Snow ice cream and wolves

Part 4

Washougal is located at the beginning of the Columbia River Gorge–well, “beginning” if you are going from west to east.  In those days the roads were narrow and winding;  no freeways at all.  Almost every winter the road up to where we lived was blocked with snow.  We were snowed in–sometimes for days on end.   After my father Harry came back from spending a year in Fairbanks, Alaska, he would hike out, wading through the snow for about two miles downhill to Washougal to buy groceries for us.

I am not sure how my mother Cora coped that year when Harry was gone.  They had just purchased the little, one room house from one of Cora’s relatives;  Harry immediately built two bedrooms on the back.  Then he got the chance to work in Alaska on the new air force base being constructed.  At first they were going to move all of us to Fairbanks, but because my sister Joy had such severe allergies, including to wool blankets, they decided that Harry would go and Cora, Joy and I would stay in Washougal. 

Once–and it may have been the year Harry was gone–Cora fried bread dough into something resembling a heavy beignet or doughnut on the oil-fueled heating stove in the living room of our tiny house.  It was the only time I remember her cooking that.   Looking back, I realize that the electricity for the kitchen stove must have been cut off by the severe winter weather, so she improvised.  Fried bread dough dusted with sugar tasted delicious as far as we girls were concerned. Much better than the biscuits she tried to make for years and always failed.  Finally when Bisquick was introduced, she gave up trying to make home made ones.

My best friend, Peggy, was in the same grade and lived across the road in a ramshackle old farmhouse with her father and two slightly older brothers.  If there was a mother in that family, she escapes my memory.   While I only ate food, Peggy could cook–cornbread.  And it was pretty good.  I think that at times, that pan of bread may have been dinner for the family.  (In another post, another time, I will write about the people who lived on Mt. Norway Road in those days.)

A big treat in winter was “snow ice cream”–basically snow, canned milk, sugar and vanilla extract.  Then, one year after an aluminum plant was built across the Columbia River and slightly to the east, all of us girls developed large, painful boils after eating the snow ice cream.  Cora was convinced, rightly, that the smoke/emission from the aluminum plant was poisoning the snow.  So no more snow ice cream.

The winter of 1948 was particularly brutal.  There were huge snow drifts behind the house.  Then a warm Chinook wind blew down the Gorge for one day and melted the snow.  The next day it froze again, creating almost an inch of ice on top of the snow and on all the tree branches.  It was glistening and beautiful.   Our little house, however, was uninsulated and the bedroom where we girls slept was very, very cold.  I remember laying awake at night, hearing the howling of wolves which had come down out of the forests in the mountains behind us to attack some sheep on a farm down along the river.  No one could ever remember that happening before.

So the wolves ate lamb that night, but we didn’t eat lamb until years later in Spokane.

Next: Carol the chicken rancher

(This post is part of an experimental memoir.  I teach memoir writing and will edit your memoir to make it better.  Learn more at www.onedaymemoir.com)