Sign of the Season

Enough said:

Making Trees

When we first came here, we could not think of a farm without an orchard. Yet here we were on our newly acquired acreage, and though it had woods to please, fields for animals, and a fenced patch for the vegetables, it had no orchard of fruit trees. So one of our first purchases was a batch of fruit tree rootstocks. We went back to town and made cuttings from the trees on the place we were leaving. We went to the neighbors and begged sticks from their backyard apples, and Asian or European pears, and plums, and figs. We paced out the orchard space in the pasture, placed markers, and stuck our tiny trees into hollows in the ground. This looked like the most miniature orchard I had ever seen.

It’s been a while coming, but year by year we have seen fruiting, first of the Asian pears, then the European pears. We had a few apricots last year. The crab apples gave us a great cider season last fall. And this summer, at last, the Gravenstein apple has produced a crop.

The Gravenstein is the apple of my childhood. It is the strong, husky tree I climbed on the knoll at my grandparents’ house. It is the apple I picked off the sun-dried grass to eat, fragrant and wormy, in the long afternoons of August. Its sweet-tart flavor, its streaks of red on a field of gold, its short-stemmed hand-rounding perfection… this is the apple as it should be in poem and in life.

It seems I am not alone in my regard for the Gravenstein apple. It has a long history as a staple of the orchard, beginning, perhaps, in 1669 in Gråsten in South Jutland, Denmark. Though it is not a keeping apple, it is a fine pie apple, sauce apple, hand apple. Its short shelf life and its habit of ripening in a disorderly way, some today, some another day or week, make it unsuccessful as a market apple today. It was once a mainstay of apple commerce in North America, however, displaced in Sonoma only when grape culture turned a greater profit. It’s a treasure of the season, to be taken while the taking is in view.

Aside from the virtues of any particular apple, the making of trees from other trees is a magical undertaking. You get a small cutting from a branch and carry it away. In that cutting is the potential for another complete tree. Joined to the wood of an established rootstock, it will mature into an example of its parent, complete in every way. The handing on of plants through cuttings is an ancient practice, and one that still contains in its heart something mysterious and beyond understanding. Here the history of the fruit, and the spirit of another time come to us in the smells and flavors of a tree propagated through grafted cells. Here is a moment of connection to another era and another garden. This warm fruit in my hand, this Gravenstein apple: its bright juice fell onto another tongue one summer afternoon, in an orchard far from here, perhaps to a 50-something woman who smiled as the broken fruit sweetened her mouth, and she tossed the core to her ewes, hopeful at the fence.

Coming of Age

Today our smallest ram became a man. That is, he graduated from the soft protection of the harem to the Men’s Quarters. There comes a day, and this little fella might have been getting perilously close to it, when a manchild in the fold is a potential father of lambs. Sheep grow up fast, though at the moment I think Nils might object that he isn’t grown up yet, and who are these guys, and where is his mother?

We had only one ram lamb this year, which means he has no age mates to join him in his advance up the sheep social ladder. It makes it hard to work out lodging for him. He is so small right now, if I just chucked him into a ram pen, he’d find himself flung over the moon in seconds. The usual thing when introducing a new ram into a group is to pen them tightly together so they can work out their Napoleon stuff by shoving and mashing, but don’t have space to back off and make runs at each other. Then, once they’ve settled the matter of who is who, they can be allowed to spread out and relax. But Nils is only an April baby, and all the other boys are at least a year older. I feared that even in close quarters, he’d get creamed.

So I partitioned an end of pen space for him, to have a room of his own for a while. I tied Morgan, our stud ram, out in the grass below the construction site. He was in sheep heaven about that. We put Nils into his little camp to give him some time to worry about it all. His brother, the redoubtable Ninja Throwing Star, made an immediate lunge at the partition, set his head low, and stamped. Nils looked back in amazement. I brought Morgan in, and sat down off to the side to observe.

Talk about an anti-climax. When Morgan finally noticed there was someone new over there, he scarcely even raised his head to get the details. Apparently that little mite is too puny to rate even a casual inspection when there is serious burping to be done. I could have set Nils down right next to his father and he’d have been unharmed. Such is the confidence and wisdom of a mature male.

Here are the Men of The Shambles. Click to make them large in body as well as heart.

This is progress

Here you see my rustic, old spin shop just prior to its planned falling down. Regular readers might recognize the step where Yellowcat and I had our photos made reading Harry Potter a few weeks ago. If I weren’t outside making this picture, I might be inside, spinning. What a confusing thought. Philosophically it’s like the old Cream of Wheat box. I wish the trash bags weren’t in the photo, but this is construction stuff going on, and it’s a messy business.

And here you don’t see it:

Honest. When he took this photo, Richard was standing almost exactly where I was when I took the other one. Except, as it turns out, I was inside spinning this time.

But soon (the day is near now!) will rise a clean, strong, and well-lighted structure to replace the old:

You might think it hasn’t any character compared to the other. Just wait. Nothing around here remains pure for long.

Highland Chocolate

Oops. This is not what you want to see when you go out to the barn in the morning:

We had noticed there was no water in the house.

Let’s compare the virtues of country living with town life. In the country, when you have a big draw on the water system, the whole thing stops. You know pretty quickly that either the well has collapsed or the water is going someplace unintended. In town… we might not have known about this until we got a $600 water bill in the mail, and went out to see our water meter whizzing at light speed. In town, you call the water bureau to shut things off, and you call the plumber to come fix it. Or you mess around with it until you are wet and tired and then you call the plumber. Out here, you look for the diagram you made once of all the shut-offs, then you skip straight to the wet and tired, because you are going to fix it yourself.

In this case, it was only a broken nipple, and not too deep after all. But it wasn’t what we had intended to do with an afternoon. When it’s for a 42-cent part, that 1-hour drive to town and back seems long. I got 2 spares so we would never need to use them.

(It may look like I wasn’t helping, but I can’t be both the photographer and the plumber!)

Modern Times

Did you think it was only the Age of Electronics that brought us personal listening? Consider this modern farm woman at work. Click the picture to make it bigger.

From her hair and dress, I am putting her in the 1930s. While she drives the hay rake, she can enjoy the broadcast of Lux Radio Theatre (if the photo was made after October, 1934), for she is outfitted with a radio (the box mounted in front of her), earphones, and an elegant antenna.

This photo is accompanied by the type-written information:

MAKES HAY WHILE ETHER HUMS

When Mrs. Holt Ramsey, of Newark, N.J. volunteered to help rake in the [t]imothy while on her vacation, at a farm in Butler,, N.J., the farmer’s son fastened the home made radio receiver and loop to the rake so that this modern ‘Maud Muller’ could combine business and pleasure.

Photo shows Mrs. Ramsey “listening in” while at work.

(c) Western Elec. co. from Keystone View Co.) GM 40

Who was Maud Muller, you might ask? In the poem “Maud Muller,” John Greenleaf Whittier describes her so:

Maud Muller, on a summer’s day,
Raked the meadow sweet with hay…

Hayfoot, Strawfoot

Self-patterning yarns are such fun. I never have cared much for ordinary variegated yarn, but these… they are like cheating. Just keep knitting, and the pattern comes out. they don’t make perfect Fair Isle designs, but they make Fair Isle impressions. If it will never be noticed on a galloping horse, which my Great Uncle assured me it would not, then it will never be noticed on my own gallopers, either. I’m nearing the end of this first sock of a pair of late summer colored ones.

Think of honeybees, stubble in the field, hay in the bale, corn in the shuckin’s… all those colors of August.

These are knitted from my favorite toe-up sock pattern, written by Judy Gibson, and generously available online at: http://tiajudy.com/putmeon.htm The sock has a nice gusset, and a nice heel, and the advantage that it can be tried on during knitting. With this pattern I have never come out with a too-long sock foot, revealed only at the closing of the toe. Follow the links to the generic version, and you will be able to size the sock to any foot. Once you find the right chart for your gauge and size, you can do any kind of fancies you might want with the rest of the design.

I just read an article about blocking the finished knitting project, and it made mention of socks. Who blocks socks? I thought they were self-blocking once you put them on your feet. Who on earth blocks socks?

Remains of the Day

We have had a splendid Sunday! Sometimes serendipity leads you directly where you need to go.

To track back a bit, I’ve had some family business needing to be taken care of, that has been resting patiently beside the bedroom bureau for some time. It was a little promise yet unfilled. So this weekend I looked out the window at the gorgeous summer day, and I said to Richard, “Let’s drive up to Skamania and scatter Aggie.”

There was a little more involved in this than a couple of hours’ run up the Columbia Gorge. I had promised my mother’s cousin Aggie I would take her ashes back to Skamania, Washington where she grew up, simple enough. But she had wanted, in addition, to have them brought to the place where her brother Hugo lay, and I really did not know where Hugo Pedersen was. But I somehow thought there were not too many cemeteries to be considered, so off we went with a MapQuest printout to Stevenson, Washington, where the County cemetery is. It seemed the likeliest place to start. We had a back-up plan. In the event we could not find the markers, we thought we’d hike up Beacon Rock and let the Gorge wind carry Aggie away. This photo comes from the Beacon Rock State Park website. The rock is the core of a long-gone volcano. Floods in the ice age eroded the softer outer layers, and left the stone standing alone. A long crooked trail winds a route to the top. We packed a fine picnic lunch of roast pork and tomato sandwiches, kosher pickles, olives, dried plums, slices of watermelon, and chilled bottles of ginger ale, took our walking shoes, and set off.

We decided to drive up the Washington side of the river, so to go through the town of Skamania on our way to the cemetery. I remember visits to my great aunts and uncles there, when I was small, and I wanted to see if I could still spot Aunt Ella’s house on Duncan Creek, and Uncle George’s place on the hill. The Gorge is beautiful; it is justly protected from modern development. In fact, beautiful photos of the Gorge are a little trite around here. I didn’t even take any as we drove upstream.

We arrived at Skamania a little precipitously, because we were nearly past “Nielson Road” when I called out “There! Turn out there!” and Richard did so, much to the alarm of the car behind who found himself following closer than he should have been. “Nielson Rd.” is a misspelling of the road named for my Nielsen lineage, Danes who settled there all in a clump in the 1920s and ’30s. It’s a short road. Seems shorter now than it did when I was nine. As we turned around at its dead end to head back out, we spotted a hard-bitten woman coming out of her house to have a cigarette under her lawn umbrella. In command mode by now, I ordered a stop, hopped out, and walked across her clipped and dried grass to say hello. Here is where the serendipity starts. She was there, to be asked.

“H’ya,” she said.

“H’lo,” I replied. “Do you know which of these places was Ella and Gus Pedersen’s?”

She sucked on her cigarette and answered, “Nope. But we on’y been here since seventy-two.”

See, these houses are not what you would call fine estates. They are little places where people live away from town, tucked against the hillside, sheet plywood houses backing up to Duncan Creek. To have been there only 35 years is to be a newcomer still. “Ella would be gone since sixty-three,” I said. “She was my great-Aunt. I have her daughter’s ashes here, and I promised to bring them back this way.” I could see I instantly had some standing. I pressed it a little: “My name is Nielsen, too, like the road. My Uncle George’s place was up the hill by the school.”

“Hmm-mhm.” She said.

We visited just a little bit more, and then I asked if there wouldn’t be another cemetery around close by, than the County one in Stevenson. Just to be sure we were headed right.

“Well, y-hup. There would be the one in North Bonneville. If they lived here, I think they’d be in North Bonneville.”

I hadn’t thought of North Bonneville. North Bonneville is a tiny place (bigger than Skamania, though, maybe) which has an unusual physical history. When the Bonneville dam was remodeled in 1974, the town of North Bonneville was in the way of the new North Power House. So the Corp of Engineers moved it. They just picked up the whole town and moved it.

“Did they move the cemetery?” I asked, wondering at the possibility. “No, they never moved that. It’s right there. Acrost from the dam access, go under the railroad and then it’s just there. You’ll find it.”

And we did, too. As we pulled up across the road from the cemetery gate, I said, “Well, there aren’t that many of them. We can check them all out pretty quickly and then go on, to Stevenson.” But we didn’t need to. There, under the tall trees, we found Hugo sharing a marker with his wife Millie and, just a little way off to the west, Aunt Ella and Gus. Well, hurrah! Success was so unexpected, I was almost disappointed to find the quest completed already. We brought out the box of Aggie’s ashes (I suppose she should be properly addressed at such an occasion: Fanny Agnes Pedersen McCarty was her name), and shared them out between her brother and her parents. She hadn’t liked Gus much, so I thought mostly of Aunt Ella as I did it. Here is me, preparing to make good on my promise.

We felt satisfied with the result of the afternoon. It was like a treasure hunt completed, and while we were there, I recognized names and names on the cemetery stones from stories my mother had told me, of fishermen, housewives, crew cooks at the dam project, hunters in the hills, school chums, storekeepers, wild cattle in the woods, beer parlors and bootleggers. I sighed to see them, and thought it was good to remember people I had never known.

So much of the afternoon remained, we decided to cross the highway and have a look at the Bonneville Dam spillways. To our surprise, the access road was open to ordinary traffic, and the man at the guardhouse waved us in, suggesting we have a look at the visitors’ center. I had imagined the dam would be closed to visitors these days, with Homeland Security protecting it. We emptied our pockets of knives, sewing scissors and knitting needles, expecting to be scanned. No such thing. We strolled in and were pointed to the escalators up and down, one to the fish ladders and fish counting room, and the other to the generators. Here’s a view of the dam, showing the spillways on the south (Oregon) side, the entrance to the fish ladders in the center, and the North Power House to the left. And, of course, the huge transmission lines on the shore.

And here, a closer look at the fish ladder entrance:

Inside the ladders:

And the point of it all:

These are Steelhead (Oncorhynchus mykiss) passing through the counting window inside the dam. I suppose it could be argued that the steelhead are not the point of it all, since the reason for the fish ladders is to keep the fish out of the generators where they become fishcakes,

and this is the point of it all:

Our educational fieldtrip completed, we found ourselves ready for our dinner. Richard suggested, in a moment of fancy, that we continue on upriver to the Columbia Gorge Hotel in Hood River, and see how it looked for supper.

How it looked? My word. Set on the Oregon rim of the Gorge overlooking the river it is a spectacular memory of a gracious, bygone age. Built by Simon Benson in the 1920s, in a pre-Depression age of elegance, it leaves a person sighing for indulgence. This postcard view shows it in its original time,

and here it is today, scarcely affected by the change of era:

To walk in the gardens is to feel rich. To look through the waving glass panes of the dining room to the view of the river is to imagine yourself dressed in white lawn, languid, cared-for, deeply pocketed. The bellman defers. The waiting staff attends. The conversation of other couples is low. The menu is incomparably decadent: a starter of baked mission figs with Gorgonzola and fresh raspberries, an appetizer of shrimp with prosciutto and polenta, beet salad with mild, fresh goat cheeses, an intermezzo course of lemon sorbet in champagne, entrees of elk bedded in greens and baked yams with fresh blackberries, or scallops with asparagus and risotto, and a dessert of lemon cheesecake with raspberries, and dark, delicious coffee to follow, served in French presses. How did it seem, for dinner? Oh.

We returned home down the Oregon highway, tired and sated from our day of discovery and indulgence. Too weary to post last night to my blog. Too weary to do much other than dream.