The Watermaster

This is not a statue of Dad, but if there were a statue in Lanark in might just look like this.

Dad served as the Watermaster on the Canal for the South Liberty Irrigation Company for about forty years.

In the small farming towns of southern Idaho, as well as in other areas around the arid west, one of the most important men in the community was the Watermaster.  Water was seldom in abundance and so it became necessary to select a man of strength and principle who would assure that all of the farmers in a given area would get his fair share of the precious water allotted to them and their thirsty acres.  Dad was that man almost continuously for forty years as he worked for the farmers who owned the South Liberty Irrigation Company.  This company was a small cooperative of farmers mostly in in Lanark and a few in Ovid who had water rights in Mill Creek and Miles Creek in the mountains west of Liberty and Lanark.  The early pioneers in the area had  dug a long ditch/canal along the foothills into which the waters of Mill Creek and Miles Creek could be diverted.  It was a canal but rather small by the standards of other canals in southern Idaho.  On a good year the canal would carry six  or seven streams of water  which would be allocated for a specific number of hours or days to individual farmers based on their held water rights.   Dad was known for his dependability and his fairness.  He was also known for his firmness which he demonstrated on many occasions when some of the farmers were found turning their own water a few hours before they were scheduled to, or readjusting the size of the stream that had been turned to them so as to get just a little more water.  For farmers along that canal system water from the canal almost always meant the difference between a good crop and one that was very much in short supply. 

     In April or early May each year all of the farmers who were serviced by the canal got together to clean it and make ready for the upcoming irrigation season.  Usually the crews were divided into two groups.  One would start at the head of the canal  which was located up in Sharon near the Derricott place.  The other group started out near the Leland Wallentine place on the south end of the canal.  The canal was about thirteen miles long so that left each crew with just under seven miles of irrigation ditch to clean.  I remember looking forward to this project most years.  It was fun for me as a youngster to be able to go out and work along side the men of the town.  At first my job was to help cut the new willows that had grown up during the previous year.  Later, I helped with almost any other assignment that was given.  Each farmer had to provide labor to pay off their water assessment, which was based on the length of time they were allocated for their water turn.I remember the stories that were told and some of the pranks that were played on fellow workers.  I think that's where I first developed an appreciation for BS. At least that's what the farmers called it.  I will long remember a "water witching" demonstration by Carl Parker one day during our lunch break.  He had a reputation as a "water witch'.  He would take young green willow with a forked branch.  He would the hold it in his hands with the fork pointing upward and walk slowly across the dry ground.  Occasionally the green willow would mysteriously turn down and point toward the ground.  I watched with interest and it truly appeared that he was holding onto the willow so firmly that it would twist the young tender bark right off the willow branch.  When this happened he would announce that that was a good place to dig a well.  The story goes that people who had him "witch" a well for them were nearly always successful in finding a good well with much water.  Carl had quite a reputation for this and was even invited by Utah State University to come down for their "Festival of the American West" and demonstrate his skills.  I was there once while he was doing this.  I don't know what the scientific explanation for this is, but there are many who would attest to his skills.

The picture above is not of our local water witch, but shows another at another time and place practicing his craft.

       I also, remember the day each year when the water was turned into the canal.  Dad and usually one other man would go the head of the canal in Sharon very early in the morning.  The would then divert a few streams of water into the canal and follow it around to the end of the canal.  If they turned in enough water it would get around to the end of the  canal by sundown.  Dad had done this often enough so that he knew exactly how much water to turn into the canal.  As the water proceeded around the canal it would accumulate a pile of debris as the water did the final cleaning of the ditch.  They always had shovels ready and would clear the debris from the ditch before it formed a dam in the canal and caused the water to overflow the canal banks and possibly wash the bank away.  That could have been disastrous.  I remember on those days how tired Dad was after completing the days work and what a sense of satisfaction he had in knowing that he had had a hand in supplying the water to his neighbors farms for another year.  This water was the life blood of the community and especially the much needed crops.  Dad did receive a pay check for his work, but it was very small in comparison to the value of the service he provided.  Keeping the fields green and the farmers happy  and at peace with one another was a challenge lesser men could never have accomplished.

      Dad mostly did this job on horseback in the early years,  His favorite horse for this job was named Smokey.  This horse was very hard to catch but easy to ride.  He had a good comfortable gait.  In later years the horse was replaced with a truck.  I remember Dad coming home with big bouquets of daisies he found along the canal bank for Mom.  She was always thrilled with these small acts of thoughtfulness.  Another time he came home with a big shovelful of Junebugs.  He said they were so thick they we about to dam up the canal and cause it to overflow.  He brought this shovelful of bugs home just to prove he wasn't spinning a story for us.  Another memory was of the fall time when the water would be turned out of the canal.  Again Dad would follow around the canal as the waters in the canal receded.  He would usually wear a pair of hip boots.  I'm not really sure this activity was essential or whether it was done for the perks.

As the water in the canal receded it would often leave stranded fish that had gotten into the canal during the summer.  I remember on several occasions he would catch lots of trout and would just put them down in his hip boots.  When his hip boots got so full he couldn't navigate very well he would climb out of the canal, empty the fish into a sack and needless to say we had some yummy fish suppers for a day or two.

      Long after I was grown and had a family of my own Dad was still serving as watermaster.  I remember one fall when we had two missionaries in the mission field at one time Dad came over to our home in Montpelier and gave me a check.  It was his entire payment for the years service as watermaster.  It had been endorsed on the back and I was given instructions to sign my name on the back also and deposit into our checking account for our missionaries.  It was an unselfish and much appreciated act of kindness, which only went to demonstrate the attitude of charity that Dad felt toward people, especially his family and neighbors.  That could easily make up another post for this blog.
    Time marches on.  The South Liberty Irrigation Compnay is in the final stages of installing a pressurized pipeline where the old canal was.  I hope it brings a more efficient and dependable source of water to the farmers who now till the land along its length.  I do, however, wonder if the modern farmers' kids will be able to look back at the good times during a lunch break sitting in the shade of a tree with friends and neighbors telling stories and sharing lunches.  Frankly, those were good times from the present perspective.

     There are many other memories, but I hope this will add a little human side to the task of keeping the water in the ditch.

by Bart

School Sports

Ellis as a varsity basketball player during his senior year at Fielding High School in 1955.  I have other pictures of some of the rest of us, but havn't got around to digitizing them so they can be included in this blog.

As most of you know Dad was not a sports junkie.  He found little enjoyment in  or need for participation in sporting events, especially if a ball was involved.  He was pretty much hooked on work and doing what he could to make a living for the family and when we were growing up that seemed to be a full time job at least for him.  That doesn't mean, however, that there were no sports allowed at our place when we were growing up.  Well do I recall the rolled up pair of socks which served as a makeshift basketball flying around the living room in an attempt to get it to fall be hind the door for a score.  The space  behind the closed door served as the hoop.  I don't recall Mom or Dad getting really very upset about our indoor winter activity, though I'm sure they would have preferred a little more serene atmosphere sometimes.  Our ward building at the Lanark Ward didn't have a recreation hall per se and so there was no basketball court for the youth to spend some of their time on cold winter nights.  I do remember that occasionally our ward young men scheduled the gym at the Emerson School in Paris to go and play basketball on Mutual nights.  That gym left a lot to be desired too, but since it was so short in length we could occasionally go home and brag about making a full court shot. 

     When we got into high school at Fielding High we wanted to play on the school basketball teams.

The school was small so it wasn't to hard to make the team.  Ellis played a lot, at least his senior year, and to me he was the star of the team.  They didn't win all the games, but they drew a gym full of faithful and somewhat raucous fans.  It was fun to be in the packed gym and listen to all the noise as our Spartan team tried to gain another victory.  It seemed like everyone in the community came to the games.  I do remember one special game when Ellis was a senior.  Fielding beat our arch enemy, Montpelier High School.  Ellis, I remember, played very well in that game.  Moroni Schwab was the coach at Fielding during this time.  I played on the Junior Varsity during my first three years in High School.  I was always kind of skinny and not well coordinated and so for the first few years I got to practice a lot, but in games I only got to play a little. As a junior I started on the JV and played quite a bit, but in my senior year, I was once again relegated to the bench for most of each game.  It didn't seem to matter too much to me.  I was a part of the team, which was what was really important to me.  We had many good times and won most of our games during my senior year in high school. Mom and Dad would come to some of the games when they could (they had to do our chores first) and I know they liked to see us participate in school activities and were proud of us when we did well.  If they couldn't make it, we caught a ride home on the activity bus, which ran to all school activities and most everybody rode the bus.

     Road trips were especially fun it seemed.  We got out of school early and the school bought the team a good lunch at a restaurant in the visiting town if there was one.  I remember eating at a restaurant in Afton, Wyoming on a school basketball trip.  It was the first time in my life I had done that.  Others on the team were not much different in that respect.  Back then there wasn't a fast food joint on every corner.  I remember one particular road game.  We played in American Falls and were late getting home, after midnight.  It was a bitter cold night, about 30 below zero when we got home to the school in Paris.  Dad had let me take the old truck to school that day so I would have a ride home after we returned from the game that night.  I don't know what I was thinking about, but I got to talking with one of the other players from just north of Paris about a mile before going home.  When I went to start the truck, it wouldn't even so much as make a grunt.  In my mind I had no choice but to walk home.  So I walked north out of Paris with my team mate, Rex Law, who lived north of town.  After we reached his home I walked on along the highway alone toward Lanark.  Finally, somebody came along.  Don't ask me what he was doing on the road at two o'clock in the morning.  He stopped and took pity on me and delivered me our home.  In those days we didn't have a telephone and besides that, I had got myself into the pickle and was not about to ask for help to get out of it.  All turned out well and the memories are sweeter than the actual experience. Strange how that has worked out over the years.

       Reed was probably the best athlete in the family.  He played football and basketball at Fielding for three years and was one of the best players on the team.  Their team won a lot of games, unfortunately for me I missed nearly all of them as I was in college at Utah State in Logan or serving a mission in Germany when he was in high school for most of the time.  His Senior year Fielding High School and Montpelier High School were consolidated.  Reed played on the very first Bear Lake High School teams.  They did quite well that year.  At the end of the year Reed was awarded the "Most Valuable Athlete" award.  He did well in football, basketball, and track that year.  He also served as the co-student body president that year.  I remember after the season was over Mom and Dad hosted the basketball team and coaches to a nice home cooked meal at our home in Lanark.  I still haven't quite figured how they did that in our small farm home, but they did and everyone enjoyed it.

     Mark also got involved in sports in high school.  He played football and basketball.  I remember watching some of his games.  By then Iris and I had moved back to Bear Lake with our family and enjoyed going to the games.  I remember Mother always worrying about Mark getting hurt in football.  She would always breath a big sigh of relief after he got up from every tackle and especially at the end of the games.  Mark did  well in high school sports and enjoyed being on the teams.  He had one of the cheer leaders convinced that he was the best.  That made up for any inadequacies he may have experienced on the court.

      The girls, well this was before Title Nine and equal opportunity for girls in school sports.

     This post was mostly about high school sports, particularly basketball.  Softball in the summer was a whole other story.  Maybe I will make a post about those experiences as well.

      I'm sure others in the family may have other memories along these lines.  Please feel free to add to or edit any of this.

by Bart

Winter Coasting Fun

Winters were cold in the Bear Lake Valley where we grew up, but that did very little to deter us from having a good time.  This was especially true as the sun rose higher in the winter sky during February and March.  I remember getting  new Flexible flyer sled like the ones pictured below for Christmas.  I was so excited.  Usually in March the sun would be warm enough during the daytime to thaw the snow a little on top.  The after the sun went down and through the night the temperatures would drop to below zero freezing a  thick crust on the snow that still covered the fields.  It was on mornings like this that we would take our sleds and walk on the crusted snow for a couple or three miles up to the Long Ridge, which was located to the west of Lanark.  Once we got up the hill to the desired point we mounted our sleds and away we flew, ever faster, weaving back and forth over this frozen sledders paradise.  We could make it from the top of the ridge, across the snow covered fences almost down to the Lanark Road before the sleds would finally come to a slow halt.  This was so much fun, I even remember thinking to myself that this was my favorite time of the year.  When I grew older , I switched to cross country skis and made similar journeys into the snowy landscape, especially on the full moon night in March.  I shall never forget the feelings of flying across the snowy crusted fields and then in later years the awesome starry silence as I crossed the fields and hills with the full moon shining so brightly on the snow covered hills, with the only sounds being that of my breath, the shuffle of the skis going over the snow, and later the sound of my faithful canine friend, River, panting heavily as he ran  along beside me.

by Bart

It's Cold Out There

We've had a few rather cold days lately, nothing like some I remember from my youth though. The picture below reminds me of the place where picked up our mail.  There were four mail boxes, one was ours, one was Uncle Harlan's, one was John Roberts', and the other one was Earl Findlay's, our neighbors. They were located on the corner where Uncle Harlan and his family lived.

 Long before A Christmas Story, the movie, or Dumb and Dumber  were released, sticking our tongues to frozen poles or mail boxes was something many kids in the cold Bear Lake Valley did and, with no disrespect to the movie, none of them cried!  I do remember one time when we were all waiting for the school bus over by Uncle Harlan's corner, Ellis decided to show us how brave he was. He stuck his tongue on the frozen mailbox and just then the bus arrived.  It's a wonder he made it to school that day.  I've always appreciated  and looked up to my big brother, Ellis, but fortunately I didn't follow in every one of his foot steps.  The picture below is not Ellis, you'll get the picture though.  I must admit I had visions of him still stuck to the mailbox when the bus brought us home from school that afternoon.  It was not to be.  He rescued himself in the nick of time.  He probably left a little meat on the pole, but he made it to school.

I remember several very severe cold spells.  One of them happened the winter after I came home from my mission.  Reed was a senior in High School.  Dad and Mom had decided to take the train down to Waco, Texas where Ellis was stationed in the Air Force and where he and his family lived.  Reed and Mark were left to take care of the chores.  Though it was in March a severe cold front moved in.  The temperatures dropped to about 40 degrees below zero.   I came home from college to help with the chores that particular weekend.  After the milking was done I went down to the slough to chop a hole in the ice so that the cows could get a drink of water.  That was a common practice.  The spot where the drinking hole was must have been fed by a small underground spring or seep because it usually didn't have a heavy coat of ice on it.  Sadly this time one of the cows walked out a little to far and fell through the ice.  It wasn't many minutes before we and she were fighting for her life.  We hurriedly got the tractor and a chain and tried to pull her out.  Things didn't go well.  Finally, we did get her out of the water, but in a very short time the cow had died.  In that extreme temperature and wet there was not a chance.  She died and there was not a thing we could do about it.  We were very discouraged and were concerned about the loss of one of the best milk cows in the herd,  When Dad and Mom got home, they were of course saddened by the loss, but were grateful it wasn't even worse.  Farming and especially dealing with livestock in such a cold climate was a difficult undertaking.  After a time it seemed to harden a person in a certain way, so that we learned to shrug it off and go on hoping for a  better day.

I think it was experiences and pictures like this that gave me such a deep appreciation for a roaring fire in the stove, which we enjoyed for so many years.

Posted by Bart

Bear Lakers

This winter has been rather mild here in Logan  as it has for much of the Inter mountain West, though I do recall Reed telling me that he had spent hours shoveling the deep snow at his place in Fish Haven/ Bear Lake West earlier in the winter.  We had some snow here as well at that time, but what was here about six inches was more than sixteen at his house.  Since then the snow has melted and we have received only small off and on snow fall since then.  I suppose it's because of the long snow winters that so many of my early memories are associated with snow, and snow storms.  I think I have told a few snow happenings in this blog before and will try not to repeat myself.  What got me thinking about snow and growing up in Bear Lake Valley with it's notorious Bear Lakers was a photograph I found on the web a while back.  It was taken in 2004 and shows what then remained of the old Lyman A. Hymas barns in Liberty and the surrounding countryside.  Iris and I lived in the house there for three years when we first moved back to Bear Lake.  Well do we remember the fierce snow storm of that first winter back in the Valley.  I remember going out in the back porch one morning with a yard stick to measure the newly fallen snow from the previous twenty four hours.  The yard stick wouldn't quite do it.  I estimated it came up about three inches short.  These thirty nine inches came in just one snow storm which  lasted over a couple of days.  It was mostly quote a powdery snow.  The next day the wind began to blow and it blew for three straight days.  Schools were closed and everything but the very most essential activity out of doors came to a halt.  We didn't see another soul for three days.  It took another two or three days to get the roads cleared and traffic moving about again.  The good thing about it was that the lights, at least where we were didn't go out and we had plenty of food and fuel to keep us full and warm.  When it was all over, I went out and spent a couple of days shoveling the car out of the snow drifts and a pathway from the house out to the mail box.  I well remember shoveling snow from the path and throwing it in a bank  on either side that was well over my head.  I remember other storms similar to this one, but not since that time.  Needless to say, we were grateful that no one was hurt, lost or made to suffer unduly from this and other Bear Lakers experience while we lived in the Bear Lake Valley. The picture below is just a reminder of those days and that it could happen again.  There is nonetheless a sort of majesty to the snowy landscape left by these winter storms.

By Bart

Christmas Musings

The Christmas Season, as we celebrate it in our day, has come and gone for another year.  It is a season of joyous gratitude for the birth, the life, and the Atonement of our Savior, all to often dulled by an extravagance of material pleasures and pursuits or perhaps by feelings of inadequacy or apology as we fail to measure up to the standard imposed by a material world which only very vaguely comprehends the meaning of the season.

Today, as I was reading in the works of Neal A. Maxwell, I came across these words which caused me to reflect a little more deeply on the role of the Savior in our lives and the responsibility each of us has to be a beacon of light to those around us, both to illuminate and also to warn.

"The same God that placed that star in a precise orbit millennia before it appeared over Bethlehem in celebration of the birth of the Babe  has given at least equal attention to placement of each of us in precise human orbits, so that we may, if we will,  illuminate the landscape of our individual lives, so that our light may not only lead others but warn them as well."

By Bart

Ancestors

I recently obtained a fan chart of our family ancestors going back nine generations.  This includes grandparents on both Dad's and Mom's side of the family.  It is not totally complete, but it does include a surprising number of our ancestral grandparents.  I was so excited to get it that I had a large poster made of it.  I have since discovered a way to get copies of this chart at somewhat less than I paid for it, so if any of you would like one, it might pay to let me help you rather than do it the conventional way at Staples or Fedex/Kinko's.

You will have to click on the chart to enlarge it enough so that you can read the names and dates.  I found this to be very interesting and motivates me all the more to research and do temple work for as many of our ancestors, including grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc as I can.  I hope some of you find this interesting and worthwhile as well.

You may have to copy this picture file of the chart into another application on your computer to enlarge it enough so that you can read it well on your computer depending somewhat upon the size of your monitor.

I'm sorry if this can't be easily viewed in this format.  I had to change the file from a pdf file to a jpg file in order to insert it in to this blog post.  It actually works much better as a pdf file so if anyone is interested in this let me know and I can send you the original pdf file which will be more usable, I think.

By Bart