We, Rebecca and I, have been living on Waschke Road nearly two months now. Albert and Victoria, our dogs, are used to being back on the road in a new house with a larger yard, but I can’t say that we are settled in.
This house is much smaller than our previous two houses, has many minor and not so minor things that need repair, replacement, or change to suit us. I begin each day with a task list that grows longer as the day goes on. I think that some morning, I’ll wake up and the list will be empty, but, somehow, I know that day will not come.
The decision to move back was hard. We loved the Ferndale house and the Gardiner Terrace neighborhood. The kitchen and the layout of the house is as perfect as I could imagine. I’ve never taken much interest in local politics, but I enjoyed learning about Ferndale city government and began to think that I might be able to help a growing city of wonderful people that seemed to need lessons on how to grow. A city that builds sleek new streets but fails to maintain the old, continually playing catchup on infrastructure, and generally fumbling its value proposition might benefit from my experience with corporate infighting and governance.
But I put those thoughts behind us when Rebecca’s surgeon recommended a fourth back surgery as soon as the covid-19 lockdown was lifted.
After your fourth trip to the rodeo, you begin to plan for your next visit. The Ferndale house with two stories and spacious layout would not work for us any longer. We thought about installing a chair lift but adding another complex device to our lives was not an answer we liked. We already owned a house that is an easy walk from our children and grandchildren, single story, a ramp to the front door, with space for my office and Rebecca’s craft studio, and a panoramic view of Mount Baker’s glaciers and buttes presiding over fields that my father, grandfather, and now our son, have farmed for over a century. The tenants who were renting the house were ready to move on to purchasing their own house. The instant we finished thinking it through, the decision was obvious.
So here we are. Albert, the border collie, and I are back to walking up and down Waschke Road several times a day, waving to the neighbors, treading paths and looking at sights that I have tread on and looked at my entire life.
Feels good. Not what we expected a few years ago, but we had soup made from kale grown by our farmer son and daughter-in-law last night. Feels good.
Today, silos in Whatcom County stand empty, towering monuments to old practices. Dairy farmers still feed silage, but their modern equipment stores it without a fuss in the giant white plastic wrapped marshmallows stacked in fields and barnyards.
This afternoon, I looked into one of my mother’s diaries and discovered that 54 years ago, instead of fretting over COVID-19 like everyone seems to be doing today, my dad was getting ready to fill the silo with grass silage.
The silo on the farm, built by Art Weden in the 40s
Some farm events, like chicken catching and hog butchering, were almost celebrations; family, friends, and neighbors gathering to enjoy working together. Not silo filling. It meant days of hard heavy work amid howling equipment that shook the ground and pounded ringing ears. During silo filling, the men were on edge, worried about breakdowns and foul weather, trying not to dwell on the how the day could go wrong.
Farming is still a dangerous profession, but in the 50s and 60s, when farmers gathered at the old Hilltop on the Guide Meridian for a cup of coffee on a rainy afternoon, talk began with pleasant banter about milk prices, corn versus grass silage, and the merits of the fresh heifers on the block at the Everson auction. But as often as not, at some point, the conversation took a sober twist toward overturned tractors, hands mangled in spinning power take-off shafts, and falls that broke arms and legs.
Grandpa and grandma several years before I was born.
In the early 50s, my dad went together with three other dairy farmers in the North Bellingham-Laurel area to buy silo-filling equipment: a field chopper and a blower. The machines were expensive, and they were used only for a few weeks each year. By combining their resources, Dad and the others were able to buy equipment they couldn’t afford individually. There was no contract or legal agreement. They just decided to pool their money and work together. I doubt that they even bothered to shake hands on it.
Each farmer supplied and outfitted their own wagon for hauling fresh-cut silage. Now days, silage is hauled on trucks or wrapped in plastic in the field, but in the 50s and 60s, farmers used hay wagons to move chopped grass to their silos. The wagons were outfitted with wooden sides and a sliding partition that was drawn by cables to pull silage to the back of the wagon where it was unloaded. Men with forks pulled the silage from the wagon to a conveyor attached to the blower. I was proud and excited the first time Dad handed me a fork and told me to start pulling grass off the wagons. The silage was blown straight up forty or more feet to the top of the silo where the heavy chopped grass or corn made a hairpin turn and was blown forcefully into a flexible distributor pipe that dangled down to the level of the fodder already in the silo.
The largest and most powerful tractor pulled the field chopper. The howl of the chopper was loud enough to be heard from the silo, even when the machine was a half mile away. The chopper cut waist high grass, slashed it into one-inch lengths, and blew it into a silage wagon that trailed behind. When a wagon was full, another tractor dropped off an empty wagon and towed the full wagon to the silo. Driving the tractors hauling wagons between the field and blower was a prime job on a silage crew.
The blower fan was spun by a twenty-foot flat belt driven by a pulley mounted on a stationary tractor running with the throttle wide open. Log chains were attached to the tractor and twisted with a peavey to keep the belt tight and stable. The roar of the blower and tractor engine traveled for miles. The ground thumped and shook when hundredweight wads of silage hit the blower fan blades and were thrown up and over the high wall of the silo.
Inside the silo tower, a half dozen men and boys directed the distributor pipe and walked in a circle around the perimeter, leveling the chopped grass, and tramping down air pockets that would spoil the silage. Wisdom was that the center would take care of itself, but the edges, especially around the unloading doors, needed attention. Tramping silage was work, perhaps not as strenuous as pulling the grass off the wagons, but fresh silage is spongy. Every direction is up hill. Leveling the silage required hard fork work, especially when the silage was wet. The silos had to be filled quickly while the milk-producing protein content of the fodder was at its prime; the soaking squalls that come in off the Salish Sea in May, like we had last week in Ferndale, were no excuse to let up, despite the slackers’ grumbles.
As the silo filled, the work got harder as sections of distributor pipe were removed and lowered to the ground. As each section disappeared, the green cascade of blown grass became more difficult to direct and the incoming silage had to be forked from the center as fast as the ground crew pulled it off the wagon. The men on the forks began to sweat.
About ten feet from the top, the pace became feverish. The distributor pipe was so short it was nearly useless. If the silage was not moved fast enough, the flow from the blower pipe might be restricted for an instant and the pipe would back up and clog. If the crew feeding the blower did not kill the engine quickly, the roaring tractor would pack the pipe solid with silage. When the silage was on the dry side, a nimble and lucky crew could clear the pipe by disconnecting it at the blower and shaking the clog loose. But in pouring rain, the wet silage would wedge in tight and the blower pipe had to be lowered on a cable and taken apart to dig out the clog.
Raising the pipe with a cable and tractor when setting up was a tense and tricky job. But when the pipe was crammed with heavy silage and the yard around the silo was churned into a slick mud hole by rain and wagon traffic, lowering the blower pipe was risky.
One sloppy wet year, the tractor on the cable lowering a jammed pipe lost traction in the mud and pipe came crashing down and crumpled. No one was badly injured, but it was close. When the pipe hit the ground, it jacked around out of control and could have broken limbs, cracked skulls, and crushed chests. The man guiding the end of the pipe got a nasty gash in his hand and my mother had to rush him in our car to the emergency room at the county hospital on the corner of Northwest and Smith. They sewed up his wound and he returned to work. One of the other farmers hurried off in a truck to the Allis-Chalmers dealer on the Guide for a replacement section of blower pipe while my dad and the rest of the crew disassembled the mess in pouring rain and cleared out the undamaged sections.
The clog occurred shortly after noon dinner and the pipe was back up and operating in time to get in a few more loads before quitting time at five.
COVID-19 is horrible, life has always been hard, but working the farm was heroic in ways it has taken me a long time to recognize.
Today, I am trying to grapple with how the COVID-19 pandemic will feel here in Ferndale. The schools and the public libraries are closing. The stock market is thrashing. But the sun shining. It’s a loser’s game because predicting the future has never worked out well for me, but I keep trying.
People are confused by large numbers. I see this when I talk to people about computer security and I see confusion in the way people talk and react to COVID-19. And I feel it in myself when I look at the numbers on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Hoard toilet paper? You gotta do something. Right?
No. Calm down.
Look at the coronavirus numbers. They are terrifying. I’m looking at 162,687 confirmed cases and 6,065 deaths. 3,244 cases in the U.S., 40 deaths in Washington State. By the time anyone reads this, those numbers will almost certainly be much higher. They grew in the hour I took writing this. The president has called a national emergency. The administration, congress, states, cities, and local health departments appear to be struggling to respond.
To get a sense of perspective, I have turned to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919, a century ago. Spanish flu is a misnomer. No one knows where it came from. Xenophobia is nothing new.
Remember that in 1919, DNA and genetic sequencing were unknown concepts, penicillin was 20 years in the future; scientists would not discover that the flu was caused by a virus until the 1930s. They were guessing at how the disease moved from person to person. Although epidemiologists today don’t have all the details on COVID-19, we know so much more than we did in 1918 when the Spanish flu first appeared in the U.S. Vaccines and medicines to control and treat COVID-19 are not available yet, but the tools scientists have today to develop these remedies would not exist for 90 years after the Spanish flu appeared.
We are in a world’s better position to respond to COVID-19 than Spanish flu. When it appeared, the Brits were still launching cavalry charges. It’s no stretch to say that the 1919 pandemic response compared to the science of 2020 epidemiology in like matching a horse charge against a squad of Humvees backed by drones. A different world. That is not to say COVID-19 will be a walk in the park, but the 1919 pandemic is a worst-case, not an inevitable reality. It tells us about what could happen if we ignore the science.
What did happen in 1918-1919? The Spanish flu was first detected in the U.S. in March of 1919. By the spring of 1919, a little over a year later, April 1919, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed at the Versailles Peace Conference, presumably from the flu. He recovered but 675,000 American died in the pandemic. That’s roughly 600 per 100,000 people.
To put this in a local perspective, if the 1919 pandemic were repeated, roughly a hundred people would die in the small city of Ferndale. That’s highly unlikely to happen, but it would mean the current death rate in the U.S. would a little less than double.
Think about how that would feel. I’m old, over 70. Three people close to me have died in the past few years: a cousin and two close friends. All in the demographic most likely to die from COVID-19. I don’t think that is out of line for most people my age. How would I feel if that number doubled? Sad, of course. But terrified? No. I have many, many cherished relatives and friends. It’s the ones who survive that count.
We are likely to be in for a tough time ahead, but only a few will be taken down. Hold on tight folks. Keep your social distance. We now know that will blunt the force of the disease. It’s going to be okay.
And quit hoarding toilet paper.
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