Calf Shed

Early this spring I lost a calf because it was born in a heavy rainstorm with about a foot of snow on the ground and I neglected to get it into some kind of shelter see Twelve Hours and Racer’s Calf. The cows are calving earlier and earlier so this scenario is likely to play out again. One fix for this problem would be to set up a pasture or pen to keep the bull out of the herd and schedule breeding time so that calving time will happen later in the year when the weather is better.

At this point in time, I am not really set up to do this or, maybe more accurately, I decided not to do it. Another solution is to provide some kind of shelter for newborn calves and their mothers. I chose this option thinking that I could put up a shed in a couple of weekends and we needed a shed for this sort of thing anyway because sometimes, no matter what you do, the calves come when they come, which is not always convenient.

As is often the case, I underestimated how much time would be needed to build the shed. I am not a master carpenter though I have built a few rough buildings in my day. I also decided to, as much as possible, use materials salvaged and left over from other projects to build the shed. This would cut down on material costs. Unfortunately, it also meant that the construction would go much more slowly because nothing was uniform and I had to custom cut a lot of the pieces. Doing this project gave  me a lot of insight into why so much stuff is wasted. If your building material isn’t a uniform size or you can’t store it where it is easy to find, it takes a lot more time to build with it. If one was doing this as a business that can cost you a lot of money.

I was also sidetracked by a lot of mostly unexpected things that came up. Most of these weren’t major but they amounted to death by a thousand cuts for the calf shed project. I had to take Skyeball to the vet (half a day), I had to go to Urgent Care due to some unexpected complications from a vasectomy (half a day), I had to help a friend out one afternoon (several hours), at the last moment, I put up a hundred bales of hay and helped a friend with his hay (most of a day), I helped excavate a collapsed basement access for the old house (half a day), I attended two memorial services (half a day each), I had to fix some fence (half a day), we got some sunny weather so I patched some roofs (half a day), we got haying weather so I put up most of the hay I will need for the year (300 more bales plus 300 more for friends) and finally, Vashti got some kind of infection so we took her into Urgent Care (half a day).

At this writing, the shed is at a good stopping point where I can walk away from it. The wild blackberries are ripe and I need to pick some, see Wild Blackberries and ..... The summer hiking season is here as well. I plan to pick up construction this fall and hopefully finish before winter really sets in.

I probably should have broken this post up into several different ones but the process of building the shed was so chaotic that I couldn’t think of a way to string it together into anything coherent. Maybe I should have done it that way because that’s how life goes.  

The site for the calf shed. Near the house with easy access to water. 

First I cut the grass back with a weedeater and set the post foundation blocks roughly where they will be when the shed is finished. I built the shed 8 feet deep and 10 feet wide. This will hopefully be enough room for the cow and calf to move around a bit without the calf getting trampled. 

Squaring the foundation blocks. A measuring tape is stretched corner to corner across the center of the building site and the measurement noted. Then it is stretched the same way for the opposite corners. When the measurements are the same, the building is square. 

Leveling the foundation blocks. For most of these I had to dig a little soil out to level them. In the past I have poured my own foundation blocks but these were ready made at the hardware store for about the same price as a bag of ready mix concrete with the added bonus that I didn't have to pour them. 

Leveling a foundation block. When the bubble is exactly between the lines the block is level. You can see that this one is still a little off but that is okay. It is within tolerable limits as the reader will shortly see. 

Leveling foundation blocks to each other. This requires a level long enough to span the distance between blocks or, as I have done here, a straight board that the level can be placed on. I probably got a little too carried away with leveling the foundation blocks, as I have heard it said many times "We're not building a piano here." Or alternatively, "We're not building the Taj Mahal here." I do find though that a little extra effort to get things right from the beginning often pays off in the long run. 

Cement for anchoring re-bar in the foundation blocks. The rebar will help keep the posts from slipping off the foundation blocks. It is a simple mixture, water and cement stirred with an old screwdriver. 

Foundation blocks with rebar newly cemented in. The buckets are to put over the blocks to keep the rain out of the anchor cement. 

Posts and rafters for the shed. The posts were salvaged from various logging jobs I did or was involved with. The boards, which will become the rafters of the shed, were salvaged from a burn pile. 

I stripped the bark off the posts with a draw knife (pictured) and cut them roughly to length, leaving them about 3 inches long, with the power saw. I really didn't want to work on this project this day but I had a feeling that time was going to be tight this spring so I had better work every day I could. As the reader can see, it was pouring rain. The rain started out as a mist that was okay to work in without rain gear. The mist wouldn't make me too wet. However, the mist gradually turned into heavy rain. This happened so gradually that I didn't notice it, being busy with my task. Strange as it may sound, I suddenly found myself soaking wet. This has happened to me a number of times in my life where the rainfall increases so gradually that I didn't notice it until my clothes soaked through. It usually happens when I am immersed in some project. 

Using a spade bit to drill into the base of one of the posts. The hole will go over the re-bar that is cemented into the foundation blocks. 

Foundation blocks ready for posts. 

A piece of tar paper is placed on top of each block for a vapor barrier and to slow the decay of the post. 

Posts in place. As the ready can see, several are leaning heavily. This also pulls and shifts the foundation blocks. Therefore, I probably could have spent a little less time fussing around trying to get everything exactly level. 

The posts have been leveled as best they could be by holding a four foot level along their length. This becomes a little complicated because the posts have a little bit of taper to them and sometimes knots make it impossible to hold the level perfectly true to the post. When I was satisfied with the level of the posts, I anchored the braces to hold the post in place. This was Memorial Day and it was rainy and another day I didn't want to work. However, I didn't work the first half of this day. I spent the first half of this day at Urgent Care dealing with some complications from a vasectomy that I had three weeks before. I won't go into the details except to say that I got the vasectomy because I think there are already enough people in the world and a lot of our problems can be traced back to overpopulation. I think in my case this probably backfired. There will probably be several more babies born because my problems with the vasectomy scared a lot of guys I know. 

Setting boards, front and back, that span the width of the shed. The rafters will sit on these boards. The board I have for the front is odd shaped and one side tapers across its width. I had to be sure to use the straight, non tapering side up to put the level on. 

Rafters in place. I nailed them to the posts and also drilled through with a spade bit and bolted the rafters to the posts with all-thread. 

Cross boards trimmed and several braces installed. Braces stabilize the structure significantly so it won't flex all over the place. I like stable structures so I probably over brace things, putting a brace in every direction. I wanted to at least get this far and have most of the permanent braces installed before I move the cows back to the pasture. Cows love to rub on things like this. They could throw the structure way out of square or even knock it down if it isn't well braced. Note that I installed extra posts in the middle of the shed. This was an afterthought. The rafters are western red cedar which, while it is very rot resistant, isn't very strong. The span is only eight feet and the rafters are full dimension 2 x 8's  but I decided to add the extra posts just to be on the safe side. The shed is facing west because we get our worst winter winds from the east so I wanted this direction to be closed off in the shed. 

Squaring the rafters. The same process used to square the foundation blocks is used to square the rafters. This is a critical part of the building process. The roofing is square so, if the building is not square, the roofing won't fit properly.

Rafters trimmed to the proper length for the roofing. I have also added blocks or nailers for the purlins which will span the shed and support the roof. The roofing will also attached to the purlins with screws. There is probably a proper term for the blocks or nailers but I don't know what it is. These blocks stiffen the rafters considerably and make the two one solid unit. Most of these blocks had to be custom cut because the distances between the rafters were all different because the rafters sandwich the posts which are not sawed to a specific standard dimension and are all different sizes.

Installing purlins. Again, I think the proper term for these boards that span the width of the shed and will anchor and support the roof is purlins though there might be another term for them with this type of construction. 

I sued 2 x 6's which should be strong enough for the span which is ten feet. One of the problems one has to deal with up here is getting a lot of snow and then getting a lot of rain on top of that snow. This can put a lot of weight on a roof very quickly. There are several ways to deal with this. One is to make sure your load bearing members, the rafters and purlins are beefy and not spaced too far apart. Another is to have a steep pitch on the roof which will shed the snow quickly when it gets wet and heavy. I couldn't get a really steep pitch for this roof so I tried to beef up the load bearing members. 

Side view. The all-thread bolting the rafters to the posts is readily visible here. 

The 2x6's I had for the purlins weren't long enough to span the shed and leave some overhang. So I had to add boards to get roof overhang. I used two boards that were long enough to do the span plus the overhang on the front and back of the shed. I set them where I wanted them, in this case, the overhang was a foot and a half or 18 inches. Then I stretched a tightline across the ends of these boards. 

Boards were then cut to fill in the overhang areas. The ends of these fill in boards were extended out until they just touched the tightline. These fill in boards were cut to have about 2 feet of overlap with the purlins and were nailed to the purlins.  

Laying the first sheet of roofing. This is the most important piece. I needed to make sure it was as square as it could possibly be. If it wasn't the whole lay of the roofing would be off maybe to the point where some of the shed wouldn't be covered. 

Adding sheets of roofing. I used the white four foot straight edge to keep track of the line of the purlins underneath the roofing so I would hit them with the roofing screws. If I missed, I would put an unnecessary hole in the roof. 

The grass was getting too long on the pasture so I had to move the cows back even though the shed wasn't finished. It was pretty well braced and I had most of the roofing on which also served to stiffen the structure. Part of my work area was outside the pasture so I needed to make sure the cows didn't get out through the gate I left open in order to work and I needed to make sure I closed the gate when I was done for the day. 

It didn't take long for the cows to come over and investigate. 

When I was down to the last two sheets, I laid them out and cut the long boards to length and then employed the straight line method to set the fill in boards at the proper length.

Roofing completed. The reader will not that the roof on the right side of the shed overhangs more than on the left. I would love to say that I did this on purpose because the extra overhang will create a better windbreak during a northeaster. Sadly, this is not the case. I simply miscalculated the center of the roofing and I didn't catch it until I was done. However, it should make a better shelter on the right side with this configuration so, no harm, no foul. 

The roofing was salvaged so it was full of holes where fasteners penetrated it for the previous roof. I had to pay attention to make sure the holes were on the crest of the roof ridges and not in the valleys which would encourage leaks. I had to go along and fill each hole with silicone RTV. I did this on a sunny day so the RTV would have a good chance to set before it rained. I also spent the rest of this day patching other roofs. 

Calves in the calf shed. If I had the shed last spring there would probably be another one in this group. 

One of the sidetrack jobs was fixing some fence. Neighbors needed to go through our pasture at the Stump Farm to move their old house out and their new house in. I rigged a temporary gate last year for this purpose. The job was done and I needed parts of the gate for other purposes so I removed it. I need to fix several sections of fence but I made this one a priority to get done before I move the cows back up to the Stump Farm. 

Digging a post hole. I always use a shovel. My dad taught me how to dig post holes this way. The ground here was very good digging. Along the back of the Stump Farm there is a lot of rock which makes digging hard with a shovel and next to impossible with a post hole digger. I don't have a auger attachment for digging post holes with the tractor. 

As the reader can see, the fence posts were not nice and round like the post holes. 

So I had to make the holes oblong to fit the posts which I should have done to start with. 

Fence posts in place. They will be straightened before the holes are filled in and the dirt tamped around them. 

Post aligned as well as possible with the rest of the fence, which is sagging in places, and tamped in. Dad taught me that the shovel handle makes a very good, handy tamping rod. 

The barbed wire was stretched back across the gap and spliced together. 

I also used some hog wire with square mesh in a largely futile attempt to keep the cows from reaching through the fence into the neighbor's shrubs. 

Back to the calf shed. The last step, probably for now was to add some nailers, boards nailed to the posts that I can nail plywood to in order to keep most of the wind out of the shed in the winter time. 

Why the People of this Place, Not Just the Place Alone, Matter

I have just completed a series of posts covering some of the lesser known history of the North Cascades along The North Cascades Highway, a.k.a. Highway 20. There is much more I could write about on the same theme of lesser known history going almost all the way to Rainy Pass.

These posts, amounted to about 57 pages in a Microsoft Word document single spaced with a font of 12, on a stretch of the North Cascades Highway, or Highway 20 that is 25 miles long.

Consider: There is a lot of history known to me and knowledge about this place that is well outside this narrow corridor. The area covered in this series of posts is a small fraction of this knowledge.

I also withheld a lot of information out of privacy concerns for people who live in many of the places along the way. I could have named who lives or lived in many of the houses along this stretch and often who built the house. Considering how long many of the post in this series are, I’m sure any of the readers who had the fortitude to read through the existing material are glad I didn’t go on about things ad nauseum (maybe the proper term would be ad, ad nauseum).

I didn’t write too much about good hunting spots because if a lot of people know about them, well, they won’t be good hunting spots any more. Likewise I didn’t indicate fish bearing streams in the area for same reason. Most people wouldn’t dream that some of these streams had fish in them. The Washington State Department of Fish and Wildlife did a lot of surveying of streams to see if they were inhabited with fish in the mid-1990’s so they might know a lot of the unlikely areas where one will find fish. I believe Trout Unlimited has done a lot of similar work as well. But I often wonder if these organizations and other like them have actually captured all the fish bearing streams.

I also didn’t want to get too specific with a lot of the information or put too much information out because there are people and organizations out there who haven’t made the investment of trying to make a living here while actually residing full time here. It seems some of these folks often use such historical information with little or no benefit going back to local, by which I mean eastern Skagit Valley, communities. I have seen bits of local history repackaged for the consuming public and conveyed by some “authority” who only lives here a couple months of the year, if at all.

Many of these same people and groups pursue policies and agendas that are detrimental to the economies of these rural communities. These policies and agendas, for the most part, seem to have a singular focus on the place, mostly the scenery and maybe some wildlife that may or may not live here, while ignoring the detrimental effects that the same policies and agendas have on the economy and people who live here.

Possession of some history gives an air of authority to these folks, who are, I’m sure, good enough people, and I’m sure that the information they pass on is great for the casual tourist. But for someone who has lived their whole life here, it is a little irksome to hear the same stories parroted over and over again with an air of authority by someone who has never lived here and is only here for the summer and makes very little contribution to the community.

I don’t think that a lot of these folks really understand what they are talking about. This is because they haven’t actually lived a life here, dealing with the challenges and limitations this place puts on anyone trying to make a living here year round. And they don’t have any other stories because they haven’t invested the time here to learn them.

Withholding information because I am concerned that it will be misused puts me in an odd spot. Obviously, if you don’t pass the history on, it is useless. I don’t mind at all sharing what I know with people, no matter where they are from, who study history and respect the people that are the source of it. I also usually share freely with anyone, no matter where they are from, if they just ask. And not many people do, which is the whole point of this series of posts, to illustrate the potentially vast amount of knowledge held by people who have lived and made their living in a place for a long time.

So this caution may seem a little paranoid. Obviously, the history of the North Cascades is not a hot item in most circles. What I want to avoid is making a lot of information easily available to be cherry-picked by someone who doesn’t want to take the time and make the investment to talk to the people who have lived here for many years. Once the information is out there, free for the taking, it is quite easy to use it in a manner that disconnects it from the people who are its source and use it to create an image of expertise and authority (many of the organizations that I am cautious about are very good at creating such images of themselves) in order to push the previously mentioned agendas and policies that are detrimental to rural communities. 

Maybe some day, if I have the time, I might still write some of this stuff down in more detail. I do hope to pass it on to my children and family and anyone who is trying to make a stake here. If this oral version is all that survives me it will undoubtedly be more garbled but no more so than if it had been misused in the manner I have outlined.

Finally, a lot of information wasn’t included in this series of blog posts simply because I forgot to mention it. I think this is quite common. Over the years, people I have known for my whole life mention something out of the blue about this place that I had never heard before. The subject had never come up, so they didn’t have a reason to think about it or mention it.

Again this highlights a flaw in written historical records. When being interviewed for the historical record, quite often people, myself included, need triggers, the right question or the right situation to retrieve many memories. For one thing, the information gathered is quite often defined and limited by the person asking the questions. I think this is the natural order of things and I think a lot of knowledge is lost between generations, especially if those generations don’t live similar lives in the same or similar place and encounter similar problems and situations.

I have nothing against historical interviews and they are certainly more permanent and, in most ways, more reliable than oral records, depending on how distant from the source they are. But I think it is important to keep in mind that interviews or statements aren’t the be-all and end-all of history. You don’t even come close to capturing all of the knowledge in someone’s head with an interview, even though it may last for hours. You would actually have to live with someone for years as a friend or family member to pick up many of the finer historical details.

As I previously stated, as surely as I write these words, some of the information I put out is wrong, either because it was misremembered either by myself or the person I got it from or it was garbled at some point in the telling. But, overall this was an honest attempt to illustrate some of the lesser known history of the area, the kind that isn’t written down anywhere.

There are other versions of many of “my” histories of the North Cascades out there as well as histories that I am not aware of. Many of these other histories are held by the other folks who have also lived here for a long time (a long time at least in human reckoning). I am sure their histories are just as flawed as mine. But they also contain little nuggets of information about this area that you can’t get anywhere else.

Flawed as they are, these histories come straight from this place and from having lived here and made a living here for many, many years and the myriad observations gleaned from that living. This, the human experience, is the living soul of this, or any, place. Along with day to day life and the restrictions imposed upon, and opportunities provided by the place, these histories form the culture of the place and a different way of looking at the world than the dominant culture.

You can’t get this from a book. I think it is fine to read history. I have read quite a bit myself. But reading it and living it are two very different things. Reading information in a book is not the same as performing the activity described on paper. Quite often when you live a life you pick out the nuances that weren’t recorded in a history as well as the misinformation that is inherent in any history, whether it was something that happened today or a hundred years ago. This reflects back on my previous comments about people who don’t live here who would use written history to gain credibility or authority to push policies and agendas that come from the point of view of people who are not subject to the limitations of living in this place.

On an interesting side note, there is an analogy in elephants to the importance of having group members with a lot of experience in living in a place.

Elephants, like humans are long lived and and old cow elephants are the keepers of the herd knowledge. They know, for example, where to go to get water during severe droughts that, at least until recently, occurred infrequently, once every several decades or more. They have to be old enough to have seen the previous drought and know, through knowledge passed down from the previous herd matriarchs, where water is still available under those conditions. An elephant that is 20 years old will not have seen, and thus not know, what happened during a drought that occurred 30 years ago but the animals that are older than 30 years will know.

So removing the older cows in an elephant herd has a dramatic impact on the well being of the entire herd. Without these older animals, the chances are more likely that many in the herd will die of thirst in the next drought. I understand this situation is especially dire in areas where elephants are hunted heavily for ivory. Obviously the older the animal is, the larger the tusks, making the old herd matriarchs prime targets for poachers.  

I am not applying to be the herd matriarch of the North Cascades or some kind of official historian. I don’t study the history of this area and I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about the North Cascades. Through the chance of birth, I happened to be privy to a lot of info that is not widely available to many other people. But I have a lot to learn about the North Cascades. I am constantly learning new things. And these histories are my version of events or at least the version that was passed down to me, which may, or may not, be completely accurate.

Not too long ago a number of signs were placed at different places and businesses around the town of Concrete that state “This Place Matters”. The unwritten history and knowledge that I have been explaining in this series of Lesser Known History posts are why the people matter who live in places like Concrete or eastern Skagit County or anywhere in the world where people stay and try to make a life. Though many of them might not hold college degrees, they are nonetheless keepers of significant knowledge about their place. If they leave or the people they pass their knowledge on to leave, the knowledge is lost and along with it, part of the living soul of the place.

I don’t see a lot of the next generation staying here. I am sure at least part of this is just the natural course of things. People have always come and gone. Quite often, I have noticed, people feel the need to leave the place where they grew up. And the world is urbanizing and globalizing. But I also believe a lot of young people who would stay here leave because there is very little economic opportunity. It has always been hard to make a living here but it has gotten much worse over the course of my lifetime.

With the loss of the next generation of the keepers of the unwritten knowledge of this place, we are losing a culture. In the overall scheme of things one might not think this is significant. I am sure someone from the dominant culture would find the people who live here indistinguishable from themselves. After all, we all speak English (with a smattering of Spanish here and there) here and participate to a high degree in the dominant culture of the region and the country. The culture is unique though, and different from the dominant culture.

The larger implication of the trend of young people leaving the places where they grew up is that it is also happening in other countries to cultures much older than the one here, probably also largely as a result of globalization and urbanization.

I hear people bemoaning the loss of world languages, and rightfully so because these languages actually constitute a unique way of looking at the world and, as such, are one basis for a culture and important for cultural diversity. If people don’t have economic opportunity where they live, more often than not, they will go somewhere else to seek it. If that somewhere else doesn’t speak their native language or follow their customs, these will be lost because they are no longer relevant to that person’s life.

The non-Native American culture of eastern Skagit County and rural areas like it are in their infancy. I am not comparing them with ancient Native cultures here or around the world that possess their own distinct customs and languages. Still these newer cultures are unique in their own way and, when they are gone, they can’t be replicated and they hold knowledge that isn’t written down anywhere. And, because they aren’t obviously different from the dominant culture, they are, in large part ignored. Time will tell how long they survive in our urbanized, global world.

I freely admit that I have a lot to learn about the North Cascades. I also admit that I can learn many things about this place from people who don’t live here or have only arrived recently. But the people who don’t live here and the recent arrivals need to admit that they too have a lot to learn about this place from the people who have been here for a long time.   

Most of my posts on the lesser known history are long and probably could stand some, maybe a lot of, editing but, as I have stated, they are an attempt to illustrate the potentially vast amount of knowledge about this place held by the people and families who have lived here for a long time. They are the best, as far as editing, that I could do at this time. I might take a while to read some of these posts but consider how long it took me to write them. If you haven’t had a chance to look at all of the posts, I invite you to do so. Though I have spared many details, I think they might provide the reader with a good bit of insight into the people who live here.

Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. I
Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol.II
Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. III
Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. IV
Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. V
Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. VI
Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. VII
Lesser Known History of the North Cascades Vol. VIII

St. Catherine's Catholic Church, Concrete.

Washington Cement silos, Concrete (East Baker).

Henry Thompson Bridge, PSE fish trap and railroad bridge piers, Concrete. 

Sauk Prairie, Darrington. 

St. Martin, St. Francis Episcopal Church, Swift Creek (Sutter Creek). 

Barn at Newby's place, now fallen down. This is right below Newby's Knob. 

Skagit River bridge, Marblemount. 

Log road house, Marblemount. 

The Mink Ranch, Marblemount. 

Old Number 6, Newhalem.