FOXGLOVE AND IDAHO

The flower for today is the Foxglove. Past summers I’ve only had pink ones, but somehow this year I also have a white one. My friend on Cape Cod says she cannot grow these. I sent her a bunch of seeds years ago, but I don’t remember if she was able to get them to grow or not. I try to be very careful when I cut them down because I swear, every single seed sprouts into a new plant. When that happens, I have to pull them as though they are weeds.  

I opened the first box of photos from the 1940s and began to look at them. I thought I had put the names of the people on the back, but there are a lot of them that don’t have any writing. I guess while I’m doing this, I should write down who’s who or when the kids begin looking at these, they won’t have a clue, not that they will anyway because with the exception of me and my sister, everyone else has entered the great beyond.

This first picture is the back of the house I think we lived in when we first moved to Idaho, although it seems much nicer from this view than I remember it actually being. Just remember though that I wasn’t even three years old yet, so memories from that time might be fuzzy. If you look closely at the back of the house, you can see that it protrudes over the river. The reason for that is because that protrusion was the bathroom.

Okay, it wasn’t a bathroom as we know bathrooms today. The walls were board and there was a bench that contained two holes. Why two, I cannot imagine because who would want to go to the bathroom with someone else. I do remember that bathroom because the holes were HUGE and I wasn’t all that big. How my mom and grandma managed to potty train me, I have no idea. I do remember my grandma being in there with me and rubbing my belly, probably because I was constipated. I also remember the remedy for that and it wasn’t pleasant.

Burke Idaho

Once mom married dad, we moved from Burke Idaho down the valley to Gem, and a nicer house. I don’t believe it came with a bathroom because I remember my dad and uncles installing a toilet, bathtub and sink. It was pretty exciting because they took the back wall of the house off in order to do that. Our plumbing fed into a cesspool located beside the house beneath the kitchen window. It in turn drained into a septic tank in a field adjacent the house. Every once in a while, something would happen and my dad would have to open the cover to the cesspool. It was horrible and he would gag and gag and cough from the smell released when the cover came off…quite disgusting.

L-R, Me, Deena & Kate

There was a little house out in that field in which an old man, Mr. Pendergast, I think his name was. Beyond him was the Walker family. Mrs. Walker had given birth to 18 children, four of whom died. So, this was a family of 16 people. Mrs. Walker rarely left the house because she was a horribly fat woman and it was difficult for her to walk. I was best friends with two of the daughters close to my age (Deena & Kate). They loved using my bathroom because it wasn’t an outhouse until one of them stopped the toilet up one too many times and they were forbidden. I loved using their outhouse until the day I ran and opened the door only to find Mr. Walker sitting there. He was scary anyway and when he yelled at me, I think I probably had to go home and change my panties.

Gayle w/bow & Moi

I know growing up changes how you view things, but when I lived in Gem, there was room to park a car in front of the house before the road went by. Across the road was a big rocky field with the river on the other side of that. There were houses on the other side of the river and you could get to them one of two ways; use the footbridge that an old man on the other side kept in repair using whatever pieces of wood he could find or walk further down and use the bigger and more sturdy bridge the cars  used. I hated the footbridge because there were always areas where the boards didn’t meet or were missing and the whitewater river gushed beneath. I held tight to the rope whenever I had to cross. For a time, my uncle and his family lived on the other side, so I crossed often to play with my cousin, Gayle. She and her mother left my uncle some time in the early 1950s and I have never known what happened to them.

The river was horribly dirty due to the tailings from the silver mine in Burke. That’s also where my daddy worked and whenever the big whistle blew, it signaled there had been a cave-in in the mine. My daddy always came home and the only person I remember being affected by a cave-in was the man next door…he lost his foot. To make the river even dirtier, once a year, the oldest sons of the Walker family had to clean out the outhouse. What that entailed was shoveling out wheelbarrows full of excrement, trundling it across to the river and dumping it over the side. That’s also where the Walkers (and maybe everyone else in the neighborhood) dumped their garbage. Really disgusting.

Some time around 1972, John and I drove back to Idaho and went up the canyon to Burke and Gem. I think the silver mine was still producing then. We stopped at what had been my house 20-some years before. It was amazing how small it was and the garage was gone. The owner had let the snow build up on the roof and it had collapsed. If you jumped out the front door, you would be in the road and I swear John could have spit in the river from the road. It or my perception of it had shrunk a lot in the years I’d been gone.

I went and knocked on the door of the neighbors we’d had before moving. Mr. & Mrs. Rose still lived there and invited us in for a visit. John and Mr. Rose talked about the river and how the EPA had made the mine clean it up. The river was once again crystal clear, but Mr. Rose said the holding ponds that became loaded with sediment filled the air with dust when it got windy…solve one problem, create another.

One thing I was really looking forward to was a glass of ice-cold water. When I lived there, the water came to our house from a spring up the road. Every spring, the men in the neighborhood would go and clean out the little springhouse. For a couple of days, you might get some moss or a worm when you turned on the faucet, but the water was delicious. Just the year before my visit, they had eliminated the old system and installed one that was more modern and cleaner and the water was tepid. I was so disappointed.

When Haley and I went to Glacier National Park three years ago, we took a trip back up that canyon. Burke doesn’t exist any more, the mines are closed and it appeared most folks living up the canyon from Wallace Idaho were most likely fairly poor. Wallace, on the other hand, has become a tourist destination with a museum, restaurants, and other amenities. 

That's today's trip down memory lane. I'm ending by including a photo I found of my grandmother and grandfather, my mom and uncles. I'm not sure which one is my mom and three of the girls I've never heard of or met...they must have been my grandfather's daughters from his second wife. Also a photo of mom with me and my brother and sister, Donnie Ray and Mary Lee. Look at those hop vines growing on the front of that house.

Moi, Don, Mom & Mary

Grandpa Jack Lay, Grandma Ada

My Uncle Beeler must be the baby.

The littlest girl must be my mom.