When I was 10 or 11 years old, I had an aunt who lived in Castle Rock. She and her husband had no kids at the time, and she really wasn’t my aunt, but she used to be married to my uncle, my mother’s brother. So we all called her Aunt Val, and her husband was Uncle Grover.
Back to my story. She was a big woman and very affectionate. I was from the Longview / Kelso area, and at 10 or 11, Castle Rock was a long ways away, even though it was less than 15 miles. In Castle Rock, Val lived in town, in a second story house, Victorian style, on a double lot, and the whole second lot was a giant garden, with corn, beans, tomatoes, and a lot of other vegetables. Along the front row was a tall couple rows of sunflowers.
My first experience with fresh veggies, and it was great.
The next house was vacant, and they owned that, too. On the other side, on the corner house, there was a man, I don’t recall his name, but he was an ambulance driver, and when they had motorcycle races at the local fairgrounds, he would drive over to the center of the raceway and park. It was great because he took me with him, and I got to watch the motorcycle races. I stayed a couple weeks in the summer with my aunt and uncle in Castle Rock.
Her mother lived up by Mount St. Helens, at a little spot called Kid Valley. Her mother’s name was Josephine, and her husband was Stan. They owned the country store and gas station. In the back room of the store is where they lived, and they also had an upstairs with a couple more bedrooms. They also had a spot out front, that looked like a shack, that they called the burger bar. They sold cheeseburgers and milkshakes, and they were delicious. It was the last stop before you went to Mount St. Helens, although this was before the mountain became an active volcano and blew its top.
My sister, Colleen, stayed summers at Kid Valley. Josephine and Stan had us call her and her husband Grandma and Grandpa. My older sister would work at the burger bar, and later they would build a full size restaurant, but that summer, I got to stay with Colleen, which was great. She was 8 years older than me, and I always looked up to her. She was a short, very attractive young woman, and one of the hardest working women I’ve ever known. She always looked after me, like a big sister would.
I have fond memories of Kid Valley. I stayed upstairs in one bedroom and my sister in the other. I went fishing and hiking and exploring in the woods, and Grandpa and his friends would talk about Bigfoot’s feet, impressions made of plaster-of-Paris. There was even a local man who had a record on 45 of the song, “Legend of Bigfoot.” All the older men would stand around talking about Bigfoot and their sightings.
I remember waking up in the mornings in Kid Valley and looking outside and seeing deer standing in the field. I also remember seeing spiders the size of a 50 cent piece only up at Kid Valley. These were green with spots on their backs, and some were red. I’ve never seen green ones anywhere else.
Grandma would pay us kids a penny a worm for night-crawlers. She would sell them in the store to fishermen. I knew even then that she was selling them for a lot more than a penny a piece, but back then a hundred worms was a dollar, and that was a big bag of penny candy. And sometimes she’d throw in a candy-bar or two, when Grandpa Stan wasn’t looking.
I was told, don’t go past the cabins next to the store. The cabins were on the other side of a field in a half moon circle, kind of bordering Kid Valley, but there were trails behind the cabins that went into the deep woods. In front of the store and gas station was Spirit Lake Hwy. Across from that was a field and a house next to that, and behind those was the Toutle River, where people always went to go fishing at the fishing hole. There was a trestle and a bridge where a log train would come through, and a tunnel. You had to get through the tunnel before the train would come.
While fishing one time, my Grandma said to always wear a hat because she knew someone that once, at dusk, got a bat caught in their hair, and they had to cut it out. Scared the crap out of me.
I also went on my first snipe hunt at Kid Valley. After learning what a snipe actually was, the joke was on me. All in great fun.
A lot happened in a short time when I was a kid in Kid Valley. I would never trade any of my adventures for anything. I enjoyed my childhood.
—Randy Long
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