VI
In my last letter, Nell, I tried to picture to you some of the beauties surrounding our new Oregon home; but I do assure you that it was only the preface to this wonderful Nature-book of the hills. I would like to tell you more of them; but as man can not live by scenery alone, and as you particularly want details of our early experiences here, not only the lights but the shadows, I shall have to go back again to those memorable days of January when we first came here. Green fir seen upon the hills is admirable; but green fir in the kitchen range is abominable, especially after being soaked by rain for three months. When first put into the stove, bolstered up with plenty of pine kindlings, it would blaze rather hopefully, until the moss had burned off and the kindlings had vanished, when with sighing and sobbing it would shed a few rainy tears, turn black, and all would be over. The most of our packing-boxes were demolished in efforts to set the fir wood on fire, but all in vain; it simply would not burn, and we had to go back to cooking by the fireplace. There we did fairly well, with a liberal supply of bark; the latter burning well here, but of no use in the range. While in this slough of despond, a man came one day to hang wall-paper for us. Hearing our lamentations, he suggested drying the wood in the oven before using it. Long may that man live and prosper! The curing process helped wonderfully,—only now the wood was too combustible; it burned out in a jiffy. We would fill the stove full, leave it fifteen minutes, come back to it, and not a vestige of fire would be left. We soon learned that the stove must never be left alone; one must stand there, with hand on the throttle, like the engineer of a locomotive.
The demand for fuel was always greater than the supply, though the oven was kept filled with it from January to May, except on baking days. Sometimes we would close the oven door, forgetting it until reminded by a great crackling, when, flinging the door open, flames would rush out in our faces, and every stick of the fuel would be found ablaze. I wonder we didn’t blow the stove up and burn the house down! Though we didn’t know enough to bake our wood without being told, we found out one thing for ourselves, and that was that when the wood was heated a pitch oozed from it that stuck to the fingers and burned like hot sealing-wax. Even after learning this fact, we kept forgetting it, and hurriedly reaching into the oven to seize a stick, we would shriek and dance around like Sioux Indians. All winter long our hands were blistered and seared. Once on the hand, the stuff stuck like a fiery adhesive plaster, and not all the waters of “great Neptune’s ocean” could wash it off.
Again our man of experience came to the rescue, telling us first to soak our hands in kerosene and then wash them,—a helpful though not fragrant remedy. We learned other things from our new guide, philosopher, and friend: first, that the wood we were using was “dozy” (we had ourselves observed that it was somnolently inclined); secondly, that if our “men folks” would cut or saw down a big tree, we would find that the heart of it would make a roaring fire. Now, we had suspicions that neither of our “men folks” had ever felled a tree, which suspicions were strengthened by their great activity in collecting bark, fallen limbs, and other woodland débris, and palming it off on us as something rather choice; but Mary and I, pining for the heart of that big tree, harped so long about it that at last the fagot-gatherers were spurred to action. At least we judged something was about to happen from a conversation in the woodhouse, overheard by us, which ran somewhat as follows:—
“Ever file one?”
“No; did you?”
“No. What the dickens shall we do?”
“Do? We’ll just file her, that’s what.”
Whereupon began terrible rasping, grating, screeching noises, which continued until the perpetrators were summoned to dinner. During the meal we were told they had been filing a saw. Though painfully aware of the fact, Mary innocently exclaimed,
“Filing a saw! I didn’t suppose either of you knew how.”
“Know how to file a saw!” exclaimed Bert. “Why, I’ve filed ’em, I may say, from infancy up.”
“Yes,” chimed in his shameless associate, “and if I had a dollar for every one I’ve filed, I’d ask nothing of J. Pierpont Morgan.” Scornful silence on the part of their auditors.
Soon after dinner there came a rapping at the kitchen door, and there we found the unblushing prevaricators, on their shoulders a saw about four yards long, one carrying an axe, the other an old tin pail half full of iron wedges.
“Whither away?” was asked.
“We are going, ladies, to hold ‘communion with Nature in her visible forms.’”
“Oh!”
“Yes, ma’am, we are going to draw near to Nature’s heart, as it were, and rive out a chunk of it to satisfy your insatiate cravings.”
We were then told that if we would glance up Mount Nebo about twilight we would behold a novel and interesting scene.
“Suppose neither of you ever happened to see a tree snaked out of the woods, did you?”
“I’ve seen ’em from infancy up!”
“Yes, and if I had a dollar for—” But our hearers had gone to rejoin the horses, which stood near, literally wreathed in log chains.
The cavalcade had not long been gone, before the rain poured down as if the bottom had dropped out of the water-tanks above. We pitied our men folks then, and their poor horses too, through that long afternoon. Sure enough, about dark, “silently down from the mountain’s crown a great procession swept,” but, look as we might, we could see nothing being “snaked.”
Passing the house, those misguided men looked so miserably wet and bedraggled that we considerately refrained from commenting on “the novel and interesting scene.”
After supper, when the inner man had been refreshed and the outer one was basking in the genial heat of an open fire, the story all came out. It seems they had found a fine tree six feet through, and thinking they might as well “git a-plenty while they were gittin’,” they had tackled it. “Good! Saw it down, saw it down!” But they never got half way through the bark, because, as Bert explained, “Every time I pulled on the saw Tom pulled against me.”
“Yes,” retorted Tom, “and what did you do when I pulled?”
“Well, old man, I said to myself, ‘You don’t get the better of me,’ so I just braced my feet and pulled too.”
“If you two men oughtn’t to be in an asylum for the feeble-minded! The idea of standing in a drenching rain this whole afternoon, trying to pull a saw away from each other!”
“But, Mary, we didn’t pull the saw all the afternoon; when we found we had struck a lignum vitæ instead of a fir tree, we gave it up. But we’ve got you some dandy wood; we will bring it down in the morning.”
“Snake it down?”
“I hardly know,—what do you think, Bert?”
“Better not,” said that gentleman, frowning thought fully. “Your team is just a little bit too light.”
The next morning I saw them unloading their precious fuel,—a preponderance of bark, and a few small mossy poles, about such as one uses to support aspiring Lima beans. I called Mary to come and see the “dandy wood.”
“It’s just what I expected,” she cried indignantly. “Snake it down! I guess not, unless they had poked those little sticks through the links of the chain.”
“But, Mary, they could have bunched them like cheese-straws, you know.”
Then we got to laughing, and fancying all sorts of nonsensical things.
“Wouldn’t these mossy little twigs be lovely standing about the room in vases, burning like those Chinese incense tapers?”
“Yes; or, cut in short lengths and tied with baby ribbon, they would make stunning favors for a green luncheon.”
“And nothing could be better if we were going to banquet the Modern Woodmen.”
In the fun of conjuring up ludicrous uses for our new wood, we quite forgot that it was not the most desirable for fuel. There is nothing like a good laugh to float one over difficult places.
Well, we never got our big tree until summer. Then the men were told by a wise Nestor of the hills that by boring holes in these large trees and firing them from the inside, they could soon burn them down. They eagerly pounced upon that idea, and since then we have had excellent wood.
Our souls were tried not only by fire, but by flour. Not that the flour was poor, for we ate good bread made of the same kind in the little town where we stopped when we first arrived. But the women there assured us that we would have much trouble with it until we learned how to handle it; and they were right. This flour was made from what is here called “soft wheat.” Put it on the kneading-board, and it would spread over it like batter on a griddle and stick there like glue. Try to remedy this by adding flour to make a stiffer dough, and it would crack open while baking and come out of the oven as hard as a baseball. As to cutting it, you could as easily slice a slab of wood. No, it must be mixed soft, and must not lie motionless an instant on the board, or it had to be scraped up with a knife. We remembered hearing that Boston bakers pound the board with the dough, instead of kneading it, and this method we adopted, though it required the alertness and dexterity of an East India juggler. We would clutch the mass, raise it high toward heaven with one hand, with the other dash flour on the board, then bring down the dough, swift as lightning snatch it up again, dash on more flour, whack it down again, and so continue to the bitter end. I tell you, Nell, when bread was mixed in the Ranch of the Pointed Firs the china rattled and the earth trembled.
Mixing was not the only trouble; the bread wouldn’t rise after it was mixed, though swathed and swaddled in wrappings until it assumed such proportions that we had to call upon the men to carry it to the fireplace, where it much resembled an enormous hassock cosily placed in expectation of a call from some Brobdingnagian of the hills. When the time came to make it into loaves, one would naturally expect to find some slight recognition of these warm attentions; but no,—there it was, as inert and unresponsive as a mixture of Portland cement or putty; and when baked it had a crust as thick as fir bark and as hard.
One day while moulding it into loaves, I thought, “I’ll just use some of this for biscuit, and give this family a surprise;” and I did. First, the loaves were baked, and put out on the table, where they looked as if they had just been exhumed from the ovens of Pompeii. Then, with beating heart, I placed my great venture in the oven. After twenty minutes of thrilling suspense the door was cautiously opened. The loaves seemed dried instead of baked, and were about half their original size. Just as I was debating in my mind whether it would not be nobler to burn them and thus end all, the men came in and Tom’s eye was arrested by my layout. “Hello! Look at Katharine’s geological exhibit,—four big round boulders; and what might these little jokers be? Geodes? No, they can’t be geodes; not the right color. What would you call them, Bert?”
Scrutinizing them carefully, Bert thought they “might be a sort of ammunition.”
“Not shells,” said Tom, hitting them a resounding whack with a carving-knife; “they’re too solid, and there is no fuse to ’em. Might be paper-weights.”
Wiping tears from my eyes with my pitchy fingers, hermetically sealing one, I looked up with the other and said,—
“‘You are pleased to be merry, gentlemen.’”
“Come, Bert, we’ve got to fly. When Katharine begins to talk like Shakespeare, she’s mad; but I’ll just take one of these things out to the woodhouse and bust it open and see if I can find out what it’s made of.”
We wrestled with this flour for six long months. While the bread improved some, it was never good. One day the groceryman gave Tom a different kind of flour, saying he had ordered it specially for “newcomers,” as they all complained of the other. When I learned that this too was Oregon flour, I had small hope of it; but, to my surprise, it made light, soft, tender bread, which was eaten with praise and thanksgiving.