By Jim Farrell
Grandpa Dick told these stories to all who would listen, and Jim retold them to his kids in the 1970s, and now to his Grandkids. More chapters are coming.
Chapter One
Early in the day, Mom and Dad had left for Port Angeles to do the monthly shopping and visit some friends that Dad worked with in the woods. They had dropped us off with Grandma and Grandpa Dick on their way into town. Of course, we didn’t mind because they were the only ones on the West End that had a TV set and Grandma’s cooking was well known as far as Port Townsend to the east and Cape Flattery to the west.
The rain was falling in torrents as fierce gusts of wind whipped it into sheets of water against the windows and the side of the house. Drenched branches were snapped from trees bent by the wild wind and flung across the fields where the cows had been before they headed into the barn or lean-too for shelter. Somewhere along the road to Port Angeles, one tree or more had fallen over the power lines plunging the West End into total darkness. Storms like this weren’t unusual on the Olympic Peninsula, but this one had been forecast by KNOP, the radio station out of Port Angeles, to hit further north into the Queen Charlotte Islands.
Inside the small farmhouse, Grandpa Dick moved about the room lighting the kerosene lanterns and moved over to the wood stove to add another log to the blazing fire, then sat back down in his aged rocking chair that was wired together and creaked when he rocked. He reached over to the stand beside his chair and picked up the old pipe with a shamrock carved in its bowl and lit it. As smoke curled from the pipe, the four of us kids, quit our Chinese checker game and moved in closer knowing what was about to come.
“You know this little storm reminds me of the night me and my Brother Bill left home from back in Walnut Grove Missouri”, he started as if he were only thinking out loud. The eyes of his four grandchildren followed him as he rocked, begging for him continue the story that we all knew was coming…
… “Ya see, the night my Brother Bill and I left home, the storm raging outside right now is only a little breeze compared to that night. The rain was falling in torrents, as fierce-as-any gusts of wind that ever gusted before or even since, tore at our old farmhouse in Walnut Grove Missouri. That awful wind caused the shakes to fly off the house, haystacks to be lifted from one county deposited in two counties over, apple trees to be torn out of the ground in one farm and dropped into the hole left in the neighbors when their trees were ripped out by that dreadful wind, and pigs eating at their troughs were flying by that old house!”
“Mother (we always called her mother) sent Bill and me out to feed the three-legged cow in the barn telling me to keep a good hold of Brother Bill, least he gets caught in the wind and blown away. Ya see, Bill was only 2 feet 12 inches tall and weighed only about 35 pounds, soaking wet, and he was wet often, cause’ he had weak eyes and kept falling in the creek; until he was given the square glasses Ben Franklin had worn the night, he lost them. We had come about them when Great Grandfather Jack Pursely, picked them up after they’d fallen off Ben, when he got the shock of his life while foolishly flying a kite in a thunder and lightning storm”.
“Well, as I was saying,” Grandpa Dick said after he put down the little brown jug at his side that he had taken a swallow of, “Bill and I headed for the barn and needless to say, I had a tight grasp on Brother Bill. Halfway across the barnyard the biggest guest of wind that ever there was, hit me and Bill. It would have blown us across the yard had I not quick-like caught ahold of the gate post with my right hand.”
“There we were, holding on for dear life, and that gust of wind kept blowing and blowing until I thought that it couldn’t blow no more. But blow it did! It blew even harder! There were chickens, rabbits, cows, horses, and even and orangutan from Africa flying through the air with us! But I held on until the strongest gust of wind that I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet, uprooted the old oak tree and threw it onto the gate, and forced the gate to slam back and smash it into my arm which caused my arm to lose all feeling making me let go of the post as that gate scooped us up and we began to soar along with that horrible wind”!
“But I kept ahold of Brother Bill,’ cause I promised Mother (we always called her mother) not to let go of his hand, and I always did what mother asked.” “That wind roared harder and harder and there we were, flying this way and that, through the air, along with a goat eating a Panama hat, and a goldfish in a bowl with a cat trying to get inside. I still had a good hold of Brother Bill, just as Mother (we always called her mother) had told me to.”
“We flew higher and higher over the tall oak trees above the rolling hills beyond where I had never been before and finally across the state line. We hung together all that evening and although the next day, worrying about how we’d ever get home if that wind would ever let us down. We must have been 10,000 feet up in the air, riding the wind and clouds when darkness caught up to us and we finally fell asleep curled up with a cat and a dog who caught a ride with us.” “That night I dreamt of home and Mothers (we always called her mother) chewy peanut butter cookies, and that was when I woke up with icicles on my arms and legs. I’d been so high that my breath had turned to frost. More important, I was alone! I had lost Brother Bill sometime during the night!”
“About midmorning when I felt I could take no more if I didn’t get something to eat, the wind began to die down. It was dying fast, and I began to fall faster and faster. When I looked down, all I could see was the fishhook shape of what I was to know later as Hoods Canal, up by the Puget Sound in the State of Washington.”
I was falling so fast that the few whiskers on my face began to fly off, causing me to worry about when I hit the water, what would be left of me. It turned out I needn’t have worried quite so much, for just before I hit, a great gray whale spouted water and caught me ever so gently and put me down in a blackberry patch on the west shore of Anderson Island, situated in that body of salt water.
As luck would have it, there was a young, pretty lady picking those delicious berries to make a pie. Let me tell you, she was as much surprised to see me fall out of that sky sopping wet in front of her as much as I was to see her picking those berries. In fact”, Grandpa Dick said, “I became so enamored with her and her pie that I later married her and there she is in the kitchen making a blackberry pie right now”.
“It took me many years of worry trying to find whatever became of Brother Bill. I think that I was probably more worried about Mother (we always called her mother) than I was about Brother Bill, cause’ she had told me not to let go of Bill. It was many years before I finally found Brother Bill, working with a huge, and I mean huge, old man and his also gigantic blue ox Babe, falling timber up near that lake called Coeur-D’Alene in the state of Idaho. Oh, the stories that he had to tell”
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