I can die happy now that I've been to This is the Place Heritage Park. We went for the Rich family reunion a few weeks ago. If you haven't been yet, I highly recommend it for the eye-opening experience and the likelihood that it will instill feelings of gratitude for modern technological advances. As I walked through Old Deseret Village with its restored pioneer buildings and houses, I had an epiphany: I might have made a half-way decent pioneer!
Living in Alaska was like being a pioneer. Sort of.
For one thing, I didn't see any toilets in the replica homes. The word toilet probably did not enter my vocabulary until I was five. Yet somehow I remember hearing stories about being an extrinsically motivated potty trainer. I was bribed with sweets. So maybe I had a toilet while my parents didn't. Fortunately, I was too young to remember those halcyon days without indoor plumbing. I have no recollection whatsoever of the "honey bucket," a crude sort of chamber pot with ten times the storage capacity. Wikipedia's entry on the honey bucket says the following: "The honey bucket sits under a wooden frame affixed with a toilet seat lid. These [buckets] are often the same type of plastic five–gallon (19 liter) buckets used for shipping many paints, cleaners, and solvents, as well as institutional quantities of food products" (emphasis mine). So naturally, a few questions arise in my mind: where did my parents keep said honey bucket? How often was it emptied, and where? I suppose the only honey bucket related memory I have is when I was a junior in high school and went on a cross country running trip to the village of Buckland. Our team was instructed to give the big red dumpster on the side of the trail a wide berth because it was filled with you know what. That was in 2001.
Okay, moving on.
Before age five, I lived in a 16 x 24-foot plywood shack, raised several feet off the ground, like all the other houses, on a hill overlooking the spruce-lined banks of the river in a village called Noatak (Noah-tack) with the Baird Mountains rising behind the trees. There were maybe two rooms. One of them was a bedroom with a home-made bed of my dad's own Posturepedic design. It consisted of layers of thick foam atop an arrangement of mismatched oil drums; some stood higher than others and created a lumpy, uneven sleeping surface (same concept as the returned missionary sleeping on top of his food storage in The RM). In this room we often woke up with the blankets frosted to the walls after the temperature dipped to -60 in the winter.
The second room doubled as a space for everything else. It was a room filled with the smells of diced caribou flanks frying in garlic or baked chum salmon, or the mozzarella cheese sandwiches with salsa on 12-grain bread my dad ate when he came home for lunch. It held the water supply, hauled by my dad in five-gallon buckets (water buckets, not honey buckets) up the hill from the Noatak River; the buckets sat in a corner while the gray river silt settled at the bottom before the water was boiled for cooking, drinking, and bathing. And speaking bathing, my sister and I took turns getting pots of warm water dumped over us while we sat in large plastic Rubbermaid tubs. It held an oil drum woodstove around which clothes wet socks, mittens, and hats were hung to dry after getting soaked in knee-deep snow during snow machine excursions. It held a dilapidated couch draped in the fur of a brown bear shot by my dad in his bachelor days. It was filled with drawings, since Merella and I were allowed to color on the walls, and I used the space to practice writing my name. Before the shack was torn down I imagine one could have found crayon murals of purple moose and pink princesses intermingled with inventive phonetic preschool spellings of "Sarita" streamed across the walls. The second room also held boxes of Harry and David's pears shipped from Conway, New Hampshire, close to where my grandparents lived--they sent packages of fruit regularly to make my immigrated Filipino mom feel "more at home." A kind gesture that I doubt compensated for the lack of a toilet and a real kitchen.
Noatak was a town where you had to wait in line at the post office to make your phone calls and where the mail came on a plane (along with everything else in the village) a few times each month, and where you could find porcupines nesting under your house. It was the good life for sure.
Secondly, I used to "make my own clothes." Sometimes. My mom got a sewing machine for a wedding gift and figured out how to use it all by herself. She made us itchy wool pants that chafed every square inch of skin they touched, fur hats, parkas, dresses for school. For my dad she made button-up shirts of the most vibrant tropical floral prints that suited her taste.
I didn't touch a sewing machine until I was in ninth grade. The first thing I recall making was a dress for an Anne of Green Gables doll. It took about a week to make and by the time I was finished, I decided I was ready to retire from my brief career as a seamstress. I took the easy way out and made all the rest of my doll clothes with a glue gun instead.
I took up sewing again in the months of April and May for the next three years. These months were filled with prom preparations and I refused to be caught wearing the same dress as someone else. This devastating tragedy happened to several of my friends. I was not interested in spending several hundred dollars on a dress that would be worn once and trailed through the mud and residual snow of May to get to the sparsely decorated high school gym. I made do with what I had at home--a story for another time. I estimate my total cost of attire for four proms to be under $15. Given my gifted nature when it comes to spending money, this is a miraculous figure. All it took were some beads and some ibuprofen to ease the backaches I acquired while bending for hours over the fabric of my dresses with needle and thread poised between my fingers. I cannot explain these bouts of irrationality I suffered every April and May. Any sane person would have just mail-ordered their dress over the Internet like everyone else...
Living in Alaska was like being a pioneer. Sort of.
For one thing, I didn't see any toilets in the replica homes. The word toilet probably did not enter my vocabulary until I was five. Yet somehow I remember hearing stories about being an extrinsically motivated potty trainer. I was bribed with sweets. So maybe I had a toilet while my parents didn't. Fortunately, I was too young to remember those halcyon days without indoor plumbing. I have no recollection whatsoever of the "honey bucket," a crude sort of chamber pot with ten times the storage capacity. Wikipedia's entry on the honey bucket says the following: "The honey bucket sits under a wooden frame affixed with a toilet seat lid. These [buckets] are often the same type of plastic five–gallon (19 liter) buckets used for shipping many paints, cleaners, and solvents, as well as institutional quantities of food products" (emphasis mine). So naturally, a few questions arise in my mind: where did my parents keep said honey bucket? How often was it emptied, and where? I suppose the only honey bucket related memory I have is when I was a junior in high school and went on a cross country running trip to the village of Buckland. Our team was instructed to give the big red dumpster on the side of the trail a wide berth because it was filled with you know what. That was in 2001.
Okay, moving on.
Before age five, I lived in a 16 x 24-foot plywood shack, raised several feet off the ground, like all the other houses, on a hill overlooking the spruce-lined banks of the river in a village called Noatak (Noah-tack) with the Baird Mountains rising behind the trees. There were maybe two rooms. One of them was a bedroom with a home-made bed of my dad's own Posturepedic design. It consisted of layers of thick foam atop an arrangement of mismatched oil drums; some stood higher than others and created a lumpy, uneven sleeping surface (same concept as the returned missionary sleeping on top of his food storage in The RM). In this room we often woke up with the blankets frosted to the walls after the temperature dipped to -60 in the winter.
The second room doubled as a space for everything else. It was a room filled with the smells of diced caribou flanks frying in garlic or baked chum salmon, or the mozzarella cheese sandwiches with salsa on 12-grain bread my dad ate when he came home for lunch. It held the water supply, hauled by my dad in five-gallon buckets (water buckets, not honey buckets) up the hill from the Noatak River; the buckets sat in a corner while the gray river silt settled at the bottom before the water was boiled for cooking, drinking, and bathing. And speaking bathing, my sister and I took turns getting pots of warm water dumped over us while we sat in large plastic Rubbermaid tubs. It held an oil drum woodstove around which clothes wet socks, mittens, and hats were hung to dry after getting soaked in knee-deep snow during snow machine excursions. It held a dilapidated couch draped in the fur of a brown bear shot by my dad in his bachelor days. It was filled with drawings, since Merella and I were allowed to color on the walls, and I used the space to practice writing my name. Before the shack was torn down I imagine one could have found crayon murals of purple moose and pink princesses intermingled with inventive phonetic preschool spellings of "Sarita" streamed across the walls. The second room also held boxes of Harry and David's pears shipped from Conway, New Hampshire, close to where my grandparents lived--they sent packages of fruit regularly to make my immigrated Filipino mom feel "more at home." A kind gesture that I doubt compensated for the lack of a toilet and a real kitchen.
Noatak was a town where you had to wait in line at the post office to make your phone calls and where the mail came on a plane (along with everything else in the village) a few times each month, and where you could find porcupines nesting under your house. It was the good life for sure.
Secondly, I used to "make my own clothes." Sometimes. My mom got a sewing machine for a wedding gift and figured out how to use it all by herself. She made us itchy wool pants that chafed every square inch of skin they touched, fur hats, parkas, dresses for school. For my dad she made button-up shirts of the most vibrant tropical floral prints that suited her taste.
I didn't touch a sewing machine until I was in ninth grade. The first thing I recall making was a dress for an Anne of Green Gables doll. It took about a week to make and by the time I was finished, I decided I was ready to retire from my brief career as a seamstress. I took the easy way out and made all the rest of my doll clothes with a glue gun instead.
I took up sewing again in the months of April and May for the next three years. These months were filled with prom preparations and I refused to be caught wearing the same dress as someone else. This devastating tragedy happened to several of my friends. I was not interested in spending several hundred dollars on a dress that would be worn once and trailed through the mud and residual snow of May to get to the sparsely decorated high school gym. I made do with what I had at home--a story for another time. I estimate my total cost of attire for four proms to be under $15. Given my gifted nature when it comes to spending money, this is a miraculous figure. All it took were some beads and some ibuprofen to ease the backaches I acquired while bending for hours over the fabric of my dresses with needle and thread poised between my fingers. I cannot explain these bouts of irrationality I suffered every April and May. Any sane person would have just mail-ordered their dress over the Internet like everyone else...
Outside the General Store. Inside you can buy faux racoon fur hats, which reminded me of the one my mom made for my brother when he was in kindergarten. He wore it with a bright blue snowsuit until the tail fell off. Inside the General Store you can also buy candy called chipmunk and rattlesnake poop. The rattlesnake poop was more expensive. Then we saw "Bella Swan" whose appearance was much improved by a taxidermist.
One of 700 pictures we took somewhere in Old Deseret Village.
We went into a hotel that smelled like toothpaste and bacon but had an ice cream shop annexed on the side. We looked at the menu and saw flavors such as burnt almond fudge, cookie dough, mint chocolate chip, and play dough. Unlike every other ice cream shop in the United States, this one did not offer free samples, so I had to trust the boys behind the counter who promised that the ice cream only looked like play dough and did not taste like play dough. They said it tasted like bananas or Skittles. So I had to take their word for it. It tasted peachy.
We then took our ice cream into the building where the pioneers printed their newspaper. Each building in Old Deseret has one or more people dressed in pioneers supposedly "in character." "In character" for most of them just means that they are simply dressed in pioneer clothes. But the man in the print shop appeared to be stuck in the 1800s, because when asked a simple question that required one straight answer, "How long does it take to print the newspaper?" he proceeded to detail the differences between the pioneers and the Israelites based on the fact that one group had a newspaper and the other did not, while referring to the pioneers with first person pronouns. When it was clear that our question was not going to be answered, we backed away slowly toward the door and left.
How could I resist the schoolhouse? The "pioneer" hostess who gave her lecture on the life of school children included a lesson on the Deseret Alphabet--which is harder to read than it looks. We were also informed of punishments naughty children had to endure, including standing with their noses touching the wall and their arms stretched out behind them holding several pounds of books in each hand, and sitting on a stool in front of everyone wearing a dunce cap. And if they were really naughty, they had to bend over for spankings with a wooden paddle. Volunteers were singled out to demonstrate each of these punishments, and since me, Jesse, Barbara and Charles were pretty much the only ones in the room, we were asked to volunteer for everything--including the spanking. That last one was kind of awkward. 
3 comments:
Wow you really were like a pioneer! Good thing you didn't know any different. Sounds like an informative trip to This is the Place park. I remember going there when I was younger thinking it was boring, but I'd probably enjoy it more now- especially if ice cream was involved!
The ice cream was definitely a bonus--and the 1.2 mph train ride!
I like reading your posts! They are always so interesting! Thanks for sharing!
Post a Comment