The same marten, or I am assuming it was the same one, tried to get into our cooler. There was just a space between the window and the screen. That is where we kept our meat, since we did not have refrigeration at the time. He was not easily discouraged. The only way I could get rid of him was to move the meat. The refrigerator we had for awhile was a coal-oil one. You had to fill it and we had to light it. It did seem to keep things cool, but it wasn’t very efficient.
One time, about the second year we were there, we were on vacation in California. When we came back here, there was a beautiful new electric stove in the kitchen. The wood stove had been moved and they had installed an AC current so we could use our iron and washing machine and that kind of thing. It was a real boon to have real electricity. We didn’t have to go start the motor in the garage to make it go, [something] which was a little bit undependable. I mean, sometimes it went and some times it didn’t. It made quite a change in our water heating and our cooking, lighting and all that sort of thing. Even the record player couldn’t operate on the DC current, the kind we had.
I remember one year I had gone down to the dentist to have some worked done and he decided that one of my wisdom teeth needed to be pulled. So he dug away at that for awhile and couldn’t get in out. This was down in Klamath Falls. So finally he said
“ Well, you’ll have to go down to San Francisco.” I didn’t have a bag with me and I had one little boy. So I got on the train. The porter I guess thought I was a little bit wacky because I was going without even a suitcase, down to San Francisco. First I phoned and made an appointment. Went down to have a tooth pulled out. It wasn’t always convenient living up there to have [our] medical needs met. Fortunately, my family lived in the Berkeley area so I wasn’t really stranded.
