The Family Farm

Although I was technically raised in Tacoma, my grandparents on my mother's side had a small dairy farm in Eatonville, southeast of town. It was where the farming bug bit me so hard, I've never recovered.

As a kid, I'd spend every possible day, hour and minute on that farm. I remember packing my suitcase the night before the last day of school. Classes were usually let out at noon, and by that evening I was in the barn milking the cows. Usually in August my mother would drag me back into town, kicking and screaming for a day of school shopping. I'd get done with the evening milking, go back to Tacoma, shop the next day, and if all went well, was back on the farm that night. I wouldn't come home until the night before the first day of school at the end of summer.

The fall of my senior year at Lincoln High in Tacoma my grandfather got sick and ended up in the hospital. I don't think I was home for a week when I had to move back out to take care of the cows. It was great. I'd get up around 4:30 AM and do the morning milking, then catch a ride into school with a teacher that happened to live only 5 miles or so from the farm. After school I'd ride back out with him and do the evening chores, homework then go to bed. That lasted about 6 weeks and I loved every minute of it.

During the school year, most of the vacations were spent at the farm, and any week-end I could find a way out of town. I was definitely a farm boy stuck in the city.

These days, not much happens out at the farm. My folks still live there, but we all know those days are numbered. They quit milking cows 15 years or so ago, and just a few months back, Dad shipped off the last five beefers he was keeping. For the first time in over 100 years there aren't any bovines on the place.

The farm is too small for it to support any significant commercial operation. The fields flood each year, which in one respect is good, it can never be subdivided and developed. On the other hand, for me, a berry grower, the land won't support the kind of farming I've settled into.

Eventually the farm will be sold to a local land trust. They are going to let it slowly go back to nature. I have no real issue with that. Our family will see that land come full circle, from my great-grandfather clearing it, to my dad farming it to the very end.

Such is the way.

Anyways...I was scanning a few of the shots I took out at the family farm over the years. Here's a few:



Grandpa wheeling a load of manure up the ramp



Mowing oat hay. Grandpa on the tractor, Dad on the mower



Dad tedding grass hay



Me riding the mower and getting splattered with grease from the spinning pitman



Dad milking



A young me, milking

Back in the Day

I went high school in Tacoma, Washington during hte late 60's and early 70's. No rural, small classes where you knew everyone, FFA, 4-H clubbing for me. At Lincoln High there were over 650 kids in my class alone. We all found our group of 15-20 buddies, had nodding acquaintances with maybe 50 more and beyond that you had no clue who the rest of those kids were.

In my senior year, I began taking my camera to school everyday. That actually took a little effort considering my camera was an old Yashica twin lens box camera, but she took good photos. Most of the shots were of girls in short skirts and hot pants, and my buddies just being, well, my buddies. Most of the shots went no further than a click of the shutter release and a session developing the film. Very few of the resulting negatives were ever printed.

Stuffed into sleeves those old negatives went long forgotten. I'd stumble across a strip or two now and again when searching for another shot, but they would quickly become buried in my ever increasing, totally uncatalogued landslide of railroad and farm images. And then I bought a scanner....

I've rediscovered these old images. Photos that have never seen the light of day have been brought to life through the wonder of the digital world. More than once a negative is scanned, the image pops up on this very screen, I lean forward for a closer look and then utter a "well I'll be damned."

But photos are meant to be shared, are they not? And, armed with these old images, I've been slowly, very slowly, tracking down some whose faces you see below. It's been fun. These days all the old high school insecurities, the cliques, everything that made high school a traumatic experience for us all have long since faded. These days, all who I've contacted are glad to know we are still alive.

So here's a quick look at us...back in the day.
















(Photographer's self portrait)

Defiance with Dignity

While traveling a Montana back road I spotted this one lone railroad telegraph pole. There was a time in the not so distant past these poles were as much a part of the railroad infrastructure as the ties and rails themselves. Tall, tight grained poles with their bottoms treated with creosote lined the right of ways. On their stretched out arms were glass insulators all of which supported the multiple wires required to keep a railroad running. Miles of poles and wires connected the smallest station in the middle of nowhere to the largest metropolis mountain ranges away. There was a degree of dignity associated with those poles and wire. They were as important to a railroad as the trains themselves.

Like so much of what was a part of past operations, modern systems of communications and train control have taken away the need for the pole lines. The majority of the poles have been chopped down, the miles and miles of copper wire long since salvaged. Even the string line of small town stations, once linked by those wires have long ago vanished from the landscape. And yet, out in the nothingness of Montana stands this one solitary pole.

Still strong and straight, its arms outstretched true to form I saw the dignity that pole once had was still there. But there was something else as well. With that dignity I saw a hint of defiance. Where all others had fallen, this one pole, somehow, someway has defied the onslaught of the modern world and remains in place along the old Northern Pacific mainline.

There is a degree of dignity in that pole's defiance. Defiance with dignity..maybe the world has stripped the pole of its original purpose, but it has not taken its dignity.

Our dignity...maybe like that pole, it's one of the few things we still can control. Maybe we too should against all odds try and defiantly hold to our own sense of dignity.