The New Year is coming close as I write this. The New Year marked the beginning of a hard month on the Waschke Homestead. I quote from my mother’s diary from January 5, 1967 “Ted [my dad] has lots of chores that keep him busy all day.” He was breaking open the silo to begin feeding silage that year. That meant forking out two or three feet of spoiled silage at the top of the silo, then loading the spoiled silage into the manure spreader to distribute the silage on the fields as fertilizer. January of 1967 was not as bad as it could be: the spoiled silage was not frozen as it was in some years. I remember helping Dad break up the frozen spoiled silage with a pick axe in a northeaster.
Winter chores were hard because the cows stayed in the barn most of the day. Dad always said that if the cows got too cold, they held back their milk, so he let them outdoors only long enough to get their droppings cleaned up and spread fresh, dry straw for bedding. The extra time the cows spent in the barn meant more manure to load into the manure spreader. Spreading manure was never fun but driving a tractor in the open fields in the cold, often cold rain like we had in Ferndale this week, was hard.
Worse, frigid northeaster winds racing down the Fraser River canyon from the Canadian arctic were sometimes harsh. The national weather service now calls these winds “the Fraser Outflow,” but we knew them as northeasters. In the 1980s, I remember a northeaster that blew gusts over 100 miles per hour and zero temperature which were recorded at the county equipment garage just south of the homestead on Smith Road—a taste of severe weather that felt like a slam in the face in our mild Pacific Northwest.
The woods used to be crisscrossed with three- or four-foot diameter rotting Douglas Fir logs that stretched out fifty feet or more. Dad pointed out to me that most of those rotten logs were aligned with the northeast wind. The logs have all but disappeared now, but they were most likely blowdowns from northeasters of the past.
Driving tractor in a northeaster was no fun, but Dad preferred to spread manure daily instead of letting the manure pile up in the barnyard. During the summer, when all the fields were either pasture or crops, he had to pile the manure in the barnyard to avoid fouling the fields, but he didn’t like spending days doing nothing but hauling manure, so he kept at it through the winter.
Water was a problem in the cold months. Ice formed in watering troughs and drinking pails that had to be broken so the animals could drink, using the same pick axe we used to break up frozen silage. The waterlines to chicken house, pig barn, and the watering troughs froze easily. Dad kept them wrapped with old burlap feed sacks, but sometimes that was not enough protection and they froze anyway. Then he had to thaw the pipes with a propane torch.
The worst water problem came before my time when Grandpa still pumped water with a windmill. A storage tank at the top of the windmill tower was kept from overflowing on windy days with a float valve. One northeaster, the float froze open. The tank overflowed in the wind and the water ran down the sides and froze. After a few hours, the heavy ice built up around the tank and the structure began to groan as the extra weight threatened to crumple the steel tower. Dad had to climb up the icy tower with freezing water sloshing over him and disconnect the pump. After all that, Dad and Grandpa had to water the animals with buckets dipped from the well.
Keeping the animals in the outbuildings comfortable was extra work. The wind found new cracks to blow through and Dad stuffed them with old sacks and tacked up boards and pieces of sheet metal to seal the drafts off from the “varmints,” as he called them. We hauled extra bedding from the straw mow to keep them warm and dry in the cold.
We kids had our own attitude toward the New Year and northeasters. Unlike our parents, we hoped for northeasters and snow. Both my Dad and my Uncle Arnold had skied when they were young men and their skis were still around. The cold didn’t bother us kids and we looked forward to missing school and strapping on the old skis and dragging homemade sleds out to the fields to glide down the slopes of the sink holes close to Deer Creek on the north end of the homestead. The slope down to Deer Creek would have been better for skiing, but in those days, the slopes were either impassable woods or an equally hazardous tangle of stumps and brush.
I’d like to tell you that Mom or Grandma would have hot cocoa and cookies waiting for us when we came back from our icy expeditions, but during a cold snap, they were too busy for that sort of thing. More often, I warmed up throwing down silage from the silo or carrying buckets of grain and water to the calves.