Spring has sprung! Or it ….
Spring has sprung! Or it will have by the time you are reading this.
Today is one of those late winter days; it might as well be spring. It is sunny and 50 degrees and here and there a few piles of snow are left to melt. If my memory is correct we only have one more snow coming to rest on the robin’s tail.
So what’s next? Spring and sticks to pick up, lawns to rake and get at those darn dandelions before they get going too bad.
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Before I get any further, I need to bring you up-to-date on something I mentioned last week. I’d mentioned not liking boiled cabbage and would wait for the national Swedish Meatball Day. Well, I looked it up and while they didn’t mention the Swedish part, everyone knows what I’m talking about. Would you believe that day is March 9. So we’ve missed it this year but just wait for 2022.
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I took a ride the other day to check out the new residential development in Spencer. That is huge and when it gets filled with new homes it will mean Spencer has grown again. I think Kobs Blossom Shop was about the only thing down in that neighborhood when we moved here.
The same could be said for Highway 13. I think the Village Plaza, where the Citizens State Bank of Loyal is located, was the end of the village then too. The Village Board was approached one night to approve a new addition way down to Willow Drive.
Arlyn Ewert, the village clerk announced he would call Northern States Power the next morning to order electrical service. He was informed that section had not been a part of the village and it was served by Clark Electric. So apparently we have two electrical companies serving the village.
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I was watching the national news the other night and a story came on about an accident. I didn’t think too much about it until I saw some of the rescue workers attempting to save two people whose pickup truck had gone over a bridge railing. There it hung, still attached to the camper it was towing. When one of the rescue workers walked in front of the camera and it read, “Magic Valley”, I thought, gee, I know where that is. There can only be one Magic Valley and that is in southern Idaho from Twin Falls west. I’ve been there many times as my sister Anna married a man who lived just west of there at Buhl.
You might say they met by accident as Art, her husband, was involved in the same accident in which my brother Ernest was in when he was killed at an army base in 1943. I don’t know who started writing, but I think it was Art, to explain how the accident happened and how sorry he was to hear about Ernest.
Before long, Anna and Art started corresponding to each other, which finally resulted in their marriage in March of 1946. He turned down a suggestion that he stay in Wisconsin and farm, claiming he would have a problem in dry weather if it didn’t rain. He needed to go back home to Idaho where irrigation was the answer.
Irrigation is what resulted in the name Magic Valley as the then desert land turned into great agricultural land just by adding water. At the time it was just irrigation ditches, but now that has changed to the huge sprayers which can do so many more acres.
It all begins in Twin Falls and goes westward along the Snake River. They claim it was part of the old Oregon Trail, which became Highway 30 before the Interstate came along.
With Anna and Art living there I had occasion to visit the area a number of times and all I can say is it is beautiful. There is just so much to see and do. I have never tired from going and would go again tomorrow if it was not so far away.
Twin Falls is a city of 50,000 people and Buhl, which is where Anna and Art lived, is just 15 or 16 miles to the west along the river. Twin Falls is the home of Shoshone Falls, a waterfall bigger than Niagara Falls in New York. It is a 45-foot higher fall. There is a catch to it. The people who control the river for irrigation sometimes block off the water to the falls. It is where Evel Knievel tried to jump the river canyon and failed.
When I went out to Anna’s funeral I was happy to see, looking to the north that you can see Sun Valley and still beyond that is a national park called Crater of the Moon. It is an old volcano and there is not a spear of grass to be found. Actually kind of a scary place.
The Snake River below Buhl has an area called The Thousand Springs and it is quite impressive to drive along and see the water gushing out of the river banks. Then just west of Buhl is an old historic site called Balancing Rock. It is quite the thing to see as from a distance it looks like it might be just standing in thin air.
What is interesting is that Idaho provides 70 percent of the trout raised in the United States. And that is yet another story. When I went out for Anna’s funeral a friend of Art and Anna had us out for the evening.
When I left to go home they gave me some frozen trout to take along. I had no place to carry them so I wrapped them in newspapers and put them in my suitcase. It was a busy Sunday, the plane to Salt Lake City was jammed and so was the one from there to the Twin Cities.
When I went to pick up my suitcase it didn’t show up on the turntable. So I drove home without it and the next morning had the travel agency check on it. They found it and had it delivered. Thankfully the trout still had some ice crystals in it. And they were great.
