Living on Hunter Creek

This story has been in the works for awhile.    Looking back I can see some humor, but at the time it was anything but humorous, more stress than anything.    

Took a look on Google Earth to see what the place looks like today.  All the outbuildings are gone, including the big Willow tree that was out front.   It is just a memory now of long-long ago.

                                              1981-1988

 

There were chickens, a goat, a black sheep, a dog, a cat, two young children, my wife and I all on two acres with a big garden and creek frontage.    It was the first home we purchased when conventional home loans had interest rates peaking at 18%.    We bought the place with seller’s financing at 10% and a balloon payment due at the end of ten years.    We had no idea how we would come up with the balloon payment and at the time didn’t give it much thought.  We were so excited to have a place of our own after living in a government house for two years where gardening or any kind of alterations to the landscaping was not permitted, because the Gold Beach Ranger Station is on the National Register of Historical Places, since it was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1937.     

It was a three bedroom house with a fireplace where we had a woodstove insert installed.   There was a variety of  outbuildings consisting of a small three-sided barn, a pump house, a chicken coup, a greenhouse attached to a building that had been added on to the back of the house with a garage attached to that and a woodshed attached to the garage.   I’m sure none of it was constructed in accordance to the local building codes, which was typical of many country places in Oregon at the time.    There were neighbors to the east and west of us, but only a forested hill across the county road to the north of the property and Hunter Creek boarding the south end.   We were two miles south of Gold Beach outside the city limits, but the city did provide water to the homes in the area.  There was a small community of homes scattered along Hunter Creek, including a small store, tavern, lumber yard with a hardware store on the old highway off Highway 101, just a mile south of Gold Beach.

My wife’s first priority was to have a goat for milk.   This was a learning experience for us both, especially when goats are herd animals and do not care to be left alone.   The first night the young goat considered us part of the herd and would whine if left alone.  This troubled my wife and the goat was brought into our bedroom for the night.   It did not work out and I don’t remember much after that episode.   One of those things that has been blacked out of my aging memory.   Eventually we got a black sheep my wife wanted for the wool to supply her with material for weaving.   The goat and sheep stayed in the back pasture with the small three-side barn for shelter from the rain.   The company of the sheep seem to satisfy the goat.  

In order to have a goat that produces milk it must be bred once a year and have an offspring.   This became a yearly event.  We had to load the goat into the bed of the pickup and drive her up a dirt road in the hills east of Gold Beach.   It was always at night as the four of us sat in the front of our 1975 Ford pickup and made our way up a muddy road to an isolated goat farm where an old lady would charge us $20 for having our goat mate with her Billy goat.    All I can recall is driving up to a rustic looking shack with a light coming from a door window and a wooden fence and barn with a variety of goats enclosed within it all.    The old lady would bring her Billy goat out to the truck where we had unloaded our goat and the procedure happened quickly since the Billy goat was more than ready.   It had to have been a learning experience for our two young children.   After a few months and the birth of the new goat the milking procedure started twice a day.   The baby goat would be sold a few months later.    This process continued for the next four years.   

Over the course of the first year we suffered some setbacks.   First the well went dry.   It came down to either drilling a new well or tap into the city water line that was out under the county road 100+ feet in front of the house.   We decided on the city water source knowing there would be a guarantee of water.  This cost us $1000 to have a meter installed off the road.  Getting the water piped to the house with all the required values was our responsibility and subject to inspection.   I did all this work myself and it even past inspection.

During the first winter Hunter Creek flooded the back 40 or the one acre where the pasture, barn and chicken coup were located.   Early in the morning I had to rescue the goat that was in the barn up to its belly in water.   We kept the goat and the sheep in the room attached to the back of the house until the water receded.  The chicken’s survived by staying in the rafters of the coup.    With the wet pasture during the winter the goat developed hoof rot, which required constant care by trimming and applying a disinfectant.    It also became necessary to supplement feed the goat and sheep with alfalfa hay during the wet season.   This required a yearly trip to a feed store in Langlois, 40 miles north of Gold Beach for all the hay bales we could load on the pickup.    We stored the hay in the back room behind the house.   This room also was where we milked the goat during the wet season on a milking stand.    There may have been a half of a gallon produced every day.     

There were the never ending projects to do.   I remodeled a couple of the rooms of the house.  There was an old fuse box in the utility room that kept blowing fuses on a couple of circuits that were overloaded.   We hired an electrical contractor to install a breaker box and rewire the place to code.  The house was on two septic systems, one for brown water and one for gray water and both were in need of overhaul.    There was a large Willow tree in the front yard where the drain field was located and the Willow tree roots had invaded the one and only leech line.   Cutting and hauling firewood from the forest involved many weekends.    In addition to everything else I constructed a split rail cedar fence along the property boundary on the eastside.   After some weekends I looked forward to going to work on Monday.  

It was an ideal place for children to grow up with the best swimming hole in the neighborhood during the summer, a forest to build a fort across the county road and a garden to pick veggies from.    There were summer days when many of the nearby young children would spend more time at our place than at their own homes.   At times we had to feed some of them and drive them back to their homes where their parents didn’t even know they had been gone for the day, or didn’t care. 

When the new McKay’s market opened in Gold Beach we entered a drawing for a freezer full of food.   We were shocked when we found out we had won it.    Most the food included was frozen meals, ice cream and some meat.  

When our children entered school my wife went to work as a teacher’s aide for a handicap class at the Ophir School 12 miles north of Gold Beach.   She also took extension classes at night in Gold Beach from Southwestern Community College in Coos Bay.    Going back to school and getting a degree in education was something she always wanted to do.    In the summer of 1986 she enrolled at the University of Oregon in Eugene and she and the children moved into university housing that September.    Every other weekend I would make the four hour trip to visit them.    With the family gone I thought I would have more free time to tackle all those uncompleted projects on the place.   During the summer months I rented out the bedrooms for two seasonal Forest Service employees to stay, since rental housing was scarce in the community.     There was a young man and woman that became tenants.  The woman did her fair share of housekeeping and cooking.  The young man did very little and always wanted to go to the tavern after work and drink beer.    This caused friction between the two and heated discussions on who should being doing what.   On weekends the young woman had her boyfriend from Corvallis come visit her.  

In the spring of 1988 I transferred to Cottage Grove to be closer to family.   The Hunter Creek house was put up for sale with a real estate broker and a young couple rented it while it was on the market.    About two months later it sold for the same price we bought it for in 1981, which was a financial loss considering all the improvements.    The goat and sheep ended up being moved to farms near Eugene where my wife wanted them to reside.   The poor chickens became a meal for some critters, except for the rooster that escaped to the rafters.   I don’t know where he ended up in the end.   The dog came with me and I don’t remember much about the cat that may have strayed off or died before the last year on the place.    Best of all we did not have to worry about coming up with a balloon payment after 10 years and my weekends were much less stressful.