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Advent and Silage

Today, December 1st, is the first day of Advent in many traditions. The Advent season has the darkest and shortest days of the year in the northern hemisphere. Each day during Advent is shorter than the previous day and sun is slightly lower as it traces its way across the southern sky. When the sun stops sinking, it is the winter solstice, December 21. The traditional end of Advent is Christmas Day, December 25th.

Many theories and stories explain why Christmas is celebrated on the 25th and not on the solstice a few days earlier. I doubt them all. When Emperor Constantine converted and declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, December 25th was declared an official celebration in 336 C.E., but whether the tradition started then, or had already been practiced is not clear. Still, I am happy to celebrate on the 25th and I am glad Christmas doesn’t float around like Easter.

I can’t separate Advent from silage. By the start of Advent on the farm, Dad (Ted) had begun feeding silage from the silo. The exact date Dad opened the silo depended on the weather. As long as there was pasture enough to keep up milk production, Dad would feed grain, mostly oats supplemented with sugar beet pulp and brewer’s grain and a little hay for roughage but leave the silo untapped. Pasture could hold up as late as Thanksgiving. But by Advent, the pasture was bare, the cows were no longer interested in grazing in the rain and cold, and Dad would open the silo.

Opening the silo took a day or two and I often helped. There was always a layer of dry and spoiled silage on the top of the silo where the chopped fodder, either corn or grass, was exposed to the air. The spoiled silage had to be shoveled out with forks and thrown to the ground into the silage cart or a wheel barrow, then wheeled out to the manure spreader, and forked again into the manure spreader. When the spreader was full, we hauled the spoiled silage into the fields and spread it to fertilize next year’s crops. As I remember there was always three or four loads of spoiled silage to put out on the fields.

Silage was hard work. Silo filling was hard, opening the silo was hard, and throwing down silage to feed the cows morning and night was work through the winter and into spring. The silage was packed hard in the silo and loosening it up was a chore in itself, but there was no getting out of throwing down silage; feeding the herd came first.

Nevertheless, I liked silage. The silo was lit by a single low wattage light bulb at the top of the silo. By the time the silo was opened, the silage had sunk at least twenty feet below the rim. In the dark days of winter, in the dim yellow light from that single bulb, throwing down silage was eerie. The single melancholy bulb overhead peered down, but there was not enough light to see clearly. The chamber was muffled in silence, the only sounds coming from the shifting of the cattle in the barn, unless the wind blew just right, and the silo would resonate in a deep sigh like a giant pipe organ. I suppose you have to grow up with it, but the sharp fermented smell of ripe silage is pleasant. In the silo, I occasionally chewed a pinch of silage. The plant cellulose fibers were coarse and too rough to swallow, but the silage had a pleasant tang and enough sugars were left be palatable.

In the farm house my mother and grandmother generated the smells of Advent, baking anise Christmas cookies, pfeffernusse, lebkuchen, apple cake, fruit cake, and mince pie, but out in the barn, which was the center of a different part of life on the homestead, Advent meant silage.

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Thanksgiving On The Farm

We ate our last Thanksgiving dinner on the homestead in 2017. This year, we had family in at our new Ferndale house. Thanksgiving is an American holiday, not German, but Germans never pass up an opportunity to celebrate a holiday. Thanksgiving was nothing compared to Christmas on the Waschke Homestead, but it was an event nonetheless.

I remember celebrating Thanksgiving on the homestead while Grandpa and Grandma still lived in the downstairs part of the house. After Grandpa retired and they moved across the road, Mom, Dad, my sister, and I began going to Lynden for Thanksgiving with my Lynden grandparents. My cousin Denny and I could never stop ourselves from roughhousing on the floor. Someone would have to break us up. I don’t remember that we ever hurt each other, but we rolled around on the floor, each trying to get the upper hand. That must have caused some heartburn among the parents, but there was no real aggression involved. I could not tell you why we wrestled, but we did until we became self-conscious adolescents, had little to say to each other, and replaced wrestling with the awkward silence.

My Waschke Road grandmother’s Thanksgiving dinner was, as I remember, a version of Christmas dinner in which the Christmas goose was replaced with a turkey. My Waschke cousins may correct me on this, but as I remember the menu was turkey with sweet cinnamon bread, apple, and raisin stuffing, sweet and sour red cabbage with apples, and mashed potatoes with turkey pan gravy. The crisp turkey skin was like candy.

The Lynden menu was more in the American tradition: turkey with a savory sage stuffing, boiled sweet and white potatoes, green beans, and pumpkin pie. The star of the day for me was sweet potatoes. I could have filled my plate with sweet potatoes.

Grandma Schuyleman was a not a bad cook, but a plain cook. She had neither time nor inclination for anything fancy. She seasoned her turkey with salt and pepper and roasted it. She peeled her sweet potatoes and boiled them with salt. Her turkey was neither over or under roasted. She took her boiling potatoes and green beans off the fire when they were done. Her table was predestined to be just what it was: plain cooking with all the nonsense reformed out, undisguised food to strengthen the body, not satisfy the senses.

How I loved her sweet potatoes. The custom was to cover them in butter on the plate and I followed the custom, but if the butter took its time getting to the kids’ end of the table, plain unbuttered sweet potatoes were good enough for me. I could finish half the sweet potatoes on my plate before the butter arrived. The turkey was fine, as is every variety of poultry when it is cooked but not dry. Green beans and white potatoes were part of practically every meal I ever ate on any farm. Since my mother learned to cook from her mother, no big meh on the Thanksgiving beans and white potatoes. But the sweet potatoes! Allow me to say, my dear wife Rebecca to the contrary, yams are okay, but they taste a lot like squash, which is good, but starchy sweet potatoes are king.

Sweet potatoes and turkey on Thanksgiving were exceptional because they were not grown on the farm, either in Lynden next to the Nooksack River or on Waschke Road.

I once asked my dad about The Depression. He graduated from high school in 1932, before Franklin Roosevelt was elected. At the graduation ceremony, the principal gave a speech in which he told the graduates that they couldn’t expect much: no jobs, no prospects, their diplomas were almost worthless. Dad said he was disappointed and disgusted.

Other than that depressing speech, Dad said the Great Depression was barely noticeable to his family because the farm was self-sufficient. They scarcely needed cash. What little cash they needed to pay the electric bill, buy gasoline and coffee grounds, they could always get by selling farm produce directly—people always eat—but he pitied the shingle and saw mill workers, loggers, and the miners that depended on jobs that disappeared when the economy went sour. The situation didn’t change on Waschke Road until the war.

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Artist Point

The road to Artist Point was completed in 1931. My friend Bill Merrow and I made it to the point on a Monday afternoon in November 2018, 87 years later. It was Bill’s first visit. The first time I visited Artist Point was at least 60 years ago. When my mother took this photo, I was as yet unborn and the road to the point was only 15 years old.

The elegant rock work at Artist Point was laid down around 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. The CCC built or improved many of the campgrounds and trails in the national forest along Mount Baker Highway at that time. Mount Baker Lodge was built earlier, opening in 1927. The original lodge burned to its foundation in a few hours soon after it was opened, in 1931, the same year the road to Artist Point was completed.

During the winter of 1934-35, The Call of the Wild starring Loretta Young and Clark Gable was filmed at Heather Meadows. The movie crew was put up in the Heather Inn, which was built to house the workers at the luxurious lodge and survived the fire that destroyed lodge.

The Call of the Wild on location Mount Baker set was a disaster and a scandal. When the crew arrived, a blast of air from the Canadian Arctic hit the Northwest. Filming was difficult. The actors and crew were forced to stay nine weeks, but the cameras rolled only six days.

The Heather Inn turned into an unholy mess. Clark Gable was always a heavy drinker, and Hollywood of that era was not known for temperance. The crew was continually snowed in and alcohol was plentiful. One of our neighbors in North Bellingham had the contract for keeping up the plumbing at the inn. He told my dad that keeping the plumbing working during the filming was hard because the toilets were clogged with smashed beer bottles. Our neighbor was a tough old guy who would tear into an overflowing septic tank or open up a clogged waste line and laugh about it. He said he had never before or since seen anything like the scene at the inn.

Many years later, Loretta Young revealed that Clark Gable date-raped her during the filming on Mount Baker. She became pregnant. She and her family staged an elaborate charade to hide the scandal and prevent MGM from forcing her to have an abortion. Frankly, I don’t know how to evaluate this gossip. Read about it here.

There were no scandals when Bill and I set off from the Heather Meadows parking lot. The parking lot was scraped clear, but the gate on the road to Artist Point was closed and pavement was covered with six or eight inches of snow.

I had some trepidation about the 5-mile walk. I have a congenital heart condition that causes “exercise intolerance” and I quit hiking in the hills a couple decades ago when shortness of breath and chest pains got daunting. I had some surgical work done on my heart at the Mayo Clinic several years ago and I’ve been getting stronger and the symptoms have diminished. I have been itching to get back above the tree line. I proposed a visit to Artist Point and Bill agreed to let me set my own pace. When we arrived, the sun was shining, and the air was in the bracing mid-forties.

Off we went. I suppose I have been to Artist Point a dozen times at least: driven it, snow-shoed, hiked it, I even rode my bicycle up the road once before my heart caught up with me, but I have never seen it more impressive than Monday. The light covering of snow accentuated rough terrain and sharpened the edges of the ridges. This photo shows Goat Mountain, Yellow Aster Butte, and Red Mountain.

The views of Mount Shuksan on the way to the point appears all over on calendars, advertisements, and posters, so this photo may look familiar, but it shows Shuksan at its best.

Notice the steep rock around Hanging Glacier. On the other side is Price Glacier and Price Lake where Price Glacier used to calve off miniature icebergs. I hope it still does. I gathered tufts of mountain goat hair in the heather and bushes around Price Lake, maybe 50 years ago.

During the hike up, I had to stop several times, and I am sure Bill was impatient, although he never showed it. But a little shortness of breath is nothing when you can catch it again after a minute’s rest. I thought of a solo hike up to Hannegan Pass. My heart was still good, and I had a pair of well-broken in logging boots with Vibram soles on my feet. I felt like the trail was flowing under my feet. I passed several parties on my way up to the pass. At the top, I looked up towards Hannegan Peak and wished I could go on. But I had things to do in the lowlands, so I turned around and returned. That was a pre-heart condition high point of my life.

Mount Baker is not visible from Heather Meadows and it remains hidden during the hike up the road to Artist Point. At the top, Baker jumps in your face. Knowing that Mount Baker was coming kept me going on Monday. I admit that the trail did not flow under my feet. I relied on the stick that Bill leant to me. But I made it to the point. In the rough times of a pre-surgery impaired heart, after a strenuous day, I plunged into lassitude. Getting out of bed was a chore, I felt like I was living in molasses. On Tuesday, if I have to admit it, I could scarcely stand up, but it only hurt. No molasses. Get beyond the stiffness and I was fine. Knowing that I can hike again is everything.

Bill Merrow took these pictures, with the exception of my mother’s old snapshot of Table Mountain. This blundering old guy hauled his camera but left his SD card at home. Next time, and I am damn glad there will be a next time, and for that I thank my friend Bill.