by Bobbi Phelps
Mike stared straight ahead when I approached him on the left side of his combine. I waved, all smiles, thinking how surprised he’d be. And surprised, he definitely was. But not pleasantly. He reacted with alarm and quickly stopped the combine.
He glared at me. “What’re you doing? You could have set the whole field on fire!” He would have said much more but my father stood beside me.
“I told her I didn’t think she should be driving across the field,” my Dad said in his own defense.
“I thought you’d be happy to see us,” I whimpered. “I guess I didn’t know the impact. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. Come on, Jim. Climb aboard.”
“Here’s a snack.” I handed over a lunch bag of sodas and cookies.
Mike leaned over and gave me a kiss on the cheek and took the insulated container.
“Just don’t do it again,” he whispered into my ear as he gave me the perfunctory kiss on my cheek. He straightened up and helped Dad climb the steep metal steps to the combine’s cab. Obviously, I needed to know a lot more about farming. It’s just a shame that I seemed to learn so many things by my mistakes.
Once I returned home, I realized my mother had already arranged wildflowers in vases around the house and had set the table for dinner. She placed silverware, napkins, and glasses for water and milk on the dining table.
“I just can’t add the toothpick holder,” she said. “I think it’s disgusting the way people pick their teeth at the table.”
“Oh, Mom. Not to worry. Most of the men only take them to use when they leave the meal,” I countered. “I’ve yet to see anyone actually use them when they’re eating.”
“Okay. But it just gripes me,” she said. “You’d think they were born in a barn—or in this case, raised on a farm.”
We both laughed at her comment and retreated to the kitchen to prepare the rest of the dinner: steak, salad, bread, potatoes, and the ever-present pitcher of milk. For the next few days of their vacation, we settled into a schedule of Mom helping me at home and Dad following Mike around the ranch. A day or so later, we heard loud banging at the front door.
“What’s going on?” I asked as I ran from the kitchen.
“Your potato cellar’s on fire!” A strange man in his forties and wearing a cowboy hat pointed to our ranch’s headquarters. I left the door open and raced back to the kitchen. As he followed me, I picked up the ranch radio. Mom left the laundry room to see who had arrived.
“Mike, the potato cellar’s on fire! Clear!” I yelled into the radio. My announcement went out over the airwaves to our ranch and to three other farms.
“Okay, Bobbi. Calm down. Nothing’s wrong,” Mike said. “We just sprayed the cellar with chemicals. I’ll explain when I get home. Not to worry. Clear.”
“I’m sorry,” the man behind me said. “There was so much smoke coming from the cellar, I assumed it was a fire.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “But I’ll certainly hear about this tonight. I’m sure the other ranchers are having fun after listening to another of my gaffes.”
“Sorry about that. My name’s Joe Tugaw. I run a few cattle south of here. Obviously, I don’t know much about potatoes.”
“Thanks, Joe. I’m Bobbi. Mike and I were married last summer. This is my mother, Florence Phelps. My parents are visiting from Florida. And as you can tell, I don’t know much about potatoes either.”
When Mike arrived home later in the evening, he told us Joe was a veterinarian from Utah and owned a small ranch in the nearby foothills. He added that Terry and Melvin were still laughing about my calling “Fire” over the radio.
“How was I to know? Joe was wearing a cowboy hat and seemed to know what he was talking about.”
“That’s okay. Just another lesson,” Mike smiled and joined my mother and father at the dining table. The following day my parents returned to Ft. Myers, and Mike and I settled back into our daily habits.
* * *
For my first Thanksgiving dinner at Sky Ranch, Mike invited his family to join us at our new home. His brothers, their wives and children, and Georgina’s parents and her brother’s family would get together at our place. Christa and Blaine chose to have Thanksgiving with their mother. Then they could spend Christmas at the ranch with their grandparents and not hurt anyone’s feelings.
Our moving boxes had been unpacked three months earlier and our home was decorated. While waiting for the big day, Mike and I placed six leaves into the dining table. He left to gather chairs while I set a formal table. With twelve gold-colored chargers under each dinner plate, I added china, sterling, crystal, candles, and flowers—but no toothpicks. The table looked exquisite and inviting. The children’s card table was similar but without the candles.
Inside my large, New England lobster pot, I added ten potatoes, peeled and quartered, and put them on the stove at a low setting. In a pan I combined a stuffing mixture, not from scratch but made from a box. Cinnamon rolls were soon to be baked and sat in a corner covered with wax paper and a towel, rising for their second time. This holiday recipe came from my father’s mother who was a wonderful baker. Her husband, my grandfather, had been a flour salesman in the early 1900s. On the other side of my family, my maternal grandmother barely cooked as she had staff to aid with kitchen chores. My mother’s background explained her void of culinary skills and thus, my lack of learning from her.
I stuffed a twenty-four-pound turkey with chopped onions, oranges, and apples. I covered the bird with aluminum foil, and we drove to his parents’ home, on the ranch three miles away. As if God were weaving a tapestry of colors right before our eyes, the hills had turned into reds, greens, and bright yellows. Numerous tumbleweeds blew across the road as we approached their house. It was another gorgeous, but blistery, autumn day.
Wearing our holiday finery, the women donned aprons over their dresses and helped Margaret in the kitchen. She had fixed her silver hair in tight curls and wore a flowered smock apron over her party dress. During the previous few days, she had made pies, cookies, and cakes from scratch: chocolate potato cake, chocolate chip cookies, apple and pumpkin pies. Sweet potatoes baked in her oven; a covered salad sat on the counter; peas, corn, and cranberry sauce were in separate containers; and a green bean casserole sat warming on her stove. At our house, we had the turkey, stuffing, potatoes, and cinnamon rolls. Plenty of food for twelve adults and six children.
“When are we eating?” Mike’s father called from their game room in the basement. The men had been playing pool while the women worked in the kitchen.
“Okay. We’ll leave now,” Margaret answered as she acquiesced to her husband’s suggestion.
“We’d better take everything,” Margaret said as the day dwindled to late afternoon. “I’ve yet to make gravy.” All the women took food containers and carried them on trays to their vehicles. A line of cars left my in-law’s place and paraded to our house. They eased into our driveway, one after another. Mike and I reached our backdoor before the rest of the clan. I walked into the kitchen while Mike greeted everyone as they entered, so proud to show off our new home. I strolled over to the top oven, opened the door, and raised the aluminum foil cover. There sat a beautiful turkey just as I had placed it two hours earlier: a creamy pink bird with no glossy brown skin. The oven was cool to the touch.
“But, Mike, I turned it on,” I said as I twisted to face him. “Look, you can see. It’s set for 350 degrees.”
“Yup, you did. It’s brand-new, so maybe it wasn’t wired correctly,” Mike said, sympathizing with me.
“Let me look,” Margaret said as she walked toward the oven. The rest of the guests had unloaded their coats in our bedroom, and the children were laying out a number of games they had brought with them. The men knew where we stashed the liquor and began filling their glasses while we held a cooking conference in the kitchen.
“You’re right, Bobbi,” Margaret said. “You set the temperature, but you didn’t turn the second dial to the ‘bake’ position. Didn’t
you notice the lack of smell?”
“No. We were at your house when it should have been cooking,” I said, tears forming in my eyes.
“Don’t worry,” Georgina said as she hugged me. “Let’s have some more wine and watch the guys play pool. Dinner will be ready before you know it.”
By the time the turkey was finally cooked, the family was exuberant—laughing and joking at every subject. With all the liquor flowing, I think that Thanksgiving became one of the cheeriest and most energetic ever. We sat around the table and Gary led the blessing. Another harvest was over, the crops were sold at good prices, and the new year looked promising.
Chapter Nine
Duck Hunting
“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Mike asked after I shot a duck and watched it fall from the sky.
“My father took me to a hunting school when I was in junior high. It was put on by the NRA,” I said. “That was just a lucky shot.”
Mike was an excellent hunter, and I liked to join him on his quest for ducks. During our first hunt with Sam, a hundred-pound black Labrador I had rescued before marrying Mike, we drove to Bell Rapids, a section of the Snake River near Hagerman. While Mike and I donned our waders and loaded shotguns, Sam disappeared. We called and called for him. Nothing but the pounding of rushing water cascading over rocks could be heard. Then we saw him. He had crossed the rapids and was coming back toward us, swimming through solid white water, with only the top of his large square head and wide eyes showing. As soon as he made it to our side, he emerged and shook a thousand beads of water from his coat. I ran my fingers over his muscular neck and broad sides. I knew from then on that he was absolutely safe. We no longer had to worry about him while we hunted near those swift rapids.
Mike had given me a Browning over and under shotgun for Christmas the year before. It was slim and light but offered a decent kick when it fired. I knew to stuff the stock butt into my shoulder and brace for the recoil. My shooting skills were limited, but I enjoyed being outdoors and experiencing the hunt.
Within a few minutes we saw ducks fluttering in the distance. We hid behind some bushes, keeping Sam close to our bodies. Mike shot his limit of six and I shot three. But what was really amazing was when I had my best shot ever. I raised the barrel directly over my head, inhaled, let out some breath and squeezed the trigger, leading the duck by a few feet. It worked. The duck fell from the sky into a patch of cattails, and Sam retrieved it as soon as the bird hit the ground.
When we returned home, Mike plucked the ducks in our laundry-room sink while I chopped onions, oranges, pears, and apples and added them around the bird breasts inside my ceramic roaster. At 350 degrees for about an hour, they turned out perfectly. Because I basted game birds with fruit, the resulting dinner was exceptionally moist and tender, as juicy as a ripe tomato and as rich as a luscious steak. My cooking skills were slowly improving.
On another of our hunts with Sam, we drove to the “firing line,” a section near the National Wildlife Reserve in Hagerman. Birds by the thousands rested in the Reserve on their way to and from Canada. At home, Sam went wild when he saw us getting out our guns. He raced around the house, in and out of Mike’s office, and out the kitchen backdoor. Sam knew he’d be invited to go with us, and he loved to retrieve.
Once we pulled into a level spot near the Reserve, we began the ritual of putting on waders and getting our guns ready for shooting. We heard duck chatter above us and the whistle of wings as the waterfowl approached. And once again, Sam disappeared. In the fifteen minutes it took us to prepare for hunting, Sam had left and retrieved twelve ducks from the river shores. We had our limit and had not even taken a shot!
“Shit! Look at this,” Mike grumbled as he surveyed the shoreline. He retrieved a plastic leaf bag from his pickup and snatched the dead ducks from the pond edge and placed them in a large bag. We then removed our waders, returned our guns to their cases, and climbed back into the truck with Sam right between us. He seemed to be smiling as he looked out the front window, maybe thinking what a wonderful job he had just accomplished. The pungent smell of wet dog permeated the pickup, and Sam was immediately relegated to the outside truck bed. Mike pulled a cigarette pack from his breast pocket and lit up. He backed out from our spot on the firing line and headed toward the ranch, muttering under his breath.
Mike buried Sam’s ducks in the farm dump while I prepared dinner. Over our hamburger meal, we talked with disgust about some hunters and their senseless attitude toward wildlife. Because so many shooters tended to hunt without a retriever, dead ducks littered the edge of the Snake River. We felt sickened by the unattractive scene as well as the waste of ducks.
When observing wildfowl in the air, I noticed duck wings flutter super-fast while the Canada goose tends to maneuver in a slower motion, squawking as it flies in a V-shape pattern. I never hunted geese since they mate for life. When one is shot, the “spouse” flies down to try to find its mate. It then becomes a target and is often shot.
Throughout Magic Valley hundreds of geese inundated local corn fields, a prime feeding territory. I enjoyed several goose dinners at the Twin Falls home of my good friends, Nancy and Doug Strand. Nancy was the first person I had met when I moved from California to Idaho. Even though I later relocated to Sky Ranch, she and Doug continued to include us in their fishing, hunting, and social activities. She taught me to cook goose, by stuffing and surrounding the body with fruit and onions. Doug also showed me how to grill elk meat. Using his recipe, I roasted venison after sautéing the deer meat in garlic butter and red wine.
Mike only hunted deer the first few years of our marriage. Then he switched completely to bird hunting and fishing. We always had an abundance of food at the ranch. Not only did we have meat from a ranch cow, but we also had unlimited potatoes, beans, peas, and onions that I stored in our small root cellar underneath the basement stairs. The ranch crops were fresh from the ground and unbelievably delicious.
Chapter Ten
Ground Blizzard
“We’re supposed to have a ground blizzard today,” Mike cautioned as he stood on the kitchen steps leading to the garage. “Be careful.”
I wondered what that meant as I backed out and headed to Twin Falls. I had now lived on the ranch five months and had never heard the expression “ground blizzard.” I imaged a heavy snowstorm— similar to what I had experienced as a youngster in New England.
Once I had settled in at my desk at the Times News, snow started in wide flakes, drifting steadily as it fell outside my office windows. The world began to turn white and the newspaper manager let everyone off early, giving us the warning, “Get home before the worst of the storm hits.”
Wearing a wool suit and a winter coat, I wrapped a plaid scarf securely about my neck and left the department. With my leather dress boots crunching on frozen snow, I hurried toward my car parked behind the building. A brutal wind stabbed ice crystals into my face; it felt like stinging nettles against my cheeks. I wiped my gloved hands over the windshield, removed most of the accumulated ice, and jumped into my trusty Subaru. It had a standard transmission and studded snow tires. I wasn’t concerned. With guidance from OK Tires, one of my newspaper accounts, I had had four studded snow tires placed on my vehicle a month earlier. Driving down Second Avenue to Highway 30, my windshield wipers valiantly whisked snow to the side. I detected few cars still on the road. The city looked like a ghost town. Most people had heeded the county-wide warning and were already in their homes. On my car radio, the weather broadcaster stated, “Winds could top sixty miles an hour.”
Away from the shelter of town buildings, snow slashed through the rays of house lights as my wipers struggled to keep up. When I stopped for a red light at Eastland, the wind intensified and the snow blew sideways. Trees bent from the strong gusts and my two-door sedan swayed with every blast. I managed to stay on the road, but not like several others. A pickup had overturned in a gully and a dozen cars had slid off both sides of the road.
> As I continued to drive, I spotted a few vehicles coming toward me, their headlights flickering through curtains of the blowing blizzard, their lights weak from the accumulating snow. When I pushed past the town of Kimberly, I became the only driver on Highway 30. The view of the countryside had by then become obliterated by a thick blanket of swirling snow. I saw only thirty or so feet of road ahead of me and I reduced my speed.
An hour passed before I reached 4900. I shivered from fear, not from the cold. The heater in my car was remarkable and my toes felt toasty warm. But as soon as I made the turn south toward the ranch, I could no longer see anything, not even the road. I was in a complete whiteout. My hands tightened around the steering wheel. And I was scared. Scared to death.
The wind slammed the snow so hard and fast across the surrounding farm land, the only thing I spied were the tops of telephone poles bordering the road. I shifted down and put my car in second gear. Inching my way a few hundred feet south, I crouched over the steering wheel and looked straight up and to the right. I wanted to be sure I stayed about ten feet to the left of the dark, wooden poles lining 4900. Finally, I came to the side of a thirty-foot-high stack of hay on the west side of the road. For its entire length, there was a miraculous clearing. The haystacks had blocked the blowing snow. I could finally see the road as I stared over the dashboard. There in front of me I saw a stopped car. I pulled behind it and waited. It never moved.
After pausing several minutes, I pulled my collar up, protecting myself from the biting wind that whipped around the hay stacks and ran from my car, squinting in the storm. I knocked on the driver’s window and stood freezing in the bitter cold. A young couple sat huddled inside. Its driver rolled down his car window, staring at me in disbelief. He told me he had radioed his family to let them know they were almost home. Being new to the area, I didn’t recognize them.
“I live about four miles down the road,” I shouted over the howling wind. “I’ll follow you.”