DANGER

What many people don’t understand about life in rural America is how dangerous it is for kid’s growing up.  As a young teenager you are thrust into the working life of adults either because of the need for manpower or because you are available.  There are many times when you are sent to work as a kid and the danger of that work has not been completely thought through.  And then there are your relatives who are trying to make a man out of you. 

My father was always having us do jobs around the house that were a bit dangerous.  When I was very young we had a sawdust burning furnace in the house and my dad decided it was my job to keep the furnace filled with sawdust and insure the flame did not go out.  It was a high maintenance job keeping that furnace operating.  You didn’t just adjust the temperature and then send the gas company a check every month.  Since we lived in a mill town there was endless supply of sawdust and when the driver delivered the sawdust it was great fun for us kids to help push the sawdust down the ramp of the truck and  through the basement window and into the storage area where we stored the sawdust.  My brother and I would get down on our hands and knees and shove the sawdust through the window and then fall into the big pile of sawdust on the basement floor.  We’d get sawdust in our mouths and eyes and laugh.   We’d shake off the sawdust and then run outside and do it all over again.   Every morning we’d get up and go down before breakfast and load the furnace with more sawdust and if the fire had gone out we’d have to light it up.  Imagine 10 year olds with a match and enough dry sawdust to burn down your house and that was how much danger we were responsible for.

My father also put me in charge of large piles of burning leaves or brush and think nothing of leaving me alone with gas and matches and tell us to watch the fire and don’t let it go out until all of the leaves were burned.  He’d show me how to keep turning the leaves and how to carefully tend the leaves but as soon as he left I took other measures to keep the fire going.  As with most kids I was a pyromaniac and when left alone I would just keep pouring more gas on the bon fire to see how big a flame I could make.  This went well for me until one late fall afternoon I got carried away with being Fireman Bill.
I had been pouring gas on this rather large pile of leaves and branches and I was really enjoying the orange flames leaping from the fire and the grey swirling smoke clumping above the fire and then drifting off towards the background of the late afternoon sky of dark clouds and darkening sun light.  The fire was really reaching a nice crescendo of primal proportions when I decided it needed just a bit more gas to really top off the greatness of burning fire.  I took off the funnel on the end of the gas can and just poured the gas on the fire with an energetic thrust and then I leapt away from the fire to be safe.

The fire exploded and a ball of orange heat lifted from the fire and crackled in the late autumn sky.  Unfortunately for me I had not leapt away from the fire fast enough and an arc of flame leapt from the bon fire to my coat and caught it on fire.  I started yelling and screaming that I was on fire and then began to roll around in the dirt trying in my own clumsy way to put the fire out.  After a few moments I was able to put enough dirt on my coat so it would stop burning and then a neighbor came outside on their porch and yelled at me if I was ok.  I yelled back that there wasn’t a problem and I was just fooling around.  She wasn’t close enough to see my brand new coat blackened and smoking profusely or she would have grabbed me by the ear and took me home to my mother.

I still had to go home and figure out what to do with the coat without my parents finding out but of course that was impossible.  So I decided to show the coat to my mother and take whatever consequences were going to be handed out.  I can’t remember exactly how my mother punished me but I do remember that it was a while before my father left me alone with anything combustible.

Punishment in our house was dealt with in a direct manner.  You were either yelled at or spanked immediately and then the subject was over.  We never got timeouts in our rooms as that meant our parents would have to spend more time with us inside the house.  As we got older there were more lingering suspicions of our character than when we were younger but for the most part you took your punishment until the next time you were caught.  My mother was the strictest disciplinarian of my parents.  She would grab us by the back of the shirt and spank us when we got out of line.  My mother was a small woman and as we boys grew she began to rely on a ping pong paddle to whack us with when we were awful.  She chased us around the house spanking us and we would run off crying.  As we grew older even this stopped hurting and being paddled by mother didn’t seem to be such a deterrent to stop torturing each other.  Then one day, after a spanking, my brother made the ill timed remark that hitting us with the ping pong paddle didn’t hurt anymore.   There was a carpenter working on the house that day and he advised my mother that if he drilled holes in the paddle she could get more force on our bottoms.  He was right and from then on we really had a renewed respect for the power of the ping pong paddle.

When we kids were really bad my mother would bring out the wild card of having our father discipline us.  We lived in fear of this because it was hard to know what he would do to us.  We knew our mother would spank us but dealing with my father was unknown. 
On a day when my mother couldn’t deal with us she would threaten us with our father and when he came home from work we had to face the music.  Most of the time he would yell at us and scare us into submission but when we were very bad he would take us into the basement and then into the furnace room.  He then pulled out a barber’s strap from a closet and held it in his hands for us to see.  It was about three inches wide and four feet long.  There were two separate straps and when my father began to emphasize what he was saying he would snap the barber’s strap between his two hands.  At that point we caved in immediately.  I don’t think my father ever spanked us with the barber’s strap but he scared us to our inner core.

But the greatest danger to our lives came from our favorite uncle Johnny Picken.  We loved going to his home in Brewster, Washington and spending two weeks there every summer.  My father would drop me off there for an extended stay when school was out and I would work in his orchard changing sprinklers, thinning the crop and then spraying the crop for bugs the old fashioned way with DDT.  We also had to feed and water about 50 head of cows that Johnny had as well.  Johnny and his wife Cora had three children and since our cousins were near the same age we would all work together with their oldest son John Robert as the lead.  Johnny had a day job as a civil engineer at one of the local dams and we were his work crew on the orchard while he was gone.  Our main job was to change sprinklers in the orchards as we lived in the desert and without enough water apple trees would dry up and whither away in a few weeks.  We would get up at 5 am and travel from water line to water line on a very old tractor that was a lot of fun to drive but at the same time it was quite dangerous to be a passenger on.  My cousin John Robert would drive most of the time and we would rod around between the rows of trees and have a great time.  Then one day as we were speeding around the orchard I was thrown forward off the tractor when we went over an unseen bump.  The tractor rolled right over the top of me and I thought I was dead.  When I opened my eyes again through some miracle I was still alive and unharmed.  When I had been thrown from the tractor I landed into a large rut and I fell just right into the depression of the rut so that the tractor rolled over the rut without crushing me.  John Robert and I swore not to tell anyone about this so that our fun would not be inhibited.  This would not be the last time that I would miraculously walk away from a life and death incident without a scratch.

One beautiful sunny morning my cousin John Robert and I were out in the back 40 tending to the cattle.  We had been changing sprinklers earlier and were a little wet.  It was turning out to be a hot morning so weren’t concerned with being wet but to get to the cattle we had to open an electric fence gate.  John Robert wasn’t too concerned with this as he had opened this gate many times but this morning his procedure wasn’t as smooth as it needed to be.  As he went to open the electric gate somehow he grabbed the handles wrong and since his feet were wet he became a conduit for the electrical charge and as his body absorbed the electrical current he shook and shook with the handles in his hands and then dropped on the ground writ thing in pain and then went still.  I thought he was dead and ran to him not knowing what to do.  He was knocked unconscious and it took some time for him to recover.  I spent the whole time while he was coming out of the shock praying to god for his revival.  I just knew I didn’t have it in me to have to explain to his parents how he had died.  It was beyond the scope of my 13 year old brain.

One summer vacation my uncle Johnny thought it would be a great idea if their house had a basement.  But instead of hiring contractors to come to the house and dig out the basement it was decided that my cousin John Robert and I would dig the basement by hand that summer when we weren’t busy changing sprinklers, getting electrocuted or spraying DDT around the orchard.  So every day from about noon to 3 pm we would climb down under the house and start digging dirt into buckets and then throwing the dirt onto this conveyor belt system that Johnny had built that took the dirt out of the hole and up onto the lawn.  We worked on this for a few weeks until we had dug quite a nice room under the house.  We hadn’t used any shoring devices to hold up the walls in the cave like room we had dug and that was our problem. One afternoon as we went to work my cousin John Robert took a might swing with his shovel at one of the walls and the wall began to shift and then go into free fall.  Before we knew it all of the walls began to shudder and then begin sliding as well.  Within what seemed like seconds the room filled with a sandy dirt all the way up to our chests and we thought we were going to die.  We were afraid to yell because that would cause the dirt to tumble even more and I remember seeing my life pass before me.  It was a short show I was only 14.  Thankfully the dirt stopped caving in before we were buried alive and my aunt came home and found us alive.  We struggled and pulled ourselves free of the dirt and I don’t think we were asked to work on the basement any more.

The most dangerous element at the Pickens though was the swimming pool.  My uncle Johnny was a great swimmer and he gave lessons at the pool during the summers.  His most famous procedure would be to through the young swimmer into the water and then force the kid to make it to the side of the pool without any assistance.  Sink or swim.
My father had taught me to swim at a young age and later I was certified as a life saver and a lifeguard at the city pool so Johnny decided to test my swimming skills another way.  He wanted to test my manhood.  There was a playhouse near the pool and to test our manhood my uncle Johnny would challenge us to run across the roof of the playhouse and then dive into the pool.  If you made it you were a man and if you missed you ended up in the hospital with multiple fractures and broken teeth.  Every night as we swam in the pool he was incessantly challenging us to make the leap to manhood.  It was a challenge that I hated.  I was afraid of the challenge because I was accident prone as a kid and I knew that if anyone would fail to make it to the pool it would be me.  But finally even the meek must meet the challenge and I climbed to the roof of the playhouse and stood there preparing myself for the lift off I would need to make the water.  All I could imagine was to hit the water to think of anything else would be torture.  As I came up in the water from my dive I remember yelling to my uncle “I’m a man.  I’m a man.”  We all laughed and everyone slapped me on the back.  No one dwelled upon the consequences of me missing the water.

Danger lurked just outside your door when you lived in my neighborhood.  On late summer nights night hawks would swirl in loopy patterns in our yard and the kids in the neighborhood would run around chasing them.  One summer some of the older boys decided that it would be great to make spears and then try to hunt the birds as they swooped around the yard.  On many hot afternoons the boys would meet in the Mundinger’s garage and fashion these spears.  A lot of effort was made to get the tips sharp and to make the body of the spear strong enough to withstand a javelin type throw. 
Since I was younger and had no spear making abilities then I was just a bystander to this sport.  As the boys felt confident that their spears were ready it was decided that the time was right to go hunting.  The night of the first hunt was perfect as the night hawks were out in numbers and the summer sky was still bright after dinner.  The boys threw their spears all over the yard trying to hit a bird and they were having no luck.  Finally in desperation Mark Mundinger threw his spear one last time with a mighty heave and the only thing it hit was me.  The spear hit me less than an inch from my left eye.  It required six stitches and I still have quite a scar.  But this was a rather common occurrence for me.
Back then kids were on the loose more and we would do crazy things like jump off the roof of garages, climb water towers and ride our bikes down river banks.  My parents used to have the barber give me a crew cut during these years so it would be very simple to take care of my hair.  At one point I counted 21 stitches in my head alone.

In the 1950’s and 60’s when a kid got into trouble it was his fault.  It wasn’t someone else’s fault if little Billy screwed up.  I learned this the hard way one time.  A major industry in the Okanogan was the orchard business and every fall would bring the harvest season.  It would also bring in the hobo’s who would arrive to work a few weeks in the harvest and make some money so they could go to California for the winter.  The hobos would camp out on the river bank near my parent’s house and we kids would watch them set up their camps with make shift tents and a campfire pit to cook on.  Hobos were so different from other men we would know in town because they had very little desire to work, wore dirty old clothes and they drank themselves to death.  One afternoon we kids were spying on a hobo as he went about his business in his camp.  He pulled out a loaf of cheap bread from a bag and then poured sterno alcohol that you started fires with for a camp stove through the loaf of bread and then he drank the filtered alcohol.  We had never seen anyone this desperate for a drink before and someone made a noise and the next thing we knew it this hobo was yelping mad and chasing us.  He had something in his hand and was going to hit us with it if he could catch us.  We scrambled up the river bank as fast as our feet would go and stayed just beyond his reach as we headed down the street to our houses.  The other kids lived nearby and they ran into their homes quickly but I had another block to go to my parent’s house.  I was running as fast as I ever have thinking my life was hanging in the balance.  The hobo kept chasing after me and was yelling he was going to castrate me if he caught me.  I pulled into my parent’s driveway and wheeled my legs as fast as they could go till I reached the back door.  My mother was standing by the door as I blew in and as she looked out the window of the door she saw the hobo standing there shaking his fist at me.  I had a lot of explaining to do that night to my parents and they made sure I knew it was my fault that the hobo had chased me home.

On my first summer home from college I worked in the lumber mill.  It was the only job in town that paid more than $2.00 an hour and it was symbolic for me to work there.  Omak was a mill town and every morning you would wake up to the sound of the mill’s whistle blow at 7 am which told the worker’s it was time to get up and then it would blow again at 7:30 to tell you it was time to be at work.  It blew again at 3:30 pm to tell you it was time to go home.  I used to make fun of this as a kid but when I worked at the mill that summer it was no fun at all.  It was reality.  I worked a variety of jobs at the mill that summer from working on milling pieces of furniture, to assembling wooden toilet seats for the National Park Service contract or building cheap wooden caskets out of pine.
I barely made it to work in the morning and could hardly wait for the whistle to blow at 3:30 to go home.  It was a hot and dry summer that year and as July wore on it kept getting hotter and hotter.  Then one night multiple fires erupted in the valley because of a thunder storm and the pursuant lightning strikes.  The next morning everyone under 30 working at the mill were pulled off the job and were drafted into becoming forest fire fighters.  We all gathered in the parking lot of the mill and loaded onto 4 school buses and were driven directly to the site of a major fire north of Omak.  As the school buses wound up the narrow mountain road to our destination we could see many trees on the side of the road ablaze.  We pulled over on the side of the road where a group of forest service rangers and men from the lumber company were camped making plans for how to fight this fire.  It was decided that my group would wind further up the road and begin to dig a 12 foot wide path between the forest that was on fire and the rest of the forest.  It was our job to clear all fallen limbs, leaves and anything combustible and rake up the dirt so that when the fire came to this path it would run out of fuel and die out.  This would work great except the wind started to blow and the fire was just arcing from tree top to tree top.  As the afternoon wore on some one at the fire fighting command post decided that the best way to fight this fire was to start a backfire where we would start the forest that wasn’t burning on fire and have it burn into the forest fire that was already raging.
At that point the two fires would merge and burn each other out.  With great preparation the new fire was set but as soon as the new fire began to rage the wind shifted again and started to blow the wrong way.  Almost all of the forest fighters out on the front line that day were just like my crew.  We were raw recruits with no training and very little gear.  I think I was given a shovel and told to dig until I could dig no more.  Orders were being shouted to us every few minutes and we were expected to hold our position trying to clear debris.  The sound of the fire building became deafening as the fire began to build in intensity.  As the fire roared up the hillside we were working on it sounded like a locomotive was churning up the hill straight at us.  I looked up from my frantic digging and saw trees explode like a piece of fireworks instead of burn.  The trees would just burst at the top and the trunks were left to burn. 

It was at this point that our management team started to yell at us from the trucks that it was time to evacuate.  I started to make my way back to the buses when I noticed the kid next to me was just standing there looking at the fire.  Everyone else was leaving him behind because they were following orders to return to the buses but I went over to the kid and told him it was time to leave.  He started telling me how cool it was to watch the fire and he wanted to stay there and enjoy the view.  It was then that I realized he was on a drug called mescaline so I grabbed him and drug him along with myself out to the buses.  The fire was all around now that the backfire had gone wrong so the plan was to drive off the mountain as fast as possible and hope the road was still clear.  The bus driver took off at a breakneck sped and we were about half way down the mountain when a big burning timber fell over the road just in front of us.  The bus driver alertly steered the bus off road and down an old logging road to a small pond and parked the bus.  We got out of the bus and sat by this pond with the fire raging around us.  The pond was protected from the fire and we stayed here for the rest of the day until the fire passed over us.  We shared that pond with many animals from the forest that also came to the pond for protection.  There were deer, raccoons and assorted forest creatures all on the perimeter of the pond away from us.

When the fire passed we were all happy to get back on that bus even though our faces were blackened with soot and our clothes had been singed from being close to the fire.  None of us had any idea that we would be fighting forest fires when we went to work that morning and somehow we had avoided danger this day.  Fire raged in the Okanogan for the next few weeks and it got so bad the sky was filled with smoke and ash all over the county during the day.  That night we slept in emergency sleeping bags made of paper and we got up and fought fires for a few more days until we were too exhausted to keep going.  When they sent us home I spent a long time sitting in the bathtub soaking up the hot water and trying to get the smoke smell out of my hair.


The most dangerous thing we were exposed to in rural America was cars, peer pressure and anger all mixed up on a Saturday night.  The drinking that is a part of daily life in rural America is staggering and so many times kids would drink too much and think they were cool driving at high speeds.  So many times this lead to death and for some reason we never got the message to stop this behavior because at all costs we needed to be cool with our peers.  I think it was also because the alcohol and the cars distracted most people from the fact that they were going nowhere in life.

Danger was all around us in Omak as kids and many times I got caught up in it.  But I was one of the lucky kids who had a safe home to go back to.  There were many kids who were afraid to go home to alcoholic parents or parents enraged with unspoken bitterness and that fear was the biggest danger of all.