This top picture shows the new large grain bins placed around the old elevator.
A major flaw was the soil our family left there. Dad cussed the situation for a long time, and I'm sure my grandfather did too, although I think they did it incorrectly.
There was always so much spoilage in the bigs that were there, and at the bottom of the elevator, it was a mess as well.
There was heavy clay soil there, which would trap moisture at the base of the granaries. The porous nature of cement meant that eventually it would rise through and effect some grain at the bottom.
Usually a pre-harvest job was shovel away spoiled grain out of the bins, after we had carefully emptied all of them. We used a scoop shovel, and the spoil varied from a few inches on sections of the shed floors to as much six to eight inches. There was massive amounts, but it wasn't like the other jobs we did later.
Dad dozed away much of the clay and set a base of gravel, which we packed to avoid future problems. That layer would allow moisture to sink instead of rise.
A bit of spoil often happens, but the new bins just didn't show the really bad mistake made much earlier. That what happens in projects like this: you learn how to do things better. And dad was a perfectionist.
The tall elevator was also something I hated. Grandpa Cles would climb to the top, which was about 35-40 yards in the air, about the height of a five or six-story building I suppose. Dad told me how his dad would grease parts on that elevator each year, sometimes twice. Dad did it as well, at least on the side where he could reach it.
Grandpa would straddle the top and lean over the back, his legs gripped about the steel and grease the other parts dad could never reach.
Like my father and his mom, I had a fear of heights, but unlike dad, it was a problem for me to get to the top to do the "easy" part. Eventually I made it, but the ladder leading to the apex of the elevator was a leaning thing, and although secure, you looked down at nothing but the ground--about 60 feet or more below.
Another bad part about that elevator was cleaning the bottom. Again the clay made things miserable. There was a section at the bottom called the pit. For years, dad would descend and sweep and scrap spoilage into a five gallon bucket. Much was still very wet. I lifted the bucket with a rope, and if it hit against the side, dad let me know from the bottom. Slop would spill on him, and there was nowhere to go down there. You sat and basically just scrapped the horrible stuff. I did the honors the last years we were on the farm. Dad was doing something else to prepare for harvest.The last time was the worst. I cleaned the pit. While working, I noticed a dry snakeskin down there, which is something you see in late summer when snakes become blind after losing that layer of old skin.
Days later, I swept the grain shed and cleaned the grates. In one corner, I reached down for a bucket, and six inches from my hand I spotted a rattlesnake. I killed it immediately, just like we did anytime we found one, but I realized immediately that my little coiled friend had been down in the pit. There I would have had no chance to get out of the way before it struck at me.
This last picture shows the bins we discarded. As I remember there were three. The metal was poor, and the construction was equally bad. It was all my family could get in that time when the world was at war.
When we moved the three bins, we spent a week digging the soil away from the base. Dad purchased a long thick cable we wrapped around the very bottom. Several times we tried to pull them away with our large four wheel drive Steiger. The massive machine had over 400 horses, so engine power was not a problem, but the tires would just spin.
We spent more time digging around the base.
"Let's try it one more time. I climbed into the tractor, put it in gear and started, but unlike other times, I gave it full throttle. Dad motioned frantically for a moment to shut it down, but after a slight spin, the granary jerked free and slid along the grass.
Dad jumped joyfully. I pulled the discarded bin far away from the grain shed. Dad ran alongside the tractor, and I could hear him saying something. When I stopped and let the tractor idle, I heard what he said: "Jonie the Miracle Worker."
It's how I remember my dad. It was the ultimate compliment. Dad knew what I did, and after I had to move my family north to a better teaching job, he paid me another compliment. "I never realized how much I relied upon you," he said to me over the phone.
I still came back summers to help dad for a couple of years, but then dad became sick with cancer again.
We have a special bond. He was my mentor, my teacher, my friend. I learned things that made me very successful in everything I did. When I received Foreign Language Teacher of the Year honors for the state of Idaho in the mid 90's, they used the term miracle worker too, describing how I took a tiny program with 30 students and made it a full-scheduled curricular spot with over 160 students in one year.
I wish my dad could have been there, when my former professor Dr. Cervantes presented me with that honor. She called me a miracle worker too, but she didn't call me Jonie. That was only something for my dad.
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