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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.

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The New Year

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.