FOUND: THE STONE FACE

I am so excited to tell you about this. I found "the Stone Face!"

Undoubtedly you've seen "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." The first time I saw it was at the theater in Orofino with my friend, Chris. We were probably 14 or 15. I particularly remember seeing the movie with Chris because she saw "the big W" before I did. Remember how the Dorothy Provine character sees the "W" and realizes that's where the money is, and you hear the angelic choir of sopranos sing "Ahhhhhhhhhhh." Well, now I know! There really is a choir that sings "Ahhhhhhhhhh" at the "ah-hah!" moment.

My dad never showed me around the perimeter of the farm. He leased the farm in 1965 or so, and life just didn't take us to the canyon rim. There weren't 4-wheelers in those days, and Daddy wasn't super-interested in hiking. As he got older, I think he was less interested in taking a mostly disinterested daughter to the canyon rim, especially since there was no real reason to go. It's not an easy trek across plowed fields, though it's not particularly far and it is do-able. And as he got older, it became harder and harder for me to say, "Daddy, there are things I want / need to know." I just couldn't bring myself to think the unthinkable: that he would change his address -- permanently.

Anyway, once Daddy mentioned to me that there was a rock outcropping the family called "the stone face," and since becoming active on the farm, I have been searching for it. I asked brother Chuck, but he said he didn't know. I asked our neighbor, a native of the area, and he said he didn't know. Always when I hiked the farm with Mike, I searched the outcroppings for the stone face.

When we arrived at the farm on Wednesday, Mike and I rode out to the west canyon rim to see if repairs had been made to the fence. We parked the 4-wheeler and hiked a short distance to a break in the rim rock where the horses come up from Little Canyon below. I suppose for the first time I stepped through the rocks and was standing below the outcropping. It was then that I heard the soprano voices. "This has to be the place!" I exclaimed. Together Mike and I looked over the outcropping until we identified the face.

You can compare the pictures for yourself: the black-and-white taken many years ago -- and the color photo I took just this morning. In some ways the old picture is better than mine but I can go back and do it better. Pretty cool that I found it, huh?

MORE PHOTOS

"Where do you and Mike live now?" asked an acquaintance I hadn't seen in years.

"We live an unenviable lifestyle," I replied. "We try to keep two places." And I explained to her about the farm (the old family home place) and the modular home in town.

"Oh, no, that's all right," she said. "I know exactly what you're talking about. My parents did it for years between the house in town and the home place near Genesee. But –" she paused, "it's always at the other place. No matter what you need, it's always at the other place." We laughed. So true.

Here are pictures of today's tramp at the homestead. Same place – different views. The time between harvest and seeding (late summer / early fall) is really a window of opportunity to walk the fields. Once the fields are plowed, it's not so easy to hike around -- sometimes ever impossible.

If you look carefully in the photo to the left, you can see Nellie "working the field." For some reason I couldn't bring myself to crop this photo. The low, wispy clouds sit above the Clearwater River. And the photo on the right shows Central Ridge between Big and Little Canyons framed by the crisscrossing topography of the farm fields.

And this last photo I took "in the forenoon," as my dad would say. Somewhere out there Farmer Kyle is still working at his seeding. I could hear him but couldn't see him. KW

TRAMPIN' THE FARM

Mike and Nellie were going bird hunting here at the farm (9-22), so I threw on a pair of jeans and my hiking boots, grabbed the camera, and tramped along behind them.


Here's a nice late-summer photo of the farm house from beyond the pond. Note the red apples on the tree.


This draw is called "Stove Creek." We pick plums here -- and the deer bed down under the plum trees. You can see the farmyard --the clump of trees on the right side of the photo. And that line running from the farmyard to Stove Creek is actually the boundary between Jack and June's homesteads.


I love this photo taken from June's field. Looking at the two properties as a whole, the farmyard sits in a natural hollow in the center. This side of the hollow was June's homestead, so you can see why it was important to us to make the two farms one again. The barn and the pond sit just inside the boundary. Of course, it didn't matter to my grandparents because the two farms functioned in cooperation.

Although she's mostly white, Nellie has little tolerance for the heat early in the season. Mike carries water and a container so that she can have a drink. Nobie would lap water poured from a bottle or canteen. Nellie says that's just too weird.


Here's a clear picture of the turn I mentioned in a previous post -- where June and Bertha's house was located. The large pine tree is on Dobson Road and marks the place where the access road begins.



And here's a picture showing Dobson Road flowing down to our lane at the left. Note how much the culvert raises the lane. Before the culvert was installed, that boggy low spot was problematic. Sometimes, when I was a child and rode with my dad to the farm in early spring, we would get stuck at this point. Daddy would walk on into the farm, get the little D2 Cat, and pull the pick up out of the mud. "Wouldn't Vance just love this?" a neighbor comments when he admires the culvert. Yes, he would! KW

VIEW FROM THE WEST RIMROCK

When I was sorting through photos one day, I discovered these taken from about the same spot in different eras. This first one was taken in 1909 and is captioned "Little Canyon from Dad's west rimrock." That's about a hundred years ago, you know.

The next photo (right) is the same scene: "August 1939 from lone tree point on the 'South 80' [that's what they called that particular field] looking down Little Canyon; Dieterle boys' place in distance."

This photo was taken by my dad in 1959 from approximately the same spot above the place that then belonged to Max Walker . . .

. . . and my contribution taken on a cold April Sunday 2008. Sonny Hairston now owns and operates a hunting club on that land.