Growing up in Wendling

I spent most of WWII in the small logging town of Wendling.  Located up the Mohawk Valley outside of Springfield, it had been a bustling sawmill town for over fifty years.  The mill and adjacent timber was owned by Booth Kelly Lumber Company, and a train track and modest highway connected the town to Springfield, where the Company had another sawmill.
My dad was taking part in the South Pacific jungle warfare, so my mom and I lived in a little red house on a ridge east of town.  On an adjacent ridge lived my Abercrombie grandparents.  They had indoor plumbing.  My cousin GD, two years my junior, had lost his mother in a car crash and his father was also in the South Pacific, so he lived with my grandparents, and because my mom worked in the mill I spent most days playing with GD.
In 1943 I was five and GD was three, and we spent as much time as we could outside.  I taught him everything I knew, which was how to climb a tree; and our older second cousins, both girls, took us into the large pasture across the street where a fallen oak tree provided hours of imagination.  It was sometimes an airplane, sometimes a bus, sometimes a building.  Further across the pasture ran a small stream where we searched for crawdads and tried to swim in knee deep water.
Because lumber was so readily available, all the streets except for the highway leading down the valley were made of wood, long timber beams bolted together to keep the cars out of the mud.  If a little boy tripped and fell while running on the plank road he could expect an arm full of splinters and little sympathy from his mother.
In the winter, although there was seldom snow, a coat of frost would cover the plank road many winter mornings, and an older boy, George, who lived behind my grandparents, could slide down the road on his flexible Flier, metal runners skimming along the top of the frost.  Some mornings as I walked to my grandparents I would see him and he would let me sit behind him, holding his waist as we sailed down the hill, wind blowing freezing tears in my eyes, then the road leveled out and we came to a stop just before we entered the big field where waste lumber was burnt.  "Dont walk in there, Nicky," my grandma would warn, "a boy stepped on a pile of hot coals in there and burnt his foot off to a stub."
Some days grandma let us walk into town to the general store.  The approved route took us past where out cousins lived, through the covered bridge, past the four room school house, around the corner past the rows of company housing, then into town to the store, a large room filled with shelves stocked with groceries and a few treats for small boys.  The floor was punctured beyond salvation by the spiked boots worn by the loggers.
The unapproved route was to turn right prior to  being observed by my cousins, and cross the mill pond holding the logs headed for the headrig.  There was a narrow walkway across the pond, and the pond workers would wave their peavies and shout, "you boys dont go trying to walk them logs, they'll roll on you sure as shootin and you'll drown, then what would your grandad say."
As I recall, he would have sworn mightily if he had seen us there.
The mill was closed down in 1946 and the sawmill burned down one night shortly thereafter.  There were still people living there after the mill closed, and we were staying with an uncle, sleeping on the floor planning to rise at 0400 and go hunting.  It was the first year I was allowed to go out with the men and I could barely sleep.  In the dark I nudged my dad.  "Hey, dad, the sun is coming up, we overslept."  He raised his head and looked at the bright shining light, and shouted, "goddamn Dave wake up, the mill is burning"
 So instead of hunting we spent the pre dawn hours watching the vast complex burn to the ground.  Electric wires from the power house would catch fire and a stream of flame would go streaking down the valley out of sight.  The ceiling collapsed in a shower of sparks.  Men stood by with buckets of water, and some people screamed that the fire would cut off our escape from town, but eventually the blaze died down.  The concrete power shed was the only thing left standing, and still does to this day.
Last summer GD and I took a day off from our golf outing and drove up to the abandoned town site to see if we could find what might be left of the houses on the hillside where we had grown up.  It seemed simple.  Follow the road, still paved, up past the Springfield Country Club, over the bridge in Marcola, up Mill Creek to the covered bridge, turn right and follow the road, now graveled, past where our
cousins had lived, turn left, then right at the woodscrap burn site and up the hill.
We got lost.
A sixty five year old stand of timber stood in our path, obscuring whatever it was we could remember of our childhood.  Tall trees crowded together.  There were a couple of roads that seemed to go in the correct direction, but then they veered off into the forest.
We found the remains of the mill, the power house, and concrete walls which had supported the head rig and dammed up the creek to form the large pond for holding the logs.  We found the road up to the picnic grounds but there was a locked chain barring our way.  We stood and looked around us, remembering where the general store was, over there was the union hall where they had potluck dinners and Santa Claus gave out candy canes at the Christmas party, up that way was Wold Creek, along which was a street of houses belonging to the executives, sawfilers and sawyers and various department heads and skilled workers.
Now it was all forest.  Perhaps there was a path up to the old flume, or we could maybe take the hike up to the old swimming hole.
But it was hot, and we were feeling old, 73 and 75 and still active, but without the energy to chase down the ghosts of our past.
Nick