It’s a beautiful August day. The sky is a light shade of blue without a cloud in sight. The trees are a trillion shades of green and a light breeze is blowing. You know what I’ve been thinking about? My thoughts travel back to my childhood. I’m remembering summers when I was between the ages of about a 6 and 14. By the time I was a teenager, I no longer yearned to spend days with my parents and my siblings, though I did. But from my earliest remembrance until my teenage years, I remember summer days spent either camping at the coast or weekends on Sauvies Island.*

I remember the picnic tables under the shade of the cottonwood trees. The fluffy seed pods slowly drifting down from above and onto the tables and covering the sand with the sticky seeds and fluff. Everyone would join to drag the heavy wooden tables to just the right spot making sure they were level and fully shaded.

Mom and Dad, Grandpa and Grandma and Auntie Wilma and Uncle Bob or Uncle Jim, depending on who she was married to at the time, would carry down coolers full of Kool aid and hot dogs and buns and chips of all kinds and watermelon. Mom would set up the camp stove and Grandma and Auntie Wilma would spread the tables with oil cloth. Mom, Grandma and Auntie Wilma would have made potato salad, coleslaw and maybe a macaroni salad or a three bean salad. We had plastic divided picnic plates in primary colors and I think we had regular silverware and paper napkins and colorful stacking tin cups. Dad and the other guys, would carry from the trunks of our cars, folding chairs and their fishing gear.

Dad and Uncle Jim (or Bob), Grandpa and Steve would carry their poles down to the rivers edge and cast their bobbers, sinkers and hooks into the water setting them up into their pole holders set firmly in the wet sand. I don’t remember a time when they didn’t take creels home full of fish. All the while, Mom and Grandma and Aunt Wilma set out the food.

I remember clearly how hot the sand was and how far it was from under the shade of the cottonwood trees to the edge of the river where the sand was cold and wet under our feet. We wore thongs that would inevitably break between our toes and hurt our feet as the rubber folded under our soles. So, mostly we were barefoot.

I can clearly remember one of my swim suits. It was a vertical striped black-and-white cotton suit that ballooned from my waist to the tops of my thighs. I can’t really remember whether I loved or hated that suit but I wore it a lot. I was embarrassed when the balloon part filled with water making me look ridiculous.

We’d take towels with us as we ran towards the river’s edge as fast as we could with Mom shouting a warning not to go too deep. We spread them out where they would heat up under the hot sun. Kristi and I put a toe into the water first just to see how cold it was. Then we’d slowly wade out to our ankles, then to our knees, then to our thighs and then to our waists and once we were up to our waists, we would plunge under the water. Steve had already run in full blast, splashing us and making us scream. Mom’s predictable saying was, “Don’t scream and he’ll stop”. But he never did.

These were the days when the Colombia was clean, and not yet designated as the 5th hottest river in the world due to the mercury content. We’d swim and we’d dive under the water opening our eyes to see each other’s legs so we could swim between them. We’d open our eyes to look into each other’s faces and try to talk, swallowing big gulps of river water. We’d do handstands and see who could stand the longest with their feet in the air. We’d swim until exhausted and then we’d run out of the water and up the beach to our hot towels burning our feet, saying hot, hot, hot” to collapse on our stomachs and doze. We’d bury our feet in the sand and we’d bury Steve up to his neck.

Soon, we’d run back into the water washing the sand from our legs and backs and arms until Mom called us to come and eat. We’d spread mustard and ketchup and relish on our hot dogs and eat them walking around in the sand until Mom told us to sit at the table and handed us a plate with salad and chips and a cup of Koolaid. We almost always got sand in our food. But Mom would just tell us to eat it anyway, saying, “a little dirt never hurt anyone”.

I remember the smell of Coppertone sunscreen. We didn’t call it sunscreen then, it was suntan lotion. Mom would slather it all over us but because we were in-and-out of the water and in-and-out of the sand and off and on our towels, the lotion didn’t last long on our bodies and we’d burn in early summer but by August we were all tan enough that the burning was over. Mom always said that we were as “brown as berries”. *

Mom and Grandma would mostly sit in the shade but Auntie Wilma would come and lay in the sun with us and swim and she had a pole in the water, too. She had won trophies for swimming and diving and had spent most of her time in the outdoors except when she was bowling or working as a soda jerk. It was from her that I learned to put iodine in baby oil and rub it on my body so that I would tan even more. But that wasn’t until I was a teenager wearing a leopard skin bikini.

This is how our weekend days would go in the summer months when we went to picnic on Reeders Beach on Sauvies Island.

Dad had a 14′ boat and if we weren’t on Sauvies Island picnicking and swimming, he would take us out in the boat, either on the Willamette River or the Columbia or we would start on the Willamette and boat up river on the Multnomah Channel to the Columbia. I remember the smell of gasoline when we would pull up to the gas station dock where he had the attendant fill up our tank for our outboard motor. I remember how small I felt when a large tanker ship heading up the Columbia would pass us and the giant swells they would make would toss us up-and-down.

This is where we learned to swim. We wore bright orange cotton life jackets filled with kapok from Sears. They were belted on with canvas straps fastened with silver D-rings. We always wore them in the boat. Dad tossed us overboard. When these life jackets were wet, they must have weighed 25 lbs. Of course, he had taught us to swim off shore first but that was not in deep waters. He expected us to be expert swimmers. Once we were good enough, he would stop the motor out from the shore of a sandy beach and we would swim to shore without our life jackets and then he would motor the boat and anchor just off the shore, where we’d spend the day away from popular beaches.

We’d eat salami, bologna and cheddar cheese on saltine crackers and cookies and chips. Dad drank beer and we had bottled Fanta sodas that left out mouths dyed orange, red, green or purple. As the sun began to set, Dad would motor back to the boat launch, with us kids mesmerized and half asleep rocking in the waves. Sometimes Dad would speed along and we laughed as the boat would slam up and down as it hit the waves, spray soaking us.

I remember Dad looking out for logs in the water. One collision would have spelled disaster. These logs would have broken away from one of the many mills along the rivers or from a barge towing a huge raft. They were frequently found, water logged and partly submerged. A real danger to boaters unaware.

Once we were at the boat launch or if we were loading up from a day at Reeders Beach on Sauvies Island, us kids were not allowed in the car, coated in sand. Mom would take us one by one and rub us down with a rough Turkish towel. Kristi and I would squeal in agony while Mom sandpapered our soft and sun burnt skin until almost every grain was left on the ground beside the car. Steve was on his own except for his feet, which Mom scrubbed mercilessly.

Not only were we instructed to eat sand at picnics and were rubbed nearly raw to remove all sand, but if we had a wound from scrapes and cuts, Mom scrubbed the wound to remove gravel and dirt or picked out bits of glass, ignoring our cries for mercy, she’d then pour Mercurochrome* on them to add insult to injury. Mom was a nurse who took her children’s health seriously. We never had an infection but all summer long we were stained red and pasted with band-aids.

These summers on the Island were some of my best memories. Of course, there were others, like camping at the coast in Florence at Honeyman Camp Ground, but those are stories that will come later. One summer Roy Rogers, Grandma’s cousin, was at the family reunion. During his stay, he had his speedboat with him and he spent the day with us at Sauvies Island. Yes. That Roy Rogers. But that’s also a story for another time.

Time spent sitting on the porch, looking at the sky and listening to the rustle of the leaves in the wind and remembering and writing these memories has been a wonderful way to wile away a summer’s afternoon.

Notes

*The phrase, “brown as a berry”, seems to date back to Geoffrey Chaucer where it appears twice in The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1380s). If you Google the phrase, you’ll be met with some further, and quite interesting information.

*Mercurochrome, in its original form, is now banned in many countries, including the US, because of its mercury content.

*Sauvies Island was just a little over 11 miles on Hwy. 30 from our house in St. Johns. It was first named Wapato Island, and is now mostly farm land. Before Europeans took the land, it was home to the Multnomah branch of the Chinook Indians with about 15 villages and a population of 2000 people. It is one of the largest river islands in the US