In 1962, Eric and Jari and I moved to Bend and lived with my sister Mary for a couple of months. She and her husband, Oliver owned ten acres south of Bend. It was in the spring. Oliver had horses and in riding through the open country south of their house, we discovered the big irrigation ditch. It was almost as big as a river, so bright and inviting in the warm sun. Where we were riding must have been where Sun River is now.
Oliver owned a paving company that had heavy equipment. He brought home some old but mended inner tubes from large tractor tires. They were about four feet across. We piled them in the back of my old chevy station wagon and took them down to the big ditch where we used them to float down the sparkling water. There were rocks in the water so we had to sit up on the edge of the tubes or we would get our bottoms scraped. We tied ropes around them for hand holds. We could not keep the tubes going straight ahead; when they hit a rock they would spin in circles. Although the water wasn’t even two feet deep the ditch had rapids, just like a real river, and the tubes would whirl and spin down the rapids. We thought this was great fun.
One day we went further down stream than usual. Jari and I were on one tube and Eric on another. We went over an especially thrilling set of rapids that whirled us under an over-hanging willow branch and scraped Jari and me off into the rapids. Jari was wearing a life jacket, so she just bobbed to the surface. I was badly scraped from my waist to my knee. Eric was not scraped off. He was the hero of the day. He jumped off his tube and helped Jari out of the water. The inner tubes floated on down the next set of rapids and hung up on–guess what?–a barbed wire fence that went across the ditch right down to the water level. If we had not gotten scraped off by the willow, we would have run into the barbed wire fence right at the foot of the next rapids!
Sometimes when I look back at how foolhardy I used to be, I wonder how any of us survived.
