Entiat

August of fifty-nine we rolled into Entiat after a two month's road-trip.  Town in an uproar. Rock Reach dam ten miles down the Columbia was nearing completion, flood the original townsite.  Every structure that could be moved sat on new foundations further up the river bank.  Classic little main street downtown buildings razed. New highway cutting a wide swath through the newly scrambled town sight.  Wonderland for kids our age. 

The church owned a house for the preacher which wasn't ready for occupation yet, sitting high on a new foundation, so we stayed in a small house across from the school playground for the month of August.

Looking north from where the new church was built that year

Last thing before we left Savannah grandad took me and Justin out into the woods behind his place and cut each of us a ten-foot cane pole.  Lashed to the top rack across country, most of the green was gone by the time we landed in Entiat, and the river hardly more than a long block away.  Without a reel, ten-pound test - maybe lighter - tied to the tip, single lead sinker half a foot up from a tiny curved hook that threaded easily into a single salmon egg.  

This one kid who I mostly forget because they moved out not long after, showed us how to fish.  Toss the hook in upstream and let it bouche down past you, letting it swirl into an eddy behind a stone where the fish hang out feeding on tidbits brought to them in the current.

August is hot in that country and Entiat river water ice cold.  Felt damned good to splash around up and down the river bank, in up to the knees most of the time. All the fish within the radius of my little line scurried to the other side of the river as soon as I splashed my way into position. Didn't get a single bite, but Justin pulled his limit every morning. Dress them out with the garden hose in the shade behind the house.  Good eating.  Mom rolled them in cornmeal, fried in hot Crisco.    

Towhead kid two houses up took me on tour of the neighborhood first day.  Culvert to cut under the highway but we climbed up the bank to check out the construction site. Uprooted and moved lots of surveyors stakes, crawled around a bulldozer or two, then headed out onto the newly completed railroad bridge.  Long way down.  Fun to stand at the edge and drop surveyors stakes into the rushing water below pretend they are boats on the wild raging ocean.

Now here's where memory fails.  All these years I remembered this scene as me standing with the tips of my shoes hanging out over the abyss, dancing around the cross ties with no catwalk or railing.  One slip would have erased my entire life since.  Get the willies just to think.

The photo clearly shows a catwalk and railing on that side of the bridge.  Not nearly as dangerous.  Guess a guy could still trip and fall.  When dad looked up from the parking lot of the old church, located close under the new bridges, he thought it looked plenty dangerous.  A point he didn't hesitate to make with a switch across my backside as soon as we got back down off the high bank.

Same kid me astray another time that month, got my ass paddled again. That time the neighborhood gang was all sitting around under the backyard shade tree, no one else in trouble for taking off for a half hour up to the irrigation ditch without adult permission.  The old man made me go out in front of everyone and select the spanking stick.  The railroad bridge thing I could see, but not humiliation and spanked with a stick for something that shouldn't have warranted anything more than a stern word about telling them where we were going.

I'm all for nostalgia about childhood in the fifties. Free-range around the neighborhood, bouncing unrestrained on the back seat of the car, would have laughed a kid in a bicycle helmet off the block.  But the whole spanking thing didn't really add any value to life that I could ever see.  

Last two times in my life that the folks hit me, and except for one time MJ bit my arm and another time scissors flew across the room and grazed the other arm, no one has struck me in anger since.  Almost got in a fight with a guy over a woman one time but that's a completely different story.  

Sixth grade that year.  Mr. Long and a young woman new teacher to help out with the big class.  Forty of us crammed into that room.  Baby boomers.  Long, a short bald guy who came back from every break reeking of cigarette smoke and read to us after lunch every day commented one day that maybe Dick, the towhead kid who got me spanked* would clean up his language a little hanging out with the preacher's kid.  Not sure if he did, nor do I really remember course language from him either.

Seventh grade they hired another new teacher and split the class into two sections.  Across the hall at the other end of the building.  Dick and I were in with Mr. Borrer, first year teaching, college after Navy.  We thought he could walk on water.  Two or three memories of that year, my favorite because I am a sub teacher now, is the dried up old lady who came into sub our class and we gave her holy hell.  When things really started getting out of hand she would fain a cough and pull out a flask, take a stiff drink.  Cough medicine.  We felt same as if our team scored a TD against Twisp. Drove the old lady to drink. 

Wished I had a flask at school sometimes these days.

Best day at school that year for me, maybe the best day of my entire academic career.  A basketball game had been scheduled that took the team away from school at lunchtime.  Coach called me up to his desk, showing the zeros in his grade book delivering the bad news I was ineligible to go to the game, had to stay back with the girls.

So we are doing folk dancing and I happen to be holding hands with the girl of my boyhood dreams when the music stopped and the teacher said ok let's change partners and she says I got the partner I want.  Little extra beat to my heart even now.

Dancing, ballroom not folk was an issue in our house.  The church we attended before moving to Entiat, went by a rule book they called the Manual that dictated behavior. Ballroom dancing, or more precisely party dancing strictly forbidden. The job at Entiat represented a transition for my parents. For career more than theological reasons, dad changed his denominational affiliation from Nazerine to Presbyterian when he made the move. The new church took a somewhat less straight-laced approach to the rules of conduct. Movies and makeup and short sleeved blouses, dancing and social drinking, even tobacco were not strictly forbidden.  Our first movie as a family, Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments at the drive-in in Wenatchee.  Then, not long after it was Ben Hur at the Liberty uptown.  Realized we had been missing out on a fun cultural ritual, Saturday night at the movies.  School dances in seventh grade created an issue around our dinner table.

Justin wouldn't have even considered going to a dance or sporting event, but I wanted to be a part of the social circle in school and the folks found themselves in an uncomfortable position.  In a small community, if they had forbidden me to attend class parties it would have appeared to some as if they were trying to put on airs.  What's wrong with us that the preacher won't allow his kid to be part of the gang at school.  So, I was allowed to go, and of course, it was really fun.  Mom was pissed when she showed up a little early to pick me up form a dance and found the lights low in the lunchroom, girls resting their falsies on the boy's shoulder sliding around the room to sound of Gene Pitney whining about the crazy granite planet falling apart. Gosh only knows what she would have thought if she saw us Twisting again like we did last summer.  Fun.

After we moved out of Entiat I never attended another school dance again, although sometimes my buddies and I went over to the Coliseum after football games in Seattle. Saw Paul Revere and the Raiders and Marilee Rush but we didn't get out on the floor trying to bust some moves to impress the girls.

Sometime during our sixth-grade year, the last of the old town had been bulldozed flat and Rockey Reach dam closed its gates.  Don't know about others, but I had been expecting the lake to fill like a bathtub, surprised wake up the next morning to see the river apparently flowing along the same as ever.  Seemed to fill ever so slowly, but by summer the current had subsided considerably with a couple good swimming holes along the new shoreline.  A short walk down from our house, scamper across the highway and over an open area where we sometimes shot at gophers with Justin's little single shot .22, we discovered about the coolest possible swimming hole.  A cove had formed in the river bank with easy access to the water where the bottom quickly dropped off into a hole ten or twelve feet deep then up what had been the bank of the old railroad bed just three or four feet below the surface.  The tracks went through a cut at that point creating an island a few yards over what had been the ditch on the other side of the tracks.

Looked about the same back then

Scrounged out of a junk pile close by we dragged an old steel commercial kitchen double sink down to the water, called it the Hunley because we heard something about a steel boat that was famous for sinking.  I'm sure we didn't know the history of H.L. Hunley, but the but we knew it had something to do with sinking, which fit our craft to a tee.  She shipped water at a steady rate, slow enough to make it across to the island, dump the bilges then paddle back before the damned thing sunk to the bottom.  Not a problem in warm weather when we were swimming anyway, but lots of times we crossed in our school clothes when a dunking wouldn't have been so much fun.

One of my brother's favorite stories to tell his kids happened one day when cousin Jon was visiting from Seattle.  Ever the prankster, Jon started chucking stones at the Hunley when Justin was coming across, I joined in the fun.  Enraged that we wouldn't stop, Justin stormed up the beach with the boat paddle, took a roundhouse swing that caught me in the seat of my pants with enough force to lift my feet off the ground and stormed off home.  Jon swore that a cartoon-like cloud with the word POW actually floated up and away from the scene when I landed on all fours.  May have been an exaggeration, but who's to say.  I'm the only one of us still living and I was looking first at the sky then dirt.

The ore Justin smacked me with belonged to Doug Grimm, couple years older than us who made the ores to help power the raft he built for cruising along the shoreline of the lake.  Most of the time when kids build a raft it barely floats, but the one Doug put together supported at least four guys at a time.  Powered by a tiny outboard motor, putting along at about the same speed as we could swim, so when the skipper reached over and removed your glasses you knew he was about to toss you overboard to swim along with the raft for a while.  Blistering hot days, the cool of the river felt mighty good.  When school got started again in September Louie and I had been swimming every single day since classes let out in June.

Celebrating the youthful exuberance of President Kenedy, youngest man in office since gosh only knows when the nation was gripped with a physical fitness craze.  Fifty-mile hikes were viewed as patriotic, and in school, a program of physical fitness testing became a part of the PE curriculum.  I easily did forty-nine push-ups, why not one more, I don't know? Also did well in other activities.  Scored Superior when Mr. Borrer added up points at the end of the test.

The next fall at Jane Adams Junior High School I got a lesson in how sports are in the head, not the muscles.  After a nearly equally active summer, I scored Inferior on the same set of fitness tests.  Hated that school with a vehement passion felt intimidated by the teachers and other students,  beat down and intimidated in the confusing rush of city life.  Couldn't do a damned thing the test.


Eighth-grade year they put us all back together in one room with coach Borrer leading the gang.  I struggled with math and every third word of my writing was misspelled but tried to carve out a little niche for myself as class joker.  When Mr. Borrer came up with the idea to do a class newspaper as our language arts for that year, Loui and I came up with the idea to do an advice column, Dear Pauline.  

He and I were totally into MAD magazine, made up most if not all of the letters we published and the responses trying to imitate  MAD magazine writing style.  No recollection at all of what we wrote for the column, but the atmosphere in the room during newspaper period are vivid memories. Mr. Borrer holding court at the old Royal, editing and typing our stories onto Ditto blanks, technological upgrade from the Memograph machine dad used for Sunday bulletin over at the church.  Kids busy working on their story ideas, the way the pages looked back from the office smelling of ditto fluid on publication day, feeling embarrassed on the bus home overhearing high school kids laughing at stories Louie and had written. 

In addition to being responsible for my last two spankings the first month we were in town, he almost got me killed during that eighth-grade year. A cold snap had the mouth of the Entiat river frozen over, leading edge of the ice just a tad upstream from the bridges.  Don't recall how we got ourselves over to the south side that day, ice further upstream probably thicker and we crossed without thinking much about it one way or the other.  Coming back we were closer to the bridges and the ice got scary thin out toward the middle.  We kept twenty or thirty feet apart and tread carefully, hearing weird creaks and cracks with every tentative step.  One or both of us could easily have broken through, current carrying us under the ice downstream, out for the count.  Finally made it safely to the bank, scrambled up and as far as I recall never mentioned it to anyone.

Railroad bridge incident may not have been a dangerous as I remembered, but this one makes up for all that, just a step away from eternity that afternoon.  

Late that spring dad landed a job as the associate pastor in a large Presbyterian church in north Seattle.  At the time I felt bitterly disappointed not to be going on to high school with that class, but retrospect it may have been for the best.

*Known as Dick in those days, when we came back to town the next fall around Thanksgiving time everyone called him Louie.  If I ever knew the story of the change it has been long forgotten.