Blood: A poetic essay on how one local farming family was affected by progress

Bryan Ovenell is the grandson of Ted and Jackie Ovenell, formerly of Stanwood. He grew up here, attending Stanwood High School through his freshman year when his family moved to Ellensburg. He wrote this essay in third person “not because it is an entirely made up person, but rather it was gleaned from conversations I had with many people growing up,” he said. Ovenell, 31, lives in Austin, Texas and is a musician and freelance writer.

Blood: Webster’s Dictionary details an artery as any of the tubular branching muscular and elastic-walled vessels that carry blood from the heart through the body. We don’t think of it often. Or, at least I never have ... the blood.

Which needs which more? Does the heart need the blood? Or, does the blood need the heart?

Both are futile without the other.

State Route 532 cuts through a forgettable section of Snohomish County connecting Stanwood and Camano Island to the rest of the world via Interstate 5.

I grew up just off of SR 532 in the foothills of the Cascade Mountain Range not far from the trisect of the Skagit, Snohomish and Island county lines that fold into one another just north of the Hatt Slough waterway.

I did not come from a family with a long history. It got lost somewhere between the shuffle of military bases and the futile job promotions of my father.

But, thankfully now, I did spend the majority of my learning years in a town that did not require that.

Stanwood, at birth, was a fishing town settled by Swedes and Norwegians.

I don’t know of their lineage, but I suppose the Ovenells fell somewhere in the middle of those pioneers.

I grew up surrounded

I grew up surrounded by them in school. And though it would be presumptuous to say that I was friends with any one of them, they were the sort of people who would never mind if I did. They were, on the whole, farmers by trade. They shared ownership with the bank of land caught between the western stretches of the city limits of town and the Stillaguamish River — but they kept us fed, and our football team in contention.

Jackie Ovenell, the matriarch of the family, might disagree, but they were not subsistence farmers by today’s standards. However, they were diversified. When the land was homesteaded in the 1860s, they were dairy and vegetable farmers. For a stint, they bottled and delivered their own milk. For a time, they had a fruit stand. And for a while, Ovenell’s Drive- In was the lunchroom of Twin City Foods, the backroom of the Stanwood City Council and the only place to be after a Friday night football game.

Some of them were quiet. Some of them were ... gregarious, should I say.

But, all of them were either born with or through a sliver of unspoken desperation, taught something so rare in today’s world ... humility.

They embodied the essence of the Stanwood of yesteryear: A sleepy fishing and farming town staving off the last stronghold of the I-5 corridor that did not need to glean its pulse from the big city up the road.

It had its own. They were not flashy, nor braggerdly.

A classic car was not the product of a 17th birthday. It was the fruit of fieldwork between two-a-day practices. Their farm was a place where hard work paid off, and the nucleus of family was revered.

They viewed the longterm of a reputation where contracts and signatures were not needed.

They held honesty with kid gloves. And when it came to the village, they gave more than they took.

And then they left.

Today, the General Mark Clark Bridge is coming down to make way for an up-sized concrete connection to span the now nearly un-navigable reaches of the Stilly.

The old Ovenell’s Drive-In is passed by 8,000 motorists a day without a glance. The homestead farm, dissected by SR 532, lay forlorn and abandoned from the weight of progress.

The taste of homegrown strawberries from the fruit stand that employed decades of high school youths are a distant recall to the nostalgic palettes of a fading few.

It is doubtful that if I ran into Russ or Teri or Gary or Ted, they would remember me without a yearbook picture in hand.

Maybe they have a history class memory of me ... maybe.

But, I don’t need their recollection.

Maybe what I need is to give them an apology. Maybe they didn’t leave us. Maybe we left them.

For those of us from thin family trees or maybe those of us who just have a tough time giving up the ghost of yesteryear, we look up at our rearview mirror with a melancholy hope ... A gratitude ... yeah ... an understanding.

Or, maybe just a solemn appreciation of blood.