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Voices of Spencer Creek
Norm's Notebook: The Brown and White Dress
A new brown and white checkered wool dress meant only sorrow for the young Linda.
By Norm Maxwell
Posted on Feb 7, 2007 |
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It was 1947 and Gramma and Grampa had returned from Alaska where they had spent the war working for the Alaska Spruce Project getting aviation quality spruce lumber out of the woods. Kelly had been a foreman in the woods while Astrid worked as a cook in various camps. Some of the light, dense grained spruce went to built primary trainers in the US but the vast majority of it went to England where the De Havilland company built the Mosquito "balsa bomber" that flew faster than German interceptors in the early part of the war, and then flew higher than the Luftwaffe could when newer models could catch up with them in level flight.
The four children had been left with Gma's parents near Nashville. Nashville, Oregon. I always like to brag that my ancestors established Nashville.
Kelly's given name was Eldon. Astrid ( pronounced Austree) had been dubbed "Pat" by her first grade teacher when she arrived in Oregon from Norway in the 1920s. The name stuck. Kelly used to make Norwegian jokes at Gma Pat's expense until he discovered that the name Hamar wasn't as Irish as he thought. There are two towns in Norway named Hamar. But what is an Irishman but a shipwrecked Norwegian? The Norwegian jokes stopped.
Kelly and Pat had lived through the Great Depression and had their fair share of hard times. One family story goes that they were recently married and living on a houseboat on the Siletz River. Otters scampered across the deck from time to time and seals paused from eating salmon to regard the people on the water with huge dark eyes. One day the need arose to go to town with a few dollars to buy beans and bacon and Bull Durham. And check the mail. "Town" probably means Taft or one of the other little coastal towns that eventually grew together to become Lincoln City.
They had waited until ebb tide and had floated the shanty built on a couple of old growth fir logs past Coyote Rock, past where the Stamper house would someday be built as a set for the film "Sometimes a Great Notion" down to about where the derelict cannery stands where the Siletz River is crossed by the old highway. They moored to some convenient trees and took off walking north. I don't think the Siletz Road was more than a big Indian trail at the time but I could be wrong.
Anyhow, they were walking down the sidewalk, staring at civilization, when they passed the shoe store with a bunch of women's shoes marked down to 25 cent a pair. Closer examination revealed that many of the shoes were size 3, Pat's size.
Gma Pat was less than five feet tall and weighed less than a hundred pounds. Even with money as no object, finding shoes for her tiny feet wasn't easy. Twenty-five cents a pair was a heck of a deal even at the nadir of the depression. Most of the shoes were impractical for life on the river. They had bows, high heels and open toes. I'm sure Gma Pat probably didn't say a word. She had been born the only daughter of a hardscrabble copper miner in Norway and life hadn't gotten much easier this side of Ellis Island. She probably just stared through the glass in wonder that there could be a place in the world where women wore shoes like that instead of cut down jeans with wool shirts and moccasins. Long story short, the beans and bacon were forgotten and the Hamars returned to their old growth "Winnebago" in time to catch the rising tide back upriver. Gma wore a bandoleer of elegant women's shoes threaded like trout on a piece of cord. They managed a couple nickel bags of Bull Durham but it would just have to be fish and "mountain mutton" (venison) for a while longer.
Back to 1947. Kelly was a logging safety officer now and Gma Pat worked in Taft at a restaurant. Logging has always been a dangerous occupation. Trees that look completely whole from every side shatter and splinter when touched by steel. Equipment fails for no perceivable reason. The strongest man in the world can be killed dead by a falling piece of limb a child could load in a stove. Things swiftly go wrong and the first take is the final cut.
The Hamar family was living in an old house on forty acres of Coast Range canyon then. Bear Creek wandered through the flat and boiled with salmon in the spring and fall. The driveway faced the Siletz river where the Pat and Kelley had changed neighborhoods with the tide on the shanty before the war. The kids caught the bus on the Indian trail that was now graveled and rode the seven miles to town.
Eldon Junior had quit school and was a logger too. Just like Dad. He went by Lee. Seems like nobody wanted to own the name Eldon. A logger didn't have to travel far to the job site in those days. Chainsaws existed but weren't yet fully operational, so big trees were still felled by hand with axes and long steel misery whips.
Gramma Pat couldn't have been too surprised when a grim faced man came to the restaurant while she was on shift and told her something had happened and Kelly was hurt bad and had been taken to the hospital in Newport. She folded her apron and got in her old car and clattered off the 25 miles south down the coast. Uncle Ralph went to Taft High School to find Neil, Linda and Casey and tell them the news.
Kelly couldn't talk but his eyes registered panic when he was told he was in the Newport Hospital. Apparently it had a bad reputation and wasn't a good place to be for anything much beyond a broken leg. A big guy wire had broken loose from an anchor stump and had whacked Kelly upside the head and down one side of his body. His hard hat had absorbed some of the impact but it had done little better than newspaper to a blow like that.
The children arrived and looked with horrified eyes at their father who couldn't move or talk. Some things are absolutely immutable in the first decade or two of life. The sun rises in the east. The kindling must be chopped. It always rains on the Oregon Coast and Dad always goes to work in the morning and comes home in the evening.
Neil and Casey stared mutely at this dead thing with living eyes that had walked out the door that morning with his tin hat and lunch pail. Fourteen year old Linda went out of the room to cry. She knew Dad was very badly hurt. A woman who may have worked there or may have just hung around to recruit new members for her church advised Linda to pray.
"If you pray hard enough, God will spare your daddy." she wisely proclaimed. Linda took this to heart. She prayed. She wheedled to God. She bargained with God. She promised God she would do anything if Dad would just get up and walk out of the hospital. Or sit up. Or move. Or just talk.
Kelly hung on for days. He never spoke but his eyes were informed with intelligence and it was obvious he knew what was said in his presence. Gma Pat grew silent and haggard. She didn't eat, she didn't sleep. She was withdrawn around her children. She spent most of her time holding Kelly's hand and willing him to get well. Kelly seemed to be getting no worse and maybe even a little better when he started getting sick. It turned into pneumonia. Gma sat with him while she made the kids go to school.
The story goes that the attending physician did not believe in penicillin. This is hard to accept in this day and age. Even in 1947, sulfa drugs and penicillin had been extensively road tested around the globe during World War II. He must have been a very old doctor who had spent the majority of his career before wonder drugs were proven a million times over . Kelly struggled and held his own for ten days after the accident but in the end he died with Pat at his side.
Uncle Ralph drove Gma Pat to Taft to pick up the three younger children after school. I'm sure it was a cold, wet rainy day like you can only find on the Oregon Coast. Neil and Linda and Casey got in the back of Ralph's old car. Pat sat slumped in the front seat and Ralph banged up the Siletz "Highway." Nobody said much.
When they reached the overgrown driveway at the seven mile marker, Ralph pulled in and switched off the motor. Gma got out of the car and started walking up the long wet driveway. The dripping alder formed a dark tunnel that swallowed her as she rounded the first bend.
"Listen kids," said Uncle Ralph. "I have to tell you that your daddy didn't make it. He tried really hard but he was just too broken up to live. Your mother couldn't bring herself to tell you." Neil and Casey stood stunned, their jaws hung open and their eyes teared up.
"NOOOOO!" screamed Linda. She pushed Ralph so hard he fell on his ass in the little creek by the driveway. She dropped to her knees in the mud and rotted leaves mixed with gravel and sobbed. "I prayed and prayed and prayed just as hard as I could!" She beat the ground with her little fists. Tears and snot flowed in her anguish. Ralph stood near her soaking wet not doing anything. Finally she fell over on her side, gasping and bawling defeatedly .
The two boys stood and watched their sister as Ralph loaded her in the back seat. Neil patted her head and Casey just stared blankly as they drove the rest of the way to the house by Bear Creek.
Gma Pat was very quiet and her eyes were dead. Ralph took charge of the funeral arrangements. The children were very sad and said little and didn't bounce off the walls the way children that age should. Gma finally rallied a little and told Linda that they must go to town and buy her a new dress for the funeral. Linda had never had a new dress in her entire life. She didn't like the idea of starting now for Kelly's funeral.
She was sullen and silent and defying God to make her believe in anything as Gma picked out a brown and white dress in checked wool. The funeral was not a happy event. When someone lives long and everybody knows it is time to go, a few tears are shed and the survivors get together after the service with red eyes and a few sniffles and say "Do you remember when..?" and everybody chuckles. This service wasn't like that and Kelly was buried in the cemetery in Newport within earshot of the Pacific Ocean with big Sitka spruce trees like in Alaska.
Gramo Gertine was there and so was Grampo Conrad. Grampo had been in a coffin once when a blast in the copper mine went off prematurely. The company had summoned Gramo and told her that Conrad was dead and to come get the body. Gramo took one look and said (in Norwegian), "He's not dead." Grampo went for a 24 hour ride in the baggage car to Bergen where Gramo had him hauled to the hospital in his coffin where somebody finally decided to humor the crazy woman from the hinterland and look at her husband's corpse. Grampo survived and immediately decided upon a career change far, far from Norway.
After the funeral Linda threw off her new dress and put on her worn-out every day dress. Gma mechanically picked it up and put it on a hanger and held it out to Linda.
"I don't want it! I don't ever want to see that dress again-- send it to the Norwegian cousins!"
The Norwegians had just finished hosting the Nazis for five years and their guests had stolen everything that wasn't nailed down. "The Norwegian cousins" were grateful for a once-worn dress or any other.
Time passed and Lee was killed the next year or so in another logging accident. Eldon must not be a lucky name in the woods. Gma grew morose and silent and ignored everybody. Eventually she pulled out of it and worked at a drapery studio in Lake Oswego, commuting to the house on Bear Creek on the weekend. She started speaking Norwegian again and Linda, married now with her own children, picked it up too. Gma had never spoken it since the teacher who dubbed her "Pat" had called it "that horrible foreign language."
Gma started flying to Norway in the 70s to visit her relatives and the tiny town where she was born near the Swedish border. Eventually Linda decided to go along and after planes and trains, she found herself in Gma's home town. I am embarrassed to tell you I don't remember its name, but it is just north of the arctic circle. Tired from the long trip, Linda was shown to her room. There, hanging on the wall was the faded brown and white checked dress. The Norwegian cousins were all tall while Linda was short like Gma Pat. One of the cousins (Rigmar, I think it was) told Linda that she had worn the dress briefly but then became too big for it. But she always liked it and so never got rid of it. Maybe it made her think of "the American cousins."
Gma Pat died shortly after my wedding in '93. A great-great-grand daughter is named Austree--but everybody calls her Pat.
This story was patched together from my recollections of conversations over the years. I winged it in a few places and I have no doubt that some of the detail and sequence is wrong, but I'm sure it is pretty close.
Norm
Copyright © 2007 by Norm Maxwell
Norm Maxwell is the author of a novel in progress, Banjo Lane, a comic tragedy about meth users in Lane County. He is a regular contributor to West By Northwest.org. Norm Maxwell received the 2004 Best of West By Northwest award for his article, The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King. Tens of thousands of readers have "voted" with their mouse by their selection of this story. Visit Norm Maxwell's other pieces about land use, firefighting and life in the country and more at West By Northwest.org.
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(Editor's note–Norm's "Dead Cars" story inspired a feature story in the Register Guard, "Heaps of trouble in the woods.")
Norm's Notebook: Norm's Notebook: Saving Fish Creek, One Dead Car at a Time
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Norm's Notebook: Is There Life After Fire?
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Norm's Notebook: The Mystery Corner of Section 37
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Norm's Notebook: A Winnebago, Motorhome That Is
Norm's Notebook: Measure 37 Fallout
Norm's Notebook: The Wayward Bus
Norm's Notebook: New Bike and The Three Acre Wood
Norm's Notebook: A Helicopter and a Hometown
Norm's Notebook: A Different Kind of Pre-Emptive Strike
Norm's Notebook: "Goodbye Dear, I'll be Home in a Year"
A Homey Homage to the Homelite: The Stone Age of Powersawing
Take Two: Jackson Road
Norm's Notebook: Battling Broom
Norm's Notebook: A Last Look from the Big Rabbit
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Norm's Notebook: A Few Acres, a Few Chickens–Who Is Living on the Land Now
Remembering the 30 Mile Fire
Old Men and Fire
The Fire of South Canyon: Remembering Storm King
Wee-wee for BB
Norm's Notebook: The Story of the Spruce Tree, and Mosby Creek, a New Land Use Lot Adjustment
Mentoring Military Style
Three Dollar Hammer
Remember Fire Road
Home, Home on Fire Road and more.
© Copyright 2000-2006 by West By Northwest.org
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