I recall being very busy and never really lacking for something to keep my mind and body occupied, wether it be constructive or mischievous it was a learning experience. I spent much of my time building things such as roads, digging ditches, or leveling fields with my collection of toys. My friends and I built "forts" in the tall willows and buffalo berry bushes that grew very dense along the river, so that we could have our special secret place. My friend Benny and I would spend hours there, sitting by the river and the ponds that were home to many types of birds and other wildlife. My grandma was a real bird lover and she provided us with little books that had wonderful pictures to help us identify the different birds. Mule deer were also very plentiful in the fields and he riparian area along the river, and other creatures such as raccoons, skunks, rabbits, squirrels, and coyotes thrived in this fascinating ecosystem. We had no idea there would be this fancy word "ecosystem" coined to describe it all.
The river had rainbow and german brown trout, bottom feeders of carp and suckers that we would catch by various methods. In the winter when the water flows were low we made long spears to spear the very big carp, and in spring and summer we fished for the trout. On a few occasions we built a small fire and cooked them, not the best as I recall but we tried. I had learned my first fishing skills from my grandpa Jim, who was a very good fisherman. He made me a pole from a long willow with the line wound around one end of it. To my amazement it actually worked to catch a few small fish using earthworms we dug from the garden. He told me those earthworms were making the soils better and we needed to have lots of them in our fields and gardens. Watching them and looking at the tunnels they left in the soil was a learning experience in itself.
