Instant Travel

Northgate Park is a nice park just north of the downtown Durham area and is only three blocks away from our son and daughter-in-law's place. It has one of my favorite walking trails.

I go into the park near the south end on W. Club Boulevard and follow South Ellerbe Creek Trail as it winds through the pine and oak woods alongside Ellerbe Creek. Crossing W. Lavender Ave., it drops the South part and becomes Ellerbe Creek Trail.

It's a pleasant walk, even in the heat of the day which this time of year runs in the mid- eighties to mid-nineties. Depending on the time of day the trees shade most of the trail.

After crossing Lavender, I walk around the west side of a large dog park and head on north until the trail takes a jog on W. Murray Avenue and then continues north until it terminates at Stadium Drive. In all, probably a four-mile round trip.

If I walk the full course it takes a little over an hour so sometimes I stop at Murray Ave and head back home.

About a block north of the dog park is where the "instant travel" of this post's title comes in. As I walk around a slow bend in the trail I come upon a cleared field of about two acres on the west side of the trail where KRJD radio station has its three broadcast towers. The field is mowed occasionally to keep the weeds from growing too high and to provide access to the towers and their guy wire anchor points.

At midday the sun shines on the field, the stubble from the cut grass is dry, there is a little dust in the air, the humidity is just right and that well-remembered smell takes me instantly to the hay fields on Grandpa Mac's farm on Orcas Island where my brother and I spent summers in the late forties and again in the early and mid-fifties.

Grandpa had a small Farmall tractor but his other farm  equipment was left over from the horse farming days when he first settled the farm there in Crow valley. Instead of mounting on a tractor and using a power takeoff as is common now, his mower had a long tongue that would have connected to the team's harness and power to move the sickle bar was taken from the turning cleated steel wheels of the mower. There was a spring-mounted seat on top of the axle where Grandma sat and lifted the sickle bar as necessary.

After the field was cut and the grass dried into hay we would hook up the old hay rake with the same long tongue and seat atop the axle where the rider would trip the rake at the right time to line up the accumulated hay with the lengthening windrows.

Next came the hard physical work. There were no balers in those days so the hay would be pitched into shocks by Grandpa or a worker using an old fashioned pitchfork and lots of elbow grease.

Finally would come the crew loading the hay onto a wagon or truck bed. The guys lifting the hay onto the bed were hard workers, they guy spreading the load was experienced and knew how to interlock the forkfuls and tie them together so the hay wouldn't fall off the wagon on the way back to the barn.

My brother and I were too young to work the forks so we were tasked with driving the tractor or truck. Since our legs were too short to reach the pedals one of the men would put the truck in "granny" (compound low) so all we did was steer close to the hay shocks so they could load the hay as we drove along slowly.

All the while there was the ever-present smell of dry grass mixed with dust. What a wonderful smell, as I remember it, although it probably wasn't so good at the time. The dust would fill my nose, the hayseeds and loose pieces would fall down the neck of my shirt and mix with the sweat. But it was good hard work and made me appreciate a big meal at the end of the day.

A farmer in those days was a jack of all trades.

Grandpa had a typical small family farm. I don't remember how big it was but I seem to remember him saying 270 acres or something close. He had maybe fifteen-twenty milk cows, chickens, a few hogs and sometimes turkeys or geese. There was the big barn with its haymows and stanchions for milking, the adjoining milkhouse with an electric separator (although it had to be brought up to speed by turning the long handled crank before the motor could be turned on), a chicken house with a storage area for bags of grain and barrels of gasoline, a bunkhouse where itinerant workers could sleep, a blacksmith shop, the woodshed, the main house and, of course, the two-hole outhouse, the original gender-neutral bathroom.

Grandpa's day began with a cup of coffee and a hand-rolled cigarette while listening to the news on the old radio, then off to the barn at 0600 to milk the cows. Even though he had a vacuum milking machine he had to strip the final few squirts out of each cow by hand. There was hay to be thrown into each cow's stanchion feed box along with some ground grain to sweeten the deal and encourage them to come to the barn for milking.

Next the fresh milk would be separated into cream and skim milk. The cream was sent to the creamery for cash and the skim milk went to the hogs along with a little mash. Along the way the barn cats got a little milk in their saucer.

After morning chores came breakfast then started the work of the day. Tilling the fields, mending fence, planting grain, cutting and putting up hay, harvesting grain with the old binder, threshing (again with the old stationary threshing machine before the days of the combine) and in between getting in wood, patching roofs and making repair parts for the machinery in the blacksmith shop.

In the evening the cows came home and were milked again, the cream separated, the hogs slopped, and finally came dinner followed before long by a well earned night's sleep. Next morning the routine started all over again.

On Saturday night Grandpa and Grandma took a bath and sometimes went to the dance at the Deer Harbor Grange Hall. They would dance the polka, the Schottische, waltzes, foxtrots, the occasional jig and even some simple square dances. I only attended a few of their dances (probably because I was too young to leave at home) but I don't remember them dancing swing dances, the Charleston or The Lindy. The men kept a bottle in their car and sometimes would go out for a "breath of fresh air." Grandpa's drink was gin and 7-Up, without ice of course, since this was before the days of plastic coolers and even household ice makers,

Speaking of ice, up until the late forties Grandma had to make do with an icebox and a cooler in her kitchen. I'm sure you know what an icebox is but a cooler is not much known today. A cooler was a tall box cut into and mounted on an outside (usually north) wall with three or four shelves, a roof and screened in walls. Sometimes the outside of the screen would be covered with louvers to keep out the weather while allowing cool air to flow up through holes in the shelves of the cooler. There was a door on the inside so Grandma could put things into and take them out of  the cooler from the kitchen.

The cooler was a very useful device because, as the old saying goes, "if you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen." Grandma's cookstove was an old Monarch wood-fired range. The fire box was on the left, ash bin under that and the oven to their right. The top of the stove was all cooking surface, ranging from the hottest, right over the fire box to the coolest far on the right side of the stove. Above the cooking surface there were two warming ovens and the important chimney draft which in conjunction with the firebox draft controlled the burn rate of the fire. Grandmas was an expert in getting the correct heat for the cooking at hand but even she couldn't do much with the excess heat generated by that efficient heat producer. Especially in the summertime it was stifling in the kitchen.

In those days before electric or gas water heaters, water was heated by running a pipe back and forth on the left side of the fire box. Water would come in the bottom, exit the top and by convection move the heated water to the hot water tank which stood next to the stove. Sometimes Grandma would need hot water for washing or something and would feel the tank to determine the hot water supply. If there wasn't enough she would fire up the range even though she didn't need the fire to cook.

Mounted on the wall to the left of the hot water tank was the telephone with its mouthpiece mounted on a swivel stalk that moved up and down depending on the height of the user and the earpiece attached by a wire and cradled in the forked holder on the left side of the wooden box. On the right of the box was the hand crank that rang the bell used to ring up the operator (with one long ring) or other people on the party line by ringing their particular combination of short and long rings. It seems like Grandma's ring was a long and two shorts. Or was it a short and two longs?

Well, my trip via instant time travel is drawing to a close. I remember more details of those days some seventy years ago than I do the details of what happened yesterday. Maybe I'll be moved to take another trip through time to remember other adventures on the farm. For tonight, it's time for bed.