GROWING UP IN SAND HOLLOW
3月
17日
"...a desert so rugged, so dreary..."
One of the 300,000 pioneer’s passing through this area wrote in her diary: “…desert so rugged, so dreary and…changes of thousand and thousands of years won’t yield anything worthy of consideration to the support of human life”.
In the 1920s the Black Canyon Dam on the Payette river, near Emmett, Idaho, created new farming opportunities, even before the Owyhee Dam created water for irrigation in the 1930s on the Oregon side. The Snake River rises in western Wyoming, then flows through the Snake River Plains of southern Idaho, the rugged Hells Canyon on the Oregon–Idaho border and the rolling Palouse Hills of Washington, emptying into the Columbia River at the Tri-Cities, Washington. It marks the Idaho Oregon border in what we call “The Treasure Valley” west of Boise, the capital of Idaho.
When I was 4-years-old, spring of 1943, Dad rented the Gilman farm next to the Randall family farm. Dickie Randall was my first playmate. The place is called Sand Hollow because the whole area is filled with “sand-draws”— a pond of sand, like a huge sand-box. Dickie and I played for hours digging in the sand draw below his house and next to our driveway. The sand had fallen or was blown out with wind and rain from the hillside, leaving the more compact soil, which became a cave-dwelling like place. We played house in the cave and I called myself “Yvonne” pronounced “Why-vonne”. Dickie had an older married sister named Yvonne that came to visit from Nebraska and I thought that was the prettiest name I had ever heard so I used it for “pretend”.
I did a lot of hanging-out at the Randall place. Their house was a square cinder block house with a flat roof. One day, I got too close to their German Shepherd when he was eating. They fed him out in their back yard next to the chicken coop where they collected eggs. The dog probably had almost my whole head in his mouth as he guarded his food. Dickie’s mother picked me up and carried me home, crying herself, along with me crying and bleeding all over my face, “I’m so sorry!! I’m so sorry!! What can I do?!”
All the men folk were out in the fields with their horses so Mom drove and Mrs. Randall held me as they got into our tan, one-seat Chevrolet Coupe. I think they left Dickie to fend for himself as he was a year or two older than me. Rushing to the doctor meant a couple miles out to Highway 30 on the graveled Sand Hollow road and twelve miles southeast to Caldwell - the main highway to Boise - for the stitches.
It’s surprising Mom knew where to go, but she was pregnant and had established a relationship with a family doctor. No one could afford much. I was born at home with a midwife and so were most others my age of that era.
My parents assured Mrs. Randall it was equally my fault and my memory is my feeling it my fault too. Maybe I had been warned not to mess with the dog when it was eating. After that incident our families became very close friends. We became part of the community, helping each other with harvesting and celebrations, being invited to Sunday dinners with friends after church, My mom and Mrs. Randall began exchanging recipes and almost daily chatted across their WWII Victory Gardens. Of course that made me wary of dogs. I can still feel the scar across the bridge of my nose.
