- What do you do you do all day in the middle of nowhere??? Write! Create!
- I swear I did not Photoshop this!!
- September 25, 2010: At least the moon is taking the ‘hits’ for us. Look at the dent on the right side!
I live on a wheat ranch in eastern Oregon. The nearest grocery store is forty miles away in The Dalles.
I grew up in Dover, Delaware; Osceola, Indiana; and Gainesville, Florida. Go Gators!
Living so far away from cities and neighborhoods and people was a huge transition for me, but now I love it.
- Springtime: soft white winter wheat
- Mid June the wheat is almost all golden.
The nights here are so dark. And so full of stars! When I sit in my Jacuzzi at night, the view is incredible. You can hear the coyotes howling and the owls hooting. Or you can hear perfect silence.
Walking down the dirt road by my house is always peaceful. The stalks rustle and move in the wind, and when the wheat starts to turn and ripen it smells like you are in a bakery. Deer, antelope and jack rabbits are frequent companions, as well as pheasants and occasional elk.
The sunrises and sunsets are awesome.
We grow soft, white winter wheat. Most of it gets shipped to the Pacific Rim for Asian dumplings. Our wheat isn’t stretchy – that is, it doesn’t have enough “tensile strength” for noodles. I think some of it is used for cake flour, too, but Asia is our largest market. Lately we have been planting wheat with more protein content, so that its use is more versatile.
My father-in-law used to travel extensively for the U.S. Wheat League. He has friends all over the world that I would call while overseas. I remember the lunch his friend from Korea took me out for – wonderful food I would never have tried without him.
We plant in the fall, around mid September if there is enough moisture.
- We have three large tractors to plant 4500 acres a year, 9000 total.
We harvest in July and August, usually starting right after our four wheeling trip to the beach for the 4th of July.
I love harvest, even with the long days and heat.
- My cousin Karen getting a ride.
Friends come out to ride combines and the hustle and bustle of the time is exciting.
- The combine dumps into the bankout wagon, and the bankout wagon dumps into the trucks.
- Putting the trucks away after harvest.
My only real job during harvest is to cook dinner and make goodies, so I find the days long and enjoyable. Its fun to go ride the combines, or sit in the truck on the way down to the elevator at the river.
- Rufus, Oregon grain elevator. It is called an elevator because the wheat is offloaded from trucks, then taken up to the top and dumped.
- Biggs Junction, Oregon grain elevator
- Antelope at sunrise
- I love to watch antelope, but farmers hate them. They are the ‘goats’ of the plains, and will eat anything, especially weeds. This sounds like a good problem, until they carry the seeds to clean fields and defecate.
The only “bad” thing about living here is the wind. Sometimes it blows for days. I can’t imagine being in a sod house, or a pioneer cabin where you could hear it day and night. Perhaps that’s why people suffered from “prairie madness”! At least inside my house it’s fairly quiet – even when the wind is howling at 50 mph.
The bad has become good. We now have wind towers, and they will fund our retirement for years to come.
Flying jets uses quite a bit of fuel; now I can “give back” something in the form of alternative energy.
I’ve found that you have to be careful what you wish for. For years I wanted to “farm the wind.” Now we are. So much for solitude. The holes were dug in May 2007. My front yard used to be wheat: then it became a freeway. Huge semi trucks thundered by at fifty miles an hour. The worst part of the project, for me, was the huge, ugly transmission lines that were built to take the power out. I didn’t think about that part.
Of course, three years later it was all done. Huge white blades slice the sky around my house and now I love to watch them turn. I love how they look – huge propellers that remind me of flying. Its like waking up on a quiet airport. I heard you could hear them, and sometimes when I step outside I can hear the rhythmic swoosh. But it’s not loud, at least not louder than the wind is! It amazes me how many people hate how they look or sound. Compared to coal plants, wind towers are so clean. I know the wind doesn’t blow all the time, but I am amazed by how much it does. I never noticed. What seemed like a breeze is actually enough to power the turbines. They turn at 7 mph and produce power at 9 mph. Naysayers claim that they only produce power 33% of the time, but hey, that’s 33% more than nothing!
If you want to see more about our wind project, you can go to www.roadtobiglow.com Kevin and Colt are even on the video – if you click on the silo it goes to “Old MacDonald had a Farm” except its old McCullough’s…. Don’t even try to power up the Biglow site unless you have fast high-speed internet. It takes an incredible amount of juice, or it “streams” like crazy!!!
- The old…
- The new!
- Paradise.
The Macnabs were chased out of Scotland by the Campbells. Yes, they were probably the Campbell’s Soup Campbells. My husband’s mother father was a Macnab, and the family originally immigrated to Canada. Two of the brothers and two of their cousins moved south to homestead the Oregon Territory. This part of the Columbia Gorge looks amazingly like northern Scotland and I imagine they felt a kinship with these hills.
They married into the Van Patten family, another resourceful “clan.” Getting a crop into the field was the primary goal. The Oregon Homestead Act required you to eat and sleep on your land and have glass in your windows. Showing great resourcefulness, or perhaps just being Dutch, they built only one house on the four corners where their land joined in Sherman County. Each had a bed and small table in their corner of the house. You had to live on your land, sleeping and eating there. Five years later the land would officially be theirs.
I haven’t been able to “fact check” this, but they were told they need glass in their windows, too. Pane glass broke easily and was hard to come by. Ingeniously, they drank the pints of whiskey and placed the empty bottles in the windows, fulfilling the letter of the law.
Today my windows are real pane glass, nary a whiskey bottle in sight. My dining room is all that is left of their hastily built homestead house and I don’t know how much of it is original. Still, I feel like a pioneer. Twelve children, including my husband’s mother, were born and raised here. The house is small, maybe eighteen hundred square feet. Five hundred feet were added in 1930.
The uncles and aunts still make regular visits to their old home. They enter, often without knocking, to the home they still consider their own. I enjoy following them around as they reminisce, trying to see my home through their eyes…
“I swear, this house sure seemed bigger when we lived here…” they muse. I’m sure it did…the uncles are all over six feet tall now and have to duck through some of the doorways.
“Remember shoveling out this place after a dust storm? Sometimes we had to move out…couldn’t breathe. Come back days later, after the wind died down.”
I remember when I first moved in. I had to vacuum the windowsills. Farming practices have improved the situation. I added double pane windows, insulation and vinyl siding. No longer do I fight the raging windstorms that suffocated and blinded and sometimes killed those unfortunate enough to be caught in their fury. I still dust more frequently than those living in civilization, but at least I do it with a cloth and a can of Pledge.
“Remember when this bedroom was a sleeping porch? Many a morning I woke up covered with a blanket of snow.” Uncle Tom shivers, remembering.
“You could see your breath. Remember the icicles?” Uncle Pat adds.
Eight boys, farm hands all, slept outside in the freezing Oregon winters. They were hardy stock. All of them survived World War II, too. Uncle Tom was down to eighty pounds when he came home from the swamps of New Guinea, suffering from malaria. Their cousin Bill was killed instantly when his B-17 collided with another near Hamburg, Germany in 1944.
“The old barn…still there. Remember when we were playing cowboys and Indians out there? I aimed my gun at you and said ‘Bang.’ You dropped down and I thought you were dead! We ran for the house, sure we would be in big trouble for killing you. Then you wandered in, bawling, half an hour later, bleeding and bawling your head off. That bullet went in through your jaw and out through your cheek!”
Rose nods, remembering well. Her teeth and jaw still give her problems. Her only satisfaction was the whipping her brother and cousin received.
“How about the time you shot the hole in the kitchen floor? We covered it up pretty well for awhile…threw a rug over it and the kitchen table over that. Then Mom went down to the cellar and saw the mess…glass and peaches blown to bits everywhere. We caught holy heck for that, too.”
I can still see the repaired hole in my cellar ceiling. Winter nights when we put together jigsaw puzzles or play cards I can almost hear their rowdy clan…popping corn over the open fire and playing Ping-Pong on a piece of plywood Grandma Bee placed on the dining table.
The double-hole outhouse seat remains in the barn, testimony of days so long ago when, windstorm or blizzard, going outside was a necessity. The uncles delighted in hiding in the dark, leaping out of the shadows and tossing clawing, wild kittens on their shrieking, terrified sisters. To this day the girls are afraid of cats and guns.
The siblings remember windblown drifts of snow so high farming horses were used to break through and carry them to the one room schoolhouse. Today we occasionally have enough to sled on. Rose and Helen remember dresses made from potato sacks and being thankful for them. They hauled water by hand up the canyon in buckets. The same water was used first for cooking; then for washing dishes, clothes and bathing; finally, for watering the rose bushes. I can only marvel at their tenacity as I push buttons for my dishwasher and run clean water for my bath.
As solitary as life is here, it is hard to imagine the hoards of people who came by this remote place on their way west. The Oregon Trail ran right through our property. So deep were the wagon ruts that we can still see them in the spring as the new shoots of wheat push skyward. My nearest neighbor is a mile away. I rise each morning to the crowing of pheasants and fall asleep to the howling of coyotes. You’ve never seen so many diamonds in one sky as we can, lying in our Jacuzzi stargazing. You’ve never seen a lawn like ours, either: thousands of acres of lush, green winter wheat.
- Paradise.
We truly are in the middle of nowhere. The toolies.The boondocks. Country hicks to some…providers of a nation’s food to others. Our life is simple, our wants, few. Sunrises are fantastic…sunsets over Mount Hood, amazing. However, my idea of homesteading is far removed from days of old.
Most of the old homesteads have been burned or fell down. The few that remain, like sentinels in the fields, are a testimony to how many people used to live here, before tractors got bigger and more land worked in a day. My kids and I loved to four-wheel down the canyon behind our house to the old Happold Place. (See the fictional story I wrote about this house, “I Am The Ghost.”)
Springtime brings a profusion of wild onion, lupin and balsam root. Deer and antelope truly play nearby, along with elk and cougar and the occasional bear. Living here, in the middle of nowhere, is a paradise I never expected to find.
