Monday, April 6, 2020

Liz Writes Life 4-8-2020


April 8, 2020

Liz Writes Life

It was so, so, so wonderful, to look out Sunday morning and see a steady rain! I said a prayer thanking God and was grateful when it rained again in the evening and woke to rain on Monday morning.

All of this stay-in-place stuff has made me very lazy, so I was impressed with myself when I went out on Thursday and hooked hoses together and started irrigating. Oh, things were extremely dry. I started on the rhubarb. It was only about six-inches out of the ground, but with decent-sized leaves. Made a huge ring-type of soil-trench around it and ran the water for 10 minutes, then did the smaller rhubarb plant.

While I was waiting for the water to soak-in, I used my favorite grubbing hoe and dug up some weeds and what I call a ground-hugging cress. I really don’t know what it is. The filaree is fairly good sized and I dug a bunch out. Oh, and then there was a dreaded Marlahan mustard about 10-inches wide! In the garden! One good whack and it was dug-up.

Some of the volunteer garlics are taller than the five-inch tall fall-planted garlic. Both needed a slight bit of weeding and little trench-building for the water to soak-in. Then, I watered the eight volunteer onions, lettuce and spinach bed, drenched the non-existent asparagus and the phlox that is two-inches tall. Decided the one-inch-tall bee balm should also get irrigated, along with hollyhocks, tulips and really wimpy short narcissus.  
Since I was zoned-in, I added another 50-foot hose and watered the boy-girl pink and blue blossomed lungwort, feverfew, snapdragons, more tulips and some Oriental poppies. Even gave volunteer California poppies some water, because they looked worse than wimpy. Can’t believe how the small lavender violet plants have scattered. Watered to the end-reach of 150-feet of hose and ran out of umph, so I stopped.

The weather man said it should rain during the weekend. But I really didn’t trust him, so I irrigated the rhubarb, garlic, lettuce, spinach, onions and asparagus, again, on Friday, with high hopes. No, I am not taking credit. Ha, ha. Just so happy we did receive some nice rains.
This extreme dryness was verified, when the USFS Klamath National Forest sent out the local April 1st 2020 snowpack report. Yep, it was not good as the snow levels were about 47 percent of average. Then, I checked the Sierra Nevada snowpack reported by the CA. Dept of Water Resources. It reported 53 percent of average. That is not good for farmers or residents in cities south of us. Darn it!

Family story

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my Uncle Charley Dillman and my brother, Steve Dillman, and their exploits using a helicopter to fix the American flag on the tall Etna flagpole around 1978. I opened my family history book and found another story about Charley, but this is during his teen years. Not as exciting as hanging from a helicopter, but might give us some perspective to life in the 1930s.

Charley told me that sports kept him in school. Scholastics were not his forte, but he liked the sports offered at Etna High School in the mid-1930s. He ran the quarter-mile in track and played football, but basketball was his favorite. EHS played against Happy Camp, Butte Valley, Tulelake, Fort Jones and a few other teams.

On one basketball trip, the team took three cars to Tulelake. This was on the old roads and I don’t have the faintest idea if they were paved or not. I also don’t know the makes or models of the vehicles. (Darn, things I didn’t think to ask about.) At the time, there were three teams from most of the schools. The teams were called A, B, or C. Height, weight and age were use to place the boys in compatible groups.

Well, this is a winter story, during a typical basketball season. Charley played on the A Team and the B Team was dropped off to play at Doris. Charley’s team won, but while beginning the drive back home, the car he was in became stuck in a mud hole – on Tulelake’s Main Street. The boys were told to get out and push. Sure enough, they got it out of the mud hole. The B Team beat the Butte Valley Team, so the guys were in high spirits as they headed toward Mt. Hebron.

It had been snowing and at some point, one of the other cars slid-off the road. In the snowy dark night, the teens got out and pushed the car back on. Going was slow and the three cars stayed together. The trip home took all night. It was just breaking daylight as the group drove through the City of Weed. There was no Interstate 5 back then, so they would have driven Hwy 99 on the West side of Shasta Valley through Gazelle. It likely took several more hours as they were still driving in snow.

When he was finally dropped-off at Holzhauser Lane, near his home by Etna, the morning chores, including milking the cows, were finished. His highlight was that, at least, he had gotten out of doing morning chores!
Charley graduated in June 1938. EHS was housed in the big red brick building on Howell Avenue at the time. Apparently, my interview with Charley (back in the early 1990s) didn’t include much information about the graduation. I did get a few wild and wooly teenaged stories. But, those exploits will have to wait for another day.

When the George Dillman family lived on Holzhauser Lane, they had to hand-pull-up buckets of water from the well. There wasn’t any running water in the two-story house and only a bare electric light bulb hung from the middle of a few rooms. Yep, they used an outhouse.

With this covid-19 virus pandemic, our lives have been drastically changed. In our reflections on our life, it is nice to realize that at least we do have running water with indoor plumbing, electric heat and lights. Sadly, sports have been shut-down in schools, along with classes and graduations. But, when school is in session, the students now ride in nice vans or busses and don’t have to get out and push their vehicle out of mud holes or snow banks!

Liz Bowen began writing ranch and farm news, published in newspapers, in 1976. She is a native of Siskiyou County and lives near Callahan. Columns from the past year can be found at: lizwriteslife.blogspot.com. Call her at 530-467-3515.

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