“Daylight in the swamp, folksies, time to get up!”
My father’s hearty voice called into our room. Vaguely aware, I opened my sleepy eyes just enough to see it was still dark outside, not our usual schedule on June mornings — and it was Mother who always woke us up. Slowly the realization dawned, through my awakening haze — it was moving day — the day we had been looking forward to all year.
John and I crawled out of bed, pulled on the clothes laid out for us, and padded toward the kitchen, making our way around stacks of boxes, and still rubbing our drowsy eyes. The back door was propped open to speed daddy’s comings and goings. He’d mowed the lawn the day before, and the cool morning air drifting in from outside smelled like cut grass. Inside, that aroma mingled with Mother’s fresh coffee.
She motioned for us to sit down at the table, but my stomach felt tight, and I could see that John looked like I felt. Taking our places anyway, we slowly ate our oatmeal, covered with thick cream, poured off the top of the tall glass milk bottle. We also had toast, hot off the little square toaster, perched over the gas stove burner. Our parents had been up long before us, eaten breakfast, and partly loaded the rented four-wheel trailer. As we finished our meal, Mother fitted perishables from the icebox into the wooden food container we used for traveling. It was cooled by evaporation from a water-soaked burlap sack she draped over the top.
Parts of the living and dining rooms were in disarray, a strange mix of order and chaos. This was not a normal move — we were only taking a few of our belongings. The rest remained in their usual places, just as though nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Daddy would be using them when he returned.
Since there was no electricity on the farm, all of our appliances — the radio, Mother’s nearly-new sewing machine, the washing machine, and iron — would remain. The only items of furniture we packed were their double bed, mattresses, a chest of drawers, and a large kitchen cabinet. Stacks of cardboard boxes, filled with clothing and linens, were lined up for loading, along with the gardening equipment, daddy’s carpentry tools, the ax, bucksaw, and scythe.
It was nearly six o’clock when daddy finally nestled the last item — the crate holding The Mother Cat and Tommy, her half grown kitten — into a sheltered spot on the trailer. Then John and I squeezed into the back seat of the car, making room for ourselves among various bundles, and propped our bed pillows back into the corners.
Daddy made a final check of our model-T and trailer to see that all was in order before climbing into the front seat next to Mother, and starting the engine. After carefully maneuvering the car into the alley, and then out onto the deserted street, he drove slowly at first, to get the feel of his two-part rig. After making a few practice stops, to test the car’s brakes with the heavy trailer, he headed north across Minneapolis, toward the highway.
It took nearly an hour before we reached the edge of town, and were finally driving on narrow concrete highway. As we cleared the city and picked up speed, the car started shuddering and jerking violently to the side. His grip tightened on the wheel, “The trailer is fishtailing … when I go faster it skews from side to side. There’s’ nothing to do but keep the speed down; 200 miles at 25 miles an hour — that’s eight hours. With time for lunch and rest stops we’ll be on the road for 10 hours.”
Mother patted his arm, “With our early start, we’ll still have some daylight left when we get there.”
As we drove past the patchwork of fields and pastures, daddy began our formal farming instruction, as he pointed out the differences between the wheat, rye, oats, and corn growing right up to the ditches on both sides of the road. His voice took on an almost reverential tone telling us about the horses we saw, identifying teams working in the fields as Belgians, Percherons, or Clydesdales, but most frequently, the dependable hard-working Morgans.
When our lessons turned to cows, the black and white Holsteins were easy to identify, but it took more practice to distinguish between the tan-colored Guernseys and Jerseys. Once he pointed out the more subtle differences, we could tell them apart. These last two were Daddy’s favorite because their milk contained more cream. His ideal was “cream so thick a cat could walk across it.”
We learned about breeds of chickens: Rhode Island Reds (mother’s favorite), White Leghorns, and the less common Bared Rocks. Soon John and I were in active competition, spotting and naming livestock. Our transition from city to farm life had officially begun.
We were so engrossed with our new lessons and creature-spotting, that we lost awareness of time. Before we reached Little Falls, Charles Lindbergh’s home town, John and I were firing out the correct breed names like champion game show contestants. Suddenly ravenous, we all headed for the picnic grounds to have lunch. We had covered the first hundred miles in good time, and my parents made sure that John and I had time to run around and play after eating — and the cats got a brief respite from their travel box.
Back on the road, the scenery began to change, as hills, lakes, and patches of woods became increasingly more common than cultivated fields. Farms were further apart and clearly less prosperous, many with deserted buildings looking unkempt and forlorn. Abandoned windmills, their blades no longer connected to pumps, continued their useless turning in the hot afternoon wind. Other cars hauling trailers passed us, and my parents must have wondered what the future held for those people. At least we had the assurance of knowing that my father’s job could support us.
By mid afternoon, the newness had worn off all our games, and there were fewer animals to see. We had been held prisoner in the back seat of that car for nine hours. The noisy old Model-T engine banged away mercilessly, while the trailer’s jerks and clunks rattled us from the rear. Below, the hard tires and stiff springs transmitted every bump in the road. The car’s black exterior absorbed the sun’s heat, which required opening the windows. The draft also brought more engine and road noise, plus clouds of road dust we stirred up as we passed. Our bed pillows, so soft and comforting early in the day, had become damp and clinging, as we sweated in the June sun.
The last-minute items Daddy stuffed in the back seat, before we left were not a problem — at first. In fact, their familiarity offered us a sense of security amidst the chaos. But, as the final hours of our journey lagged, whenever John and I changed positions, and the car shimmied, they shifted around, pressing in on us from all sides, and intensifying our feeling of entrapment in the confines of our little cell. So John and I responded in a perfectly natural way, by turning our attentions to annoying each other, as all self respecting siblings instinctively know how to do.
By late afternoon, we were on the last twenty-five mile stretch, a bumpy gravel county road. The wind had died down, but the dust bowl sun continued to blaze on us from a cloudless sky. An occasional car going by raised a thick yellow cloud that hung in the still air, forming a corridor of dust we had to pass through, its gritty residue clinging to our hot sweaty bodies.
But when we reached the first of many stretches of washboard surface — places where use and the elements had combined to produce a corduroy pattern of ridges across the road — we discovered a new amusement. When we made a continuous “ahhhh” sound, the rapid bounces of the car jarred us enough to form a machine-gun-like staccato. A little more experimentation proved we could accentuate the effect by holding our teeth barely apart, allowing the bumps to make them chatter in perfect synchrony. This diversion sent us into delirious fits of giggling.
Our parents must have welcomed this respite from our bickering, but the calm was short-lived. Suddenly my father yelled “Damn!” then pulled over to the side of the road and stopped, a profuse cloud of steam hissing from the car’s radiator. In the interest of harmony on a stress-filled day, Mother did not make her usual fuss about his strong language. The swearing may even have helped reduce some of her frustration, though I’m sure she never would have admitted it.
The hot day and heavy load had overtaxed the engine’s cooling system, and more water was needed. While highly inconvenient, it was not a real emergency. Daddy had extra water in the trailer. While the engine cooled down, we refreshed ourselves with cold water from a thermos, and a surprise treat — some home-made cookies mother produced from a secret stash. With the car’s radiator replenished, we resumed our cramped places for the remaining home stretch.
We were approaching what we had named “The Big Hill” last year, after our first visit to see the farm. The grade was so steep, that the car had stalled there, forcing Daddy to back all the way down, and make a second run, before we finally scaled the summit. Of course, this time we had the additional drag of our bulging trailer, which would make backing down a formidable feat. My father approached the hill as fast as he dared, and then, sensing the exact moment when the engine began to strain, shifted into low gear.
As the rig slowed, John and I urged the car ahead with a synchronized pumping motion — but it continued to slow, until we were barely crawling along. After an agonizing Promethean effort, our over-taxed little-engine-that-could, somehow got us over the top. With a sigh of relief, my father’s shoulders finally relaxed, “We’re almost there,” he said cheerily.
In a few minutes, we rounded the gently curving hill past the Shaws, our nearest neighbors. Then, after two more mini-rises in the road, we spied our own slanting mailbox post and weed-filled driveway. Daddy turned into the yard, and pulled to a stop in the shade of a young jack pine growing near the house. Home at last — we had arrived just in time to make supper.
We all scrambled out, and Daddy took off his hat, and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. Replacing the hat, he turned to the car and said, “You done a good job, Betsy, damned if you didn’t!” patting the hood’s hot metal as if it were the perspiring shoulder of a tired horse, after a long day’s plowing.
John and I quickly found traces of the path leading back from the house to the privy, almost hidden by trees. We returned to the car just as Daddy was releasing the confused and annoyed cats from their cage. They promptly headed toward the sagging old barn, disappearing in the tall grass. Wondering about the barn ourselves, we followed after them, while our parents got out the box of food, and set up the gasoline camp stove on the back of the trailer, ready to cook supper. They had already decided that the ground outside was cleaner than the twenty years of accumulated dirt and litter inside, so we would live in the open air, while getting the house fit for human occupation — according to Mother’s standards….
She soon called us back from our investigations. ”Here, you two! Make yourselves useful. Take these two pails in your wagon down to Shaws and ask them if we can have some water. We need it for supper.” The handle for our pump in the side yard was missing, and we had used Shaw’s water the year before. As we reached the road, she called out after us, “And be polite!”
Glad to be free again, we raced down the road, nearly bouncing the pails out of the wagon. Not even a dog was visible outside at the Shaws, so we went up to the door. No one came in response to our knocking, but we heard a woman’s voice from inside call out, “Who’s there?” I answered, “We just moved up here from the city and our pump doesn’t have a handle so our mom sent us over here for water.” Remembering my mother’s admonition to be polite, I asked as respectfully as possible, “Can we please fill our pails?”
“My man ain’t home,” she answered, “You’ll have to pump it yourselves, I’m sorry I can’t help you.” We learned later that Mrs. Shaw had recently given birth to a baby.
Giving our thanks to the voice in the house, we left the porch and set about finding their pump and filling our pails. Prepared to race back with the water as fast as we had come, we were surprised to discover that the return trip was an entirely different operation. With its heavy load, the wagon wheels sank into the soft sand at the side of the road, where it was smooth from the road grader. When we moved to the part packed down by traffic, the wheels bumped on holes and embedded stones, bouncing the pails around and splashing their hard-earned contents. We settled for the sand, taking turns with one of us pulling the wagon while the other pushed. It was a great relief to see Mother coming over the hill to meet us, anxious to get on with preparing supper. With her help, we soon were home, with at least enough water remaining for her purposes.
She quickly had potatoes boiling, and the smell of steaks sizzling on the stove suddenly reminded us just how hungry we were. Daddy smiled as he observed our obvious impatience, commenting, “You won’t have to worry about these young ones’ appetites from now on, Martha.” But she said, “I’m a little worried about how I’ll be able to get enough food for them after you go back with the car.” For the moment, though, they were content to prepare supper and be thankful we had arrived safely.
As we ate our meal quietly, sitting on the grass beside the car, I looked out at our new world. The buildings had changed little in appearance since the year before. Near the house, a few wild flowers and raspberry bushes grew, tangled with long thick timothy and foxtail grass. Our yard was surrounded by a grove of pine trees with a border of pink wild roses. Behind and to one side of the house, the log barn leaned northward as if frozen in mid-collapse, the slanting lines of its doors and windows awry. Directly across from the house, was a small shed suitable for storage.
With the dishes washed, and supper things put away in the trailer, we prepared for our night under the stars. Daddy unpacked our bedding from the trailer, and we all helped arrange our sleeping places. First spreading a canvas tarp on the grass beside the car, we laid quilts over that for extra softness, and then followed with sheets, blankets, and pillows.
Just as we finished, the welcome cooler air of evening quickly filled with mosquitoes, swarming up from their daytime hiding places in the long grass. Putting our outer clothes in the car to protect them from dew, we sought refuge by crawling as far down inside the bedding as possible, and pulling the sheets up over our heads. Even then, some hyper-focused mosquitoes managed to find their mark through our barriers.
Trying to ignore the high-pitched whine of bloodthirsty insects, I resented cowering under the covers. I longed for a full view — to watch stars emerge one by one, as the light slipped beyond the western edge of the woods. Despite my fatigue from the long day, I strained to hear all the new soothing sounds like crickets, nocturnal scampering, and breezes rustling through leaves. At some point, I drifted off…
Waking in the middle of the night, cramped and uncomfortable from trying to keep the covers around me, I finally braved the mosquitoes to gaze up at the night sky, studded with uncountable stars — neither blurred by the city’s haze nor dimmed by its lights. The sight was almost too immense — so distant, and yet so close — I could almost trace silhouettes on the deep black void. Pulling the covers back over me, I again sought the comfort of sleep.