Wednesday, June 9, 2010

In The Place of the Family Ghosts

Mt. Hood as seen from "The Ridge"

Sometime during college I heard a statistic regarding the provenance of the various undergraduates at UC Berkeley with me. Inevitably, I will misquote the exact figure, but let's say that something over %50 of the students there had at least one parent born outside the United States. While this great melting pot/tapestry of a society we live in is both made more beautiful and strong by this fact, it actually puts me in this very boring-sounding minority: both my parents, in fact, all of my grandparents, were born in this country. And even when we do trace my roots back to Europe, I come from decidedly white stock: England, Ireland, Norway. Incredibly, this has given me a bit of an inferiority complex. I can't talk about learning recipes from the far-away country where my grandmother grew up (unless you count Nebraska), and my heritage doesn't include any stories about the "old country" as it were. Maybe it's because I live in California, the melting-est melting pot of them all, but it makes me decidedly weird to be able to say this: not only were all of my great-grandparents born in this country, but most of my great-great grandparents were as well! (I think one or two may have been from Canada, but I'm not sure at this point when the "Canadian line" met up with the American side).

Years ago I decided to start thinking about this as the cool fact it is, rather than something to be ashamed of. And, it is definitely a privilege to also have access to names, photographs, and even biographical information of ancestors of mine going back six or more generations. My great-great-great grandparents on my father's side were Remembrance and Katherine. What names! On my mother's side, my uncle has traced our family back to the Revolutionary War, when two brothers, William and Robert, were on opposite sides. William was a loyalist, and eventually fled to Canada, where his descendants stayed for a while. He is the brother I'm descended from. A loyalist to the crown!

Slightly more recently, a young Norwegian man named Lewis Anderson was pretty much kidnapped by his sisters and brought to live in north-central Oregon. He met a girl named Carrie, and together they built a homestead in a place called Pleasant Ridge and raised four children: Oscar, Lambert, Mabel and another girl whose name starts with E. Mabel is my great-grandmother. She married Samuel Meeker and their children were Helen, Doris and Earl. Earl married Mary Alice and they are my grandparents. All of this happened up on Pleasant Ridge, surrounded by scrub oak woods and wheat fields. This past weekend, I had a chance to see where I came from. And, looked at the right way, it's as amazing as anything else.


The "A-Frame" and in the distance, a barn

Lang's Pond


The diversity of flora on Pleasant Ridge

At the Anderson Homestead

Of course, the very most wonderful fact about this whole story is that Lewis and Carrie Anderson (again, my great-great-grandparents) built a homestead on Pleasant Ridge. There was nothing there but pine trees and views of the mountains, but like all those folks you hear about on the Oregon Trail, they built a life from almost nothing. Besides their house, they had a barn, a granary, various sheds (to my left in the picture), a root cellar and a blacksmith's forge. They cleared their land, farmed it, raised four children, and set events in motion that lead directly to me typing this today.

Anderson Homestead, pond in the distance

The best part of my visit was visiting this old piece of land, which has belonged to my family for over 120 years (the construction date on their house says 1895, but I know they lived there for 5 years before it was built).

Lambert Anderson's House

Lambert's house is reached via "Library Road" going southeast-ish from the original homestead. It's still standing, but that could change any time now. Inside, one can still find remnants of carpet, linoleum and their window coverings. It's like archaeology! Lambert would be my great-great uncle, so I am not his direct descendant. Lambert's wife, Edith, kept lots of books, and the children on the Ridge would walk to her house to borrow them, so she was the local librarian of sorts, and that's how "Library Road" got its name.

Lambert's Barn


Lambert's Barn

View of Mt. Hood from Lambert's Home

So here I am, exploring the land my family has owned continuously for five generations. We were treading paths followed by the childish feet of my own grandfather, who is long ago passed. The land was farmed by my great-aunts and uncles. They saw these gorgeous views, which have not been (nor, I hope, ever will be) obscured by modern buildings and highways. They breathed this air. And, looking out on all this, I could feel that there were ghosts there. They weren't mean or scary ghosts; they weren't even the kind of ghosts that try to influence the physical world. But they were there. The air around me was pregnant with history and memory. There was a kind of vibration, an energy, just outside my ability to feel it, reminding me that this is where I come from. This is my heritage. This land. The people who poured their whole lives into it that their children and children's children might go on to live and thrive and produce me.


Anderson House (built 1895)

Here's the house that Lewis and Carrie Anderson built. My grandfather donated it to the city of The Dalles as a permanent museum (to avoid its being burned down in a grass fire). Most of the inside is decorated based on educated guesses and some help from my great-aunts when they were still living. However, the spinning wheel inside did belong to my great-great grandmother, Carrie, which I find just splendid.

Tearing Down the Duck Blind

Since the land is still farmed, some real work must still be done. The trip involved a great deal of reconnaissance of the hundreds of acres of property, checking on wheat crops, trees stands that my uncle hopes to harvest for timber, and dealing with the consequences of hunting (see photo above). This structure is built next to a pond so "hunters" can shoot elk and deer from the trees when they come to drink. Not very sporting! My brother tore it down using mostly a pry-bar and his biceps.

Cousins, descendants of the wheat farmers (six others not pictured)

Mine is the first generation of my family since before the turn of the century to not grow up farming wheat on Pleasant Ridge, near The Dalles, OR. As a child, I heard stories from my mother about driving the hay trucks and being out next to her dad riding on the combines. Though the land is still farmed, my mom and uncle lease it to someone else and get a part of the profits from the sale of wheat or barley.

I stand to inherit part of this land some day. I have a lot of choices about what I can do with it. My cousin has some land, but she doesn't farm it and instead gets a little money from the government to do nothing with it and allow it to go back to its natural state (pine forest). I could build a house on it, but not a farm. I won't pretend that I could somehow manage a fully functional, self-contained farm. Or, like my mom and uncle, I could lease the land to someone to grow wheat. At the very least, I would love to continue the tradition of having this land to come back to. The memory and knowledge of the place are only kept alive as long as we have interest in them, and I don't intend to squander the remarkable gift of history my ancestors have left me.