![]() There was a playground with swings and a play structure, and there were lots of outside games around, like bean bag tosses and hula hoops and the thing where you toss two bolo’ed balls at a ladder of horizontal bars in hopes of wrapping the balls around the highest bar. A fountain feature burbled into one of the two ponds at the back of the property near the woods. Fun, jokey signs and decorations were everywhere, and there were picnic tables and benches here and there around the spacious lawn, which was green and lush. At first blush it seemed a little cheesy for a farm - a putt-putt golf course would not have looked terribly out of place here. It wasn’t so much a farm - no agriculture was being undertaken there that we could see - as someone’s 10-acre rural backyard, into which every rural or outside activity a kid might like to engage in had been provided for. Spanaway is south of Seattle an hour and a half or so depending on traffic, and the farm was a little further south, just off Highway 7. There was also a pond there stocked with rainbow trout. Old McDebbie’s was a petting farm in Spanaway where kids could ride ponies and feed pigs and goats and donkeys (and a camel), and hang out in the barn petting kittens. ![]() While looking for a fun weekend thing to do on a Saturday morning that promised to warm into one of the last beautiful Saturdays before the darkening of the season, I found Old McDebbie’s Farm and Jim’s U-Fish online. Mara, who is now eight, has told me once or twice that she wanted me to take her fishing. I don’t know that dispatching the fish like that bothered me much at the time, but I do know that I have never forgotten that moment. I remember the fact that the highway crossed the creek because I remember being almost directly underneath the bridge, standing on wet pebbles reflecting a grey sky, when my father kneeling at my side showed me how to smack the fish’ head smartly against a rock so as to kill it quickly. ![]() I believe that the morning I’m thinking of now was sometime after that sunny morning at Helen’s Cove, and I believe we caught some trout this time. At least, I think it was not the first place I caught a fish, because there is a very clearly tagged memory in my head of a place - God only knows where, now - called Helen’s Cove, a place of morning sun on the shore of what I remember as a good-sized lake, where there was a fishing dock, and where my sister Jeni and I fished side by side under my father’s tutelage, and where for the first time in my life I saw my pole, which was not in my hand because I was jumping around on the dock at that moment, I saw my pole begin to wiggle and the red and white plastic bobber out in the lake to dip under the surface of the water, and my father shouted to me that I had a fish on and told me to reel him in, and I did, and it was a perch, and it was the first fish I ever caught. ![]() I also don’t know whether or not it was my first fishing experience. I don’t know how many times we fished there, but my memory of the place seems to encompass multiple events. It is certainly dangerous and probably illegal now to pull off the freeway unless smoke is coming out from under your hood or your tire is flat, but in those days a man might without worry pull his old but well-cared-for ’57 Chevy wagon over to the side of the highway early on a Saturday morning and leave it there, leading his young son a few yards through the damp understory of salal and sword fern to the creek’s edge, where the bespectacled and fretful lad would have a hard time casting his fishing line into that deeper, darker water just behind big boulders, which is where - his father said - the fish were resting on their journey upstream. To reach our fishing hole we parked right about where this photo was taken about a dozen years earlier. “Northern Pacific Railway’s North Bend Local at Issaquah, 1955”. ![]()
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