GUESS WHO I AM?

Guess Who I Am? (mslamb.com)

  “What did Mrs. Reimer teach you in Sunday School today?” I asked my two-year-old.

    Lenora’s blue eyes sparkled as she placed her dolly on a chair, folded her hands together under her chin, and sang the first song I’d ever heard her sing by herself:

    “Jesus is our Shepherd.
    Guess who I am?
    Such a lovely secret…I’m his little lamb.”

    Even though the last lines came out, “Such a wuvwy secwet, I’m his witto wamb,” I knew, and she knew, the meaning of what she sang.

    Lenora is all grown up now, as are the many other children who went through Adeline Reimer’s toddler Sunday School class. Mrs. Reimer was a tender shepherdess to those wee ones of the church, loved by their parents as well for her understanding and wise counsel.

     Jesus is our Shepherd. But he gives each of us others to shepherd in turn. We might shepherd our own little lambs as parents or grandparents, or we might be teacher-shepherds. A few people become shepherd-leaders in the church, and we love and respect them for the task they undertake. Whether our flock be large or very small, we have a Good Shepherd whose example of love and kindness and care we must follow.

   We never grow too old to be his “little lambs.”

Oso Slide, Part of a Bigger Picture

A rock and mud slide along the Mountain Loop Highway

    A water-logged hillside in the Cascade foothills east of tiny Oso collapsed Saturday morning, sending a mile-wide wall of mud and debris crashing over a riverfront neighborhood. It buried the highway and dammed the North Fork Stillaguamish River. Horrified, we’re watching rescue efforts, along with the rest of the nation.

    We live in a region prone to such disasters because of unstable soils left by ice-age glacial events. Just this morning a newspaper article mentioned an 1820 tsunami caused when a headland on Camano Island’s south end collapsed into Puget Sound. Three hundred years ago, a mudslide near Lake Ozette on Washington’s coast buried and preserved a Makah Indian village. It was rediscovered in the 1960s when a fierce winter storm eroded the shoreline to reveal long-hidden artifacts.

    Smaller slides halt railroad trains every winter along the Sound between Everett and Seattle. We see slides along nearby Pioneer Highway, cutting into the bluff bordering the Skagit Delta farmlands.

    I remember a devastating slide in 1950 at Gold Basin, in the valley of the South Fork Stillaguamish where I grew up. That fork flows through Verlot and past Granite Falls before joining the North Fork at Arlington. Then the combined rivers make their way through the lowland valley to salt water near Stanwood.  Geologists tell us that historically as well as recently, slides are common in both the North Fork and South Fork valleys. Though the Gold Basin slide did not result in loss of life, it changed and is still changing the land.

    Both forks of the Stillaguamish share a geologic history with other river valleys in the Western Cascade Mountains. The river basins of the western Cascades begin as narrow, steep-sided mountain valleys whose floors are generally less than 3000 feet above sea level. The rivers flow into broad lowland alluvial river valleys, through flood plains to the extensive glacial outwash plain along Puget Sound. 

    The Puget Lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet came down out of the north, as far as Olympia. It advanced, then retreated many times, shaping the geography of this region. Old channels and terraces that mark the retreat of the ice margins are still visible. As the ice pressed southward, smaller glaciers filled the upper river basins. Only the tops of peaks like Mt. Pilchuck protruded from the ice. The smaller glaciers scoured away the mountainsides. They pulverized solid rock into flour-fine clay and left bowl-shaped amphitheaters called “cirques.”

     About 14,000 years ago, the glaciers filling the lower mountain valleys melted. But remnants of the big ice sheet still plugged the valley outlets, blocking drainage. Long lakes formed in the valleys as the alpine glaciers melted and dropped deposits of rocks, gravel and lighter sand and clay. Finally, the retreating Puget Lobe allowed rivers like the Stillaguamish and the Skagit to find their way to the sea, carrying tons of silt along with them to form the rich soils found in the Skagit-Stillaguamish deltas.

SkagitValley clay soils, once part of the mountains in the distance

Dad and little brother David beneath the Gold Basin cliffs, c. 1947

     Old lake deposits are visible at many places, wherever the river cuts through embankments of sand, clay or gravel. Some are very deep, like the hillside that collapsed near Oso or the cliffs at Gold Basin State Park.  At Gold Basin, the forest-crowned palisades, layered with fine tan dirt and gray silty clay, towered nearly straight up from the river’s edge.  Fans of crumbled sand and gravel scalloped their base. In places, water seeped between layers of permeable and less permeable materials to streak the face of the cliffs.

65 years later, showing trees growing on slide and new location of river

    The winter of 1950, we had a lot of rain. It saturated the soil to a great depth and sent the river roaring toward Port Susan Bay. Water percolating down through the layered deposits at Gold Basin hit less permeable material. The water moved out toward the face of the cliff. And the waterlogged soil above the interface began to move with it. The cliff and its crown of trees collapsed into the river. With no place else to go, the river forced its way into the park, chewing away great chunks of the opposite bank and following the lines of least resistance to gouge temporary channels along and across what had been park roads. The sparkling waters of the Stillaguamish turned an opaque gray-brown. For years, banks and boulders wore a slick coating of clay.

    More than fifty years later, the bluffs at Gold Basin are still unstable. The river eats away at the bottom, dissolving the soil into gray fluid and making life difficult for fish and the creatures they live on. Below the slide, new forest has grown on the island that formed where the river once flowed.

    Storms and the river still combine to challenge those who live along the river and those who attempt to keep it healthy for the wild things that live in and near it.

    More recently, in October, 2003, huge amounts of rain fell throughout the northwestern Cascade Mountains. Back country trails washed out or were obliterated by slides, bridges crossing mountain streams were damaged, and sections of the old Mountain Loop Highway between Barlow Pass and Darrington crumbled into the Sauk and disappeared. People living near the Stillaguamish below Granite Falls found the river racing through their houses.

    The hill that collapsed on March 22 has been the focus of concerns since the 1950s. The Seattle Times refers to a report filed in 1999 with the U.S. Army corps of Engineers, warning of “the potential for a large catastrophic failure.” The report was written by Daniel and Lynne Rodgers Miller.  “We’ve known it would happen at some point,” Mr. Miller said. “We just didn’t know when.”

    A lidar map is made by lasers which can visually strip away vegetation to reveal the underlying landforms. The Times published one such map that shows the semicircular scars of many past slides in the area of Saturday’s disaster.

    There were slides in 2003 and in 2006 on the same hillside, yet homes continued to be built in the path of danger. All of us should remember that it was Nature’s job to sculpt and change the land long before human history began, and she will continue to do so, regardless of our wishes.


The river sculpts the land.

Book Review: Telling It the Way It Was

In David Jussero’s book, Telling It the Way It Was: A Country Boy Survives Life in the City, he urges his readers to get the most out of life, because “Life is like a roll of toilet paper; the closer you come to the end, the faster it goes.”

I do agree with his philosophy, but that’s not the only reason David's book struck a chord with me. As is true for many Washingtonians, David and I both have roots in the North Dakota prairies. My grandparents were German immigrants. His were Finnish. Hard-hit by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years, my family left farming to seek better opportunities on the West Coast. David and Caroleen Jussero did the same thing. North Dakota roots run deep, especially when one leaves family and good friends behind. Even though we’ve both spent most of our lives in the Pacific Northwest, that sense of connection to our state of origin is not easily severed.

David Jussero’s grandparents, John and Anna Jussero, immigrated to the U.S., married, and homesteaded near Rolla, North Dakota, not far from the Canadian border. Four children were born while they lived in a sod house. Then John built a wood frame house for his family which expanded by five more children, one of whom, Richard, became David’s father.

The tight-knit Finnish community somewhat reluctantly accepted Richard’s marriage to a pretty French girl from Lac la Biche, Canada. Their oldest child, David, was born in 1936. David’s often humorous tales of growing up on a small wheat farm, going to one-room country schools, and dropping out of school at age sixteen to undertake a series of farm jobs draw a picture of a life that emphasized self-reliance and hard work. But Dave had bigger dreams and by the time he was nineteen, he’d left the farm behind to seek a new life out west.

He found work in Portland, Oregon and sent for his neighbor and sweetheart, Caroleen Messier. They married, had a daughter, and moved to better jobs in Seattle. Soon Dave was also buying and managing rental houses. He was so successful in his sideline, he retired at age forty to spend time at the things he really wanted to do, such as volunteering for Habitat for Humanity and other humanitarian groups, traveling extensively with Caroleen, and bicycling twice across the United States.

Dave’s observations on history and his stories of human interest, interspersed with homemade verses, witty comments, and many photographs make reading his book a pleasure.

David and Caroleen Jussero live in Snohomish, Washington. Telling It the Way It Was is available at Amazon.com or may be ordered through booksellers or at www.iuniverse.com.

North Dakota Schoolteacher, Winter of 1949

New Leipzig, ND, 1950 Kids on their way to school

    While searching for another document on my computer, I came across this story, sent to me in the winter of 2008-2009 by my mother’s cousin, Ursula Wunderlich, of Voltaire, ND. Since then, Ursula has finished her time here on earth so I can’t ask permission to use this, but I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. She wrote it originally for her home-town newspaper, and I know there are many mid-westerners who can identify right now with the weather she describes:


    “This bad winter weather brings to mind a time in this writer's life,
60 years ago, to be exact. It was January 1949, and I was teaching a rural
school in McLean County, Otis Township, in the Strawberry Lake vicinity.
Fresh out of high school, I was asked to take on the job, as teachers
were hard to come by. Having no college degree, or practice teaching to lean on, this was quite a challenge, to say the least. I had 11 students in
all grades except the second & sixth grades. Patron families represented
were Alvir Anderson, Ervin Golly, Miles Harmon, Palmer Madsen, and Henry Sheelar. [The Andersons were also cousins.] I was my own janitor, hot lunch cook, and custodian of whatever needed to be done. This included carrying coal from the shed near the school house, storm or no storm.
   
     I stayed at the school during the week, if possible. Didn't think of it at the time, but I should have had a rope strung from the school building to the shed, so as not to lose my way, as there were times when one could not see one building from the other. I firmly believe that the good Lord had angels watching overtime, or I wouldn't be here today.

    That January, we had full-fledged blizzards every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. No one came to school, except teacher and her pals-- mice! Thursday & Friday as many of the students as could, arrived. On Friday I would ride home with either of two families to spend the weekend. This arrangement was designed to save the precious coal supply, as the weekend coal then could be on hand for [school] days.
   
    Sundays were usually calm, & I'd either walk the mile from one family to the school late Sunday afternoon, or the patron would take me there with horses & sleigh, depending on where I spent that particular weekend.
    Monday morning..another storm [moved in], no kids. Since the teacher was on the grounds and as long as the students got their work accomplished, we did not have to make up all those days. Good thing, as Don Wunderlich and I had our wedding date set for June 7th, and I fully intended to be married, not teaching until mid-July!

    One Sunday in late January, a neighbor flew south to the
Anderson farm with a visitor from out of state. (I still wonder how he
got to this area, as nothing we knew of was moving, no mail service, and we didn't have phones, although we did have electricity.) I asked the
gentleman if he knew whether Don Wunderlich was back from a trip to Michigan, where he'd gone during the holidays, [to] bring back a new car. He responded, 'Yes, and I'm going to the Wunderlich farm from here, want to go along?' If I had had a few more minutes to decide, I probably would have declined the offer, but I said 'Okay, let's go!'

    What a sight  from that little plane! There was no bare ground to see anywhere from the time we got in the air until we landed on a field near the Wunderlich farm. Every thing was WHITE!

    Made it back to the Anderson’s and of course, the next day--no kids due to another storm. We were blocked in till the 4th of March, when the Army plowed us and the entire area out. That evening Chuck Sheelar's Mom sent him to the school and we drove to Kongsberg for needed supplies. The next day it stormed so bad and really blocked everything, rock hard. The Army couldn’t come back a second time so we had to wait until spring when Mother Nature took over and melted all that snow!

    Yes, this winter of 2008-09  brings back memories and also reminds us that this is North Dakota, and winters can be open or they can come with a vengeance. So, stay warm, close to home, and be prepared!"

 More About Ursula:

Ursula did marry Don Wunderlich. They lived all their lives on a farm near Kongsberg and raised their family there. Ursula was active in the little German Lutheran church at Kongsberg until her recent death, but nothing is left today of that busy little town except the church. Most of the people buried in its cemetery are Ursula's relatives.

Heart Lifters for Difficult Times

Diana Savage’s 52 Heart Lifters for Difficult Times (Harvest House) is the perfect Valentine for my sweetheart! The pastel colors, the delicate daisy on the front cover, might indicate a  book intended for a feminine audience, but a look at the table of contents indicate that the pithy devotionals inside apply to either gender. Here’s a sampling: Who is God’s Interpreter, starring an absentminded, umbrella-snatching professor; In the Shadow of Tradition, featuring Punxsatawney Phil, the groundhog weather prognosticator; Wisdom for Overwhelmed Fathers, about parenting challenges; and the piece that sold the book to me, one for Valentine’s Day called Like...Fantasy Football Games. 

Every devotional begins with a humorous story, followed by unique and thought-provoking applications of God’s principles to our own lives. Each is tied up with a ribbon of humor at the end, making 52 neat and memorable gift packages to encourage either man or woman...or in our case, both of us. For what could be more romantic than sharing one of these devotions, perhaps as part of a weekly date night?

photo credit: France1978 via photopin cc

Fishing Among Treacherous Rocks

Former commercial fisherman Ti Foltz told me this true story several years ago. I thought it might be a good one to share with Sun Break readers on this foggy morning:

Ti’s trolling boat rose and fell in the cold Alaskan water. He fished alone on that clear summer day, too busy to notice a gray line of fog building on the horizon. The twelve lines from the outriggers on his troller had multiple leaders. Lined with hooks, each leader reached out into water as far as seventy-five feet. Dozens of hooks needed to be loaded with the herring Ti hoped would lure the King salmon.

He watched for rocks as he worked. All around him spread swirling, white-capped wave broken by thousands of jutting rocks. Some disappeared beneath the waves only to pop into view again as the water receded around them. Others, tree crowned, were as big as small islands. He needed to get close to the rocks without damaging the boat or losing his lines. Bait fish schooled along the deep rock ledges and the salmon lurked there to feed on them. The lure of those big Kings made risking the treacherous waters worthwhile.

Suddenly the salmon began to strike hard and fast. As soon as Ti reeled in one line and gaffed the fish aboard, other lines filled up.

As he worked, he realized the sunlight had dimmed. Clammy fog swirled around the boat. Immediately he hauled in his lines, but already the land and rocks around him were blotted out.

Fortunately, he had a compass and charts on board. In the fog, with no landmarks visible, he had to trust them to take him back to port. Depending on his senses to steer a straight course wouldn’t work. His instincts screamed, “Wrong direction!” and he fought vertigo as panic threatened to overwhelm him. Lord, he pleaded, show me what to do.

Then he heard a mournful, muffled wail through the mist. He recognized the foghorn on the cape, right where it was supposed to be. His inner ear righted itself and he felt calmer. With his eye on the compass, he motored slowly through the rock-studded fog and back to safe harbor.

In any situation, Ti concluded, feelings can betray us and cause us to crash. Relying on God’s Word to guide us is like having a chart in front of us and a compass to steer by. Even when feelings overwhelm us and threaten to throw us off course, we can trust God’s Word to brings us through the rocks and into the safe harbor of his perfect plan for us.

Safe in the harbor

lower photo credit: gillfoto via photopin cc

top photo credit: sydandsaskia via photopin cc

Shopping via Traveling Salesmen

We like our Senior Center fitness class as much for the interesting conversation as for exercise. Tony, in particular, can be counted on for a great story. As a newlywed in North Dakota, he’d worked as a produce manager in a grocery store. When he and Bonnie moved to Everett, Washington, he interviewed for a job with the old Penney’s store. “If you can successfully sell one thing, you can sell anything,” he told the manager. He got the job and soon he was in charge of the men’s and children’s clothing departments.

Tony loved selling suits. On slow days, he would stand on the sidewalk in front of the store and observe the men walking by. When he spied a likely customer, he’d strike up a conversation:

 “Say, got a minute? I have a suit in here that would look wonderful on you. Come on in and take a look.” Before he knew it, the stranger would be standing in front of the mirror in the suit, while Tony mentioned what a perfect color it was for his complexion and busied himself with pins, taking a little in at the sides and shortening the cuffs a bit. “There, now, isn’t that perfect for you?”

The customer would cock his head, admire himself, agree, and before he knew what had hit him, he’d be walking out of the store humming a happy tune, with a new suit under his arm.

Tony’s story reminded someone else about the traveling salesmen who, when we were young, made regular circuits through our neighborhoods, and soon we were off on another topic. Our family lived far from the big city, but still, the Watkins man and the Fuller brush salesman found us. My mom would buy vanilla flavoring or pepper, liniment or special salve from the Watkins man. The Fuller brush man brought us cleaning tools and hairbrushes.

Then there were the salesmen who might pass through only once; persuasive sellers who found a ready audience in the five kids who listened to their spiels.

We all loved to read. When a college student came through selling a fat book called “The Lincoln Library,” and leafed through the thin pages, showing us articles on every imaginable topic, even our parents thought this would be a good substitute for the encyclopedia set we couldn’t afford. And at first we were thrilled, pouring over the articles. But after a while, the tiny print, difficult to read under our kerosene lamps, made it discouraging to use for anything but pressing flowers.

Sometime in the early fifties, another salesman stopped to demonstrate a marvelously easy-to-play instrument he called a “Hawaiian Tremelo.” It looked something like a zither, with strings of varying lengths on one side you chorded with a pick. With the other hand you slid a rolling bar on a mechanical arm up and down a melody string, plucking the notes of a song. It made a whiny, wobbling sound that reminded us of the then-popular music of Hawaii. We clamored to have our own “Hawaiian Tremolo,” and persuaded our parents that we would faithfully practice if they would put out the at-the-time huge price of $30. We did practice...for a while. I, at least, learned to play it. But it didn’t take long to get tired of the tremolo sound, and it, too, went on the shelf.

But the traveling salesman’s item I remember most was the fur coat my father bought my mom. We children were very young then and my parents struggled to make ends meet on Dad’s logger’s earnings. Mom sacrificed a lot to keep us fed and clothed, and I think Dad felt she deserved something nice for herself. The pelts, probably squirrel skins, were glossy variations of brown. The three-quarter length coat itself hung straight from big, 1940s shoulders...not a pretty style, but my mom faithfully wore it on every excursion to town or for every special occasion for two decades. Eventually she cut it up and made a sofa cushion out of the good parts.

Today we can shop at the mall or online. Our choices are limitless. But there was something special about having the store come to us in the person of an old-time traveling salesman.