IT WAS DAYLIGHT at the homestead, but I was more than a little late for breakfast. I probably missed it by 50 years or so.
The cabin had collapsed and been covered by a maze of blackberries. The barn and the root cellar had vanished without a trace. A 4-foot-square depression in the meadow marked the indelible impression of the outhouse.
All that was left of what had been a farm was a collection of derelict apple trees. Wind blown and broken down by storms and generations of marauding bears, the old trees stood witness to the lost world of the pioneer homesteaders.
There are few remains of this culture today. It was a time when all you had to do to claim 160 acres of land was to establish a habitation and cultivation. In other words, build a cabin and plant a crop.
Some people took advantage of this generous offer by stacking four logs as a foundation and putting a potted plant on a stump to prove their claim. Others spent a lifetime making a home in the wilderness, where generations tried to eke out a living from the land.
They were called stump ranchers because moving the stumps was too much work, so they planted what crops they could grow between the stumps until these obstacles to agriculture could be pulled out or burned up.
It was a laborious process that could take a lifetime of brutal labor. Even the most successful stump rancher often had to go to work in a logging camp so his family could survive the winter.
You certainly weren’t going to get rich growing the typical homestead crops. There was no market. You couldn’t sell your potatoes, cabbage, rutabagas and onions to your neighbors because they were growing the same things. The best you could hope for was to store enough of your harvest in your root cellar to last until spring.
The only variety in this mundane diet was provided by the abundant fruit trees delivering a dependable annual harvest.
Pioneer memories provide a glimpse of life on the homestead when the apple harvest failed, making a bleak existence even more difficult.
One daughter of a rainforest homesteader described her favorite Sunday dinner. That was toasted bread with milk that was thickened with flour, if they had it, and sweetened with sugar, in the unlikely event that they had that, too.
These magnificent old fruit trees may have gotten their start from seeds from the old country that were saved in an envelope and brought across the ocean and the continent in the course of the great western migration from Europe to the West Coast of North America in the 1800s.
A visit to a pioneer orchard can be a wildlife adventure since almost every critter and bird likes apples.
Grouse live in the old apple trees, eating apples and the new buds. Deer set their migration routes timed to the ripening of the apples.
Bears love apples more than all of the rest of the animals put together. And if they find a hornet’s nest in the tree, they’ll eat that too. The bears can also provide the tree with a free pruning service by breaking the branches off, which is a little rough, but it doesn’t kill the tree.
Once, I watched a bear sitting over a pile of apples. It was holding an apple between its paws, chopping them up in her jaws while sucking out the juice.
It was a picture of pure enjoyment.
I felt bad about scaring the bear away, but I needed apples, too.
_________
Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
