Bob W*, Summer 2007 · 16 October 2007, 16:16 by Julie Loyd
Bob: I think this was one of the better places in the entire Northwest for herring. Of course, they fished it out.
:14 Julie: You remember that boat that came in, the Blue Horizon?
Bob: Oh yeah, The Blue Pacific. I’d row out there and the gulls would be around this boat, oh just a thousand gulls diving around there, it was rather an exciting time. I’d row out there and they’d say, “You want some herring?” and I’d say, “I just happened to have this washtub with me here.” They’d give me a bucket full of herring, they had herring just spilling out all over the boat.
:49 Julie: So now, the herring I’ve seen are about 6 inches.
Bob: That’s what I understand now. They were nice herring, about ten inches, something like that. Maybe a little longer, some of them. They were not huge. But boy, it was more fun fishing for those than anything else. You didn’t use any bait, you just had a little shiny hook, no barbs, and you’d just have a little short leader about five or six inches long and you’d tie them up on a leader, a fish line.
1:25 Julie: Lots of different hooks.
Bob: Yeah, oh, about seven or eight, that was about the standard number, far enough apart so they don’t catch into each other. The reason you’d have that short leader on there, when you jig the line up and down, the little short leader will flash the hook. You had a weight on the end of the line and you’d just go down to the bottom of the bay and then reel up a ways and jig a while there, and reel up a little farther. After a while you’d get in them and you just leave it in there when they’re biting like that. Once in a while you’d get a full house. But normally around two, three, four, something like that.
I used to have the dog with me, and he learned to know that when I was reeling up, there was something was going to happen. He’d put his feet right up there on the gunnels, watching those fish coming out of the water, he thought that was great stuff.
2:29 Julie: I bet you did too.
Bob: Then you’d be out of the herring, they would leave where you were. We’d start in fishing usually the big tides in June, those were the best herring tides. We’d start in up at Disney. There’d be a tide line approximately from Point Disney going towards in the general direction of Sandy Point.
You’d just stay on that tide line and watch for the gulls. Billy C*, he called them “bugs,” they were in the water, I think they were copepods, there were just jillions of them. There’d be a big brown cloud of these creatures. And then the herring’d be right in there, and then the gulls would be there and then these diving ducks that were down below, and it was a big turmoil.
Do you remember when those little fish were in down at the dock a few years ago? Just little guys?
3:52 Julie: Sand lance, candlefish? Tubesnouts? Eulachon? Anchovy?
Bob: Yeah, I think that was it. There were jillions of those too, a big cloud of anchovies, and there’d be a seal down there, just wallowing right through them, and then those diving ducks and the seagulls were there. Right down there where the dock meets the land, it was right close to shore.
4:33 Julie: I haven’t seen any diving ducks for a few years now.
Bob: They’re the ones that bring the herring up. When you have a herring ball, it’s the ducks that bring them up There might be just two ducks down there, and every time they move their wings, they got some white on the fore part of their wings, and with every stroke of their wings the fish just go like that, you know.
5:01 Julie: Up. That’s really clever.
Bob: Well, they fished the bay out of herring of course. That was in the 60’s, so it’s been quite a while for them to come back, if in fact that’s what they’re doing. I think you guys are right. I think you’re probably observing it correctly.
5:27 Julie: The last time we did a beach seine, we caught chinook, little ones, and Tina Wyllie-Echeverria says there are also lots of herring. The herring are on the bottom and the chinook are on the top.
Bob: I remember looking over the side of the boat and if the herring were up near the surface, it was just a big flashing silver mirror down there, just continuous, just everywhere, they were just right next to each other (laughs)
The old timers, you know, at Fishery Point, that’s where they smoked herring a lot. TheC*rbunch, there was somebody else over at Fishery Point, I can’t remember their name. But they took the smoked herring over to Victoria by sailboat, that’s where they sold them. They might have gone to Bellingham too, I don’t know, but they did go to Victoria.
I think North Bay was also a big herring bay, but I’m not as familiar with that bay over there for herring.
6:51 Julie It’s not as cupped.
Bob: What else did they have around here that we don’t have anymore?
7:01 Julie: How about the whales?
Bob: I’ve not seen as many whales, we used to see the Orca. When the A*’s lived down here at the Point, they saw some of the bigger whales. Minke? There used to be a lot of Orca here in the bay here. They’d slap around and occasionally you’d see one clear the water completely, when they come up. I was out there in a little rowboat one time the first year we were here …
7:44 Julie: Which was when?
Bob: Oh, in the fall of ’55. I was out there, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by these fish, these blackfish. I was positively … I was really frightened, I tell you. I just sat there, they were just cavorting around, all around the boat. These monsters, you know, they’d come up and they’d blow their breath out …
8:15 Julie: Can you smell that?
Bob: I guess you could, but I can’t say that I have, but I think that you could if you were in the right … They blow out just a little bit before they surface. That’s what the spout is. The spout is the compressed air picking up the sea water when they blow. They don’t have that moisture in their lungs of course. They start exhaling just before they get to the top and the moment they’re out, they’re inhaling. So they get it quick enough, so they don’t get a mug full of saltwater.
9:06 Julie: They were here for herring probably?
Bob: I think so. I’m sort of ignorant about what the whales do. I know they eat seal. I think when they’re in the abundance of herring, when they’re in a pack of herring, they probably take them in.
Julie: It’s hard to imagine them. Looking out your window, it’s hard to imagine whales out there.
Bob: Yeah. We were coming from Indiana, it was pretty startling, being among a bunch of whales.
9:51 Julie: Were you able to tie the disappearance of the whales to any event?
Bob. No, I don’t really know why they don’t show up here anymore. The last several years I’ve just not heard any … We used to hear them slapping around frequently. I guess they slap with their side fins. Probably upon occasion with their tail too.
10:24 Julie: The diving ducks you mentioned, do you have any idea what kind?
Bob: No I don’t, I’ve not been very excited about looking them up. When you see them, they really can cover the territory rapidly underneath the water.
Julie: You can look down and see them?
Bob: Well yeah, when they’re amongst fish. They just go like a dart. They have to be streamlined so that when they bring their wings forward it doesn’t block them off, their stroke is backstroke to make them go forward. They’re streamlined for that. It’s sort of like a design on a big ship. You got a sort of bulbous bow and the tail goes back. Like a fish. They have the least resistance that way, I guess.
Well, that isn’t very much information about …
11:43 Julie: It’s just right. Another thing I know you’re really interested in is gardening. You can talk about that.
Bob: I came from a long line of gardeners. I come from the Mennonites, they always settled where the soil is good. They went to the Ukraine in Russia. They went there because they were opposed to war and they wanted to get out of Austria. Catherine the Great let them come up there. They got this black dirt in the Ukraine. In fact, there’s a commemorative stamp of them bringing that wheat over here. It’s what they call the Turkey Red wheat. It’s real heavy. A sack of that wheat will weigh 145 pounds, it’s real dense. Anyway, they brought it over here from Russia. They finally got annihilated over there during the rise of the Communists. They had big farms in Russia.
And then they’re settled in Pennsylvania of course, where the black dirt is. There’s some spots in Colorado. Of course, Iowa, Indiana, Illinois. They dealt with the soil. They were farmers.
I don’t think much about what I’m doing in the garden, I just kind of do it like my dad did or my mom. My mom was the gardener for the kitchen table, but my dad raised the corn and potatoes and the cabbage, in pretty big quantities. The gardeners here on the island, B* and Rebecca and those guys, they got to know what they’re doing or they’ll go broke.
13:58 Julie: Yeah, but there’s traditional things that people do that a scientist would never think of studying, that turns out to be just right.
Bob: Yeah, my dad had what they called a shovel plow. He had two blades on it, and it made a furrow in which you could plant potatoes. He’d just plant potatoes in that trench, it’s just about the right depth for planting potatoes.
Of course then, we had the old corn cultivator, the same kind that Ken A* had for his horses. You’d straddle a row and you’d have your feet in a couple of stirrups and you can turn the wheels a little bit with your feet. You can dodge past the corn plants so you don’t wipe ‘em out. They used to plant what they call a check row corn. They’d have a wire stretched across the field that would have knots in it about every three feet. Then the corn planter, when it come to one of those knots, it’d plant the corn. When you got to the end of the field and got ahold of this wire, you had a big stake on it. You got to stretch the wire just about the same way each time. And then you’d go back and the wire was placed a certain distance over every time. Then you could cultivate both ways. Nowadays they don’t cultivate anymore, they use spray to keep the weeds down.
16:17 Julie: Unless they’re organic.
Bob: I don’t know what the organic ones do. All through the years you had to keep changing your machinery to go with what was coming up. Your older stuff was not economical to have just a two row corn planter, you had to have a four row corn planter. And then you had to have a picker-sheller. And then you had to have a kiln (?) to dry the corn. All this stuff, you just can’t keep up with it. I don’t know how the agriculture people can manage.
17:04 Julie: I think Big Business, they’ve just got a lot of capital.
Bob. The big guys, they just get a lot of subsidies. They get subsidies for crops that are over-abundant.
Anyway, I’ve always been interested in putting stuff in the ground and having it grow. That was just something you did. I don’t get down in the garden as much as I should be.
17:45 Julie: If our gardens had a contest, yours would win.
Bob: Back east, we had thunderstorms, usually, that would … We didn’t use irrigation on our farm. Of course now and then, we’d get drouthed out. Now all the big guys, they’ve got huge irrigation systems, big pipes and a great circle thing that makes a big circle of irrigated territory. You could see those from the airplanes when you’re flying across the country, you see these big green circles.
18:22 Julie: They’re really dramatic, aren’t they?
Bob: It takes a lot of money to get that stuff operating. And a big fat fuss too. There’s always something going wrong with it.
I was in the milk business for quite a while, I was a sanitarian that inspected the farms. The farmers those days, they were going through a big transition period of going into getting refrigerated bulk tanks in their milk houses. That milk is kept at about, oh, 34, 36 degrees, and when there were bacteria in the milk, when it’s milk, they don’t multiply, and when you get it in the milk house that is at low temperature, they just don’t multiply. ‘Course, that’s not the best philosophy of keeping clean milk. You should have the milk that goes in there clean too. But it’s my philosophy that there’s hardly any milk that doesn’t have cow manure in it. The very second that it comes out of the cow, there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip on that stuff. That’s when it gets contaminated right away.
19:48 Julie: I used to keep goats. I don’t think we ever had milk without hair in it.
Bob: They’re cleaner than cows, though. Cows have got this slimy manure. You just have to have good management to keep from lying down in it, and so on and so on. Subsequently just about all of them gets some manure on that udder. And then the washing job is always relative. These guys in the milking parlor, they got a hundred cows, they got to run through there quick as they can. You know the washing job on that udder is pretty sketchy. But, pasteurization easily kills the pathogens from that source. The ones pasteurization doesn’t kill are from dirty equipment. Where you got residues of dirty milk, left in a rubber hose or something, that bacteria count is .. See, that hose and what-not goes through a washing process, and those bugs that’re in there, they become resistant to heat. These are the thermodurics, they call them, they can withstand heat. You can pasteurize milk that’s got those in it, and they’re still there. So when you test milk, you have two tests, raw count and pasteurized count. If the raw count is high, that’s not so tricky. You can have a raw count on the milk but the pasteurized count will be pretty good. But that shows you that the pasteurization gets rid of those that don’t have that thermoduric capability. But the big thing is, milk ought to be pretty clean before it’s pasteurized.
I noticed on the computer yesterday they had an article about drinking raw milk somewhere. I wanted to put a note on the thing, I couldn’t get it to come up right so I gave up on it. It’s sort of startling to realize that just about all milk has cow manure in it. But if it’s produced fairly well, refrigerated and pasteurized, it’s not too dangerous.
22:45 Julie: What we’d try to do, we made cheese and we’d just take it straight from the goat and into the cheese pot and make it right then and there. The theory was that whatever awful things it had in it didn’t have a chance to multiply.
Bob: Aged cheese, it looses its potential for causing trouble. I think it’s got to be aged six months, this is for these hard cheeses, aged cheese. Isa down there, she produces some cheese. I’ve tasted, boy it’s really good stuff. She’s got various bacterial strains, starters.
Well, we’re getting off our subject here.
Bob: Chuck L* was trying to clue me in about how you have to operate out here. We just came out here, we didn’t have the slightest idea how you function on this island. We didn’t know where to get water, we didn’t know whether we could have a garden. For the fuel business, Chuck said we could get bark for our fuel. We lived where the M*’s house is now, that first year we were here, we rented that.
Julie: On the North Beach?
Bob: Yeah. We had this stove, it had a special draft thing on the door, it was automatic. It was a very popular stove. There wasn’t any insulation in that house, you could see out about anywhere, through the boards. We had a little pile of bark outside, oh, about six feet high. It was a sizable amount of bark, Chuck thought that might do us through the winter. Well, we had four Northeasters that winter and it just piled through that house. We were always standing right around this stove.
1:27 Julie: That was like living at M*’s.
Bob: Oh, that gets it right straight there. You’ve experienced that then.
1:37: Julie: Yeah. It was cold.
Bob: Anyway we got our fuel mainly by just chipping the bark off of stumps. Now and then we could pull the bark off of a snag. Sometimes you’d remove the bark on the lower part of a snag, the whole bunch would fall out and you had to watch out so you didn’t get clobbered. There was a great big snag right near where the airport is now. It had loose bark around the bottom, big slabs of loose bark. I cleared a little place in the brush where I could run. I had a long pole and I shoved it in that bark and then I had a pretty good lever. I started running up that trail that I’d blazed and all of a sudden this whole thing came down in just one great crash. It was a very foolish move that I made there. But I had four great big trailerloads of bark, this great heavy dense of dense bark, that was just dry as a bone.
2:52: Julie: So when you’re saying “big snag” ...
Bob; Oh, this was a tree, what’ll I say, three feet in diameter, something like that, it was a big tree, thick bark. I did get a winter’s supply of wood out of that one. That was a dangerous thing to do. And I had no experience with … The first couple years we were here we didn’t have a chainsaw, I just had a crosscut saw. When I built this house here I didn’t have any machinery, I just had a saw and a hatchet and an axe and a wedge. I had one of those big crosscut saws you know when you’re supposed to have a person on each end. Well, the kids would get on the other end. One of them would tucker out and the next one would try it and that’s the way we got the wood cut. Of course, now everything’s chainsaw. Dangerous arrangement. That’s about the most dangerous tool that anybody has ever devised. Now I don’t have enough strength in my arms to start the silly thing. I guess that’s a good thing.
4:13 Julie Most people I know have had some kind of near miss with their chain saw.
Bob: Coming over on the mail boat, all the specialized little things it takes to do on an island were very new to us. ‘Course we don’t think anything about it now, the mail, the boat … We used to have a better service on the water for freight than we do now. Bill C*r had a big Bristol which was 64 feet long, It was an Alaska fish boat. He’d get cement and lumber and stuff, they’d have it on pallets and he’d just hoist it up with his winch over the top and swing it over and drop it on the dock. Well, we didn’t have to lug stuff around, we’d just … Of course, when that boat sank, we had to change to different arrangements.
5:25: Julie: It sank?
Bob: Yeah, he had an automatic pilot on it. Oh, it was a grand old boat, it was a very old boat. It had a big galley. You could seat maybe 12 people around the table in the galley, and it had a stove in there going all the time. The deck hand, Dutch A* was his name, he was a real good cook, he’d serve you up stuff. They brought the mail. They were written up in Sunset Magazine about that freight boat. And then people’d start coming up. They had a big afterdeck, a big open space. They had chairs all around on that thing. People were coming up from California and whatnot to go on this old funky fish boat on this mail run and they’d make the tour around the islands. I think they even went to Stuart upon occasion. Now and then Billy would have a fast little boat, he would park the Bristol here and then he’d buzz over to Stuart on his little fast boat. Maybe he’d stop out here and catch a few herring on the way. (laughs)
But anyway, he had an automatic pilot on the boat. I think it was the night before Thanksgiving, I can’t remember the exact situation but there was a holiday right there. It was in the dark. He was going back to Anacortes with the mail on that boat. It was a round trip to Anacortes. He was in that big channel …
7:31 Julie: Rosario?
Bob: Yeah, Rosario. I think it was anyway. I think it was near an island called Sinclair maybe, within that region. Of course it was dark. He stepped outside, he had the radar going. This boat had a great big diesel engine. He got an oil can, I think so he could lubricate some valve, something about the valves, from just standing beside the engine. He looked out there and just right smack dab in front of the boat was this great big barge full of sawdust. It was actually the second barge. The tug that was pulling this thing had two barges on it, and Billy hit the second one. He made a dive for the wheelhouse. He was just right beside the wheelhouse when he looked up there and saw that barge.
8:39:‘Course he couldn’t do anything, the boat just hit the barge at full blast. I think the whole bow fell off the thing. The boat sank very quickly. They had a little old dinghy on the boat, it was not a very substantial thing. Well anyway, it was all shattered. Both Dutch and Billy got ahold a couple of the strakes off that boat to hold them up. Well, the guy on the tugboat, he realized that the barge got hit somehow, I don’t know how he knew that, maybe he saw them coming. It took him quite a while to release his cable from those barges. He had to try and come around and get these guys.
That took about 30 minutes. Dutch A* was a thin guy but Billy, he had a little stuff under his skin everywhere. He had to keep encouraging Dutch to hang in there, “Hang in there, stay up, he’s gonna get us, he’s gonna get us.” I guess they made it, but Dutch A* said he was never gonna take a bath again. (laughs) But there they were in that cold water for about a half hour. Of course, all the mail went down. This was some time before Christmas, and there was a bunch of mail going out, it was was going to go to Europe and so on, it was people sending stuff over there to their relatives or whatever. These mail bags they kept rising up over down by the bottom end of Lopez down there somewhere somebody would find a mailbag somewhere, days, weeks, later. I don’t know all the details but that was quite a story about all these mailbags and all the stuff that got lost.
So the Postal Department they said no more boats, so they started flying the mail in. Then after a while, we subsequently had this ruckus with Bill C*n. He was going to have a plat over on the airport, the Airport Plat, and we worked on the Commissioners rather unmercifully. (laughs) It was the first plat they ever turned down. Bill C*n got pissed at that and he shut the airstrip down. That’s where our mail was coming from.
So I told Tony, Tony’s dad knew the postmaster over at Anacortes, and I said, “Tony, why don’t you get that job of bringing the mail over?” Well, the Postal Department, they went back to boats again. So Tony got that job after Billy shut off the airport. Of course, that’s sort of a historic event.
12: 27 Julie: It’s all good.
Bob: It was a big thing when it happened. Franny L* was Billy C*r’s wife when the Bristol went down. Jim L*, we were living in the school cottage at that time, he just burst in the door that day and said, “Billy lost the Bristol.” You see, Jim was a sea captain and he would use that terminology, “Billy lost the Bristol.” It was a big thing. ‘Course, it was a big thing. It was pretty nice riding on that boat. We got all our big iron stoves, all our heavy stuff, we got it on the Bristol. ‘Cause they could pick it up, they didn’t have to wrassle with stuff, they could pick it up on the pallets.
And, one thing we used to do, there were very few people on the island, and in the fall like right now we’d start stealing apples. You know, up there behind the old airstrip, I think that was the old Raehorst farm, there were a couple of old-time Gravenstein apples up there, and boy, they were just beauties. Nobody was … they were not being harvested at all.
Julie: That’s my favorite apple.
Bob: The Tiburgers, they had some special trees here and there that nobody else knew about, some apricots and whatnot, and hazlenuts. (laugh)
Julie: It’s like mushrooms.
Bob: But that’s the way we used to get our apples, scrounge through the woods, off the beach. Bark and whatnot. We used to get a lot of wood up on the mountain. We’d go way up there from that logging operation. Now and then you’d find an old downed tree that had been there for a long time that still had a lot of bark on it.
14:46 Julie: When you say “go,” did you have a truck?
Bob: I had a car with a big trailer. That trailer now is used for the local bar here at the … The words, they just escape me anymore, I want to say something and I can’t say the word. That’s my old-timer’s disease.
15:22 Julie: I’ve been noticing that in myself.
Bob: You’re too young for that.
Julie: Yeah, that’s what I tell myself.
Bob: I like the outfit that Camilla had at that little play. She had that long scarf or something around her neck, draping down to the floor. I thought that was rather unique.
15:47 Julie: She likes drama in her clothing.
Bob: Yeah, yeah. Well, she can carry it off, too. It works okay with her.
One thing I’ve been noticing this year is that … Chris noticed it too on the north side. You know, the kids, they used to have bed shakes over on the north side, there’d be a little plateau of sand up above high tide. Quite a bit of territory. Boy, it’s not there anymore. I don’t know if that’s just a little brief interlude here and it’ll go back to the way it was or not. I had a house guest here the other day and he went down to the Point and he had difficulty getting back on this side.
It always used to be, even at the high tide, there’d still be some sand to walk on. But not now. I don’t know if this is a current thing about the ocean rising or a great big chunk of ice broke off down at the south pole, just a huge thing, oh, it would be as big as several states.
17:10 Julie: The latest thing I heard was that they expect 3 feet in 50 years.
Bob: Really? Three feet?
Julie: Yeah, but it keeps changing, so I don’t know if we should trust that.
Bob. That’s pretty drastic Bangladesh, they’re only about six inches above water level.
Julie Holland has dikes.
Bob: Yeah. The Dutch, they’re sort of like the Mennonites. They go to over where the low lands are there. See, over by Mt. Vernon, they’re always fighting the salt water over there too. I think that’s the worlds’ largest bulb production there in the world. A bunch of Hollanders came in there because that was their environment over there.
Julie: Yet to me, it looks American because there’s kind of sloppiness around the edges whereas when I flew over Holland everything was completely crisp. At least from the air it doesn’t look like they have any wavy lines.
Bob: They’re very tidy. It might be because they’re so close together. These guys over here, they use that big equipment on that, see, it’s all river silt, that whole flat area around this side of Mt Vernon, it’s all river silt. They’re using this heavy equipment on it. Some of those places are getting cloddy now, they’re getting clods in that stuff. That shouldn’t happen that way, they ought to keep putting enough greenery back in to keep that tilth nice. Because oh, that’s wonderful soil. You can raise broccoli over there like you wouldn’t believe. Broccoli or any of that stuff, just huge stuff.
1930 Julie: Dave and I, when we want to start a new garden area, the first thing we do is put potatoes right on top of the grass and then add dirt on top. On the theory that that will do something.
Bob: How’d it work?
Julie: It does something. I think it works, I think the potatoes kind of dig into the …
Bob: Yeah? Well, there’s another theory that the potatoes form between where the seed potato is and the top of the ground. One of our former County Commissioners, he was a writer. He was author of a gardening column in some Northwest publication or some magazine, I can’t remember the name of the thing, it was very popular. He said you could put a little dirt in the bottom of a barrel, and put your potato in there, put a little dirt over it and it’ll sprout and start up. You keep adding dirt around this green part that’s growing, you keep adding dirt and keep it coming up. He said you’d have a barrel full of potatoes in the fall.
20:45 Julie: Have you tried that?
Bob: No but, Bitte, she worked for a while. The type of potato he had was one from South America somewhere. And it was a terrific potato but the flavor was not so hot. But it was very productive. Bitte called them the pink-eyed Peruvians because it had sort of a pink sprout where it would come out. She called it the pink-eyed Peruvian. You could get a lot of potatoes that way. They’d keep coming out all along the way, I guess.
My potato vines are all dead right now and I should be digging potatoes, it doesn’t hurt them to be in the ground, even in the warm ground because it hardens up their skins. But I wish I had them in my, pit. I have a pit up here in the woods where I put my potatoes. I wish I had them in there instead of out there. I’ll do that maybe next week.
Julie: When you dig them, do you wipe them off or anything?
Bob: Leave the dirt on. You shouldn’t wash them. That’s what I read, anyway.
Now and then you get a potato that looks great on the outside and you cut it open and it’s almost entirely rotten on the inside. I mean, it’ll have a great big black void in there. I don’t know whether it’s some organism or some creature. I don’t know what it is. I took three potatoes up to Bitte’s the other day, she cut one of them open and it was positively useless, it was no good at all. But you don’t get very many of those.
I just raise two varieties. I raise Kennebecs, which are the main potato, and then the Nooksack, which is a western potato, it was bred out here somewhere. But the Nooksack is like an Idaho baker, something like that. Of course, the Kennebec is a white-skinned potato, light colored. It’s a productive variety too.
This year I’m planting my corn in … I do like B* and Glen R*, both of them, they don’t plant all their corn at once. They might even stick with just one variety and plant it every ten days, you plant another setting. I used to raise all my corn at once. Then I’d have a whole pile of roasting ears to give. I couldn’t use them all, so I’d have to trot around delivering all this corn. So this year I’ve got these successive plantings.
Julie: Your microclimate is different than ours. I don’t even bother with corn, it doesn’t get ready in time.
Bob: That’s right, you don’t have enough sunlight. Corn requires warmth, it requires calories. Where’d you come from?
24:23 Julie: L.A.
Bob: L.A? Back east, they have the warm nights, because the Gulf air comes all the way up. Everywhere East of the Rockies in this country you got the Gulf air. That’s where you sweat like a dog.
The corn will grow faster at nighttime that it does in the daytime, because light inhibits plant growth. You have a plant on the windowsill and it’ll turn towards the glass, to the light. What it’s doing is, the cells on the shadow side of the plant are growing faster than those on the light side and it pushes the plant over. Well, people say, “The plant is seeking light.” The plant doesn’t know what it’s seeking, light or not. It’s just that the cells over there on the back side are pushing it over. I think that’s why the fir limbs tilt up. Light is a big factor in plant growth. It’s a strong thing. Put milk out in the light, and it changes its chemical structure.
26:04: Julie: It has some kind of tinny taste.
Bob: Of course you know, you better not leave it out there very long, it’ll go sour. Other foods … you wouldn’t want to put your wine out in the light. It’d get rancid real quick.
Well, I think we’re getting off the historic situation here.
Bob: Well, I dug a well down here just above the high drift. I got into the aquifer in one day, just digging with a shovel. This was about a four foot square hole.
Julie: How did you keep the sides from …
Bob: Well, it’s all tight earth here. You get down below this upper stuff and you get into the … I got into one area of this blue clay, real pale blue clay, real pretty stuff. Then when I got into the sand, the water rose up about 18 inches up into the clay, the area that I cleared out. That shows that the water was under pressure. Well, the pressure was produced by coming down off the mountain. I mean, that’s the only place that you could get any pressure around here.
I was stumping around there with my boots, and the water was all turbid from the clay right at the top of the aquifer. I looked down in the water and it would clear up on the land side, you could see it getting clear from the land side. Pretty soon, if you left it idle, you wouldn’t mess it up, it would clear up the whole thing, pretty soon.. Subsequently when I pumped water out of that well with a slow pump, I couldn’t drain the well. But if I had a fast pump, it would pump it out, maybe 40 minutes or something like that. There’s a lot of water moving through here.
The best well on the island for a dug well is over at S*’s. That water comes in just like a creek and if you go down at real low tide below the S*’s, you’ll see that water coming right out of the aquifer right just above the sea water level. It’s just very rapid. And it doesn’t have any salt in it at all.
2:32 Julie: Why do you have salt? Or do you?
Bob: Well, they say it’s infiltration, but do you know what I think it is? I think it’s the salt that falls on the soil in a storm. The tops of the waves that are blown off by the wind in the wintertime when we have a windstorm, our windows are all salty. I have to clean them off several times during the winter because you can’t see out. I think that salt is seeping down in through the centuries, you got salt going down all the time.
We don’t have fast infiltration in the soil because it’s so tight. There are interstices in between the clay molecules. Clay is pretty fine stuff, you know. But there are little crevasses. If you dig down in the clay, you’ll see a whole bunch of roots coming down, little tiny hair roots coming down in a little tiny crack in the clay. To put water through that thing it’d be almost impossible, but you get some. You get some infiltration.
Maybe I am getting some infiltration from the sea, I’m not sure.
I shouldn’t be drinking any more sodium than I get in my food. My food I get enough, the salt I put on my potatoes, I have plenty of sodium there and I don’t need any more when I’m drinking water. And I’m supposed to drink a lot of water every day.
But up in here, I think the sodium content would be pretty low. They measure chlorides. Of course, that’s sodium chloride.
Down below, on low tide down here, the reason I put the well where I did, there’s a big patch of wet moist sand, even when the tide’s been out for hours, there’d be a big area on the sand that’s wet. Well, Chuck L* says if you dig right above that wet spot, you’ll hit the water you’ll hit the water pretty quick, and sure enough.
There’s another good place where you could dig a dug well, and that’s as you’re going around the corner going down to the dock from the P.O, there’s a little ditch on the land side there, and there’s water coming out of that ditch and right above that ditch, there’s a whole bunch of horsetail growing, Equisetum. Well, they grow only in a moist spot, that’s the only place they grow. If you dig down there, you’d get fresh water.
The well for the old Lv* house, the old structure is still up there, just above the dock. The water’s going through that thing just like a river almost. It’s not tight on top. It’d be more work to fix that thing up than it would be to dig a new well. Well, I dug a new well right close by that thing, I thought I’d be sure to get that same big bunch of water, but it didn’t work out. Water is sort of like gold, it’s where you find it. There are some indications on the surface that tell you where the water might be.
I don’t go for the dousing bit, but some people …. Fred A* does. There was a book called Henry Gross and his Divining Rod. He became famous because he found water down in some island down in the West Indies, where they didn’t have any water, he found a copious amount of water. Well, he became very popular. He got so popular that he would take a map and he’d douse the map, some foreign country or something, and tell you where the water was. Well, that turned out to be a big, fat farce.
But there might be some electrical connections somehow with water. I don’t know what all the gadgets are that might determine that, but I’m sure there’s something. You know, Larry W*, he was a douser for oil. He wasn’t a douser, he was a scientific guy, an oil geologist. I think it was a pretty lucrative business for a while.
7:40 Julie: I’m sure it still is.
Bob: I see the crows are in my transparent apples. (laughs) They just flew away.
Bob: One year we were at Neah Bay, and Mary was teaching. She had 42 second-graders. Half of them were Air Force kids and half of them were Makahs. Well, there was a certain amount of friction there all the time, between the air force and … Even among the adults. For example, some of the women from the Air Force, they’d go out on the Makah beaches and pick up these Japanese net floats that would normally be picked up by the Indians. Then they’d take them down to Portland or somewhere and sell them for some money and the Indians … When we first went out there, the beaches were closed to white people.
And in the school … See, the Indians of Neah Bay, the ones that are on the First Street, right next to the water, they’re the king pins, they’re the top flight. You get back a street or two behind, and they’re the descendants of slaves. And this still carries through. In school, Chris had friends with the number ones and friends with the number threes, too. But she got along with them, but every now and then there’d be a big fight between her girl friends. Now and then there’d be a big cat fight where they’d scratch and tear into each other. It was a difference in their culture.
1:35 Julie: Yeah, it’s still going on.
Bob: The Makahs, they used to go on down to Clallam Bay and whatnot and come back with a bunch of heads in the canoe. And that wasn’t just too awful long ago. That was in this last century. Pretty rough stuff. The Makahs, they were the top ones on the coast. I guess the Haidas, they were the big ones up north farther, but the Makahs were the ones down here. These guys in here, they were inferior, the Samish and so on, they were inferior to the Makahs. And the Makahs, they still know this.
2: 29 Julie; It’s interesting that you would measure superiority or inferiority by how warrior-like you are.
Bob: Yeah. Well, they were the whale hunters. They lived out there where the whale was. That was a pretty risky business. They got honor for that, being after the whale.
But that was Mary’s first year of teaching, after she got her degree. She didn’t get the degree until late summer and of course these jobs were all taken up everywhere around nearby, but there was that one out Neah Bay and by gosh they took her, just like that.
Julie: Yeah, my first job was like that too, they In a district where they hadn’t even got any applicants for the position. And I showed up the week before school started. I should have known.
Bob: However, Mary got along well, and Chris got along well too. We should have stayed another year because we were just getting kind of close to them, closer to them. We lived in a compound that was surrounded by a fence around the school. See, at Neah Bay the livestock run at large. Every night there’d be herd of horses tearing through the town, just ker-bang! There were a bunch of cattle, a bunch of bulls, and whatnot. So the school, they had a fence around that place. They had some cabins where we stayed and some of the other teachers stayed.
Julie: That’s like the mid ‘50’s?
Bob: No, that was later than that. That was ’65, ’66. I built the other half of this house that summer. That spring Mary was still out there in ’66. Quite a commute here. That was an interesting year.
One day I was walking home from the P.O. over there and I was walking with an Indian. They have this cemetery down there right next to the beach, and they have a little barbed wire around the thing, just one strand of barbed wire around the cemetery. And the reason the cemetery was there is because when they had the smallpox epidemic, they were dying so fast they just had people laid out on the beach. Then they drug them up just to the closest soil they could find to bury them. Anyway this Indian that I was walking with, he said,
“If it hadn’t have been for the Norwegian fisherman,” he said, “we’d’ve been out of luck completely, because we got some blue-eyed Makahs.” I don’t know which eyes are dominant. For color of eyes, one color is dominant and I don’t know whether it’s blue or not. But he claimed there were blue-eyed Makahs. But it was one of those fishermen that also brought the smallpox. It just about wiped them out. It just about wiped them out.
It’s sort of like the Indians, they can’t stand alcohol very well. That’s from the way their genes are, I suppose. Alcohol is in our culture way back when. I guess we can get by with a certain amount of it. Some of us can.
6:40 Julie: Not me.
Bob. Well, it’s pretty limited, even those that can get by with it, it’s very limited about what they can get by with. As any fool can plainly see, now and then. You better turn that thing off.
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