Gila Bend, Arizona 1934

My father's aunt, who lived then in Flagstaff with her husband, owned a gold mine in Gila Bend Arizona. My father, at 18 wanted more than anything to get away from rainy, foggy and sometimes snowy Seattle to work on his aunt's mine for a summer. She had hired one old cowboy to work there on the gold mine and so my father joined him there to work the Gold mine there.

They had an old tin shack that they lived in while mining. But, it wasn't able at that time to keep the mice and rats out. Now, the old miner sort of put up with all this by putting food he wanted to keep from them in tin containers away from them and if they wanted his crumbs then so much the better.

However, my Dad was raised much different than this because 50 years before 1934 would be then 1884 or even 1880 or before which likely was the age of the old single cowboy working the mine.

So, my dad brought along his Dad's Woodsman .22 automatic pistol that I used when my Grandad ran over me accidentally with his world war II power wagon which looked a lot like some of the vehicles in MASH from the Korean war. Because after all, when I was 8 it was 1956 and almost everyone owned at that time in the country an old Willys jeep or dodge 4 wheel drive power wagon out of world war II or Korean war Army Surplus and fixed them up then.


Anyway, my Dad (being all of 18) had the bright idea one night that he would use a flashlight in this extremely remote place in the desert then to shoot the mice and rats one by one. The problem with this was the miner was asleep in a bunk bed next to him. If you have ever shot a pistol of any caliber in an enclosed place without ear protection it is first very stunning and deafening in the short run sort of like being nearby a hand grenade going off outside somewhere.

So, everytime he shot a rat or mouse (by turning on his flashlight) and shooting it then, the old Cowboy would cry out and say, "Fred, you're giving me a heart attack every time you do that. We just have to live with these critters there are just too many of them!"  But, knowing my Dad I'm not sure he would listen to the old man and might have just kept pointing his flashlight at them and shooting them because there were so many of them he couldn't sleep with them crawling all over him and his stuff all during the night.

But, they weren't out in the day time because they all hid away in their nests somewhere else. So, the only time he could get them was during the night. I think eventually he just got used to them sort of like the old cowboy did then too.

Thinking more about my Dad what he would do is leave the food in the tin shack and build an outside sleeping platform with no food nearby. You would want to be at least in a hammock or raised platform because of scorpions and rattlesnakes who would often crawl in bed with you if you weren't in a hammock or tent or inside your motor vehicle where they can't get at you to get warm next to you as you slept. Cold blooded things prefer to be warm at night. So, they try to find warmth and if you are warm they are going to climb into your sleeping bag to be warm too. Otherwise, they will usually go underground where it stays warmer. Deserts are known for extreme changes in temperature between day and night. Cold at night and sometime really hot during the day. But, when it is 120 degrees or more out often it is only 100 degrees or so by 6 am in the morning too.

When we went on business in 1973 we slept in the back of his pickup truck to prevent these kinds of problems then when I was 25 in Gila Bend.

So, this life only lasted for a summer but made my Dad loved the deserts from then on. He loved the large expanses of views of 50 to 100 miles or more and the feeling of being all alone except for the desert creatures far away from civilization.

Eventually, he returned to Seattle to become a journeyman electrician in his father's business and eventually an Electrical Contractor himself when I worked for him from my age 12 to 17 after school weekends and summers during the early 1960s.