A Week In View

Seen in and around Dayton, Washington.

Main Street runs East-West.  This is looking West.

Pretty running trail that runs North-South.  Here it's looking North



Touchet (pronounced TOO-shee) River looking North



Same river, but with pretty foliage.

Touchet river by a happy old hill.



My mother's brother- Uncle Steve 

See the resemblance?



My grandparent's place. Five acres out the Patit road.  My aunt and uncle bought it and remodeled.

Aunt Vina's cabin.  She was my Great-Grandmother's sister. My uncle and aunt have it now too.  Before that, it was my Uncle Vernon's. Waaay up in the hills. No electricy or running water. Or plumbing.



The inscription says "Have a seat on a glacial erratic deposited in Columbia County by the great floods of ancient Lake Missoula". Way cool.

My first cousin, Chryssee.



Chryssee's daughter, A----.

My Grandparent's mailbox, left unchanged

Happy for new siding.  The old stuff was three shades of green.

New everything inside, including the kitchen...



 

...and the livingroom.

As you can see, it was a happy visit to my little town.  Grey got to meet some members of my family and look around Columbia County.  And now we don't have to go back for a little while.

Day Town

Well, I'm driving.
Eleanor came with us because the cat sitter is out of town.  She is nonplussed and heavily drugged.  Eleanor does not like car rides and takes a form of kitty valium called acepromazine for when she goes any distance with us.  She is really stoned and that's or the best because she meows, climbs all over the car and generally works herself up into a frenzy.

Before I started giving her prescriptions for travel, my vet recommended "Rescue Remedy" and Benadryl.  Rescue Remedy is apparently a naturopathic placebo.  Only nobody told Eleanor what it's supposed to do before we gave it to her.  On one of our trips to Tulsa, she was cranky the whole way and tormented me, spreading hair all over my boyfriend's car.

When I tried Benadryl, she foamed at the mouth, acted like she had a sick tummy, and puked (twice) right into my hand.  At least she didn't hit the seats or anything.  She also pooped on my foot while she was puking into my hand.  But hey, at least she didn't hit the floorboard. It was a long day for everyone, and I ended up with a long shower and a couple of hours of soothing my poor kitty.  We tried cold turkey again, only with her carrier. She doesn't like her carrier.  She peed out the back side of it, this time hitting the back of the seat.  At least I was overly prepared with sprays and wipes and paper towels.

So I drug her.  And everyone is much happier.  She tends to hang out between the feet of whomever is on the passenger side of the car and stare into space while a heater blows a little warm air on her head.  It's very zen, especially for me.  I don't like to think of any animal or human being in pain.

Anyway, I'm driving.  The drugs haven't quite hit and Eleanor is pacing.  Grey is trying to wrangle her and be patient with me as I bark orders having to do with my cat.  He does not need me to tell him what to do with a cat. Especially this cat- he lives with her and knows her just as well as I do.  But it makes me feel better.

We are headed to Dayton.

Dayton, Washington. Home of my Centennial family.  Chrisopher Marll moved there from Pennsylvania right before statehood and settled in Dayton with his family.  I believe he was Grandfather to Nineva, who was my Grandpa's mother.  Nineva.  She went by Nina.  When I wear my hair up in a bun, my Grandma told me I look just like her.  That's one of the reasons my grandpa liked me so well.

And nobody goes by their original names, it would seem.  My Great-Grandma Nina used her nickname.  She had a sister named Vina- also a nickname.  My Great-Grandpa Albert was Abbot, Aunt Sis was Alberta, Bessie is Bettie, Teddy was really named Alice and Chaud was actually named Charles.  Family reunions are a bitch for this reason.  That and having a grandma who was an identical twin.  I thought I had two grandma's until I was 7.  It's no wonder I am named Mindie but go by Antoinette and that I married a man named Greg, who goes by Grey.

And now, it's time to introduce Grey to the family he married into.  Because it's not just a family; it's also a town and sometimes a geneological snarl.  I don't know where to start.  I'm related to just about everyone.  I consulted with Patti before we decided to come visit.  We decided to do what they do: stay in a local motel and visit from there.  That way, we have a place to retreat to, in order to have a bit of quiet and a place to rest up after the heavy information inputs.

We stayed at the place that allows pets. The reason the motel allows pets is so that hunters who come year round can bring their dogs.  Clean room- no pet hair.  Free wifi, hot water.  Not much else.  A quiet haven.  Hunters go to bed early. Come to think of it, everyone in town goes to bed early.

Time to meet the Fockers.

I always referred to my uncle Steve as Uncle T-B.  We couldn't say his name when we were little. He and my Aunt Karla bought my grandparent's place since their deaths and rennovated the house.  It's the first time I have seen the house in the two years since they moved in.  New siding, new windows, floors, heating system, bathroom (might I say WOW on that part) and a couple of new walls.  Pretty snazzy.  I am amazed at the touches they left in place.  The floor of the back porch that my grandpa built himself is the same.  The root cellar is still in the same place- also dug by hand by Grandpa.  Much of the furniture placement (new furniture) is the exact same, and the deck is updated by still in the same style.

T-B showed Grey videos of me when I was an awkward teenager, complete with long, blonde, permed hair and acid wash jeans.  And pimples.  The 1980s were a tough time.  He also showed Grey the vdieos of my time on the Columbia County Fair Court, wearing red off-the-shoulder dresses and big red picture hats.  Waving to a crowd of people with a big smile stuck on my face.  Riding in the back of a wagon at the country fair with spray-painted on jeans and white shirts.

Oy. Family.

One thing my family loves is apples.  One of the best places to get apples is in Ellensburg.  That's fortunate, eh? So we went to the best place to buy a couple of boxes: Thorp Apples and Antique Mall.  It's good food, reasonably priced.  Organic, local and oh, so yummy.  I picked up a couple of boxes for my aunt and uncle, and a couple of boxes for my sister Mickie and her family.  Mickie had her husband, Lester, stepson Logan and granddaughter Jenna Lynn (age 2) living at her house right now. Logan is 11 and very talkative.  He's a good kid.  While we were visiting Steve and Karla, we got to also visit with my cousin Chryssee, her husband James and their four year old daughter, Allie.

I spent a lot of time with this part of my family when I was younger.  A few weeks in the summers, lots of holidays and time where Ryan, Rob, Chryssee and I would be at Grandma and Grandpas at the same time.  Alsways fun.  I loved my cousins.  I went from being the youngest to being the oldest in just a few hours and I loved spending time with them.  So it's a treat to see any of my cousins.  Chryssee was born when I was 11, and somewhere floating around is a picture of me holding her when she is six months old.

We take apples for everyone.  Grey appeared somewhat skeptical at the prospect of me buying boxes of apples for my family.  We had taken one over to Patti's house the last time we were there and they ate them, straight up.  Didn't even pretend they were going to can them.  Bigger families on this side, so we brought more boxes.  It's not just my family; everyone here eats them like crazy.

We visit awhile longer and decide to go back to town to see the Christmas Kickoff fireworks.  The town really loves fireworks but can't shoot them off on the fourt of July because it's such a dry area.  So they do it the day after Thanksgiving.  Even though there are only about 2,500 people in town, thousands come to see the fireworks.  Grey and I find parking and work out way towads the courthouse.  It's the second oldest in the state.  My Great-Great-Great-Great Grandparents saw it built.  On the way I am stopped by Ramon Streby, who goes to our family church and a friend from high school named Denise Witt, who I have not seen in 20 years but she is so remarkably unchanged we recognize each other immediately.  She is married and has three lively boys.  I see lots of people I know.  Some know me too and we nod.  Grey doesn't say much and seems unsurprised when I suddenly hug Ramon and then introduce him.  He's affable.

After the fireworks, we go by the historical Winehard Hotel, run by my friend Shelly.  She is one of the nicest people you will ever meet.  You need a gorgeous suite in a beautifully rennovated hotel?  Go THERE!  And then off to a restaurant to eat.  The first place we tried, we couldn't get anyone to take our order.  It was terribly busy.  I recognized my nephew's girlfriend but we haven't been introduced and I didn't want to freak her out while she was working.  The second place, Skye Book and Brew, had a pretty decent grilled cheese sandwich and a local Johnson Hollow IPA.  Perfect. And a good end to the night.

The night ended at 9.  In fact, everything sort of ends by 9 in Dayton.  It's a "roll up the streets when the sun goes down" sort of place.

Today was a shopping and a walk around Dayton sort of day.  More relatives- Grey met one of my third cousins and a former stepdad (who I just love), and we walked a mile out to Grandma and Grandpa's to visit a bit longer.  On the way, I gave more town history and pointed out some landmarks.  Lester, Mickie's husband, took us up the Touchet River Road, turned on Hatley Gulch Road and drove us to the old Marll (Grandpa's people) homestead, past a bunch of my Uncle Vernon's land that my Uncle Steve now farms and to Aunt Vina's cabin.  The homestead is where they used to grow vegetables and strawberries to make their living, and that very strawberry field is the place where my Grandma correctly diagnosed my Aunt Dorothy with appendicitis- and it saved her life.  Grandma lost her kid brother to a burst appendix when she was just a teenager, so she knew the signs. We saw deer and Pioneer Park, the land my Uncle Vernon donated to be a hunting/camping park.  The sign just says that people should be courteous.  Nobody has to clean the place up.  Down Skyline and through the fields in fallow we drove, around a couple of hairpin turns, and back into Dayton.  I am really impressed with Lester. He knows our family history at least as well as me.

But by the time we got back to town, it was dark and I was carsick as hell.  And I needed to pee.  Jenna Lynn fell asleep in the car and would be up all night.  Logan helped to narrate and all along the way, Mickie showed us all the places she and Jenna Lynn would glean apples and have picnics.  I guess since Mickie and Uncle Steve both do it, gleaning isn't just a weird thing about me. Mickie referres to the practice of picking wayward apples, apricots, berries and other fruits as "procuring".  And Yvette does it too, sometimes in tandem with Mick.

So there.

I'm exhausted.  It's 8 p.m.  We are in for the night.  Tomorrow, it's church at our little United  Bretheren Church and then saying our goodbyes and taking off for home.  Yvette isn't here this trip.  She was at Mom's house for Thanksgiving and is now in Olympia visiting her boyfriend.  She and Grey will meet. Someday.

I worry about Grey though.  How will he do on the geneology test?  Will he know the Marlls from the Jennings?  Will he know the nicknames? What about the UB church history?  Will he be able to find his way back to town when Lester drops him off on Skyline? Can he correctly identify the location of the hospital where I was born? I mean, now the hospital is on the other side of of town. Will he be able to tell the difference in taste between a Jonagold apple and a Honeycrisp?  What if he can't even name my Uncle Vernon's favorite apple (It's Golden Delicious)? There is over 100 years of history just on my mom's side of the family to memorize.  I feel a little sorry for him but hope he will be able to come home with me.  I'll post pictures in a separate blog in a few days.  Because you know I took a bunch.

Back Road

It doesn't always snow in Dayton, Washington.  When it does, you get these big, fluffy mounds that drift across the road and settle nicely at the bottom of the gulches and gullies.  Columbia County is, topographically speaking, like a big patchwork quilt that someone fluffed and never smoothed, with gently rounded hills and creek beds at the bottom of every canyon.  Wheat fields are interspersed with fallow, soybeans, bearded barley and rapeseed.  Corn crops up from time to time and strip farming is common to help aid in preventing soil erosion.  Farming is a time-honored profession.  I learned this not only from living in the environment, but from a day my grandfather took me on a little excursion.

He had an old white Ford pick up truck, and when we would go for a drive up the back roads- Patit Road, Johnson Hollow, Eckler Mountain, Crall Hollow, the Touchet River Road and Hatley Gulch, we would look for wildlife.  I'm a crackpot wildlife spotter.  I don't see dark colors well and cannot accurately tell between gray, brown, and green or blue from black, but I see shapes extremely well.  I can spot small game from hundreds of yards and tend towards a holistic view of a given landscape.  Leaves, time of year, light and weather just sort of point things out for me. And Grandpa loved to go for a drive. I think he just really loved to look around his world.  He drove until he was 89 years old and the people in Dayton just sort of watched out for his car since he stopped obeying parking signs or places to stop and go.  Nice people, Daytonites.

We'd get going and be on top of the world, looking out at the land and the fields, breathing the clean air.  The windows would be rolled all the way down and neither of us thought about seatbelts.  Half the time, I rode in the back of the truck, losing my breath looking over the top of the cab or coughing on dust the whole time.  But on drives like this, Grandpa would dispense advice and we'd take turns pointing out mule and whitetail deer, the occasional elk, gorgeously plumed Chinese pheasants and coyotes.  Grandpa would point off to the right, and that's the way the truck would veer.  On a washboard gravel road, it gets pretty terrifying to swerve so sharply.  Fortunately, we didn't go faster than 20 miles per hour on these outings.  Grandpa didn't really notice, as he would be busy telling stories and jokes I had heard a hundred times before about a 12-point elk (his antlers are still up at the cabin), building hydraulic wood splitters and how the crops are doing that year. I loved it and I knew that one day these would be only memories.  Every ditch we narrowly avoided, every herd of Mulies we spotted and the few black bears we saw stuck in my memory and lingers still in my imagination.  They serve as part of the vast backdrop of my storytelling.  As adults, my sisters and I would play a game with our boyfriends.  We'd take them out to my grandparent's house and wait for Grandpa to offer to take him of a ride, then decline to go with him.  Depending on how carsick and/or frustrated he got would sometimes dictate whether or not that relationship continued.  We weren't really nice girls.

When I was 12, Grandpa took me to watch harvest in action.  I hopped in the truck with him and we made our dusty way towards Waitsburg and off to the Northeast to a corner I'd never be able to find on a map. Fifty or so trucks parked in a field and I recognized several of the old men from town, including my Uncle Vernon.  Almost everyone there was an old man, with a few child witnesses, more curious about days gone by than swimming at the community pool.

Two men sat atop an old-time swather.  A twenty-mule team was hitched to pull, only there were way more than twenty mules.  How did they get so many out here in one field? How were they going to pull that heavy piece of equipment on a hillside?  In the Boax commercials, which is what one usually associates with a twenty mule team, the mules are hitched in a double line, two deep and ten long.  This was not the case. The mules were four and six deep but only five or so long.  As they pulled the swather along, the mules towards the sides did the work of turning and the ones in the front added stability.  Likewise for going straight across the field.  It was hot work for men and mules, kicking up dust but doing the job of wheat harvest.  I can see why a whole crew was needed for harvest work.  Indeed, my grandmother's first paying job was to cook twice daily for a harvest crew of about a dozen men, including shopping for, cooking and cleaning up after the meals.  Hard work for women too.

As Grandma had grown up in a large family with nine siblings, she knew inherently how to plan, cook, serve and clean up after men and children.  A lady hired her was a teenager to stay at their farm and cook for the harvest crew, including the man of the family.  The lady didn't think much of my Grandma, nor did she trust her cooking skills, allowing her to only make one kind of dessert, kind of a dry cake with no icing.  The men didn't really like the cake and Grandma offered to make something else.  The lady wouldn't hear of it, saying that Grandma would just waste money in making inedible messes.  But the man, after a week of the same thing, took Grandma aside and asked her if she could make chocolate cake.  Yes, yes of course she could. And so triumphantly, a chocolate layer cake with chocolate icing was baked and proudly set before them.  It was promptly devoured.  Every Sunday afterwards, Grandma baked them the same cake.  They paid her two dollars a week, plus room and board.  A dollar was enough for a pair of shoes and she gave most of it to her family to help with expenses.  She was fifteen or sixteen years old and worked as a cook for the rest of her life.

Hours later, I was still mesmerized by the process of pull, turn, pull turn.  Dump grain and cart it off. Pull, turn, pull turn. Sweat.  Sweaty mules, sweaty men.  It all depended on them working together in unison.  One man calling out and the rest knowing their jobs. Community.  The mules knew their jobs too, and were offered water when the men took a break too.  It's damn hard work.

Farming practices have evolved greatly.  My friend Ramon Streby works harvest on a big, air conditioned harvester, wearing Oakleys and blaring music in the cab.  He posts pictures on Facebook looking cool.  My other friend Elissa is a physics teacher in Long Beach, California.  Sometimes she has to go home to Dayton to help out too.  Thin, tan and a beautiful California girl, she goes when her dad calls.  And all of us, us kids from Dayton, we sometimes spread out over the world.  David is in New York, I am in Oklahoma, Claudia is in Texas and more and more of us travel and move around the globe.  But the center of our world is, ultimately, a gravel road and an old truck with buttons you push on hard to get the radio station to tune in. It's a 12 degree creek on a hot July day and taking your kid fishing for the first time on the Tucannon.  It's my Grandma telling me stories of the church socials where all the unmarried girls would make a pail lunch for two and put them on a picnic table, and all the unmarried men would choose a pail and that's who you would have lunch with.  Grandma got an ugly one once, and she stopped making delicious lunches for church after that.

We rode home in silence.  I'm not sure why Grandpa took me to see the harvest, Maybe he didn't mean to take me at all.  I'm glad he did.

Later in life, I did the driving

Grandma- heading to church

Garden

Mule Deer

Harvest. Photo Credit:  http://www.columbiaco.com/

Columbia County. Photo Credit:  http://www.columbiaco.com/