Four Corners

At the intersection of Vail Rd SE and Bald Hill Rd SE, about 9 miles outside of the town of Yelm, WA, sat a little country store. It was called, rather obviously and quaintly, Four Corners Country Store. When we first moved out to the Bald Hills, I was about 4 years old and our house seemed roughly a million miles away from civilization. Back then, the road we lived on was called Pringle and was just a gravel throughway between Vail and Bald Hill roads (years later it was finally paved and the name was changed to the much less-charming 138th Ave. SE). Our small house was surrounded on three sides by dense forest (4 if you count the woods on the other side of the road) and there were only a few other houses on the road, and those spaced pretty far apart. No streetlights. Nights out there were dark and lonesome, with only the sounds of frogs and coyotes to keep you company. But the nighttime sky was spectacular. There were two other small country stores farther up both roads--Country Corners on Vail and Cougar Mountain Store on Bald Hill--but we rarely had reason to go that direction as nothing much lay that way except dairy and sheep farms and increasingly seedy rural homes and run-down trailers with yards full of ancient broken-down automobiles.

So, Four Corners was the go-to for those quick-need items, like a carton of milk or a pack of cigarettes (my mom smoked when I was a kid, much to my displeasure). Or a quick run-in to get a candy bar or a bottle of pop on the way to do some shopping in one of the bigger towns north or south of Yelm--Tacoma or Olympia. Or if we were making a trip to visit one of my aunts/uncles or grandmother. A lot more of my family lived out there back then, scattered around Pierce and Thurston counties.

Four Corners back then was a legitimate “country store”. More of a shack than a commercial property, with a small patch of gravel on one side for a parking lot. In those days, you had to be careful walking barefoot on that gravel because it was littered with pull-tabs from beer and soda cans and those jagged-edged bottle caps. Littering was ubiquitous in those days before Woodsy Owl shamed us all into “giving a hoot” or a crying Indian filled our hearts with guilt every time a McDonald's hambuger wrapper was thrown out of a car window. Two ancient gas pumps sat on a slab of rough concrete in front of the store and a large weeping willow drooped over the roof on the south side. An aging house sat next to the store, sharing the shade of the other side of the willow. Otherwise, the store was surrounded by an empty lot overgrown with tall, brown grass that made me sneeze in the summers. For a while, I went to school with the kid who lived in that old house. His name was Ray Beers. He wore thick glasses with black frames and was fond of striped t-shirts. He invited me over once to play with his electric train. One day Ray just wasn’t there anymore. Funny how that happens. People come into and go out of our lives so randomly, sometimes. Where do they come from? Where do they go? I wonder if Ray still has that electric train; it was a grand one.

There was an awning over the entrance to the store, which was just a door like any old door, except plastered with faded signs and stickers for all manner of odds ‘n’ ends like chewing tobacco, beer, soda, cigarettes, bubble gum and, of course, LIVE BAIT, there being several lakes in the area as well the rivers Nisqually and Deschutes. The awning was composed of strips of black and green metal (mostly green, though, as a fine layer of moss had been growing over it, and the entire roof of the store, for years) and didn’t do much to keep off either the sun or the rain. One short concrete step got you inside the store.

Come inside with me, now, won’t you? We’ll just grab a few things.

Probably the first thing you notice once inside Four Corners is the presence of one or two, sometimes three, grizzled old-timers in worn khaki pants or denim jeans, held up by suspenders, faded flannel shirts and either greasy baseball caps or crumpled cowboy hats. They are generally bewhiskered and gray, one portly, one slim (the third, if present, is a wild card) and smell of cigarettes, cigars or pipe tobacco, gasoline and pickled eggs, which they eat from a large jar on the counter. They are the only people brave enough, or foolhardy enough, to eat them. The ages of the men and the eggs may be roughly the same. They are retired, of course, and enjoy hanging out in their little corner of this little country store for hours on end. Their conversation, and they will rope in any customer who will listen, covers all the major topics: politics, fishing, sports, fishing, cars, fishing, any local happenings such as the Prairie Days parade and three-day carnival to follow, who has been arrested recently and for what, what work they’ve done on their cars, lately, and, of course, the best places to fish. When you first enter the store they will pause their conversation to give you a nod and maybe a slight wave. If you’re a woman, they will doff their hats and maybe give you a wink and a yellow-toothed smile. They may look rough, but they are harmless and friendly.

The interior of the store is cluttered and many times during the year you may have to navigate around a tin pail or two that have been set out on the floor to catch the drips from the ceiling in rainy weather. And being the Pacific Northwest, that could be any time between January and December. The walls are mostly dark wood with a few having been painted a pale yellow at some time in the distant past, but you can’t see a lot of the wall, anyway, because they are covered with more advertising and old framed black and white pictures of smiling men holding up that day’s catch, along with some yellowing articles clipped from the local newspaper, the Nisqually Valley News. The layout inside is rather Lovecraftian; odd angles and shadowy corners. This is because over the years, walls have been torn out to make more room and replaced haphazardly with seemingly no rhyme or reason. There were times I would go into the store with my dad and linger at the big, wooden magazine rack (looking for Famous Monsters of Filmland or MAD magazine) or the creaky comic book spinner rack (do those even exist anymore?) while he went about his business, only to feel a weird fluttering in my stomach when I went to look for him and started to feel lost in the maze of shelves filled with kitchen staples (condiments, baking powder, flour, canned green beans, corn, peas, condensed milk), automotive goods (oil, carburetor cleaner, those pine-scented air-fresheners that looked like little trees that you hung from the rear view mirror), rack toys (my favorite, aside from comic books. I could get a cool Hot Wheels knockoff or a balsa-wood airplane that ran on rubber band power. And does anyone remember Poopatroopers?), and other random items. For such a small store, it seemed magically vast and multi-layered. Eventually, of course, I would connect with my dad and all would be well.

Along the back wall was the cooler full of the beverages of the times: 7-Up, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Tab, RC Cola, Fanta, Squirt, Orange Crush and Dad’s Root Beer. Another cooler contained the popular beer brands. In Yelm you were probably drinking Rainier or Olympia, possibly Schmidt (aka Animal Beer), or if you were high-falutin’, Budweiser, Coors, Miller High Life or Pabst Blue Ribbon. My dad’s drinking days were long in his past (I wouldn’t find out about his sordid youth as a hot-rodding hell-raiser for many, many years and only knew him as a hard-working surveyor, and later a concrete finisher, during the week and a preacher on Sundays) so my knowledge of alcoholic beverages came mostly from the stories I overheard from my older cousins or some “cool kid” at school. But all those neon beer signs were alluring and I felt the intrigue of the forbidden whenever passing by those coolers.

Another favorite section of the store were the candy shelves. Like most kids, I had a ravenous sweet tooth and it was hard to pass by those boxes and stacks of candy bars and penny candy (although penny candy was no longer 1 cent, even in those simpler times). Of course, I didn’t always get what I asked for, but on a good day I would roll out of the store richer by one comic book (The Hulk or Spider-Man, usually) and a box of Lemonheads or a Butterfinger. Or a toy and a pack of bubblegum cards. That was the joy of it; you could always mix-and-match.

When you were ready to pay for your purchases, you’d step up to the counter (saying howdy to the two or three grizzled loafers, of course) and get rung up, usually by the owner and proprietor of the store, himself. His name was Jack and for the life of me I cannot remember his last name. I know it was Polish but that’s as far as memory serves. The reason being, I have to think, is that as a kid it didn’t matter what his last name was; everyone called him Jack. All the other adults in my life, aside from family, were Mr. This or Mrs. That, so Jack stood out. (Edit: I asked my parents if they remembered Jack’s last name and my mom told me it was Tokarczyk) I always thought Jack was the original owner of Four Corners but my aunt recently told me that wasn’t true; there was another man who owned the store first. She didn’t remember his name but she remembered that they got their dog, Rebel, from him. Anyway, Jack was a friendly guy; well-liked and respected around town. I can remember him and my dad, who never met a person he couldn’t have a conversation with, talking about all kinds of things while I loitered nearby, leafing through my current issue of Marvel Team-Up or the Human Fly. Jack actually looked like a benevolent version of Spider-Man’s nemesis, Harry Osborn--the Green Goblin. Tight, curly red-hair and eyebrows that flicked up devilishly at the ends. One thing I really liked about Jack was that on Halloween we would trick ‘r treat in the store and he would give us those GIANT SIZE Hershey’s chocolate bars. Talk about endearing yourself to a kid! Years later, I would interview with Jack about working at the new Four Corners store (we’ll get to that in a minute) and he seemed like a very fair but strict boss. He laid out what would be expected of me and what would happen if those expectations weren’t met. It was my first real job interview and although he was clearly the man in charge, he made me feel relaxed. At the end of the interview, though, Jack said, “Of course, if you’re hired you’ll have to cut your hair.” Cut my hair? This was senior year of high school; I’d been fighting my parents for three years already on the issue of hair length and seemed to have finally won the battle and was on my way to the heavy metal rock star look I desperately wanted. Cut my hair? I was crushed. I had just started my first band that summer and my only goal in life at the time was to be a musician. I did give it some thought; about a minute’s worth. Then I thanked Jack, shook his hand and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I guess I won’t be working for you.” Jack took it well enough. My mom was a different story, though.

As the years went by, that little old shack of store just couldn’t keep up with the growing community as more and more people moved into the area - many were military families from McChord Air Force base or Ft. Lewis, the army base. Some were coming to be part of the Ramtha School of Enlightenment (that’s a whole other topic I may get to someday). But whatever the reason, the little town of Yelm, WA and its surrounding rural areas was starting to become more populous, and Four Corners Country Store needed to expand to survive. It was with heavy heart that we saw that old building torn down (along with the now-abandoned house of the long-lost electric train engineer, Ray Beers), the surrounding land cleared and a brand new, modern Four Corners erected. In terms of sufficiency, the new store was stellar; plenty of room to stock loads of items, a deli with hot food, clean, state of the art gas pumps, no leaking roof (not to mention the space to house a few of those new video game arcade machines the kids were furiously pumping quarters into - see previous Frogger essay). In terms of character, though - sorry, I just never took to that new store in the same way. And with a bigger store came more and newer employees, several of which were schoolmates of mine. Jack became more scarce and eventually was hardly ever seen at all, anymore. Same with those grizzled old hangers-on (they moved down Vail Road to the Country Corners store, which steadfastly refused to modernize. Plus they had chairs there that they could comfortably sit in for hours on end). It was the end of an era, for sure.

Four Corners is still there, basically the same store since its revamping. Jack eventually sold it to a Korean family who ran it for a while and then sold it to someone else. My knowledge of ownership ends there. I drive by it whenever I go out to visit my parents but I couldn’t tell you the last time I actually went inside.

Well, there’s no real ending to this as it’s basically a reminiscence so I’ll just finish by saying that in my mind’s eye I can still clearly see all the nooks and crannies, the warped shelving, the pails half-full of rain water, that old weeping willow…everything associated with that original little country store. I can smell the tobacco and pickled eggs and aged wood. I can feel the gravel on my bare feet. So although the material form of Four Corners may be gone, it lives on in my heart and mind. I hope there are still some old country stores out there, somewhere.