Frank’s Place

   

     Last week’s deluge filled not only the dam on the Lickdab.  It brought up a bag of memories from “the old days” as we used to term it to our parents and their generation.  I now understand their amusement of having their childhood viewed as “the old days.”

     Standing by the overflowing dam brought back the only time that I can remember of seeing my dad in a bathing suit.  It was a warm Sunday afternoon.  We all loaded up in the Ford pickup and trucked down to the dam, Mom and Dad and baby in the front, “the boys” standing in the back hanging on to and looking over the grain sides of the pickup.  When we arrived at the dam, it was full then, too.

     Dad, barefooted, stepped into the water a ways, then took a dive forward, swam across the pond and back.  For a while he was swimming beneath the surface.  When he reached his starting point, he stood up and walked back onto the grass, the water dripping off him as he wiped it out of his hair and eyes.  I stood there and watched it all, fascinated.  I didn’t know he knew how to swim.

     Playing in the mud and water was always a fun pastime.  We could make dams in the streams that followed in the wake of an afternoon thunderstorm.  We made boats out of everything we could, little pieces of wood, paper, scrap metal and floated them down the shallow muddy streams of the run off.  The fun only lasted so long.  Certainly by the next morning the estuaries were all dried up and navigation had to be overland.

     When the dam and creek filled up, however, it afforded a larger window of time for playing in the mud and water, time to create fancier and larger watercraft.  Thus it was that we built rafts to float on the dam.  The cargo was us.

     The materials for raft-building were readily available.  The Frank Horak homestead site was nearby.  There was an old house, the remains of a granary, and a still-functional barn with a corral.  There was plenty of old wood, one-inch planks and some dimensional lumber.  I guess we must have recycled nails.  We even had a reclaimed hammer we found on the premises, a camping hammer Dad called it.  It survives. 

     The raft story is a three bears story.  My oldest brother had the biggest raft.  It might have been four or five feet by eight feet.  It was made by nailing two cross boards across several side-by-side parallel boards.  He could stand on it and pole it along. 

     My older brother had a smaller raft.  It might have been an old barn door.  I don’t remember for sure, but it would support him.

      The baby bear raft was three boards, one-by-sixes nailed loosely in the form of an H.  I wasn’t a very good nailer, a deficiency I have never overcome.  I spent far more time trying to get the three boards to stay together then I did in the water.  I suppose a snowboarder or a skateboarder could have stood up on it, but I couldn’t.  I had to straddle it like a horse.  Even then, it drew four or five inches of water.  I had to propel it by kicking my legs, most of the time my feet touching the muddy bottom.

     I have no idea how much time we spent building and modifying the rafts and getting them to the water.  Probably a whole lot more than we did navigating for sure.  I seem to recall that the bigger two rafts stayed around for multiple uses, while my puny effort floated off the next time the dam overflowed.

      The material supply for our rafts, the Frank Horak place, also provided other entertainments.  Of course the house was haunted.  It was a two-story with a basement.  It wasn’t a great feat to enter the main floor.  The steps were gone, so it was a bit of a climb to get into the house.  Going upstairs was a bit riskier, especially when the stairs deteriorated.  We did go upstairs some.  But I never found the courage to enter the dark old basement.  What would we find there? Snakes?  Spiders?  Ghosts?

    In the 1950’s, Dad tore down the old house to build a new barn.  The basement is now a small square cement hole in the ground which has collected a lot of trash.

     There was an old barn that we still used some when I was a preschooler.  I remember Dad and Harold Drier, the cattle truck driver, “working” calves (castrating the young bulls) in the old barn after the cattle going to market were loaded on the cattle truck.  Being a cattle truck driver must have been a lot of fun then, too.

     There was a loading corral which we kept up and improved upon using lumber from the old barn when it began to collapse.  To get to the corral to load, the cattle truck had to cross the Lickdab, which in many, many cases was no problem.  It was dry with gently sloping banks.  But there were two occasions when it wasn’t dry. 

    The first occasion, I was too young to help when the truck got stuck in the creek bottom.  It took our tractor and two or three neighbors’ tractors with plenty of chain to get the loaded truck dislodged and on its way.

     In the second incident, I took the truck driver, F.T. Link, up to the farmyard.   F. T. drove the pickup, and I drove the tractor down to the site where we were able to get him out of the creek without too much trouble. 

     After that last incident, we decided it made more sense to have a loading facility at the farmyard corrals rather than maintaining a separate place with the disadvantage of needing to cross the Lickdab to get to it.  The new facility got used only a few times before the cattle business came to an end.

     There was one other entertaining feature of Frank’s place, an old cottonwood tree.  It was the sole tree on the place.  It nestled in a dent in the creek bank.  It was dead for as long as I remember.  Dad always said Frank salted it to kill it.  Mom would chip in, imitating Frank’s pronunciation, saying that Frank didn’t want the “Federal Landbank ‘teeves’” to get that tree.  They foreclosed on him, along with several other homesteaders in the area.  Apparently, the tree was one of Frank’s prized possessions, and he refused to have it fall into the possession of the evil lender.

        You could still climb it in my earliest memories, but the limbs became brittle and broke with weight.  It was dangerous beyond my risk tolerance.  Eventually, it fell down and rotted away.

   

     The tree stood in the hollow above the water puddle.  In the background is the remnant of another old corral.

    Now, if we had to build a raft or anything else from the Horak place, it would have to be made of old concrete or wire. The wood has all rotted or washed away.   Scavengers have removed all the household items that once were scattered around the homestead.

     A footnote:  Nate Einertson once told me he was born in Frank’s house.  His dad Alfred was working for Frank and Olga was cooking and keeping house for Frank.  Part of their pay was room and board.  They were living with Frank when it came time for Nate to arrive on the scene.

      In the foreground closest to the water is the old granary foundation.  Above it is an old well.  The basement is above and to the right of the well.