This is Part two of my week-long Cle Elum Memories series. (I had no idea it would become a series. So many memories have been flooding my mind that it’s hard to keep track of them all!)
But first, a little history. Cle Elum means “swift water” in the Yakama language. That’s because (duh!) the river runs very swiftly through the area. My sister Jackie’s friend Melody Ruhl almost lost her life in the river when her inner tube went under a log jam with her in it. Jackie managed to pull her out, but it was a very close call. Other tubers have not been as lucky.
Today I’ll talk about the first jobs I ever held down, since they began in Cle Elum as soon as I was old enough to work. (Of course, I had been working on our farm/ranch ever since the day we arrived in 1961. But that wasn’t a paid gig. That was CHORES: raising and feeding cattle and horses, growing and harvesting potatoes and hay, herding cattle, mowing the lawn, catching fish, etc.)
The first paying job I had, I would just as soon forget
One hot summer, I worked in a corn processing plant in Ellensburg. So did my Mom.
It was, hot, sticky and grueling. I was never so tired after a job in my life.
Proof: one morning we got back and I asked Mom to be sure and wake me up when a certain hour came around because I wanted to see William Shatner in an interview on TV. She promised she would.
I awoke hours later, realized I had missed the Shatner interview, and accosted Mom for forgetting to wake me.
She said, “I did wake you. When I did, you told me you decided to skip the interview. I asked you, ‘Are you sure?” and you sat up in bed, looked right at me, and said, ‘Yes, I’m sure!” and laid right back down again. So I assumed you were awake.”
I had NO recall of that somnambulatory conversation. That’s how exhausted I was!
At the corn factory, we worked on a high platform, standing during our entire shifts, on metal grates. I remember this because a lot of the lady workers wore skirts and dresses in an effort to stay cool (the breeze from down below the grates helped) but the situation also allowed male workers who stood below the grates to look up and see whatever (if anything) the women were wearing beneath their skirts and dresses.
And many of them did. I thought it was disgusting.
Here were ladies busting their asses to assess and sort the corn on the conveyor belts for all of — what, maybe $1.48/hour, if that? — while perverts were hanging around below, looking up, pointing and laughing at their undercarriages.
“Men At Work” I thought ruefully.
Later, as a go-fer in my dad’s construction company, the same boorish shenanigans continued. Wolf whistles, propositioning, etc.
So many times I wanted to say, “Get your minds off your peckers and get a life, will ya!?”
Men at Work.
I find being a man difficult, as a result of my experiences with men like these. I have so few decent role models, but the ones I have are exemplary, among them DeForest Kelley, Chris Bailey, Dan Alpern, Dan Kronstadt, and too few others!
Safeway
My next job — which started at $1.65/hour and escalated quickly to $1.85/hour when the manager of the store realized what a workhorse/producer I was — was at the old Safeway Store in downtown Cle Elum. (Their relatively “new” Safeway is up on the hill on the west end of town these days.) The manager was a guy named Bill and the deli guy was Jerry.
I stocked shelves, bagged groceries, and frequently helped Jerry behind the meat counter. That was always a challenge because many of the ladies who came in spoke only Italian (or maybe they spoke Italian because Jerry could speak Italian, too, and they liked speaking in their native tongue). The ladies would try to speak Italian to me, too, but eventually resorted to just pointing at what they wanted because I learned Spanish, not Italian in school.
One day Bill asked me to taste something.
I asked, “What is it?”
He said, “If I tell you, you won’t want to try it. Just trust me. Close your eyes and open your mouth.”
Since he was my boss, I complied.
And the most ghastly thing I had ever tasted landed on my tongue. My eyes flew open, I wanted to spit it out. It was just god awful.
He saw the look on my face and said, “Really? You don’t like it?”
Speechless, almost gagging, I shook my head madly “NO!”
I found something to spit it out on, looked at it, and said, “What is that?!”
He said, “Pickled pigs’ feet.”
Trust me. They’re terrible. (Or an acquired taste, if you can stand to keep them in your mouth that long, I presume!)
Train Station
My third — and last — job in Cle Elum before we moved away was at the train station in South Cle Elum. I worked the evening shift from about 8 or 10 at night to 6 a.m. or so in the morning as a short order cook. (I’m still a short order cook. If I can’t make something in five minutes, I rarely make it, unless it’s something I can prepare in five minutes and pop into a crock pot for eight hours!)
Once again, clueless, ham-handed men ruined it for me. One guy (married) who frequently came in on the train evidently believed himself to be God’s gift to womankind. But he was such a boor. He asked me a few leading questions — I responded pleasantly enough but noncommittally (remember, I was transgender before I even knew there was a term for what I was, and guys were NOT on my radar as romantic partners) — and then he said, “I’d love to nail you.”
How romantic, right?! If that line ever worked for any woman, she must have been a prostitute. (“Cross my palm with a plenty of money, buster, and you can nail me !”) What are guys like this thinking?! I have no idea.
MOVING ON TO CLE ELUM FARM MISHAPS
Living on a farm is often like living on the edge. It has its perils, just as it has its pleasures.
Once when I was riding a horse next to another one, the horse next to me kicked my horse, but connected with my knee instead of my horse. I ended up with water on the knee that time.
Another time, I was working in a pen trying to get half-grown steers into a chute so Dad could brand them or give them a pill or something, and one of them came out over the top of me. His back hoof missed my head by a fraction of an inch. His hoof kicked my hair back on one side of my head but it didn’t connect with me. If it had, I could have gotten a concussion — or worse!
On another occasion, Dad and Bob Mickelsen were trying to separate a heavily loaded trailer from a farm tractor. Dad asked me to get into the driver’s seat of the tractor and pull it forward after Bob and he lifted the tongue of the trailer off the ball hitch, but he didn’t tell me to just pull ahead a little. I thought he wanted me to pull away entirely. Sadly, the safety chain was still attached (which I didn’t know), so when Dad said, “Pull ahead now!” I drove too far and the chain pulled the heavy trailer down onto Bob’s big toe. Oh my God, the incident squashed his toe flat as a pancake and he was in agony. I was apoplectic and felt like a jerk.
After we moved from Cle Elum, Mom and Dad kept a lot near Horseshoe Lake (which Dad had blasted out in the middle of one of our fields). One time they were over there clearing brush and building a gazebo, and there was another young man helping Dad. During another mechanical accident, the young guy got a broken arm as a result of something Dad did. Total accident, but painful, nonetheless. And Dad felt like a jerk.
I’ve already written about the subterranean burning building mishap (in yesterday’s post), about the “catch the rat!” mishap with Tammy, and about the motorcycle mishap with Mom when she inadvertently did an Evel Knievel-type jump into a canyon. If you missed those, you can go back and find them.
Tomorrow I will share some more animal stories (about bears, great blue herons, beavers, catching fish bare-handed in one of our irrigation ditches, and my skunk Fancy) and two additional stories that you may have a hard time believing, but I swear they’re true. One is about experiencing an actual ghost up close and personal, and the other is about experiencing a UFO that was close enough to hear and eyewitness. So, stay tuned!
