It could be said that in a way, great grandfather dominated my early life by way of his eldest daughter. I didn’t think of it that way at the time but looking back it is pretty clear she began telling me stories about him long before I could distinguish the words from her lavish love and care. Even though he died early leaving her to take care of ten younger siblings and a cousin as well as her bed ridden mother, he resides deep in my psyche to this day as I try and try again to be the “good and decent man” Grandma made him out to be.
She also revered the memory of her favorite sister, Jenny, the youngest who died their first Christmas after coming from Iowa to Pueblo on the train with a herd of Guernsey milk cows and a bull. From toddlerhood on she would taking me visiting Jenny’s little grave by the large old Prairie Avenue cemetery’s front corner. Each time Grandma would say, “I can still see her clear as day. We laid her out on the ironing board in her new white Christmas dress. She was so beautiful and so peaceful looking.” Kin ship was a deep and abiding lesson she was teaching me through her examples and devotions to all the graves scattered across the days of life in Pueblo County.
After her father’s death from emphysema, Grandma continued to walk two miles to the country school house on west of their little Goodnight colony to start the fire and cleanup before her considerable brood of siblings arrived and school began. She treasured those moments and memories of her Dad accompanying her on occasion and telling her the importance of education for his children. She made sure they all took schooling seriously. But, she eloped with a man who had a sixth grade education after she left high school. A man who became a lifelong learner while rebelling against the formal education of his college educated parents. He once ran away for a time with a group of gypsies after being punished for racing gypsies with his horse drawn milk wagon.
That milk wagon also caused the elopement. His parents did not approve of the fatherless waif who hitched rides while delivering cartons of eggs and bread while he delivered milk. Grandma and her brood had moved to town. “Would you say, ‘The horseman knowed her,’ or, ‘The horseman knew her?’Grandma would always interrupt this story to ask. When you gave her grammatically correct “horse manure” she would giggle and say, “No talking dirty in my house please. I swan—you young people today.” The elopement on an Indian motorcycle up Phantom Canyon to Cripple Creek and her solo ride down to Colorado Springs for Grandpa’s bail money was always a good story. No haircut from her was complete, though, without some reference to her father and his larger than life memory.
“He owned a stone quarry in Iowa and we had a white picket fence around our house. When he came back late in the evenings I would wait out front swinging on the gate. Every night he would tell me, ‘Don’t swing on the gate little one!’ Then, he would pick me up and swing me around. Quarry dust flew off of his clothes. It was the dust that made us move to Colorado for the clean air. The rock dust still killed him almost as soon as we got here.”
These hard working larger than life dirt poor farmers were the heart of my formative years. Mother’s parents were throwbacks from another era even though their own parents had been college educated and fairly successful businessmen. When I was four, Harry and Hetty (Robbe) Himes moved seven miles up North Creek past Beulah in the Wet Mountains west of Pueblo. They became dirt and dairy farmers after selling the town dairy inherited from his parents and pooling the equity with their eldest son’s savings from his time in the army. For many summers, my own parents left my younger brother and me out at this beautiful but economically marginal farm we called a ranch. Our family headed out there every holiday while a majority of weekends found us visiting and helping out as well. Wet summers Grandpa could sometimes irrigate and we cleaned and repaired ditches and worked the water. Most times, though, the CF&I water man came with water rights acquired years before and shut Grandpa’s water off. But, he couldn’t stop us swimming in that same dammed water down on the creek.
At the top of North Creek’s valley, the ranch house sat on the brow of a hill and must have been about twenty eight by thirty six feet, two stories high with no basement. It seemed large compared to the compact little homes we knew in town. The kitchen had a large wood stove, an enamel sink fed by a spring a half mile away through pipe that froze for long periods many winters, and a table covered by oil cloth next the refrigerator. The wood range went from five in the morning until last recharge and damping down at bedtime. A back porch and pantry were added on as a lean-to. The living room ran the length of the house with two sets of double hung windows and a fireplace lit only for company. The two hole outhouse sat a hundred feet behind the farmhouse and had a view down the valley through its many knotholes. The upstairs was one large room with a ceiling slanting down to storage cupboards under the eaves. There was one dormer with two windows. The wind shook the panes and blew freely around the sides of the windows in summer and winter. Two uncles and their young brides shared that space right after World War II as did my parents and other relatives on weekends. Grandma often fed thirty or more relatives on a Sunday afternoon. I have no idea where all the food came from since we only butchered once a year and had wild game but occasionally. On these Sundays people were generally pretty hungry because Grandpa had put everyone he could to work hauling and stacking hay, building fence, getting more wood in the shed, and doing the host of things on his long to do list.
Two barns and their attendant corrals framed a barnyard in a side valley coming down the hills out back—the horse barn and the milk barn. The horse barn was built into the hillside and was centered by the hay mow that ran from front to back and across the hay mow from the horse stalls and tack room was a shop large enough to drive a tractor inside. The horse stalls were open to the hay mow and after horses had stretched their necks across their mangers into the hay over a series of weeks, we began tossing ‘fork fulls’ down from the hay loft. Later, when most of the hay was gone, we hauled it from far corners of the big center room (hay mow) by setting the forks on end every few steps to rest from over sized hay piles balanced on the tines. In another time, riding a Vespa scooter across the Island of Mallorca I saw a peasant harvesting his whole field by carrying huge mounds of hay above his head on a wooden fork and resting every ten feet or so by putting the butt of the fork in the ground while the hay hung down around him. The urge to run out and help him was strong but I rode away with memories of Grandpa flooding over me.
Loose hay on a wagon came into the barn by way of horses hauling a full wagon from the fields up the hill behind the barn and parking it below a high window through which a rail ran out over the wagon. A large fork was dropped from a trip device on the rail into the hay and anchored there by side teeth that were used to hold the hay on. Then, the team was taken around to the front of the barn and hooked onto the long cable which pulled the hay up to the track and then along it until a release was pulled that let the hay drop. From time to time the younger crowd was allowed to jump into the hay from various perches and move it to the sides. It took some care not to get too buried as large wads of hay would slide down from the center hill of hay into the valleys along the walls and stalls. On occasion, the extended family’s youth would dare each other to swing out on the rail and drop down as the barn emptied over the winter months. Some of us had the air knocked out pretty badly by the fall but apparently there was enough give in the hay below so we never broke anything as far as I can recall.
Across the barnyard, the ‘milk barn’ also had a shop, a cooling room for the milk with a hand cranked cream separator, a pig sty along with a calf pen, and a set of six milking stanchions. The hallmarks, though, were two oak planked silos rising with their iron rod bands way above the roof with a fermenting silage odor most of the year and dark mysterious corners between and around them where wild barn cats held sway.
The hen house, garden, an abandoned log house used for chicks and pullets up the draw, and a log cellar set in a side hill by the house completed the home area. The wooded pastures were divided by three fences radiating from the barnyard and irrigated hay fields ran down the valley below. In wet times, two higher fields could also be hayed. Two teams of horses produced the hay and consumed a good part of it. The milk herd was hayed only in the winter but received rations of silage at each milking. Grain was mainly for chickens.
Worn out and abandoned cars, trucks, and machinery were strategically located in various areas and used for parts and occasionally resurrected. The farm was a little short of the six hundred forty acres in a section of land but the bordering national forest was several thousand acres and we used it freely. Though it had but little water and grass it was a fantastic playground and a source of wild game.
Grandpa’s classrooms were the barns, pastures, and fields. Grandma’s domain was house, chickens, garden, woodshed, scrub oak groves for wood, and chokecherry bushes. For her, mountain pastures were woodlots, wild flower gardens, and sources of occasional income from selling pine cones to tree nurseries. She kept a little ledger where thirty dollars income in a month was something to celebrate. Some months that income came solely from my younger brother’s egg route in town that competed with the egg factories just coming onto the urban fringe. Other months she led a troupe of cousins out stealing bushels of fir cones squirrels had stashed away in the forest and sold them to a middle man for a tree nursery in Denver.
One special summer camping trip we took an old horse up to the porch so my considerably overweight Grandma could be hoisted on. She then rode several miles with a group of us up to the mythical Silver Circle Park on the other side of Scraggy Peak south of the ranch. There we camped for several days and my Dad and Grandpa fished in Middle Creek. Grandma cooked the fish as well as a host of other goodies to make my mouth water today. There were some old abandoned mining cabins in the area and we saved square nails from them.
In many ways, this farmstead life resembled a timeless peasant existence close to the lifestyle of a long chain of ancestors down through eons of European and Asian history. Electricity and the radio extended the days and awareness of an outer world. Teams of horses were slowly replaced by tractors but only gradually and grudgingly. These kinfolk lived close to the bone and the small surplus was largely taken by governing bureaucracies to pay for physical and legal infrastructures and for a small military defense system. Until the time of my arrival, American governments relied on distances, weaker nations on the borders, an armed citizenry, and a stable social class system for the nation’s defense. Little did we know the tsunami of change the little farm would be riding after the middle of the century.
Grandpa taught lessons in every task we undertook. He would wake me before dawn to help with routine chores before breakfast. He would have shaken the coals and stoked the stove most mornings–except when he wanted to see if I could do it. Then came arm loads of scrub oak wood to last the morning. Next, he called the cows in as we went breath steaming down the hill in the morning coolness. Usually the cows were already coming in on their own and we closed the gate and let them in and out of the milk stations to be fed silage and hooked up with milking machines and stripped by hand. My usual job was to scoop the poop they dropped in the gutter behind them. Sometimes, if Grandpa was out mowing or irrigating late, my uncles would let me ride a cow out the door—living my rodeo dreams. At times I would have to take a stick and bring in the last balky cows. All cows had names and came with their own habits—good and bad. Ada liked people and Elsie hated us and they demonstrated their feelings with licking and kicking.
Talking knowledgably about basic principles of biology, physics, geology, and weather as we worked, Grandpa would point out instances of gravity, capillary action, osmosis, agglutination, erosion, germination, insemination, glaciations, death, decay, and regeneration. He loved figuring out how nature and machinery worked and his immersion in the moment often exasperated my uncles in their need for speed. Once, when asked a question about how batteries and generators worked, he spent the morning taking them both apart and then built a battery charger from an electric motor and a fan belt lying around. He had been meaning to do that for some time but it meant not getting hay put up that morning. Some of my cousins remember Grandpa being cranky and impatient with them. I guess I was the oldest and got the best from him as a work mate while the younger kids bonded into a play group not so useful to him or as anxious to please. To be fair about it, I was not only the oldest but was also a bully and probably jealous of my prerogatives with him. Seven to ten cousins in each others’ soup as much as we were came to rub up against both the bright and the dark sides of our respective souls as we passed through various stages of development–and not.
The first week of November when I was a junior in high school, I found myself at lunch break dumped on my back on the main hall floor at Central High looking up at a couple of classmates who were teaching me a lesson—“don’t ever bug him again.” My uncles and a bit of bull riding had made me pretty scrappy but I was rail thin and felt I was no match for these two guys. I walked out the front doors and ran three miles home. Once there I saddled up a skinny young colt that was used for my five mile paper route West of City Park and rode hard towards the mountains out Rock Springs Road. Twenty miles later he lay exhausted in belly deep snow up behind Red Rocks Dude Ranch. I hung saddle and bridle in a tree and walked five miles on to my uncle’s place on North Creek. “I done quit school,” I said. He took me up to my grandparents. About four the next morning Grandpa rousted me out to begin the day–Dad must have done the paper route for me. The revived two year old colt was feeling frisky when we went to find him that morning and gave Grandpa and me quite a chase before we caught him.
After chores and breakfast we headed out to cut a few hundred Christmas trees for a semi truck coming from Denver later that week. Grandma sent lunch with us and we came back to the barns at dark, milked the cows and fed the pigs, calves, horses, and chickens. Then we had a serving of milk toast and hit the sack. Grandma had gone down to Beulah to use a phone and call my Mom. I would not tell them why I was there, just that I was quitting school. They knew I had been in some fights and figured it had to do with that. For a spell there, several days could go by with my Grandpa and me hardly saying a word. Once he told me, “Quit throwing the trees so hard,” (into the back of the pickup or I would break the window). On the next toss the window broke. He just looked at me and shook his head and went on working. The window came out of my meager pay.
Grandma brought my school books back from town another day but I never looked at them and I never left the ranch until January. It had gotten down to thirty or more below some mornings. With no heat upstairs it was a bit frosty. Mom talked to the teachers. They were willing to work things out with me. I went back after the holidays and graduated in the class of 1959 from Pueblo Central where my mother and father and all my aunts and uncles had also all graduated. My brother two years behind me graduated from the new South High where I did my student teaching in 1964. That was the final requirement for my bachelor’s degree from Colorado State College in Greeley. I worked pipeline construction in Anchorage, Alaska for two of those college summers. My Grandpa died during those years and I seldom made it back to Pueblo. When I did, though, Grandma’s little house was my first stop.
One remaining horse was sold on graduation from CSC and financed a journey through fourteen countries in Europe. Graduate school in sociology at Boulder was financed by grading papers, pumping gas, as a night watchman, and by washing sorority dishes for food. After five years in graduate school, a group of students from courses I was teaching wound up moving with me and my wife to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They bought me a horse and ended five years of horselessness. When I was fifty-nine I moved into Rapid City and left one last horse with friends in Nebraska. Grandma hangs on the wall astraddle the 1917 Indian motor cycle she rode on her honeymoon watching me begin each day and preparing for sleep each evening.
Shauna and Lang are in their thirties and my wife’s two daughters are in their twenties. Somehow these fragile little kids have become dynamic, well educated, successful, adaptable, resilient, adventuresome, and well traveled people. Each of our oldest has a pre-school age child. We are grandparents but I am left wondering what it means to be a grand-parent at a distance. It will be difficult to implant the ancient ones in their psyches. Whenever they come for a visit to Rapid City the grand kids love to spend hours at Old McDonald’s Farm. This was my wife’s idea which I initially resisted as too corny and artificial. But after hearing their enthusiastic reports, I too have been captured by Old McDonald’s Farm where we can watch, listen to and hold peeping fuzzy baby chicks, pet calves, goats, pigs, sheep, rabbits, puppies, and horses and take pictures of joy on grand children’s faces as they feed this tidy array of animals, get licked and knocked down, ride ponies in tethered circles, and grin from ear to ear. We smile too, as we wave goodbye to Old MacDonald’s and the chores of old.
My wife, too, had a horse growing up in Sioux Falls and she would often walk a couple of miles out to ride him on the farm where he was boarded. And, her Mother’s parents were farmers further north of Sioux Falls with more fields and more and richer topsoil but no Colorado Mountains. She has some great stories of times there, though, including some about her Grand Dad’s antics with his1930’s biplane.
The beloved ranch was sold after Grandpa’s heart attack at age fifty-five. They moved into a small suburban home in Pueblo that they never loved very much. He died after a few years but not before the home place sold in several pieces. Cousin Jay lives a couple of miles down the creek from the old place and Uncle Warren and his wife Vera live a mile down from him. Grandma survived her lifelong partner by a decade but she never ceased to mention him whenever we visited whether on her inaugural Michigan plane trip to see her first great grandchild. Or, when she was talking non-stop during a visit to see the second great grandchild on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. While visiting a Native American family at their little home on the Reservation, she was out of the car before me challenging the kids with, “I bet I can find more of those hens’ eggs than you can!” She did too. Then, in their little log cabin it was, “Oh, Daddy bought me a wood heating stove just like that. I loved it.” The act of remembering a life gone by was something they could identify with as well as her way with kids.
Life as a white collar worker raising hobby horses and dabbling in rural life while being mindful of aerobics, cholesterol, range of movement, and muscle tone has left me of sounder body and finances and more non-working occasions to play with the grandkids than my Grandparents. But, I could never buy their farm nor can I give our grandchildren the freedom to roam the hills, the clear connection between honest hard work and food on the table, the joy of watching a new calf or colt rise up steaming and ready to run kicking through the dawn. My kids and Becky’s had deep tastes of that old life as they grew up on acreages in the Sandhills and Pine Ridge country around northeast Nebraska. It hasn’t seemed to hurt them too much. They get a kick out of Old MacDonald’s too. But, like us, they moved far from home on their adventures and have sunk roots in new and vibrant places with radically different venues. None is prone to being a hick from the sticks like me.
There is great joy in watching these new little ones soaking up their emergent worlds and taking such joy in flowers, vegetables, clouds, moons, pine cones, rivers, creeks, deer, wild turkeys, birds, dogs, cats, farm animals, and the wonderful love and support they live within each day. The world is so much changed from that time on North Creek, and yet it also endures almost unchanging in its smallest and biggest parts. How we see it, how we know it, how we approach it and use it changes but so far we still have the earth, sky, fire, and water to share, to learn from and to enjoy together. These grand children will grow up without being tethered by stories and haircuts to their grandparents’ life and times. It’s a good thing, I expect, because though Mother earth endures, Bob Dylan was so right, “the times they are a changing.” Great Grandfather died young of dust in his lungs, Grandpa of hard work, my Mom ten years older of smoking, my Dad at eighty-six of dancing too long and hard at the Eagles Club. It remains to be seen what and when, but it’s not likely that any of those things will be what takes out this old Grandpa. Meanwhile, as that last great adventure waits over the hill, life goes on with deep memories of Grandma’s great grandfather stories, “Everyone came to him to get their horses trained, He even trained the Governor’s horses.” That’s what she said. But, then, everyone said she was a bit prone to exaggeration. Not, the Paul Bunyan type story, but the spice it up a bit type. <>
Dowell Caselli-Smith (©2008)
