Some experiences of living in the mountains. Part 1

My Grandmother has been pestering me for years to write about our experiences living in the mountains on the coast and about our move out to North Dakota. I always think about how uninteresting and commonplace it all is and how it would never interest anybody, but then not too long ago I got a book written by a great uncle about his growing up (and consequently about my great grandfather) and it was fascinating. Nothing particularly unusual for pioneers just coming over from Italy but to me it was precious information. I guess that no matter how ordinary and plain I may think some stories from my life are, someone down the road may think them worth reading so, I’ll write a few down and my Grandmother will enjoy them if nobody else will! A friend of mine has mentioned that he would be interested so maybe I’ll have more than one interested reader! Actually, it’s reading his story about their move that has finally inspired me to set down and write mine.
This is not an autobiography; I think a better way to describe it would be “letter format”. There is no way I am going to be able to tell everything that we did or that may have been interesting, this is just a real brief overview, touching the surface and giving readers an idea of how it was and of a few of the things I did. I don’t know where to start so I’ll just jump in at the beginning.

I was born in Tacoma, Washington and until I was 12 years old lived (and I thought I ruled) the 10 acre mini estate that my mother had grown up on. There were two houses, one was called the mansion by all of the neighborhood kids, and that one was rented out most of the time, never to anyone interesting to me. I remember there was a gigantic pink rose bush that grew up and then trailed down like a fountain right down to the ground and left enough room under the canes that I could carefully (so as not to be pricked by thorns) crawl under and have a very secret and sweet smelling hiding spot inside the rose bush. There was also a small formal rose garden that usually ended up getting neglected so I tried in a youthful way to keep it up and I think that was the beginning of my love of rose gardens. The other house was a smaller place but I didn’t like keeping the big house immaculate like it had to be so the small place was fine for me and I think Mom liked it better which was why we usually lived there and rented out the other, there was a small orchard in that yard and I remember putting a net over one cherry tree and climbing up inside to catch the birds that would get trapped in the net. There were lots of really big trees to climb and I climbed every single one of them to see if I could touch the top, these were all big Douglas fir trees so they were really tall and skinny at the top, I guess I didn’t think about falling out but I remember the neighbor guy scolding me several times for giving him near heart attacks when I was reaching over the top of a tree and clinging to branches the size of a pencil. The thing that he didn’t know was that I could see Mt. Rainer from up there and it was worth the risk! I had several bikes and wore out every one riding around the country doing whatever boys that age do, tree forts, tree swings, jails in the tops of trees for younger brothers, traps for anyone that dared to walk under one of “my” trees, and some of the best times were making “nests” in trees with branches. As you can see, the trees were my life, well, those and my bike. I also spent quite a bit of time digging “mines” that were long tunnels or trenches covered over with old boards and branches and then covered with dirt so as to be un noticed. I remember there was a little balcony out of my bedroom window at the big house so when we lived there for a while I would climb out the window, on to the balcony and down a huge tulip tree onto the patio. I thought this was the greatest way to escape! I had pet doves and pigeons that rode my head and shoulders while I rode my bike around or climbed trees and I usually had a half dozen or more baby chicks in various pockets of my coat which I took out from time to time to let run around. Did I ever mention that I was a really strange little boy? For a while I had a pet crow that rode the handlebars of my bike, that was his spot and the other birds had better not take it! We had a long paved driveway and I would ride my bike from one end to the other with my crow on the handlebars, a dove on my head and a book wedged in a little contraption I built for the handlebars so I could read and ride at the same time. I read a lot of books that way after school was out, and when school was supposed to be in session I would regularly disappear with a book to one of my secret mines or holes or sometimes to the top of a tree or under the house and read instead of doing school. I remember reading the entire Pilgrims Progress while crouched at a vent under the house for a tiny bit of light one day. My other occupation (besides birds, reading and trees) was singing, which I did non stop and very loud, especially from the tops of trees. Sometimes mom would come out and spank me because it was about the hundredth time she had told me to stop singing so loud. That was before my voice changed and I got too embarrassed to sing. Mom was a riding instructor for most of my growing up and we boarded horses for the students. If Mom wasn’t training a horse she was giving a riding lesson or cleaning the barn or working on the fences so horses were just part of my life.
I loved living there but things started getting worse and worse in the neighborhood. First we had to put up a fence, then I couldn’t go roaming about in the afternoons when the teenagers got out of school. Then I found a butcher knife in our field which really scared Mom. One night a policeman came to the door and talked to Dad, I guess some kids were shooting cars with paintball guns out on the road by our place and had hit the police car! They took off running through our yard and he was wondering if it wasn’t me! I had no clue what a paintball gun was at the time and was asleep anyway. Turns out the kids had run right through our electric fence and it scared them so much they dropped their guns in our horse pasture! That was a very “shocking” fence as I knew from experience. With time things got worse and worse, neighbors moved in, things happening that Mom and Dad talked about when we were not supposed to be listening, more sirens going by at night and we wanted more room! We moved to Oregon for 6 months and lived in a log cabin with no electricity on a farm and that was like heaven on earth for me, I had a mini bike by that time and I could ride it for as long as I wanted without seeing the same place twice as long as I could scrounge enough gas for it, I would often raid the medicine cabinet and use the rubbing alcohol in the gas tank, which worked with a few adjustments, other times the Coleman fuel for the lamps would end up in the gas tank and I was positive I could go much faster on that fuel! We were right in the middle of a big wheat farm and that was when I found out that I wanted to be a farmer when I grew up. There was a small creek running right through the yard so I spend a lot of time wading around in that, making dams and using old pipe to pretend irrigate my “fields”. While this was all going on a new house was built on the place in Washington and we moved into that when it was finished, unfortunately, while a new house helped with the growing family and lack of space problem it did nothing for the neighborhood, which by now was really bad, I had a ground floor bedroom and had to be very careful about closing the blinds every night because we had a peeping tom who looked in my window at nights. The $1,300 per month house payments didn’t allow Dad to stay home from work very much anymore either so Dad and Mom decided we were going to permanently move away from there. That made for a lot of really exciting land search trips which soon turned into terrible drudgery for all of the kids, me included! We piled into our van and drove all over the country, and I can’t remember how many nights we spent sleeping in the van all piled up here and there because there were no motels available where we happened to be. We all wanted room to roam again, plus room for our animals, which were increasing at a rapid rate, it had to be extremely rural and really cheap because the plan was to get completely out of debt. Unfortunately, real estate agents have a way of making a desert wasteland sound like heaven on earth so we made a lot of trips to look at “beautiful” pieces of land that ended up being a disaster area look alike.
After about a year of looking they found a place that looked good and decided now was the time to finally sell the house. That wasn’t too hard to do as houses in the area were selling for absurd prices and selling like mad! The house sold and the property we wanted sold too, just before we got it! The seller happened to have another piece nestled way back in a corner and up an impossible driveway which wouldn’t sell (for obvious reasons, it was impossible to get to it) We didn’t mind having a little privacy for once so Dad bought it. The day Dad went to pay for it I went with him to check out my new home. We tried to drive up the driveway but got stuck right at the bottom of the hill so we had to walk the rest of the way, which was exhausting even for me. The seller had a 4x4 pickup with really big and aggressive tires so he was able to make it up to the top where the house site was. The property was any 12 year old boy’s dream place, especially mine because there were lots of HUGE trees to climb! There were two creeks, a spring, sledding hills, cliffs to swing out over, a great big river at the bottom of the driveway for fishing and rafting, lakes to hike to and by far the best part was the millions and millions of acres of national forest and Wherehouser land that was free for exploring! I could walk 40 miles north, 15 miles east and about 60 west without seeing a road or human habitation, except for the rugged logging roads. There were more lakes, some that nobody could get to without walking for miles, rivers that were clean enough to drink from (I did all the time) huge old growth trees that were big enough to have a family picnic on the stump, which we did on the few that were cut down, and that’s a family with 6 kids! I couldn’t climb those because there was about 80 feet of no branches before you found a single foothold. There were huge hills to climb, some that had snow almost all summer on top, the woods were full of bears and cougars were all over the place, you could see bobcat tracks every morning if you looked for them and I did look!
Dad towed our big RV up to the property but even with two trucks there was no way we could get it up that driveway so we camped in it at the bottom of the driveway for a few days while Dad got the bulldozer guy out to level the spot for the house. For those first few days we used Dad’s little Volkswagen Rabbit diesel car to drive up the driveway to the house spot, it wouldn’t go up driving forward because the wheels would spin but if Dad went in reverse the weight would be distributed over the front drive wheels just enough that it would go up, spinning and sliding all the way! At first the gravel was loose and Mom and I would have to sit on the hood to add enough weight to give the car traction but as time went on Dad learned how to maneuver just right and the gravel settled enough that it would go up ok without the extra weight. Of course I thought all of this was heaven on earth, we parked the RV right next to the creek and that was our drinking water as well as what put us to sleep at night, I still miss the sound of creeks.
Finally, the bulldozer got there and that pulled the RV up the hill no problem. Dad was driving 90 miles over a mountain pass one way each day to get to work, and then of course the same 90 miles back at night so he wasn’t around much. While he was gone I put a lot of hours on the chainsaw cutting firewood, clearing brush and making trails. Exploring a little too! Mom kept me busy with the endless chores like filling the RV tank with water, we had to haul it up the hill in buckets from the creek and after one time of that I fixed my mini bike up with a platform to hold the bucket and as long as two of us pushed it would haul the bucket to the top. We also had to stake out the animals because we had no fences yet so that was a big chore that I disliked a lot. Since we hauled the water showers were out of the question which was fine with me at the time. Unfortunately Mom had other ideas and the creek served for a few times. Meanwhile, we had the bulldozer drag the cement trucks backward up the driveway so the cement wouldn’t spill out and got the foundation for the shop poured, the plan was to build a shop with living quarters upstairs and to build a real house at a later date when we could afford it without borrowing the money for it. The lumber truck came and again, we had to have it dragged up the hill like everything else. Laundry was hauled to town once a week and Mom and I had the wonderful job of dragging and pushing sled loads of laundry up the hill, which was 1/10th of a mile. It was usually raining so we were all perpetually wet, winter was becoming miserable, there was absolutely no let up in the mud being dragged into the house and all over everything imaginable. Even my good pair of shoes ended up being rubber boots because nobody could go outside without getting at least ankle deep in mud. I am glad it wasn’t quite as bad as North Dakota mud though, nothing is as bad as that!. I had my 13th birthday there and then Dad decided that the house would not even come close to being ready in time for the new baby coming so he rented a place in town 10 miles away and we stayed there until the baby was born. I guess that would have been Matthew. One night Dad got home a little early and went up to the property to get some things. There was snow on the ground so he had to walk up the hill to the house site. On the way back he noticed that there were cougar tracks in the snow following his incoming tracks so he turned around and attempted to follow them to see where the cougar had left off following him, about 5 steps away the tracks went into the outhouse but not back out! Dad almost flew back down to the car and the next day he bought a gun to carry around at the property from then on. He also told me that I had to get a gun if I wanted to hike very far out of the yard, which didn’t bother me any! Not too long after that I bought a gun that became almost my constant companion for several years. That thing has been up many trees, buried in several mudslides, fallen out of trees into mud puddles, been dropped down cliffs onto rocks, fallen into the creek a time or two and been carried on motorcycle, horse and in the back of old pickups bumping around old logging roads in the dust and mud. It still works as good as new though!
We moved back to the RV as soon as possible after Matthew was born. It was tough because Mom and I still had to drag and pull the laundry, propane bottles, groceries, babies, tools and everything else up and down that hill to the van, which seemed like an endless chore at the time for me. Dad was gone most of the time and when he got home he was tired and it was late so on weekends he tried to catch up on what needed to be done. He bought a 4x4 pickup and put tire chains on it so we could haul water from the creek and he even put a gas powered pump in the creek so we could fill the 55 gallon drum in the pickup without having to use buckets! We had a milk cow and there was no way all of the milk would fit in the RV refrigerator so every milking someone would carry the milk down to the creek, which did a good job of keeping it really cold.
About that time we finally met our nearest neighbor, who was a lot more of a mountain man that we were and he taught me how to trap beaver and bobcats, which kept me busy when I wasn’t hauling water or building fence for the animals. I managed to sneak a bit of time in here and there for taking off into the woods with my rifle and usually a pistol or two in my belt, with a big old backpack, several knives, binoculars, a camera, extra ammunition “just in case” and a big old military poncho covering everything to keep out the non stop rain. I think it rained every day that winter! Bear were all over the place, once in a while one or two would mess up the garbage but that is about all of the damage they ever did. Cougar tracks were all over too but we rarely saw any since they are great at keeping out of sight. We heard them once in a while though! They make a nasty scream.
Life went on that way for the winter and in the spring we finally were able to move out of the RV into the very unfinished house. Now I had a room of my own to store all of the treasures I was amassing, though I had no door, which distressed me a lot because getting dressed was no fun with a row of brothers and sisters peeking around the corner!
We still had no electricity and hauled water from the creek. For lights Dad rigged up a lawnmower engine and car alternator which charged an old forklift battery which in turn powered the lights which were just car taillight bulbs soldered into regular light bulb bases and used in regular light fixtures. Unfortunately, Dad would usually be gone for a week at a time so I had the job of keeping the lawnmower charger running; anyone who has tried to keep a completely worn out Briggs and Stratton engine running knows how frustrating that can be. Usually we had no lights and relied on kerosene lamps which were so reliable it was easy. I still like kerosene lamps. Mom had both a propane stove and a wood stove for cooking and we had a cell phone that used up most of the battery when we had power to charge it with. Mom and I built an awful little barn and we both took turns milking the cow with the rain running down our backs and into our faces every day. I remember the daily chore for whoever was caught not at least acting busy was shaking the cream into butter in a jar. It rained all winter and all summer it seemed. Of course that made the creek grow until it washed a 6 foot deep channel across our driveway and we were stuck at home until Mom got desperate enough and we all hopped into the pickup and she literally launched that thing through the bushes and across the creek upstream from the washed out road! It is amazing what a 4x4 pickup will do with a desperate woman at the wheel!
Here is where I should divide this into two postings because it’s getting really long. Part two will be available shortly.