Living in the mountains. Part 2

Finally, somewhere near August the rain stopped and life was really great. I had worn out that old mini bike and gotten a small Honda 90 motorcycle with a new engine that I eventually wore out on the logging roads and deer trails exploring. The forest roads were open for travel until you got way back miles and miles into an area where it was almost impassable for anything but a crazy kid like me to ever find. I would fill the motorcycle with gas and carry an extra gallon on the back so when I ran out in the main tank I would know I could re fill and just make it home on what I had in the back, though I was often foolish and I ended up pushing that motorcycle a lot of miles after running out of gas!. That got me far enough to get into the deep forest where nobody ever went except the forest ranger, and that was extremely rare. He carried a machine gun (which made me want one too) and the locals warned me about never letting him catch me back there. I didn’t care much about that and went out there anyway; finally you get to locked gates and no trespassing signs. It’s government land supposed to be national forest so I figured I would just go anyway. I was just out to look around so I couldn’t do too much harm. One reason I think they had those gates and signs I found out when I really got back there past the gates. The military was doing practice out there and they didn’t want anyone around! I didn’t stick around much after that and went other places.
There was a place we called Cougar’s Bluff for the obvious reason that there were a lot of cougars there, that I always went to if I could. It was way back in the middle of nowhere and getting to the top was a real challenge. At about 4,000 feet the motorcycle wouldn’t have enough power to move up the trail anymore so I would turn the gas mixture screw until it had a little more power, go up a while, adjust the screw, go a little more, adjust, and on all the way to the top, which was a flat plateau above a mountain of rock with sheer rock cliffs dropping what seemed like miles straight down. The trail up was a zig zag affair that took forever to climb. The nice thing about the place is it was like a fortress and I planned that if I ever needed to run away and hide all I would do is go to the top and blow up the trail to the top with explosives and nobody could get to me without a helicopter. The view was amazing too. From the top I could see the 6 mountains in the range, from Mt. Rainer in the northern part of Washington all the way to Mt. Hood in Oregon with Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Baker and Mt. Adams and Mt. St. Helens in between. You could look right down into the crater on Mt. St. Helens and on clear days you could see the mountains in southern Oregon and barely in northern California. The view was worth a million dollars and I never tired of looking. There were a lot of unusual herbs growing up there too and I collected all I could throughout the summer. I always stuffed my backpack with twigs, roots, bark, leaves and flowers of whatever I found around and dried them on rocks near the river where it was shady but there was good air flow and the rocks were warm. As long as it wasn’t raining, which it usually was.
Sometimes on hot days in the summer I would ride back to the big river deep in the woods, the North Fork of the Tilton, and go swimming, at least until the day the river was bigger than I was and took me for a wild ride where I got into a whirlpool. I thought I was dead but I finally found a foothold on a big boulder in the middle and was able to stand there with my nose out of the water and little else! I realized that there was only one way to get out and that was to let the water carry me to some shallow spot because there was no way I could swim through the rapids that were all around. I caught my breath and bumped downriver to a nice area where I was finally able to get out. That was the last time I ever swam in that river or any other! I never told Mom about that either! I probably should have.
Now that I look back I am surprised she didn’t worry about me doing crazy things like that and carrying a gun around the woods all the time. Maybe she did and I never figured it out or something. Some days I would take my pack and guns and ride the motorcycle as far as I could and then walk as far as possible to get as deep in the woods as I possibly could. I would determine to only eat things that I could find, usually berries and weeds and bark and things that tasted nasty. I would start a fire but tried to be careful to keep the smoke as nonexistent as possible so as not to alert the game warden. I only saw him twice back there in 6 years so I don’t think I really needed to worry about it. One time that I’ll always remember is when that crazy neighbor of ours almost kidnapped Dad and the three of us took off with our backpacks, guns and sleeping bags on an overnight trip. The goal was to hike to the top of the mountain behind the house and camp. The hike up there was almost torture because it was so steep. I was ok because I was so used to it but sometimes I was too short to get over the logs or rocks so had to have help. I don’t think Dad was properly prepared for a hard hike like that and he was a bit sore! We barely made it to the top, the neighbor who was as fit as a fiddle would leave horehound candies here and there for us to follow so it was like a treasure hunt to keep on his trail that last mile or so. From the top we found a valley that led in the direction we wanted and we followed it as fast as possible because we were out of water and as thirsty as we ever were. After what seemed like forever we found the little spring that was the beginning of a big creek down several miles and we were able to refill the canteens. About the time it began to get dark we looked for a camping spot but there are not too many of those on the side of a steep hill, actually closer to a cliff than a hill. We camped by the creek in the deep woods with huge old growth trees that would hide the campfire and diffuse the smoke. I learned that night to grab the good sleeping spot as fast as you can or else you’ll sleep in a miserable spot because that’s all that is left! We stayed up late with the neighbor telling bear hunting stories, probably trying to scare us. It didn’t work and all of the stories were true, one was where a black bear came after him after he had shot at it but missed and he had to shoot it with his .44 pistol. The bear fell dead on top of him and he had to be rescued by the other guys in the party. His next bear hunting trip he was planning on getting his with just a knife. I don’t think he ever went on that hunt! That night I had the importance of picking a good sleeping spot firmly implanted in my mind. If you sleep poorly, the next day is miserable. That means find a soft and smooth spot with no rocks and no sticks, not in a low hollow where the cold, moist air collects, not by a creek where the cold air drains downhill by the water and definitely not in the path of a wild animal trail!
The next day we hiked back to the house and since it was all down hill it went fast and easy. Another lesson learned though, take enough water and above all, get the best boots possible! No cutting corners here, if you have blistered feet you are worthless.
We lived close enough to Mt. Rainer that it was a short drive to a place where I could hike up a glacier and hike up to the meadows of wildflowers that grow just above the tree line and where people generally stay away. It is unbelievably beautiful and just a short walk to permanent snow cover.
I can’t remember which spring it was that we found the twin deer that needed a mother. They must have been pretty young because we had no trouble catching them, their mother was dead and they were right there with her. We fed them goat’s milk and I kept them in a hollow spot in the brush in the edge of the yard. They would follow me around sometimes and came into the house when it rained. They soon became pests but we didn’t mind because they were so much fun!
I remember one time when Mom was in town for some reason we didn’t want to clear the table of all the leftover food so someone got the bright idea to bring the milk cow inside to eat it off the table. One of the horses ended up inside too, then the herd of 20 some sheep and a few of the goats. They happily cleared the table for us and settled down to inspecting the house. Then Mom came home and the fun ended rather rapidly. I remember another time not too long after that when we came home from an all day outing and found the door open and the sheep and goats had moved in. My angora goat climbed the stairs and was sleeping high up on my bed, I guess it was like sleeping on a hill or something.
After the first summer I had built enough fence to keep the animals where they belonged, had cut a forest of small alder trees and blackberries away in order to plant a garden and we had built a water system for the house that allowed us to haul several hundred gallons of water from the creek to a big tank up the hill from the house which gravity fed to the plumbing in the house. It only gave a trickle but that was better than nothing. We even had a propane hot water heater so we could take a real hot bath in a tub in our doorless bathroom! I hated it. There was a blanket over the door opening but that didn’t do much good.
About that time I inherited a whole bullet reloading operation so I set it up in my bedroom which was full of beaver skins, antlers, guns, all kinds of gear that I kept for going out in the woods and a little bit of space for the bed. With the reloading things the bed had to go somewhere else so I put it up as high as I could and made room. In order to get in the door I had to climb up and over the reloading bench which was always scattered with gunpowder and primers. The freedom to shoot that the reloading gave me was worth it though! I would load and shoot 100 pistol rounds each morning (well, almost every morning) and all of the practice was great, I could actually hit something if I tried. Unfortunately I haven’t kept that up and I can’t hit a thing anymore.
Out just past the back yard was a steep drop off that was about 90-100 feet down to the creeks. One day I was looking at a particular tree and realized that it had a perfect branch for building the best and most terrifying rope swing imaginable. I used my bow and tied a small string to an arrow and shot the string over the branch, which was quite high and stuck way out over the drop off. With the string we were able to pull bigger and bigger ropes over the branch until we had a great swing. At first we were all to terrified to swing from the top of the hill but as we built courage we started higher and higher until finally the brave ones tried it from climbing a tree up on the very top. After sending the cat down to test and make sure we wouldn’t die from the extreme speed. The cat lived so we tried it and it was so scary you would almost black out when you first jumped! It felt like you had left your stomach back up in the tree and were falling from the top of the sky when finally the rope caught you and you would go flying up into space over the creek well over 100 feed below you. I don’t know why Dad didn’t make me take it down because it was terribly dangerous. Mom was never worried about anything, I suppose I could have jumped out of an airplane and she wouldn’t have worried much.
The last time we rode that swing David was especially daring and that was the time the rope broke and he went crashing down to certain death except for the 10 or 12 foot thick mass of blackberries at the bottom where he fell. God had a lot to do with it too! He broke some bones and that was the end of swinging for us, though I would do it again now if I had a better rope and tied it in such a way that the rope wouldn’t wear.
During the summer we would take our sheep to all of the shows around in the back of our van, then later in the back of our 1949 Chevy truck. That was the highlight of every summer, we would spend a couple of weeks at fairs and come home with a bunch of ribbons, trophies and the best part, money! I made enough money showing and selling sheep to keep my shooting addiction going as well as save quite a bit. I also learned a lot from the livestock showing. Not only about livestock but about people, being cooped up with thousands of them all day long every day really made me appreciate being out in the wild and woods where there was nobody. I would also get a scholarship every year to join the state veterinary youth team which helped at the state fair. I got the scholarship every year because I think I was the only boy to apply. Regardless of the reason I loved every minute of it from doing C-sections on a cat to doing the demonstrations to the public about what we were doing to the horse with colic that seemed to be a regular occurrence. I learned a tremendous amount of very useful things doing that program.
What was by far the most tedious job at the time has to be hauling water. I would haul a load every day or sometimes twice a day and wait a half hour for the pump to fill the tanks, then drive up to the main tank and siphon it out of the truck into the big tank for the house. The hill was high enough that there was no pump that we could get to pump it up from the creek that didn’t run on electricity or wasn’t a huge monster diesel pumping rig. Finally Dad found plans to build a hydraulic ram pump. He had to modify the pump a little to suit our situation but when he was done we had a pump made from junk laying around and several pipe fittings and old bolts. It pumped night and day without using a drop of gas or a spark of electricity and I was elated because hauling water was now just a memory! We could hear the klunk, klunk, klunk once each second like a wind up clock if we listened real carefully from the back deck. The pump kept the big tank full and overflowing constantly and we could use as much water as we liked! It was like magic for us at the time. That pump ran for a year before we moved away and as far as I know it is still there working.
About the time the Y2K scare was in it’s height we decided it was time to move again. We were getting more animals, more children, wanting to be able to grow more food than our hillside garden would manage and the people were moving in around us as fast as we could keep track. It was a beautiful country and everyone wanted to come there for vacations and parties and to escape the city like we had 5 years before. Land values had skyrocketed and we knew there was hardly any way we could get more land without going deep into debt so Dad started looking to sell the place. Before we could hardly blink we were offered an enormous sum for our little 5 acre place with a half finished shop and no electricity. Someone wanted it as the perfect Y2K hideout and retreat. Dad had to think fast in order to find a place to move! After prayer he decided he was going to North Dakota. We all wondered if he had lost his mind, or at least most of us did. North Dakota was a dry flat desert with nothing but wheat fields right? Oh, except for the 100 below zero winters and 6 month long blizzards. He came out here and a few days later came home and said we were moving. He said there were mud holes called sloughs everywhere and lots of trees and better yet the land was $400 per acre so we could afford a decent place with a good house and he wouldn’t even have to go to work for a year or two! Packing was started and then we learned that we had to be out of the place in two days or else we had to start paying rent. The problem was there were two drivers (Mom and Dad) but three rigs and three trailers! The van and stock trailer, Dad’s truck and another huge trailer and my suburban and another trailer. The problem was I had never driven before except for up and down the driveway with the 1949 water truck and certainly not with a big old trailer on the back! Too bad, we had to go so I got a suburban load of kids, furniture and a 16 foot trailer and I followed Mom while Dad followed me. The first hour of the trip was White Pass which is a nasty narrow and steep mountain pass. We drove very slow! We had CB radios so we could talk and I was just barely 17 years old, which was certainly old enough to learn how to drive but it would have been nice to have someone to teach me how to shift the manual transmission and to back a trailer! We made it almost to Idaho that day which tells how slow we went, since we had such a caravan of trailers, animals and kids there was no way a motel would have allowed us anywhere near so we looked for a camping spot. Unfortunately, the only place we could find before it got too cark was right underneath a “NO CAMPING” sign so we camped there. We aren’t usually so blatant about disregarding laws but that time we had little choice. We cooked supper on my little camp stoves that went with me all over the mountains and slept wherever there was a good spot. I am glad it wasn’t raining!
The rest of the trip was one funny encounter after another. When we stopped at rest areas it was usually hilarious to watch the people pointing and taking pictures of us walking the cows, horses, watering the sheep and goats and turkeys, plus we had a pigeon that rode someone’s head all the time so that was a special attraction. We camped the whole way, all of 4 days and nights. Nobody but Dad had ever seen North Dakota so it was a surprise when we finally saw that at least the western side is not totally flat! And there are trees here and there! By the time we got to the place we were going to stay I was so tired of driving I would have rather not ever driven again. Within a couple of months we were in our new house. We had electricity, a phone and running water, real water pressure at the shower! Dishes were easy and we actually had an indoor bathroom that consisted of more than a sink and a washtub! I hadn’t had a real shower in years, actually from the time I was 13 until I was barely 17. The younger children had never had an indoor toilet and didn’t know what to think of it. I remember Rebekah must have been 10 or 11 years old and she about flipped when she saw a toaster. Or more accurately, when the toast popped up out of the toaster! The automatic dishwasher was another real stunning invention for the younger ones, “Grandma, all you have to do is put the dishes inside and shut the door and it washes them AND dries them all by itself!” Finally living with all of the “normal” things wasn’t entirely a nice thing. All of us would have and still are more than willing to go back to no electricity though nobody would appreciate giving up hot and cold running water!
We all learned so many important lessons living as we did and I value every day of it though not every day was as fun as I would have liked it to be. If I were to change anything I would eliminate the non stop rain that we endured, It was good in one way, that is that I was able to spend a good deal of time indoors reading because it was far too muddy and wet outside to do anything and since laundry was not very easy to do we had to stay as clean and dry as possible. I learned quite a few useful skills, though I haven’t used most of them in so long I think I have forgotten some. If I could go back I would do most of it all over again, though I know of quite a few things that would have made life easier that I would do now! For instance, I would build a ram pump the very first day and I would have traded the van for a 4x4 suburban or something like that so we could have gotten up and down the driveway in all weather without having to drag and push sled loads of things.
Someday I should fill in the details and add more depth to the account but for now I’m through with it.