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The Dread Effanem Crusher: Pioneer Fashion Accessory

Ah, the Effanem (pronounced “F & M”) crusher. On the farms and hills of Whatcom County, baseball caps are de rigueur these days. Men, women, and children all wear them, but sixty years ago, county men and boys favored Effanem crushers, Maine hunting hats they are sometimes called, but I don’t see that Maine has any special claim to them.

Ball caps vs. the Effanem crusher

I used to wear a ball cap, but I’ve gone back to wearing an Effanem crusher most of the time. Rebecca, my wife, who I finagled into giving one to me for my birthday, doesn’t like it, and I imagine I get a few odd glances, but I don’t mind.

The Dread Effanem Crusher
The dread Effanem crusher hunting hat

To swing the deal, I had to compromise with Rebecca. The traditional color for a hunting hat is red. During the last flash of crusher popularity, blaze orange was common. The one I wear now is black, a compromise choice.

Red hats

The red hat was to ensure that hunters did not mistake your head for a deer, pheasant, or duck and blast away. Blaze orange was the same idea, raised a notch.

I was never much of a hunter, but I like a red hat. In the late 1960s, I hiked all over the North Cascades with my cousin Ed. He was a photographer and wannabe prospector who said mountain pictures always came out better when somebody wore red. I went along with him and wore a red hat.

In the 50s and 60s, you could buy a hunting hat at any sporting goods store in the county. I got my first from Ira Yeager’s store, which started in downtown Bellingham near the YMCA.

Angling for a crusher

Last fall, angling for a crusher as a birthday present from Rebecca, I checked out the availability at Yeager’s new store on the Northwest, which can’t have been located there much more than fifty years now. The girl in the clothing section was polite when I asked where I could find an Effanem crusher, but I could tell that she thought old geezers would be better off if they stayed home more.

Since this is 2020, I went online and found three sources for genuine Effanem crushers in red, blaze orange, hunter green, and black. One was a place in Maine that sells aged coyote urine with a Maine hunting hat sideline. I know Rebecca will never order anything from a place called Predator Pee Store, so I passed on it.

Johnson Woolen Mills sells the hats, but nobody owns up to manufacturing them. The obvious candidate, F & M Hat Co., looks genteel and probably shares Rebecca’s attitude toward the Predator Pee Store. Amazon sells them too. I took the easy way and put a red Effanem crusher on my Amazon wish list.

That’s how I got a black one.

Opening day

Now days, there’s not so much hunting in lowland Whatcom County. When I was a kid, the first day of hunting season was an occasion. Mom made me stay close to the yard and Dad avoided going into the woods more than he had to.

Dad always said the first couple days of hunting season were dangerous—early on, game was not as wary as they became after a few days of random gunfire. The easy hunting attracted less experienced and excitable hunters who didn’t know how to handle guns like the steady old hands. Getting a gun permit and hunting license sixty years ago was easier and cheaper than it is now. In the country, it seemed as if almost everyone had a gun of some sort around for shooting pests.

And, as I once overheard someone say, the first day of hunting season was as good a reason as any to get drunk. News of relatives and neighbors killed or wounded in hunting accidents was common.

Pothunters

You don’t hear the word pothunter often, but that is exactly what my grandparents and many of our neighbors were. They hunted for food, not sport. And they did not hunt like sportsmen, who, as their name implies, generally prefer to give game a sporting chance. To my practical grandpa, giving game any chance at all was a waste of time and ammunition.

According to my dad, Grandpa would watch deer carefully during the summer to get to know their habits and quirks, passing out samples from his garden to get them used to him. Toward fall, he would go out early in the morning, just before dawn, where he knew his nearly tame deer would pass, set out a spread of vegetable to get their attention, and wait. He had his rifle ready, a measly little twenty-two because the ammunition was cheap.

When a deer sampled the bait, he would shoot it in the head from close range with a single shot, no messing around. He could make one box of cartridges last several years. Dad said Grandpa took pride in quickly hanging and bleeding out the deer he shot to avoid the off taste of typical sportsman’s venison.

Dad also told me Grandpa didn’t pay much attention to hunting season. In those days, before my time, shooting a deer out of season for the smokehouse on your own farm was your business, nothing for the game warden or the sheriff to fret over. Whether it was the law or not, the season did not affect pothunters on their own land. You might as well try to tell them to thrash their grain or slaughter their hogs by the calendar instead of the weather. For a pioneer farmer, hunting season was nothing more than an annoyance that egged strangers on to trespass.

Times change

By the time I was around, that had all changed.

Throughout hunting season, we often heard shots in the distance and saw hunters wandering through the fields and woods. Today in pandemic 2020, we are in the midst of deer, upland game, and small game seasons. With the exception of regular booms from the trap shooters at the gun club down on the Larson Road, I have not heard shots or seen hunters this year.

I can’t say exactly when the hunters disappeared. I imagine there must still be a few around and there are deer all over, but with houses so close together now, shooting that was merely dangerous sixty years ago is now reckless.

The hunters I know today, cross the Cascades to eastern Washington, Idaho, and beyond to hunt. They hunt to fill their freezers, but with the cost of travel and all, venison is an expensive cut of meat. And, if you ask me, some of these sportsmen could take a lesson in butchering from my grandpa.

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The Radicalization of America: Whatcom County

I read an article in the New York Times this evening “The Radicalization of a Small American Town.” Brian Groh, the author of the Times article, describes a microcosm of the radicalization of America, a small town in Indiana that has been devastated by the economy of the 21st century, wracked with pain and death of opioid addiction, crippled by the response to the covid-19 epidemic, and violently political.

Radicalization of America
Sunrise in Whatcom County

Instead of the friendliness, lack of pretension, and sense of decency Groh remembers from his youth, he recounts the story of a former neighbor who was recently threatened when he expressed a political opinion.

Groh laments the change.

Opioid crisis and the radicalization of America

It’s a good story, but I wonder if many of his neighbors would agree with his view. I looked at opioid death statistics in Indiana where statewide deaths per thousand are above the national average. The county in the article has one of the lowest rates in the state. We in Whatcom County are fortunate: although opioid and other drug deaths are still far too prevalent, some statistics show a slight decline in the opioid death rate in Whatcom County between 2002 and 2018.

We have a problem, but not a raging crisis. Thank heavens. Covid-19 is bad enough.

Rural Indiana

I’ve visited Mr. Groh’s rural Indiana. I’ve never lived there, but it felt like home as I listened to conversations among farmers at the tractor dealership where I was installing software. Both my Dutch and German ancestors spent a few decades in the Midwest before they made their final jump west to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. In rural Indiana, I felt like I could have been in Lynden or Ferndale.

What’s changed?

Groh’s experience does not match my experience in Whatcom County. I agree that the rural America I see today is not the place I saw when I was growing up. But the question is what changed? Did Whatcom County change? Or did I?

Well. I changed. I know that. I went off to college and graduate school.

What I learned

There, calculus taught me that differentiation and integration are mathematically two aspects of the same operation. In chemistry and physics, I learned that science can measure and predict the changes around us with greater precision than muddled impressions of undisciplined observation, but it continually refines and deepens understanding rather than lays down immutable laws.

At the age of nineteen, a mathematical logic class forced me to plumb the mysteries of the proof of Gödel’s theorem, which asserts that no matter how much you know, there will always be things you can’t fully understand. By twenty-one, I had learned to read classical Chinese and was forced to notice that the Athens-Jerusalem axis of western civilization has not been the only foundation for successful societies.

Then I realized that a humble farm boy had best quit straining the seams of his underpants. I came back home to work that out, but I was no longer the kid I was growing up and already I saw Whatcom County through changed eyes. But I also realized that my eyes had become exotic. I fret over Gödel’s theorem. My neighbors don’t.

Fifty years later

Fifty years later, I’m still working on that project. I see that my neighbors and relatives have many virtues. They are tough, self-confident, often happy. Some are prosperous, some think the prosperity they deserve has been withheld by forces they should control but can’t. Some are accomplished, many are stylish. A significant number are convinced that they have right on their side. I’m still the lout with manure on my boots that I was fifty years ago.

My experience is in the software business, which is like most businesses, as far as I can tell. You don’t last long in the software if you can’t spot who is likely to get the work done and who is likely to screw things up. I learned to stay away from loudmouths who succeed by refusing to pay their help, stiff their creditors, shift blame, and counter reason with bluster. They may succeed for a while, but eventually business caves in around them and everyone loses. That’s about as far as my politics go.

Doubling down

I also know it is easier to double down on a bad choice than it is to switch to a better choice. Switching to a choice that you once rejected is a humiliating struggle. I’ve been wrong often enough to know the sick feeling and bad taste that fouls my gorge when I recognize a misjudgment. I’ve faced it often enough; I don’t wish it on anyone.

When a bad choice is not all bad, the struggle is more painful. If a segment of the population prospered for three years while others struggled, the segment that thrived will not readily give up their gains. They will be proud of their sagacity. Those who look up to prosperity often throw their lot in with the prosperous even though they have reaped few benefits. Humans are not good at balancing long and short-term gains.

2020 vs 1960

In pandemic 2020, everyone is overstressed and close to anger. Add an atmosphere that promotes strife and tension over calm, and you have a community inclined toward violence.

But is the Whatcom County community fundamentally different from the same place sixty years ago? I say no. It was not ideal then and it is not ideal now. McCarthyism was still a topic sixty years ago. Racism was casually accepted among my parents and grandparents. Abusing native Americans acceptable behavior. The Ku Klux Klan flourished for a while in Whatcom County. Dig into the local newspaper archives and you soon run into language and propositions that might make you flinch.

Given today’s conditions, I think the county of my youth would have been inclined toward violence, perhaps more so than today. Although gun enthusiasts are vocal and prominent today, guns and ammunition were more easily available fifty years ago. Most country people had weapons for dealing with varmints and were ready to use them. More so than I see today.

Racism was more overt, mistreating the tribes was usual.

But serious violence never erupted. That’s important. Today, folks rant about antifa and the far right. As a kid, I overheard talk about threats from Bolsheviks, Wobblies, Fascists, Communists, and so forth, but it all turned out to be nervous fretting.

Is Whatcom County radicalized?

I don’t think so. No more today than fifty years ago. What I do see today, like fifty years ago, is a huge and quiet majority of concerned good people who want to live their lives in peace with their neighbors.

That hasn’t changed at all.

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Farm Inspired Software Remote Agile Scrum

Lessons for managing teams working at home

A jagged line of hills…

I’m usually an early riser, a habit that started when I was growing up on a farm where the day’s work started when the cows woke up. In early fall, I’m awake when the crests of the foothills begin to show as a faint silhouette on the horizon. One morning this week, looking out on the same jagged line between dark and light in the eastern sky that I have seen thousands of times and hope to see a thousand times more, I realized that habits I learned in the old farmhouse inspired the remote agile scrum I used to manage remote software development teams working from dispersed offices and homes.

Sixty years ago, working from home was common. My uncle Arn and several of the neighbors on Waschke Road worked out, which meant they had jobs off the farm, not that they exercised their muscles regularly. Avoiding exertion was more in vogue then.

Most ran their own farms, more or less independently. Farm cash came mainly from dairying. Milk checks were small in those days, very small if your bacteria counts were high and you were forced to ship milk to the ice cream, cheese, and powdered milk factories instead of the Seattle Grade A fresh milk market. Many of the jobs on the farm, like harvesting hay, thrashing grain, and filling silos were too big for a single family to handle by themselves and there was no money for hiring help. The answer was to work together.

Working together

You don’t see folks working together much now the way the used to. Today, folks who want to accomplish something big and complex hire a contractor. The contractor has an organization and a network of suppliers and subcontractors. Strike an agreement and the contractor gets the work done.

Even when someone acts as their own contractor, the process is based on money moving from person to person. If you don’t have ready money but you want the job done immediately, no problem. There’s an entire financial industry– banks, mortgage companies, credit cards, payday loans, and pawn shops– eager to supply you with whatever money you need. If that fails, there is always GoFundMe. But at the time and in the place where I grew up, those resources were rare and money was hard to come by.

No Gantt charts, critical paths, or milestones

In those days, work was often done without money. Hands showed up on the day they were needed. No Gantt charts, critical path analysis, or milestones, not even a crude schedule on the back of an envelope. Maybe a phone call or two, but mostly the word got around and the hands appeared. The crew knew exactly what to do. No boss ever ordered anyone around. I never saw a To Do List on the farm and yet all the work was finished. Never a word about job descriptions, pay grades, or equal pay for equal work. Then, it seemed effortless. Now, it seems more like magic or a miracle.

When I think back on what working together was like, I realize that it was a subtle and delicate process that took a demanding level of skill to execute. Human nature is, in my observation, constant. Offer too much, and you are taken advantage of, offer not enough and you freeze in isolation. The variables are subtle and elusive. What is egregious flattery today is mild social lubrication tomorrow. My parents knew their work group with greater precision than I knew the software development team I led.

Farm management and visiting

My parents always shipped Grade A milk, but money was still tight. For them, maintaining social ties among their work group was a way of life. Nearly every afternoon and many evenings after milking, a neighbor or relative stopped at our house or mom and dad visited someone at their house.

I used to think sharing a cup of coffee was recreation. My parents enjoyed visiting; sitting down for “coffee-and” was a few minutes of rest in a long and strenuous day that started at sunrise and ended long after sunset, but I realize now that they had no choice: the circuit of visits, cups of coffee, and plates of cookies and sandwiches were the essential cooperative fabric of farm life. Cooperative work was designed and planned in those sessions, sometimes in wordless agreement, only occasionally with explicit dates, times, and assignments.

Mutual obligation

The neighbors worked from home on their own farms, paid their own bills, and nursed their own wounds, but to cut, rake, bale, and load hay into the mows; bind and thrash grain; and fill silos with chopped grass and corn, they had to work together. Without their neighbors, very small farmers and pensioners like John Schaefer, Luther Johnson, Howard Fretz, and Art Coss as allies, my parents could not keep the farm running. My parents helped them and they helped my parents. They formed an alliance, a team, that could be counted on for the big jobs. I saw no accounting of quid pro quo, no balancing of the books, only a simple recognition of mutual obligation.

While managing software development, I used mutual obligation without explicit quid pro quo to keep remote teams working together, although I did not know where I learned the technique, certainly not from the books of self help and management strategies I read. But the remote agile scrum I used to run were based on mutual obligation.

The daily standup

I always insisted on a daily “stand up.” Although I seldom enforced the rule, a daily stand up meeting is a meeting in which no one is allowed to sit down, because when no one gets comfortable, meetings automatically stay short. In the agile programming paradigm, these meetings are intended to answer several specific questions: what is everyone doing today, what is blocking progress, and what help do you need? The questions do not have to be answered in the standup. It’s often more efficient to deal with them in smaller side conversations.

That’s how it works in theory. Practice is somewhat different. Dissembling, I won’t call it lying, is endemic to standups. Everyone says they are bounding forward and wildly successful; no one ever freely admits they are stymied. Management-speak encourages dissembling: the word “problem” must always be replaced with “challenge.” Hah. Progress comes in small steps littered with mistakes that no one wants or needs to hear about.

Mutual obligations on software teams

So why insist on daily standups? Because remote teams have to work together, just like the small farmers when I was a kid, and they can’t work together if they don’t understand each other and their work. Communication and cooperation may look spontaneous, but they seldom occur without cultivation. My parents visited, I ran standup meetings to ensure that every member of the work group understood the role they and their neighbors played in the web of mutual obligation that makes up a team.

Little of that communication occurred in standup meetings themselves; most happened in the side conversations that the daily standup started and continued through the day and night. Since software teams are often globally distributed and the workweek varies from place to place, any hour of my day or night could be in the middle of some member of the team’s workday. Consequently, the work of the team never stopped. Someone was moving the project ahead every hour of every day.

I considered a big part of my job was to make sure the team members kept talking after the daily standup ended. In those days, I had administrative assistants. One of their tasks was to keep a contact sheet up to date and distributed to every member of the extended team. My assistants knew I liked to see new contact sheets distributed within minutes of changes in phone extensions, chat room parameters, anything that was necessary for team members to keep in touch. Those contact sheets were as essential as my parents’ knowledge of who was farming in the sections surrounding the farm.

I kept a mental list of conversations that I would verify were taking place, dropping in on discussions, making phone calls, and trying not to be a pest while urging the team on.

The daily standup was the hub and mutual connections were the rim of the wheel

As I am ending this post, the sun is not yet up. No horizon is showing; soft white fog blankets the farm. The fence our son hired a contractor to put up last month is only fifty yards away and invisible in the mist, yet I am confident that the fields are still there. Some days are like this both on the farm and in software projects. You’re sure everything is okay, but you can’t see what’s ahead. A good day for visiting and reinforcing the ties that make the wheel of progress roll.