The fifteen-foot Polynesian woman

One of my children's favorite stories from my growing up years involves what our daughter Anna refers to as the Fifteen-Foot Polynesian Woman. I do not remember with any certainty when or exactly where this incident occurred, likely sometime during the mid-1960s, when I would have been 15 or 16 or thereabouts.

My brother Jerry, who is eleven years older than I am, was a milk man and would make home deliveries in Nampa and the rural areas near town. During the years I was in high school, I would often go with him in his milk truck on Saturday mornings or, when school was out, on summer mornings.

Late one spring or summer morning, along toward midday, as we were concluding our rural deliveries somewhere south and west of Nampa, out near Lake Lowell, we were driving along a remote road in our dairy truck. There were tall weeds or bull rushes growing along the ditch or borrow pit to the left of the road. As we were driving along, we saw a woman standing off the side of the road. Just standing there. A gentle smile on her face. She was dressed in a long blue dress, perhaps a muumuu, or some other flowing gown of some sort. She appeared to be somewhere from the islands—perhaps Hawaiian or Polynesian.

It startled us both. "Did you see that?" we said to each other. We looked out the mirrors behind us and saw no one. We stopped to investigate further. Still nothing.

As we tried to process what we had just seen, we thought the woman in the blue muumuu, who was standing out among the growth in the borrow pit, would have had to be very tall—perhaps eight or ten feet tall—for her to be eye level with us in the truck. (Her height, in later tellings of the story, grew to fifteen feet.)

Kind of spooky.

Yet we both had seen her. And it was broad daylight. And to this day, nearly half a century later, I have no clear explanation of what Jerry and I saw that day. Or why.