April 2024 Making Loam from Dirt

  • Change my life from barren to fertile ground, how?.
  • How do I attend to my soil?
  • What can lay waste to my garden?

The Old Wedge

By Eugene Marckx

Everyone in the family knew my grandfather was a grump. That might have been partly because we grandkids were always going into his workshop, taking his tools to make toy boats and tanks, and leaving the tools anywhere. In visiting my grandparents on the bay, I could not begin to see the huge freedom he allowed us. Later I came to see him as the grandfather of all handymen, who had installed electric circuitry at its dawning, who had strung wire for the first telephone service, who could build a house, put in plumbing, cabinetry, and furniture for it.

I later lived and raised my own family in a rental house he’d built. But when I was a boy I heard him blast the air with cussing if he couldn’t find a tool. His mood had been set in the Great Depression. He came from a decent family. His father had made good money in his business, but my grandpa wanted to farm, to raise his own food and sell his crops.

He worked for his father in Seattle as foreman of a crew painting hotels. When he married Grandma, they moved onto 80 acres they bought in South Puget Sound. With timber cut from that land, they built a fine log house, with a four-foot fireplace made of river rocks. There was plenty of food, but they couldn’t afford shoes for their children. Crops in those days did not have government price supports. Somehow, they never quite made a decent return. At the onset of WWI, he had to go back to painting transport ships a drab gray. When the war ended, they traded their land for a hotel and repair shop in Whitman County, Eastern Washington.

But they didn’t fare any better in a small town in wheat country. When it burned down, they moved back to Seattle. Grandma did piecework as a seamstress, turning half-blind with cataracts, and Grandpa got postal work running special-delivery letters ‒ two cents apiece. They lived at three locations. In each one Grandpa broke ground and grew garden vegetables for his family. This was his one solace. He could build up any soil into loam.

My uncle Harry, their son, sold a stack of Saturday Evening Post magazines each week and had to give the money to his dad. He couldn’t wait to grow up. But jobs were scarce. My aunt Aloha found a position in a doctor’s office, and my mother worked in a department store.

Then a surprise came into Mom’s prospects. Ed Marckx, the older brother of one of her high school friends, had been waiting for her to come of age. Whenever he came calling, her dad would disappear in the basement.

And so, she asked him, “What do you think of Ed?”

“I don’t like him. He’s not a union man.”

“Well, he asked me to marry him.”

“He did?”

“And I’m going to.”

Grandpa was not at the wedding, and he didn’t speak to his daughter for a year, only through his wife. Mom gave birth to her first child, my brother John. Grandpa, driving special delivery, found time to stop and see his little grandson. On his second visit she looked him in the eye. “Why don’t you and Mom come here for dinner ‒ when Ed is home?”

And so, the healing began. Just before WWII Dad started a bakery in Portland, Oregon. Since Grandpa had experience in construction and electrical, Dad asked him to build an addition to the plant and to maintain the trucks and bakery equipment. Through the war their relationship ‒ between a union man and a businessman, a Democrat and a Republican ‒ became quite cordial. Grandpa and Grandma gained stability. Mom and Dad bought beachfront land on Willapa Bay, a place to get away and rest. Grandpa saw a chance to further their relations into his retirement. He and Grandma bought a neighboring parcel. He built their own home and our beach cabin.

Grandpa was in his glory there as a gardener. The soil was brown sand that rain ran right through. He folded eelgrass from the tide into that sand, load after load in his wheelbarrow. Trace minerals in that mulch made strawberries, spinach, peas, red potatoes, and corn ‒ everything grow in richness, and a row of blazing dahlias leaned over the fence. Fishing the ocean surf, he filled a freezer with sea perch and sole, as well as razor clams dug on the tide and blackberries picked in the woods. When Mom drove us from Portland for long summer weeks, Grandpa made whistles for us from thin willow sticks, or kites out of cedar strips, newspaper, and string.

But he still wasn’t over the Great Depression. If he came back skunked from fishing or lost a few nickels in a friendly card game, the sarcasm would boil over. His mood might have seemed laughable, but no one was laughing. The man had lost out in one place after another, and, although contented now, he felt the thinness of that monthly social security check.

In 1958, before my high school senior year, I’d worked all summer in Dad’s bakery. So I spent Labor Day weekend at the beach cabin. I didn’t want to hang out with my little brother and sisters. I’d had enough of babysitting.  Mom was driving us to Seaview, on the ocean, so she could catch up with her sister, Aloha. I rode along to see my cousin Jack, who was a year younger and seemed like a brother. Although I lived faraway in Portland and had two older brothers, I had a lot more fun with Jack, who knew how to rebuild a Ford V-8 engine.

When we piled out of Mom’s 1950 Buick, she and Aloha sat and shared gossip. The younger kids had lemonade and cake with Della, Jack’s sister. I asked Mom if I could take the Buick along the Columbia River and haul back some snags for firewood. With all the clear-cutting of the Cascades in those days, logging scraps floated downriver and out to sea, coming to rest on the ocean beaches. That wood was full of salt, and burning it rusted the iron in a fireplace or stove. But wood along the Columbia didn’t have salt. It was prized by those who knew.

Mom looked at Aloha, who nodded and said she’d drive everyone to the cabin if Jack and I weren’t back. Everyone was going to eat there that night, talk, and play cards. It was called a cabin, but it had lots of space. Mom handed me the car keys, and Jack and I got away fast.

The Columbia River at its mouth is over five miles wide. We drove on a rutted side road between the towns of Ilwaco and Chinook. At a bleached-out jumble of snags I pulled over. In that tangle I saw a great long wedge of wood, the undercut of a giant fir that had been felled. To fell a tree in a safe direction, loggers make an undercut, a wedge on that side at the base of the trunk, then knock out this wedge, and on the back side make a parallel cut until the tree topples. This particular wedge, from a centuries-old Douglas fir, was almost six feet long. On one side it was two feet thick, tapering to a ragged edge on the other. It was gray from the river and half-bleached by the weather. It had big burls from that tough old virgin fir.

“Jack, we could make something of this.” I’d seen a hemlock log that Grandpa had cut down the middle with a chainsaw, pegged out of branches in four legs under each half to make a couple of benches in his yard. I told Jack what I had in mind. His eyes lit up, and we dropped our plan to haul firewood. We were going to make this big old wedge into a bench.

We dragged it to Mom’s Buick. When we toppled it into the trunk, the car hunkered down on its back springs. We tied the trunk-lid, but as I drove in the ruts the lid flopped and flopped. I had no idea what we were tackling, but I was young and sure of myself. And with Jack I was even more sure. This great slab full of burls would be a bench to stand the test of time.

We drove back to the bay and carried the wedge in a wheelbarrow through the woods to Grandpa’s workshop, with me pushing on the handles and Jack pulling the prow over roots in the path. Grandpa’s shop looked out on the bay. He’d built it with one-by-twelve vertical boards and one-by-three battens on the seams, board-and-batten. Its roofing was of shakes split from blocks of old cedar. The shop itself stood on four huge logs.

That workshop looms in me like a museum of Grandpa’s work life, with all kinds of antique tools, hand drills with auger bits, porcelain insulators to string electrical wire, old floor planes two-and-a-half feet long for planing smooth pine floors, a couple of telephone boxes with black horns and brass ringers, ingots of lead to melt into fishing weights, two kegs full of nails, and a grinding wheel with foot-pedals. More tools than I can remember ‒ wrenches, chisels, wire cutters, electrical switches, outlets, paint brushes, linseed oil, and all kinds of saws. Around the towns of the bay, he did a lot of work ‒ painting, stringing barb wire, installing water pumps and electrical systems, and fine carpentry ‒ with decades-old tools under that shake roof, ready-to-hand for the next job. The only thing that wasn’t work was his gardening. He had a separate shed for that, with roots and seeds. We were never allowed in that shed.

Jack and I hauled the wedge into the shop. Before we could peg in the legs, we had to trim about ten inches off the underside to lessen the weight. We cranked on Grandpa’s chainsaw, and after a few pulls it was purring. I held the wedge upright. Jack pulled the trigger, and the bar cut into thick wood. A couple of inches in, tiny sparks came flying off the chain. Jack was getting tired. We traded places. It was slow progress, and then it was barely cutting at all. I pressed the bar into those tough burls. And the chain broke.

In our minds we were conditioned to hear Grandpa cursing, turning the air blue. But we weren’t kids anymore. He’d never raised a hand to us. A repair shop could fit on a new chain. But this old wedge ‒ how could we finish the cut? We checked the saws hanging on the wall, and above them, with long sharp teeth, a six-foot crosscut saw, and on each end a handle for pulling.

Jack and I lifted it down and propped the wedge against the workbench. We started cutting ‒ back and forth ‒ back and forth ‒ barely making any headway. We took a break. By the door the box telephone jangled. It was on a line Grandpa had strung through the trees between his home, the shop, and the beach cabin ‒ an old-fashioned party-line. Crank it, and the other phones ring. With the receiver to my ear, I leaned into the horn on the box.

“Yeah?”

“Dinner’s ready.” Mom said. “Are you hungry?”

I glanced at Jack. The old wedge suddenly seemed a lot tougher.

“We’ll be right there.”

We left the whole mess without thinking. We hiked through the woods to a table with folks gabbing, joking, ribbing each other, and giving unasked-for advice. Jack and I were hungry. We piled into fried salmon that Dad caught, new potatoes, carrots, and peas from Grandpa’s garden, and strawberries on the side. I forgot to tell him about the mess we left in his shop. Later Jack went home with his family, and I went to bed. Next day I rode with Dad to Portland and started my senior year of high school, with girls, games, grades, and college on the road ahead.

The summer I graduated I worked in the bakery panning bread, filling racks, and pushing them into a steamy room to let the dough rise before it was baked. The heat outside was about ninety degrees. Inside it was hotter. The work gave me good reason to succeed in college.

Dad spent summer weekends between the cabin on Willapa Bay and Ilwaco harbor, where he moored his thirty-foot yacht. He fished for salmon across the Columbia bar where fish schooled before going upriver to spawn. He invited family, friends, business associates, as well as his bakers, route drivers, office, and sanitation workers to fish with him in the ocean. They could sign up, drive down, and meet him on the dock at 5 am. He had poles and bait waiting.

I signed up, but I got away early on Friday, in time to ride with him to the cabin. We talked about his future and mine. When we arrived at the bay, I brought my knapsack and started through the main room to go upstairs.

I was stopped right there ‒ as if my shining idea from last summer had materialized in front of the fireplace ‒ the old wedge. In a breathless moment I began to gauge those chainsaw repairs, the cussing, and then all the sweat of cutting through the burls. I took in the meticulous care in how the underside was cut. I ran my hand over the burls. They’d been sanded and sealed against the spills of time. I could only imagine the patience held in a man of experience, who had a hand-memory of working on tough materials. It wasn’t furniture. You could sit on it, but it wasn’t polished furniture. Its character came from centuries of life in the forest, remade here through an old man’s craftsmanship, a man whose experience was well-earned.

Grandpa never mentioned the mess I’d left. I began to see that I hadn’t very much to do with the work. I’d only brought it to him. He finished the bench for himself. That first sight of it stayed in me, and I’ve tried to emulate it with some success and much failure. Here in my mind, I can sit on that old wedge, set myself to make some piece of beauty, and try to work over any tough burls I find. And Grandpa’s voice is still in me, cussing a blue streak if I let up or lose focus.

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