Fifty years later, I can't recall now how we came to earth in Ferndale, or even how we knew of Huxley College's existence for that matter.  I suspect that it was at least partly or maybe completely thanks to my close friend Dennis, another of our company of misfits at Fort Lewis who like Gary and me and every other clerk in the room had his own list of a thousand infantrymen per cycle he kept records for, recording their test scores and producing their shipping orders when they completed infantry training and were destined to fly off to Saigon for their tour of duty.

Dennis was the one I mentioned before, a bike racer from MIT.  In addition to probably steering me north to Bellingham, he inspired me to buy my first ten speed and take up biking again.  And I credit him for introducing me to the fun of punnery.  Somewhere in the storage unit is the hand-crafted greeting card he gave me, probably for my 23rd birthday which took place before inwas discharged.  It included a fine ink drawing of a mushroom, with the greeting "Mycology is your university".  If I can find it I'll come back and add it in here where it belongs.

Ferndale is a small place roughly fifteen miles north of the college; and our place was in an even smaller place, a small country house or maybe even a trailer, on a county road out of town somewhere with a long, low poultry house right behind us.  And how did we even manage to find a place like this, in an era before AirBnB or Booking.com or even cellphones and digital devices for that matter?  I have no idea now.

We stayed in Ferndale until mid-autumn when we moved to a house in Happy Valley just blocks from Huxley College.  In the meantime CJ provided most of the income for the family by driving into town to work as a service rep for Ma Bell, the same job she had landed back in Olympia.  My contribution was to periodically help our neighbor Ted empty out the poultry house, work I did in lieu of rent.  I still remember that work well, spending the entire day reaching both hands into one wire mesh cage after another to grab a pair of market-ready turkey poults by the feet, pull them out of the cage they'd lived in since birth, and carry them head down outside four at a time and load them onto the truck waiting to carry them to the next station in their short, uninteresting lives.

I'm pretty sure somewhere in storage is a photo of that scene and of a beefy, shirtless, smiling Ted holding up Dona, our fuzzy young puppy.

And when I wasn't yanking turkeys?  During the winter and spring quarters I was in school down in Bellingham, where I assume CJ must have shuttled me   to and from her way to work - though I don't actually have a memory of that.

And in my other free time?  I was often on my beautiful new U-08, exploring Whatcom  County and falling in love with biking again.

Heart

1

Comment

0

Link

Log in to comment or reply

_