Over half century ago, I grew up in southern Oregon or “God’s Country” as the locals preferred to call it. What they neglected to add was that God has a left to go along with his right hand.
The largest town in the area was and still is Medford, which in my youth had a population of about 20,000 with the principal industries being lumber and pears. While this sounds like a rustic Garden of Eden, it had a bit of a smog problem made nearly intolerable by frequent atmospheric temperature inversions. In those days, lumber mills had no way to get rid of sawdust, so it was burned in huge metal teepees misnamed wigwam burners. This coupled with the nasty process of burning old tires used to prevent the pear buds from freezing during the spring, produced witches brew fogs that put London’s pea soups to shame. Although winters were mild, they were dreary with misty rains, while summers were often miserably hot with daytime temperatures often exceeding 100 for two or three weeks at a time.
But even hell has its rewards. Less than an hour away are the southern Oregon Cascade Mountains. This is a truly stunning place, with mixed groves of old growth Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and western hemlock. Together these trees combine to shade an understory of ferns that can grow to your navel. It is an area of countless pristine high mountain lakes and creeks that are filled with rainbow trout that were catchable even with my adolescent angling skills. At lower elevations, numerous reservoirs contained warmer water pan fish like crappie and blue gill, which were easily caught in abundance using worm and bobber.
My dad and grandfather loved to fish, which often involved camping in an old army surplus canvas tent. I hated that tent. It was greasy, infested with earwigs, and smelled like a musk ox in rut. I hated sleeping on those terrible army cots or worse on the original air mattresses which bore almost no resemblance to the fancy inflate-a-beds of today. They had four rubberized longitudinal tubes which required an hour of blowing by mouth to achieve a lumpy firmness which leaked out overnight. Although the mattresses were uncomfortable, what I hated the most was the noise they made. My parents rolling over in their “sleep” sounded like a terminal emphysema ward. I also hated having to bathe in ice cold lakes then trying to warm up next to a fire that produced more smoke than heat. As a kid I could get away without daily baths. As I grew older, the first day without a bath left me with a pungent sweaty gym shorts odor. The next day I developed the stickies. followed the rash. The tent eventually disintegrated into a greasy blob which was then carelessly discarded into a rat- infested landfill, where I suspect it might have been seen and warped the mind of a young and impressionable Steven King.
After the curse of the tent ended, we seldom camped. Even after my father bought a small camp trailer, we still did not camp. This was because my father always dreamed of owning a farm or at least to be as self-sufficient in food as humanly possible. He reasoned that when the next great depression happened, we could live off the land while others less foresighted would starve or be forced to become bootleggers like great uncle Frank.
For years he had been looking to buy land so that he could have a few cows, pigs, chickens, and a garden. On the surface, my mother seemed to support him, yet there was always something wrong with the land deals he found. In truth, she did not want to be a farmer’s wife and somehow managed with subtle feminine guile to dissuade him. She was so good at this that, in retrospect, I am surprised that he ever was able to realize his dream. But after years of searching and now into his early forties, it was finally realized.
It was only 16 acres, which was not enough to support a family, so dad always had to have a steady job in town. But it was enough to raise all the beef, chickens, rabbits, and carrots that it took to survive in the harsh world of his youth. My sister was probably the main reason why mom relented, for if anyone was better at manipulation than mom, it was her. And Sandra like all young teenage girls of her generation wanted a horse. Somewhere in the musings of Sigmund Freud there is probably a sexual explanation for this female fascination with large powerful animals being ridden by girls with spurs on their high-topped leather boots. Regardless of the underlying reason, if Sandra wanted a horse, she was going to get it. She begged, pouted, cajoled, promising to keep it fed and groomed. I am sure she even convinced herself that she would keep those promises.
I, on the other hand, got a duck. Not that I wanted a duck. Nor to the best of my knowledge are there any male fantasies involving carnal knowledge of ducks or any species of waterfowl. I had actually wanted a goldfish. But the dime I was tossing at the carnival bounced out of the dish over the fishbowl and dropped into the one over the duckling cage. Seems like everyone at the carnival won a duck, even the kids that lived in town. That is something that probably does not happen much anymore unless you live in rural Laos. But in those days bringing home a duck from the carnival was pretty common. Most did not last a week. Mine lasted three. My sister’s collie killed it. The dog was something else she had begged to have on the farm after watching a Lassie movie. This was yet another thing which she had promised to care for and train, which of course she didn’t. I was devastated. Quacky, Donald, or Daffy or whatever name it had that week, was dead. I pleaded with my father that the crime deserved capital punishment, but my father refused. It might have been different if it had been a chicken or rabbit as dad was highly protective of our potential food resources. But Quacky-Donald-Daffy was not considered as food, being too “greezzy” as mom so aptly put it. But a week later, when Lassie killed about 30 baby chickens that were under a brood light, she was quickly “disappeared”. I don’t know the actual fate of the beast but suspect that she succumbed to the three “S”es (shoot, shovel, and shut up).
Over the years I had other more traditional farm animal pets, but I never got as attached to them as much as I did Quacky-Donald-Daffy. I knew that eventually they would all meet the same fate—-food. Sometimes that first bite or two was a little tough, but all my pets turned out to be mighty tasty. It may sound cruel, heartless, and a bit sadistic but such is the way with farmers, and it is not a bad way to live, with the exception that you can’t go anywhere. There were always cows to feed; eggs to collect and a garden to weed. In the summer we irrigated, cut hay, baled it and stacked it in the barn. Most of this work fell on my father and grandfather, who came to live with us. My father also had to maintain the farm equipment. We even had a hay baler. This was silly as only about eight acres were in hay, but he thought he got a good deal on it. The problem with the baler was powered by the old 45 horse Briggs and Stratton air-cooled engine. It had to be started by hand crank. This was easily accomplished when the engine as cold, but once it warmed up there was no way to restart it till it cooled. Dad never learned this lesson. As I walked up the long dirt driveway after getting off the school bus one early September afternoon, I could hear him trying to restart the beast after it gorged itself on too much hay. Crank, crank, crank, then silence for a bit, then crank, crank, crank again. Drawing closer I could feel his frustration. If I had known he was beginning to suffer from Chrohn’s disease I might have taken over for him or better yet suggested that he relax with a beer for an hour till it cooled off. Maybe he would still be alive today if he just learned to relax a bit as I believe that stress was a contributing factor to what ailed and eventually killed him. If I had been in his shoes, I would have taken a nice nap as well, or better yet just sold the farm and moved to town where there was far less work and food came pre-wrapped. But Dad was not that type, he continued to crank in total frustration and silence. When I was within 20 feet he looked up at me and spewed out a string of creative cuss words that hangs over Medford to this day as a light blue haze. It was such a shock to hear my dad curse so colorfully that I involuntarily snickered. That turned out to be a really bad idea.
The beginning of the end of his farming days was the result of milk cows. While one cow produced all the milk we needed, with two, then three, we produced more milk than we could use. This was converted to cream which my mother sold to a local creamery where it was made into butter or other high fat dairy products. Mom though that this was a great way to get a little extra spending money, especially since she, having never milked a cow, did not have to work for it. Sandra, being a girl, was not expected to do it either. And even if she was, she wouldn’t. I might have been able to help, but could never get my mind to accept the idea of sitting on a stool near the ass end of a living fertilizer factory. So my Dad milked them morning and night for two years. Then one day he had to work late at his real job of being a lift truck mechanic. He got home about 2AM to the sounds of three bawling cows wondering why the guy with the calloused hands did not show up that evening. Dad got to bed just before dawn. The next day they were all for sale at the local beef auction. A year or so later we were living in town. Took the ol’ boy about eight years to figure out that if he wanted to be a farmer, he was on his own. It also convinced me that I never, ever want to be a farmer.
Although Dad never totally gave up the dream, we only had a large garden after that. No chickens, pigs, cows or rabbits. It also meant that we could take up camping again. The trailer was eventually replaced by a pickup with a camper so that Dad could pull a small boat trailer behind that mobile bedroom. As much as possible I tried to avoid these trips. I still enjoyed fishing, but girls and partying in my parent’s house had much more appeal to me at the time. And if I did go, it was my job to clean the fish, another job that my mother worked at avoiding.
Time heals all wounds, and the same can be said of bad memories of childhood camping trips. In college, I worked summers for the forest service which rekindled my love of the southern Oregon Cascades. During those summers, I lived in rustic but comfortable cabins, complete with showers, flush toilets, heat, and beer.
In the spring of my senior year in college I married Judy, and Wes, much to my mother’s relief, was born ten months later. By the time Wes was two we were making a little more money and I even had some paid vacation time. I don’t know if Judy or I came up the idea of a camping trip vacation, but we both were excited to be in the mountains near Union Creek, OR, where I used to work. We bought a small tent, a couple of sleeping bags, borrowed a Coleman camp stove, and were off to enjoy the wilds. We didn’t last one night. The mosquitoes were horrible and Wes took the greatest joy in crawling backwards down a steep hill with the bottom hem of his shirt digging into the soft earth like the blade of a giant earth moving tractor. Even at that point we might have stayed if there was someplace to bathe him, but we only had the Rogue River, which is so cold at that elevation that hypothermia would have been almost instantaneous. We packed our newly purchased tent, stowed the sleeping bags and drove home in the dark vowing to never try camping again