CHAPTER 7
Cascade
1946
Cascade was a place I never went to school. I had just finished fifth grade when we left Paxton and school didn’t start again until after we left Idaho. Darwin and I rode in the back of the truck while Mom, Dad and Linda rode in front. Dad had put a little window in the left side of the camper shell so Darwin and I could see out as we traveled now. I was impressed by all of the antelope as we went through Wyoming. Then we came to the mountains; I thought the Quartz Mountains around Granite were big, but these were something else. As we went up the Snake River valley in Idaho, all the farms were so pretty and green. When we got to Boise, we turned north and were in the mountains again. When we got to Cascade we stayed in a motel for a couple of weeks while Dad worked and looked for us a place to live.
We were still living in the motel when Mom’s brother, Uncle John, came over to see us from Monroe, Oregon. He wanted Mom and Dad to go in with him and Uncle Ray to buy a small sawmill there in Oregon. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but Mom was expecting again; she and Dad were concerned about the doctor situation in Cascade. The baby was due in December and the nearest doctor was in Boise, 80 miles away. The road was through the mountains and they were afraid of the winter snow. I think that is what convinced them to move to Oregon. I’m not sure when they made up their minds but we only stayed in Idaho about two months.
We were still in the motel when we discovered we were living next to an ice house; it didn’t even have a roof over it. There was a conveyer going down into the river that ran behind the ice house. In the winter they would take big saws to cut ice blocks out of the river, float the blocks to the conveyor and bury them in them in saw dust in the ice house. Then they sold ice all summer long.
For some reason, everyone traded in silver dollars instead of dollar bills in Idaho. There was a dollar slot machine in the motel office and we used to watch people put their money in. I never did see anyone win anything. The motel office also had punch boards; this is a gambling device made of a board that looks honeycomb. Each cell has a little piece of rolled up paper in it; you punch the paper out with a peg and get the prize written on the paper.
On the Fourth of July we were still in the motel and they had a big parade down town; Darwin and I walked down there. After the parade was over they had races for the kids. When they called ten year olds, I went to the starting line. We ran about 100 yards and I won second place. They gave me two silver dollars.
We finally got out of the motel when Dad rented us an old farm house. I’m not sure just where it was but after looking on the computer map, I think it was about three miles east of Cascade on FR-22 Road. I know the house was on the right side of the road after leaving Cascade. The house was between the road and a lake. Also, as we were driving toward the house there was a big snow covered mountain peak to the left and in front of us. The house was similar to the ones in Granite and Hay Springs; it had no indoor plumbing. But the landscape around it was beautiful; it was in a flat, green meadow and the snow covered peaks just a few miles away.
The pasture was infested with ground squirrels. Darwin and I decided we wanted to catch some; I have no idea why. We had left our steel traps in Nebraska so we had to find another way. We found a metal barrel that would hold about ten gallons; we buried it flush with the ground and put stiff grass over the top with some kind of bait on the grass. We thought they would try to get the bait, fall in the barrel and we would have them. We went back the next day; the grass was in the barrel and the bait was gone but there was no squirrel. We decided they must be jumping out after they fell in the barrel so we figured if we put some water in the bottom they wouldn’t be able to jump. When we went out to check the trap there were four or five drowned squirrels in the bottom. We couldn’t figure out why the second squirrel fell in after the first one had knocked the grass off that concealed the hole. Then it occurred to us: they were not after the bait, they were after the water. After that we didn’t even to bother to put grass over the hole; but that was too easy and it was no longer any fun. Years later I have wondered if anyone ever rode a horse through the pasture and fell in our barrel. I comfort myself by thinking all the squirrels we caught would have dug a lot more holes in the pasture than the one we left with the barrel.
There was one project I wish we could have worked on a little more in Idaho: fishing. Some distance across the squirrel pasture was a lake. Darwin and I went fishing there one day with cane poles and caught several nice fish. This was the first time I had ever seen a trout. Then I hooked something big and it broke my line taking my only hook with him. Before I had a chance to try again, we left for Oregon.
Dad had just started making a dollar per hour which sounded like a lot of money to me but since Mom was expecting they decided to take Uncle John and Uncle Ray up on their offer. Because of the health problems Cheryl had when she was just a few months old, I feel sure she would not have survived if we had stayed in Idaho. Anyway, in August of 1946 we loaded up the old 1939 Ford pickup and started for Alpine, Oregon. (See figure 8.)
No comments:
Post a Comment