Posted on

Ages of Piety

“It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.”

The fourth year of the Education for Ministry (EfM) program is devoted to theology. EfM years equate to Richard Hooker’s classic Anglican three-legged stool: scripture, tradition, and reason. The first two EfM years are on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the third year is on church history and tradition. The fourth year is theology year, which I like to think of as the year for reason.

Our group’s fourth year students are now reading Timothy Sedgwick’s The Christian Moral Life: Practices of Piety. Sedgwick ties the practices of Christian piety to the challenges in life that vary over time. He depicts three phases of American piety.

The first, he calls “traditional” and ties it to the society typical of the first half of the twentieth century. At that time community survival was crucial. Vine Maple Farm is my name for the farming community in which I grew up, immersed in what Sedgwick calls traditional piety.

Social interaction was a necessity, not a luxury. Neighbors had no choice but to get along and work together. Tasks like putting hay in the barn, thrashing grain, and harvesting potatoes took more concentrated labor than a single family could provide, but with the cooperation of willing neighbors, everyone could survive and sometimes prosper.

But cooperation doesn’t happen without reciprocity. Rules are required, like returning borrowed tools  in better condition than when received. Visiting, exchanging meals, celebrating birthdays, weddings, and funerals were necessary to keep communications lines open and the community working. This spirit of cooperation and mutual support was the vital characteristic of traditional piety. Read my impressions of this life in posts like Chicken Catching Night.

Traditional piety declined in importance as people got jobs. Instead of relying on their neighbors, folks began to rely more on their job and employer. This, and other societal changes brought on the form of piety that Sedgwick calls “modern.” For me, this was the piety of the Vietnam War protests in which an equitable future became the dominant concern of folks who were morally concerned about their world.

I mark the beginning of “post-modern” piety to nine-eleven when America discovered vulnerability. I happened to be at the east coast Consumer Electronics Show in Atlanta when the Trade Towers went down. I entered the show hall early, preparing for a panel discussion on a new release of our team’s product that I thought was exciting and would make the company a mint.

By the one o’clock, my bosses and colleagues were huddled together in a hotel dining room worrying over what to do next. My boss, who lived in Brooklyn, was frantic because his eighty-year-old mother had been in Manhattan for the day and was returning home on foot, walking over the Brooklyn bridge. We were all figuring out how to get home as safely and quickly as possible. Since planes were grounded in Atlanta, a group from Seattle formed a caravan of three rental cars for forty-three hours of driving straight through back to the northwest. Our piety had shifted focus from the future to vulnerability and safety in less than a day.

In 2025, we’ve practiced post-modern piety for almost twenty-four years, but I wonder: have we moved on to a new stage? America changed decisively in November 2024. Have we passed on from community, future equity, and vulnerability to something new? And more terrifying?

This week, our EfM group discussed our changing feelings about Tesla vehicles. A year ago, a Tesla Y was a desirable vehicle. Its minimal carbon footprint, sleek design, and low operating costs were all attractive. But today? For some folks, a Tesla has become an advertisement for a nihilistic creator intent on rapid and radical change, reshaping government programs indiscriminately, and pursuing threat diplomacy.

It’s early yet. All drastic changes don’t herald new ages.

But caution has never stopped me from making wild guesses. I predict a decline in reliance on government and return to something like traditional piety in which personal cooperation shines more than it has for decades.

Today, government services and society in general appear disrupted and not as trustworthy as they once were. Consequently, we may have to turn more often to our families and friends for support. Personal communities will become more important, revitalizing bowling leagues, lodges, and churches. Neighborly visits and community potlucks will comfort us in a turbulent world. Computer networks will foster interdependent support groups and shift away from spotlighting blazing individualism. Helpers will become more prominent than influencers.

Sound utopian? Well, why not?

Posted on

Chicken Catching Night

We lived differently in the 1950s on Waschke Road. Neighbors and relatives relied on each other when a job needed extra hands. Haying, thrashing, digging potatoes, hog butchering, and chicken catching were the community events that entertained kids before we began to see the wider world on television.

Chicken catching came shortly after the first killing frost. In Whatcom County, that’s often about now, mid-October. School had started by then. Kids were needed to help, so chicken catching night was usually the first Friday after a hard frost, which withered the squash and pumpkin vines in the vegetable garden. Their orange and yellow bounty brightened the stage for chicken catching.

In those days, my grandpa ordered cartons of baby chicks by mail in the spring. These chicks would replace the laying hens he kept in the chicken house.

Grandpa set out the chicks under a metal hood heated with light bulbs and suspended by a block and tackle from the collar tie rafters in our brooder house. As spring turned to summer, Grandpa raised the hood gradually as the growing chicks began to explore the brooder house. Summer wore on and the baby chicks grew into hardy pullets, that ranged over a wider and wider area, eventually running loose all over the farm yard, grazing on grass, weeds, and bugs. By September, they had begun to lay a few eggs and roosted in the orchard at night. They only went into the brooder house for water and wheat that Grandpa set out for them.

Towards fall, Grandpa would call Wallace Poultry in Bellingham. Today, city folks get coffee and bagels, something we had never heard of, at a shop called The Bagelry, which occupies the old Wallace Poultry store. Decades ago, instead of fancy coffee, Wallace sent out trucks to pick up the old hens from our chicken house. If a kid was lucky, the truck didn’t arrive until after school and the kid got to join the squawking mayhem of tossing the old birds into wire crates that the trucker loaded on his flatbed. We kids speculated on exactly what happened to those scrawny and scrappy old birds. Needless to say, we only sold to Wallace, never bought their poultry.

When the old hens were gone, my dad and grandpa would thoroughly clean the chicken house and spray it down with Carbolineum to kill mites and parasites in preparation for chicken catching night. Some years Grandpa would brighten up the coop walls with a coat of white wash, another job to entertain a kid if Grandpa didn’t finish before he got home from school.

Chicken catching night was a big event. Relatives and neighbors carrying flashlights came to help capture a couple hundred sleeping pullets. Anything in the dark with flashlights was fun for the kids. Squawking chickens added to the excitement. The men would shine their flashlights into the trees, reach up and catch the pullets by the legs. The kids would grab the legs the men lowered down and carry the noisy struggling birds to the chicken house feed room where Grandpa had a wooden barrel waiting. We’d drop the chickens in the barrel. Grandpa pulled them out one by one, looked them over, set aside the culls, then forced a worming pill down their throats and let them loose in the chicken coop. The chicks in the spring were all supposed to be hens, but a few roosters made it through and had to be set aside. Grandpa also didn’t like to feed runts and the occasional one-legged hen who wouldn’t lay eggs anyway.

When all the pullets were in the chicken house and wormed, it was late and we were all tired. My mother and grandmother would have coffee and dessert ready for everyone. In October, pie made with red Gravenstein apples from the orchard was the rule. Even the kids got milk with a little coffee. Tired folks in those days did not fret over drinking coffee at night.

Sleep always came easy after chicken catching night on Waschke Road.

Posted on

Fish Fry

This week, I will write about another Waschke family tradition: the Fish Fry. The Waschke Fish Fry was nothing like the hundreds and thousands of Fish Fries held all over North America. I’m not sure why the Waschke Fish Fries were even called by that name. They did involve fish, but the fish was always salmon slowly roasted over an open fire. The fish was never fried, never dipped in batter like fish and chips, and always a whole salmon.

I have been told that my great grandparents, Gottlieb and Bertha Waschke started the Waschke Fish Fry tradition. Gottlieb and Bertha had six daughters to marry off. One of our old neighbors told me that my great-grandparents hosted many large parties in search of suitable husbands for their daughters.

The generation that attended those parties is probably all gone now, but I remember occasionally running into folks who remembered my great grandparents’ parties when they heard my name was Waschke. Whether the Fish Fries were part of a scheme to marry off daughters, I do not know, but all my great aunts were married eventually, so it could be true.

But I also think my great grandparents, especially Gottlieb, liked a good big party. I think I have pictorial proof of this that I will bring out someday.

I mentioned in my last blog, Hog Butchering, that my grandpa, Gus, sometimes fed wheelbarrow loads of salmon to the pigs. From that, you might surmise that the Waschkes did not think much of salmon as food, but you would be utterly wrong. Salmon was a delicacy that rivalled my grandma Agnes’s cinnamon, raisin, and apple stuffed Christmas goose.

I don’t remember that my grandmother ever cooked salmon, except maybe in her spicy and vinegary fish soup. I once tried aalsuppe (eel soup) in a bierstube in Germany and I was shocked to discover that it tasted exactly like my grandmother’s fish soup, which she called “fisch stip.” I believe “stippen” is low German for “to dip”. I don’t quite understand Grandma’s name for the soup, but I loved it when she made it, although I also seem to recall that neither my grandpa Gus nor my dad liked it.

I had a similar surprise when I happened to read this excerpt from James G. Swann. The Northwest coast; or, Three years’ residence in Washington Territory. New York : Harper & Brothers, 1857. Pp. 108-109.

We did not wait till the fishing was over for our breakfast, but, when the sun got up high enough to shine clear above the peak of Mount St. Helen’s, old Brandy-wine [a white settler] called us up from the beach, and gave us a glorious repast of salmon, just out of the water, cooked in real Indian style by his Indian wife.

The choice part of a salmon with the Indians is the head, which is. stuck on a stick, and slowly roasted by the fire. The other part is cut into large, flat slices, with skewers stuck through to keep them spread; then, placed in a split stick, as a palm-leaf fan is placed in its handle, with the ends of this stick or handle projecting far enough beyond the fish to be tied with a wisp of beach grass to secure the whole, this stick is thrust in the sand firmly and at the right distance from the fire, so that the fish can roast without scorching. Clam-shells are placed underneath to catch the oil, which will run from these rich, fat salmon almost in a stream. Neither pepper, salt, nor butter were allowed during this culinary operation, nor did I find they were needed; the delicate and delicious flavor would have been spoiled by the addition of either.

I was so much pleased with this style of cooking salmon that I never wish to have it cooked in any other form, either boiled and served with melted butter, or fried with salt pork, or baked with spices. The simpler a fat salmon can be cooked, the better; it retains its flavor with perfection, and is more easily digested; and the only style is to roast it before an open fire.

Son of a gun. Swann’s (or Brandywine’s wife’s) recipe for Fish Fry salmon and the Waschke family recipe for Fish Fry Salmon were the same.

The Fish Fries in my memory were presided over by my uncle Arnold. His method was almost identical to Brandywine’s wife’s recipe moved forward a century in time.

My uncle began by starting a wood fire and topping it with green vine maple logs. He fastened the salmon to chicken wire netting with wires in a steel angle iron frame rather than sticks and suspended the rack over his fire. The salmon roasted slowly in the vine maple smoke. Vine maple sap and wood is sweet and gives salmon a unique flavor. Ivar’s Salmon House on Lake Union in Seattle is not the place it was when Ivar was still alive, but it made alder smoked salmon famous. However, for me, alder is a poor substitute for vine maple. I think my uncle would differ with Swann on seasoning: he used brown sugar on his salmon, but he would have agreed with Swann that the point of seasoning salmon is to taste the salmon, not the seasoning.

In the old days, according to my dad, Fish Fries often were inspired by the arrival of a member of the Lummi tribe with salmon. Later, we would get the salmon from fishermen off the dock in Bellingham or Blaine or a fishing neighbor would drop off a salmon. Still later, we bought it from one of the fish markets.

I often think that there must be a link between Waschke Fish Fries and the Salish potlatch tradition. The classic anthropological discussion of the potlatch tradition is found in Marcel Mauss’s book The Gift. Claude Levi Strauss also studied and wrote about Salish nations.

I know that in the fifties, my grandparents had occasional visitors from the tribe, sometimes bearing salmon, and, of course, I mentioned before that my father was delivered by a Lummi mid-wife. I also know that Grandpa traded potatoes and other produce with the Lummi. Exactly how the salmon tradition made the jump from the Lummi tribe to the tribe of Waschke Germanic interlopers, I don’t know, but I do know that the salmon at a Waschke Fish Fry and at the Lummi Stommish would be hard to distinguish in a blind fold test. And I have searched for German roasted salmon recipes that might have inspired Waschke Fish Fry and have found nothing. The most important similarity is the intent: the essence of potlatch is generosity and reciprocity among friends and neighbors. This was the spirit of the Waschke Fish Fry. The more partakers, the better.