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.

The birth of our third child

Nearly a month short of Michael's second birthday and a few weeks short of Rebecca's first birthday, our third child and second daughter was born in Provo's Utah Valley Hospital. Rachael arrived at noon on Thursday, August 7, 1975. She was a big one—7 pounds 15 ounces, almost eight pounds. She was 20 inches long.

"All is well with Claudia and the baby," I wrote the next day in my journal. "Since I returned to work today, Claudia was not ex­pecting me to visit during the afternoon visiting hours. But I took off work and surprised her. She was so happy."

On Saturday evening, August 9, we went to the Dixon family reunion in the Payson Park. Even though she wasn't there, Claudia was the talk of the reunion for having just had a baby. We'd had two since the previous year's reunion. At that reunion, Rebecca hadn't been born yet.

"Claudia and Rachael came home from the hospital today," I wrote on Sunday, August 10. Home was a little brick house on 300 West in Provo, where we occupied the main floor and rented the basement level to four single college students. "Michael Adam seemed pleased; Rebecca less so, which surprised me. I thought she'd be too little to even know what was going on. It is good to have Claudia back."

Claudia's parents were visiting from southern California, her mom to help out with the new baby. Or, more accurately, to help out with not-quite-two-year-old Michael and not-quite-one-year-old Rebecca.

On Monday I had gone to work in Salt Lake City. Late that afternoon, August 11, a brief thunder­storm hit Provo and moved north along the Wasatch Front. Claudia was sitting in our front room nursing four-day-old Rachael. Michael Adam was next to her patting the baby. Rebecca was on her way to the kitchen looking for her grandma, who was putting clothes into the dryer.

That's when the lightning struck a tree overhanging our driveway, only ten feet from where Claudia was sit­ting. It sounded like a tremendous explosion. The sound was deafening. In the kitchen the dryer and stove sizzled before the power went out.

When I arrived home from work, there was evidence of shattered tree all over our driveway. For about three days, until the huge tree was completely removed, we had the most popular tree in the neighborhood.

I blessed and named Rachael in the fast and testimony meeting of the BYU Eleventh Branch on Sunday, September 7:

"Our Heavenly Father, by the power and authority of the holy Melchizedek Priesthood which we bear as elders in the Church of Jesus Christ, we take this infant child in our arms to give her a name and a first father's blessing. And the name which we give to her at this time is Rachael Cleverly. And by this name may she be known upon the records of Thy church and the records of this land.

"And may she, as she grows and develops, as she begins to perform the mission for which she was sent to this earth, may she be aware of the great heritage behind this name which she bears. May she pattern her life after the great woman men­tioned in the scriptures, Rachael of old.

"And we bless her, Heavenly Father, that she may grow and develop, that she may be able to do that which she was sent here to this earth to do. We recognize that she has been re­cently in Thy presence. We pray that Thou wilt bless us—especially those of us who are her parents and family, who will have the greatest influ­ence upon her—that we may teach her all that she needs to know to someday return to Thy presence. And may we be able to pro­vide for her the proper environ­ment that she may grow mentally, physically, socially, and spiritually, that she may be a valiant servant and child of Thine.

"We are grateful for this precious spirit who has come to be with us. We pray that we be worthy of her. May all be done according to Thy will. We say these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen."

Lightening strike

Monday, August 11, 1975, was a typical summer day in Utah Valley. Late that afternoon a brief thunder­storm hit Provo and moved north along the Wasatch Front. Claudia was sitting in our front room nursing four-day-old Rachael. Michael Adam was next to her patting the baby. Rebecca was on her way to the kitchen looking for her grandma, who was putting clothes into the dryer.

That's when the lightning struck a tree overhanging our driveway, only ten feet from where Claudia was sit­ting. It sounded like a tremendous explosion. The sound was deafening. In the kitchen the dryer and stove sizzled before the power went out.

When I arrived home from work, there was evidence of shattered tree all over our driveway. The Provo Daily Herald had come to take pictures and ran a little story the next day with one of the fellows who lived in our basement standing next to his lightening-damaged tree holding a piece of a branch in his hand. No mention that it was really our tree.

For about three days, until the huge tree was completely removed, we had the most popular tree in the neighborhood.

Childhood pets

During the years I was growing up in eastern Oregon, we had a family dog named Red. I do not know what breed he was. Like most dogs, however, he loved to chase after balls or sticks and bring them back to be thrown again. We could tell when it was about to rain because Red would eat grass before an approaching storm. By the time we moved to Idaho in 1959, Red was getting pretty old in dog years. On one of several trips to the new house, he jumped out of the back of the pickup and was never seen again.

I think we had other dogs in later years, but I do not particularly remember any of them.

I am not particularly a dog person. That stems, I suppose, from having been bit by dogs during my growing up years in the Nampa area. The two incidents I recall both stem from when I used to go door to door trying to sell greeting cards. One was from a yappy little dog that bit me on my heel. So much for my mother's oft-repeated adage that a barking dog doesn't bite. The other bite came from a large dog, a German shepherd I believe, that quietly slipped up behind me and bit my buttocks before I even knew he was there. Not a warning bark or growl. Nothing. Maybe these incidents also explain why I've never been interested in being a door-to-door salesman.

Once on my mission in Brazil I had also had an encounter with another small yapping dog that tried to bite me and would have succeeded had not the owner right at that precise moment yanked him by the tail away from me. The dog got my pants but fortunately not my leg.

Claudia's family, during the years she was growing up in southern California, had a beagle named Sunny Boy. Knowing that healthy dogs have wet noses, she felt his nose once and, finding it dry, poured water on it to make sure he would stay healthy.

Her family also had goldfish, which once upon a time she killed by pouring milk into the fish bowl. She reasoned that if milk were good for her it must also be good for fish. Wrong.

In later years the Langes also had a German shepherd named Gunther. He was the family's dog at the time Claudia and I were married in November 1972. Just a month after we were married, we drove to southern California to spend our first Christmas with the Langes in San Gabriel. Claudia's younger brother upstaged Christmas morning as we were first gathering around the Christmas tree. David came into the living room, staff in hand, dressed in a robe, with Gunther at his side playing the part of a humble sheep, as David proclaimed in comedic voice, "And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night" (Luke 2:8). The comic moment was unforgettable, classic David, the stuff of happy memories.

The runaway manure spreader

A large irrigation ditch ran across the northern border of our farm in Oregon. A narrow path where the tractor or a pickup could drive ran along our side of the canal. Once, when we still had horses instead of a tractor, some of my older brothers were coming off this ditch bank road onto the main dirt road that ran in front of our place, the boundary road between Oregon and Idaho, with the horses pulling a manure spreader.

Some­thing spooked the horses, and they started run­ning down the hill toward the yard. The bottom of the spreader bed, which one of my brothers was stand­ing on, would move like a conveyer belt whenever the wheels were en­gaged, which they were on this occasion, and he was run­ning at break-neck speed on top of the spreader while hanging onto the reins trying to stop the horses.

Had he lost his foot­ing, he would have gone out the back of the spreader and been mangled or even killed. Some­how he managed to hold on, running in place as fast as he could, and sur­vived the sharp turn off the road into the yard, where the horses stop­ped short as soon as they reached the barn.

The scary canal

We lived on an eighty-acre farm in the Big Bend area of eastern Oregon when I was a child. It is the only portion of the state east of the Snake River.

A dirt road ran along the eastern edge of our farm and on up and over the hill that was to the north of us. That road was the state line between Oregon and Idaho. We had substantial ties to both states. My parents both worked in Idaho. We went to school in Oregon. Our mailing address was in Idaho. We went to church in Oregon. Our telephone number was in Idaho. But we lived in Oregon.

A paved road ran along the southern edge of our farm. That road headed west to Adrian, which was about six miles west and north from where we lived. Adrian is where I went to school. Going in the other direction, that same road turned by our house and headed south toward the Snake River, which was about a mile away, and then mostly east from there to Wilder and Greenleaf and Caldwell.

Someone else's farm was to the west of ours.

A large irrigation ditch, a canal really, ran across the northern border of our property. A sagebrush-covered ridge that was too rocky and steep for farming was on the other side of the canal. A narrow path where the tractor or a pickup could drive ran along our side of the canal. And that was what was scary. I used to panic when I was riding in the truck with my dad and he'd turn around, repeatedly back­ing and pull­ing forward enough times to turn the thing around in an area that was way too small for such turns, and with my knowing that some day he was going to back right into the ditch, and we'd drown, and that would be the end of that.

But he never did.

Really stupid things

Sometimes we do really stupid things.

I recall a story from my dad's childhood in northern Utah. His family lived on a farm in south Davis County in what is now North Salt Lake and Woods Cross, and the Bamberger train, the interurban rail line that during the first half of the Twentieth Century ran from Salt Lake to Ogden, passed right in front of their place. There was a Bamberger stop in the area known as Cleverly Crossing (as depicted in the early photograph below from the Utah State Historical Society). Dad and his brothers and sisters used to ride the Bamberger to Kaysville, where they attended Davis High, the only high school in the county at that time.


The story handed down from my father is that on a winter's morning, while waiting for the Bamberger to arrive, he licked the cold rail, probably on a dare, and his tongue stuck to the cold metal. With the train approaching, he did the only sensible thing a person in that predicament could do. He yanked his tongue away from the rail. That must have really hurt. And I doubt he ever tried that trick again.

My own really stupid story was not as life-threatening and may actually have been repeated more than once. I too grew up on a farm. We had cows and used electric fences to keep them in, except that cows, despite their being stupid beasts, always seemed to figure out how to get out anyway. It came as a shock to learn that if you pee on an electric fence, you feel it throughout the entire body. Not a pleasant sensation.

Swimming

When I was a boy we lived within a mile of the Snake River, which curved to the south and west of our farm in a great bend that gave the area its name, Big Bend. We never went swimming in the river. Mama always warned us of its treacherous undertows and cur­rents. Plus I always secretly knew it had snakes swim­ming in it, and snakes and I respectfully kept our dis­tance, thank you.

We did swim, however, in a swim­ming hole a quarter or a half a mile south of the farm house. The swimming hole was at the junc­tion of a couple of drain ditches and had a culvert, a small, moss-covered cement thing, we used to slide down into the water, a welcomed relief on a hot summer afternoon. (I visited the spot after I was a grown-up and was utterly amazed at how much smaller it was than when I was little.)

At other times we would drive to a place called White Rock, located somewhere on the Owyhee River, a much smaller and evi­dently less treach­erous stream, since Mama let us swim there.

Some­time in the summer of 1955, just after I turned six, I nearly drowned at White Rock. (Mama mentioned in her diary our going to White Rock three times during the summer of 1955: July 23, July 25, and July 28. She did not mention my near-drowning, but she did record on July 28 that while up swimming she shut her little finger in the car door and "it sure hurt.")

Anyway, back to drowning. I was wad­ing along the side of the river in shallow water, stepping among the rocks that covered the bottom in the spot where I was. Some of my older bro­thers, swimming farther out in the stream, had seen some fish and were trying to catch them with their hands.

The next thing I remem­ber was standing or sitting on a rock that was slippery, with my body mostly under the water, when a fish splashed right in front of my face, just inches away. It startled me enough that I lost my balance, and I slipped out into the water, my head underwater, and I started drifting down­stream. I didn’t know how to swim, and I don’t think anyone had noticed me go under. It seemed like I floated along under­water for the longest time, as my brief little life passed by, although I was probably under only a few seconds.

As I floated by my brother Kay, who was thirteen, he saw my foot in the water. As he grabbed for it I remember his yell­ing something like, "Hey, here's that fish!" And he pulled a cough­ing, sputtering little brother foot first out of the water.

The whole experience scared me terribly. For years I had a great fear of any water I couldn’t see the bottom of, such as a lake or a river. A few years later, when I was a teenager, this fear kept me from earning the Eagle rank in Scouting. By the time I quit Scouting, I was only two merit badges short of Eagle—swimming and lifesaving.

By the summer of 1967, just after I graduated from high school, I finally worked up the courage to try water skiing for the first time. And I actually survived.

My earliest memory

Water is a part of my very earliest memory. We were out on a lake in a small motorboat. It started raining, and I must have been absolutely terrified. All I can remember is water. Water everywhere—water in the vast lake, water falling out of the gray sky, water spraying on me from the noisy motor. And, most likely, water streaming out of my bawling two-year-old eyes.

According to my mother's diary for July 1, 1951, we were with my grandparents on an outing at Jenny Lake in Wyoming's Teton National Park. That would have been two and a half weeks before I turned two.