Is There Life After Air Force? Or: The Egin Period.

I think the car actually belonged to Jocelyn. Yes, I think so. My father had somehow arranged for us to use it since I had to get to Ricks every day. There were also groceries to be bought and relatives to be visited, not to mention long drives out the Red Road to be taken when I had the time. Those chucks and coyotes weren't going to ventilate themselves!

The kids loved living out there. It was, after all, "the country." We were in the sticks, the toolies, the back of beyond. There were trees and bushes and irrigation ditches and plenty of dirt. Their mother told them to avoid the irrigation ditch out front by the road and not to play with the Toyota parked by the house. But Hyrum was a tiny fellow at the time and she couldn't watch the older two constantly, so they were left on their own for a couple of minutes. When she came back out, she saw what you see here. Autumn's dress was all sooty and Joseph's hands were blackened. Then there was the eye which had peered into the exhaust pipe.

Shayne wanted to be stern, but she couldn't stop laughing, so she told them to wait just a moment and returned presently with her 35mm camera.The kids knew they'd done wrong, but they also sensed that there was something redeeming about the whole situation. They were still nervous when she started taking pictures, but they had known all their little lives that people who took pictures of them were pleased with them, so they were getting over their concern in a hurry.

Their mother and I laughed about this for years afterwards. But Egin left some more sobering marks as well.

It was a great community full of pleasant people. Our landlord soon made it plain that he didn't worry about getting all the rent, part of it, or, on a couple of occasions, none of it. He liked us and knew that we were poor as the proverbial church mice. Which brings us to my next topic. Mice.

This old farm house was full of mice. We set traps and employed poisoned grain which we found upstairs in the unheated part of the house. I also got out a Crosman .22 caliber air pistol I'd bought for celebratory purposes on the afternoon that Hyrum was born. More than 20 mice fell to those little 12.5 grain pellets. But when you see and hear mice everywhere,on the stove, under the couch, peeking at you around a corner in the hallway, it can get to you after a while. It was hard on Shayne and I felt bad about it. We were relieved to move into a clean, new apartment in Moscow in August of 1981. There we could just look back on the pleasant parts of our Egin stay, like having close relatives in the ward and all the lovely scenery.

But, after we'd been in Moscow maybe two months, Joseph woke up one night with a bad dream. Hearing him cry, Shayne jumped up and ran to the babies' room. When he had finally gotten back to sleep, she came back into our room, very sober. She said she'd asked Joseph what had happened, and he'd said, "Hyrum fell in the ditch."

There it was, the worst of all possibilities in the mind of a barely-five-year-old who felt the weight of the whole family's well-being on his tiny shoulders. He had, indeed always been responsible to watch the younger children. And his whole-hearted acceptance of this responsibility had led to this terrible dream. We held each other and shed tears of amazement and love for our little man. And he's still saving people to this day.