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Alee
True Blue Farmgirl
22941 Posts
Alee
Worland
Wy
USA
22941 Posts |
 Posted - Feb 06 2008 : 10:01:33 AM
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I got a laugh reading this old essay of mine, but some of the points I made still ring true and it has made me think this morning. Please pardon the writing. I think this was a rough draft of an assignment.
Returning to the Basics
Alyssa Gaulke
I wake suddenly. My pulse is pounding, and I find I have forgotten to breath. By reflex I bound out of bed and slam my hand on to the back box that is making a piercing noise. Sudden silence fills my room. I am awake.
I sit on the foot of my bed and breathe heavily while my hands shake in reaction. I shake the last vestiges of sleep from my consciousness and head to the bathroom. While doing my morning routine, I do not think of the miracles in my house. I expect my running water, sewage, and heating to be there.
I find it ironic that in our day and age where we have many modern conveniences to make our life “easier” we have record amounts of stress. We have so much stress, in fact, that we have new diseases and problems due to stress. Many people have high blood pressure or over eat due to stress and anxiety in their lives. How can all these modern conveniences that make life simpler really make our life more stressful?
100 years ago, people did not wake up to the blaring sounds of an alarm clock; they got up because their bodies were trained to get up around the same time every day. On the same note, people may have drunk tea and coffee, but they did not have many caffeinated drinks to keep them awake longer than they should. Most settlers went to bed shortly after chores and meals were through.
One settler that I have gotten to know through her published letters and several biographies is one such settler, Elinor Pruitt Stewart. She speaks in her letters about being busy, but rather than complain about it, she usually commented on how happy she was to be doing her work.
By the time I get up at 9:00 in the morning, Elinor would have already have gotten up, milked her cows, feed her chickens, watered her gardens, cooked breakfast, cleaned the house and would have been working on the noon meal.
While I take indoor toilets for granted, Elinor and her family had to trudge an outhouse no matter what the weather was like, even in blizzards. I take showers daily and feel unclean if I have not bathed that often. Settlers like Elinor would bath once a week if they were lucky and the whole family would use the same wash water. The old saying “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water,” may have always been intended as a tongue in cheek saying, but settlers would bathe from the oldest to the youngest so by the time the baby was washed, the water was rather dirty.
I may have running water at my beck and call, but Elinor had to haul her water from a hand dug well or from the near by streams. During sever droughts, which Wyoming is known for, the streams could become an unreliable source of freshwater and deep wells would have to be dug to enable farms to survive.
I, freshly washed, dress in clean clothes. I pour cereal into a bowl and add milk. I have neither grown nor made anything in my house except the bowl I eat out of, yet I do not worry about where or how to get more of my “necessities” when they are used up or wear out.
Elinor and her family had to travel 60 miles to the nearest railroad supplied town, Green River, to buy any goods that they could not make on their ranch. It would take her a week to go and come back from town. Elinor and her friends would have to write long shopping lists for their husbands to take with them so that they could be assured of getting everything that they needed for the coming months.
The desert is not a very forgiving space to cross. Not many settlers crossed the desert between settlements unless pressing business forced them to. Settlers came to rely on their small communities for more than just friendship. If one settler came upon hard times, many would pull together to help each other through their difficulties.
My father also eats breakfast with me. We are planning on traveling thirty miles to our cabin for a day away from civilization. His salt and pepper hair was much darker when we first started to build our retreat and he did not have so many worry lines around his eyes.
As we walk towards the garage where the car is parked, we walk past a piece of clear plastic tacked to the wall in the laundry room. My mother has carefully written with a Sharpie marker where marks on the walls were in our old houses. Each mark is carefully labeled with a name and a date. I look for one of the earliest occurrences of my name.
Alyssa 5-1-86 2 ½ feet tall.
I was only four years old at the time. I smile because that is the same year we started to build our cabin.
My dad walks by with my dog bounding along at his side. We all climb into his GMC Jimmy with its rust spots, faded baby blue paint and the bucket seats with the cracked vinyl side walls. We chat about my plans to continue college and where I see my life heading as we drive the short half hour to our cabin.
“I’m so proud of you Alyssa,” my dad says, turning his head to look at me. I want to live up to his expectations, but secretly fear that I will fail him.
“I love you dad. I’m glad that Doug and I got to come home for New Year’s. We both really miss the Wyoming scenery. Idaho is beautiful and all, but there is something about Wyoming that makes me feel like I am home.” My father and I recount memories of time spent at the cabin to pass the time. I feel as if my childhood is held within the bounds of our two lots in the Big Horn Mountains. I watch through the slightly dusty glass to try and find deer out in the badlands.
We stop at “The Pony Express” in Ten Sleep, where the clerk asks us “Aren’t you Gaulkes?” We chat briefly and wish her a good day.
The land we pass is now dotted with sheep and cattle. It is strange to see how the passage of time has cooled, but not extinguished the intense hate if the cattle rancher for the sheep rancher. And vise versa.
As we get closer to the cabin, more snow is on the ground and Dad has to drive more carefully. I ask him again “Where was it that you saw the mountain lion?” He points to the spot and we idly wonder if the mountain lion he saw was the same one that investigated a friend and my campsite a few years ago.
As we enter our private subdivision, neighbors (a term that I use loosely because no one lives too close) wave to us and we stop to chat. We are warned that the road conditions are still poor from the last snow storm and we promise to be careful.
We pass the spot on the road where I shattered my face in a bike wreck many years before and finally the cabin is in sight. I smile happily for this is as much my home as the one in town.
From the road it looks like a giant Monopoly house. It has one peaked dormer on the roof for the front half, and one for the back. At the corner of each wall, the bark covered logs over lap each other like giant Lincoln Logs. There is a rickety porch that sags in places and needs rebuilding. We find the hidden key and let ourselves in the front door.
My father has not been able to come up other than occasional quick visits for several years. The cabin is dirty and needs to be reorganized, but the first order of business is to light a fire.
This has always been my job. I do not remember a time when I did not light the fire. From an early age, my mother and father taught my sisters and me how to make a circle of stones to keep the fire in. They taught us how to pick fire sites that would not catch other areas on fire, and they taught us to put fires out completely with water and dirt.
Inside the cabin wood stove, I make a careful Tee-Pee of sticks and newspaper. As the cool yellow flames lick around the small sticks, I add thicker pieces of wood until I have a roaring fire.
After cleaning the cabin for a while, we sit down to eat our lunches and enjoy the rest of a rare afternoon together. I work on some cross-stitch as my father reads his Louis Lamoure books.
My mind wanders and I think how lucky I am to be who I am, when I am. I am well acquainted with my state’s history. I think of all the technology I have used in just a simple day and how many miles already my father and I are from our home and how little we think about it.
My family and I build a cabin in the mountains as a get-away from the hustle of “city” life. Elinor and her daughter Jerrine moved from the city to leave behind a broken marriage and to get away from the hustle of city life.
Alee
Farmgirl Sister #8
Please come visit Nora and I our our new blog:
www.farmgirlalee.blogspot.com |
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Old Essay (2005) Taking Technology for Granted
