Fun and games on the farm

We never actually lived on a farm or ranch during my stay in Ekalaka and Carter County but I spent a lot of time on my grandparents farm. In a sense, we lived on a farm also because even on the 4 acres at our first house in Ekalaka or the 152 acres on the second, we always had a milk cow and horses plus sheep, goats, pigs and of course, chickens.

In recent years, I have heard kids complain bitterly about being bored. To the best of my recollection, I was never bored on our small farms or on my grandparents larger one. All of this was pre-video games or cell phones and even pre-television. We found lots of ways to entertain ourselves, I will tell you about some of them.

Most of our fun and games on the farm involved animals. Of course, we tried to ride every kind of animal there was, including pigs. I never had much luck with this; either they bucked or scraped me off or they just stood there but it was fun. Believe it or not, I always enjoyed milking cows and feeding the milk to our cats as I milked. I hated milking goats. A lot of kids liked riding horses. I didn't, although I had to ride them a lot.

Then there were the games involving wild animals and insects. My grandpa taught me how to catch a big black horsefly, carefully put a thread around his neck and lead him around on a leash. That was great fun while it lasted. Frogs were great things to play with; I would take a carefully prepared grass straw, carefully work it up the frogs rear end and then carefully blow air into the frogs belly. Then we would throw it back in the water, he could swim around but not dive. Terrible, I know. After a while the air would come out and he would dive and swim away.

One time I was gigging frogs for frog legs and a frog got off the gig. The next year I saw the same frog with the gig scars on his back so we didn’t hurt him. A lot of kids had fun with non-poisonous snakes. Not me, I was scared of them, even though not obsessively scared.

Swimming and wading was a big part of our fun. We would swim in reservoirs or in Boxelder Creek. My Christiansen cousins and us Lavell kids would wallow in the mud in the canal until we were covered with mud, then run and jump into the reservoir, great fun. One time we all asked our parents if we could go swimming. We couldn't because it was too close to lunch. Well, “can we go wading?” we asked.

They replied, “yes.” We waded right up to our upturned nostrils. Our parents were unhappy, but I think they were secretively laughing.

My grandparents had an ice house where they cut blocks of ice in the winter and then used them all summer. We loved to go into the ice house and dig down to get a piece of ice to cool us off on a hot day. There was an old engine sitting right next to the ice house. It had a magneto on it and if you turned the engine over the magneto would shock you if you touched the wire. We all had a lot of fun with that magneto shocking each other and threatening to do so.

We had a lot of fun with winter, sliding down hills with sleds and toboggans. There was a hill near our house which was perfect but had a barbed wire fence at the bottom. If I laid down flat on the sled, I could just get under the bottom wire. One time I didn't make it and got a barbed wire across the back of my head. The best fun was when you had a drop off at the bottom and could make a nice drop at the end of the run.

We also loved to dig in drifts. One time we got a huge drift across the entire back yard. We worked on that drift all winter until it finally fell away, honeycombed with caves and tunnels. My sister, Bertha, and I had a custom; along toward spring but while winter was in full swing we would collect several winter artifacts, icicles, snow balls, etc. We would then wrap them up real good with insulating materials we found around the place and bury them in the ground to see how long they would survive. Of course we had to dig them up after it got warmer, timing was everything.

My personal greatest pleasure was exploring the hills and forest behind our second Ekalaka house. I loved that forest and spent all the time exploring that I could. I went alone a lot but also with friends. We spent a lot of time up on top of a hill we called Titty Butte. One time Larry Turnbull, Frankie Silvis, and I spent several hours prying and cutting on a piece of rock. We were finally rewarded when it came roaring down the hill. Anytime you could roll a rock down a hill it was fun.

I suppose that the greatest thing I enjoyed was catching a girl in the outhouse and throwing dirt clods or rocks at it. Once in a while I miscalculated and did it when my mother was in there. By the time I realized what I had done, I got lost real quick so she didn’t know who did it.

There are lots of other things that we did to have fun. I’m sure I will remember several that I should have included after I finish. I hope that you Ekalaka kids still have a good time without totally relying on modem technology.