Down On The Farm

Riding along on the Foothills Trail from Orting to South Prairie, you will see traces of an older lifestyle, evidence that this rich river valley was once farming country before the upscale condominiums and outsized homes began their encroachment toward Mount Rainier. I remember those years when you had to slow down for cattle crossing the two-lane road; I remember the "Dairy of Merit" and the roadside stands where cucumbers, fresh corn, bunches of beets and piles of squash were sold for fifty cents or a quarter. Today, only a few of those farms are in operation, and that at a much reduced level. Little haying is done now, and the fields of corn are turned into mazes at Hallowe'en, more profit in charging $5 a head to play a game than in selling sweet, sun-warmed ears five for a buck. The stands selling blueberries and blackberries import them from other areas; "locally grown" means somewhere in Washington, not in the Puyallup and Carbon River valleys. The equipment which once raised clouds of dust as sod was turned and fields were tilled now sits forgotten behind tumbledown barns and outbuildings, balers and disks, tractors, plows and trucks now gone to rust. The grass grows high with no cattle to graze it, and only a few of us recall the sound of their mooing, gently sounding in the August morning fog.