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I grew up in the foothills of the Cascade Mounains, lived in a converted lumber mill cook shack with a big old wood stove for cooking and heating -- and an outhouse about 50 steps from the kitchen door. We raised chickens, planted a big kitchen garden, hung our laundry on lines strung between Douglas fir trees, swam in Mill Creek in the summer, rode a bobsled down Ivy's hill in the winter, and drove 20 miles to see a movie or shop in a department store. It was quite a come-down from our former home, in a good-sized city on the eastern side of the mountains near Grandma Lucy and my aunts and uncles, a house with an electric stove and indoor plumbing. At the time I resented mama for moving us to Salkum.
About 200-250 people (80 families) lived there, most of them made their living in logging or lumber mills, some ran dairy farms, there was a general store/post office, a telephone exchange, the Brown Shack beer tavern (you had to go to the state-run liquor store to buy the hard stuff) and two service stations.
We (me and my younger brother and sister) rode the bus ten miles to school in the town of Mossyrock, bought our clothes out of the Monkey Wards or Sears catalogs, and couldn't wait to get out of that town where everybody knew our business and nobody was shy about voicing their opinion. After high school I got a job at the phone company in Seattle, working in the mail room. I loved the job, the city, the opportunity to get the family out of the boon docks. The two years I lived in Seattle were the happiest I'd ever been until then.