So How Much Was Your Allowance?

I remember once I got my dad for ten bucks because I thought my allowance was too low. I was freshly ten, which just means never being single digits again, but I thought it was code to the universe for "entitled to free time." Yet most every school day I woke at 5:15 to:

1. Turn on the back water for the lawn

2. Turn on side water for the plants

3. Feed the Koi

4. Feed chickens and collect eggs

5. Wash and empty dishwasher if not finished from night before

6. Turn off the water after fifteen minutes, repeat for the front lawn and back row of plants

7. Shower, eat, hand water plants on front and back patio

8. Feed and water dog, cat, clean dog poop from garage

9. Sweep kitchen, hall, both decks

10. In the winter, I stoked both fires and pulled at least a wheelbarrow full of log for the day and stacked it between spiderwebs next to the sliding glass door.


Man, I know there was more, and on weekends, I was busy, or expected to be busy most days, until ten o'clock. Cleaning the bathroom, vacuuming the main rooms,dusting the antique furniture, cutting lawns, re-sodding plants, laying brick or stones, etc. Each season meant a different thing; before fire season, there must be defensible space, before planting season, we must weed, aerate, and irrigate, before winter, there must be wood. Before spring, the house must be immaculate. The mosquito trees (manzanita) must be cleared in the fall, the pipes replaced after the last melt.

Early every summer, Dad and I hopped in the truck and headed to the most remote places in Northern California to climb the longest stretches of dirt road on foot, only to fish for three hours and decide if we ought to come back with the Jeep and some chain later. And that's if we found anything. Those days I don't remember well. I do know that having finished the falling of trees and the sawing into logs by himself, my job was splitting and stacking the three cords we could fit into the back of the green GMC. Can't just toss 'em back there, you stack a cord cross-angle, neatly, so as not to waste space. Which, if you can imagine, meant not being free all day until dark to ride my bike, instead sweating an awful lot, building the strong muscles I feel atrophying today, and drinking RRRRRRR's horrid ice tea.

We went camping in the middle of summer for two weeks or so a year, at a little hideaway up in the California area of Tahoe. It was in Desolation Wilderness, near Ice Floe Reservoir, not the more public, accessible place just fifteen minutes up the road we ducked out to for a few hours of water-skiing in the evening, most every other weekend. That was where I learned to slalom and not step on glass within hours as a seven year-old. The first day, the "leaving" day, for Hope Valley, was the same every year. We woke up early to get ready, to see that everything at home was done. I would try to stay out of the way, hang out near my room, getting the daily chores done. RRRRRR and Trish swam through the kitchen, preparing the the two big coolers. That was where we put enough meat and produce to last a week. The ingredients for S'more's and the other sundries were picked up when we stopped to gas the boat at the country store. RRRRRR, who liked to direct me with shouts, had me running around the house filling duffels with clothes and hygiene. Dad typically avoided the nonsense by staying outside triple-checking the boat and the truck and the car RRRRRR uses to drive with Trish to the actual campsite. I know it's almost time to round up Ty Cobb, the family dog, when Dad would start the Jeep parked out back so if we need his brother to come get us he can.

California's drought years meant the water level was never the same two summers in a row. Sometimes, it came up so high I spent the whole two weeks on my bike, riding until it was time for Dad to go out on the boat again. More often, it was so low I could get lost between the dunes, hiking down where another year could not reveal, forsaking shoes and sinking until my chin got a mud bath. And I never knew until we crossed the dam what the water level was. After backing in the boat, though, vacation was started. Trish and RRRRR take the car and the truck to the site, Dad and I and the dog meet them in the cove, and the camping trip is underway.

The pitching of tents, the laying of kitchen tarps, the staking of claims...the Alden's instilled in me the Camper's Code, which is extremely basic and simple. "Leave the place nicer than you found it." He calls me over, just as I'm ready to run off through the sand to the wind-whipped shore and freeze(?) my toes, tells me I can have a penny for each piece of trash I pick up, and hands me a trash bag. The first day was not going to end up being a chore for me. I started by walking the tree-line, picking up after strangers, and only the trash that was valuable to me, until I realized that every piece of trash was valuable to me. I sat down with my eight-gallon bag
full of muck-brimmed liters and twisted aluminum on a mound of sand covered in broken glass.

Ten dollars a week. That's if I didn't "mess up." I counted the glass by the fives, the tens, the dozens. When I knew he couldn't say there wasn't ten dollars worth of removed danger in that bag, I took it to him; when I knew there was more than one thousand pieces of glass in there, that was when I went to him to ask for the money. He cocked an eyebrow and told me I would be expected to pick up "trash" when we left in two weeks, and gave me the ten dollars.

Which I spent a week later when we went back to the country store for sundries and gas, on Atomic Fireballs.