Читать книгу The Egg and I - Betty Bard MacDonald - Страница 6

Table of Contents

When I was nine years old we moved to Seattle, Washington, and the pioneering days were over and preparedness for the future began. At least I'm quite sure that is what Mother and Daddy had in mind when they started Mary and me taking singing, piano, folk dancing, ballet, French and dramatic lessons. If they had only known what the future held, at least for me, they could have saved themselves a lot of money and effort because for my life on the chicken ranch a few hours a day shut in the icebox contemplating a pan of eggs would have been incalculably more useful early training than, say, French or ballet. French did come in handy in reading books by bilingual Englishmen and women, but conversationally it was a washout, as I did most of my talking to myself, and only Frenchmen go around talking to themselves in French.

In addition to our injections of culture, we children were suddenly tumbled into a great health program. We ate no salt, never drank water with our meals, chewed our food one hundred times, got up at five o'clock in the morning and took cold baths, exercised to music and played tennis. Also, to keep our minds healthy, I guess, we were not allowed to go to the movies or to read the funny papers. One of the houses we lived in had belonged to the Danish Consul and had a large ballroom in the basement which Daddy immediately turned into a gymnasium with horizontal bars, basketball hoops and mattresses. Every night he forced us into this torture chamber for a workout. We leaped over the bar without hands, swung by our knees, played basketball, did back flips and hated Daddy. We did not want to be healthy. We wanted to go to the movies, read the funny papers and relax like all the other unhealthy children we knew. Fortunately Daddy left home on mining trips quite often and the moment the front door closed on his tweed-covered back we got out several months' supply of funny papers and settled down to a life of hot baths and blissful slothfulness until he returned. His mining trips kept him away from home about six months of the year, off and on, and it is a wonder that our muscles withstood this business of being hardened up like flints, only to squash back to jelly. Only the lessons kept on while Daddy was away, as Mother and Gammy weren't any more anxious to get up at five o'clock and take cold baths and exercises than we were.

I have been told that I was directly responsible for this dreadful health complex of Daddy, for I was a thin, greenish child who caught everything. Up to this time I had brought home and we had all had measles, both German and Allied, mumps, chickenpox, pink eye, scarlet fever, whooping cough, lice and the itch. Every morning before sending me off to school, Mother and Gammy would examine me in a strong light to see what I had broken out with during the night, for I looked so unhealthy all of the time that they were unable to determine if I were coming down with a disease until the spots appeared.

We always lived in large houses because Daddy had a penchant for inviting people to stay with us. He would casually wire Mother from Alaska "Meet the SS Alameda on Thursday—Bill Swift and family coming to Seattle for a few months—have asked them to stay with you." Mother would change the sheets on the guest-room beds, heave a sigh and drive down to meet the boat. Sometimes Bill Swift and his wife and children were charming and we regretted to see them go, but other times Bill Swift was the world's biggest bore, his wife whined all the time and we fought to the death with the children. After the first day, we could tell what the guests were like from Gammy, for if they were interesting, charming people Gammy retaliated in kind and was her most fascinating and witty self, but if they were dull or irritating in any way, Gammy would give us the signal by calling them all by wrong names. If the name was Swift, Gammy would call them Smith, Sharp or Wolf. If one of the children was Gladys, Gammy would call her Gertrude or Glessa, and a boy named Tom would become Tawm. Gammy had other subtle ways of letting them know they were in the way. From her bedroom on the second floor she would call to us children playing in the basement, "Cheeldrun, please come up and see if those bores are still in the bathroom. I've been waiting an hour to get in." We thought this very clever of Gammy as we knew that the guests knew that there were other bathrooms and we would look knowingly at each other and giggle and let her call about five times before we answered. Mother must have drawn heavily on her wealth of charm and tact during those days, for in spite of Gammy's remarks all of our guests stayed their full time and all seemed sorry to go.

When I was eleven and just about ready to go up on my toes in ballet, we bought a house in Laurelhurst near the water. This was a fine big place with an orchard, a vegetable garden, tennis courts and a large level lawn for croquet. We immediately bought a cow (which obligingly had a calf), two riding horses, two dogs, three cats, a turtle, white mice, twelve chickens, two Mallard ducks, several goldfish and a canary. Our animals were not very useful and too friendly and hovered in the vicinity of the back porches day and night. We had a schoolboy who milked the cow, fed the calf, curried the horses and tethered them all out, but either he was weak or they were strong, for the minute he left for school they would all come galloping home to the back porches where Gammy fed them leftover batter cakes, toast and cocoa. We loved all of our animals and apparently our guests did too, or if they didn't love them they didn't mind them, for our house overflowed with guests and animals all of the time. Guests of Daddy's, guests of Mother's, guests of Gammy's, and our friends and animals. There were seven of us, counting Daddy who was rarely home, but our table was always set for twelve and sometimes forty. Dinner was an exciting event and we washed our knees, changed our clothes and brushed our hair with anticipatory fervor. Mother sat at one end of the table and Daddy at the other, if he was home, Gammy sat at Daddy's right and we children were spaced to eliminate fighting. Daddy had made a rule and it was strictly enforced, whether or not he was home, that only subjects of general interest were to be discussed at the table. This eliminated all such contributions from us, as "There is a boy in my room at school who eats flies," and "Myrna Hepplewaite stuck out her tongue at me and I said bah, bah, bah and she hit me back and I told her mother...." In fact, it precluded our entering the conversation at all except on rare occasions which I think was and is an excellent idea. I resent heartily dining at someone's house and having all my best stories interrupted by "Not such a big bite, Hubert," or "Mummy, didn't you say the Easter Bunny came down the chimney?"

As soon as we were settled in Laurelhurst, Daddy decided that in addition to Mary's, Darsie's and my singing, piano, ballet, folk dancing, French and dramatics and Cleve's clarinet lessons, we should all have lessons in general usefulness and self-reliance. His first step in this direction was to have Mary and Cleve and me paint the roof of our three-story house. The roof was to be red and we were each given a bucket of paint, a wide brush, a ladder and some vague general instructions about painting. It seems that there was a shortage of ladders so Cleve and I were on the same one—he was just a rung or two ahead of me and both of us biting our lips and dipping our brushes and slapping on the red paint for all we were worth. We weren't working hard because we liked this job; we didn't, we just thought it was another one of Daddy's damnfool notions and we wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. Cleve and I had just finished the small area over the back porch and were moving up when something went wrong and Cleve dumped his bucket of paint over my head and down the back of my neck. Gammy cleaned me off with turpentine but she grumbled about it and said, "It's a wonder to me you aren't all dead with the ideas some Men get." We finished the roof, though, with Daddy lowering me by the heels so that I could paint the dormers of the attic, but it was a scary, slippery job and was an outstanding failure as far as a lesson in self-reliance was concerned. Daddy's next step was the purchase of a .22 rifle and a huge target. Gammy had hysterics. "Guns," she bawled, "Guns are for Huns and heathens. Those children will kill each other—please, Darsie, don't give them a gun." So we learned to shoot. Mary and I were both rather nearsighted and very poor shots but Cleve was a good shot and practised all the time. Cleve became such an expert marksman that he took up hunting when he was only ten years old and Daddy thought it was a fine idea until Cleve drew a bead and fired at a quail that was perched on the sill of a huge curved bay window of a neighbor's house. None of the neighbors was killed but the bay window was very expensive and so the gun was put away for a while and Daddy bought us an enormous bow and arrow and a big straw target. While he and Cleve were practising archery, Mary and I were learning to cook. Mother supervised this herself as she was a marvellous cook and Gammy was the world's worst. Mother taught us to put a pinch of clove and lots of onion in with a pot roast; to make French dressing with olive oil and to rub the bowl with garlic; to make mayonnaise and Thousand Island dressing; to cook a sliver of onion with string beans; never to mash potatoes until just before serving; to measure the ingredients for coffee; and always to scald out the teapot.

Gammy taught us that when you bake a cake you put in anything you can lay your hands on. A little onion, several old jars of jam, leftover batter cake dough, the rest of the syrup in the jug, a few grapes, cherries, raisins, plums or dates, and always to use drippings instead of butter or shortening. Her cakes were simply dreadful—heavy and tan and full of seeds and pits. She made a great show of having her feelings hurt if we didn't eat these cakes but I really think she only offered them to us as a sort of character test because if we were strong and refused, she'd throw them out to the dogs or chickens without a qualm.

Gammy said she did not believe in waste and she nearly drove our maids crazy by filling up the icebox with little dishes containing one pea, three string beans, a quarter of a teaspoonful of jam or a slightly used slice of lemon. If Mother finally demanded a cleanup and began jerking dishes out of the refrigerator and throwing stuff away, Gammy would become very huffy and go out and get a twenty-five pound sack of flour and hand it to Mother, saying, "Go on, throw this away too. Waste seems to be the order of the day." Gammy made great big terrible cookies, too. Into these she put the same ingredients she put in the cakes but added much more flour. These cookies were big and round and about half an inch thick. They stuck to the roof of the mouth and had no taste. What to do with them became quite a problem when we finally settled down and weren't moving around any more. They were stacking up alarmingly in the kitchen and lying around the back porch untouched when the Warrens moved across the street from us. The Warrens had a beautiful colonial house and two cars, but their children—there were four of them, two boys and two girls—ate dog biscuits. Why, I don't know, but they did. Mrs. Warren kept a one-hundred-pound sack on the back porch and the little Warrens filled their pockets after school and nibbled at them while playing Kick the Can. We tried some once, and they weren't much of a shock after Gammy's cakes but we didn't care for the rather bitter tang they had—it was no doubt the dried blood and bone. One day the Warren children stopped at our house before going home for their dog biscuits and Gammy happened to be baking cookies (she happened to be baking cookies about six days a week—she said that they were cheap and filling and would save on the grocery bill) and she forced us all to take some. The Warrens liked them. We were amazed and took a few tentative bites ourselves to see if these cookies might be different. But they weren't. They were the same big stuffy, tasteless things they had always been, but I guess compared to dog biscuit they were delicious because the Warrens begged for more and the suckers got them. All they could eat and all we couldn't eat. From that day on they ate all Gammy's output and we didn't have to flinch as we watched her pour the rest of the French dressing and a jar of "working" plums into her cookie dough.

When I was twelve years old Daddy died in Butte of streptococcic pneumonia. My sister Alison, who has red hair, was born five months later. It was a very sad year but rendered less tragic and more hectic by a visit from Deargrandmother, who came out to comfort Mother and make our lives a living hell. She dressed Mary and me in dimities and leghorn hats; asked who our friends were and what their fathers did; she wouldn't let Gammy work in her garden as it was unbecoming to a lady, so Gammy had to sneak out and hoe her potatoes and squash at eleven o'clock at night; she wouldn't let our old Scotch nurse eat at the table with us and insulted her by calling her a servant; she picked her way downtown as though we had wooden sidewalks; and was "amused" by anything she saw in our shops because this wasn't New York. Our only recourse was to go out to the laundry, which was a large room built on the back of the house and connected to the kitchen by a series of hallways and screened porches, with Nurse and Gammy, where we would make tea on the laundry stove and talk about Deargrandmother.

When she finally left for New York we took life in our own hands again and things continued much the same as they had before Daddy died except we were poorer and fewer of our guests were Mother's and Daddy's and Gammy's friends and more and more of them were friends of Mary's. As an economy measure we had stopped all our lessons but the piano and the ballet, and we were to go to public schools in the fall.

In high school and college my sister Mary was very popular with the boys, but I had braces on my teeth and got high marks. While Mary went swishing off to parties, I stayed home with Gammy and studied Ancient History or played Carom or Mahjong with Cleve. Mary brought hundreds of boys to the house but she also brought hundreds of other girls, so I usually baked the waffles and washed the dishes with alarge "apern" tied over my Honor Society Pin and my aching heart. Gammy used to tell me that I was the type who would appeal to "older men," but as my idea of an older man was one of the Smith Brothers on the coughdrop box I took small comfort in this. To make matters worse I suddenly stopped being green and skinny and became rosy and fat. I grew a large, firm bust and a large, firm stomach and that was not the style. The style was my best friend, who was five feet ten inches tall and weighed ninety-two pounds. She had a small head and narrow shoulders and probably looked like a thermometer, but I thought she was simply exquisite. I bought my dresses so tight I had to ease into them like bolster covers and I took up smoking and drinking black coffee but still I had a large, firm bust, just under my chin, and a large, firm stomach slightly lower down. I am sure that Mary also had a bust and stomach but hers didn't seem to hamper her as mine did me. Perhaps it was because she had "life." "Torchy" they called her and put under her picture in the school annual: "Torchy's the girl who put the pep in pepper." Under my picture was printed in evident desperation "An honor roll student—a true friend."

I was handy around the house and Mother taught me to mitre sheets at the corners and to make a bed as smooth as glass. Gammy smoothed up her beds right over cold hot-water bottles, books, toys, nightgowns or anything else that was dumped there in the hurry of the morning. Mother insisted that anything worth doing is worth doing well, but Gammy said, "Don't be so finicky. You'll just have to do it over again tomorrow."

Mother set the table with candles and silver and glassware and flowers every night whether we had company or not. Gammy preferred to eat in the kitchen with peeler knives and carving forks as utensils. Mother taught me to wash dishes, first the glassware, then the silver, then the china and last the pots and pans. Gammy washed dishes, first a glass, then a greasy frying pan, then a piece or two of silver. Mother served food beautifully with parsley and paprika and attractive color combinations of vegetables. Gammy tossed things on the table in the dishes in which they had been cooked and when she served she crowded the food into one frightened group, leaving most of the plate bare. "After all it's only nourishment for the body," she would say as she slapped a spoon of mashed potato on top of the chop and sprinkled the whole thing with peas. It was a lesson in cross-purposes and the result now is that one day I barely clean my house and the next day I'm liable to lick the rafters and clean out nail holes with a needle.

When I was seventeen years old and a sophomore in college, my brother, Cleve, brought home for the weekend a very tall, very handsome older man. His brown skin, brown hair, blue eyes, white teeth, husky voice and kindly, gentle way were attributes enough in themselves and produced spasms of admiration from Mary and her friends, but the most wonderful thing about him, the outstanding touch, was that he liked me. I still cannot understand why unless it was that he was overcome by so much untrammeled girlishness. He took me to dinner, dancing and the movies and I fell head over heels in love, to his evident delight, and when I was eighteen we were married. Bob was thirteen years older than I but a far cry from the Smith Brothers.

Why do more or less intelligent people go on honeymoons, anyway? I have yet to find a couple who enjoyed theirs. And, if you have to go on a honeymoon, why pick quaint, old-world towns like Victoria, B. C., which should be visited only with congenial husbands of at least one year's vintage or relatives searching for antiques.

We honeymooned in Victoria for a week and though I had visited there many times previously, I was surprised that I hadn't noticed what a dull place it was. Nothing to do. Victoria's idea of feverish gaiety is Thé Dansant at a hotel where Canadian women in white strap slippers, mustard-colored suits and berets, dip and swirl with conservative Canadian men. We spent one afternoon at Thé Dansant but there was a noticeable lack of hilarity at our table. Bob, that dear, gay, understanding companion of our courtship days, sat with chin on chest staring moodily at the dancers while I ate. I ate all of the time we were in Victoria. I was too fat and I wanted desperately not to eat and be willowy and romantic but there seemed nothing else to do. Bob ate almost nothing and looked furtive like a trapped animal. I guess it is quite a wrench for a bachelor to give up his freedom, particularly when, every time he looks at his wife, he realizes that he is facing a future teeming with large grocery bills.

On the boat going up to Victoria, Bob seemed to be well established in the insurance business and held forth at some length on premiums, renewals and "age 65," and I determined to ask Mother just how much I should learn about insurance in order to be helpful but not meddlesome, and wondered what the wives of insurance men were like for friends. On the way back from Victoria, Bob talked of his childhood on a wheat ranch in Montana, his days at agricultural college and his first job as supervisor for a large chicken ranch. When he spoke of the wheat ranch it was with about as much enthusiasm as one would use reminiscing of the first fifteen years in a sweat shop and I gathered that he thought farming hard, thankless work. But then he began on the chicken ranch job, sorting over the little details with the loving care usually associated with first baby shoes. When he reached the figures—the cost per hen per egg, the cost per dozen eggs, the relative merits of outdoor runs, the square footage required per hen—he recalled them with so much nostalgia that listening to him impartially was like trying to swim at the edge of a whirlpool. He told me at last that he had found a little place on the coast, where he often went on business, that was ideally situated for chicken ranching and could be bought for almost nothing. "What did I think about it?" What did I think about it? Why, Mother had taught me that a husband must be happy in his work and if Bob wanted to be happy in the chicken business I didn't care. I knew how to make mayonnaise and mitre sheet corners and light candles for dinner, so, chickens or insurance, I could hold up my end. That's what I thought. That's what a lot of women think when their husbands become dewy-eyed at the sight of their breakfast eggs and start making plans for taking the life savings and plunging into the chicken business.

Why in God's name does everyone want to go into the chicken business? Why has it become the common man's Holy Grail? Is it because most men's lives are shadowed by the fear of being fired—of not having enough money to buy food and shelter for their loved ones and the chicken business seems haloed with permanency? Or is it that chicken farming with each man his own boss offers relief from the employer-employee problems which harry so many people? There is one thing about the chicken business: if a hen is lazy or uncooperative or disagreeable you can chop off her head and relieve the situation once and for all. "If that's the way you feel, then take that!" you say, severing her head with one neat blow. In a way I suppose that one factor alone should be justification enough for most men's longing for chickens, but again I repeat, why chickens? Why not narcissus bulbs, cabbage seed, greenhouses, rabbits, pigs, goats? All can be raised in the country by one man and present but half the risk of chickens.

The next morning after our return to Seattle, the alarm went off with a clang at six-thirty; at six-thirty-one Bob, clad in a large wool plaid shirt, was stamping around the kitchen of our tiny apartment making coffee, and demanding that I hurry. At eight-forty-five we had driven twelve miles and were boarding a ferry as the first lap in our journey to see the "little place."

It was one of our better March days—it was, in fact, one of the March days we have up here which deceives people into thinking, "With spring like this we are sure to have a long, hot summer," and into stocking up on halters and shorts and sunglasses. Then later, summer appears wan and shaking with ague and more like February. This March day, though, was strong and bright and Bob and I spent the long ferry ride walking the decks and admiring the deep blue waters of Puget Sound, the cerulean sky, densely wooded dark-green islands which floated serenely here and there, and the great range of Olympic Mountains obligingly visible in all of their snowy magnificence. These Olympics have none of the soft curves and girlish plumpness of Eastern mountains. They are goddesses, full-breasted, broad-hipped, towering and untouchable. They are also complacent in the knowledge that they look just as mountains should.

We were the only passengers on the large, crowded ferry who took a breath of fresh air or even glanced at the spectacular scenery. The rest of them, business men, salesmen, farmers' wives, mill workers and Indians, either remained below in their cars or the bus which boarded the ferry or huddled in the hot lounges and read newspapers in a bad light. They were a forbidding-looking bunch and Bob and I ran a gantlet of ferociously hateful looks when we came heartily inside, after half an hour or so, stamping our cold feet and slamming the doors and searching hopefully for coffee. We found the coffee, dark green and lukewarm, in the galley and drank it to the morose accompaniment of two farmers' wives discussing "the dreen tubes in Alice's incision." Bob had been smoking when we came in and apparently no one noticed it but when, halfway through my cup of coffee, I lit a cigarette, one of the farmers' wives snatched off her manure-colored hat and began fanning the air violently in my direction, meanwhile uttering little hacking coughs. I continued to smoke, so the other woman picked up a newspaper and waved it so vigorously that I was afraid she'd sweep our coffee cups into our laps. Bob hissed at me, "Better put out your cigarette," and I hissed back, "I wish I had a big black cigar," and he looked at me reproachfully and led me outside and handed me a small pamphlet which I thought might be a religious tract but turned out to be a small travel booklet describing the country, in the depths of which the prospective ranch was hidden. It was a brochure of superlatives. "The Olympic Mountains are the most rugged mountains on the North American Continent ... the largest stand of Douglas fir in the world ... three million acres, two and a half million of which are wild ... Cape Flattery is the most westerly point in the United States ... the greatest fishing fleets on the Pacific fish from Cape Flattery." The little book stated that here was nature at her most majestic, that opportunity was pounding at the door, natural resources were pleading to be used and scenic drives aching to be driven. I thought the whole thing slightly hysterical but then I hadn't seen the country. Now I know that that country is describable only by superlatives. Most rugged, most westerly, greatest, deepest, largest, wildest, gamiest, richest, most fertile, loneliest, most desolate—they all belong to the coast country.

The ferry landed, we drove ashore and made a circuit of the two streets which comprised Docktown. There were a great sawmill, a charming old Victorian hotel with beautifully cared for lawns and shrubs, a company store, a string of ugly company houses, and a long pier where freighters were being loaded with lumber by an alarmingly undecided crane that paused first here, then there and finally dumped a gigantic load of planks almost on top of the longshoremen. Curses flew up like sparks from the men as they scattered to safety but in a moment or so the air cleared and they were back at work. Cranes and piledrivers can keep me at a pitch of nervous excitement for hours and hours and when I finally do tear myself away it is always with the conviction that the operator is going to find the operation very difficult without my personal supervision. I would have been content to lean on the sun-warmed railing of the ferry dock, smelling that delicious mixture of creosote, cedar and seaweed which characterizes coast mill towns, and watching the cranes for the rest of the day; but Bob warned me that we had a long drive ahead of us and if we intended to return that night we should get started.

The road out of Docktown was dangerously curved and not too wide and alive with cars, trucks and logging trucks with terrific loads and terrible trailer tails that switched and slithered behind them. Everyone drove as if he were going to a fire and on the wrong side of the road, and we were warned of approaching corners by the anguished screams of tires and brakes. Bob is an excellent driver but he was hard put to it to hold his own when a logging truck carrying three of the largest logs of the largest stand of Douglas fir in the world came winging around a curve and we had to leap the bank and scurry for the woods to avoid being smashed into oblivion by the playful trailer. The driver leaned out and grinned and waved at us and then went careening off down the road. We backed carefully onto the road again and trundled sedately off, hugging the bank nervously when we spotted another logging truck. After a while we left the woods and began skirting a great valley where emerald winter wheat, the velvety blackness of plowed fields and the tender green of new pastures checkered the bottom land. This was a dairy country and the smallest farms ran to three hundred and fifty acres. The houses, for the most part unattractive boxlike abodes, close to the road and unadorned with flowers or shrubbery, were across the road from their farm lands, their back porches snuggled against the blue-black tree-covered hillsides. The barns, silos, bunkhouses and outbuildings, magnificent structures of generous proportions were on the valley side. I thought this arrangement had something to do with keeping the cattle out of the house until Bob informed me that the road had been put in after the ranches were laid out.

Black and white Holstein cattle and deserted farms seemed to dominate the landscape and one was responsible for the other, according to Bob. This valley once boasted some of the finest Holstein herds in the country and the farmers invested heavily in breeding stock, but when the Holstein market collapsed some years back, many of them went bankrupt. The farmers the Holstein market didn't get were soon put in their places by contagious abortion and tuberculosis in their herds and a Government drainage ditch, the assessments on which were terrific, on their lands. In addition to this they had the ever-present problem of marketing and were either at the mercy of the local creameries and cheese factory or occasional city firms, none of which, the farmers said, gave them a square deal. Bob did not waste much sympathy on them, however; he said they were hopelessly unprogressive and many were using biblical methods of production and complaining because they couldn't compete in up-to-date markets.

I had noticed wisps of smoke rising from the ground in the farthest fields. "Burning peat," Bob explained. "One of the great tragedies of this country. Years ago some of the farmers, in an effort to clear the practically unclearable peat land, set fire to some of the huge piles of logs, roots and trees unearthed during plowing. When the roots and stumps had burned the farmers were surprised to find that the land itself was burning and that ditching, plowing and wet sacks were ineffective agents in putting it out. After much experimenting they learned that by digging four-foot-deep drainage ditches around a small area at a time, they could control the fire but this was such an undertaking that in most cases they let 'er burn."

"Isn't the land arable after the fires have burned out?" I asked.

"Unfortunately, not for years and years because peat burns deep down to a light feathery ash which will not bear the weight of a horse or a tractor. Hand-cultivated, it will grow potatoes almost as big as watermelons and about as watery, too," Bob concluded dismally.

"Look at those fields," I exclaimed pointing to plowed fields as black as licorice. "That soil must be terribly rich."

"It's rich all right," Bob said, "but it's peat land and hellishly expensive to clear and drain. You clear and plant a field and the next year your plow digs up a stump every three feet and you have to clear all over again. Every acre of it has to be tile drained, too."

After that, for a time we drove along in silence while the unconquerable peat lay black and scornful in the valleys and the unconquerable forests thundered down at us from the hills.

"This land resents civilization and it isn't a little futile stick-out-the-tongue kind of resentment, but a great big smashing resentment that is backed by all the forces of nature," I thought, huddling down into my coat and hoping we'd soon come to a town.

We did, and it boasted the mad confusion of four enterprises—a hotel, a barbershop, a gas station and a country store and post office. In addition there were a dear little graveyard and an imposing brick schoolhouse. Five roads led away from this small town but Bob didn't hesitate. He chose one pointing southwest toward the frosty Olympic Mountains. For the next several hours we saw no more towns, only crossroads stores; rich valleys separated by heavily wooded hills; herds of cattle and widely spaced farm houses. We had nosed our way into the foothills of the Olympics while we were still in the farming country and it wasn't until I looked from the car window and saw, far below the road, a frustrated little mountain stream banging its head against immense canyon walls that I realized that we were in the mountains proper. Yellow highway signs announcing Winding Road appeared at intervals and Bob put the car in second and then low gear as we spiraled forward and upward. We were climbing but seemed to be getting nowhere for we were walled in on all sides by the robust green mountainsides and only by sticking my head clear out of the window was I able to peer up and see the sky. Two or three hundred million board feet of Douglas fir. Later, we turned off the main highway onto a dirt road and jounced and skidded our way at last to the "little place."

On first sight it looked distressingly forlorn, huddled there in the laps of the great Olympics, the buildings grayed with weather, the orchard overgrown with second-growth firs, the fences collapsing, the windows gaping. It was the little old deserted farm that people point at from car windows, saying, "Look at that picturesque old place!" then quickly drive by toward something not quite so picturesque, but warmer and nearer to civilization. Bob halted the car to take down the rails of the gate and I looked morosely around at the mountains so imminent they gave me a feeling of someone reading over my shoulder, and at the terrific virility of the forests, and I thought, "Good heavens, those mountains could flick us off this place like a fly off their skirts, rearrange their trees a little and no one would ever be the wiser." It was not a comforting thought and the driveway, which proved to be a rather inadequate tunnel under the linked arms of two rows of giant trees, did nothing to dispel it. Heavy green branches lashed the top of the car and smaller twigs clawed at the windows and the car wheels churned and complained on the slick dry needles. We drove for perhaps a quarter of a mile like this and then abruptly the trees stopped and we were in the dooryard of the farm, where a great-grandfather of a cherry tree, hoary with bloom, stood guard over the huddled buildings.

I'm not sure whether it was the cherry tree or the purple carpet of sweet violets flanking the funny silvery woodshed, or the fact that the place was so clean, not a scrap of rubbish, not a single tin can, but it suddenly lost its sinister deserted look and began to appear lonely but eager to make friends. A responsive little farm that with a few kindnesses in the way of windows and paint and clearing might soon be licking our hands.

While I stood in the dooryard "feeling" the place, Bob was bounding around with a hammer, pounding the walls and calling happily, "Look, Betty, hand-hewn-out-of-cedar logs, and sound as a nut." The hand-hewn cedar shakes which covered the sides and roof had worked loose in several places and Bob pulled them off to show me the cedar logs and the axe marks.

The house, evidently begun as a log cabin about twenty feet by twenty and added on to at either end, was beautifully situated on a small rise of ground from which an old orchard, peering out from the second-growth fir, sloped gently down to a small lake or large pond. The original cabin was the living room with windows on the north and south sides and a thin rickety porch across the front. It faced south, across the orchard, to the pond and of course the mountains. The mountains were everywhere—I'd start to turn around, come up against something large and solid and wham! there was a mountain icily ignoring me.

Opening off the living room on the right, with windows north, west and south, we found a bedroom with roses and honeysuckle vines in heaps on the floor below the windows, as though they had climbed up to peek in and had fallen over the sills. Down three steps and to the left of the living room were an enormous square kitchen with windows east and north and a pantry the size of our apartment in town, with three windows facing east. Jutting off the kitchen toward the front was a bedroom with windows looking east and south. Up a creepy flight of stairs from the living room were two tiny slope-ceilinged bedrooms. Under the front porch we discovered a bat-hung cellar, and to one side of the kitchen, forming an ell with the living room, an entryway and wood room.

A very large, very surly and slightly rusty range was backed defiantly against the north wall of the kitchen—otherwise the place was empty. The floors were warped and splintery—the walls were covered with carefully tacked newspapers dated 1885.

At first glance the outbuildings seemed frail and useless, but closer examination revealed fine bone structure in the way of uprights, beams and stringers and so we were able to include in the assets of the place, a very large barn, two small chicken houses, a woodshed and an outhouse. The assets also included ten acres of land showing evidences of having once been cleared, and thirty acres of virgin timber, cedar, fir and hemlock—some of it seven feet and more in diameter. Scattered over the ten cleared acres, like figures in a tableau, were the dearest, fattest, most perfectly shaped Christmas trees I have ever seen. Each one was round and full at the bottom and exquisitely trimmed with brown cones. I was caressing and exclaiming over these when Bob told me that such little jewels of trees are cut by the hundreds of thousands by Christmas tree dealers, who pay the farmers two cents each for them. Incredible that anyone who professed a love of the soil would sanction such vandalism and for such a paltry fee.

At the edge of the clearing and sheltered by one of the great black firs, we found an old well. It was half full of water, but the intake was a tiny trickle instead of a robust gush which this season warranted, so Bob decided it had been abandoned and we looked elsewhere for water. We found a larger, more substantial spring at the foot of the orchard, feeding the lake, but as it had not been boxed in and showed no other signs of use, either it was a thing of recent origin or suffered from summer complaint—time would tell. It did too, and water became one of the major obsessions of my life.

We threaded our way through the orchard and found slender fruit trees bravely blossoming with frail hands pushing futilely against the dark green hairy chests of the invading firs. The firs were everywhere, big and virile, with their strong roots pulling all of the vitality out of the soil and leaving the poor little fruit trees only enough food and light to keep an occasional branch alive. These were no kin to the neatly spaced little Christmas tree ladies of the back pasture. These were fierce invaders. Pillagers and rapers.

The more we walked around, the stronger became my feeling that we should hurry and move in so that we could help this little farm in its fight against the wilderness. Bob was overjoyed when I told him of this feeling and so we decided to buy it at once.

For the forty acres, the six-room log house, the barn, two small chicken houses, woodshed, outhouse and the sulky stove, the mortgage company was asking four hundred and fifty dollars. Between us and by pooling all savings accounts, wedding present, birthday presents and by drawing on a small legacy which I was to get when I became twenty-one we had fifteen hundred dollars. We sat in the sunny doorway under the cherry tree, used a blue carpenter's pencil and shingle and decided that we would pay cash for the farm; put seven hundred dollars in the bank to be used to buy, feed and raise three hundred and fifty pullets; and we would use the rest to fix up the buildings. Fuel and water were free and we'd have a large vegetable garden, a pig to eat leavings, a few chickens for immediate eggs and Bob could work occasionally in one of the sawmills to eke out until the chickens started to lay. Written out in blue pencil on the weathered shingle it was the simplest, most delightful design for living ever devised for two people.

We left then and hurried home to put our plans into action. The next morning Bob paid the $450, and brought home the deed. The following week we borrowed a truck, loaded on everything we possessed and left for the mountains to dive headfirst into the chicken business.

"Which all goes to show," I said, "that preparing a girl for marriage before she marries is battre l'eau avec un bâton"; and as Bob often remarked later, "To prepare a girl for marriage after she is married is vouloir rompre l'anguille au genou."