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/

21st Century Women Revisited

I've often made the point to my students that revision is writing. I knew that when I posted my last blog, I'd need to add something. There was just some point I hadn't made, some note that didn't ring the right note. Hmm. So I talked to my editor about it and bounced some ideas off of him about what I'd written. Grey is my editor/boyfriend/collaborator/friend. He observed that I had written something about what did not qualify me a 21st Century woman, but not much on what it means to be one. How would I recognize other members of this tribe? What, if anything, did I think of as "woman's work"? To put it differently, is there anything a man might do that would make me feel as though he was infringing on my domain?

That made me think. I guess there isn't much. I think men who clean house are pretty sexy, and since if I'm ever going to live with a man in an egalitarian sense, he should probably do his fair share of cleaning. In the home, I do prefer to be the one who cooks breakfast most of the time, and the one who cleans the bathroom. I suspect, and perhaps someday science will fail to rebuff my theory, that men do not see dirt the way that women are able to do so. Women always love it when men do dishes and to tell the truth, I have one more dirty little secret: I hate dealing with finances. I would clean every toilet every week for eternity if I didn't have to worry about money and what we do and do not have. I care that if I want a new dress, I can just go get one. I care that I have reliable transportation and money for food and maybe something shiny once in awhile. That's it. Seriously, I couldn't give two shits about money unless I didn't have any. But I'm pretty sure that this is much more about laziness than it is about gender roles.

Likewise, I think my upbringing wasn't really so much about gender roles than it has been about necessity. Women and men both can hunt and fish and work like dogs on harvest crew. It's more likely to find men in jobs that require outside work or dangerous work, but it's still pretty common for women to be in those roles too. I have snowmobiled quite a bit, jumped off of cliffs, spoken to audiences of over 2,000 people and stepped into a prison to try to make a difference there. And yet, nothing about me is particularly manly.

Maybe the things about being a woman that I like best is the ability to slip into a nurturing role, a mom-type of role that offers comfort, guidance, support and help. I usually can tell when one of my kids is upset or hiding some emotion. They don't seem to mind speaking to me about personal issues or asking advice. I like being a care giver. I dislike that Grey is sick and hope he feels better. If he isn't better when I get home from Louisville (I'm here for a conference), then I will bring him some cold remedies and cluck over him like a chicken until he either passes out or pretends to feel better so that I will go away.

Speaking of conferences, I happened to end up in a workshop with the Assistant Superintendent of the school district where I teach. I stepped out to take a phone call, and in my absence, my assistant principal told her we were having difficulty implementing the America's Choice curriculum. When I returned she asked "What do you think of America's Choice"?

In my defense, I was far more polite than one might think. I strongly believe that as a for-profit company, Pearson does not have my student's best interests at heart. Their curriculum is for 1 hour classes and I have only 45 minute classes. Furthermore, this year none of the grade level teachers have ever seen or had training on the curriculum. We have since had a one-day workshop wherein there was a group grump session at the organizers. They suggested implementing adaptations tot he curriculum that the teachers in the district often were gotten in trouble for doing. In fact, the Pearson "coach" for my school threatened me several times by telling me that her report would go to the very woman who was standing before me, asking for my input. I almost quit over the unsupported mandates and the coach barging into my classroom, writing reports about me that I was not privy to, reports that did not cast me or my teaching practices in a positive light. This from a non-district book company. A corporation.

But I was polite and I was diplomatic. And at the end of our long discussion- I think it was productive- the Asst. Supt. decided to come visit my school in the next two weeks. I offered to create an instrument to help gauge district teacher's attitudes towards the curriculum and immediately went back to my hotel room to construct a survey. As I exited the workshop and overheard my assistant principal exhale loudly and say to his friend "Well, the Assistant Superintendent *did* ask. What was she expecting?"

This guardianship of my students, fighting for what I believe is their best interest, and being willing to speak my truth and not back down- this is what a woman does in the 21st century. I could get fired. My principal may get into some trouble and life could become more uncomfortable than what it is right now. It's a risk I am willing to take. And man or woman, you had best step aside when in that particular arena.

I am a 21st century woman; articulate, adventurous, athletic and sometimes brave. I am not good at mopping floors or mowing grass, but I can split an infinitive or demonstrate the correct of the pluperfect subjunctive on short notice. Usually I'm ok for a laugh. My very romantic relationship is multi-platform and highly engaging with a man I like, respect and find to be more than qualified to handle a woman such as me. And handsome. Perhaps that's what I like best about being a woman. Maybe It's as simple as great sex and emotional connection; feeling safe and cared for and knowing that the one you care for in a healthy relationship also cares for you. Yeah. Glad I'm a woman.

Privilege and Cantaloupe

I was cutting cantaloupe for breakfast this morning. I've been thinking of my grandma a lot lately, since she died in March, the day before her birthday.  And when I think of her I usually have memories of food and home and cooking and cleaning with lemon-scented Pledge.


This morning it was cantaloupe.  I usually don't bother with it because of the slicing and scooping out of seeds and so forth.  Plus it gets a little slimy and I don't really enjoy handling this fruit. But it reminds me of childhood. It would be early on a dry summer morning, around 6:30 when the sun comes up over the ridge.  Out on Patit Creek Road it's a valley winding through farmland.  On either side of my grandparents house are cows belonging to the Broughton's and Grandpa and Uncle Kennard usually had a cow/calf or a couple of them to raise for meat.  Old farm implements dot the landscape and Grandpa's shop always had machinery and tools and bins of nails, screws and other things someone might need to fix the problems of the world.  It smelled like oil and old grease and whatever old mamma cat they had would inevitably hide her kittens in the shop because it was out of the elements and cats always trusted Grandpa more than anyone in the world. The five acres my grandparents owned were farmed every year to grow alfalfa or grass hay for the animals.  In later years, my cousins Lester and Little Kennard, the grandsons of my great uncle Kennard, did the seeding and harvesting for Grandpa.  That's what family is for, to go on and to help and to keep things going.

Grandma loved cantaloupe.  She would make breakfast when I was little, getting up early to throw sausage and pancakes on the griddle and she would always have a fresh fruit and milk and coffee to drink.  To wake up in the morning to that was such a treat.  The smell of the griddle and the coffee percolating and sometimes the washer and dryer going at the same time made me happy to be alive.  And we'd sit down and eat when she called us, watching "Good Morning America" on television.  Then it would be dishes and clean up and outside to play.  The sun would begin to cook us and in the afternoon, after lunch, Grandma would take us to the pool for a couple of hours.  There was always cold watermelon when we got home.  Much of that fruit, plus all of the walla walla sweet onions were bought at roadside stands.  The strawberries came from Klickers and once, my sister brought home a starving calico kitten which she called  "Onion Baby".  One of the most loving cats we ever had.

Some people have privilege in their lives through social status or money.  This morning, I bit into the juicy cantaloupe and thought of the privilege of my youth, of gravel roads and public swimming pools and I wonder if I will ever find that again.

Maybe I'll be a Farmer

Farming is hard work. It's dusty, at times, especially if you don't have an air conditioned John Deere with an mp3 player or at least an iPod. You gotta get out there at the ass crack of dawn, till up earth, fertilize, plant, spray, water, spray, harvest and care for the earth by leaving it fallow for a time too. Farming doesn't really come with a retirement package- at least the farmers I knew back in the day didn't talk about their 401k's or what have you. Often, family farms get incorporated and then more benefits like insurance become available and more affordable. "Vacation" doesn't happen in the spring or summer, or even in fall (that's hunting season, after all). Vacation happens in winter, when the ground is resting.

I'm not sure I could be a good farmer. I can barely grow tomatoes. Even following around my brand new zippy, 5 miles per hour self-propelled Craftsman lawnmower for the 45 or so minutes it takes me to mow now is just dizzying and repetitive. I get no sense of satisfaction; just a note that the chore is finished for the week and that the grass is shorter than it was. I get excited about potted plants and strawberries. And my fruit trees which I fertilized last week. I think farming, growing seasons and all of that work make me long for winter. Of course, growing up we had sheep giving birth on the coldest, darkest night of the year. Nothing like being awake at 3 a.m. on a school night while your prized ewe takes her time doing what she needs to do. I do miss all of the county fairs, FFA, the smell of the livestock barns at 7 a.m. and Mountain Dew before hitting the show ring. Ah, good times. I was a pretty good showman once.

There have been a lot of changes lately in my life. I took 3 classes this summer- insanity by grad school standards- and taught a course. It went quickly. I accepted a one year lectureship at a small university 70 miles from my house and I'll commute this year during the week. I bought a little miata for the drive because it gets almost 35 miles to the gallon. If I'm lucky, I may have a shot at a permanent position out there, depending on whether or not I finish that degree on time, or in a reasonable amount of time. I've got two classes to take this fall, my general exams to pass and a dissertation to prepare for.

My friend Steve is taking a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. I gave him my thoughts on Seattle and he camped out in Mt. Rainier park. Lovely place. I miss Seattle. Steve commented on the teeming mass of humanity that moves quickly from place to place, never meeting or acknowledging one another, seemingly disconnected from each other and from nature. Swathed in electronica, virtual communication takes the place of face to face and he wonders where he fits in the grand scheme of life. Does it matter what we do or how we do it? How can we make life meaningful in the short time we are here? Steve also noticed how in the most beautiful places, older people resided there and younger people rushed on by. He doesn't want to wait to grow old to realize the important things, to enjoy his life.

I can't fault him for that. I have felt rushed and cramped and sometimes on a wild joy ride these last two years. One more year left, and maybe a summer. Then I insist that I slow down for a bit. I look forward to just one job and time to develop my writing more. I'd like to publish a book- ok, two books. One of poetry and one fiction novel. I have one more week off before the semester hits. I have to use that time to wrap up all of my loose ends and get my syllabi in order. I'm taking two classes, writing my general exams and teaching five classes. And commuting. And I still have a dog, a cat, a home and a boyfriend, most of which like to be fed and brushed.

So you could see how sometimes farming or ranching would seem the way to go. Life may not be much simpler. You worry all the time about money and weather and wildlife and the price of wheat fluctuating. I'm pretty sure I'd find a way to multi-task. Maybe write poetry on the back of a tractor, or post blogs after offloading bales of hay. Come to think of it, I'd make a pretty crappy farmer. I wouldn't be able to kill other plants just so mine could grow. Equal opportunity farming, I guess. I like to sleep in past 4:30 a.m. and might die of boredom after driving in circles for 18 hours straight, field to field, line by careful and linear line. Maybe what I really want is to have more time, to *take* more time to just stop, inhale deeply and be grateful for what I've got. Isn't that what it's all about anyway? I hope so, because it's the best that I can do today.