Going West

SEPTEMBER 11, 2000

GOING WEST

My father's father was a journeyman printer whose journey took him to Pen Yan, NY, from whence he took a bride west to Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She died there when my father was two. One brother went with the printer, my father was adopted by the bride's mother. She brought him back to New York state for a while but he went west again.

My mother's parents went west from Wisconsin and homesteaded three quarter sections beyond the end of the railroad, starting in a sod house, and eventually moving into town and building the first house there with indoor plumbing. They however scorned the piped in hard water for baths and routinely pumped water from the cistern in the back yard heated it in the kitchen and carried it upstairs to pour into the tub, at least in summer. (A well gets water from the water table far below. A cistern stores rain water. )

Mother went through the 8 grades my grandmother taught, in the one room schoolhouse on their farm. There was no high school in town, so mother was sent to Huron Academy, still in South Dakota. My father said "Your mother walked in to class, and that was it." They were married ten years later, after my father finished two years at Huron College, attached to the Academy, and four years at Cornell. Mother stayed at Huron for those two years, spent a year at Oberlin and a year at Cornell, worked for her father in the County Clerk's office, then went east to get married and move into a New York apartment. My father earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering, but a certificate in Electrical, because this new idea didn't merit a degree course of its own, for the class of 1914.

The first trip west I remember was with mother on the Nickel Plate Railroad. All I remember is finger bowls in the dining car, and the fact that the man at the depot hung out a red flag and that whole big train stopped just to let us off. On later visits I joined other kids to go down to the depot and watch the flyer go by. I never saw it stop for any body else.

After that mother drove out, so I grew up assuming it was normal for unescorted ladies to drive across country, and have been doing it ever since. I remember the Editor stopping to visit one morning when we had just arrived, explaining to me that population was usually 300, but was now 303. Grandma always managed to have new chicks hatching when I got there. Neighbors still had cows that were led down the alley to pasture, mornings and back in evening. The town ended in prairie two blocks either way from Grandma's house so the cows had only a short walk. Rain was a cause for celebration and we were allowed to get as muddy as we liked. Midwest mud is entirely different from eastern mud. It has the feel of finger paint, great for smearing on legs but not so good for construction.
You really can fry an egg on a South Dakota sidewalk, but I had to take mother's word for it, as no one was about to waste another egg to show me. I was allowed to carry eggs to the store and trade them for thread or whatever was needed. To play hopscotch we begged buttons, as there were no stones in that lovely soil.

All the women, as far as I could tell, caused their houses to be immaculate and their cookie jars full, before 2 P.M., then sat on their porches or visited some one else's porch. They pieced quilt sections, and tatted and crocheted, or darned socks, and talked. Grandma did exquisite embroidery with silk threads. I still don't understand how they had big dinners ready on time, or when they canned and pickled and preserved, not just garden stuff but pheasant and other game. We learned to eat the pheasant casseroles warily, to find the lost pellets.

My musical life started at Grandma's house. There was a piano and a bench full of music, particularly "I didn't raise my boy to be a Soldier", "For Me and My Gal", and "There's a Quaker down in Quaker Town. " There was also a book of school music by Hollis Dann. I pestered Mother to explain which note on the page went with which key on the piano. She was busy, and I can hear her yet, pointing to a note and saying, " Oh, that's middle C. Go figure it out." There's probably no surer way to learn the staff. I still sight read better than I practice. Many trips later I had a great evening in a small low ceilinged house at a Russian birthday party. The father of the house took out his flute, opened a big, black covered manuscript book, and let me accompany him. Sight-reading has its special rewards. Another evening we sat on the porch and heard another piano down the block, from the big house of a big family from which two of South Dakota's governors came. The first of them graduated from Grandma's one room school. The song I remember from that night was"Ramona."

My brother and I picked choke cherries out back of Grandma's house. This is a terrible tasting very small cherry, which makes the best jam in the world, at least in memory. No other fruit tastes like it. We were allowed to climb the ladder to pick. We were allowed to sit on Grandpa's grindstone bench and pedal. We were allowed to go down the alley to visit the backyard where a grandfather made stilts for us and our friends taught us to use them. There were lots of handy fences to lean on until you got into the swing of it. We were not allowed to go out the upstairs windows onto the porch roof after we had been sent to our rooms for some evil doing, but we did, and went back in before we got caught. I was allowed to help pull a coaster wagon around town while my friend delivered the doughnuts her mother made. They were raised doughnuts, just out of the oven, rolled in granulated sugar. No recipe would help. You had to be there. Once in a while we were taken out to the farm, by that time rented to a tenant farmer. My brother discovered that he could stir things up nicely by tramping on the roof of the pigsty. This was not an approved activity. I helped my grandfather carry water to very young trees and learned how valuable each tree was. When we went back as adults, after we inherited the farm, water was piped from the Missouri, the town was tree lined and shady, crops were growing. We sold the farm to the farmer next door, so to speak, and noticed that he was driving a Lincoln Town Car. We weren't.

One year mother took Grandma back east as far as Minneapolis for cataract surgery and I went to school in the west for 6 weeks. I stayed with Grandpa, and never asked him one question about all he had lived through. He had a big western movie mustache, and he mostly sat in a big leather chair reading a book or a newspaper while the women talked. He actually said, "They was a-makin' whoopee", about some town disturbance. He died at 85, after a Sunday working on the farm, without ever seeing a movie. My brother and I went to every movie, every Saturday. There were advertising slides, there was a piano playing, there was a bouncing ball for sing-alongs. We even went down stairs under the hotel to the poolroom. The height of wickedness that I saw was an older girl showing how high she could kick.

Chatauqua came to town and we went to lectures in a big tent. We went out of town to The Lake for picnics and learned not to run barefoot in cactus country. I went to church and Epworth League meetings and learned that there were lots better hymns in some churches than there were in the Episcopal Church. I never got over how friendly the kids were. They all believed I was rich because I lived near New York. During the Depression and the Dust Storms I heard men sitting on the general store bench telling each other that Wall Street was the cause of all their trouble. I didn't know about that, but I did write home to my father, when I was 12, that it seemed pretty dumb to plow up the land and let it blow away when leaving the prairie grass would have kept it in place. Sand piled up two or three inches high on the inside window sills. Grasshoppers ate the crops and then the tool handles. Hail cut up the roof of Grandpa's open sided car. We learned deep respect for weather and the hazards of farming.

One year my father drove and took Grandma with us further west to the Black Hills and on to Yellowstone. It was a proper family vacation. Mother caused a bear jam (a Yellowstone traffic jam) feeding a bear from the car window. I slept with Grandma in a tourist cabin and the whole bed collapsed in the middle of the night. My brother and I jumped out of the car and started running up the mountain, collapsing abruptly as our eastern bodies noticed the oxygen problem. Yellowstone Lodge served canned sweet potatoes. Yuck. My beloved box camera got stolen. But Grandma got the rocks she wanted for her new rock garden, and a good time was had by all. Grandma was the kind of gardener who knows the Latin name of every flower. The progress of her garden was a frequent newspaper item.

I still feel a little stirring of the hope of adventure every time I cross the Delaware and head west, even if I know I can only go a little way into Pennsylvania. I wonder if this is more because of books and movies, or those childhood trips, or my deep pleasure in the wonders of the plains and the mountains. When I first saw the Big Horn Mountains making shadows in the valleys I told myself I'd be back there some day. It's just as breathtaking every time. There are fine things to see and to do up north, down east, down south, and right here, but going west is special.