Negra

Work is finally underway on our new staff, volunteer, and visitor building. I’m excited about this project for several reasons. Selfishly, I’m looking forward to having the master bedroom of our house back after 18 long years of using it as the sanctuary’s main office. In the very early days, the office could only be accessed through our kitchen and dining area. As awkward as that was for Diana and me, it was even worse for the other staff who had to get past our often aggressive Chow Chow, Honey B (for more on the seemingly coincidental fact that we once had a dog named Honey B, click here). We used to leave a bag of bread by the door so that people coming in could throw crumbs and distract her while running to safety in the office. It seemed like a major upgrade when we had another sliding glass door installed.

As for the sanctuary, I’m looking forward to all this new building will provide to our current staff and volunteers—more work areas, real offices, a locker room with separate laundry facilities, and a kitchen and break room—as well as what it will provide to our summer visitors and student interns who come to learn about chimps, caregiving, and the work of sanctuaries like ours. But beyond that, it will also provide a foundation for future growth—for the staff and volunteers that will one day (hopefully soon) be caring for rescued monkeys on these same grounds. After all, there are only so many people I want working out of our bedroom.

This groundbreaking is bittersweet, however, since it requires saying goodbye to a historic barn on the sanctuary grounds. This barn is over 100 years old, which at first didn’t seem that old to this New Englander. But it is downright ancient for Cle Elum, which was at that time inhabited largely by pioneer homesteaders and not the wealthy gentleman farmers of my native Connecticut. These barns were made of the trees that once stood in their place, likely by the same people that farmed the land.

Several years ago, I got interested in the history of the canyon in which the sanctuary sits, and the people that used to live here—people like Big John Taylor and his business partner, known to the locals here as Indian Charlie, who used to turn sheep out on the hills in the late 19th century. The sanctuary’s pastures were said to have been filled with the teepees of the people from present-day Yakima who worked for them in the summers. Big John Taylor’s wife, whose name I don’t know, ran something of a mess hall for the folks that loaded logs down a flume and into the Yakima River. In the process of permitting a new driveway for the sanctuary, I was once sent the original blueprints for our road, Highway 10, which used to be the only road across the state to Seattle. And I was delighted to discover that where the bottom of our driveway currently sits, there was once a train stop and a dance hall. It really was the wild west.

The manger for the cows, including Sparky, Blacky, Little One, Toots, Baldy, and Maud:

The barn was one of the last buildings standing from that era. Unfortunately, it spent the last 100 years sinking into the ground as its log foundation rotted away. As an example of how much it has sunk, the left side of the barn used to house draft horses—these days, I hit my head going through that door. Often. The right side has sloped so much that you feel drunk walking through it. And there’s a good chance that the whole thing is one strong gust of wind or one heavy snowfall away from returning to the earth entirely.

Saddle racks and stalls for the draft horses:

So the barn must go. But we are salvaging the wood so that it can live on in some other form. And I am spending the bulk of this blog post writing to you about a barn instead of about chimps because I feel like we owe it at least that much.

Workers remove siding from the back of the barn: