I Am A Mountain Girl.... That Is Who I Am!!

In search of a treasure, I go to the boxes my father gave me to hold onto.  They were four boxes now condensed down to two gray plastic tubs that hold a history.  Family photos and keepsakes that his mother, my grandmother Bea left for him. (my father's Mother)

~"please note...while I would never tell my father how or what to write... he has decided that our relationship is about him telling me how and what I should write".... In an effort to keep the peace... I am deleting some of what I posted and I am not including names that I grew up knowing.~ 

  Here is what I found that makes me even more convinced of what I have always felt.  I am a mountain girl.  I may love to look at the ocean and venture to it now and again.  My heart belongs to the mountains.  Here is a bit of why....

(Music Video Picks for This post: Jessica Andrews "Who I am" 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd9zYKLepCw 

and Alabama's "Mountain Music")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NshQKDfFPlw 

The Article I found "Requiem for a lake ~ Readers morn loss of 'Spirit'" from the 'living' section of the Oregon Journal (Oregon Journal Tuesday, June 10, 1980.) is here in its entirety.  My great uncle sent it to my father shortly after that date with a note that I will also post.  The article was compiled by Jack Pement Journal Staff Writer (no copyright infringement intended) and is a lovely tribute to a beautiful place.  

Requiem for a lake

  Readers mourn loss of 'Spirit'   Compiled by JACK PEMENT Journal Staff Writer

It's the sense of tranquility that people seem to remember more vividly than anything else.

     True, they speak of the majestic sight of the white-clad mountain and the towering trees, the chill of the sparkling water and the sweet scents of the forest floor, but in saying "thanks for the memory" the people who have been there seem to want to dwell most of all on the peace and the quiet - the almost eerie quiet - that they found at Spirit Lake.

     The Journal recently invited readers to share reminiscences about their visits to the Mount St. Helens recreational area.  Some wrote poems in reply, others filled many pages with their fond memories, and a few who wanted to say something themselves more fully simply wrote that there was no place in the whole world to match Spirit Lake.

     Losing the lake was, for Robert W. Manners of Longview, "one of the biggest tragedies" of his life.  It was there he had met his wife-to-be.  That happy occasion was June 12, 1938, while he was on a DeMolay outing.  

     "It was the day our lives began..."  wrote Manners.

     "It was ours, the mountain and the lake, and the memory of it all will live forever in our minds."

     Michael and Gail Warren of Beaverton remember a man from Arizona strolling repeatedly past their camp to get water from a nearby pipe.  The man said he had never tasted anything so delicious.

     Mrs. Myra K Ladder of Gresham was 17 and just starting her freshman year at Reed College when she visited Spirit Lake for the first time in 1961.  From her camp she wrote a letter to her parents in Los Angeles.  It said in part:

    "I am curled up in my sleeping bag....The lake is next to 10,000-foot Mt. Helen (and Daddy, it has real snow on it!)...The camp is a YMCA camp.  Lots of kids have guitars and banjos and play quite well... their repertoire of political parodies seems endless.  Everywhere you turn there is a group discussion of politics or philosophy or literature...

     "The sky is beautiful blue all day.  The sun shines on the lake, but the rest of the camp is in shadow all day (except maybe at noon) because it is surrounded by enormous trees...."

     V. M. Hamilton of Milwaukie remembers the happy time when with his loved ones he "drove through tall, green timber and rented a cabin a mile from the lake."

     "What a batch of huckleberries we gathered!"  he wrote.

     "Pail after pail of cool, sweet and plump huckleberries!"

     John V. Johnson of 804 NE 23rd Ave. spent a two-week vacation at the YMCA camp in 1926 and remembers climbing St. Helens in a party led by Lige Coalman, the legendary Mount Hood figure who spent his later years with the Y at Spirit Lake.  He remembers something else too.

     "For minor infractions such as smoking and swearing, we had to face a kangaroo court," wrote Johnson.  "Sentence usually was they would smear your body with iodine.  We would have to lather up with soap and dive off the dock into that icy cold Spirit Lake.  It took several latherings and dives to get rid of the iodine."

   When Isma A. Kaiser of Grants Pass heard what had happened to Spirit Lake, she wept.  She considered it "her" lake.

     "Fifty-one years ago I had the pleasure of spending a whole summer there," she wrote.  "My husband Jerry Menane, was topping and falling trees to make room for resort cabins at Harmony Falls.  The tree branches were burned to melt the snow so they could build a cabin for us to live in...We had a launch to bring in our supplies as well as our customers....

     "There was and old log cabin, perhaps a miner's cabin, and this was turned into a kitchen.  Our refrigerator was a small double-walled room with the space between the walls filled with sawdust....

     Guest started coming as soon as we had three cabins available....

     "My husband caught a rainbow trout that was so big my 4-year-old daughter could just get its tail off the ground while she held it for a photographer....

     "It was at Spirit Lake I gained my reputation as a fabulous cook.  Guests would tell me they would just want a half grapefruit and toast for breakfast.  Then they would go for a walk in that marvelous air and beautiful scenery and come in and eat a stack of hot cakes, two eggs and a slice of ham. Ha!  They thought it was my cooking!...

     "When I wasn't busy i picked huckleberries and made pies which I sold for $1.25, which was a big price in 1929.....

     "When the stock market crash came the people who were building the resort at Harmony Falls could put no more money into it and we were out of a job.

     "About eight or nine years ago my daughter and I returned to Spirit Lake and rented a cabin after phoning for a boat to come pick us up, and we lived over our memories of that summer so long ago.  I'm glad we did....

     "Today, as I write, tears have welled up and spilled over."

     Dorothy Knoll Gehrhart of 1730 SW Custer St. said that she, her husband and their two daughters had just moved to Portland form Detroit and were "still in awe of the wonders of the Northwest" when they saw Spirit Lake for the first time in the summer of 1942.

     "We had heard about Spirit Lake and a 'fabulous' eating place there.....At the park we were shown to a tree with a phone in it!  This was exciting in itself, but what came afterwards was delightful.

     "On this phone we called the lodge on the other side of the lake, ordered our dinner (a choice of beef or chicken as entree) and a boat was sent to pick us up!

     "I'll never forget that beautiful trip across the clearest water we had ever seen, and the wonderful dinner served country-style to a few people who were strangers to start with but who were soon talking as old friends."

     As the daughter of an executive board member of the Northeast YMCA, Mrs. Maxine Shannon visited Spirit Lake every summer in her childhood, each time with happiness, but the one winter trip she made to the Y's Camp Meehan in 1937 started off as a nightmare.

     She was 16, and she had received her first set of skis as a Christmas present.  The day after Christmas she and 45 other young people boarded a bus bound for the Y camp.  It was to be a winter ski trip, something the Y had never tried before.

     But somewhere short of the camp the bus bogged down in snow.  The driver told his passengers to get out, put on their skis and make their own way into camp.  Maxine asked the driver how far they had to go he said 13 miles.

     "I was sure he was joking," recalls Mrs. Shannon.  She had never been on skis.  That's why she had joined the Y party.  She was going to learn how to ski at the camp.

     It turned out that the driver was not joking.

     "The snow kept getting deeper and deeper,"  Mrs. Shannon remembers.  "Naturally the good skiers were way ahead of the slower ones.  Soon the sun set and we found ourselves having to climb over log after log that had fallen across the road.

     "Soon it was dark and there were four of us girls who were all alone in the woods - fallen trees all around us and still falling, and the wind howling....

  "It was a nightmare.  I was scared to death...."

As they were ready to despair the girls saw a lantern ahead, and they made way for it.  Advance units of their group had broken into a trapper's cabin.  There everyone spent the night, cold, cramped and hungry.  The next day newspapers were reporting the entire group as "missing."

     It wasn't until the end of that second day that they finally made it, exhausted but safe and sound to camp.

     Mrs. Shannon learned to ski that week at the YMCA camp, and by the time she and her party were ready to return home she skied out six miles, smugly, to meet the bus.  Later, when she went to Oregon State University, she made the ski team.

     "That  winter trip to Spirit Lake was the most memorable and rewarding experience of my life," wrote Mrs. Shannon.  "It's something I will never forget."

     Mr. and Mrs. Henry W. Pickens of 5256 NE 48th Ave. camped one summer at the edge of the lake with their daughter and two grandchildren.  Everything was serene and "fantastic."  Then a family of 12 moved in next to them.

     "I said to my husband, 'Oh no! Our peace and quiet are over!'"  wrote Mrs. Pickens.  "But I was wrong!  I never saw such an organized family, and not a litterbug among them.  All the children stood in a perfect line for their meals.  Gramma and grampa did all the cooking, and the young ones cleaned up."

     The Rev. Charles H. Reep of 13505 SE River Road visited Spirit Lake in 1952 with his wife and daughter and was delighted when he was invited to conduct a Sunday service at the Girl Scout camp.  He still remember the subject of his sermon.  It was "Choosing Values and Priorities in Life."

     "Our days there were restful and relaxing, and we received impressions that will remain with us all through life,"  wrote Reep.

     Spirit Lake's Harmony Falls was something special for Julie Bernard of 7011 SW Hunt Club Lane.  She had known the place all her life.  She wrote:

     "After something close to 50 years of variations on the theme and lots of water under the bridge, Harmony Falls probably changed less in its true nature than any other place I can remember in my lifetime..  It was a renewal place for all of us who went there.

     "When I was 3 my grandmother and I stood ankle-deep in clear water on the lakefront at Harmony Falls, and tried to catch glistening ninnows in a milk bottle.... I think it was still a mining camp then with one small green cabin that my mother and father rented.

     "Later Jack and Tressa Nelson leased the place built cabins and a great log lodge below the falls.  Who can forget the old boat called the Tressa and the one called Ruby after Jack's sister? Jack would come over to get us in the Tressa and we would load on the people, dogs, guitars, booze, fruit, ice and stacks of gear....

     "We remember Jack Apeman's stories around the campfire.  My brother singing 'The old 97' and the kid who could recite 'Casey at the bat' and all of Robert Service.  We remember the sign my brother carved for our cabin, 'Harmony Fails.'  And after that all of the cabins got names.

     "There was the great peacefulness of water washing against the white seahorse log called 'Wrggly' and the herds of sleek-haired little girls, giggling and skinny-dipping at night.

     "There was my mother reading in the warm cabin while rain swept across the lake and danced on the roof.  There were my own children later and my friends' later and then my grandchildren, and my daughter and son-in-law finally there at Spirit Lake running the lodge at Harmony Falls and bringing back the good food of Tressa days and the smell of fresh bread and pie...

     "Mountain - we won't be here when you are ready for us again.  When you have finished with your great new design bless our descendants with the same spirit of love that was ours when your countenance was calm."

     James J. Fenwick, assistant superintendent of Portland Public Schools, has some unusual souvenirs from St. Helens.  He writes:

     ".....My most treasured recollections involve the joy of discovering the bonsai forest that covered the north face of the mountain just at the level of the timberline (about 5,000 feet) and above the lake.

     "These beautiful dwarf trees were, for me, a sheer delight since my hobby is collection and growing bonsai.  Now, as I look out in to my apartment deck, there are three prize keepsakes growing there - a dwarf Western hemlock standing 1 1/2 feet tall and perhaps at least 50 years old; a dwarf alpine fir of the same age, and an unusual multiple-trunk lodge pole pine standing one foot tall and at least 40 years old.

     "The trees are a reminder that life goes on. Each is a reflection of the tenacity of nature."

     Spirit Lake was "beautiful and peaceful" when Mr. and Mrs. Joe Hamm visited it in 1945, using precious gas rationing stamps to get there.  When they ended their camping-fishing stay they stopped at a gas station on their way home and an attendant told them the war had ended in the Pacific.  Now the occasion is "a rare memory," said Mrs. Hamm, who lives at 3913 N. Longview Ave.

     "My mother and father spent their honeymoon at Spirit Lake 51 years ago, riding out from the Castle Rock area in a wagon pulled by a team of horses," wrote Shirley Hamilton of 2337 NE 130th Ave.

     "When we camped at Spirit Lake my brother and I would always be on the watch for sidehill gougers, thunder bobs and mountain apes (we hadn't heard the word Sasquatch at the time.)  It was always a fun kind of scary to sit around the campfire and listen to our father and grandfather tell of these weird animals!

     "A sidehill gouger was supposed to have two legs on one side shorter than the other side so he could walk around the mountain easier.  Strictly imaginary, but we kids loved it.  There really is a thunder bob - a burrowing type of animal that gets its name from the way it bangs rocks together underground.

     "Walking through the picnic area and looking down the fenced-off holes where trees had rotted out after the last eruption gave us a small feeling of the power of nature.  Little did we know that we would see in our lifetime just what that power could do....."

     Dorothy Spencer White of Tigard, the daughter of a YMCA secretary, had been acquainted with Spirit Lake sense her childhood.  She and her husband spent their honeymoon there.  She wrote this:

     "Cabins can be rebuilt, but never again in many lifetimes will this once serene area ever be enjoyable again.  We have suffered an irreplaceable loss.  My memories are many and vivid.  But I hear the sound of taps echoing across moon-mirrored lake."

My Grandmother

 The way I understand it, my Grandfather Jerry Menane (who is mentioned in this article by his first wife Isma) fell in love with grandmother at first sight when she came into the cafe where he at the time was the "cook."  He was quoted as saying that his knees went weak and felt ill at the sight of her.  Which sounds funny, but he was struck by her bubbly personality, beauty and charm.

She fell in love with his kind ways and "his cooking!"   It truly was a good match.  I have been told that they enjoyed their short lived romantic life together, as they had much in common.  My grandfather died when my when my father was just five years old.

     Isma also mentioned her daughter, my father's half-sister.  I knew Louise Menane as a truly wonderful woman.  She was kind and loved her family.  She was smart and very much a career woman.  From what I understand she did very well in the vitamin industry and later retired to Sedona Arizona.  Aunt Louise had a son John and daughter Starleen.  

Aunt Louise (Isma's Daughter)

John and his two daughter's opened their home when I was a young girl and shared their mountain life with me above Jamestown Colorado.  I was only in the sixth grade and lived with them while my father lived down in Boulder.  I missed my family, but truly it was one of my favorite times of my life.  

Life is different away from town on the mountain.  There is a lack of utilities and yet the resources and your resourcefulness become limitless.   




So much was learned there that I could never have learned anywhere else!!!

Christine (C.C.), Natasha (Tashi) & Me!  Mountain Girls

C.C., Tashi, (Grand daughters of Louise) & Me

Us Three..... Later, Uncle John married & added another blessing to our Club!!  ANOTHER GIRL!!!    I've yet to meet her, but know that she is fantastic!!  She has to be!  She comes from good stock!!  Ha!   :) 

I hope you have enjoyed this as much as I have!  What a treasure it is to find out more of where you come from.

Enjoy your week!  keepitbubbly!!  xOx ~Jeri

Jeri Sharpe