COLD

For the most part I’ve always written about how HOT it was in the Okanogan and how I would spend hours sitting in front of my parent’s air conditioner in the summer and just press my face against the cool air as it flowed into the house.  Calling this unit an air conditioner was stretching that term out of proportion.  It was basically a big sheet metal box with a spinning wheel inside of it.  Our outdoor water hose was hooked up to the box and in the morning my father would turn on the hose and the stream of water would turn the wheel inside the metal box and there may have been some motor trying to cool the air but any way I sat in front of that air conditioner for a long time every summer day even though the water from inside the air conditioner would spit droplets of metal flavored residue on your face you wouldn’t mind it because you were not sweaty hot and then you’d reach up and sneakily turn up the fan from medium to high and water started spitting everywhere and your mother would run into the living room and chase you outdoors because the water was getting all over everything and you had had enough of a good thing and now it was time for you to go outside and brave the elements.  Your mother would then sit down in front of the air conditioner and gasp we’ve got to buy a new air conditioner I can’t go on and then you would go on every day like this for weeks.  You’d go out side on the front steps and one of the neighbor kids had heard that you could fry an egg outside on concrete when it got this hot.  You couldn’t believe it and you said no way you can do that so Rudy Lutchinmeir runs across the street and grabs some eggs out of his mother’s refrigerator and hauls over a few eggs to your Dad’s front porch which was so smooth and hot and facing south. 

I should tell you about Rudy’s other claim to fame as a kid in Omak.  He was the only known person to be able to drink Lemonade at the same time as he was peeing his pants.  Rudy’s dad was the town banker for a while and then they moved on and probably right now Rudy is trading hedge funds in Hong Kong or something like that.

Well anyway Rudy brought those eggs over to my parent’s front steps and my brother and I thought great let’s fry some eggs and get into the paper.  The newspaper would surely think that frying eggs on the front steps would be front page material and we’d get our pictures taken.  I think my mother was still passed out in the living room trying to get cool so we didn’t bother to ask her and then Rudy just broke open the eggs and they did sizzle a bit but sort of turned black and dirty and left big splotches on the concrete and my dad had a fit when he came home and yelled at us for a long time while he tried to remove the leftover crud off the front porch.  “Front page story!!!! I’ll tell you what would be a front page story.”  It was a good thing that my father was only a yeller and once he got being mad out of his system he would forget the travesties we committed.  Otherwise I would have spent my entire childhood grounded in my room.  I’d probably be just getting out this year.

Yes it was hot in the Okanogan but what was even more challenging to your senses was the cold.  I would much rather be hot and stressed than being cold and debilitated.  Living in Seattle all of these years I have forgotten about the cold.  I’ve forgotten about the bitter cold that hits you in the face in the morning when you walk outside and freezes the phlegm in your nose and the spit in your mouth.  The cold doesn’t really freeze your spit it just crusts it over and this is a message to say it is too cold to mess around outside.  You need to find cover.  The bitter cold would follow you all day and you had to get used to it because it was only December and the worst was to come.  Now my parents never let the cold get in the way of our daily lives.  It was up at 7:00  and then breakfast at 7:30 and then off to school.  Off to school no matter what.  I think my brother and sister and I almost always had perfect attendance at school because staying home was not an alternative.  It wasn’t part of the schedule.  It was off to school because that’s what we did in the morning.  I will give you an example of this work ethic drive of my parent’s and how sometimes it went awry.

It was the first week of January and my brother and I were both in middle school.  He was in the sixth grade and I was a big shot 8th grader the oldest class in the middle school.  My mother woke us up per usual that morning for breakfast but that morning was different.  It was snowing and the wind was howling and drifts of snow were blowing over the road and you said to your mother maybe it would be a good idea to stay home today because it was so stormy and maybe the schools will be closed and we could stay home and listen to records or call our friend’s on the phone or maybe even play board games and drink hot chocolate but your mother say’s no way.  Hurry up with your breakfast because your Dad’s taking you to school in a few minutes.  So we eat and grab our books and homework under our arms, no backpacks then, and we run out to the car where Dad has warmed up the family car and Jesus Christ it’s so cold the goop in your hair has just frozen solid and you look in the rear view mirror and realize that it looks pretty good frozen but then you start to worry about what happens when it thaws out.  Your Dad is busy scraping the windshield and is standing up to his calves in snow but he’s got on his rubber overshoes and he is unfazed by the impending havoc of the storm that is blowing into town.  It was hard to keep the ice off the windshield that morning because you couldn’t scrape it off.  The ice would just reappear in a few minutes and the car heater couldn’t keep the inside of the car warm enough that morning.  This might have been a clue to stay home but no.  It must have been -20 degrees that morning but my parents were not willing to let the elements keep my brother and I away from school.  We started to drive down the hill to town and my father was lighting his pipe with a match and driving at the same time.  The roads were pure ice and although we had snow tires on we had no seat belts.  This was before Ralph Nader.  I sat in the front seat and my brother sat in the back seat clutching his books and calculating our chances for survival.  He would later grow up to be a mathematician.  As we slid around on the road I don’t think my father once got nervous.  Hell just a little wind today nothing unusual this weather will all die down in an hour or so.  As my brother and I slide around inside the car bouncing against the doors as the car wove its way down the hill and into town we began to notice that no one else was out.  Dad, look there is no one around its way to cold to be out today.  I don’t see any other kids going to school this morning.  Don’t worry about it there will be school today my dad assured us.  When we got to the school my dad let us out in the bus circle in front of the junior high school and the snow was already piling high maybe two to three feet by then.  My Dad jetted off and left us there.  The wind blew right into our faces at probably 40 miles an hour and we held onto each other while we skidded down the icy path to the front door of the school.  We barely made it to the door and my brother pointed out that there was no one else around the entire school.  We were there all alone and Dad had left.  I banged on the door and finally the janitor answered the door and he told us to go away.  The school was closed and we’d better get home because our parent’s would be worried about us out in this storm.  We both stood there dumbfounded.  Our Parent’s worried about us?  They brought us here.  It doesn’t matter said the janitor I’ve got to shut the school down and then get home myself.  You kid’s better get out of here. 

My brother started to look incredibly miserable and said it was too cold for us to walk to Dad’s office and we were going to die.  The wind was really starting to blow and the snow drifts were starting to cover the roads near the school and we really had no choice but to start walking and we took off with my brother hanging onto me worrying we were going to die and what happens when you freeze to death.  Do your eyes pop out or anything like that and I told him to cool it because we had to think positively and there we went sliding and skidding and the wind blowing us around and we were still carrying our books and my brother is afraid he’s going to lose his homework and I’m worrying I’m going to lose my brother and then my parent’s would blame his being frozen on me and how did I get in the middle of all of this?  I’m just a kid and so we trudged on with the phlegm freezing in our noses and the water in your eyes getting crusty and maybe we’ll live another day and the wind and the snow are making it hard to tell where the sidewalk was any more and no one is driving around because maybe someone might recognize you and give you a ride but no such luck and then we make it to my Dad’s office and we open the door and the wind nearly rips the door off it’s hinges and all your Dad has to say is, “What the hell are you doing here, I dropped you off at school.”

Working on my Dad’s yard was a full time job for one compulsive grown-up who couldn’t sit still unless he was playing cards and his two son’s who seemed to have no purpose to dad other than day laborer’s who would never work hard enough.  My father was always the first person up in the morning.  As soon as there was daylight my father was up drinking his coffee haphazardly along with smoking his pipe and going into action with his plans for the yard.  Often he was out in the yard, at 6 am, mowing a specialty section of the lawn that he trusted only himself to mow correctly.  The neighbors would be yelling from their bedroom windows for him to stop and mercifully let them sleep.  As much as he violated the noise codes in the neighborhood all of the neighbors loved my dad.  He was ornery, difficult, direct and collected past due bills for a living.  He was probably one of the best liked people I have ever known.  Anyway, Saturday mornings would usually start with my father starting up the lawn mower and the neighbors yelling and then my father bounding up the stairs to our room and waking up his boys.  We would pretend to be in a deep sleep with the covers over our heads but my father would pull the blankets back and demand we get out of bed so we can get the yard work done before noon and then we could spend the rest of the day playing baseball. We all knew it would never work out that way but we went along with him.  My mother was downstairs cooking breakfast and we could smell the sausages and eggs cooking and this would persuade us to get out of bed and follow after my father.  Some weekend mornings my father would cook breakfast because my mother had had enough of us all and when my father cooked and it was a time of uncontrolled mayhem with food being burned food dropped on our plates and smoke billowing out of the kitchen until the smell would get my mother out of bed she would start worrying that the house would burn down and good god chuck get out of the way while I clean up this mess.  Those were special weekends but this morning it was my mother at the helm and we were efficiently fed and sent out the door to start our work day.

My father had a real passion for his lawn.  The only problem was his lawn was spectacularly large for a family who never hired a gardener.  It was over 3 acres and the greatest place to play football in the fall except that one of the end zones was my father’s rose garden and the other one was his prized hedge that bordered the street.  Whenever a kid would run into my father’s rose garden he would always run out the house and say get out of my damn rose garden but he never made us leave and we must have made him run out of the house yelling at us 10 times a day.  The hedge always had holes in it where we jumped through clutching the football tightly in our grip but my dad would only be grumpy about it on the surface and I think he really enjoyed having all of the neighborhood kids tearing up his prized lawn and wreaking his roses.

Back to the lawn, the craziest thing about the lawn was that Dad insisted on mowing the lawn every three days and we had to mow it in a certain direction so the lawn would take on the look of a well manicured golf course.  For my father it was a sight of beauty but for me it was pure drudgery.  Until we got the first riding lawn mower in town and then I could mow the lawn in style and pop wheelies with the lawn mower when my father wasn’t around.  Like I said my father was a real stickler for the pattern of the lawn after it had been mowed and he was always instructing me about this.  Well, one summer day Mark Mundinger, the kid next door, got the idea that we should mow our initials into the grand side yard at my father’s and then after we showed all the other kid

COLD

For the most part I’ve always written about how HOT it was in the Okanogan and how I would spend hours sitting in front of my parent’s air conditioner in the summer and just press my face against the cool air as it flowed into the house.  Calling this unit an air conditioner was stretching that term out of proportion.  It was basically a big sheet metal box with a spinning wheel inside of it.  Our outdoor water hose was hooked up to the box and in the morning my father would turn on the hose and the stream of water would turn the wheel inside the metal box and there may have been some motor trying to cool the air but any way I sat in front of that air conditioner for a long time every summer day even though the water from inside the air conditioner would spit droplets of metal flavored residue on your face you wouldn’t mind it because you were not sweaty hot and then you’d reach up and sneakily turn up the fan from medium to high and water started spitting everywhere and your mother would run into the living room and chase you outdoors because the water was getting all over everything and you had had enough of a good thing and now it was time for you to go outside and brave the elements.  Your mother would then sit down in front of the air conditioner and gasp we’ve got to buy a new air conditioner I can’t go on and then you would go on every day like this for weeks.  You’d go out side on the front steps and one of the neighbor kids had heard that you could fry an egg outside on concrete when it got this hot.  You couldn’t believe it and you said no way you can do that so Rudy Lutchinmeir runs across the street and grabs some eggs out of his mother’s refrigerator and hauls over a few eggs to your Dad’s front porch which was so smooth and hot and facing south. 

I should tell you about Rudy’s other claim to fame as a kid in Omak.  He was the only known person to be able to drink Lemonade at the same time as he was peeing his pants.  Rudy’s dad was the town banker for a while and then they moved on and probably right now Rudy is trading hedge funds in Hong Kong or something like that.

Well anyway Rudy brought those eggs over to my parent’s front steps and my brother and I thought great let’s fry some eggs and get into the paper.  The newspaper would surely think that frying eggs on the front steps would be front page material and we’d get our pictures taken.  I think my mother was still passed out in the living room trying to get cool so we didn’t bother to ask her and then Rudy just broke open the eggs and they did sizzle a bit but sort of turned black and dirty and left big splotches on the concrete and my dad had a fit when he came home and yelled at us for a long time while he tried to remove the leftover crud off the front porch.  “Front page story!!!! I’ll tell you what would be a front page story.”  It was a good thing that my father was only a yeller and once he got being mad out of his system he would forget the travesties we committed.  Otherwise I would have spent my entire childhood grounded in my room.  I’d probably be just getting out this year.

Yes it was hot in the Okanogan but what was even more challenging to your senses was the cold.  I would much rather be hot and stressed than being cold and debilitated.  Living in Seattle all of these years I have forgotten about the cold.  I’ve forgotten about the bitter cold that hits you in the face in the morning when you walk outside and freezes the phlegm in your nose and the spit in your mouth.  The cold doesn’t really freeze your spit it just crusts it over and this is a message to say it is too cold to mess around outside.  You need to find cover.  The bitter cold would follow you all day and you had to get used to it because it was only December and the worst was to come.  Now my parents never let the cold get in the way of our daily lives.  It was up at 7:00  and then breakfast at 7:30 and then off to school.  Off to school no matter what.  I think my brother and sister and I almost always had perfect attendance at school because staying home was not an alternative.  It wasn’t part of the schedule.  It was off to school because that’s what we did in the morning.  I will give you an example of this work ethic drive of my parent’s and how sometimes it went awry.

It was the first week of January and my brother and I were both in middle school.  He was in the sixth grade and I was a big shot 8th grader the oldest class in the middle school.  My mother woke us up per usual that morning for breakfast but that morning was different.  It was snowing and the wind was howling and drifts of snow were blowing over the road and you said to your mother maybe it would be a good idea to stay home today because it was so stormy and maybe the schools will be closed and we could stay home and listen to records or call our friend’s on the phone or maybe even play board games and drink hot chocolate but your mother say’s no way.  Hurry up with your breakfast because your Dad’s taking you to school in a few minutes.  So we eat and grab our books and homework under our arms, no backpacks then, and we run out to the car where Dad has warmed up the family car and Jesus Christ it’s so cold the goop in your hair has just frozen solid and you look in the rear view mirror and realize that it looks pretty good frozen but then you start to worry about what happens when it thaws out.  Your Dad is busy scraping the windshield and is standing up to his calves in snow but he’s got on his rubber overshoes and he is unfazed by the impending havoc of the storm that is blowing into town.  It was hard to keep the ice off the windshield that morning because you couldn’t scrape it off.  The ice would just reappear in a few minutes and the car heater couldn’t keep the inside of the car warm enough that morning.  This might have been a clue to stay home but no.  It must have been -20 degrees that morning but my parents were not willing to let the elements keep my brother and I away from school.  We started to drive down the hill to town and my father was lighting his pipe with a match and driving at the same time.  The roads were pure ice and although we had snow tires on we had no seat belts.  This was before Ralph Nader.  I sat in the front seat and my brother sat in the back seat clutching his books and calculating our chances for survival.  He would later grow up to be a mathematician.  As we slid around on the road I don’t think my father once got nervous.  Hell just a little wind today nothing unusual this weather will all die down in an hour or so.  As my brother and I slide around inside the car bouncing against the doors as the car wove its way down the hill and into town we began to notice that no one else was out.  Dad, look there is no one around its way to cold to be out today.  I don’t see any other kids going to school this morning.  Don’t worry about it there will be school today my dad assured us.  When we got to the school my dad let us out in the bus circle in front of the junior high school and the snow was already piling high maybe two to three feet by then.  My Dad jetted off and left us there.  The wind blew right into our faces at probably 40 miles an hour and we held onto each other while we skidded down the icy path to the front door of the school.  We barely made it to the door and my brother pointed out that there was no one else around the entire school.  We were there all alone and Dad had left.  I banged on the door and finally the janitor answered the door and he told us to go away.  The school was closed and we’d better get home because our parent’s would be worried about us out in this storm.  We both stood there dumbfounded.  Our Parent’s worried about us?  They brought us here.  It doesn’t matter said the janitor I’ve got to shut the school down and then get home myself.  You kid’s better get out of here. 

My brother started to look incredibly miserable and said it was too cold for us to walk to Dad’s office and we were going to die.  The wind was really starting to blow and the snow drifts were starting to cover the roads near the school and we really had no choice but to start walking and we took off with my brother hanging onto me worrying we were going to die and what happens when you freeze to death.  Do your eyes pop out or anything like that and I told him to cool it because we had to think positively and there we went sliding and skidding and the wind blowing us around and we were still carrying our books and my brother is afraid he’s going to lose his homework and I’m worrying I’m going to lose my brother and then my parent’s would blame his being frozen on me and how did I get in the middle of all of this?  I’m just a kid and so we trudged on with the phlegm freezing in our noses and the water in your eyes getting crusty and maybe we’ll live another day and the wind and the snow are making it hard to tell where the sidewalk was any more and no one is driving around because maybe someone might recognize you and give you a ride but no such luck and then we make it to my Dad’s office and we open the door and the wind nearly rips the door off it’s hinges and all your Dad has to say is, “What the hell are you doing here, I dropped you off at school.”

Working on my Dad’s yard was a full time job for one compulsive grown-up who couldn’t sit still unless he was playing cards and his two son’s who seemed to have no purpose to dad other than day laborer’s who would never work hard enough.  My father was always the first person up in the morning.  As soon as there was daylight my father was up drinking his coffee haphazardly along with smoking his pipe and going into action with his plans for the yard.  Often he was out in the yard, at 6 am, mowing a specialty section of the lawn that he trusted only himself to mow correctly.  The neighbors would be yelling from their bedroom windows for him to stop and mercifully let them sleep.  As much as he violated the noise codes in the neighborhood all of the neighbors loved my dad.  He was ornery, difficult, direct and collected past due bills for a living.  He was probably one of the best liked people I have ever known.  Anyway, Saturday mornings would usually start with my father starting up the lawn mower and the neighbors yelling and then my father bounding up the stairs to our room and waking up his boys.  We would pretend to be in a deep sleep with the covers over our heads but my father would pull the blankets back and demand we get out of bed so we can get the yard work done before noon and then we could spend the rest of the day playing baseball. We all knew it would never work out that way but we went along with him.  My mother was downstairs cooking breakfast and we could smell the sausages and eggs cooking and this would persuade us to get out of bed and follow after my father.  Some weekend mornings my father would cook breakfast because my mother had had enough of us all and when my father cooked and it was a time of uncontrolled mayhem with food being burned food dropped on our plates and smoke billowing out of the kitchen until the smell would get my mother out of bed she would start worrying that the house would burn down and good god chuck get out of the way while I clean up this mess.  Those were special weekends but this morning it was my mother at the helm and we were efficiently fed and sent out the door to start our work day.

My father had a real passion for his lawn.  The only problem was his lawn was spectacularly large for a family who never hired a gardener.  It was over 3 acres and the greatest place to play football in the fall except that one of the end zones was my father’s rose garden and the other one was his prized hedge that bordered the street.  Whenever a kid would run into my father’s rose garden he would always run out the house and say get out of my damn rose garden but he never made us leave and we must have made him run out of the house yelling at us 10 times a day.  The hedge always had holes in it where we jumped through clutching the football tightly in our grip but my dad would only be grumpy about it on the surface and I think he really enjoyed having all of the neighborhood kids tearing up his prized lawn and wreaking his roses.

Back to the lawn, the craziest thing about the lawn was that Dad insisted on mowing the lawn every three days and we had to mow it in a certain direction so the lawn would take on the look of a well manicured golf course.  For my father it was a sight of beauty but for me it was pure drudgery.  Until we got the first riding lawn mower in town and then I could mow the lawn in style and pop wheelies with the lawn mower when my father wasn’t around.  Like I said my father was a real stickler for the pattern of the lawn after it had been mowed and he was always instructing me about this.  Well, one summer day Mark Mundinger, the kid next door, got the idea that we should mow our initials into the grand side yard at my father’s and then after we showed all the other kids what we had done we would then mow the lawn the right way and my dad would never find out.  I thought that was great.  Who wouldn’t think their initials mowed thirty feet long in the grass was great.  Well we got out an old mower and went to work.  We had just finished the job and were wiping the sweat off of our brow when my father unexpectedly drove home.  “What the hell is going on here?  Are you kids nuts?  This is going to ruin the lawn for weeks.”  Mark disappeared because my dad’s anxiety level was scaring him and my dad ordered me to start mowing this entire strip of lawn over and over again until I mowed it 3 times.  Only my father could tell the initials were still there and he was fuming even after all of the mowing so we set three giant sprinklers on the spot and left them running for hours trying to drown out the initials and for days the first thing in the morning my dad would go out to the violated spot on the lawn and see if my marks had finally gone away.

So the man loved his lawn there are worst things to love.  The other love of my father’s was his lilacs.  We had a giant row of lilacs across the middle of 3 acres and it separated the more formal garden around the house from the more farm like setting behind the hedge running back to the neighbors.  It was spectacular in May when it was in bloom and I will always remember gathering lilac blooms from it and giving them away to everyone at school.  These were old fashioned lilacs and they were incredibly pungent and the smell wafted over the yard for about 10 days every spring.  Well in the summer of 1968 my father’s love for his lawn and roses and formal gardens won out over his love of the lilac hedge.  By this time I had a paying job working delivering furniture and I came home one afternoon and my brother and father were out chopping down the hedge and I was stunned by the change this was bringing.  My father was thrilled because his master plan for the gardens was being realized and I was struck with how quickly change causes other changes.  I might have mentioned something to him about the lilac hedge being a windbreak in the winter but he would never have heard me anyway.  The hedge had to go.

I’m telling you all of this because change does cause change and it was coming soon.  In November of 1968 it started getting cold in the Okanogan and it never stopped until April of 1969.  It was just crazy cold playing football that November and we all had to wear gloves and new coats to stay warm.  It started snowing at Thanksgiving and the wind started in early December.  It started to snow and snow and the thermometer got down to -49 degrees.

The wind piled the snow up about twelve (12) feet in front of my parent’s front door and you could hardly get out.  We’d crack off 5 foot long icicles off the gutters and use them like swords to battle each other.  Well one Friday night in early December the snow and wind really picked up the snow started to drift over the entire yard and because the lilac hedge was gone the snow drifted over into the street in front of my parent’s house.  It drifted so quickly that there were actually two cars driving by that got stuck at the same time and had to be left there for six weeks until they could be dug out.  My father and I watched this from the living room and he thought about the possible mistake of taking the hedge down but then decided that having more lawn was worth this.

That winter of 1968 was the coldest I have ever been.  One day I took out a rock and roll record to put on the stereo in my room and it snapped in two because the room was so cold. And I was inside the house.  But as usual we teenagers adapted to the conditions and reveled in the fact that on either side of the sidewalks the snow was piled 5 or 6 feet high and you could throw snowballs at cars at will and then hide behind the piled up snow banks.  We did this for hours when we had nothing to do and believe me we got chased all over by the drivers of the cars that were hit.  The cars that were hit would swerve around and come back to the spot where we threw the snowballs and then we would make a mad scramble over the snow banks and scatter for home.  Great fun indeed for future captains of industry or maybe it was privates of industry.

-49 degrees was hard to prepare for.  Like the night you drove your girlfriend to Oroville to see Gone with the Wind and she thought you were so grown up because you actually asked her to go, she didn’t know you’d been throwing snowballs at cars the night before, and you showered and put on your English Leather cologne and you were thinking you looked pretty good and you drove to Tonasket and you actually got to Susan’s house on time and you drove her to the movie and it was only -30 and you were set because you changed the anti-freeze to a -45 blend and the guy at the service station said you were all set and you thought this is my night to be one handsome stud with a girl wrapped up with you in the cold and completely prepared for the elements.  We watched the movie and did the couple smooching in the theatre thing and then when we went outside and it was -49 degrees.  Do you know how cold it is to be standing around at night when it’s -49 degrees.  I didn’t give it a second thought.  I was on top of my game and we got into the Mustang and it started right up and we drove off but in a few minutes I knew things were all wrong.

As we drove down the road I began to notice that the car heater never warmed up and the defrost wasn’t working.  Then I stared down at the heat gauge and it was all the way over on hot with the arrow bouncing all over the red zone.  Smoke was billowing out from underneath the hood and then I knew we were in a lot of trouble.  I stopped the car and tried to open the door but it was nearly frozen shut.  I pushed on the door very hard and it finally opened.  I got out and tried to open the hood of the car but I couldn’t budge it and then complete panic set in.  What are we going to do I’ve got my girlfriend with me and of course we don’t have the right clothes on and of course you were supposed to be taking care of things and of course you were now 5 miles from the closest wide spot in the road that you could call a town where someone might help and it was almost midnight.  Hardly any cars drove by on Highway 97 that night and you worried that maybe this time you were in fact in trouble.  The wind blew and we huddled together outside trying to wave cars down and we jumped up and down to stay warm as our noses and ears were getting way to tingly from the cold and then a car pulled over and it turned out to be a friend of my girlfriend who had gone to Canada that night and saw my car and wanted to see what kind of stupid thing I had done now.

Thank god people enjoyed seeing how I was going to elude trouble once again.  I had to leave the beloved Mustang on the side of the road and hope for the best but as we drove down the road hoping our ears and noses wouldn’t fall off Linda put a new tape into the 8 track tape player and there began my new love with my old love the Beatles.  It was the white album and I was hearing it for the first time.  All around us the landscape was white and cold and inside we were listening to the white album and as we were carried away with the music the cold seemed to recede into the background as we listened to another cultural wave bringing us new ideas and thoughts.  Pop Music always seemed to be moment specific like that in the 60’s you’d turn on the radio and the song that was playing was the  perfect song for what was going on in your life.

We stopped the car at a rest stop on the way to Tonasket and turned the stereo up loud and played the Beatles over and over.  That night our shoes were cold and wet and our socks were cold and wet and our pants from the calves down were cold and wet.  It seems like we were cold and wet for months but we had the Beatles and we had each other and we knew that next winter we’d be at college and high school fiasco nights like this would soon come to an end.  When I finally got home that night I went to bed without explaining things to my parents and as I lay in bed that night I could see my breath as I pulled the covers over my head. 

You guessed it.  In the morning my father wanted to know where in the hell is the car?

s what we had done we would then mow the lawn the right way and my dad would never find out.  I thought that was great.  Who wouldn’t think their initials mowed thirty feet long in the grass was great.  Well we got out an old mower and went to work.  We had just finished the job and were wiping the sweat off of our brow when my father unexpectedly drove home.  “What the hell is going on here?  Are you kids nuts?  This is going to ruin the lawn for weeks.”  Mark disappeared because my dad’s anxiety level was scaring him and my dad ordered me to start mowing this entire strip of lawn over and over again until I mowed it 3 times.  Only my father could tell the initials were still there and he was fuming even after all of the mowing so we set three giant sprinklers on the spot and left them running for hours trying to drown out the initials and for days the first thing in the morning my dad would go out to the violated spot on the lawn and see if my marks had finally gone away.

So the man loved his lawn there are worst things to love.  The other love of my father’s was his lilacs.  We had a giant row of lilacs across the middle of 3 acres and it separated the more formal garden around the house from the more farm like setting behind the hedge running back to the neighbors.  It was spectacular in May when it was in bloom and I will always remember gathering lilac blooms from it and giving them away to everyone at school.  These were old fashioned lilacs and they were incredibly pungent and the smell wafted over the yard for about 10 days every spring.  Well in the summer of 1968 my father’s love for his lawn and roses and formal gardens won out over his love of the lilac hedge.  By this time I had a paying job working delivering furniture and I came home one afternoon and my brother and father were out chopping down the hedge and I was stunned by the change this was bringing.  My father was thrilled because his master plan for the gardens was being realized and I was struck with how quickly change causes other changes.  I might have mentioned something to him about the lilac hedge being a windbreak in the winter but he would never have heard me anyway.  The hedge had to go.

I’m telling you all of this because change does cause change and it was coming soon.  In November of 1968 it started getting cold in the Okanogan and it never stopped until April of 1969.  It was just crazy cold playing football that November and we all had to wear gloves and new coats to stay warm.  It started snowing at Thanksgiving and the wind started in early December.  It started to snow and snow and the thermometer got down to -49 degrees.

The wind piled the snow up about twelve (12) feet in front of my parent’s front door and you could hardly get out.  We’d crack off 5 foot long icicles off the gutters and use them like swords to battle each other.  Well one Friday night in early December the snow and wind really picked up the snow started to drift over the entire yard and because the lilac hedge was gone the snow drifted over into the street in front of my parent’s house.  It drifted so quickly that there were actually two cars driving by that got stuck at the same time and had to be left there for six weeks until they could be dug out.  My father and I watched this from the living room and he thought about the possible mistake of taking the hedge down but then decided that having more lawn was worth this.

That winter of 1968 was the coldest I have ever been.  One day I took out a rock and roll record to put on the stereo in my room and it snapped in two because the room was so cold. And I was inside the house.  But as usual we teenagers adapted to the conditions and reveled in the fact that on either side of the sidewalks the snow was piled 5 or 6 feet high and you could throw snowballs at cars at will and then hide behind the piled up snow banks.  We did this for hours when we had nothing to do and believe me we got chased all over by the drivers of the cars that were hit.  The cars that were hit would swerve around and come back to the spot where we threw the snowballs and then we would make a mad scramble over the snow banks and scatter for home.  Great fun indeed for future captains of industry or maybe it was privates of industry.

-49 degrees was hard to prepare for.  Like the night you drove your girlfriend to Oroville to see Gone with the Wind and she thought you were so grown up because you actually asked her to go, she didn’t know you’d been throwing snowballs at cars the night before, and you showered and put on your English Leather cologne and you were thinking you looked pretty good and you drove to Tonasket and you actually got to Susan’s house on time and you drove her to the movie and it was only -30 and you were set because you changed the anti-freeze to a -45 blend and the guy at the service station said you were all set and you thought this is my night to be one handsome stud with a girl wrapped up with you in the cold and completely prepared for the elements.  We watched the movie and did the couple smooching in the theatre thing and then when we went outside and it was -49 degrees.  Do you know how cold it is to be standing around at night when it’s -49 degrees.  I didn’t give it a second thought.  I was on top of my game and we got into the Mustang and it started right up and we drove off but in a few minutes I knew things were all wrong.

As we drove down the road I began to notice that the car heater never warmed up and the defrost wasn’t working.  Then I stared down at the heat gauge and it was all the way over on hot with the arrow bouncing all over the red zone.  Smoke was billowing out from underneath the hood and then I knew we were in a lot of trouble.  I stopped the car and tried to open the door but it was nearly frozen shut.  I pushed on the door very hard and it finally opened.  I got out and tried to open the hood of the car but I couldn’t budge it and then complete panic set in.  What are we going to do I’ve got my girlfriend with me and of course we don’t have the right clothes on and of course you were supposed to be taking care of things and of course you were now 5 miles from the closest wide spot in the road that you could call a town where someone might help and it was almost midnight.  Hardly any cars drove by on Highway 97 that night and you worried that maybe this time you were in fact in trouble.  The wind blew and we huddled together outside trying to wave cars down and we jumped up and down to stay warm as our noses and ears were getting way to tingly from the cold and then a car pulled over and it turned out to be a friend of my girlfriend who had gone to Canada that night and saw my car and wanted to see what kind of stupid thing I had done now.

Thank god people enjoyed seeing how I was going to elude trouble once again.  I had to leave the beloved Mustang on the side of the road and hope for the best but as we drove down the road hoping our ears and noses wouldn’t fall off Linda put a new tape into the 8 track tape player and there began my new love with my old love the Beatles.  It was the white album and I was hearing it for the first time.  All around us the landscape was white and cold and inside we were listening to the white album and as we were carried away with the music the cold seemed to recede into the background as we listened to another cultural wave bringing us new ideas and thoughts.  Pop Music always seemed to be moment specific like that in the 60’s you’d turn on the radio and the song that was playing was the  perfect song for what was going on in your life.

We stopped the car at a rest stop on the way to Tonasket and turned the stereo up loud and played the Beatles over and over.  That night our shoes were cold and wet and our socks were cold and wet and our pants from the calves down were cold and wet.  It seems like we were cold and wet for months but we had the Beatles and we had each other and we knew that next winter we’d be at college and high school fiasco nights like this would soon come to an end.  When I finally got home that night I went to bed without explaining things to my parents and as I lay in bed that night I could see my breath as I pulled the covers over my head. 

You guessed it.  In the morning my father wanted to know where in the hell is the car?