I’m taking a trip to Cle Elum (pronounced Klee-Ell-UM) next week to reconnect with a number of  Class of 1969 schoolmates.  I’ve only visited this small town in the Cascades a handful of times since I left there in the early 70’s because so many unsettling memories arose every time I thought about doing so:

 

My parent’s bankruptcy and the auction of our farm equipment and cattle; Mom falling into a firepit; Bob Mickelsen’s toe being crushed (by me) during a tractor-separating event; Dad breaking someone’s arm in another mechanical event; Mom being diagnosed with brain cancer; Phil being stung by a bee and going into anaphylatic shock and almost dying; my gender dysphoria and isolation from social activities as a result of it…

 

The list goes on! I began to regard Cle Elum as a decidedly unlucky place. I actually developed a superstition about it: Cle Elum is a land on which the indigenous people placed a curse (and rightfullly so, with all we did to eradicate them!) on the White Man!

 

But since I’ve committed to going — mostly because I owe this particular group of Cle Elum ladies a long-overdue in-person THANK YOU for supporting me in such a wonderful way during my chest masculinization surgery following The Big Reveal that I am transgender in about 2016 or 2017 — all of sudden I am being flooded with scores of truly memorable times in Cle Elum.

 

And no, they weren’t all good, but enough of them are to make me want to revisit again with a degree of actual enthusiasm.

 

My First Experiences in Cle Elum

 

When Mom and Dad informed we three siblings that we were going to be moving to Cle Elum, I had a helluva time remembering the name of the town until I realized that Cle Elum spelled backward was (more or less) Mule Elk. (Strangely enough, now there is  a Mule & Elk Brewing Company in Cle Elum, so someone else made this connection, too, perhaps for the same reason). When my Tacoma friends would ask me, once again, where I was moving, I would have to do some quick mental gymnastics (“What’s Mule Elc backward?”) before I could respond.

 

When we got there, the culture shock that greeted me threw me for a loop

 

As a shy kid from a big city (Tacoma, WA), I was completely unaccustomed to small town America. People called out to me almost from Day One, “Hey, Kris!” and “Hi, Kris!” without bothering to tell me who they were, so my first few months there were spent trying to figure out my neighbors’ and classmates’ names without asking them directly, because it felt so odd to have to ask when they seemed to know all about me from first blush.

 

Cle Elum had  party lines back then, you see, and — as the new family in town — The Smiths had become the talk of the town. It was utterly terrifying to me! Big cities don’t “pry.”  That was my feeling.

 

In a big city, I only knew a few people and had a few friends/acquaintances, and no one else seemed to give a fig about me.  But suddenly, here in small town Cle Elum, I  had, apparently, new siblings, aunts, uncles and other Watchful Eyes keeping tabs on pretty much everything I did, said, or apparently even thought, it seemed to me! Cle Elum came across to me like an early version of Big Brother or the NSA. Nothing much got by its residents. Luckily, I was a law-abiding kid and never got into trouble, or the whole town would have known and broadcast the news.

 

I entered school in Cle Elum in the fifth grade (thanks, Jessie, for the confirmation!)

 

By this time, I was already a dyed-in-the-wool writer. Ever since teachers in Spanaway (a suburb of Tacoma) had taught me to string words together, spinning yarns was My Thing. My fifth grade English teacher in Cle Elum picked right up on my ability as a storyteller and began reading my Roy Rogers and other stories in her classroom, which scared (and thrilled) the stuffing out of me.  As a shy kid, having anything I did pointed out to my classmates was downright painful: I wanted to blend into the tapestry, not stand out like a Scarlet Macaw in a new town, for heaven’s sake! Although I was secretly proud that she wanted to share my stories, I felt they gave away too much about my love for the Rogers family than I cared to express publicly, and I was acutely embarrassed.

 

The Governor Visits Cle Elum

 

One of my earliest memories of Cle Elum was the time Governor Dan Evans and Lt Gov John Cherberg visited the school and spoke during an assembly to all of us. (Cle Elum School taught kids from kindergarten through high school in the same red brick building during all the years I attended.). After they spoke, it was the end of the school day and time for us kids to head for the school buses, so I fairly hurtled out the front of the school where I collided abruptly and very publicly with Governor Evans!

 

Oh my God!  I was so embarrased and appalled!  He just smiled, I remember. I could’ve died right there on the spot.  What a klutz I was, I felt. JEEZ! More reason to stick out like a sore thumb in Cle Elum. “Kris almost flattened the Governor!”

 

Elk and Deer Galore

 

Mom and Dad had bought 300 acres of property in Cle Elum, most of it pasture land and hay fields. Not far from our first home on the place (which was an old, two-story stagecoach stop from whence pioneers used to take potshots at Native Americans, according to the tales I heard from oldtimers; we found arrowheads in the fields, so I believed the tales, whether or not they were true) there was a field that didn’t belong to us, but it was just across the street from fields that did. In this field gathered large herds of elk and deer all during non-hunting seasons. But as soon as the guns came out, the animal disappeared. They could sense the difference in intentions between usually benign farmers and ranchers and the predators they became at certain times of year. The animals had the Humans’ number, in spades.

 

Other Creatures 

 

Other wild creatures inhabited our barns and fields in Cle Elum, too. Over the course of the ten plus years I lived there, I caught rats, marmots, ground hogs and other animals and kept them for a while (or until they escaped, in the case of the marmot, who was with me only one night). I also adopted a skunk (named her Fancy) and rehabbed a fawn that had fallen into the massive irrigation canal and worn its hooves to the quick trying to scramble out before someone spotted it and hauled it out.

 

And when Dad accidentally ran over a nest of redtail hawks in the field, he brought the survivors to me (they were covered in grey down and looked like naked chickens for the most part) and I raised and rehabbed them until they were old enough to fly away and start their own families.

 

Tammy and the Rat

 

One time my cousin Tammy Brantner visited us for a week or so. She was just a wee thing and very impressionable. We were in the barn one day when a huge brown barn rat made an appearance. Excited, I said, “Let’s catch it!”  without thinking through what such a directive would mean to a little girl.  Tammy raced over and grabbed that rat in both hands instead of waiting for me to find a bucket or some other receptable to use in the capture. I was appalled! I yelled, “Tammy, NO!”  Luckily, the rat didn’t take offense right away, so she was able to drop it before it bit her. I have been bitten by rats and it is NOT a pleasant experience!

 

Puddles and Snazzy

 

When we moved from Tacoma to Cle Elum we brought several horses (Stormy and her filly Sandstorm, Sugar Babe, Charlie, and Shorty, among others) and our two dogs, Snazzy (Dad’s Labrador Retriever, adopted from a man with several halfgrown pups during a pheasant hunting trip to Pomeroy, WA) and Cindy, nicknamed (during her entire life) “Puddles”because, when she was a pup, she left a lot of puddles in her wake.

 

 

Cindy/Puddles

As you can already discern, in addition to being a writing fool, I was also an animal lover. Animals were my best friends, always. They were my confidants; I’ve cried into more furry necks than I probably can even recall, because I didn’t think anyone else could love me the way they did, given my shameful secret (which had no name until about 25 years ago, as far as I can tell): I was transgender.  I did not feel the way the other girls did about much of anything, least of all boys. I was a boy, and I wasn’t gay!

 

When Sandstorm (Stormy’s baby) was born, I adopted her. I spent hours in the field with her, playing with her, watching her, lying by her side when she went down for a nap. She was my sunshine. I’d never had a baby horse before and I was enamored. She was born on Mother’s Day one year and died on Easter about two years later.

 

When we moved to Cle Elum was the first time Sandstorm experienced a run-in with barbed wire. In Tacoma our fences had all been made out of boards.  Sandstorm tore the heck out of her left armpit and we had to clean and dress the wound on an almost daily basis while it healed, which tooks weeks, because the gash was large.  She tucked her head into my shoulder and let us do it, but it wasn’t comfortable for her. She knew we were helping and she trusted us.

 

I rode Stormy in the Cle Elum 4th of July parade one year with Sandstorm dancing and prancing at her side, untethered.  The crowd loved the spectacle (Sandstorm loved meeting people) and I discovered  that Stormy had been a parade horse during that ride, because whenever the bandleader would blow a whistle, Stormy would switch sides and walk sideways down the boulevard like a show horse.  I was amazed, but the citizenry thought I was an expert horse trainer. Little did they know!

 

Sandstorm’s Death

 

During Easter one year, Dad decided we needed to herd the cattle into an enclosed area closer to the barn, so he locked Sandstorm into a stall (possibly this was the first time she had ever been separated from her mother) and we headed out to get the cattle.  Sandstorm lost her mind and tried to jump over the gate, which had spiky tops on each of the boards.  She came down on one of the spikes, impaling herself. My eternal, fervant hope is that she died instantly.

 

Stormy knew something happened because she became upset and a little unruly, but we didn’t know why until we got back to the barn to see Sandstorm’s lifeless body on the ground. Stormy got to see her and understand, but Shorty (who had been Sandstorm’s best friend) didn’t get a last chance to see her, so he raced around the pasture for a long time afterward, looking and calling out for her. That’s when I realized that animals need to be shown what becomes of their buddies when they die, because they have the same emotional connections to their friends as we do to ours.

 

Swimming Hole Disaster

 

Near the irrigation canal (into which the fawn had fallen, reported earlier) there was a pond that was about neck-deep on horses. During the summertime when it was hottest in Cle Elum, we would take Stormy and whichever other horses we were riding into the pond to let them cool off and have some fun. We also swam there at times when we weren’t on horses.

 

One time, Karen Kraft said she would like me to teach her how to dive.  The pond was no place to do that, because the water was only about half an  arm’s-length deep on the edge.  But I said, “Here’s how you do it, but as soon as your fingers touch the water, be sure to straighten out (I pantomimed “toward the middle of the pond,”) so you don’t go straight down.”

 

Well, she straightened out, all right, but she did so perpendicular to the waterline,  and broke her arm.  Good Lord!

 

Back Road to Cle Elum

 

There was another way — a longer route — to get to Cle Elum other than the freeway. It went toward the  Teanaway Junction and a lot of school kids lived in those hinterlands, so that’s where our bus driver took us when we got in every morning on the way to school.

 

It was a lovely, treelined journey. Sometimes, we would ride horses along that route, and when we got motorcycles, we rode it a lot.

 

The time Mom got a migraine headache during a shopping trip in Cle Elum (before I had a driver’s license, although I had been driving tractors for years already) , she asked me to drive home “the back way.”  That was the only time I “broke the law,” and it was at Mom’s insistence. “You’re in far better shape than I am right now to drive. Please, just drive!”  So I did, without incident.

 

Snow Plop

 

And that incident reminds me of the time I rode into Cle Elum via the freeway with Mom to pick up Jackie at school and do a little shopping during the same trip.

 

On the way in, I spotted a huge white blob alongside the road.  It wasn’t snowing, there was no snow on the ground, so I said, “What’s that?”  Turns out some big truck had probably had a huge snow blob stuck up under its frame and it had let go at that location. Satisfied that we determined what it was, we drove on into town.

 

After picking Jackie up, we went shopping. Somehow, I got separated from them (I probably went looking for a magazine at the drug store) and Mom forgot all about me, so she and Jackie got into the car and headed back.

 

At the same snow blob site as before, but coming from the other direction, Jackie asked Mom, “What’s that?” which threw her for a loop, as we’d just had this conversation on the way in.  That’s when she realized she had left me back in town!  So, back they went to collect me.  If Jackie hadn’t mentioned the snow blob, how long would it have taken Mom to figure out I was missing, I wonder!  HA!

 

Stormy’s Death

 

Stormy became ancient and decrepit. So, one afternoon while we three siblings were at school, Dad took his ditch digger out and cut a huge trench with a sloping bank, then he and Mom led Stormy out and down the ramp. Dad put a bullet in her brain.

 

That’s what farm families have to do sometimes.  Jackie and I were heartbroken when we found out.

 

Stormy is buried next to Sandstorm and I know exactly where their bones are to this day.

 

More Deaths 

 

Snazzy was hit by a car one dark night, but not killed. But he was in such bad shape and suffering that Dad had to shoot his own dog.  He suffered for years after that. He said all he could think of as he stood there convincing himself that he needed to pull the trigger were the years he and Snazzy had hunted pheasants, ducks and grouse, and how, every year when hunting season came around and Dad would lift his rifle down from its place, Snazzy would jump four feet in the air pretty much proclaiming, “Oh, boy! Oh boy! We’re goin’ HUNTING!!!” (“Not this time, buddy…”)

 

Mom had a veterinarian put Puddles to sleep when she became old, painfully arthritic, and decrepit. But she didn’t tell us kids until we were on a trip back over Snoqualmie Pass toward home, when the topic came up about Puddles condition. I waxed eloquent about how we don’t put people to sleep when they get old, so we shouldn’t even consider doing that to Puddles.

 

That’s when she told us the deed was already done.  I’ve felt bad ever since about reading Mom the riot act for her selfless act of compassion and kindness. I have had to do the same thing many times since then and I know how hard it is.

 

I still dream of Puddles being alive and every time I tell myself during the dream, “She can’t still be alive. She was born in 1954, dogs don’t live 50/60/70 years.”

 

But she will always live in my heart. (As will Deaken, my serval son. There are just some pets I will never get over losing.)

 

Motorcycles

 

When the horses were no more, we got Yamaha motorcycles.  We buzzed all over the logging roads on them. Mom had a hair-raising experience on a motorcycle one time and swore off them after that.

 

We were high up on a logging road where the tops of the treeline could be right next to you on the road.  Mom was an inexperienced rider, but Dad encouraged her to come along, since logging roads are a pretty easy ride (or so we thought).

 

At one point, we stopped for a moment. As we got back underway, Mom hit the throttle and took off over the side of the cliff next to us like Evel Knievel. We saw her disappear and head down, down, down… and then nothing.

 

Horrified, we yelled down, “Mom! Mom!”

 

From way down somewhere in the dense forest, we heard, “I’m okay…”  which meant she was still alive, but not necessarily okay because she would lie about something like that, so as not to unduly worry us.  For all we knew, she could have been impaled by a treetop and she’d still continue reassuring us, “I’m fine!”  (How do I know this? Read on!)

 

Turns out she was fine, after all. Dad and Phil went down after her bike, Mom climbed out and walked home.  She’d had enough of our biking adventures to last her a lifetime.

 

Nose Kick

 

Three final anecdotes are about my dear mother’s tendency to discount her own trials and tribulations in efforts to keep her family discomfort-free. I will share additional Cle Elum Memories in subsequent blog posts.

 

One night around midnight — and yes, this is insane — I was doing handstands in the living room.  Well, full disclosure: Mom and I and maybe Jackie were doing calisthenics in the living room.  Mom was showing us that she could still do headstands. Jackie and I were doing cartwheels and handstands.

 

At one point, I kicked up into a headstand at the exact moment that Mom decided to get up from the couch on which she had been sitting, and WHAM!!!  My heel connected with her nose, breaking it and causing a gusher.

 

I heard and felt the crunch of her face and came down from the headstand to find her standing there with blood rushing over the tops of her hands as she tried to arrest it from getting all over the place.  I was horrified and almost passed out.  Mom told Jackie, “Get a towel!” as she ministered to ME!

 

I felt sick to my stomach … but Mom danced a little jig, saying, “I’m fine!  I’m fine!”

 

Like hell you are, I thought

 

Jackie brought her a towel, Mom made sure I was going to survive, and then Dad drove her to Ellensburg (or maybe just to the emergency clinic in Cle Elum, but I think it was Ellensburg) to get help.

 

And of course, the ER doctor’s immediate thought, given the time of night, was that Dad had punched her in the face!  Mom quickly assured the doctor, “Oh, no! Oh, no! My daughter was doing handstands and I got in the way!”

 

I still relive that nightmare at times. I could have killed her right there. Smacking someone’s nose into their brain is a martial arts way of killing people. I get chills just thinking about it.

 

FIREPIT

 

On three more occasions, Mom’s concern for family members overruled her personal  discomfort and (indeed) agony.

 

One afternoon in Cle Elum, in midwinter, Mom spotted what looked very much like smoke coming up from a field not far from the barn.  She got up and headed out to see what would cause such an anomaly.  She got within ten feet or so of the smoke when the ground underneath her gave way. As she explained it, “My tumbling days in high school kicked in, and as soon as I started to go down, I threw myself backward as best I could…”

 

Still, she landed in red hot coals up to her ankles.  She said her swift response to the ground giving way probably saved her from a far worse fate.

 

It turned out that the people who owned the property before us had razed a structure and plowed it underground after burning most of it, but the embers had continued to exist and eat away at the structure until it finally began to smoke, at which time Mom came along to investigate.

 

At the hospital is when the worst agony began. The doctor had to pop the blisters, apparently, and that caused immense pain.

 

And then, for the next month to month and a half, Mom had to have her ankles and feet debrided (the dead and dying skin scraped away) almost daily. The procedure fell to my dad, since the doctor was so far away in Ellensburg.

 

It was agony.  For both of them.

 

Dad hated to hurt Mom, and Mom hated being hurt. But they both knew it had to be done. Mom bore it stoically, as she did everything in life.  What a gal!

 

Deaken Bites Mom

 

The final Mom-as-protector anecdote happened in Hollywood, not Cle Elum, but I want to share it within this thread because this is where it belongs.

 

Deaken only bit people twice (except the time he bit me on the leg while a vet was giving him a very painful, stinging injection and I didn’t hold his head tightly enough). Both times it was Mom, and both times she said it was her fault.

 

The first time, Deaken had ingested pieces of a rubber ball so he had a tummy ache. I didn’t know he had eaten the ball, but I knew he was uncomfortable and not feeling well. I asked Mom to keep an eye on him while I was at work. She called to let me know he was looking worse, so I asked her to cook him a little hamburger and offer it to him. If he refused it, I would come home and take him to the vet.

 

Mom cooked the burger and set it in front of him near the door where she entered and exited.  He sniffed the meat and looked interested enough, but refused to eat it.  So she stepped toward the door to come call me, and he bit her (not hard, just perfunctorily), telling her to stay away from his food.  I took him to the vet and he had surgery to remove the blockage.

 

Deaken Bites Mom Again

 

The next time Deaken bit Mom was when she went into my garage in Encino, CA to put some clothes into the washer or dryer at about ten at night. Next thing I heard, was, “Kris! ”  I called out, “Yes?”  She said, “Deaken just bit me. I think I stepped on him when he was asleep.”

 

I asked, “Oh, no! Badly?”

 

She said, “I guess so…”

 

She came in and there was a thumb-size hole taken out of her lower leg.

 

I immediately called Tippi Hedren, who said to take Mom to Urgent  Care but to be sure they didn’t stitch the area closed. I asked her if I’d get into any legal trouble if I told them what actually happened, and she said, “Absolutely not — unless you mother plans to sue you.”

 

Well, that was the last thing on Mom’s mind.  She didn’t even think her injury was worth a trip to Urgent Care!

 

So, I called Urgent Care in Sherman Oaks and reported (again, this was very close to closing time for them) that my mother had been bitten by a cat. The person who took the call said, “Oh, that’s probably nothing. A cat bite.”

 

I said, “No, this is something. It was a big cat that bit her.”

 

They weren’t entirely convinced that even a big cat’s bite (they were thinking house cat, of course) could be of much concern, but since I seemed overly concerned, they said, “Okay, bring her in.”

 

I took her in … they took one look at the open gaping wound and said, “How big is that cat?!”

 

I said, “Knee high.”

 

Mom said, “My grandson is a serval cat.”

 

Well, they took one more look at the wound and said, “Yes, we’ll take care of this.”

 

And as they did, of course it hurt, and of course Mom remained noncommital about the whole event.

 

Finally, the doctor said to her, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

 

Mom said, “No. Why do you say that?”

 

He said,”Most Beverly Hills types would be be screaming or fainting right about now.”

 

“Oh, this…. ” Mom said reassuringly. “This is nothing.”

 

That was my mama!  She dealt with life. No big deal — even when it was a big deal!

<<<<<<>>>>>>

 

Seven memories/anecdotes are written down now. Just fifty to go! So stay tuned!