Water Witching

My Uncle Chas (Charles Fountain Beatie, II) had a small piece of wooded land on the headwaters of Beaver Creek. The place was at the end of a dead-end lane, just beyond the Carus Cemetery. It was not far from my grandparents’ home.

During one of our summer visits to Oregon we camped at Uncle Chas’ place rather than staying in the house with my grandparents and Uncle Jack and Aunt Ada.

One evening our family was joined around the campfire by uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents. The lively discussion turned to the subject of water witching. My father decided to demonstrate how the process worked. He cut and trimmed a forked willow branch. The cut stem was about a foot long and the two forks were about a foot and a half long, each. By grasping the ends of the two forks it was possible to cause the stem end to point downward by bringing the fork ends close together.

So, grasping the two ends, my father began to whoop and holler and prance around like a mad man. Shortly he tripped on a root. As he began to fall he brought his hands together, causing the stem end to point straight down. And father fell face downward in the headwaters of Beaver Creek. Thus proving that, in at least some cases and situations, water witching does work!

The Death Penalty

The past couple of days there have been news reports of two long-delayed executions. That, and the fact that I have been called for jury duty next week, has lead me to contemplate the issues surrounding the death penalty.

Being somewhat old-fashioned and analytic, I tend to address these sorts of questions with the use of a Ben Franklin balance sheet, thusly:

Attributes of the Death Penalty

Positive:

• Recidivism rate is zero.
• Some crimes are so heinous that they demand the death penalty.

Negative:

• Some innocent individuals are convicted.
• Typically it takes many years to carry out the sentence - "Justice delayed is justice denied."
• The many, many appeals cost the tax payers a lot of money.
• The cost of incarceration of a death-row inmate is a lot more than for a "lifer".

I could go on, but these, I think, are the major points. My conclusion after weighing these aspects of the death penalty:

• Philosophically I am very much in favor of the death penalty, BUT
• Unless we can return to the days of the old west and carry out the sentence within thirty days there is no practical value to imposing the death sentence.

Grey Diggers and Crawdads

In an earlier post I told you that my Uncle Bob had a filbert orchard. Along one side of the orchard was a stand of Douglas fir trees. As the filberts began to ripen all of the trees next to the Douglas fir stand were being stripped of nuts. It was ground squirrels, grey diggers my grandfather called them, crossing over the line to raid the nuts.

Uncle Bob had an old .22 rifle. That rifle must have been fired over a million times. There was almost no rifling left. However it was just fine for shooting grey diggers. On several occasions I sat, watching the no-man’s land between the forest and the orchard. I shot a number of raiding grey diggers. When I tired of the sport I hung a dead squirrel on the barbed-wire fence.

After a few days I wrapped a burlap sack around an old barrel hoop to form a net. I tied the dead squirrel to the center of the net. By now the dead squirrel was very “ripe”. Cousin Suzie, my brother, and I took this assembly to the next door neighbor’s crawdad pond where we lowered the baited net into the water.

A few minutes later we retrieved the net and collected some large crawdads that had come to feast. Within an hour or so we would have a sizable collection of crawdads.

Sometimes, but not always, we filled a large, copper washtub with water and put it on Aunt Alta’s wood-burning kitchen stove to heat. When the water was boiling we tossed in the crawdads after rinsing them off with fresh water. When the crawdads were nice and pink we proceeded to eat them.

Usually, however, we would feed the crawdads to the hogs. The hogs seemed to relish crawdads, shells and all.

Swimming and Fishing in the Molalla River

It was about a mile and a half from my grandparents’ house on Carus Road to highway 213, and another three and a half miles to the Molalla River. There was a large swimming hole on the river under the highway bridge. There was a raft anchored in the middle of the river. On occasion, when we were not committed to tromping hay or picking raspberries or blackcaps (black raspberries whose juice is used for inspection stamping on meat), the kids would walk to the river to go swimming. At first we tried to hitch-hike, but stopped trying after a sheriff’s deputy scolded us.

On one incident I took along a length of fishing line with a fly attached thereto. Upon reaching the raft in the middle of the river I paused and attached the fishing line to my big toe. After about five minutes swimming with the fishing line attached, I hooked a six-inch cutthroat trout. My memory is fuzzy, but I think that I released the fish back into the water.

Hay

Before bailing became prevalent, processing hay was a labor-intensive activity. Here are my memories involving the hay field beside my grandparents’ home in Oregon.

When the hay was ready for harvesting my Uncle Bob hitched the horses to the mower and mowed down the hay. Then he hitched the horses to a rake and raked the hay into rows. The hay was left that way to dry out. (Without proper drying there was a danger of spontaneous combustion when the hay was stored in the barn. A lot of barns were burned down that way.) A few days later a second pass with the rake turned the hay over, allowing for complete drying.

When the drying was complete the manual labor began. The horses were hitched to the hay wagon and they pulled the wagon to the hay field. While my father, Uncle Bob, and Uncle Jack pitched the hay into the wagon with pitch forks, Cousin Susie, my brother, and I tromped the hay down to compact it in the wagon. All the while Uncle Bob was issuing verbal orders to the horses to keep them moving the wagon to facilitate the loading process.

When the wagon was full it was off to the barn. I remember the barn as being huge with a very large hay loft. At one end of the barn was a large door above the hay loft. The top of the door was shaped like an inverted “V” to match the shape of the roof. The door was hinged along the bottom and was raised and lowered using ropes and pulleys. At the very top of the door opening was a large wooden boom that projected out from the barn about six feet. It was under that boom that the hay wagon was parked.

Attached under the boom, and running the full length of the barn was a trolley track. On that track was a rolling carriage to which was attached a large, two-tined fork. I do not recall all of the technical details but somehow the carriage, with fork attached, was positioned over the hay wagon. The fork was then released from the carriage and lowered rapidly, using ropes and pulleys, into the load of hay. When the fork was firmly embedded in the hay, two “fingers”, one from each time, were activated to hold the hay onto the fork.

While all of this was going on the horses were unhitched from the wagon and taken to the other end of the barn. There they were hitched to a very long rope. This rope ran all the way through the barn, through pulleys, and down to the fork in the hay. When all was ready the horses pulled on the rope, causing the fork, loaded with hay, to rise up to the carriage. When the loaded fork reached the carriage, the carriage was released from its position at the end of the boom and began to move down the trolley track into the barn. When the fork load of hay was over the spot where Uncle Bob wanted it, he pulled a cord that released the “fingers” and the hay dropped.

If we (the kids) had done a good job of compacting the hay in the wagon the entire wagon load went into the loft with the first try. As I said, it was a large fork.

This process was repeated until all of the hay had been transferred to the hay loft.