Ice age: A story of 1050

By Tim Wheeler

I walked in the darkness to bring down the cows that cold January morning in 1950, a few days before my tenth birthday. Usually, the cows were beneath the cedar boughs chewing their cuds. But this morning, they were milling around restlessly. When I opened the gate, they headed for the barn without prodding. Bonnie and Daisy, our workhorses,

were pacing in their corral and snorting nervously. I stood still. I could feel it, too. A dense, cold, humidity in the air, an urgency of something big and menacing rolling near.

The cows filed into their stanchions. "It feels like snow," my father said. "A storm coming on." As the sky grew lighter in the east, this air of expectancy deepened. I walked to the end of the milking barn and looked out. The clouds over the Strait of Juan de Fuca had turned black.

After milking, my brother Steve and I washed, changed into our school clothes and walked with our little sister Susan down the hill through town to school on the north side of Sequim. The first flakes of snow were falling and by the time we reached the school, it was coming down fast. We attended classes in the venerable Sequim schoolhouse, a tall clapboard building with a belfry and lofty, small-paned windows that looked out on the Olympic Mountains. That morning, I joined my classmates huddling near the steam radiators that clanked and hissed as they poured out the heat. The snow was falling so thick we could not see as far as the old gymnasium across the playground.

My teacher was Neva Wheeler, not related to my family, but a kindred spirit in other ways. Her husband was a dairy farmer like my father. She was a handsome, prematurely graying woman with a deep voice. She had a rumbling laugh and she laughed often at the shambling ways of children.

She called the class to order. We labored through arithmetic and had just taken out our reading textbooks when Mrs. Haller, the principal, appeared at the door. She conferred in whispers with Mrs. Wheeler who then turned to us.

"School is closing early because of the storm," she said. "Put your desks in order now." By rows, we went to the cloakroom to retrieve our coats, caps, mittens and galoshes.

For the majority of the pupils, the early dismissal was cause for celebration. Sequim had a consolidated school district with the farm children riding schoolbuses from their homes to school. The town children walked and so did we since our farm was only a mile away, in the foothills of the Olympics.

We were Cold-War refugees fleeing the anti-Communist blacklist. My father couldn't get a job teaching despite his impressive academic credentials. He tried working as an oil furnace mechanic in Seattle but soon was laid off. Since he grew up on a farm and knew the tribulations of farming, it made sense to try farming now.

My parents bought the old Bell homestead with the handsome white farmhouse on a high hill overlooking Sequim in Clallam County, Washington. It was 53 acres of rocky soil, an orchard, a weather-beaten barn, 23 milking cows, a flock of chickens, a collie named Tricksie and an irritable bull named Chimacum.

We enrolled in the Sequim schools in the autumn of 1948 and thrived. We were enthusiastic students and outspoken in our political views. We defended the innocence of the Rosenbergs and opposed the oncoming Korean War.

I got into an angry exchange with a fellow student when he claimed with a sneer that the S'Klallam Indians were "rich," proven, he said, by their preference for big luxury cars. A visit to the S'Klallam's impoverished village, Jamestown, would expose this absurdity. The Indians were among the poorest people in the county. Every inch of land had been stolen from them. They finally scraped together $500 to buy back a few acres of the county that bore their name. It was a narrow strip of beach property on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, far from the Dungeness River and its teeming salmon that had sustained them.

I told this student, "If they are rich and own fancy cars, why does their chief, Jake Hall, walk everywhere he goes in the valley?" The kid was stumped. And it was true. Jacob Hall, Chief Whitefeather, was a familiar sight to everyone in the valley, his bent form striding along Clallam County roads with a gunnysack over his shoulder. He was a handsome, dignified man, a hunchback, who often came to deliver lectures to the school children on his people's exile in their own land. My father often gave him rides.

Sequim is on the Olympic peninsula, a dark forest and two ferry rides from Seattle. But it was not far enough to shelter us from the repression. In the summer of 1949, a federal marshal delivered a subpoena ordering my dad to appear before an investigating committee in Washington D.C, a 10-day round trip by train. It was one of seven subpoenae he would get over the decades that followed.

But that one was the hardest. My younger brother Nat and my sister Honey Bee were in diapers. And there were also the three older children. Five kids and 23 cows to milk.

At that time we had no contact with the Communist Party USA. I try to imagine how alone my mother felt. Later she confided that she dreaded my father being arrested and never returning home.

The day after my father left, my brother, then 13, came down with the flu. Dizzy and nauseous, he pulled on his boots and together we went to milk the cows twice a day. We celebrated when Daddy came home.

d d d d d

W ithin minutes of our dismissal, the classroom emptied, the children climbed onto the buses and they pulled away into the storm. Somehow, I missed my brother and sister. I zipped my jacket, pulled my cap down over my ears and stepped into the snow. It was already four inches deep and getting deeper. I walked south toward town, past the Clyde Rhodefer Memorial Library. I waded to the library door on the chance that Steve and Susan had stopped there. The door was locked.

I was always a dawdler. "Tim, you're as slow as molasses in January," my father would say. I know about molasses in January. It was my chore to draw buckets of molasses from the 50-gallon drum lying on a wooden frame in our grain room and pour it on the hay in the manger. It was cold as ice and sticky. That's how slow I was walking through the storm.

I just made it to the comforting warmth of the Sequim Drug Store. The place was nearly empty and I ordered a cup of hot cocoa at the soda fountain. I wrapped my frozen hands around the steaming cup and felt the ache as my fingers thawed. The wind screeched in the highest octaves and banged the drugstore sign. Clouds of snow whirled up the deserted street. I dreaded the walk home.

I heard a familiar voice speaking with the pharmacist. A minute later my teacher, Mrs. Wheeler, hurried past. She caught sight of me. "Tim, what are you doing here? You must get right home! This storm is getting worse! Why didn't you go straight home when classes were dismissed?"

She shook her head in disbelief, turned and hurried out. I saw her step into her car and drive off into the tempest. I knew where her farm was, far north on the Dungeness River at least seven miles away. She had good reason to be in a hurry.

I took the last sip of cocoa, slid from the stool, zipped my jacket and stepped out into the snow. When I turned the corner at the bank, half a block away, a blast of wind nearly bowled me over. I leaned into it and struggled to put one foot after another.

A chill I had never
felt before traveled up from my fingertips and toes. My ears were frozen. The wind whipped particles of ice into my face, blinding me, stinging my cheeks and nose. After 20 minutes of plodding south, I had walked less than half way to the old abandoned Milwaukee Road passenger station. Even when I reached the tracks, I would have two hills to climb and a valley between.

I was so far from home, the pain in my fingers and toes so unbearable. I slowed to a standstill. A feeling of self pity flooded over me. I will die right here!

I don't know how long I stood there with the storm howling. Headlights lit the swirling snow and I heard the sound of a motor. Then came the familiar voice shouting to me. "Tim! Tim Wheeler! Come, come!"

I couldn't move. Someone's arms were around me, pushing me into the front seat of a car. A minute later, my fourth grade teacher was there beside me. The car heater was on full blast. It brought excruciating pain to my frozen fingers. I was shivering uncontrollably. Tears rolled down my freezing cheeks. "Poor boy," she said. "Why did I leave you in that drugstore! I should have known!"

She drove through the blizzard, past the railroad station, up the hill past our neighbor's farm house, down past the snowy bottom pastures of our farm. The hill grew steeper and I could feel the car fishtailing. Mrs. Wheeler kept a steady foot on the accelerator. Slowly it inched to the crest of the hill. She turned into our driveway and stopped. "I'm not going to try to get up your driveway," she said. "I'd get stuck. You can make it from here. Have your mother put your hands in cool water. It will relieve the pain."

My mother, bent against the wind, hurried down the driveway toward us. She had been watching anxiously at the window for me and rushed out when she saw the headlights. Mrs. Wheeler rolled down the window. My mother put both her hands in and grasped Neva Wheeler's hands. "Thank you!" she said. "I was so worried. You must come in. It is dangerous."

Neva Wheeler would not stay. She had a family of her own and a herd of cows to tend across the valley. But I saw her return my mother's handclasp, the sympathy of two farm women in a cold and unforgiving time. She turned the car around and headed back down into the maelstrom.

The warmth from the wood stove hit me when I came into the house. My father was there, dressed for the storm, on his way to look for me. Steve and Susan had caught a ride home with a neighbor who happened to pass by. It was only a little past 1 p.m. My ordeal had lasted only two hours. For me, it was an ice age.

On the last day of school that spring, Mrs. Wheeler handed out report cards. I opened mine. Opposite social studies she had checked, "Shows special ability." She had written a note, "Tim is a very fair-minded boy."

That storm was 50 years ago this month. It is hard to remember now, in this new century of promise and hope, that fear stalked our country as cold-hearted as that January blizzard. "The FBI knew exactly what our situation was," my father told me a few days ago. "They knew that taking me away from the farm for a week or 10 days could break us. I might crack under the pressure and start naming names."

In the years that followed, our family won the respect and affection of many people in the valley. We became active members of the Communist Party of Clallam County, an organized force in defending my father and other victims of repression. A few years ago, Clallam County dedicated the Mary Lukes Wheeler Park, a cedar grove on the banks of the Dungeness River, on land donated by my family.

The cold warriors underestimated the courage of my mother and father. They also underestimated people like Neva Wheeler. Looking back, her simple act of humanity in rescuing me from a blizzard was an expression of solidarity.