2 Turning Life Around, Again and Again Could there be anything more important to a woman of eighteen than great lipstick, gorgeous hair, and clothes that revealed all you had to reveal? Forget extraterrestrials and their ships. I wanted guys to whistle at me and think "beautiful chick." My beauty parade ended flatly when I had an opportunity to take up skiing at the South Hills--I mean way south. I rented equipment and joined friends, determined to have a Saturday like no other. There was a rope tow up Magic Mountain. Nothing fancy for beginners like me. Just grab that rope and up you''d go. The fancy stuff was for those who knew what they were doing and skied like pros.
I just barely managed to hold on to both slats of wood. When I jumped off the tow, challenge number one was to pretend that I knew what I was doing. Not hard to do, actually. Down. That''s where I wanted to go, down that really big, wide bank of snow spread out before me. How? Just do it. That''s what others did. They just cut loose, and off they went.
Well, if they could do it, I could, too. So, I did. Just like that. Down I went. You might know some crazy idiot would stop in my path to adjust his boots. I screamed. Too late. I can honestly say when my soon-to-be husband and I first met .
we fell for each other. He spent the rest of the day teaching me how to curve around the slope without killing anyone. If you love adventure, just get married. Ours was a big church wedding followed by police cars chasing us as we broke all laws, scooting out of town and zooming right onto the tarmac to a Cessna waiting for us to board. The pilot helped us as we managed to close doors, aim for the runway as a flank of police cars chased us right up to take off. We thought for sure there would be a crash. Nope. The police held back as we flew away, headed to a car waiting for us in Nevada.
A good friend piloted the plane. We made it free and clear. Had we hesitated, even for a minute, my dad admitted he was going to jail us overnight--just as a joke. He never got the chance. We made it out of Idaho and into Nevada, where our car waited for "the honeymoon couple" to catch up. Our drive to Las Vegas was great, including time off to visit Nellis Air Force Base and collect rocks. Beginnings are like that. Magic.
Wedding gifts handily filled our new kitchen and bedroom, all kinds of dishes, even two toasters. They were identical. We gave one away. A promise from landowners in Illinois guaranteed us a farm in Sucker Flats, just outside Filer. They were called "Sucker Flats" because no one thought this scrub brush would ever be worth anything. Only those silly folk from Illinois. Bankers. As things turned out, scrub brush could be tilled, worked with.
The uninformed made millions. If you could rent a farm there, show the owners what you could do, this was a chance of a lifetime. Prayer answered. We got one of those rentals, and we were ecstatic! We moved into a wonderful house with a large basement, garage, lawns, place for a garden and flowers. In two years, two kids--"Pete and Repete" my husband called them. Funny. Then one winter it rained nonstop. The cattle we bought as feeders to fatten for the winter wound up mired in mud, every day, every week, every month.
We lost our shirts in payoffs--selling cattle for less than we paid for them. Our landlords felt sorry for us, so they built a state-of-the-art barn, one made-to-order for milkers. We bought enough cows to guarantee calves with just a few bulls. Milkers indeed. With the milking system we now had, and if you tended the times right and were willing to work hard, you could have enough milk and cream to make a good living and establish yourself as someone to be trusted. Our dream of good crops finally paid off. We hired help, had a house for a man and his family, tractors, everything we needed to enlarge our spread and impress owners for a land contract. My muscle drove tractors (which terrified me), mowed large lawns (which was beyond my ability to handle).
Two babies, house cleaning, baking everything from scratch, dealing with a washing machine that only worked on occasion, a clothes dryer that defied description, pet dogs, pet cats, plus extra farm work. I folded. A really tough broad I wasn''t. Folks claimed I was too citified. One day a range fire broke out. Maybe around 10 or 11 a.m. Out our large living room window, I could see flames eating up range land in the far west.
A growing dark. I ran out the back door and managed to unpin a large wash hanging on long lines, grabbing kids and pets, stuffing everything I could inside, shutting doors, windows. Then it happened. Twelve noon and everything turned black. No sky. Black. Nothing there. No cars.
No people. No trucks. No hope. Only a solid black nothingness. I''ve never seen the likes of this before or since. I''ve seen range fires before, forest fires, barns ablaze, but nothing like this. The terror stays with you. When we lost our farm, I felt bad at first.
I knew how much we tried, people we hired, worked from dawn till dusk. Everyday. Neighbors were for real back then. Everyone helped each other. One guy smothered to death when a haystack collapsed. He couldn''t get out. We lived close enough that we went to help. Too late.
Such grief. Middle-aged. Had a wife, kids. Don''t know if he had insurance. The next morning, I brought enough cooked food to feed everyone: muffins, fried eggs, fried potatoes, greens. All of us did this, helped each other. So we lost our lease. Gave everything our all, but as things turned out, it was not enough.
Good friends won our prize farm. Landlords didn''t understand the crux of our story, but our friends did. We had managed the soil, built it up year after year. Got it to the point when you could at last make a profit from the place. Not us, though. Friends got the place. Illinois bankers didn''t understand soil and what it takes to build up a rich loam. So we tried custom farming.
Used our equipment to help other farmers bring in their crops, bale hay, whatever needed doing. Seemed to work well, yet it didn''t take long before what we put out in energy and commitment never added back to even a living wage. In a huge farm sale, we sold off everything. Even with a top-notch auctioneer and a good crowd, hardly an extra cent bought a thing. The two of us, plus our kids, stood there, watching, as everything in our world disappeared. We found acreage near the railroad tracks, halfway to the city of Twin Falls. We tilled it some, but finally my husband got a job driving a taxi, and I got a job with a bean-broker (yes, you read that right, beans replaced money in large purchases). Our main source in the company I worked for--brokers in Cuba before Fidel Castro''s takeover of the country.
Our kids went to a one-room school, all grades in the same room, same teacher. Yes, it worked. That teacher really did a great job, and the kids really learned. A third child came, so small we kept her in a doll cradle. Had a huge garden. Practiced no-till gardening with flowers fencing off the good stuff from bugs who had other ideas. I always left a tenth of everything for the bugs so they could eat, too. I canned and froze so much food from our garden, plus leftovers gleaned from orchards, that we had plenty of food.
Plus we almost always got an elk tag in the annual statewide drawing for a ticket to kill one. This meant our food bill for a family of five was never over fifteen dollars in any given month including December. Plus, we either raised or shot our own meat. If we were lucky, the whole family could be there when a kill was needed. Barnyard. All of us sitting near the animal to be shot and always giving that animal our thanks and our love. And every time we did this, the animal stood still, died quickly, its meat tender and sweet. If you honor your food, it will honor you.
We lost everything again. Just couldn''t make enough money from that acreage to pay our bills and have a life. So we sold the place and moved first to Nyssa, Oregon, then to Boise, the state capital. My husband worked for a gas distributor in Nyssa who charged more to those who had more, and less to those who had less. He manipulated all prices accordingly. That struck us as wrong. You can make deals, but the base price should be the same for everyone. Advertisements--same deal.
We couldn''t handle his way of handling money. He bragged about being a good Catholic. Said he took care of everyone. Oh? Living there gave us an opportunity to experience winds of around a hundred miles per hour or more. Usually more. Took off roofs. Sometimes it collapsed buildings. We were saved because of the unique structure of the house we rented.
When the front door blew open, so did the back door. Winds blew straight through. And those winds were unique. You could walk outside, up to the road, and stand there untouched as winds right in front of you tore up everything, while not a hair on your head even wiggled. More than once did we encounter such wind--a wind with a mind of its own.