Original home is up for sale

I noticed that the home for the first few years of my life is up for sale.  Today it looks like this:

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Growing Up #5: The Cats and Milking

When I grew up we had a cow that we had to milk twice a day who looked something like this.  When I was old enough, I took over the morning shift.  I would wake up around 0600, fill the wash bucket with warm water and a bit of iodine as a disinfectant.  I would then take it and the milk bucket down the hill to the barn. I have found memories of cold winter mornings, my breath like smoke, walking through the crisp air to the barn where the warm cow awaited me patiently.

Jersey Cow

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Growing Up #4: The TV

My Dad was concerned about the impact of a TV on his kids so he created an environment where it was difficult to watch the TV.  Our house was built on a hill with the main floor level with the road in front and the full basement level with the backyard.  The basement had two rooms, unfinished concrete floors and no heat.  A workshop with a concrete floor full of my Dad's tools, two freezers, the hot water heater, and lots of shelves for storing food.  A second room with lots of bugs and small windows.  In this second room is where he put an old couch and the TV.  The upshot was that only time we watched TV was for Saturday morning cartoons and Sunday Disney show.  It was a great example of the environment encouraging a particular behavior. It was not pleasant in that room, so as kids we only used it when there was something we really, really wanted to watch.  It was much, much nicer to be up in the warm, living room area of the house.

What amazed us kids was that as soon as the youngest left for college, my Dad brought the TV up and put it in the living room so he could watch it from his easy chair.

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Growing Up #3: The pond

In Growing Up #1, you can see a big pond.   I was around 6 - 7 years old when my Dad put it in.  His idea was to stock it with trout so he, an avid trout fisherman, could go fishing year round.  The creek wrapped around the right and top sides of the pond. The stream fed into the pond at the bottom right of the screen and the water left the pond at its top left corner.  Dad had to put in screens at the entrance and exit culverts to keep the pond separate from the stream so (1) the stocked trout could not leave and (2) he could fish at anytime and not be limited by state fishing season rules.  At least that was the idea :)

Dad hired a firm to dig out a pond that was 9 feet deep at the bottom end and gradually sloped up to a beach (imported sand) at the top end.  The one thing I remember about that process was that they used a big front end loader like this filling up a dump truck.

Frontend loader and dump truck moving dirt

  

The truck then dumped the dirt along the top edge of the pasture. This worked fine until they hit a very sticky clay patch in the deep end and the loader got stuck.  I have this vivid memory of the contractor bringing a tiny bulldozer that was about as high as the loader wheel and using it to pull the loader out of the clay.  This little tiny machine rescuing the big one is something I will never forget.

One the pond was dug, the entrance and exit culverts in place with their screens, it filled pretty quickly and Dad stocked it with 1000 fingerling trout sometime around October to November.

Fingerling Rainbow Trout

Unfortunately for my Dad a few of these showed up. 

Common Merganser Ducks

They are large fish eating ducks who thought my Dad was the greatest as he provided them with food all winter long.  So that winter the routine was as soon as my Dad woke up, he would go outside to yell at the ducks.  The ducks would barely be able to fly off the pond as they were soooo full from all the nice rainbow trout my Dad had so thoughtfully provided for them.  They literally needed to run on the water for quite a distance before they could lift off.  This went on all winter long.  By spring time, Dad figured that he had just a few of the 1000 fingerlings left.

Several years later he found out another problem with the pond.  The creek on the right side was only separated from the pond by a 5 - 6 foot stretch of soil.  A few pairs of these critters moved into the

Muskrat

creek and proceeded to drill several holes through that 5 - 6 of soil so the pond was no longer separate from creek.  Between the ducks and muskrats, my Dad never did get a pond for fishing year round.  We did go fishing during season and every now and then would catch a nice trout.  We also used the pond for summer parties and even a wedding.

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Growing Up #2: The creeks

In Growing Up #1, you can see that we had two creeks on the property.  One along the top border and one that came in from the bottom, circled around a pond and then when through the middle of the property where it went through a culvert so the cows could get to both sides of the property easily.  As kids, we loved to spend a summer day playing in and around the creeks.  One game was to build a small 'boat' from a stick of wood we filched from my Dad's workshop.  We would give it a pointed front and sometimes put something on the board.  They had to be small (6-8" long by 2 - 3" wide) to navigate the creek hazards and not get caught.  Then we place the boat in the water where one of the creeks came into our property and follow it to where the creek left the property.  We had several competitions along the way such as:

• Whose boat was the first to the where the creek left the property
• Whose boat needed the least amount of help
• Whose boat exited the culvert first (kind of like Pooh Sticks)

Along the way we would find interesting bugs, frogs, small fish, and if we were lucky a newt or salamander.  Other times we would just go to the culvert in the middle of the property and play pooh sticks while the cows grazed nearby in the grass or sometimes wandered over to see what we were doing.  Just being out in the warm sunny afternoon with the smell of fresh grass, flowers and the sound of the insects and cows was so peaceful.

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Growing Up #1: Setting the stage

I grew up on a small, 11 acre, hobby farm outside a small logging town in Washington State.  The town was a single stoplight, single school, single policeman, single doctor, small library branch sort of place where folks all knew each other.  It had a hardware store, two small markets, a few restaurants and the main phone switching facility for that part of the county.  The town had several churches and taverns and we liked to joke that the tavern to church ratio was 2 or 3 when in reality it was probably 1 to 1. Basically one of your standard, rural logging towns that are all over the western US.  Now, 50 years later, the town has become a bedroom community for larger cities to the west and while there are still several churches, only a single bar survived.

Our house was a few miles from town.  I remember that you would drive along a winding road and then down a small hill with trees on right and pasture and power/telephone poles on the left. At the bottom of the hill the road bends to the right, starts to climb a bit and you see pastures on both sides.  Our land was on the right side - 11.25 acres of pasture.  All the cleared land surrounded by trees to the left of the road.  Our house is in the bottom right of the picture with the pond behind it.

Farm where I grew up

The road continued for around 200 yards and then did a partial turn to the right and our red, 2 story house was there on the right side. 50 yards past the turn, you could pull into a gravel parking spot on the right. Just across the road from the parking spot was our mailbox.  The house was back about 20 yards from the road surrounded by a white picket fence.  The front of it had a large porch with two brick columns holding up its roof.

Our land was all cleared to be used as a pasture for animals and surrounded by the fir, hemlock and cedar covered lands of the neighbors.  Facing away from the road toward the back of the pasture we had a creek on the right side of the property and another creek that came in from the left side, then turned in the middle and when almost to the back where it turned again and joined up with the creek on the right side (the trees in the middle of the property follow this creek). The house was on a small hill that we had to go down to get to the pasture area and barn (above and to the left of the house).

It was a great place to grow up and learn about the world.

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