Days of Vashon

When I was a boy of 10 or 12, my family had 5 acres at Cove and we loved every square foot of it.  There was a story for every part of it.  One day I nearly drowned my brother Mike on purpose; or at least he thought so.

Dad needed money for the mortgage on the property; we didn’t have much   He was working for the plumbers’ union, selling memberships.  His salary was $600 per month.  It wasn’t enough.  Selling the big fir trees between the house and the beach was a way to pay the mortgage.  He called Cleve Bard and made arrangements to sell some 1200 year old trees that were 6 feet in diameter on the stump.

The stumps were so big that we kids would climb up and play on them. We hid our stash in a hole in one of the stumps.  We called cigarettes “juds”, a code word.  We had stolen a fruit jar from Mom to keep the juds and lighter dry and preferred Herbert Tareytons because they were longer than our Mother’s Camels and tasted better.  Kit’s Mothersmoked Tareytons and he stole them and his Mother’s lighter from home.

 One day that summer, Kit, a neighbor and part of our gang fell out of the big fir tree beside the garage.  Kit was a wiry little guy with big ears and dark skin, he looked like a monkey. He could have hurt himself seriously, but didn’t. A branch broke and we heard Kit screaming 30 feet up and down he came, bouncing on the branches. It was a big tree and Kit hit the ground hard, and cried all the way home.

Cleve felled the giant fir trees and drove a D-8 cat to drag the logs down the creek to the beach.  It was quite a mess.  The logs were rolled onto the beach at low tide and chained into a raft of logs or boom as it was called, to await the coming of the tide.

It took Cleve all summer to sell the boom, and we would go down to the beach at high tide and run on the logs, buck-naked, because we could do it. The chained logs containing the boom were more stable and safer than running in the middle.  In the middle, it was very dangerous.  If the logs parted when you jumped or slipped off, they could close over the top of you.

Dale and I got charged up and headed for the beach.  Dale was a big fat guy who would take us home with him and bribe us for our loyalty with peanut butter sandwiches that were two inches thick with great slabs of butter.  We didn’t like Dale bribing us.  We took Kit and little brother Mike with us.  “Let’s play naked Indian”, Kit said.  We had to take all our clothes off to play naked Indian and no girls were allowed except for once, but I’m not allowed to talk about it.

It looked like a good day to run on the logs; not too many freighter waves, which made the logs rock and roll and made it dangerous and hard to stay on top.  Little brother Mike and I were closer to shore when I heard a boat noise.  I knew the sound.  It was Cleve coming back to check on his boom.  His old workboat went tut-tut- tut- tut.  Our necks would be in a noose if we were caught running the logs.

There was an open space between our log and the next one.   I told Mike to jump in the water quick or there was going to be “hell to pay” if we were caught.  We hunkered down behind our log so Cleve couldn’t see us as the work boat came around the point.  “It’s too cold”, Mike whimpered and started to cry.  I was furious and shoved his head underwater lest Cleve hear him as the boat  engine had stopped.  Mike was coming up for the second time when the tut-tut-tut of Cleve’s engine told us it was safe to come out of the freezing water.  He didn’t really “almost” drown.

The tut-tut-tut-tut faded away as Cleve’s workboat pulled around the point to the South and we attempted to start a fire on the beach to warm our  shaking bodies.

Playing naked Indian didn’t always happen on the beach.  There was a big field of bracken or ferns across the road where we could hide and plan our attacks against each other.  The ferns and Scotch Broom provided hiding places and were a source of the preferred weapons.  Stripping the fronds from the fern created a fine spear, the pointy black root being the tip.  Shorter ferns were turned into long-knives which we stuck in our belts, the only article of clothing we had on.

We built small forts by lacing the tips of standing ferns together and proceeded to hunt down and kill other naked Indians or wreck their forts,   never knowing who actually won.

 Kit decided to build a fire to smoke the rest of us out into the open and failed because the whole field caught on fire and we got into a lot of trouble over that.  “Put that fire out,” I yelled at him to no avail.  We were out of there!

 Dad planted a cover crop of vetch in the field above the house which was thick and grew 5 feet high, thus providing us with a green jungle to crawl thru, making tunnels and little rooms where we hid with our flash lights and meager food supplies, like stolen cookies or purple plums from the Damson plum tree nearby.

 The bright beam of light came out of the tunnel to strike me dead.  The flash of the light meant you were out of the fight and you had to wait to see who won the battle.

 There was a barbed wire fence between our property and the Maybees.    Mr. Maybee didn’t mind us playing in his field as long as we crawled under the fence and not over it, to keep from stretching the wire.

 One day we found an old navy life raft up against the far fence, not easily seen in the grass, it was made of Balsa wood wrapped in battleship grey canvas that was pulling apart.  There were compartments in the sides, full of emergency rations that had been covered in rainwater for years and stunk to high heaven.  Most of the cans had rusted thru, except for a few which we opened to find them full of tasty pemmican, a mixture of meat and berries and nuts used by the Indians and adapted by the navy; which we dared to eat.  If the can were rusted thru, we wouldn’t touch it because of the bad smells, not because it could kill us.  We had sticks for paddles and one day we paddled that broken raft to the farthest parts of British Columbia, sneaking over the line where the Mounties couldn’t see us.

Learning to hunt on Vashon was a kind of religion in the sense of always pointing the barrel up or down and never at another person; or never lean your gun up against the fence lest it fall over and go off.  Another rule was how to get thru a barbed wire fence carrying the shotgun butt first lest you endanger the people who have crossed the fence ahead of you.  If you were the first to cross then you carried the gun, barrel first.  Hunting season was the only time we were allowed to wear our old clothes to Mass; as we were up at the crack of dawn, trying to find pheasant, the last of the hunter gatherers, or so we thought ourselves.

Uncle Jerry took me on my first deer hunt in his old 49 green Plymouth. It was dusk and a low mist hung over the field where two deer stood, hardly visible through the haze. It was cold but not raining, my eye trained to the little B-B on the end of my barrel. It was my first gun at 12 years old and had cost me $25 at McCormick’s Hardware, a Stevens 20 gauge-single shot.

Uncle Jerry was standing above me; I was on one knee and consumed with buck fever. “Uncle Jerry, Uncle Jerry, can I shoot,” I whispered?  “The buck has horns. I can see them”. “No,” he replied. “Both of those deer are doe.

Let them go”.  The “buck fever” had blurred my vision and I thought I saw horns on one of the doe.  I let the hammer down slowly, so the gun would be on safety. It was one of the many lessons we learned in hunting. We couldn’t take the doe but had a tag for the buck, if it had been one. I went home very dissatisfied, no meat for the freezer.

We always hunted as a family, that was the way it was. Hunting ducks at Portage in the fall with Dad and the dogs was the best.  We had Boots who was a Springer Spaniel that never greeted a car in the driveway without a stick or leaf in her mouth.  It was her way of greeting visitors.  And then there was the black lab called Pan who could swim halfway across Colvos Passage and not come back tired.  Both dogs were avid retrievers.

Boots was a “knothead” as Dad would often say when he was irritated at her.  One day he missed three shots in a row hunting pheasant and Boots took off to hunt for herself, I guess.  Dad was livid with anger.  She came back hours later with a gravely wounded cock pheasant in her mouth; she was very proud.  She had run the pheasant down and was bringing it home to add to the pot.

The gap between Vashon and Maury Islands was a flyway where the ducks, flying with the wind would come by our old log blind like bullets. The little Butterball or Blue Winged Teal were the hardest to shoot. The pellets from the shotgun were so slow, that you had to lead the ducks by 20 feet if you were going to have a chance of hitting one. The ducks had the advantage in numbers, in the altitude of their flight or the width of the gap or isthmus between the islands. Over 150 feet in range and the pellets would be ineffective. That’s why we always shot as the ducks were flying away from us; so the pellets wouldn’t bounce off their feathers; which shielded the body of the duck. The log we shot from was 200 feet from shore and so big it never floated away with the tide, but stayed stuck in the mud for years; until George Miller built a wood platform on it with a diving board made from a stiff old plank, that had no bounce. It was also a good place to launch rockets on the 4th of July.