December 11, 2002

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  To clear up an ambiguity from my latest blog:  I have not yet tried the new camera.  All the contemporary pics so far were captured with my “old” Kodak DC3200, a Xmas gift from two years ago.  The old family shots, BTW, were virtually all taken with my father’s Kodak “folder”.  It was almost an antique when he was using it, and I still have it, although cracks in the bellows made it useless as a camera sometime during my childhood.

  
  

  I’m waiting for the arrival of 256 megs of memory for the new camera before I start fiddling with it.  It has the capability to capture movies with sound, and the 16 MB memory included with it is inadequate for a full tryout of the camera’s features.  I ordered the memory even before I placed the order for the camera.  The two 128 MB cards got all the way to Wasilla (from Tennessee) before being sent back for an “incorrect address” (which wasn’t incorrect, but then it’s winter and how can any reasonable person expect Fed-Ex to drive all the way up this valley, eh?).

  
  

  On the subject of winter’s joys and going to the spring for water, some of my readers correctly divined my feelings.  I love this life here.  With my multiple chemical sensitivities and lung disorders, clean air and water are very important to me.  With my empathic sensitivity, the behavioral sinks of cities quickly become unendurable to me. 

  
  

  I love people, and hate crowds.  Even when my neighbors gather together, there are so few of us it’s not much of a crowd.  I enjoy those chance meetings at the spring, the lodge, or the general store… or, as more often happens, at the supermarket or mall in Wasilla, 50 miles away.  It’s one of the oddities we often remark on:  we live in the same neighborhood, but most often see each other on those long shopping trips to the city.

  
  

  Now, on with the memoirs:

  
  

  

  
  

  This backyard swing my father built for me didn’t last long.  I love swinging… the rhythmic sloshing of my middle ear fluids gets me high.  As a kid, I was never content just to swing.  I would stand up on the seat, try to get high enough to go over the top (never made it, but had some spectacular spills), twist the ropes and spin, and bail out at the top of my arc to see how far I could fly.

  
  

  My overprotective mother hated that, of course.  First, the swing came down.  Then later, my father built me a playhouse in that corner of the yard where the fence on the west met the garage/workshop on the south.  I helped him build it.

  
  

  He hadn’t had much carpentry experience.  He was an accomplished “grease monkey”, a shade-tree mechanic, and by trade was a machinist and welder.  Woodwork hadn’t been his thing, but he was always up for a new challenge.  I don’t know whether the idea of building a boat came first and the playhouse was a practice project, or whether the boat idea came later.  The playhouse was built first.  He collected used lumber at the dump, and my job was to pull out the nails with the claw hammer, and use the other side of the hammer’s head to straighten them for reuse. 

  
  

  I’ve looked unsuccessfully through my old photos for a picture of the playhouse.  It had two rooms.  The kitchen held this set of wicker table and chairs I’d been given on my second Xmas, and a sink and stove my father fabricated from scraps of sheet metal salvaged at his job.  The stove had knobs that turned, but I had to imagine the fire.

  
  

  An antique overstuffed love seat from the dump was in the front room of my playhouse, and in one corner my father hung a length of pipe horizontally to hold my “dressup” wardrobe.  The caption on the back of the photo at left, in my mother’s hand, says, “This is ‘Mrs. Brown’ bringing her baby to ‘Grandma Douglass’ while she goes shopping.”  I remember having four similar suits of different colors, in styles from the era of World War I, definitely pre-Roaring Twenties.  The skirts had been hemmed up but still had to have their waistbands pinned up under my armpits in order not to drag the ground.  They smelled of mothballs.

  
  

  Dressing up was one of my favorite forms of play.  Sometimes I’d even rope my friends into the game.  This “first wedding” shot predates my first real marriage by about 9 years.  That’s my playmate Donald in the hat.  My “veil” is a beautiful old lace curtain.  The flowers were wax roses.  How many of you knew that artificial flowers were made of wax in the time before plastics came into use?

  
  

  At some time after the playhouse was complete, my father spent a lot of time looking at blueprints spread out on the kitchen table.  Then he nailed up a carefully-spaced set of boards and blocks on the fence on the east side of the yard.  Next, he brought home several long planks, wet them down and forced them into the mold he’d built on the fence, to bend them to the shape for the bottom of the boat.  I participated in every phase of construction, fitting out and painting.  I don’t know how much real help I was, but I was THERE.

  
  

  At left is the boat at it’s usual dock at Willowood Resort on Weatherbee Lake.  In 1950, the San Joaquin flooded, and the owners of the resort rowed out on the rising waters, undocked our boat from its little pier and took it back to their living quarters in the resort’s lodge and store building, and lived in it until their rooms dried out.

  
  

   I recall the floods.  We visited the lake to see how things were, but couldn’t get close because of the National Guard.  Our friends the Hoisingtons, the operators of the resort, had left a message for us at the emergency center, explaining that they were living in our boat.  For the duration of the emergency, we did our weekend fishing elsewhere.  Besides the San Joaquin, my father also fished many of the trout streams in the Sierras, at Lake Tahoe, and on the coast, usually around Santa Cruz.

  
  

  

  
  

  I especially loved our trips across the Coast Range to Santa Cruz because we usually stopped at Big Basin State Park.  The park ranger there encouraged me to pet and feed the tame deer.  I’d be willing to bet money that policy is no longer in effect there, even if there are still deer in the area.

  
  

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  Our houseboat can be seen between my shoulder and my father’s head in the shot at right, and I think that light colored car on the right was our old Dodge.  My mother’s handwritten legend on the back says that this is the, “last picture that I have of Clyde.”  He’d have hated that.  Few people knew that his name was Clyde, and virtually no one ever heard that his middle name was Wilbur.  His signature was “C.W. Douglass” and he introduced himself as “Doug”.  This photo appeared in an ad for the resort, published in California Sportsman Magazine.

  
  

  I have another bunch of photos of little me to illustrate another self-indulgent “cute kid” blog, and then I’ll move on to my travels with Mama after Daddy died, and get into some shots I took with my own first camera.  Unless inspiration hits and I do something different, I think I’ll just go on and get the youth written down before continuing with my early years in Alaska in the ‘seventies.  The long hiatus since my last memoir blog has been partially the result of my bouncing back and forth between ‘fifties and ‘seventies.  I’ll get more done, I think, if I try to do one thing at a time.  Who knows?

  
  

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  • 3:31 pm
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