Pater: cuttings, hormone powder, and hydrofluoric acid...

Pater: cuttings, hormone powder, and hydrofluoric acid...  My dad is enjoying the snow around Mt. Lassen in June, 2007.  He's holding a piece of deer moss (actually a lichen, Cladonia rangiferina) that he wanted to show me – it had dislodged a pebble and lofted it a couple inches, which he thought was quite an achievement for some lichen :)

Cuttings, hormone powder, and hydrofluoric acid...

One of the first things I ever did that actually did help my dad was to plant cuttings of hollies that my dad was propagating.  For my readers who are not familiar with the techniques of horticulture, “cuttings” are the most common method used for cloning woody plants (like holly trees).  You might wonder why not just plant seeds, as one might in a garden – and the reason is simple: the plants grown from seed will vary, often in undesirable ways, from their parent plant (much as human children will vary, often in undesirable ways, from their parents :).  To get a “child” plant that is identical to the parent plant, you need to clone it.  And taking cuttings is the main way that's done.

The process of making cuttings is actually very simple: you clip a twig with a few leaves off the parent plant (much as you might if you were simply pruning it), and stick the cut end in some good soil.  Then you keep the soil moist, give it plenty of sunshine and heat, and there's a good chance your little cutting will grow roots and become an independent plant – a genetic clone of the parent.  You can improve the little cutting's chances by making sure the cut is “clean” (no bruising, splits, or tears), and by wetting the cut end and dipping it in some hormone powder (auxin) before putting it in the soil.

All of this was well within the ability of quite a small kid, and I did this for my dad several years running, starting in '60 or '61.  The first year I was supervised by Julius Mate, the fellow I wrote about earlier who lived on our farm and helped, especially in our greenhouse.  This sort of work, with cuttings, is something he knew well.  He and I spent a morning together as he taught me lots of little tricks for getting the cuttings going.  We mixed the soil – a mixture of oak leaf mold and sand – until he pronounced it just right.  Then we filled a bunch of 2" square peat pots with the soil, loaded them into wooden “flats” (wooden trays with sides about 3" high, roughly 16" x 24"), then wet them down.  Our source material was a burlap bag full of rough clippings my dad had taken from the parent tree.  Usually we could get three or four cuttings from a single piece that my dad had cut.  Julius showed me how to make a clean cut, reliably, using a special knife whose cutting edge was a razor blade and holding the little twig in our fingers so as not to bruise it.  Julius was very fussy about those cuts :)  Then we'd dip the cut end into a bowl of water, then right into the can of hormone powder, and straight into the soil in one of the peat pots.  The process gets quite mechanical with a little practice, and in a few hours we had planted several hundred of these things.

American hollies (Ilex opaca) are quite stickery, and the thorns exude an irritant – a very successful evolutionary trait that keeps most animals (like deer) from browsing on it unless they're quite desperate.  It was also, unfortunately, very successful at irritating the skin of any little kid working with it for a while (adults, with thicker skins, were less affected).  By the time I got done with that job, I looked like my hands and forearms were afflicted by a bad case of measles!  Julius swore this was good for me, but I didn't believe him.

Sometime in the early '60s, my dad read an article about a new technique that would help cuttings succeed: bathing them in diffuse light instead of direct sunlight.  The theory was that this made it much less likely that any leaves would overheat, prevented shading out by a neighboring cutting, and it would also make it irrelevant which way the leaves were pointing.  My dad thought that all made good sense, and set about creating a place for some cuttings flats that had diffuse lighting.

How do you make a greenhouse with diffuse lighting?  Easy: you just use frosted glass instead of ordinary window glass.  Our greenhouse was made entirely of small glass panes (from memory, about 10" by 16") held in wooden frames (much like wooden windows), which were themselves held up by the greenhouse's wooden framework.  In the southwest corner of our greenhouse, we removed something like 50 or 60 glass panes.  These were glazed the old fashioned way, with tiny triangular metal pieces called “points”; we removed the points around each pane of glass with pliers, scraped the putty off with a putty knife, and worked the pane out.  We set up some sawhorses with a couple sheets of plywood across them, to make a large outdoor table, 4' x 16'.  Then we arranged all those glass panes flat on the “table” and began the truly tedious part: making a little “dike” of paraffin wax around the edge of each of those panes.

Julius and I took several days to make all those little dikes.  We had a pot of melted wax on a hot plate, and we'd first carefully dip all four edges of each pane into that wax, making a thin strip (about 1/4") of wax all the way around.  Then we'd dip a little wax out of the pot, ladle it onto a warm flat plate, and roll it until it had partly solidified into along “worm” (that's what Julius called them :).  Then we'd press the worm onto the strip of wax to make a little barrier, about 1/8" high, all the way around each piece of glass.  Tedious, that was.

Each morning my dad came over to where we were working, to check up on things.  Even then, young as I was, I could see that mostly he was glad that he didn't have to do this particular job.  It was definitely not the kind of work he enjoyed.

Finally, on one happy day, we finished.  Julius and I celebrated with a tasty pastry that his wife had made – some Hungarian concoction made with buttery, flaky crust, lots of sugar and cinnamon, and some spice that I still don't know but would recognize in a heartbeat were I ever to smell it again.

Next came the part that's really the center of this little story: the actual etching of the glass.  You do the etching with hydrofluoric acid; that's still the principle method for etching glass today (the major alternative is blasting it with sand or tiny metal beads).  Now hydrofluoric acid is some pretty nasty stuff – it dissolve glass, along with just about everything else except plastic and wax (which, of course, is why we were using paraffin wax for the dikes).  It's poisonous, and can cause very bad burns on one's skin.  It's especially evil if it gets in your eyes.

Not exactly what you'd imagine giving a 9 or 10 year old kid to use, is it?

My dad did, though.  Very carefully.  Julius, who was evidently quite familiar with the process, refused to work with the acid himself, saying that his hands were too shaky – but he stayed with us in case we needed help.  My dad and I did the work with the acid.  We donned plastic rain slickers that my dad came up with from somewhere; mine was far too big so we had to tape the sleeves up to make them shorter.  We wore plastic gloves, and had some plastic goggles; the only thing exposed was our face.  My dad and Julius prepared several buckets full of a mild alkaline solution, made with lye, in case one of us got acid on us.

The hydrofluoric acid came in a small plastic carboy, I think about 2 or 3 gallons.  I remember the label had all sorts of strongly-worded warnings on it – and the label itself had gnarly-looking holes etched into it.  Not encouraging.  At this point I was feeling some trepidations, and it didn't help that we looked like aliens in our slickers, or that Julius was looking very nervous.  My dad, though, acted like this was just an ordinary activity, the kind that normal people did every day.

My dad did the first pouring of the acid – he had a couple of plastic containers that looked a bit like a gravy boat, and he filled both of these about half full of hydrofluoric acid.  Then he took one of them and poured it onto the first pane of glass.  Nothing dramatic happened – there was no hissing, no bubbling, no smoke – the acid just spread out across the pane.  After a little while we could see some evidence that it was working, but dissolving glass doesn't go very quickly.

After that, I (very carefully!) took the second container and started on filling the other glass panes.  That part actually didn't take very long; I think it was less than a half hour until we had them all filled up.  We were all very relieved to have that done!

Except, I found out, were weren't done – because, after the panes had been sufficiently etched, we still had to dispose of the acid that we'd poured onto them.  In my memory, there were a few hours between the time we poured the acid out and the time we started the clean-up.  I'm not sure that's right; it seems like a longer time than I'd expect.  But in any case, it was in the afternoon that we did the cleanup; I remember my dad being anxious to complete it before it got dark.

So how do you get rid of a few quarts of partially-used hydrofluoric acid?  I'm not sure what the “approved” method is, but here's what we did: we poured some concentrated lye onto each of the panes, waited a few minutes, then carefully lifted each pane and tipped its contents into a big plastic tub.  That was quite tedious – those little wax dikes weren't very tall, and it would been really easy to slosh the liquid over them.  We did it by moving the tub around and sliding the panes off the edge of the table over the tub, and then tipping the panes to empty them.

When we'd emptied all the panes, we piled them into a big metal tub filled with water, and then Julius took them out, one by one, and rinsed them thoroughly.  The plastic tub with the acid/lye mixture in it was nasty looking, but my dad tested it for PH (with some litmus paper strips), and added acid until the mixture was neutral.  I don't remember what he did with the tub's contents after that, but I remember him using strip after strip to get it neutral – that part took a while.   Apparently we put far too much lye on those panes.

The next day, Julius and I stripped all the wax off the glass panes, and we had a nice pile of frosted glass to reinstall back in the greenhouse.  The job we did was far from perfect, and I know now that a big reason why is that we didn't pay much attention to cleaning the glass first.  As a consequence, the dirtier sections didn't etch as much as the cleaner sections, and that glass had a distinctly “home built” character as a result – not the mechanical perfection you see in a piece of commercially purchased frosted glass.

Over the years, as I got to know more people who grew up in very different circumstances than mine, I came to realize that this sort of childhood experience (by this, I mean working with dangerous machinery or materials) is mostly confined to the children of farmers.  Kids that grew up in the city are exposed to much different kinds of dangers, mostly from other people.  Kids that grew up in the suburbs had, in general relatively safe and protected existences.  Other farmer's kids I've known as adults have lots of stories of their own about the things they did as a kid – things that seem crazy dangerous to the kids who didn't grow up on a farm.  It's a difference of childhood experience that has long fascinated me, and one of quite a few such differences between the childhoods of farmer's kids and others.  My own suspicion is that collectively these different experiences of farmers have a big impact on the adult lives of those kids.  It certainly feels that way to me.

Do I think my dad was crazy to let me work with hydrofluoric acid at that age?  No.  In fact, I'm glad that he did.  Not with hydrofluoric acid in particular, but I'm glad that he didn't shield me from working with dangerous things like that.  Working with hydrofluoric acid sounds scary, perhaps – but I suspect some other things that we kids did were actually much more dangerous.  For example, I was driving our tractor just as soon as my dad confirmed that I could stomp on the brake and he could teach me how to shift its unsynchronized (“crash-box”) transmission.  That tractor had a PTO (Power Take-Off), and accidents with those are one of the primary reasons why farming is one of the most dangerous of professions.  I spent many, many hours on that tractor, but just one afternoon with hydrofluoric acid.  I could spout off a long list of dangerous jobs we did around the farm!

My dad didn't shield me from these things.  Instead, they became opportunities to teach me some important lessons about danger and risk.  I have no idea whether this was something he did consciously and deliberately, or if it happened by accident – but it really doesn't matter.  It happened.  By his own example and by training, he taught me that one could be safe around dangerous things.  The most important lesson, though, I'm having trouble finding words for.  It's the very idea that one can act as a rational, thinking person even in the presence of dangerous (even deadly) things or situations.  Working with hydrofluoric acid has dangers, for certain – but there are ways to mitigate them.  Also the idea that one can analyze situations to understand just how dangerous they really were.  The open, rotating shaft of a PTO-operated tractor attachment was a great example of something that might, at first glance, look all that dangerous – but actually was (getting your sleeve caught in one of those could tear your arm up, or even kill you).  These are lessons that I've used throughout my adult life, both at work and at play.  I'm grateful to have had my dad to learn them from, and for the experiences he allowed me to have...