Deciding to leave this place feels a little bit like breaking up with a lover. Even if you know that it’s the right thing to do, and the right time to do it, there are still so many small things that are heartbreaking to say goodbye to. The way that you are struck one morning by the fact that you will never see their toothbrush again, or that plan you had always had to travel to South America together when you got old, or that you can’t share this really fabulous tomato with them.

There are so many little things that I’m saying goodbye to here. Even though I feel good about the decision to move to Olympia, I’m sad to say goodbye to my little tomato patch, and to all my grandiose plans for a real garden next year. My little writing studio/bedroom with the little white stove that kept it always too hot or too cold and the bats in the roof will be sorely missed. I won’t be here for the snowfall this winter to track the skunks and coyotes and bobcats that I saw during the snows last winter. I won’t get another chance to really for real this time harvest all the blackberries and preserve them. I will never see the black bear that is rumoured to live around here. I won’t convince the song sparrow in the back yard to eat out of my hand, nor the skunks either. I won’t get to see the first snow fall on Mt. St. Helens from my deck, and I won’t enjoy my morning cup of coffee while watching the mountain steam. I won’t ever learn exactly what sort of fir trees those are that line the driveway. I won’t get to do a 24-hour sit once a month in the hemlock grove down the hill.

There are a lot of things I’m looking forwad to about being in Olympia, but I’m glad that i have 6 weeks or so, because it will take me at least that long to say goodbye to everything here.

I walked over to the neighbor’s house and mowed down his cat’s ears (which he calls dandelions) today. I used his riding mower (vroom! ) and it took me 90 minutes. He wrote me a check for $40, which was nice, and told me a few stories. He’s turning 85 years old next month, and he’s been around this part of the country his whole life. We were talking about Mt. St. Helens, and he started talking about how his father and grandfather were both loggers. I thought it was just a case of an old man getting distracted, so I let him tell his story, but it turned out that he did actually have a point connected to the mountain.

I guess back in the 20’s it was standard for the loggers to all get 2 weeks off over the 4th of July. So every year, the whole family would load up in the two cars and head out to Spirit Lake to go fishing for two weeks. It would take them two days to get from Dryad, Washington up to Spirit Lake in the Model T Ford and the old Chevrolet. The Chevrolet was the first model of car to have rolling windows in it. They would make it almost the whole way in the first day, but the second day was spent on puncheon roads for about 15 miles. That 15 miles would take all day. I had never heard of puncheon roads before, and he explained that it was a road bed made out of saplings about 4 or 5 inches in diameter and cut to about 10 feet long. Over 15 miles of that, and you were bound to get stuck several times. And the puncheons weren’t anchored at all, just laid on the roadbed, so as soon as you accidentally spun the tire a little bit, it would spit the puncheon out, and your wheel would be stuck down in the mud between the two adjoining puncheons. So you would have to jack the whole car up in order to get the puncheon back in there underneath the tire and be on your way again, until the next time you got stuck.

I ended up spending about an hour listening to his stories. He’s also super conservative, and has been a logger most of his life. He has Rush Limbaugh books on the mantle. When he got out of the service after World War 2, he sold his car for $1000 and went into the logging business and has worked for himself ever since. It was interesting to me that, during the course of our conversation he said something about how it’s too bad that we aren’t utilizing our own natural resources instead of buying them from other countries. I figured he meant that we should be cutting down more trees, but then he said, "Someday I suppose they’ll develop a useable alternative fuel, and then we won’t have to buy so much oil." And that led to a discussion of electric cars (Preston is planning to convert one), and solar power (Willard, the neighbor, started using solar powered radio towers for his crews back in the early 60’s). It was really encouraging to hear that even this ultra-conservative could see the need for alternative and sustainable fuels.

Tags: alternative fuel, logging, oldtimer stories