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Education

My grandfather was in his late teens when he hid under the straw in railroad car packed with the family’s cattle, farm equipment, and household goods for the trip from Blue Earth Minnesota to Bellingham. The railroad allowed one person to ride in the car to tend to the cattle. That place was taken by my grandfather’s older brother. Grandpa had to dive under the cattle bedding when the railroad inspectors came around. When the railroad car arrived at the siding in Bellingham, they opened the door, and a chicken, seeing Bellingham Bay, flew squawking out into the water and was never seen again.

Schooled enough to survive, my grandfather was not refined. He chewed tobacco, leaving a trail of brown saliva wherever he went. My mother said he never used an indoor toilet, preferring the woods. He seldom bathed, usually smelled of manure and wore overalls for all occasions occasions but church. For entertainment, my grandmother read to him in German.

My grandfather’s father, Gottlieb, was a devout Lutheran who pored over his cherished complete works of Martin Luther. He did not transmit his piety to any of his children except my grandfather, who was the least prepared or inclined toward theology. My grandmother told me the only time my grandfather rested was in church.

From Gottlieb to my grandfather, the family slipped down a notch in culture and refinement. In Germany, Gottlieb was an educated man without a heritage. He built his heritage by emigrating to America and using the skills he gained through education to become a landowner. Even in landowning, Gottlieb exceeded my grandfather. My grandfather owned forty acres. Gottlieb originally owned one hundred sixty acres, some of which he later sold.

It is easy to attribute this slip to the years spent in Minnesota. Gottlieb’s younger brother emigrated a few years after Gottlieb and joined him in the car yards. But the younger brother skipped Minnesota and went directly to Whatcom County. It was the younger brother’s reports of Whatcom County that brought Gottlieb. The younger brother’s children got more than a third grade education, graduating from high school and college, and eventually becoming teachers and university professors.

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The Barn

Barns in Whatcom County, and all over the US, changed in the mid-twentieth century. In Whatcom County, the dairy industry propelled the change. In the old, pre-refrigeration, days, every farm had a few dairy cows, just enough to supply the family with fresh milk, cream, and butter. A few dairies near population centers were larger and supplied fresh milk to non-farm families, but their size and location was severely limited by the rapid handling required to prevent milk from spoiling. Butter and cheese were the only traditional ways of preserving fragile milk and they were not an effective economic connection between remote farms and city populations.

Until the forties– I’m not sure of the year– my grandparents had only three or four cows. My grandpa and and my dad sat on three legged stools and milked the cows by hand. The milk was cooled by placing a twenty gallon milk can into a tank of cool well water. The milk that the family and one or two neighbors could not consume then went to a hand-cranked, later electric, centrifugal cream separator. Cream kept long enough to sell to a dairy, and the perishable skim milk went to the hogs.

For its first fifty years, cash crops on the farm were quite diverse. Grandpa sold potatoes, eggs, sugar beets, wheat, oats, garden vegetables, beef, pork, cream, and probably other things I never heard about. Mid-century, the diversity of cash crops ended. The farm became a dairy farm with three cash crops: whole milk, eggs, and potatoes.

The economy of the family centered on the monthly milk check. Dad and Grandpa sold an occasional cull dairy cow for beef, a load of hay, straw, oats, or wheat when they had a surplus or the price was too good to pass up, but those were bumper crops and windfalls, not to be counted on to pay taxes and the electricity bill. Dad continued to raise grass, wheat, oats, and corn, but as feed for the dairy cows, not as cash sources. The eggs and potatoes were still cash crops, but these sidelines were only assurance that there would be no idle time left after dairying and raising fodder.

The transformation to a dairy farm also transformed the barn. In 1940, the barn housed a team of horses, a bull, a few cows and calves, and their hay, grain, and bedding. By 1950, the herd grew to close to thirty head, requiring specialized space for milking and more storage for hay, silage, and grain. The horses were replaced with a tractor and the adoption of artificial insemination eliminated the prison-like quarters for a sometimes violent bull.

The  war time Seattle population clamoring for refrigerated whole milk drove the change. With improved transportation and refrigeration, Whatcom County, a  hundred miles to the north, became a major milk supplier, and eventually grew to be one of the largest milk producing counties in the US. But Whatcom dairy farms first had to meet the requirements of the King County Health Department to get a Grade A license, which was the entrance ticket to the twentieth century economy for a farmer in what was called the fourth corner of the country.

Like health departments all over, King County required concrete floors, painted walls, and generally sanitary conditions in the milking barn and milk house. As time went on, they also required refrigerated storage of milk on the farm. The days of cans of well-water-cooled milk sitting on milk stands waiting for the milk truck were over. From the cow to a refrigerated storage tank to a refrigerated tank truck was the only acceptable way to handle Grade A milk.

Dad and Grandpa added a concrete floored milking wing to the barn before I was born. The milking barn had eighteen stanchions to hold cows while they were milking and was specifically constructed to meet King County Health Department regulations. The stanchions were equipped with vacuum lines to operate milking machines. They also added a concrete silo to replace the small wood stave silo that was only adequate for the small herd of the old days. The old milk house was located at the well and set up for water cooling the milk; Dad replaced it with a new milk house that was closer to the barn and contained a refrigerated milk tank.

In addition to changes to the barn, Dad appropriated every bit of spare dry space in out buildings for storing oats and wheat that he had milled for his own blend of dairy feed. The old horse barn, hog barn, even the little mother-in-law house that Grandpa built for my great grandmother were eventually requisitioned for grain storage.

This was the barn as it was while I was growing up. It continued to be used in the same way for close to fifty years until an accident forced Dad to retire.

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Visiting the Ocean Beaches

Rebecca and I went to Moclips on the Pacific Ocean side of the Olympic Peninsula last weekend. I enjoy the ocean beaches but my parents and grandparents, who lived on the same farm we do, never showed any interest in the ocean. Bellingham Bay and Georgia Straits were enough for them. FoggyBeach

They may have been too busy. City dwellers may fantasize that farming is a relaxed, low-pressure life, but that is not the way I saw it. On a small farm, especially a dairy farm, it’s up at dawn and work until after dark, seven days a week, three hundred sixty five days a year. And the work fills every available minute. When my father took a day off, he had to choose which jobs that had to be done would go undone and he had to cope with the risk that something serious would go wrong in his absence. He often envied neighbors who he saw leaving for work in town when he was shoveling manure after morning milking. And we would see those same neighbors coming home while he was getting ready for evening milking.

A psychiatrist once told me that in Whatcom County, his most severely depressed patients were dairy farmers and he considered dairy farming, especially small family operations, to be a psychologically dangerous, even life-threatening, occupation. The rate of accidental death among owner-operator farmers is high, and from talking with his patients, he wondered how many of those accidents were actually suicides.

That view seems extreme to me but there is an element of truth. A farmer is at the mercy of the commodities markets, the banks, the weather, the health of his herd, and a thousand other things over which he has only minimal control. The work itself is often mind-numbingly boring and physically taxing. Every dairy farmer lives with the look, smell and even taste of bovine feces. By 50 all farmers have some form of arthritis and carpal tunnel is rampant. Most are injured often enough and severely enough to have missing or non-functioning body parts. Among my father’s farming friends, I remember three suicides, and that seems like a lot to me, because I can’t think of a single suicide among my friends.Pig barn
On the other hand, given all the drawbacks, there are some who like it. I think my Dad genuinely enjoyed working with the cows, and sometimes, even I have to agree with him: shoveling manure is unpleasant in a way that is preferable to the tone of some corporate meetings, and a mouthful of a manure dipped cow tail tastes better than what left in the pit of your stomach when you lay off a good employee because corporate mandated a ten per cent reduction in force. There is good and bad in everything.

I saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time after I had seen the Atlantic. Only after I had gone to college on the shore of Lake Michigan and seen the Atlantic from New York and Boston, and only at Rebecca’s urging, did I ever go to see the Pacific. Since then, I still wait for my fill of the wide Pacific Ocean beaches of the Washington and Oregon coasts. My ancestors carefully kept woodlots and windbreaks all around the farm yard, so I have always lived in a clearing in the woods. A hundred yards in any direction and its a wall of trees. The ocean is a new world to me. Bursting out from the firs and cedars of the coastal forests, I see those wide wide breakers rolling that wash away my sopping cow tails and corporate meetings, and I could stay there forever, out of places and times and watching the waves.