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Distant Thunder - A Life Remembered Growing Up "Ranching in those days in the border country took raw guts. By the time I was five years old I was working the cattle on horseback and milking six cows twice a day. I was too young to go to school but not too young to do a man's work. My dad worked harder than anybody. He was up before dawn and quit after dark, seven days a week. He would irrigate the alfalfa fields at night, turning the water into a field at one end, then going down to the far corner and lying down on the ground to go to sleep. When the water touched him and woke him up he'd turn the water into the next field and go lie down again. He did it all night. It was the only way he could get the irrigating done, all the ranch work, and a little sleep. I never saw anyone work as hard as he did. It was the only thing he knew, and he did it all his life. They taught him as a boy that hard physical labor was the only thing that justified your existence, and if you didn't work hard you were a bum. No wonder he had such a violent temper. I had a brother Leo, and sister Alma, both older than I. If my dad caught us playing like kids once in a while, like wading in the mud in the irrigation ditch to cool off our feet, he would double up a rope and beat us ‘til the piss ran down our legs. I grew up hating my father. I don't anymore. I understand now what a tough life he had. Many years later I began to realize it was his background of growing up on the western frontier in unimaginable hardship that made him what he was. But whatever caused it sure gave me a heavy load of emotional problems to carry around with me for the rest of my life. I never understood or knew how to cope with them." |
