Why I Am Vaccinated and Wear a Mask

I want this pandemic to end. With approaching 700,000 US dead, lives are ripped apart, I lose sleep fretting. Angry folks lash out. I don’t blame them.

I was raised in a Christian community. My family on one side is Dutch Reformed Calvinist. On the other, German Lutheran. They argued, although, as I see them now, they agreed on much more than they disagreed. Me, I’m a perennial student. I’ve read tons of theology and history from and about past centuries.

All this study has given me a desire to treat my neighbors as I want them to treat me. I could’ve learned that from a ham-handed educational film on the Golden Rule that the teachers exhibited every year or so to stuffy darkened rooms of whispering and restless grade-schoolers at North Bellingham Elementary School. I would’ve saved myself years of time and trouble if I’d paid attention.

I’ve read enough Covid-19 research literature to see that the doctors and scientists are still struggling to learn to mitigate or end the pandemic. The best recommendations today may change tomorrow.

I’m not a scientist or a physician. There’s nothing I can do in that line. If I had my life to live over, I might become an epidemiologist or a biochemist. But I’m seventy-two years old. Fat chance of change now.

I’m one person without expertise or power. I cannot change the course of the disease or the economy.

All medicines have risks, but the risk of vaccination today is tiny compared it to the pain and chaos around me. I’m brave enough for that.

Masking is ugly and uncomfortable, but it slowed the 1918 flu pandemic and has slowed Covid-19 in places where it is practiced.

It all boils down to how I want to treat others and others to treat me. I want everyone to do what they can to end the pandemic. Will a jab in my the arm and mask end the pandemic? Of course not. But the jab and mask are the two things I can do.

That’s why I’m vaccinated and wear a mask.

Smoke and Wildfire in Whatcom County

This morning, Monday, 2 August 2021, the sun rose as a dirty brown disk over the north flank of Sumas Mountain. Last night, the Northwest Clean Air Agency sensor in Columbia Valley north of Kendall was bright red and labelled “Unhealthy.”

Smoky sunrise over the fields where my grandparents battled the forest fire of 1910. Taken 3 August 2021

The air has cleared since early this morning and the sensors are back to “Good” all over the county, but I imagine that is only temporary.

This isn’t the first time wildfire smoke has mingled in the August Whatcom County air. When I was a kid in the 1950s, we often smelled smoke in the late summer and early fall, which my dad said was from logging slash burns, the practice of setting fires to clean up the debris left from a logging operation. I suppose those weren’t technically wildfires, but they were close.

Much earlier, a forest fire burned through the Waschke Road homestead the year after my grandparents were married in June of 1909.

Whatcom County was different then. Much of the lowland was logged for merchantable timber before the turn of the century, but logged over land is not ready for crops. Logging in 1895 was not like forest harvests today.

I’ve seen a few photographs, which I wish I had to display here, that show glimpses of the homestead when my grandparents took possession. Huge stumps, some eight feet in diameter, and eight or ten feet tall dotted the ground covered with slash and brush. Snags, dead standing timber sometimes fifty feet tall, towered over dry fiddle-head and deer ferns mixed with hardhack brush; a havoc that would become the orderly fields my father and grandfather cultivated, and now is still farmed by my son.

Loggers were only interested in trees of a certain size. Too small, and they weren’t worth the trouble. Too large and they were too hard to move. Falling a monster Western Red Cedar or Douglas Fir with axes and misery whips– double-ended hand crosscut saws– could take days. Then the trees had to be limbed and bucked into sniped lengths that ox teams could pull down the skid road, a path through the brush and remaining trees. Greased wooden skids were laid across the way every four feet or so. The oxen pulled the logs on the skids to a saw or shingle mill, the river, or the bay. I heard stories of abandoned giant logs, which farmers had to dynamite to break them into chunks small enough to dispose of— most likely by burning.

Big leaf maple, birch, alder, cottonwood, and vine maple were trash trees left behind for the farmers to contend with.

Following their marriage in 1909, my twenty-four year-old grandfather Gus and his soon pregnant seventeen year-old wife Agnes set themselves to transforming the chaos of stumps, snags, and underbrush into a productive farm.

My grandmother told me a story that took place in September of 1910 in the second year of their marriage. I caution you that this is my grandmother’s recollection fifty years after the event, and my recollection here was formed another sixty or so years after she told the story to me.

Gus and Agnes had planted a few potatoes and peas between the stumps and snags on ground that they had cleared of underbrush. They had one cow, a pig, a horse, and a few chickens that fended for themselves. They lived in a cedar shack Gus had built for them. Gus had dug a shallow well by hand so they didn’t have to walk the half mile to Deer Creek carrying buckets of water. But no electricity, pump, or running water.

Towards the end of August 1910, smoke began to drift in. Gus wasn’t surprised. He had arrived a decade earlier in the North Bellingham-Laurel area with his parents, brothers, and sisters on the Great Northern Railroad. He knew August and September were often filled with smoky haze.

One morning at sunrise, the couple saw a column of smoke rising between their little homestead and Sumas Mountain in the foothills to the east. Snowy Komo Kulshan (Mount Baker) was silhouetted to the south.

They did not think much about it. Something was on fire somewhere almost every day back then. Neighbors gathered to try to smother the flames, but most often, the fire burned itself out. A northeast breeze, now called the Fraser outflow, was building, as it often does in late summer. Unlike the extreme cold of a December or January outflow, a summer northeaster is hot and dry. Wheat and oat thrashing weather.

Fire weather

The smoke column grew all day. Instead of burning out, the fire was moving down the Nooksack River plain.

As often happens, a cool and damp onshore breeze from the straits to the west blew in towards evening, slowing the fire down. Shortly after dawn, the outflow was back, stronger, hotter, dryer. The fire began to speed closer.

Gus and Agnes had a hard day, clearing away brush and beating down small fires with burlap sacks and shovels as flames flared up from embers carried by the wind. Their livestock had disappeared.

Now comes the part that amazed my grandmother fifty years after the fire.

This summer, the news broadcasts show evacuations, fire crews, and houses burning almost daily. With all our technology and heavy equipment, people still die in forest fires. I shake my head today, wondering if my then young grandparents were wise and brave or foolhardy for what they did next.

When a cool and damp onshore breeze rose in the evening, my young and innocent grandparents laid down their tools, said their prayers, and went to bed. Grandma smiled and giggled when she told me they slept like little rabbits snuggled in their nest.

The next morning, they resumed fighting the fire, which passed by the homestead, and eventually burned itself out in the flats south of Ferndale. Finding their cow, horse, and pig took several days, Grandma said. The chickens came back on their own.

Looking at this story, today, I can hardly believe it. But my grandmother was a truthful person, not given to exaggerating or over-dramatizing.

Contemporary newspapers bear out her story. The Lynden Tribune, 15 September 1910, has account of the fire from Lynden as the town fought to prevent the town from burning. The Blaine Journal also reported on the fire and the fight to save Blaine. An item in the same paper estimated the damage at $1,000,000– 28 billion in 2021 dollars.

My grandparents slept through it.

Note: Wendy McLeod, Assistant Manager of the Lynden Public Library, helped me find the newspaper articles that substantiate my grandmother’s story. Thank you, Wendy!

Heat Domes and Haying

Late June, early July was haying season on Waschke Road when I was growing up. The heat dome of the past weekend that everyone is talking about brought haying to mind. It was hot work. One hundred degree temperatures have never been common in our part of Whatcom County, but they were not unheard of either.

Hay fields at sunrise.

Waschke Road is about eight and a half miles from the Salish sea and then a good twenty miles of open water intervenes between the beach and the Southern Gulf Islands off Vancouver Island. That stretch of cool water drops the temperature of the on-shore breeze by a few degrees before it reaches the Waschke farm.

I have always been grateful for those gentle on-shore breezes. This weekend was hot, but I learned real heat in the haymow.

The job eased you in. When haying started, the haymow was a shaded and breezy cavern capped with a high cathedral dome ceiling. But as load after load of hay bales arrived from the fields, the top of the stack approached the cobwebbed rafters.

Tier upon tier of bales rise forty feet up in the dusty air, nearly touching the roof. The high stack blocks the airflow and the sun beating down on the roof turns the little space at the top of the barn into a bake oven as the loaf-like bales of hay come in, piping hot, steeped in sun from the fields.

The haymow cathedral dome.

Up near the roof, the haymow crew begged for gaps between the hay loads, a minute to climb down from the mow, feel the onshore breeze cool sweat-soaked jeans and tee-shirt, and gulp down cold well water from the milk house wash hose. Then, before these luxuries began to inspire resentment, scramble back up the long ladder, into the sweltering oven, and make ready for the next onslaught from the fields.

I couldn’t man a haymow today, but I haven’t forgotten why I loved it when I was sixteen. Oh, love it I did. Loved it because my resilient young body could do it, loved it because it gave me a role on the hay crew appreciated by Dad and the older men, who knew how hard the work was because they had been up in the fiery mow many times themselves.

Later, they would trade the heat and dust of the haymow for the adult worries of haying in a marine climate where rain always lurks off-shore, where a cloudless morning never guarantees a dry afternoon, entering a life in which summer rain always threatened to leach nutrients from hay drying in the field.

When spring and summer were over and the grass was no longer lush in the pasture, the cattle ate the hay and converted dry grass into milk and meat that eventually paid the bills and kept life on Waschke Road prosperous.

But when a summer rain washed the grass’s protein into the soil, winter became harder and longer for the family than any afternoon in a fiery summer hay mow; low milk yields, tiny checks from the co-op dairy, and big bills for expensive feed to bolster the poor hay.

Haymows aren’t used much anymore; today’s equipment is fast and powerful. I can only shake my head at the speed farmers today cut, rake, and bale up hay that is stored away by tractors instead of sweating teenagers.

For the time being, I’ll linger on the pleasure of climbing down from the haymow into the on-shore breezes and forget grownup worries. But if these heat domes make a habit of hanging over us, I hope I never forget those fiery haymows.

It’s been hot. Take care.