Thanksgiving Then and Now

Tim, my Grandfather Dear, and my Aunt Ann
on Thanksgiving Day, 1953, which also happened
to be my first birthday anniversary.

My memory of Thanksgivings in Camas or Portland* from the 1950s through the 1970s is imperfect, as is it about those in Kentucky and North Carolina up until about 10 years ago because I tend to not be able to distinguish between holiday gatherings and other big dinners with friends and extended family.  They run together. But I’ll do my best to recount a classic Thanksgiving feast at my Grandmother Dear’s in Camas as a child and teenager, and a couple particularly memorable Thanksgivings during my adult years.

The classic.  Imagine this at the lovely little brick house on the right overlooking LaCamas Lake, the house above Leadbetter Road just as you turn off State Highway 500 north of Camas: The men, say, an uncle, my dad, and Tim (Grandfather Dear—we never called him that) and us boys sitting on the couch and cushy chairs on the western end of the front room (it was one space that contained both the living area and the formal dining table) while the women are preparing the meal and setting the table.  This is how it was and nobody imagined that the men would help in the kitchen, and it never occurred to the women that there was anything wrong with the arrangement.  They were happy to serve and to impress us with their culinary prowess. The adult men being the primary “breadwinners” and us to follow someday in their footsteps, our sole job was to come to the table promptly when called, which was hard enough as I recall, because it usually took several insistent attempts to convince us to end the flow of conversation and move ourselves.

Tim sat at the end of the table with his back to the windows, he probably carved the turkey, and Grandma Dear sat on the opposite end to be nearest the kitchen.  We never said grace or a prayer or blessing.  I think when all the dishes were in place on the table and after Grandma seated herself, probably as the last person, she likely gave a signal to begin.  We began.  The only controversial topic discussed at the table was whether to pass to the right or left.  The only other topic was food.  There was a lot to say about food, apparently, because Grandma Dear was the most amazing cook you’d ever meet.  Whenever the conversation threatened to flag, she’d insult her work, knowing that somebody would chime in to compliment her and the masterpieces.

Her name was Blanche, but this was not French cooking.  The turkey, steaming and tender and browned to perfection. Mashed, whipped potatoes loaded with milk, and if my Aunt Ann were there, laced with garlic. (But maybe I’m thinking of roast beef with garlic.)  Gravy, thick, but not too thick, and salty.  You’d make a crater in your potatoes, and pour the gravy over it, the turkey, and the sage dressing that actually was cooked inside the turkey.  Seems like there was a vegetable like string beans. Then of course cranberry dressing, both the delicious sweet jelly kind from a can and the homemade of ground cranberries, orange peal, and other sour unpalatable things that adults crave.  Don’t forget some kind of biscuits or rolls, scratch made. Jam. Naturally, the conversation became lively—to an extent even threatening to overturn the table—when the highly divisive issue of dark or white meat arose.

As you know, cranberries are grown in bogs and harvested by means of rakes.  What you don’t know is that some of them grow tall and are called High Bush Cranberries.  Our daughter in Alaska delights in eating them in the winter, fresh picked frozen solid right off the bush. They’re sour. Years ago the wife of a Methodist pastor I knew in the Camas area drank cranberry juice to ward off bladder infections. I bet you weren’t expecting me to tell you this.

Lastly at that classic meal: dessert and coffee, the latter in tiny cups on saucers. You’d likely have three choices for dessert: pumpkin pie, apple pie with flaky Crisco crust, or my favorite: both of them.  Whipped cream sweetened with sugar for the pumpkin pie, vanilla ice cream for the apple pie, and half-and half-for the coffee.

After dinner, the men would retire to their well-earned chairs to tell biographical stories while the women put the leftovers away and washed dishes.  It’s possible, just possible, that one of the men would help with the dishes, but as far as reality is concerned, this idea is merely theoretical.  I know for a fact that we boys helped put the leftover pie away; it in glass pans was kept untended and neglected on the kitchen counter and any time you liked you could slice a piece and eat it out of your hand.

The featured photograph is of Tim carving a turkey with my aunt Ann looking on. This photo came from a roll of film that contains pictures of my Great-grandparents, the Toners, at their family home in Central Oregon and of me there as a one-year-old child.  So, I’m pretty sure the turkey carving scene is located at the Toner’s place.  I downloaded the photo from my brother's archive and zoomed in. The goblets are filled with milk. My aunt is eating a piece of cake, which she shouldn’t have because she had had Type One diabetes from birth. She passed away at age 34.  I’m sad right now just thinking about her. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a special no-sugar dessert for her.) And right next to her is a napkin with the image of a round cake on it, and on top of the cake is stuck ONE candle.  So, the cake is my birthday cake!  And the day was also Thanksgiving Day!  When I checked online for a calendar to confirm this, I found an article about President Eisenhower’s National Thanksgiving Proclamation for 1953. One thing he wrote was:

“Especially are we grateful this year for the truce in battle-weary Korea, which gives to anxious men and women throughout the world the hope that there may be an enduring peace…”

My dad was in Korea then. I posted a link to Eisenhower’s proclamation here.

My brother sent me another old family photo of one of my granduncles, Vick, wearing an apron and selecting kitchen utensils from a drawer. In the background is a turkey in a pan. I can’t tell you anything more about the photo without digging around. Regardless, the photo is proof our men did wear aprons on some occasions.

The dinnerware shown in the photo on the left below is an heirloom set from my side of the family, but I’m not sure now who it belonged to.  I always thought it had been a wedding present to my grandparents, the Dears, but certain expert sources on the internet, that infallible authority, sources like sellers on Etsy, suggest that it was made in the earliest 1950s, which means it could have been a wedding present to my parents!  We never used this set.  Nobody ever used it, perhaps.  The labels on each piece identify them as “Franciscan Fine China, Acadian Gold, Made in California.” There’s so much of this stuff for sale “As New” everywhere, I don’t think anyone anywhere ever used it—it’s too delicate.  What we ate from at my Grandma Dear’s fancy meals was pure white china, called “Cloud Nine Franciscan Whitestone Ware” made in Japan by “Gladding McBean & Co.” We have that set stored safe in boxes.  Some of what has survived over the years is chipped from loving use. I’ve included a photo of three intact pieces on the right below.

Members of our family on Tim’s side played a historical role in the turkey business.  His brother served as Secretary of the Oregon Turkey Improvement Association. You can thank us for the Butterball. My grandparents the Dears had good friends who were turkey farmers. The Schmidts.  I think I have a memory of them carrying about their persons the acrid smell of turkey manure. We visited their house once. Every flat surface, including 90% of the floor was piled with stuff.  There were pathways down the center of each room. It was fascinating. I used the Schmidt’s house as a model for the house of the main character of my short story, “Ms. Thurman’s Intervention”, she, a hoarder who, it seemed, “studied the angles of repose.”  You might enjoy the story.  Plot twists and a surprise ending. The story is on this blog somewhere.

From that classic Thanksgiving dinner in Camas I jump ahead to another more contemporary classic at my wife Edie’s family home on the mountainside 180 acres above Black Mountain, North Carolina, in the windowed dining room of a log house her grandfather built in the 1930s.  I’ll only mention one thing here, something absent in our Camas holidays: a sung blessing.  Maybe a dozen adults in the room plus a number of children at side tables.  Most of us were comfortable and practiced at singing.  Edie’s mom was Episcopalian with a bishop in her ancestry and a son-in-law bishop-to-be, so the group was highly influenced by “high church” culture. We sang a complicated three part round, or canon, of “hallelujah” by the 18th Century English composer, William Boyce.  The room resounded acoustically with the echoing, natural overtones and built-in musical chords and overlapping melody. No professional choir sounded better.

I’ve posted a link here to a YouTube video of the canon reproduced by an electronic simulation of human voices.  The reason for this odd idea is because I don’t like any of the human performances I’ve found on the internet.  Most of them feature an arrangement adding instruments and placing the last note of Part A an octave up, presumably for children’s voices.  I prefer the original version that lets the basses rumble.

Moving on. One year when all our adult children were home we moved the dining table outside onto our 500 square foot deck and bundled up against the cold.  Another year when all of our children but one were occupied elsewhere, we, three of us, stuffed our fulsome, traditional Thanksgiving dinner with the trimmings into backpacks and carried it all up to a high mountaintop bald, and then finished the day with an exhausting long hike along a ridge and down a steep trail deep with a layers of slippery leaves until well after dark.  Most of the time at the end, I either scooted on my backside or swung from rhododendron trunk to trunk beside the trail. As that daughter says, there are two kinds of fun.  Type One fun is fun while it’s happening and fun in memory.  Type Two is terrifying, painful, or grueling, and fun only in memory.  The dinner was One, but the second half of the hike, Two. (There's another kind of fun, Type Three, and that's when the natural world around you has gone wild with wind and rain, you fear the roof might blow off, trees are falling everywhere, you suddenly live on riverfront property, the long-distance views are much improved, the power is out, and all the roads are blocked. It's fun while it's happening but not so much in memory.)

Now I jump ahead to this present week of 2024 when we actually have no plans for Thanksgiving.  Nothing firm whatsoever.  One child is in Vietnam or Thailand doing a visa renewal, and another lives in Alaska, but is visiting friends in Texas. A third will be in the Caribbean. One lives up east. The other two children will be someplace else and Edie and I are on our own.  Admittedly, I feel a little abandoned, but I’m not sad. We will be thankful and enjoy the day one way or another.  I’m not bad at improvising and who knows what will happen?  And there will be other family gatherings in the future.  At least half of the children have recently mentioned their interest in buying property next to us individually or severally.  I don’t want the criminal internet world to know, so I will delete this following information soon, but my birthday is sometime around Thanksgiving and we expect a family party here.  My official Facebook birthday, by-the-way, is January 1, 1900.

We will have a nice meal on Thanksgiving, just the two of us, and then maybe we’ll hike up into the tornado zone through and around the hundreds of downed and broken hardwood trees to the ridge above our house, and then if possible make our way up to the Blue Ridge Parkway that has been closed since Hurricane Helene, due in part to the road having been obliterated in some sections.  I love the natural universe, especially wilderness—the wild places of the world where humans may visit but can not live for very long.  With Helene, wilderness came to us, to just outside the doors, windows, and walls.  So, despite all the destruction and the continuous work of cleaning up and restoring order to our home place, I have to be thankful, and I am. We witnessed up close an amazing natural event.  As I write this just after 5:00 in the morning, it’s dark and rainy outside.

Last Sunday we listened to some ancient Russian Orthodox chant that was notated in the 1400 and 1500s. Much of it was different musical settings of Psalm 135. I quote one small section.

“Praise the Lord…

“The Lord does whatever pleases him,

In the heavens and on the earth,

In the seas and all their depths.

He makes clouds rise from the ends of the earth;

He sends lighting with the rain

And brings out the wind from his storehouses.”

So, that’s Thanksgiving then and now.

*My Hunt grandparents lived in Portland.

The gravy boat above is from the Acadia set
and the three pieces to the right (or below) are from the 
Cloud Nine set, the one Grandma Dear
used at all of her company meals.  It's nice
that pieces from both of these may be purchased 
though they were made decades ago.

Koselig Then and Now

Photo: A scene in my mom's hutch.

Edie and I rented a $50 a night AirBnb “suite” in Palmer, Alaska for two weeks last summer as part of our month up there.  As you might imagine $50 a night doesn’t buy you much in the way of space, privacy, cleanliness, and interior climate control.  But it was a big step up from our usual practice of camping, and even was less expensive than many camping places we’ve been to over the years.  Even better than the comfort and convenience upgrade was the unobstructed million-dollar-a-day view of the mountains to the east.  When we tired of staring out the windows in the evenings, we watched summer Olympics events on TV.  One evening one of the commentators was talking about the competitors from Norway and made passing reference to how Norwegians were as he said, “the happiest people in the world because of their practice of koselig.”

Being in Alaska at the time, another far north latitude, I had to know what was koselig.

(The interweb says “KOS-e-lee” with a long round O, and a fast long E.)

Everything I read about it so far says it’s almost impossible to translate, at least not with one word.  It has to do with how to thrive psychologically and emotionally when the winter weather outside is cold and harsh and the nights long, very, very long.  It relates to enjoying the outdoors and then taking refuge with good company, food and drink, warmth and beautiful cheerful surroundings. This description is only for a start, I’m sure there’s more.  If you want to read a fun article, I’ve linked in the comments to one by Lorelou Desjardins in a promotion of her book “A Frog in the Fiord: One Year in Norway.”

Forgotten Camas Washougal as a title fits part of the process of writing this weekly column because I spent a few hours last night trying to remember, or unforget, when and how I experienced koselig while growing up in Camas.  Our winter nights were not as long and cold as they are in Alaska, but they are long and can be cold.  Wherever I’ve traveled in the US, people always would say, “Doesn’t it always rain in Seattle?”

Cloudy.  It didn’t always rain in the NW, as such, but it would be cloudy with mist falling down all day and night long. July and August were often dry, but the cold came in October and then it seemed it would “rain” November through June.  I remember one fall in the early 70s when it rained every day in November, except the last three or four.  A friend of mine from Hawaii was depressed all the time because of the weather.  For me it was normal.

Bleak.  Yes.  Camas, and Washougal too, I suppose, was bleak, as I remember, for four months of the year.  The cold wasn’t the nice, clean, sharp cold that you can protect yourself from with wind breaking and insulating layers, it was the insidious damp cold that penetrated whatever you might wear.   It sucked the heat from your body. Then, working the swing shift at the mill was bleak.  You leave for work just before everyone else in the world is arriving home.  You work when it is dark outside and you arrive home when everyone else is sleeping. By the time you arise in the morning, everyone else has left the house on their merry ways.  And the graveyard shift was even worse. It’s called graveyard for a reason.

I think that instances of koselig in my life in those days were not rare, but they weren’t common either.

When we were children and visiting grandparents, our grandmothers would tuck us in bed every night and we’d say that prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

The prayer was always comforting back then, and it might be now, too, because I'm older. As I look back it might have fostered in us children an unreasonable fear of dying in the night. I confess I don’t know why this would have been a concern of our grandparents and I’d like to know.  As active and adventurous as we were, I wonder why she didn’t have us pray in the morning when we woke up that the Lord would take our souls if we died during the play or school day when the danger of a car accident, falling from a tree, drowning in the river, or dropping dead from embarrassment was much greater than, say rolling off the top bunk that had a safety rail or a meteor hitting the house. But I risk being unserious. It was comforting at the time.

Friday night high school football games were koselig.  It was dark and cold.  Everyone breathed out clouds of steam.  Cheerleaders and cheers. Excitement.  The ad hoc tag football game in the end zone.  Bright lights.  And home games usually followed by a dance in the cafeteria.  One night returning from an away game on the rooter bus, I didn’t really know anyone. I had gone by myself. The kids were not in my extremely limited social circle.  They were in fact the cool, sociable kids.  I was a loner back then, basically, because I was unaware of my value as a person and had no skills at conversation, and not a lot of social courage or confidence.  I’d never been to a summer camp of any kind, nor was in a church youth group.  But that night probably for the first time I experienced a feeling of being part of a group other than family.  They sang camp songs. One or several of the kids, girls, I think, led in singing, and I sang along, the best I could not knowing them.  I’d never been a part of anything like that.  Traveling home in a bus on a cold fall night with a bunch of young people singing cheerful and inspiring songs.  It sounds like a poignant scene from a movie.  Koselig.

I can cite a lot of examples of long solo walks at night or on a cold winter day around Camas and Fern Prairie and returning to a warm comfortable, bright house.  I’ve written here earlier of a Christmas eve at my grandmother’s and later, an evening in high school where I lit a fire in the fireplace at the abandoned Leadbetter mansion with two friend-girls and we shared from a bottle of wine.  There are countless tiny examples, but it was never a conscious practice, and I think life would have been richer back then knowing how important it to cultivate a culture of koselig, which in raising a family we did so every day without being aware of the concept.

One story that encapsulates our approach.  In the summer of 2002 we travelled with our six children across the United States and into Canada in a new, green Ford E-350 12 passenger van pulling a small grey cargo trailer.  During our trip we spent a week or so in the North Cascades in Washington State.  The youngest child was seven years old, so we didn’t do anything extreme as per an adult level, though everyday we did something maybe considered dangerous when children were concerned.  We camped low near a stream and drove up to the end of the road every day, with a view of Mt. Shuksan.  To our surprise, early August was not yet hiking season in the North Cascades, so the high trails were still deep in snow, which made route finding hard.  With so much snow, it’s almost impossible to tell how steep a slope is below you, so we made ice axes for all the children from crooks of seasoned tree branches, and then we practiced self arresting on a safe slope.  Just in case, you know.  We didn’t have ropes.  One tricky part was crossing a stream because you couldn’t tell how strong the snow bridge was over it. Often we had to climb down a bank, step across the stream and then climb back up the other side. Anyway, we decided to spend a night up on Goat Mountain, a 6,000 and some feet high peak.  We hiked up several hours and picked a camping spot in the middle of a thick clump of low conifers, probably spruce.  Anyone passing by would not have seen us tucked in there.  We pitched a tarp and spread our eight sleep bags underneath, barely underneath.  It snowed all night long, a wet snow that slid off the tarp. Here’s the koselig part:  I read out loud to the children from the Hobbit, by J.R. Tolkien.

The next morning we found that the mountain just a few yards above us covered in fresh unmelted snow, below the line the new snow had melted.  It was unbelievably beautiful, with the pure white and rocky Shuksan prominent and close by to the east.  That day we hiked up to the top of Goat Mountain, we thought, but which we realized was not the true summit.  We eventually made our way across lush untrammeled tundra along a ridge to the base of the true summit, another few hundred feet above us, and I decided it was too dangerous and too late in the day to try to go up there.  Recently one of my adult children told me he still regrets we didn’t go for it.  I don’t think he quite remembers the four hour hike back to our van, the drive back to base camp, and how our 10 x 12 canvas wall tent had collapsed the night before under the weight of the rain and snow, breaking and bending some of the aluminum poles.  Edie scrambled in the dark to make dry beds for the younger children in the van. We ran the engine to get it warm, then she made hot chocolate, while I scrambled like a maniac to sweep the water out of the tent and set it back up.  I think one of the older children built a campfire. We made up dry beds in the tent the best we could and everything was perfect.  I don’t know if I ever enjoyed a bed more. Koselig.

Once we travelled the northern section of the Bartram Trail. William Bartram was a late 18^th Century naturalist who explored much of the Southeast US. Nine miles of the Little Tennessee River forms part of the trail and we did this by canoe into Franklin, North Carolina and from there walked over hill and dale to join the Appalachian Trail on the top of Cheoah Bald, from which we descended into Wesser along the Nantahala River.  Anyway.  On one of these days, thunder followed us for hours until the rain caught up and poured.  We trudged along under umbrellas and ponchos until it was time to set up camp. Of course we were damp, especially boots and feet.  I always liked to camp well off the trail so that we couldn’t be seen and I’d search the topo map for flat places for tents and tarps.  One of my sons who was and is especially skilled in woodscraft took on the task of lighting a fire, not an easy feat when the all the world is soaking wet. But he found a small dead tree, pushed it over, and scooped out the dry punky wood inside and used it for firestarter.  The rain had let up and we sat around the cheery campfire, our bare wrinkled prune-feet toward the center, while we tried to dry our socks and boots a little.

When I talk about moving to Alaska most people of the Lower 48 say, “But what about the everlasting nights?”  My daughter, who lives there now, and who overwintered there once so far, says, that most year-round residents enjoy winter sports and get outside as much as they can.  Ice skating, cross country skiing, mushing, and just hiking. The hardest time of year is what she calls “mud season” when it begins to thaw and all the trails are impassible, not frozen and not dry. Some people keep sun lanterns in their living quarters to simulate an earlier sunrise and later sunset.  Until I mentioned it, she had never heard of koselig, but she said that the winter people employ it in various ways, such as being sure to go to a weekly potluck with friends.  Some of our ancestors are Swedish, so we must have some of this winter survival blood in our genes.  I’d like to take a vacation in Alaska in the dead of winter or maybe Iceland, which is nearer to us, and see the Aurora Borealis.

One of my sons hiked 300 miles last summer on Norway’s system of trails.  If you’d like to see fantastic videos of his similar treks in Scotland and the Alaska Brooks Range, I’ll post a link to his YouTube channel.

When Hurricane Helene blew through a month and a half ago we were without on-grid electricity for two weeks and longer.  After we got an inverter generator we ran it mostly to keep the fridge and freezer cold, but every night I ran an extension cord to one single table lamp in our main room. Later after bedtime, I kept three of those battery powered flickering votive candles burning all night in the bedroom, and several more throughout the main room in the house, for navigation in the dark.

Now that I know about koselig, I’ll be looking for ways to practice it more and more, and not only in winter.  Seems like it would made a good subject for school or a club.  Like, you know, Feng Shui, Ikebana, or even Jiu Jitsu.

***

 

PS:  Below is the concept of a short story I started writing.

Working title: “The Long Night Awaits”.

A sleep therapist who began studying the subject because of his own insomnia has a successful career and helps hundreds of patients. But there one patient, his most difficult, who had what’s called Endless Night Disorder (END). It’s a belief and sensation that those hours awake in the middle of the night in the dark last forever, or at least as long as a year.  

The therapist asks the patient to begin a journal giving an account of his insomniac periods, which as it turns out is usually between 1 and 6 AM.  The patient tells of how he often goes outside and walks in the dark for days and even weeks.  How the moon seems to never move and people out and about are like frozen statues cool to the touch.  As an experiment he touched a girl on the cheek with the back of his hand and it gave her a blister.  Only the nocturnal animals move and carry on like normal, which the patient finds terrifying.

An odd thing is that the patient says he sleeps during these endless nights, but when he awakes, it is still night and the clock has barely registered any passage of time. This supposed sleep explains how the patient is not seriously debilitated by his insomnia, the main problem is he is so alone.

So, treatment ensues and it emerges that patient was traumatized as a child by realistic nightmares of Norse monsters when he and his family lived in northern Norway for several years over the long winters. Nightmares brought by being tormented by his older brothers. Well, the therapist has some ideas of how to proceed, but the patient insists that the endless nights are real and he has proof. The fact that he has written a lot of novels during the endless nights and can produce several complete ones in a single night. These are successful novels under a dozen pseudonyms, the patient claims, some that are household names that the therapist recognizes.

 The therapist is sympathetic and professional in his quite natural skepticism until one session when patient brings in a box of unpublished manuscripts—one box of dozens, the patient says—which the therapist finds immensely disconcerting. Most are handwritten and edited, and a few typed.  He wonders if the patient had much deeper problems than insomnia or loneliness that he would create and even believe such an elaborate hoax.  On the other hand, what if the patient is actually telling the truth?  He begins reading one of the manuscripts, a comic fictional travel guide, and it’s actually well done, perhaps even publishable. The therapist does not consider himself an expert and thinks of sending it around to some of his colleagues who are more literary than his is.

But the therapist doesn’t get far into the book, because during this time he's distracted when he wins an international award not just in his own specialized field but in the world of psychotherapy. A huge cash prize. The therapist is so humble, and devoted to work (he isn’t married or have any children) he doesn’t have any idea what to do with the money and feels such a failure because he hasn’t yet helped the one special patient. The patient then suggests that the therapist go to Norway and do some research into the folk legends—that maybe he can learn something there, but says in urgent emotional terms that it should be above the Arctic Circle in the summer when the sun doesn’t set. The therapist goes along with the idea, takes off an entire summer and has an amazing time, during which he develops a theory of compensatory healing and is eager to begin testing it when he arrives home.  During this time he meets a lovely young widow who has two children.

CH is an idea that people who have suffered traumatizing loss or abuse can find healing through overwhelming opposite experiences and life situations to neutralize and counteract the damaging effects of the injury.  For instance—and this is relatively trivial example—if an ill tempered neighbor is hateful and curses out a patient because of an irrational grudge, the anger and self-doubt that the patient feels and keeps him awake at night can be made to disappear if another neighbor or two, or a whole team of neighbors, comes over and helps the patient with some chores or throws him a birthday party. (Note, I don’t know if CH is a real recognized therapy because I made it up. I made up END, too.)

When the therapist returns from Norway and gets back to work, the patient does not resume the scheduled sessions. He never answers the phone. There's not even provision for voice messages. Never responds to mail. The therapist is about to begin a deeper search even to the extent of notifying law enforcement about a possible missing person.

At that time the therapist’s off-site secretary of the kind that works from home, calls him and says she has received a registered letter from a bank. He says to open it. And it’s an accounting of tax-paid millions of dollars in publishing royalties from multiple companies that are held in his name, and always have been.  When the therapist receives the bank’s detail listing of account activity by email attachment, he finds among the many charitable contributions, one large sum from late last year donated to the professional psychiatric society that gave him the award, the money he used for his Norway trip. 

Epilogue: over the next couple years the therapist makes inquiries into the whereabouts of the patient, but he finds no one who ever actually saw him.  It’s if he never existed.  So, in honor of the patient and his generosity, the therapist always takes a month off once a year and with his new wife explores a place in the world when the sun never sets.

Firewood Then and Now

Our woodshed ready for new green wood from Storm Helene

We moved from Oak Park to Fern Prairie in Camas, Washington in the summer of 1967, and the new house—the first and only house Dad and Mom ever bought—had a brick fireplace with a steel firebox around it and vents that allowed air to passively circulate through a chamber and add to the radiant heat.  One of our chores was to split firewood and bring it from the woodshed into the house in the wheelbarrow.

Though my parents’ seven acres, which was surrounded on two sides by the Fern Prairie Airport, had trees—mostly Douglas Fir and one lonely oak—I don’t recall it ever being a source of firewood.  As my uncle worked for the US Forest Service, we had good information and we sometimes collected firewood from windfalls and the rejected logs after logging operations.  One memory is of sawing up and loading rounds from a Western Red Cedar, which made the perfect kindling.  With its straight grain and other characteristics it would pop open and split seemingly at the mere touch of the ax. And then the aromatic smell that would fill a room!  Our only hardwood to burn in those days was alder, and my dad always thought it was special, because he never lived near hardwood forests where we have abundant oak, hickory, locust and all the rest.

One firewood memory is slicing up Presto-logs outside for my great-grandmother’s Monarch trash burner that she kept in her kitchen in Washougal.  My dad did the work and I might have picked up the pieces and put them in a box. Or I might not have.  I don’t remember, but I was there.  I say “slicing” because the “logs” were like sausages and one little hit with a hatchet was all they needed.  I have that same trash burner in my possession now.  I bought it from the estate for $35 when I was in my early 20s and brought it to North Carolina years later.  Someday I’d like to install it in a little cabin we have.

My grandparents the Dears owned the beautiful little red brick house that once stood on three acres at the top of Leadbetter Road.  Their primary heat source was the wood furnace in the basement.  The heated air, pushed by a fan, circulated through ducts and warmed every room, so much that it was usually far too hot for me as a child.  I think my grandparents bought firewood that was delivered and dumped it on the driveway next to the house.  It was a family project to toss the wood onto a wooden chute that funneled the pieces though a small window.  Probably what helps me remember this so well is one time I got hit in the head with a chunk of wood.  The basement was always fragrant with the pine, and probably the fungus and mold as well.  A smell that brings back fond memories.

Another NW firewood story:  Dave and Bonnie Deal are Raku potters.  You may have heard of them, and if not, I’m posting a link to get you started.  I visited Dave many years ago up on Livingston Mountain where they lived and owned property.  I’m not in touch with them much anymore, but back then Dave fired his work only with wood he himself cut by hand (sans chainsaw).  I remember seeing his massive kiln in the woods at night, orange-red lines of fire glowing through the gaps in the brick.  It took 24 hours for a firing and Dave would sit up awake all night and the rest of the time attending the kiln and feeding in more wood.

In the 1980’s a couple years after I got married, we moved to Western North Carolina where I took a teaching job in a small rural school.  The rental house—more a cabin—was near a lake, and had a low ceiling, like, seven feet high, and it had no heat source other than a fireplace.  So, we needed a wood store.  I wanted a Fisher Baby Bear, found one in Kentucky, brought it home in the little 1966 Datsun pickup that had been my grandfather’s, and installed it and stove piping that we ran up through the chimney. Bought a chainsaw. One time we got a permit and cut a load of firewood in National Forest.  Upon driving out, we found a locked chain blocking our way.  It had been open of course when we entered.  It was getting dark and I proceeded to dig out one of the posts and had freed the concrete anchor, but I couldn’t lift it out of the hole.  I was facing spending the night in our pickup with my wife and a baby.  But the chain was next to the highway, a two lane rural highway, and someone had seen us and called the someone who had the job of locking the chain at night. He arrived to free us, and it was, amazingly, one of my students!   A responsible person as 16 year olds go, and one of the school’s bus drivers.  Yes, they let 16 year olds drive school buses then, the big yellow ones, on the rural roads.

Our next wood stove was a few years later in Swannanoa in another rental house.  It was, however, not a woodstove, but for burning coal, and had a tiny chute.  You couldn’t “build” a fire in it because you could neither place anything or even see inside.  You just stuffed in paper and kindling, dropped in a match, and hoped for the best.  Likewise, you just dropped in small pieces of firewood.  Once, one of our children dropped in my car keys.  That may have been the time when I perfected my searching process skills.

We lived in that house for four years and two of our children were born there, in the bedroom.

We at last bought our own house a few miles from Swannanoa and moved the Baby Bear into the basement, the stove being our primary source of heat for the next 30 years.  We cut and hauled most of our firewood and bought some as well.  When Y2K rolled around, we had enough for two winters.   I still have the Baby Bear, and the house as well.

Splitting firewood by hand for me is a spiritual exercise, a non-combative martial art.

Which brings to mind those “Kung Fu” experts who would break bricks, wood, and other building materials with the sides of their hands.  I’m pretty sure it’s pretty fake, however, because I’ve never actually seen this done on real construction sites.  I can imagine it happening though.  A guy calls down from the rafters, “Okay Bruce. Next one, 14 feet-2¾ inches.”  Bruce carefully stretches his measuring tape, pulls a pencil from behind his ear, makes a V mark, takes the hand square from his belt to flick the V into a clean line across the board with the pencil.  He then cracks his knuckles, rolls his head around to loosen his neck muscles, stands back, concentrates all his focus, and WHACK!  The task is done.  He passes the perfectly cut board up into the rafters.  Saves dragging a saw power cord all over the place or recharging those batteries.  If this is a real thing, those guys should have their own labor union.  But I’m positive Karate Chops working up a really well-seasoned chunk of ash is not even remotely plausible.

But seriously, splitting wood with a maul and wedge is an art form.  First surveying the chunk of wood for knots and checks to learn the obstacles and splitting pathways, I look for checks to see where the wood is already splitting naturally.  Then the lift and swing.  It’s not easy hitting a round of wood in exactly the right places, over and over.  Nor is hitting a wedge of steel with a four square inch target.  (And sometimes you hit the side of the wedge and send it flying at your ankle.)  My children and wife have wounded or broken many a hickory or ash handle.  You use both gravity and centrifugal force, keeping your eye on the target.  Once after I had some professional tree people take down an enormous Tulip Poplar tree for me, we, I and the children, held wood splitting races.  The competitors each would have their own set of tools and we’d compete on who would split their rounds the fastest.  The trick was to split pieces completely with one swing, stepping around the work as you went.  Somehow 14 seconds sticks in my mind.  Tulip Poplar, by-the-way, is easy to split when it’s green.  They’re thinking about making this an official sport in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

A proper stack of firewood is also an art form, especially a free standing one with the “log cabin” criss-crossed ends of a row that’s expertly tied into the main stack for stability.

Now.  Now after Hurricane/Tropical Storm Helene our five acres with a house we finished building a few years ago is a firewood farm.  At this point about half of the lost trees are safely flat on the ground thanks to help from three of my sons, some Eco-Forester volunteers, and a chainsaw crew of eight young Mennonite men from Ohio, who came under the auspices of the non-profit Plain Compassion Care Response.  Half the trees are still “leaners” (caught in other trees) and thus require technical assistance, like tree climbers with ropes. We saved out 17 foot logs from the best of the larger trees, like mulberry, hickory, and wild cherry.  I wish we had a black walnut go down, but alas.  Someday I hope we can get a portable sawmill in here.

In the meantime, after the insurance settlement payout, I could afford to buy a mechanical, gas powered wood splitter, which in my mind will assist an aspect of “Debris Removal.”  I shopped around and settled on an Oregon brand machine.  Oregon.  Yes, emotion is an essential factor in decision making.  Not the only one, but if we depended upon reason only we’d be parlayed because it’s impossible to process every tiny detail of information to make the “best” decision.  The Oregon cost more than the China-made ones, but it’s from a unique small local business and not one of the giant retail chains.  And this local business will be able to do repairs and maintenance.  I picked it up yesterday and towed it home.

The mechanical wood splitter will help process a lot of wood in a short time and should be great as a family work project.  We’ve done this before, but I’m hoping we can do a firewood splitting-hauling-stacking day at our property over one of the upcoming holidays.  With as many of our children and grandchildren as possible.

For me, the machine will never give the physical, mental, spiritual, and aesthetic satisfaction of splitting firewood by hand. One of my heroes, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about how in the Soviet Gulag he would go out in the “frost” of a sunny winter day and split firewood with his shirt off. I tried that once myself. My favorite time to split wood was in the evening before supper as it was growing dark. And at Christmas, while we played the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols on the radio live from Kings College of Cambridge (performed every year since 1918), I’d split firewood in the front yard.

Hurricane Helene brought up tropical Caribbean weather in its wake and it has persisted far too long.  I look forward to the seasonal cool fall weather, and then winter, and lighting fires in the woodstove.  There’s nothing like wood heat to warm the bones.  One of our sons spent a month hiking 300 miles in Norway last summer.  I learned that the Norwegians are said to be “the happiest people in the world.”  How can this be with the long dark winters of the north? 

You know what?  I’ll write about this next time!