Labor Day, actually

So, Labor day really….Monday dawned nice and easy and slow.  E making breakfast, both enjoying coffee and watching people pack up to go home from their long weekend.

So, plan for the day…we want to go to Northern Quest Casino in Airway Heights (Spokane) and see this widely touted Eastern Washington Casino.  For those of you who know us, the important thing is that it has a really nice poker room.  We also want to do some area touring.

I went to high school at Jenkins High in Chewelah.  This is a small high school (we graduated 62 students in 1982) which serves the local area.  We lived in a small log cabin up Deer Creek Road out of Valley, WA.  I mean it was small….2 bedrooms, one bathroom.  We had baseboard heaters but that was too inefficient and expensive so we heated with our freestanding wood stove and fireplace.  This place was pretty primitive.  There was no foundation, it was built on timber piles.  There was no insulation, it truly was a LOG CABIN (think pioneer days) with mud chinking in between the logs.  Chinking is traditionally mud and straw mixed together and stuffed into the cracks between the logs.  This is to keep the wind and weather from blowing through the cabin by sealing all the gaps between the logs.  Our chinking was done with a concrete mixture and didn’t need the constant repair that traditional stuff does.  We chopped a lot of wood to keep that place warm.  Dad and I would start harvesting firewood during summer and continue right up to when the snow flew.  This consisted of us going into the surrounding woods and looking for down or dead standing trees.  Dad had bought a brand new Echo chainsaw when we moved into the cabin at the end of my freshman year of high school.  We would load up the truck with chainsaw, gas, oil, lunches and our Australian Shepherd “Snip” and drive up into the woods and find a tree and go to work on it.  Snip would prowl around and keep an eye on us, he never strayed and often would sit on top of the cab of the truck to provide guard while Dad and I would use the saw to cut the trees into 16 inch lengths and stack them in our Chevy pickup until the bed was full  then take it home and unload in the splitting area.  We (usually me) would then use an axe (later got a maul and wedges, woohoo!) to split the rounds down to manageable/burnable size then stack it into our woodshed.  That shed would hold over 10 cords of wood (a cord is defined as a stack of wood 4 feet high by 4 feet wide by 8 feet long)  and we would use it all over the winter.  We had horses, chickens, a couple cows, a goat (once) and guinea fowl (the best watch dogs ever).

In the summer there was a garden to plant and tend, the animals to tend and I had a rabbitry for an FFA (Future Farmers of America) project.  I also had a dairy calf as a FFA project while we were there.  Dad and I built a barn and fenced off the garden.  We had to predator proof our chicken pen as we were often awakened in the night by the sound of a cougar or bobcat trying to eat all of our chickens.  This was always fun,  The Guinea fowl would start cackling (a sound you don’t ignore and never forget) then the chickens would start in and then the horses would start snorting and we knew there was a predator.  They never tried to kill any of our large animals and the Guinea fowl roosted in the trees so their favorite target was our chickens.

Speaking of cougars…..One day on a crisp fall morning (wool coats and hats with long johns and boots) Dad and I were cutting firewood in a small bowl.  We had not taken Snip along on this outing for a reason I no longer remember.  Now it had turned kind of hot as the sun rose higher and we had shed our coats and hats and were down to rolled up shirt sleeves.  The sun was shining directly into that little bowl and it was really nice.  We took a break to refuel the saw and eat a snack and as we looked around we saw him.  On the rock rim about 20 yards away and 30 feet above us was a cat.  Now, he was all stretched out catching some sun and warming up.  He looked about half asleep and kind of lazy.  He also looked about as big as I was back then (5 foot 10 and 120 pounds).  Well, we sat there on the tailgate of that old Chevy truck and watched Mr. Kitty Cat watch us.  We ate our sandwiches and drank a couple of Cokes and eventually he stood up and stretched and left.  That is a memory that Dad and I still talk about today.  We made a lot of memories there in those three years that have been guiding lights in my life.

Anyway, E and I head up through Loon Lake, take the left towards Springdale then up Long Prairie Road to Deer Creek Road.  Go up through the canyon all the way to the end of the pavement and about a quarter mile of washboard dirt road later you see the old cabin on the right.  It still stands there with it’s red paint intact and most of the concrete chinking still between the logs.  The widows and doors are boarded up but it is still standing.  The roof is intact, our old woodshed, carport and the barn we built are still there.  The chicken house is gone but the garden is still there and fenced in like we left it 35 years ago.  Dad and Mom sold the place to some new age healer when they moved to Western Washington and I went in the Air Force so it really is kind of a surprise to see it this intact and looking like we left it.  The interior has been gutted by someone in between and looks like they may have thought about remodeling or rebuilding but didn’t follow through.

front from the old driveway

front from the road

back of the house

our barn

It just goes to show that you can go home again……Just don’t expect it to be home as you knew it.  I look back at those days with 35 years of time passed and wonder at the wonderment that I experienced back then.

We drove on into Chewelah and by the old school.  It’s still exactly the same with a couple of portable buildings added to the property.  Town really hasn’t changed but it has aged.  There is now a big tribal owned gas station and small casino just south of town where I remember nothing but farms being.

We stopped and got a coke and a smile and pointed the Beast southbound on 395 toward Spokane.  An hour later we were pulling into the Northern Quest Casino (a tribal casino).  We parked in the garage, which is a little cumbersome to park and then go into the casino.  There is just no fast or easy way to get from the garage to the gaming floor.  We got our Players cards from very friendly staff and then headed to the poker room in the non smoking portion of the casino.  This is a really nice poker room in a clean area of a nice casino.  This is not your Vegas casino, it is very typical of the Tribal Casino in Washington State.  We got seated right away on limit tables and for the next couple of hours had a fun gaming experience.  The food/beverage service at the table was prompt and the food (Lo Mein) was hot and tasted good.  The floor staff were professional and I only witnessed one dealer make one mistake which makes for a fun time.  Sometimes the dealers like to cater to locals whom they know and spend more time focused on their conversation than on dealing the cards in a professional manner.  Not so with these folks, they were professional and calm dealers.

After a session of neither winning nor losing much, we decided to leave and drive the hour back up to the KOA.  I know, no one fall over with shock…..we actually left a casino before 2 in the morning.  We were back at Piper and eating dinner by 9:30.

We got to bed with our minds racing with anticipation for the next day and our run to Lakeside Montana.  We are scheduled into the Edgewater RV Resort there for our sojourn in the Kalispell/Glacier National Park/ Bigfork area.

Again, if you see us out there, say hi.

Let’s GO!

BFD