor was bookkeeper for Griggs, an office supply and book store in downtown Bellingham. Griggs closed in 2014 after a 100 year run. Alida brought home a copy of Silent Spring. Her family read it. They lent their copy to my dad and mom. Dad, Mom, and I all read it.

The neighbors were big fans of Carson. Their family was inclined to extremes. At one point, they became vegetarians. During their vegetarian phase, the patriarch of the clan was a frequent guest at the heavy platters of the roast beef from cull dairy cows that were the mainstay of the Waschke Road diet. The vegetarian distraction did not last long, but the patriarch’s frequent appearance at our dinner table colored the reaction of my parents to his enthusiasm for Rachel Carson.

Dad was not a fan of chemical herbicides and pesticides. He often talked about the declining effectiveness of DDT. When he first applied it around the cattle, he said the barn flies died so quickly, he swept a black carpet of fly carcasses from the barn floor. The next time he sprayed, flies died, but not as fast or in as great a quantity. Within a few years, he said DDT scarcely worked.

Sometime in the 1960s, burdock, the invasive weed that inspired Velcro, became a problem in the barnyard and the outskirts of the woods. Burdock burrs got in cows manes and tails and had to be cut out. Without tending, wads of burrs grew softball sized and interfered with the cows’ feeding. For a while, Dad carried a hand pump sprayer and spot sprayed burdock with 2 4.D, the broad leaf herbicide, like people use glyphosate (Roundup) today. That lasted about a season before he decided that a grub hoe was cheaper and more effective. For a couple of years of we carried around grub hoes and rooted out every burdock we saw before seeds formed. Then the burdock practically disappeared and the grub hoes stayed in the tool shed.

Dad continued to use chemicals, but he was always skeptical. He maintained chemicals were most effective if they were used lightly as a supplement to traditional cultivation and weeding, but he never said they were bad, just over used.

But let me get back to Rachel Carson. She predicted that bird populations, especially birds of prey like hawks and eagles, would decline if DDT and other pesticides and herbicides continued to be used indiscriminately. She hit the right note at the right time and eventually the environmental protection act was passed.

You can argue that the EPA is an unwarranted extension of government and a bureaucratic nightmare, but I disagree. I’ll go along that most large organizations have elements of inefficiency and confusion—I developed software products for several Fortune 500 corporations and I will testify that if the Waschke Homestead had been run like a corporation, we all would have starved long ago.

Some people think government is less efficient than private enterprise. I disagree there too. I’ve executed software contracts with the Department of Defense, Allstate Corporation, NATO, Deutsche Bank, and dozens of other large organizations. Both government and private enterprises can be run well or badly. Good ones are effective and efficient, bad ones are incompetent and wasteful. And small business is not off the hook. It’s quality that counts, not private versus public, big versus small.

We could use more good businessmen in government, not scam artists who have failed in serial bankruptcies, but good men who have a track record of success. And a lot of businesses could use the scrupulous integrity of good public servants. I’ll admit that there is less incentive to become a public servant today. It’s easier to make your first million in business than public service. From what I have seen, good public servants are in it to serve the public, and there are fewer such people today. I profoundly wish that were not so. Note that I have not mentioned politicians. I did not intend to. A good politician is harder to find these days than a hummingbird nest. They exist, but you have to keep your eyes open.

When I was a kid, seeing a hawk was rare. So rare that Dad would stop the tractor to watch them hunting field mice over the pastures. Eagles? Who ever saw an eagle in the 50s and 60s? That has changed. When I walk Waschke Road and the fields, I see hawks and eagles almost daily. Farmers stopped spraying DDT from fifty-gallon drums and started using chemicals carefully instead of indiscriminately. It’s not perfect, but it is so much better now.

And the hawks and the eagles came back.

Photos by Jake Knapp (C9 Photography).

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Swamping on January 5, 1966

My mother kept an unpretentious practical diary. She recorded important events in life on the farm, keeping more of a farm log book than what most people would call a diary. I’ve read several years of her notes in the last few weeks and I haven’t seen a single entry in which she expressed a single thought or impression. She stuck to the facts.

Her entry for Wednesday. January 5, 1966:

Northeaster. 15 mph wind- drifting and snowing turning to sleet. No school. Loni here. Marv working at coal yard. Temp 20 degrees at 7am- 24 degrees at noon. Roads slick.

Loni is my youngest Waschke cousin. She may have still been toddling in 1966. She usually spent her days with my aunt and uncle at their heating oil and coal business in Bellingham, but when the weather was bad, and business was hectic, she often stayed with my parents during the day.

My uncle Arnold, my cousin Loni’s father, and his family lived next door on Waschke Road. When the northeaster blew, his business boomed.

His coal and oil trucks ran all over Whatcom County in the northeaster. My cousin Dave is almost exactly the same age as I am. If I was working at the coal yard, so was he. When the weather turned bad and school was cancelled, the two of us often helped my uncle by riding as helpers with his regular truck drivers.

They called us swampers.

On the oil trucks, we would root around in the drifting snow looking for the tank inlets and help drag the hoses. When the furnace was in the basement, the tanks were almost always buried and protected from the cold. But when the furnace or oil stove was at ground level, the tanks had to be suspended on stands several feet above the ground, so gravity could feed oil to the burner. The tanks and the feed lines were exposed to the cold. In a northeaster, the oil in the tank and feed could get cold enough to thicken and freeze up. The solution was to top off the tank with stove oil instead of furnace oil. Stove oil was lighter, as thin as diesel fuel, and would not thicken, at least at Whatcom County temperatures. If the flow was already stopped, the driver and his swamper had to warm up the feed with a propane torch so the oil would flow and bleed the oil line to get it going again. Cold work.

Swamping on a coal truck was different. Delivering coal required maneuvering a dump truck as close as possible to the coal bin without getting stuck or mangling the flower beds. If you were lucky, you could unload the coal using the truck’s hydraulics and watch the coal roll down the chute. Then the swamper’s job was only to find a safe path through the snow for backing the truck and direct the driver.

Then there were “tub jobs.” Not all houses had convenient coal bins that the coal could be dumped into. Then we had to tip the coal into galvanized tin wash tubs and carry the coal to the bin on foot, more likely than not down narrow slippery stairs and over an obstacle course. During a northeaster, we would only tub in enough coal to keep the house warm until the weather turned. We couldn’t leave other customers were waiting in the cold, no matter how much fun we were having carrying tubs of coal.

A day swamping swamping in a northeaster could get long. My good-hearted uncle would not let any one’s house go cold if he could help it. We kept working until everyone who called got fuel, whether they could pay or not. It may be a quirk of memory, or short winter days, but I remember swamping more often in the dark than in daylight.

I don’t have specific memories of that Wednesday, but I checked the news of the day: Bobby Baker, Lyndon Johnson’s adviser in the Senate, was indicted for theft, tax evasion and misappropriation of funds from Johnson’s campaign funds. Politics have not changed. I guess that is a consolation.

I imagine my cousin David Waschke has many more accurate stories about the heating fuel business than I do, but my mother’s diary brought back a few memories of my own.