Bridge, OR

After their marriage in Chicago, Vake and Milly packed all of her belongings for the train ride west.  Almost everything arrived intact; only a snow globe had broken, and Vake speculated that it had frozen on the ride.

            They settled at Bridge, OR, up the Coquille river from Myrtle Point; or if you prefer, 15 miles from Remote.  They rented a cabin from Mrs. Van Alstein. It had no bathroom, but rather, was served by an out-house.

            Vake worked at logging. A photograph was made of the loggers, with a case of beer out front. Years later, Vake’s son Mark challenged him:  “What was the brand of the beer?”  He knew: it was Miller’s.

 Milly boned up on being a house wife. She sent for pamphlets, but discovered that “foul brood” referred to bees, not chickens.

             Milly was still very much a city girl, despite her service in the military, and despite her time on an uncle’s farm in Indiana, where, she complained, the horse would scrape riders off at the corner of the barn, into a manure pile. Her midwestern relatives figured Oregon was pretty remote, too.  Her brother's wife Ada mailed an expired Sears catalog to use in the outhouse; evidently she thought toilet paper wasn't available in Oregon. 

            Milly was convinced that a domestic duck had rabies: It was foaming at the mouth.  She threw a galvanized tub over it to show Vake when he got home. The duck had eaten slugs. He removed the tub, and let the poor creature go.

            Milly was convinced that she had heard  a cougar scream, but nobody believed her.

            Milly locked the doors at night, and got teased for it, until a stranger wandered up the driveway one day.  “Do you know where the wind comes from? It comes from here!” he said, a shoved a stick  into a knothole on the side of the cabin.

            Milly watched David and Arnold from time to time. One time, Arnold got his feet wet. Milly dried out his shoes in the oven.  When he went to put his shoes on, he got teary-eyed, but did not complaint. She found out that the shoes were painfully hot.

            Then there was the time that David said that there was a chicken down the hole in the out-house. David  had a huge imagination, so nobody believed him. But after a fashion, they believed that there was a chicken in the outhouse. The chicken was retrieved, and it flopped on the ground and pecked at the food tossed on the ground around it.

            Mrs. Van Alstein had a whole orchard of Gravenstein  apples, but she didn’t use them; she saved them for deer. One deer ate so much that it got bloated, and wandered through the yard whimpering.  One day when they knew that she was away, Milly and Sylvia sneaked into her orchard, and load up the trunk of a car with apples.

            Milly wanted to make an apple pie for Vake, but she had no rolling pin to roll out the crust.  She asked to borrow a rolling pin from Mrs. Van Alstein, who initially said “No.” But then she relented, on the condition that Milly not wash the well-seasoned rolling pin.  Vake contended that each apple pie Milly made was the best one she had ever made, ‘til the very end of his life.

            Milly suffered from horrible menstrual cramps. She said that she would sit up all night, suffering, until she completed her first pregnancy.  Then, while pregnant,  she gained weight hugely. Her doctor chipped at her constantly about controlling her weight. She injured herself under the impact of that weight while she was trying to pull out an old fence covered with wild vines, but crushed a vertebral disk. She moved with military posture after that.  When she gave birth, she lost so much water weight that the doctor apologized for having nagged her about her weight. She delivered at Myrtle Point on June 11, 1947, and I, Susan Rae Sampson, was the product.

            Kathleen visited Milly in the hospital, and brought her a bottle of perfume. 
“You’ll need it,” was all Kathleen would say. Nobody  had explained to Milly the long process of her body’s drainage while it recovered from childbirth.

            When I was one year old, I started screaming, and squirted blood into my diaper. Milly figured it was dysentery that she had seen in the tropics. Vake and Milly threw me into the car, and drove to the nearest hospital, in Myrtle Point. Dr. Rankin had moved to Oregon to train to be an orthopedist. He expected to see plenty of broken limbs from the logging industry, but hadn’t seen any.  He diagnosed “intussusceptions,” a condition in which the intestine folds up like a  collapsed telescope. Surgery was required. Small world phenomenon:  When I was a junior in high school at Florence, Or, Dr. Rankin's son David was my history teacher. 

            Following surgery, I needed nursing care, so Vake and Milly moved from Bridge back to Coos Bay, and stayed with Eli and Sofia. Vake’s friend Charlie Wisti had a sister-in-law who was an RN, and she provided my care. Before the surgery, I had just started to walk, and now, had to learn all over again. Vake looked for a job related to his training as an aircraft metalsmith, but found none.  He did find a job at Bay Hardware, and signed on as a plumber’s apprentice.  Sylvia’s two brothers-in-law, Everett and Thane Goodman were working there.

            Small world phenomenon:  When I was about 17, I went to the Coos Bay Elks Club community picnic. I was walking across the grounds when a woman stopped me and asked, “Are you a Sampson?” I admitted that I was, and she had me take her to the table where Milly and Vake were sitting.  She was Mrs. Wisti, the nurse who had cared for me during my illness 16 years before.