Growing up behind the times

Time Traveler:I had intended to write a column about my boyhood home but as I started to slap some words on a blank page they started to sound familiar. So I checked out our old columns and what do you know? I already wrote this column. It appeared in the Auburn Journal June 7, 2015. I must have been time traveling, stopped long enough to write the column, moved on and forgot all about it. Time traveling can get confusing sometimes. Anyhow, I read the column and it ain't half bad. I don't think I could improved on it. So I'm gonna use Paul Harvey's famous quote "and now for the rest of the story."In that initial column I described the house and its general location. To quickly recap, the house stated out as a miner's shack sometime in the early '60s — as in 1860s — and hadn't improved much by the time we arrived 90 some years later. I have a map from 1866 showing that house. It survived because someone had put a tin roof on it, otherwise it would have collapsed long before. It didn't have an indoor toilet or electricity when we arrived and didn't when we left. There was a faucet in the kitchen but no water came out of it until my dad tied into an old water line from a spring or maybe from an abandoned lime quarry operation on the hill behind us. I don't really know and at 4 years old, I didn't care. The water, we heated on an ancient wood-burning cook stove, the kind with a bun warmer on top, very fancy in its day. Black-cast iron with nickel-plated trim, it dominated our tiny kitchen and in looking back, it makes me thing of an aging dowager empress. She was the heart of the house. My dad eventually saved enough money to buy a gas-powered Servelle refrigerator that keeps food cold by burning propane and heating something up, a concept I still don't understand.From the sound of it, we were dirt poor but I didn't know it. We had a roof over our head, hot water and cold food and really, what the hell else do you need?The old house was located in a rural part of El Dorado County and when the Rattlesnake Bridge went down, Placer County was cut off to us. After that the nearest neighbor was over a half dozen miles away. I was pretty much living in a 19th century environment. How could I get so lucky? I was blessed with being able to live in two centuries at the same time. My backyard didn't stop at a fence, it went for miles. My freedom of movement made Huckleberry Finn's lifestyle, by comparison, seem like militant nuns raised him. We didn't have neighbors but we did have visitors. In today's world it's considered rude to show up at someone's house unannounced but we had no phone so they just showed up. It was beyond OK, it broke up the day. There were rules, however, I remember old man Crutcher would drop by from time to time and if he didn't see my dad's car, he would stand a the road, take off his hat and holler, "Hello house!"He considered it inappropriate to stand on the porch if my mother was home alone. In those days we had rules, in today's world every time someone breaks wind we pass a new law.We obey laws because we have to; we obey rules because we want to — big difference. Many of the visitors were well passed their prime; most of them had been born before the Wright Brothers took off at Kitty Hawk. Quite often they would stop by for an evening to sit on the porch with my dad and talk … note to the one millennial reading this: people used to talk — a lot. These old boys didn't talk about what they were doing because they weren't doing anything. They talked about their youth, they talked and I sat and spit watermelon seeds at the cat and listened. Over a period of time, I took their memories and tuck them away in my 5-year-old noggin because I didn't have many of my own yet. In the years since, my memories and theirs have folded into each other to the point that I'm not sure whether I'm remembering for them or me.I had intended to write more about my old house but I got distracted. Maybe next time I will because to me it was a magical house that gave me the best childhood anyone could ask for. Several years after we moved, my dad and I walked down to the old place, several windows were broken, the door hung askew. He stared at it for a minute and said, "Well son, it's just an old house with a broken heart."We left. He never went back. But I did and sill do. John Downs, aka Time Traveler, and Robin Enos, aka Portuguese Pirate, are Newcastle residents.