Sisters

Ellen

My sister Ellen is 3 years older than me. 
I would not characterize our early life together as completely loving; she was more likely to try to beat me up than she was to be nice to me, but there were times when we were friends.  The love hate relationship might have started when I broke her thumb when I was 3 years old.  It was probably an accident.  I dropped a rock on her thumb.  We were living in a tent in Bandelier National Monument near Los
Alamos while Daddy helped develop the atomic bomb during WWII.  He was a lieutenant in the Navy and didn’t have
enough rank for family housing.  For more detail see http://www.afewthingsilearned.com/408737001 .  For kids this was super fun.  There was a creek, Indian caves, trees
to climb, wildlife to see and lots of rocks.  But Ellen’s thumb is still shorter than the other one. 

After the war was won, we got a house and moved up to Los Alamos.  The first house was a pre-fabricated small house, but a year or so later we moved into a real house in the newly built Western Area of Los Alamos.  The Western area was on a mesa surrounded by canyons and the Jamez Mountains. 
This is high 7500 feet elevation ponderosa pine forest area, and again was a super place to be a kid. 

Ellen, our neighbor Bobby and I spent many days in the canyon near our house.  We had a code of behavior including how to dress – canyon colors to blend in, no loud noises, moving slowly so we could avoid being detected.  Our section of the canyon was the lower canyon, but the upper canyon was the domain of the dreaded Bradbury gang.  This gang was headed by Jim and John Bradbury, the sons of Norris Bradbury, the Director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, but I don’t think I knew that at the time, nor would we have cared.  There was essentially no class distinction in Los Alamos. 
We were all superior.  Anyway, Jim and John were
several years older than we were so we were careful not to have much direct contact with them in the canyon.  When
we did run into each other fierce pine cone wars would break out, but they were usually pretty ineffectual because we wouldn’t get close enough to actually hit each other.  We both had forts.  One of our main objectives was to find their
fort and destroy it.  This was pretty dangerous because they might be in it.  We did once find it and wrecked it; it was a pretty sorry fort anyway consisting of some logs and branches over a gap between two large boulders. 

They never did find our fort.  It was a shallow cave under some boulders and tree roots.   I
vividly remember one summer afternoon we were in the canyon and a violent thunderstorm came up.  We were huddled in
our fort, I was the youngest – probably 6 years old and was scared and crying and Ellen and Bobby were stuffing our lunch – egg salad sandwiches into my mouth to shut me up. 
The amazing part of this story is that Daddy found us.  It must have been a weekend and he was home, but our parents only had a vague idea of where we all went when we were in the canyon.  But he came to the edge of the canyon and whistled for us, we heard him and climbed up, wet muddy, scared and stuffed –  at least I was. 

And by the way, 12 or 13 years later Ellen married John Bradbury.  Turned out he was an OK guy. 

There was another time when Ellen and I got into a serious predicament.  We
decided to walk up above the Western Area houses and found the water tanks that supplied the water to the housing development.  These were big tanks that were in an area that was blasted out of rock to make a flat floor for the tanks.  The
rock walls of this area were natural climbing challenges, maybe 30 feet high.  We climbed up, but couldn’t get
down.  Fear, lack of hand and foot holds, down is harder than up, for whatever reason we were stuck.  We were far enough up the Jamez Mountain that yelling for help was not working, just too far from the last houses.  It was getting dark, past dinner time, we were stuck, more and more afraid.  Again. Daddy found us.  How he
knew where to look for us, I have no idea.   It took the fire department to get us down. 

When I was in 4th
grade and Ellen was in 7th grade, she protected me from getting beat up by the class bully.  Earl was bigger than any other 4th grader, (probably had been held back a time or two) and for some reason he took a dislike to me.   He
said that after school the next day he was going to beat me up.  I asked Ellen to help me out, she said she would,
and Earl never showed up.  She was a very tough kid and Earl knew it. 

When I was in 5th
grade we moved to The Valley.  At the time in Los Alamos you couldn’t own a home; all housing was rented from
the Government.  My parents wanted to own and to have some land.  So they bought a house on 4 or 5 acres in the Espanola Valley on the Rio Grande near Black Mesa. 
The house was not really finished but was livable.  Finishing
it and taking care of the land was a non-ending task for Daddy and his reluctant worker – me.  For more details
see http://www.afewthingsilearned.com/408736991 .  Ellen was 13 and immediately had to have a horse.  It has been my observation that girls love horses much more than boys do.  So we bought a horse.  Star was a big black horse with a white star on his forehead.  Star was a barrel raiser.   Barrel racing is a rodeo event in which three 55 gallon empty oil drums are set in a triangle in a pattern like first, second and third base in baseball, but ~100 feet apart rather baseball’s spacing of 60 feet.  Home plate is where the racer starts.  The horse must be fast and able to turn on a dime.  That was Star.  So Ellen became a barrel racer.  Most barrel racers are girls because they are light, the horse isn’t carrying as much as he would if a man were riding him.  Think of a horse starting at home plate, running at 40 mph to first base, going around the barrel, running to third base, around that barrel, tearing to second base, then turn around that barrel and then running at top speed back
to the starting line where he has to make an immediate stop because this is in a rodeo arena and there is a fence at the end.   Very exciting for the horse, rider and the fans.  Whoever does this the fastest without knocking over a barrel is the winner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_racing 

Star was an athlete, as was Ellen.  And like most human athletes he became very excited when he knew that he would race, and he remained very excited after racing.   
Ellen use to practice at our house in the valley.  All
it took were three oil drums.  One time after she had run the barrels several times she asked me to cool Star down.  That is, ride him slowly until he calms down and we could put him in his horse lot and groom him and feed and water him.  I was a good rider so saw no problem.  But Star had other ideas.  He took the bit in his teeth and took
off at a dead run (40mph) through the neighbor’s apple orchard.  The tree limbs were barely high enough for
him to get under them, not enough for him and a rider.  I did the old Indian trick of getting over alongside his neck
and hung on.  I had essentially no control of the horse, but did finally get him turned to home and back into the
horse lot.  My family was watching all of this, probably thinking that I was dead or would soon be, but after he ran
into the lot, they closed the gate.  He did a barrel racing turn at the end of the lot, ran up to the gate and stopped.  I slid off, whacked him along side of the head and told Ellen he was cool.  My mom asked why I hadn’t just jumped off.  I don’t think dismounting at 40mph is a very good idea. 

When Ellen was in high
school used to “test” potential boyfriends by having them try to ride Star.  In New Mexico, everyone thought
they were a cowboy, and certainly no self respecting boy would admit that they couldn’t ride.  Even if they
were a decent rider Star made short work of them.  Daddy got great pleasure out of seeing them get thrown in the first
one or two minutes of being on Star.  Horses can sense when someone isn’t worthy of being on them, and Star
was very proud. 

He threw me only once, and I really don’t think this should count.  I was riding him along the Rio Grande, relaxed, just loping along at a slow canter, when Star saw a white bleached out cotton wood
log, and shied away from it, which means jumping sideways about 6 feet with no notice.  I didn’t fall off, but
was certainly taken unawares and lost my seat.  He then started bucking, and as the old Marty Robins song goes “he
left me spinning there up in the sky.  I turned over twice and came back to earth and lites in to cussing the day
of his birth.”  Luckily he didn’t run off. 
Just stood there looking at me as if to say, “what happened to you?”

One other Ellen story.  50 years later, she and her second husband Ed lived (still do) in a nice adobe house in Santa Fe.  I was visiting before Christmas and she and I were on her roof putting faralitos up. 
(A faralito is a paper bag with a couple of inches of sand in the bottom and a candle which lit at night is very pretty.) 
Anyway, the house has a pitched roof.  She was
on one side of the pitch and I was on the other.  Suddenly I heard her crying for help.  I looked over the ridge of the roof and saw her literally hanging on to the edge of the roof with her fingernails.  She had slipped on a patch of ice and almost went over the edge to the street 20 feet below.  I avoided the ice and pulled her up to safety.  Later that evening she thanked me for saving her life and said that I was now forgiven for breaking her thumb. 

Carolyn

My other sister Carolyn is 5 years younger than me.   Because of this age differential, growing up I didn’t so as much
with her as I did with Ellen, but this story, which I originally wrote for her husband Jim’s birthday book is about her as well as about Jim.

The Canoe Trip from Hell

Jim was a fresh faced newly minted gung ho Air Force jet jockey (queue the Top Gun theme song), recently married, and on leave after completing the Air Force’s survival training and then the POW training
camp.  For those of you that don’t know, survival training consisted of putting the men into a forest with only
what they might have if they had bailed out of a dead airplane over enemy territory.  Note – this was at the
height of the Vietnam War.   So, armed with a parachute, a knife and the cloths on his back, he had to survive
for a week.  Snake never tasted better. 
Good weight loss regimen.   Right after
that, because he was gung ho and stupid he went through POW camp.  This consists of having others treat you like you
were in a Vietnam POW camp for a week.  Ask John McCain about it. 

Anyway, after surviving these two weeks, the plan was to join my dad and me and with Carolyn and go on a week’s canoe trip in Minnesota’s boundary waters
wilderness area.   If I remember correctly, Jim still was essentially deaf in one ear from being pounded in the head in the POW camp, had numbness in one leg from who knows what and was seriously under weight.  But what the heck, how hard can paddling a canoe be?  Carolyn thought it would be fun and was in love so went willingly.  My dad and I had done a similar trip a couple of years previously so we knew what to expect, at least so we thought. 

So we went to Ely, Minnesota to a wilderness outfitter company where we were set up with tents, sleeping bags, food for four for a
week, back packs the size of Volkswagens, a 20 pound cast iron griddle, matches, saw, ax, knives, shovel, and two aluminum canoes.  And a waterproof map.  Good thing. 
So off we went, Jim and Carolyn in one canoe and my dad and me in the other.

There exists in nature the phenomenon known
as the 100 years storm.  They happen after everyone who can remember the last one has died so it’s ok to name
a new one.  One day out, the new one came along. 
It started when we were out in the middle of a large lake and while we did see the rain coming across the lake we didn’t appreciate what wind can do to the surface of a lake, and the
ability of people to control a canoe in the face of heavy wind and waves and rain.  Fortunately, we all made it to
shore without being swamped and set up our first wet camp.

We got good at starting fires with wet wood and cooking over a very smoky fire under a poncho. Thanks Carolyn, you were super, and
continued for the rest of the week traveling in horrible weather over lakes and land, which is done by portaging from lake to lake by carrying everything including the canoes on our backs. 
Two good things about this, the canoe kept the rain from going down the back of your neck, and there really wasn’t a bug problem because they all either froze or drowned.  We were always wet and cold, hungry because the dry food didn’t stay dry, smelly because of the fire smoke and bathing in the
lake was out of the question because it was cold enough to snow, but we survived.  At some point Jim admitted the
POW and Survival camp was easier than this trip.  Made us all feel better. 

After we made it back to Ely we learned that we were the only group that hadn’t quit and returned to Ely when the weather turned, and there was a
message from my mom that the arroyo had flooded and their house in New Mexico was full of mud to a depth of several feet.  It was a fitting ending.