Seattle Sun Newspaper - Vol. 8, Issue 6, June 2004
Copyright 2004 Seattle Sun. Please feel free to use the article below in your research. Be sure to cite the Seattle Sun as your source.
STAN'S LOOKOUT:
My country home ... but in the city
By STAN STAPP
(Editor's note: The following column originally appeared in the June 27, 1968 edition of the North Central Outlook.)
Happy the man, whose wish and care
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air,
In his own ground.
Alexander Pope, 1700
Ten minutes from work is my home. Each night when I return there, usually tired, occasionally tense, I find refreshment that eases the rigors of the day. By the next morning, I am as eager to return to my job, as I was to head home the night before.
Some of this refreshment comes from the people there, the atmosphere, the enjoyment of living; some comes from its setting, the yard, trees and flowers.
It is the latter that I write about today. Some other time, I will cover the others, just as I have from time to time written of my work.
It has amazed me, the several times I have shopped for homes, that real estate men have never really understood what it was that I wanted. My general impression is that they think everyone wants to live in Windermere, or at least on the edge of it.
The salesman who found my wife Dorothy and I our present home (in the Victory Heights neighborhood), I am sure, only came up with it as a last-ditch desperate effort when all of his other "much more desirable" listings failed to move us. But almost from the moment we approached the property, we were "sold" without any further effort on his part.
The small, unpretentious, naturally finished rough vertical sided house, with large windows, flat roof, and sundeck, was nestled amongst dogwoods, maples and cedars on a hilly lot at the end of a dead-end street and even had a tiny little brook at the bottom of the ravine. And all of this very much inside the city limits.
Dorothy and I are both outdoor-type people, and if we fell in love with the setting in the winter time when most of the trees were bare, just imagine our feels when spring came and thousands of leaves and buds added to the scene. And the discovery that we also had acquired a birch, labernum, vine maple and several rhododendrons, mountain ash, and alders.
Whether one believes in God, or prefers to credit Mother Nature for life on Earth, someone has figured out a pretty good system that puts leaves on the trees in the summertime when a little shade would be handy, and removes them in the winter when it is desirable to receive as much of the sun's rays as is possible in this northern climate.
The wait to move in seemed interminable (though it actually was but several months), as the previous owners, the Slade Gortons, still had to find a larger home for their growing family. This was somewhat complicated by the necessity of locating in the 46th legislative district in order for Gorton to seek reelection as state representative. (Editor's note: Gorton later served several terms as a U.S. Senator.)
Because of its natural setting, there was little that had to be done to beautify the place. My main activity was to keep the trees and underbrush from completely blocking the "trail" from the house to the brook, and removing the dead branches that had accumulated during the winter. Dorothy excitedly added new flowers here and there, discovered trilliums and wild bleeding hearts in the "woods" and skunk cabbage by the brook, and began developing a rock garden. (In fact, no trip to the country is a success now, unless we return with a carload of rocks for her garden.) And both of us being somewhat organically garden-minded, we soon had compost piles all over the place.
A by-product of my cleanup was the accumulation of enough firewood to take care of our fireplace without having to buy any wood. Dead branches, old fences and boards that had accumulated on the outer edges of the property, small trees that needed thinning (mainly maples and alders), and some already cut up big alders which I split, provided all the wood that was needed.
A future project, which I would like to tackle, would be the addition of a few chickens for the eggs and fertilizer. I am investigating now to see what variety might best adapt to hillside living. If you know of any that have been crossed with mountain goats, please don't keep it a secret.
My first major project failed, when I attempted to create a natural pool by damming up the brook. I thought I had created a body of water about 10 feet in diameter one Sunday, but several days later when I checked it out, I found nothing but a round area of sand, a foot deep, and "paved" perfectly flat on top, with the stream running through the middle a silting basin, I think it's called.
Part of the challenge of having a yard that interests kids is how to best get along with them, while maintaining some degree of privacy. It was obvious that the neighborhood children had long used the path through our property as a shortcut from the end of the dead-end street to the nearby elementary school, and they had considered the brook to be in the public domain.
I am one of those guys who can't forget what it is to be a kid, who played on vacant lots in the city when he was a youngster, and therefore has a guilt complex if he puts a few flowers and the desire for a little privacy above the natural craving for little boys and girls to take a shortcut through someone's yard, or play in the water.
Still, I reason, there is another path through vacant land, and the stream is much bigger not far away where nobody cares if they play in it. So we're not really being selfish if we'd like to cut down a little on the foot traffic in order to nurture wildflowers, and perhaps develop a natural bog area around the brook. You certainly can't do it if the little girls are going to pick all your daffodils in the woods and sell them to the neighbors, or the little boys are going to trample the skunk cabbages, water lilies and maidenhair ferns as they fight over who owns the dam they're building.
I've been attempting to gradually control kid traffic by strategically locating compost piles, piling dead branches and thinned out trees, and encouraging blackberry vines to grow around the perimeter of our property. It seems to be working, too, and we only have about 10 percent of our former traffic, and we didn't have to get into any petty fights in order to accomplish this. I wouldn't want to totally exclude the youngsters, anyway, for a place would be pretty dead without a few around. As long as they are not destructive, I won't chase them away.
We have some other wild life around our place, too, such as birds and animals. Chickadees, finches, robins and blue jays are fairly common, attracted by the abundant natural food and our two bird feeders.
Squirrels abound, and are frequently seen leaping from our roof to a tree branch, or chasing each other corkscrew fashion around and around maple trunks. Last year, we had some mountain beavers, which chomped down our raspberry vines. They lived in a hole in the ground. It was not unusual to see a bunch of foliage, three feet in diameter, moving along the trail, then disappear into this hole, being dragged there by one of the beavers. How they got it into the tiny hole, or managed to get out past it again themselves, I don't know.
After they ate the raspberry vines, we decided to get some traps, but the beavers must have read our minds, for they left last winter and haven't been back.
There are a few cats in the vicinity, besides our own. In fact, I met one early Sunday morning on the way to the bathroom in my pajamas. It apparent was the cat that has discovered how to make entry through our own Snoopy's private basement door, up the stairway, through the dining room, and into the kitchen to where Snoopy's own private food dish is kept. I wouldn't recognize which cat it was, because it apparently heard me before I knew it was in the house, an in its haste to go through the dining room, down the stairs and out Snoopy's private door, it didn't stop for even a friendly meow. All I saw was a gray streak, lickety-splitting by, sounding like a racing car zooming by the Indianapolis grandstands on Memorial Day.
There are a few dogs around, too. In fact, if you should decide to come out and visit us, we will know you are arriving before you do. For there are three or four assorted ones who live at the top of the hill about a block away from our home, who run out to meet every car, both coming and going, and bark the information to everyone on the block.