Childhood, history and touchstones, oh my!

In early January 1972 I was sitting in a blue Ford station wagon, watching my dad drive through the night, the headlights barely catching the road through the white curtain of snow.

We were moving.?From Drake St. in Burlingame, CA to Mile Marker 4 outside a little town called Butte Falls, Or.?It was dark.?I mean pitch-fucking-black.??And it was empty--my six-year old self couldn’t understand how we were moving someplace with no street lights. With no houses.?Just a lot of trees, big snow-bound trees.

When the car slowed down, the three of us kids in the back strained to see anything out of the windows.?Nothing.?So when Dad turned, the tires sliding a bit on the ice, onto a narrow gravel road and then drove and drove seemingly towards nothing??I thought we were goners.

Finally, the headlights showed us a tiny little house.?Built, as I quickly learned from Mom, with “fucking cinder-blocks?”.?Dad didn’t answer, he was too busy looking for the flashlight which would take him out to the generator to get it running and then to the spring to make sure we had water.?The generator on, meant lights on.?Mom herded us into the bathroom to take a bath before bed…and quite frankly to warm us up because it was really cold.?Not realizing a) the pipes hadn’t been used in months and b) the hot water heater wasn’t lit.?I remember being super glad because all I could see were spiders and brown water.?Ick.??

Dad was having a blast.?Mom, not so much.?You see a few months before, Dad and two of his Navy/Pan Am buddies went on a hunting trip.?They came back and told their wives they had all bought ranches around this little town in Oregon.?Much, much, much later I learned that my mother pledged this was going to be the only concession she ever made to my father and that her mother, who I was named after, didn’t speak to her for three years because of the move.?

Not an auspicious beginning.?That night, like many others to come, was tense.?Tense and quiet.?More tense and even more quiet when Mom learned that there was no phone to call and tell her parents we had made it safely. And that there was no wood for the only source of heat, the wood stove.

The wood we could cut right outside the front door.?The phone??Not an easy fix.?No phone lines were run up our way for about 5-years and even then it was a party-line with the Wattenburger’s.?One of the other Navy/PanAm families.?

Eventually this place got a name, “Three Link Ranch” because of the configuration of the fields, although ‘the ranch’ became our go to over the next 40-or so years.?

“You coming to the ranch later?”

“I’ve got to get back up the hill to the ranch.”

“You going to the ranch for Christmas?”

Now, it’s “You coming to help get the ranch ready to sell?”

The Huey’s, five kids and two parents, lived at the ranch for 49 years. It was a working cattle ranch and we all learned to ride horses, to work the cows, to shovel shit. To learn not to name the animals, especially the cows and chickens.?We had a goat named Blanca who thought she was a cow.?We played in the creeks and ponds—mud fights, cow shit fights, snake and frog gatherings. I always say it was like Little House on the Prairie but with acid.?

We had turkey and peacocks and sheep and pigs.?I had an all-girl hay crew for a couple summers, earning good money and getting fit in the off season.?We did 4-H, planted a giant garden and learned some more.?My mom had to learn the most.?She was a debutante from the Bay Area plopped down onto an off-the-grid ranch with three, then 5 kids.?Dad was still a pilot for Pan Am and was away two, three weeks at a time.?I remember him calling us once from Rome only to get an earful from Mom about how she and I had been out in the snowstorm pulling a calf. Hard, bloody, scary work.?She told me once, much later, that she’s pretty sure she was crazy for 20-years.?I can see that, totally.?

We built onto the cinder-block house, got a bigger generator, a few more wood stoves and even, eventually, solar power.?We kids went to school in the nearest town, 5 miles away, Butte Falls, population 350. Every Sunday we drove 35 miles to church. We made friends.?Some played all the sports, some were cheerleaders and some were both.?We partied in the woods, drag raced outside of town and graduated, moved on to college and then various places across the US.?

About 15-years ago my parents, spry in their late 70’s, decided they were done with the ‘working’ part of the ranch.?The cows and horses went and the only thing the ranch was putting out was hay.?My mom was talking more and more about selling because the winters were too cold.?Wanting to keep the ranch in the family, I wrote up a business plan for turning the ranch into a lavender farm/farmer’s market.?Then later, another business plan for a goat farm.?But no.?So, here we are a decade later and they are finally, really, truly selling. And moving to fucking Arizona to a Del Webb community.?Blow my fucking mind.

So, this coming week most of us kids and grandkids will be at the ranch getting it ready for a giant ranch/yard/estate sale.?We’ll take pictures, play games at night and tell stories.?Jesus, the stories from over the years. So, so many, so, so funny.?So full of people I’ll probably never see again.?We’ll send the kids up the road to Crater Lake for a break. They can swim and have fun in one of the most beautiful places on earth.?

Then, we’ll have the sale.?And then, that will be it.?The Ranch will be no more for us, and I will cry, because regardless of where I’ve lived my life, I loved that ranch and wanted to come back to it one day. It was, for most of my life, the touchstone to who I had dreamed to be. I also wanted my kids to experience it, to have the memories of something pretty damn unique in this day and age. It was not meant to be.?But I am thrilled that they’ll be there with me at the end.

The way it smells after the hay is cut in the summer, with the pine-scented breeze cutting the heat is something I’ll never forget.?Neither will I forget taking a pb&j and my Nancy Drew books up behind the ranch where I would hide and read for hours.?Or waiting for my first date to pick me up wearing an awful rabbit skin jacket. Egads.?Or driving the flat bed dually, with the passenger door tied shut with binder-twine, around the countryside, mudding, with my friends.?Or getting in trouble for having a party (or two) at the ranch.?Of my son and I getting rammed by a cow and getting covered, layers deep in shit as we fell—another story that we’ll continue to laugh at over the years.?Of leaving and coming back over the years.

And of coming back this one last time, and then leaving for the last time.??