I began writing last week about rural life in the years immediately before everyone obtained electricity.

It was a time when one-room country school houses still existed. I am describing my own experiences in rural Oregon because I know they did not differ much from the experiences of many living in Pagosa Country at the same time.

I pick up today where I left off last week, describing the country school.

We lived in New Hope, a small community about eight miles outside of Grants Pass, Ore. New Hope was but one of many small communities located around Grants Pass. Each of those communities contained a small, first through eighth-grade school. Some of the more populous communities contained schools with more than one room, more than one teacher.

The New Hope School contained two rooms. The teacher lived in one room. Because it was on a main, through road, the school had electricity and an “operator please” telephone. It’s water came from a pitcher-pump and well. Behind the school house was a wood shed. Inside the school room was a sizable wood furnace. The older boys (eighth grade) kept the fire stoked.

We walked the three miles separating us from school. Other students may have walked five or six miles to school. Some rode bicycles.

Our three-room log cabin did not have electricity or running water. Dad worked in a lumber mill some 15 miles from our home. He drove a 1935 Dodge four-door sedan (the years I am describing were 1943-44) back and forth between home and work. The road leaving the main road contained a number of branches, with people living much as we lived scattered about. Our home was at the end of one of the branches. The home nearest ours was more than a mile away, but some of my school friends lived there. Consequently, that’s how far I walked to find someone to play with. Most of my play time was spent with brothers or sisters or by myself in the woods.

The area in which we lived had been logged at some time in the past. The terrain was rolling with sizable mountains behind them forming the horizon line. Brush and even sizable trees had grown up replacing the logged-off forest.

We had a few goats, a milk cow and some calves, some chickens and sometimes other animals including an old horse. I was 10 years old and saddled with some responsibilities, including gathering the animals each evening and chopping firewood. Neither we nor the neighbors had fences. The animals wandered at will.

Even at the age of 10, since my job was to find the cow and goats for milking, I learned how to track the animals and was quite capable of finding my way into the woods and back home. A bell hanging from the cow’s neck helped. I’ll admit to being scared when it got dark before I got home with the animals, but I still had to do it.

It was to be many years before I saw a chain saw. I became quite adept at operating a long, two-handle cross cut saw and a variety of axes. The wood we cut included Douglas fir, oak, mountain laurel, and manzanita. Pine were available but were considered less desirable because they were so pitchy and they burned too fast. Mom cooked on a wood stove. For cooking she preferred laurel, manzanita, or oak. Fir was the main fuel for the potbellied wood stove in the living room.

The Oregon of the early 1940s was much like Pagosa Country; wildlife programs were not highly developed or well funded and there wasn’t a lot of wildlife. Since I spent a great deal of time in the woods, I learned the characteristics of the wildlife and how to recognize their spoor and offal. Watching landmarks and my backtrail as I moved through the woods became an automatic thing. I also read as often as I could (by kerosene lamplight) and especially enjoyed James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather Stocking series, “The Last of the Mohicans,” and such. I practiced moving through the woods with the stealth of an Indian and felt I was good at it.

In any case, life for me and many other small boys was much different from the life my kids lived and even more different from the lives my grandkids live. I wouldn’t trade them. Though we never had money and owned little in the way of material things, I never felt deprived or bored.