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Show 'i V Page MOD August 3, 1995 The Park Record D Section A AnM Ilit (Goes... HOUSE STADMMCG Tired of re-staining? By TOM CLYDE Have your home powerwashed and treated with a stain that lasts. Gall the professionals at Timpanogos Painting for a prompt, free estimate. (801) 375-5971 Licensed and insured AT HOME WITH COMPUTERS A PROFESSIONAL SERVICE SELECTING AND TEACHING PERSONAL COMPUTERS LET ME HELP: Choose a Computer that will Grow with You Shop the Best Price for a New System Upgrade Your Existing Computer Setup and Install Hardware and Software Performance Tune your System Provide On Site Training $35 PER HOUR TOTAL SYSTEM SUPPORT FOR HOME AND SMALL BUSINESS 24 YEARS EXPERIENCE WITH IBM JOHN CHAMPION 649-8542 in park city One Stop Shopping For Office Sit pplies! One Stop Shopping For opying! One Stop Shopping For rintingl One Stop Shopping For miputer Rental! One Stop Shopping for Graphic Design! Friendly Help - Competitive Pricing A CKKPtf nnKDIT ffM MORE THAN A COPY STORE ! 875 IRON HORSE DRIVE Phone 801-649-COPY FAX 801-649-2972 Open Monday - Friday 8:00 - 6:00 Saturday's 10:00 -1:00 Out standing in his field The other day, I saw something I've never seen before. A cow moose and her calf were standing in the pasture, and the calf was nursing. It was pretty early in the morning and I was out turning irrigation water in the field. The morning was cold, and there was frost on the grass and ice at the edges of the pools of water left by the irrigation. The moose were out in the middle of the field, standing broadside to the sun, warming up. The cow saw me, decked out in mismatched sweat pants and sweat shirt, rubber boots, and my trusty shovel. She didn't seem to care a lot, but I also wasn't very close. The horses had that wigged-out look they get when anything unusual is afoot. They were in the opposite end of the pasture, with their butts against the fence, staring off in the general direction of the moose. There have been enough moose through here in the last several years that I would expect the horses to be used to them by now. They've adapted to farm machinery, highway construction equipment, dogs, crying babies, ATVs, and a Republican Congress, but a moose will still send the horses into a full equine panic. I watched the moose while I moved the canvas dam down the ditch to water another part of the field, and leaned on the shovel for a minute to see if they would turn around. The calf was on the far side, behind its mother. When it tried to move to the other side, for the second course of breakfast, the mother turned around, keeping the calf more or less hidden from view. I decided to go back to the house before getting her too upset. There are few measurable rewards from running a farm in this climate. It snows in June, freezes in July, dries up in August, just in time for the snow in September. And people are surprised that farmers and ranchers aren't raking in the money. But it's hard to put a price on watching the moose family eat breakfast in the morning. I've spent a fair amount of time irrigating this summer. We have a full-time guy who waters the hay fields six days a week. He's the best there is at it, and people say he can make water run up hill just by giving it a crusty look. On his day off, we hired a high school kid. He's good, but things keep coming up. He made it into the national high school rodeo championships (I was thinking of getting Tonya Harding to pay a visit to his horse), the SAT exam, a family vacation that had been planned a long time before, football stuff, and one Saturday, he had to "show his pigs." I didn't even ask what that was all about. Anyway, I've ended up doing the relief irrigation about half the summer. It's a lot of work. We have five different streams running all the time. A canvas dam (which is really plastic these days, but they are still called canvas dams) across the ditch spills the water out in the field. In some places, it will run to the end of the field in about a half hour. In other areas, the ground is so well drained that it can run in the same spot most of the day and not reach the end of the field. When the water gets to the end of the field, it's time to move the dam upstream about 10 to 20 feet to start the process again, flooding strip after strip until the whole field has been soaked. Then you switch the water into the next ditch to start on the next piece. I wear knee-high boots. The full-time guy has hip waders that he has to fold up and down every time he gets in or out of the truck. No matter what boots you have, my experience has been that sooner or later, they will be filled with water that only yesterday was snow. The old school of thought is that you just tough it out, and finish the day with your legs wet and numb from the cold. My approach is to wear the boots until they get swamped, then switch over to sneakers and shorts. My legs get a little scratched up walking through the deep hay, but at least my lips aren't blue. Something about irrigation fascinates me. It's probably a genetic predisposition, descending from farmers on both sides of the family. My grandfather on my father's side was said to irrigate a field until the fence posts started growing. My grandfather on mom's side irrigated a smaller farm, but also had a dry , farm in Idaho. Dry farming is a lot of work, and maybe more risky, but because there isn't irrigation, it always seemed like dry farmers were getting away with something. I didn't realize at the time that there were millions of acres of farm land that actually produced crops on the basis of natural rainfall alone.; Funny things happen out therein the fields. With the water on one area, there will be gopher holes squirting like geysers in the middle of a lower field. Fish swim down stream until they hit the canvas dam, then shoot back up the ditch, to the main canal, and maybe all the way back up to the river. My dog likes to "surf" in the ditches when I pull the dam and sencj-a . surge of water downstream to the next location. Between turns, I was sitting in the truck reading the mail. There was a brochure on a stress management clinic, where, for $300 bucks, some expert would teach you relaxation techniques, meditation, exercises, and time management skills that were guaranteed to make life blissful. The clinic was to be held in a windowless hotel conference room, under fluorescent lights, with validated parking available. I got thinking that there were opportunities there. Maybe I could offer stress management clinics out here in the hay field, where for $300 bucks, stressed out business people, lawyers, and other yuppies on the edge of cardiac arrest could spend a day turning water, listening to country western classics on the truck radio, and watching sand hill cranes hunt for bugs in the soaked up fields. They would have to be frisked for cellular phones first. I could package the whole thing up with some meditation training tapes, a souvenir shovel, a pair of hip waders with a painted-on logo, and maybe a T-shirt T-shirt with the sleeves cut off to complete the packages By the end of the day, they would be munching on a piece of grass, watching the shadows for the return of the cow moose. HMes ffiromm (DM Park (Cnty By JUSTIN L. "JACK" Fl KM, Freeze-dry tears I remember northern Utah's winters. Park City was perched high in the mountains, had a bunch of snow, and was fairly cold. Park didn't seem anywhere near as cold as the Uintah Basin, however. The nightmares about Utah's winters and cold always revolved around getting to and from school. We had no buses in the early 1930s. We were left to our own devices for getting to and from the J schoolhouse. Mostly, we walked. When I started school we lived almost two miles from the schoolhouse. The altitude was only 6,000 feet but the winter mornings were often colder than a politician's heart. During my first year there were four of us always together. Theda and Ila were in the fifth grade, Merlin was in the third and I came plodding along in the first grade. That was great for me because I had the protection of the older kids. When the hour arrived the four of us headed down the road walking. The only alternative we had to walking was that we occasionally rode a horse. That was something to see, the four of us stuffed aboard an old work horse. Theda and Ila rode in the saddle, well, not really in the saddle because their legs weren't long enough to reach the stirrups. They each threw a leg across the saddle, put their other foot in the stirrup, and down the road they went looking like a model-T Ford with both doors open. I sat just behind the saddle and Merlin rode behind me. On really cold mornings, that helped keep me warm. Picture, if you will, the four of us trudging to school through a foot of new snow. Theda and Ila were bigger so they broke trail. Merlin walked behind them and I came tagging along walking in their footsteps. We never made much ceremony about this trip, we just bundled up and took off walking. Half a mile north of us lived the Olsens and they also had a flock of kids. Oftentimes we waited for Richard and his charges and then tramped off to school together. We had strength in numbers and the bigger kids broke trail for us and made us feel secure. I remember especially, one bitterly cold morning when the four of us rode our horse to school. We looked plenty weird with those girls cocked crazily off to the side as the were, but by pushing it a little we could be in school in about 20 minutes. The temperature that moming was probably below -30F.; the air was so cold that it hurt our faces as we rode along. We had been through this before and we kerJt telling ourselves and each other, repeating over and over, "Don't cry! Don't cry!" we knew that if our tears wet our faces the pain would be unbearable. Even worse, our flesh would actually freeze. We were a bunch of tough little warts and normally managed to keep back the tears until we got to the Rhodes' home. The Rhodeses were related to the Mechams and we counted on getting to their house to get warm. Evelyn Rhodes dashed out into their yard, lifted us from the horse and shoved us into the house. We were stripped down to the bare essentials and pushed up near the heating stove, ooh how delicious! We were then bundled up and stuffed back aboard the horse. We made a fast half-mile ride to Grandma Fuell's where we again stripped down and warmed up. On those really cold mornings we might not get to school until about an hour before noon. The Olsen boys built a one-horse sleigh in 1931, and we sometimes rode that on the trip to school. The lad who drove that sleigh was Richard Olsen. In those days Richard seemed a real giant to us school-age school-age kids. In 1933, the county bought a school bus that we rode to school. From that time on we had fewer problems, other than the half-mile walk from home to the bus stop. Of course there were several younger kids with us by then. I was always glad that those younger kids never had to make that long walk to school the way we did in those earlier years. Justin Fuell, a former Park City resident, has written two books of his early recollections-teckie and Beeba and Me. He lives in Marana, Ariz, with his wife Beeba. Plan your weekend... read ARTS & LEISURE in The Park Record. i 1 J I |
