Hunting Pictures

Last week my husband and I took an early autumn vacation to Canada.  We flew to Calgary, then boarded a train, traveled thirteen hours to Kamloops, where we spent the night in an old but prettily refurbished hotel.  Then another twelve or so hours on the train through the Rockies, alongside Thompson and Fraser rivers filled with salmon returning to spawn and die, to Vancouver.  We spent a couple days there before flying home to our disgruntled kitty.

The entire time I kept trying to capture a little of the beauty I saw speeding past with my little "point and hope" camera.  It's hard shooting through a window, although sometimes I elbowed my way to the open viewing platform where folks with pricier gear set up shop.  Sticking my head out in the fresh air, I imagined how giddy dogs feel when they push their heads out open truck windows, ears blowing back, tongues flapping in the wind.

Anyway, today I visited my local consignment place and found a little book called Natural Histories: A Bestiary, by Jules Renard.  There are charming pencil drawings by Toulouse Lautrec that accompany word sketches of turkeys, geese, swallows, squirrels and many more animals.  But the first little essay charmed me completely, and spoke to my need to travel, to take photos, and to paint.

The Picture Hunters

He jumps up early from his bed and sets out only if his mind is clear, his heart pure, his body light as a summer garment.  He carries no provisions.  Along the road he will drink fresh air and inhale wholesome smells.  He leaves his firearms at home, content with keeping his eyes open.  His eyes serve as nets in which pictures are caught.

The first one he snares is that of the road, showing its bones of polished stones and broken veins of its ruts, between the hedges laden with blackberries and small wild plums.

Then he catches a picture of the river.  Whitening at the elbows, it sleeps under the gentle stroke of willows.  It glistens when a fish turns up its belly, as though a piece of silver has been thrown in; if a light rain falls, the river has goose flesh.

He picks up the picture of the moving wheat, the toothsome clover, the meadows hemmed in with rivulets.  He seizes in passing the flight of a lark or a goldfinch.

Then he enters the woods.  He did not know that his senses could take in so much.  He is soon impregnated with scents, he misses not a single muffled sound, and his nerves attach themselves to the veins of the leaves so that he may communicate with the trees.

Before long he is vibrating to the point of discomfort, he is in ferment, he is afraid, he leaves the woods and follows from a distance the peasants returning to the village.  

Outside, he stares for a moment, with eyes ready to burst, at the setting sun as, on the horizon, it divests itself of its luminous garments, its scattered clouds.

Home at last, his head full, he puts out his lamp and, before going to sleep, delights in counting up his pictures.

Obediently, they appear again as his memory calls them.  Each one awakens another, and the new ones constantly join he phosphorescent band, like partridges that, all day pursued and divided, come together in the evening, and, safe in the depth of furrows, sing and remember.

Back from the Rockies

We just returned from a week in Colorado - six days of cool, dry weather.  What a relief from the muggy and sticky days and nights we've been experiencing here in southern Wisconsin.  We stayed a few days with friends who rent a house in Breckenridge, then we explored a little in Leadville and Georgetown.  We discovered Georgetown last year, when we pulled off the highway for fuel and food.  This year I wanted to ride the train they have there. Georgetown Loop 

Their local historical society runs several trains a day in a loop to nearby Silver Plume and back.  This particular day was spectacular, dry, and clear.  We enjoyed both the scenery and the narration provided by the crew.

Tourists who ride can also book a tour of an old silver mine, which we did not do.  The brakeman who hopped back on after we pulled aside to let another train  chug up the grade, chatted with the kids who were obviously having a blast.

Today, after finishing another load of laundry, I headed down to the local consignment shop, and found a new stack of vintage post cards, including this one of the original bridge and train at Georgetown. The old bridge was tom down ages ago, replaced with a sturdier version. But I was excited to find the card less than a week after I rode a train in the same location.

Sounds From the Past

modified contour drawing of my great grandparents when first married

In 1994 when my mother asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I asked for a taped interview with my grandmother. I got the tape that year, listened to most of it, and put it in my tape caddy. Last week I got it out and listened for nearly an hour. There behind the hissing of the old cassette tape, were the voices of my mother, aunt, and grandmother. Grandma and Mom are gone now, and it makes me a little crazy that I cannot ask for more details on some of the stories. Now, after having put together memories with old photos, and having visited the places she lived as a young girl, I know what I would ask Grandma. In 1994 I didn't know, and was probably too busy with teaching to probe for more.

So, little by little I'm transcribing her taped answers to my questions, and when I finish I hope to have it transferred to a CD, and share it with my family. This is the first installment.

Transcript of Interview With Bernice Tess

December, 1994

This is Bernice Tess. We are gathered here with Ellen and Carol, my daughters, to celebrate Carol’s birthday, and while we are all here together we thought it would be a good time to answer some of my granddaughter Sherry’s questions. She has written down quite a few questions on paper that she would like to know about my past. And I think we should start more or less at the beginning, which is a long time ago, because I am ninety-two years old.

And I was born in the Cascade Mountains in the state of Washington, the very very deepest part of the mountains in Leavenworth, Washington, where they cut the big pass for the railroad over the mountain. They had to put two engines on there because it was too steep for one engine. And my father, being an engineer, wanted to live there. So my first memories were of a little cottage, up on a hill, very high up, And all I could see when I was a toddler around the house was snow because the windows were all covered with snow, and we had to have lamps, oil lamps, to see by, even in the daytime. And gradually in the spring, we would see the snow go down, and we would watch it on the windows, because every day it’d be an inch or so when the sun melted, and it was very thrilling to watch the snow go down, inch by inch, until we finally could look out our windows. They were pretty dirty by then, but that didn’t bother me any at the time.

We lived there until I was about three years old and then there was trouble in the household. And my mother and father disagreed, or, agreed to disagree, I guess. Anyways, Mother got me up in the middle of the night one night and said we were going on a train journey. Which was very surprising to me because my father was still sleeping in bed. But we went to the neighbors and the neighbors took us down to a train, and we went to Hillyard, which was quite a few miles and on flatter land. It was a suburb of Spokane. And we went to a friend of Mother’s and stayed with her for a while. Eventually we bought a house there, or my father did; he came back to live with us for a while. But that didn’t last too long either. And this time when we left, we left for good. 

I wasn’t ready for school yet, so I must have been around four when we left the final time. And all I remember from those days were different people’s homes and faces where I stayed while Mother worked. She was a midwife, and she went to various homes and helped with babies being born, she told me. So I, being a very shy little girl, I wasn’t used to staying with all those people; I was very uncomfortable. Especially when I could hear them talking, whispering about my mother behind my back. I didn’t like it very well. So we were not too happy. Mother read ads in the paper, and finally decided the best place for us would be out on a ranch. There would be no people around to be talking about us, and we could live our own lives. So she answered an ad, for a man that wanted a housekeeper, out on a big ranch, in the east, northeastern part of Washington, right near the Columbia River. So she answered the ad, and he was not too happy. He didn’t know that she had a little girl, but he finally accepted me because there were very few people that wanted to go work on a ranch that was fifteen miles from the nearest town. Well, fifteen miles on land. If you crossed the Columbia River you could go to Hanford, and that was only six miles away, but it was hard to get across the big wide Columbia River. 

Eventually I had to cross the river to go to first grade, And then I was boarded out again. But, that year passed, and I was back to the ranch. Then we looked for a school teacher. We had a hard time getting one because nobody wanted to teach out there. It was very wild and woolly.

We had four big sections of land, and it was sand dunes and sage brush, and they grew dry wheat. It was an experimental thing with growing wheat, because it was bare, almost desert like country. Hardly ever rained. If it did rain we all ran out and tipped our heads and opened our mouths and let the rain run in. It was fun. We loved getting wet. We loved the rain.

But, school was not much of a success. We started out in a little one-room shack that had belonged to a homesteader that went broke, as they all did, most of them at least. And they had a woman teacher, but she didn’t stay with us long. When the left they got a man teacher and eventually built a one room school house, that was really a school house. We had an outdoor toilet, that had to do for both boys and girls, and we had a lean-to that did for the horses, because a lot of us rode horses to school. There were no cars of course, and no roads, really, just sand,. We went where there was room to go, there wasn’t a real road. And we thought we were very well off with the new school, though the teacher was rather - different. He taught us all that we didn’t really need to study, because the world was coming to an end, in just probably six months. So, we needn’t worry too much about our grades. He just taught religion to us. He said that was much more important than lessons. And of course we didn’t sleep very well at night, I had nightmares, Finally Mother asked me what was troubling me, and I told her. I said, “We are all going to die,”

“Oh no, “she said, “we’re not going to die.”

I said, “Yes we are, and it’s going to be real quick.”

And so, that was the end of the teacher. He left and we didn’t have any school that year at all, we just sort of took it easy and went without school. It pleased most people, but I was very hungry for companionship and the only companionship I had was at school. So I was pretty lonely. 

Then we got a hired man that was very very nice to me, so that helped a lot. He taught me how to dance, out in one of the hay lofts. It had a hard floor. It was over our jackass. And when we danced too hard he would bray, and make a terrible noise. You could hear him for miles away. But we laughed. That was just part of the fun. But I was never allowed to go near him. He was very vicious, wild. The farmers brought their mares there, but that was all. He had a very special yard of his own that was fenced in with high fences. That was just part of farm life. 

And we also had the only windmill in the country, and the only place that had a well big enough that they could dig down deep enough in the sand to get water. So all the farmers and the homesteaders would come to us for water. And they had water wagons in those days, made out of wood, and the slats twisted and turned like a barrel. Some of them leaked. Most of them leaked, and you could tell their trail, coming and going, by the water leaking out of the slats. But that’s all they had, apparently there was no way to seal the seams because they all leaked. But we never charged them for water. They got it for free. They just had to carry it. 

And we also had a huge big water tank, and that’s where I learned to swim, in the water tank. And then I also learned to swim in the Columbia River. But the current was so swift there that I had to have a big rope tied on me. Because the current would have carried me downstream, and that really wasn’t a very good place to learn to swim. So I really relied more on the water tank for the cattle and the horses.

National Train Day

Engine at the Hamilton Logging Company, about 1912, Washington state, my great grandfather's last job

Engine on the Great Northern Railroad, my great grandfather the engineer

My great grandfather, Len Adams

It's funny how coincidences happen. I was on my way to meet a friend for lunch yesterday, listening to NPR, and there was an interview with Larry Tye who wrote Rising From the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class, and he mentioned that National Train Day was this weekend. You can read about National Train Day here: http://www.nationaltrainday.com/2009/events Basically it celebrates the day the United States was connected from coast to coast by rail. It just happens that I am packed and ready to leave this afternoon on a train adventure.

My sister-in-law and I are traveling on the Empire Builder to Spokane, Washington. This Amtrak line follows the rail route of the old Great Northern line, a line on which my great grandfather was an engineer from about 1900 until 1913. One of my goals for the trip is to meet relatives where he grew up in Washington, to see the landscape where that family lived, and to try and understand my grandmother's early life and history. I want to walk the cemetery where he is buried, and talk to people who remember things from before I was born.

I also want to see sights, eat out, draw in my travel journal and have a real good time. I'll be back in a couple weeks.

PS - Train Day was fun.  Even the tiny station in Columbus, Wisconsin gave out goodies like cake and coffee, packs of cards, paper conductor hats for the children.  I heard that in Chicago they had live music.

Machu Picchu

This was our big day, the day I hoped for since I first saw a photo of Machu Picchu in my first year Spanish book.  To get to the site from Cusco, you have to take the train.  I took this photo from our train car across some tracks.  Our car was set up for dining, and had large observation windows at the top as well as the side.  It takes two hours to get to the town at the base of Machu Pichhu, Aqua Calientes.  So far as I can tell, the town exists to house and feed people from around the world who want to see the Inca city, a thousand feet higher.

The ride was not boring.  We were served a breakfast of rolls, cheese, meat, fruit and coffee. Good thing too, since the train left the station at seven in the morning.  We loved watching the scenery roll by, seeing the landscape change, becoming less agricultural, more mountainous. Eventually we spent our time with our necks craned back, watching the sheer cliffs and the gradual transformation of the world into cloud forest - a world where mountains trap clouds, the edge of the jungle.

Once we got to Aqua Calientes, we had to make our way through a market to the bus.  Buses run constantly, whizzing tourists up a steep, winding gravel road with hairpin curves to Machu Picchu.  It rained in the morning, March is the end of the rainy season in Peru, but we were lucky, the sun came out.  The altitude here is lower than Cusco, only 8,000 feet, and it got warm.  I was glad I brought a short sleeved shirt and capri pants.  I was also glad I brought sunscreen and bug spray.  We were much closer to the equator than we are here in Wisconsin, and despite warnings, lots of people got sunburns.  Being Wisconsinites we are used to bugs, but I was glad I had a tube of repellent.  The park people spray for the sort of mosquito that carries malaria, but they have a sort of midge that can bite if you don't watch out.

This is the entrance, and I was reminded of places like the London Tower and the Grand Canyon.  This is a place to meet people from all over the world, to hear a half dozen languages being spoken at any time.  There is also a nice restaurant, and an exclusive lodge for those who can afford to stay.

This is us.  We made it.  There have only been a couple times when I was so excited that I was moved to tears, at the Sistine Chapel, at Stonehenge, but I was moved to tears at seeing Machu Micchu.  

Photos don't tell the whole story of how huge the city is, how awe inspiring.  They don't let you see or hear the Urubamba River, silver in the valley below, or the toy town, or the little blue Peru Rail trains.  They don't show the bright song birds, iridescent blue millipedes, butterflies, or llamas grazing on the terraces.  You can't see the sun and shadow passing over the mountains, terraces or stone ruins.   Still, photos hint at the magic of the place.

I took this photo while our guide was explaining something about the history of how these massive stones were carved and moved.  This little guy is a viscacha, a critter that looks like a cross between a mouse and a rabbit.  It is related to a chinchilla.  Later, a couple lizards joined him to sun on the rocks.  Can you tell I'm easily distracted?

It was a challenge walking through this world heritage site.  There are hundreds of uneven and steep stone steps, and some are not for anyone with vertigo.  I suspect a person could visit a dozen times, read all sorts of histories and books about archeology and never learn all there is to learn.  There are several hikes around the area that we did not have time to try, although two younger women from our group did stay at the lodge overnight and hike the other paths the next day.  I am just grateful that I had the opportunity to see this place for myself.

Murder Mystery, Part 3

Grandpa Adams and his engine

The man from the Skagit River Journal of History and Folklore who is helping me research my great grandfather's death sent me another bit of the puzzle. It came in the form of a photocopied clipping from the May 14, 1914, Mount Vernon (Washington) Argus.

Little Baby Snyder Laughs and Coos in Jail While Father Waits Trial on Murder Charge.

I went down to the jail last night to get the story of the killing of Ed Adams by Matt Snyder at the English Camp near Hamilton last Saturday night. And I walked in where the mother was nursing a six months old baby girl of the "killer" and the soft, sweet little angel put out her tiny hand and grasped me so I couldn't and I wouldn't get away. I didn't want the story of one who killed Adams; I didn't want the story of why Adams was killed; I wanted to take that pure sweet innocent baby out from the bars and bolts of jail and let her spread the sweet influence of infancy upon the whole lot of us sophisticaed men of affairs who are really respected.

There was a circus in Sedro-Woolley.

People came from miles around.

Saloons are operated in Sedro-Woolley by common consent of the best citizens.

Matt Snyder got drunk.

So did his friend, Ed Adams.

They went home to Hamilton together.

A trivial matter brought on a quarrel.

The quarrel brought on blows. From blows a killing resulted and a jury must say whether the "killer" was justified or must spend his life in a prison cell.

Let the verdict be what it will, there is still a little cooing babe close up against its mother's breast that loves every human being that comes within its touch and yet must bear the everlasting stigma of a drunken father's act.

He may be guilty.

His wife may have acted rashly in handing him the weapon.

The little blue eyed babe is still cooing in a cell in the Skagit county jail and the state or county or city that licensed the father to kill must answer to that baby if they can.

In addition to this florid bit of reporting (a temperance editorial?) , there was a short quote from a biography of Matt Snyder that his granddaughter wrote:

"During that time he got into a drunken argument and shot a man to death. There was a trial ad he was acquitted on the basis of self-defense. Matt was not a very big man, but Nam (grandma Anna, Matt's second wife) said in later years, that after the trial nobody ever fooled around with Matt Snider again."

Indeed. I wonder if my great grandmother kept clippings of the death of her first husband. I wonder if she felt vindicated in leaving him, sad, or perhaps a bit of each. I'm sure that the publicity must have been humiliating to the woman so proper she wouldn't be seen out in daylight while she was pregnant. I wonder if she ever missed him.

More from Grandma's Autobiography

October 13th was my grandmother's birthday. I missed getting a card to her on time many years because I would forget about Columbus Day and no mail delivery. She was born in 1903, and the story of her life, and of her mother’s life have interested me as long as I can remember.

Edward Lemuel (Len) Adams married Sarah Ellen Hodgson on January 1, 1900, in Leavenworth, Washington. I have no idea how or where they met. I know that he worked for the Great Northern Railroad as both an engineer as a boilermaker. I know he was social and liked to go out and meet friends. I know he and my great grandmother were divorced, and that just a few years later he was dead. Here’s how my grandmother tells it in her autobiography:

“By the time I was born my folks had moved to Leavenworth, way up in the Cascade Mountains. My father was an engineer on the Great Northern Railway, and Leavenworth was where the extra engines were added to the trains so that they could make it up the steep mountain passes.

I was about two when we left Leavenworth, and moved to Hillyard. My earliest recollections are of Hillyard and the little tan colored house we lived in. The McClain family lived next for in another little tan house, exactly like ours inside and out... The McClain girls were my friends. Evelyn was my age and Agnes two years older. Agnes made our lives miserable. She bossed us around and told on use when we were naughty. She also threw all my playthings out the upstairs window and broke all my dolls. I remember my fourth birthday, when I had a birthday party, the only one I had as a child. We had cake and ice cream, and I threw up.

I knew that my mother and father were not getting along. There was a lot of yelling and door slamming after I was put to bed, and nobody answered my questions. My father was a very outgoing, sociable sort, and he liked to stop in at the local saloon after he got home from a run and have a drink with the boys. Mother was brought up to believe the devil was in every drop of alcohol. She couldn’t abide his drinking, even in moderation. ...At this time she was very young, very straight-laced, and unforgiving.

About this time we moved back to Leavenworth. I don’t know why, probably because Father was put on a different run. We only spent one winter there. I remember we were housebound all that winter. Our dining room windows were completely covered with snow and we had to light oil lamps to see. The view out our front door was just huge snow banks and the tops of men’s hats bobbing along as they walked out on the sidewalk.

Things went from bad to worse with my folks. I hated to have my father come come because it meant a fight. The night it came to a head I had an earache and was crying. My father had a headache...He yelled at Mother and told her to quiet me, and she told him she was leaving and he’d never have to hear me cry again. He didn’t believe her, but the next day after he left for work she packed our suitcases and asked the neighbor to take us to the train depot. We landed back in Hillyard, with no place to go except the McClains. Our old house had been rented.

(Grandma writes of her parents' divorce, and how her mother secured a position as housekeeper on a Washington ranch.)

About this time tragedy struck. We received word that my father had been murdered in a logging camp in the Cascade Mountains. He had been foreman and had to fire a logger for drinking on the job. The man left, but came back that night and shot in in the head. I was devastated. I hadn’t been that close to my father; only two years of my life I could remember was spent with him, but in the lonely years that followed I built him into a fantasy figure. I remembered time he gave me rides in his big black locomotive and how he loved to show me off to his friends. The large walking doll he gave me was my most prized possession, and I allowed no one else to play with it.

Mother and I went back to Fairfield for the funeral and I met my Fairfield relatives. There was my spunky little grandmother for whom I was named, my grandfather, and assorted uncles, aunts and cousins. It was wonderful to find I had a large family after years of Mother and I being alone. The day of the funeral it was raining and miserable. The little church was crowded and I had to sit on Uncle Otto’s lap. After the service was over he insisted on carrying me up to the casket to say good-bye to my father. All I saw was the dreadful hole in his forehead... I cried and refused to be comforted. It is still engraved on my memory. I was ten years old.”