What the heck's an Oprah?

The thing about growing up on The Mountain without electricity was that we didn’t have certain things. No TV, telephone, or air conditioning. No light switches. No doorbell, no stereo, no curling irons.

What we did have was books. Once every two weeks, our mom would pile the four of us kids into the car and off we’d go to the public library.

To this day, I remember everything about that library. The smell of paper and binding and glue. The short shelves in the kids’ section. The colorful bean bag chairs. The sturdy, hollow ker-thunk of the librarian’s check-out stamp.

We were allowed six books each. I always finished picking mine first. I knew what I liked and I’d return time after time to the same authors, the same sections, and same series.

Our library had tinted front windows that gave it a sort of mysterious fairytale-cave patina. I’d find a quiet spot, and hunker down with my stack of treasures, feeling all cozy and snug and somehow wealthy, as though having a fresh stack of books in front of me was like Scrooge McDuck counting his gold. I’d go through my pile, sorting them and re-reading the covers and stacking them alphabetically, before choosing the one I’d read first.

Back home with our big cloth bags of books, my older sister and I would race to the two best reading spots – comfy chairs near both the wood stove and the big front windows. My little brother and sister would pile their books out onto the floor and read there. One thing was guaranteed – on library day, our mom could count on peace and quiet for the remainder of the afternoon.

In this way, our childhood was spent reading hundreds and hundreds of books. Classics and popular fiction and books about how things are made and mythology and fairy tales and biographies and historical fiction and everything we could get our hands on.

We didn’t watch soap operas, Dynasty, Oprah and Donahue. We didn’t tune into ABC After School Specials. We didn’t watch the evening news.  

And we didn’t miss a thing.

The breakfast of champions.

I learned to cook on a wood cook stove, like Ma Ingalls, but with feathered hair and hot pink corduroy pants. It was 1988 and I was discovering that when it comes to burning, all wood isn’t created equal.

First of all, a cast iron wood cook stove is a moody monster of a thing approximately the size of a Sherman tank. We called ours The Beast.

Once you build the fire in The Beast’s guts, the temperature on its cooking surface ranges from Satan's own inferno to the cool side of the pillow. You learn the geography of the cook-top. North side? Good for a simmer. Southwest side? Flash fry your eyebrows if you get too close. When you’re juggling three pans atop The Beast, it was best to get familiar with its various climates, lest you burn off all the knuckle hair you’ve worked so hard to grow.

Secondly, WOOD MATTERS. You quickly learned to recognize bad cook stove wood and good cook stove wood. The bad: madrone, oak, anything with even .01% humidity in it. The good: pine. That’s it. Just pine.

Dry pine wood is the best. Dry pine with pitch in it is like a magical combustible wand. Pitch is super flammable, and it catches and burns like some poor schmuck’s dongle after a date with Lindsey Lohan.

When you have to wait for the fire to kindle, catch and get to burning, then for the stove top to heat up (a process, when related to a cast iron surface the size of Montana, takes approximately three hours), cooking turns into an all day thing. Anything that could speed up the process, even if it’s a spot of pitch the size of a silver dollar, was like winning the lottery.

Third, in our kitchen, we didn’t have anything even remotely resembling Teflon-coated pans or fancy-pants Pam olive-oil spray. We had cast-iron frying pans. They weighed forty pounds apiece and got hot enough to melt tires. We never washed them, but wiped them out in a cleaning method called “seasoning”, also known as “building up an industrial-grade resistance to food-borne illness” (see: building character).

Near The Beast, we had a coffee can full of “drippings”, i.e. bacon fat and other greasy cooking run-off that was like molten lava when hot, but silky smooth and oddly creamy when cold. “Drippings” kept things from sticking to the seasoned pans, and also made everything taste like bacon, which wasn’t exactly a bad thing.

So, the cooking equation of my youth went something like this: using pitchy pine wood, ten pounds of bundled newspaper, eye of newt and the prayers of a baby unicorn, build a fire in The Beast. Heat up a cast-iron frying pan until it glowed red like the surface of the sun. Add a heaping mound of “drippings” which would instantly begin to snap, crackle and explode tiny incendiary devices all over any skin the cook was stupid enough to leave exposed. And six hours after you started, you had a fried egg.

Mmm, breakfast!

Don't worry; we shot the bear before he could eat the baby.

We had no shortage of wildlife on the mountain. There were rattle snakes, deer, raccoons, bears, not to mention our pet wildlife - two pigs, a really stupid goat, and many interchangeable cats and dogs.

The rattle snakes never hurt anyone, despite my brother and me going to their den and throwing rocks in there.

Over the years, we filled a coffee can with the rattles of snakes brave or stupid enough to come close to the house. We learned to be careful to bury their bodies where the yellow jackets couldn’t eat them. Because the last thing you want is a yellow jacket stinger full of rattle snake venom. Well, the very last thing you probably want is to live somewhere infested by rattle snakes, but the second to the last thing you want is a yellow jacket stinger full of rattle snake venom. We were just lucky to have BOTH of those things.

There were bears in the woods, but they only ever came really close to the house once, when my baby cousin was asleep in his playpen outside. Don’t worry; we shot the bear before he could eat the baby. (That would be a strange sentence for most people to write. For me, however, it’s no stranger than saying “The outhouse would be the scene of my epic battle for survival.” How was my childhood not illegal?)

Our two pigs got real fat and we killed ‘em and ate ‘em without remorse, and our stupid goat got tangled in some brush and strangled himself one cold winter night. His tongue turned grey and stuck out of his mouth. I wiled away some time poking it with a stick until my dad told me to stop.

Many, many dogs and cats came and went on The Mountain. We didn’t name them and often, one or two of them would just mysteriously disappear. They slept under the porch and roamed around in packs and kept the rodent population in check. They were practically feral and they always smelled bad and that never stopped my little sister from forcing them snuggle with her.

We didn’t have pets like other people have pets. Every animal had a purpose. The cats ate the mice, the dogs (supposedly) kept the rattle snakes away, the pigs got fat on our pre-compost leftovers and eventually became pork chops, and the pre-suicidal goat helped us clear brush. We were eco-friendly before eco-friendly was even a thing.

Rattlesnake Tracking Made E-Z!

Moving to The Mountain meant giving up some things. Pavement. Indoor plumbing. Electricity. But there was a trade-off: never in all our years of civilized living had we experienced the joys of a country driveway.

The Mountain was composed of 99% red clay and 1% other. The driveway was a long, curving, gently rising and falling scenic path and the means by which exactly 2,954 pounds of clay ended up on our mom’s kitchen floor every single day.

Every winter, without fail, a roaring creek of muddy water and debris would appear out of nowhere and wash out our driveway. We would spend the season parking the cars at the end of the driveway and hiking nearly a mile through wet, heavy, sticky clay to thehouse. By the time we go home, the layers of clay sticking to our shoes made us seven feet tall.

The first time it happened, I was confused. We didn’t live near a creek, yet somehow, a creek had appeared. It was a magical combination of Oregon rain and a geographical low point that resulted in us hauling groceries 5,280 feet from the car to the house. We learned to appreciate food in a whole new way and spent all winter buying groceries based on their weight.

Our dad built a makeshift board bridge over the washout. You haven’t truly experienced life until you’ve crossed a 2x6 wooden plank over a roaring flash flood creek, balancing a bag of groceries in one arm and a sack of potatoes in the other.

During the dry months (in Oregon, there are only two: July and August) the clay was a fine, powdery red dust that could find its wicked way through even the tiniest crack into our house. During the wet months, the rain turned it into a sticky, red, cursed cement that would instantly build up on shoes, tires, tools, the dog, firewood, my baby sister, basically anything that came into contact with it. I’m sure there’s an industrial adhesive application for that clay, but I never did figure out any good use for it.

The driveway was also where the willow patch was. A stern parental “Go pick out a switch” and you were on your way: a regretful walk down the driveway to the willow patch to retrieve a branch for a whoopin’. That mournful trip was like the footsteps of doom. On occasions such as these, the driveway may as well have been lined with black bunting.

Like for most kids our age, the fine, powdery red clay dust on the driveway made for easy rattlesnake tracking. Our dad taught us how to read the tracks to determine if they were heading away from our house…or towards it.

The driveway made a big looping circle that encompassed the house and about 3 acres of mostly brush-free land (country-speak for “a yard”). Checking for rattlesnake tracks around the house and yard was called “walking the loop” but The Mountain translation was: “Walk around the house and see if it’s safe to set the baby down outside without worrying some large snake will carry her off.”

The driveway was our only road to the outside world and the only road home. It was a curse and a blessing. It was long when you wanted to be somewhere and short when you didn’t. It was something I don’t ever want to have again, but that I won’t ever forget. It was a country driveway.

I have so much character, it's shooting out my ass

I was reminiscing to my kids about what life was like when I was their age and I got the feeling they think I’m full of crap. I could tell by the way they kept saying, “Mom, you’re so full of crap!”

My kids are wrong.

For instance, I remember rolling down the highway in the back of my dad’s truck. Not in the back seat of my Dad’s truck, sillies. In the BACK of my dad’s truck, with the leaking gas can and the toe-squishing spare tire and the sharp, stabby, dead pine needles.

As strict believers in Darwin’s law of the jungle, the bigger kids always laid claim to the coveted “spot against the cab”, where they were slightly protected from the 55 mile-per-hour, eye-piercing tornado of sawdust, twigs, and dead bugs. The younger and smaller you were, the closer to the tailgate you had to sit. That was the worst spot because your lips were all that stood between you and French kissing some bug guts.

My kids, raised in 3-strap industrial strength car seats until the 3rd grade, can’t fathom it. In fact, I suspect they wistfully think riding in the back of a truck was actually some fantastical form of tingly transportation.

The truth is this:

I was raised in a town called Trail, located smack dab between the Middle of Nowhere and Get Me The Hell Out of Here.

Back in the day, people lived in Trail for a variety of reasons. Generally, they had zero tolerance for a) city life, b) city convenience, c) city people. Some of them were hiding from the law or their red-headed ex-wives. But mostly, they just scorned the city and all its various elements. The population, counting our family, was approximately 16.

In 1987, my parents found their paradise there. Calling it “paradise” was totally subjective - a 30 acre mountain of old growth trees and dense brush and fat rattlesnakes and dusty red clay and hearty poison oak bushes and an enormous willow patch. We called it The Mountain.

Their plan was for us to build a house and some character*, not necessarily in that order. Now, anybody can tell you that building a house while living in said house is like hot pants on a truck stop hooker - never a good idea. But my parents were wide-eyed and square-jawed and determined.

This was a time long before children were allowed their own opinions, so my siblings and I were not consulted about the decision. And we didn’t argue about it either, unless we wanted to have the privilege of picking out The Mountain’s first willow switch.

So, I packed up my pink Rick Springfield t-shirt and my Wham .45s and said goodbye to things like microwaves and Night Traxx on TBS and electricity and indoor plumbing and pavement and you get the idea. (The Wham .45s ended up stuck on the wall for decoration… no electricity meant no record player, silly rabbit.)

We actually lived four miles outside of Trail. If you looked it up on a map, it would be on the meridian of Holy-Shit-People-Live-There?!.

Trail proper consisted of a post office (called Trail Post Office), a tiny market (Trail Market, obviously), and a tavern (named Trail Tavern). Folks in Trail didn’t waste energy coming up with witty names for their businesses. They left that to the folks in the cities.

As a kid, it puzzled me that if a town is going to have three buildings, shouldn’t one of them be a church or a bank or some other fine, upstanding civil institution?

Obviously, I didn’t understand what it must be like for an adult to live in Trail.

That tavern was necessary.

(*This was our parents’ battle cry: it builds character. The harder/messier the wound/work/lesson, the better the character. For example: My brother: “Dad, I cut half of my thumb off splitting kindling.” Dad (slapping a well used back-pocket bandana over the wound): “Scars build character.” If that’s the case, my brother has more character in his thumb than both of my kids put together.)