Journal Entry, 10 May 1977

There is an old Indian saying which says something to the effect of, “Don’t judge another until you have walked in his moccasins.”

When I was a little boy, we lived down the hill in a house near a creek.  It was really a ditch, but it ran all year.  My brother, Tim, and I had great fun in the creek fishing, floating boats, and making dams.  There was one spot where we made a dam each year.  They were elaborate dams which backed the water up and made a nice little pond.  We were proud of our dams; but each spring, shortly after we had built them, Frank Evans would come up the creek and tear them out.

Frank Evans was a farmer who had land a mile down the creek.  He had a good water right out of that ditch, and did all his irrigating from it.  Each year he cleaned it, and each year our dams were part of the cleaning.  We were so disgusted with him.  He was mean and unfeeling.  Our dams weren’t hurting anything.  They just backed the water up until it got high enough to go over, around, or through our dams.  He got his water anyway, so why couldn’t he leave our dams alone?

Years passed.  Frank Evans retired and sold his place to Forrest Lillard.  Tim and James grew up, eventually becoming farmers and irrigators, too.  Forrest Lillard died; and Tim, James and their father bought the old Frank Evans place from Mrs. Lillard.  Tables had turned.  It was now James who found himself ready to irrigate the Evans place.  It was now James who found it hard to get the water all the way to the field.

Thus it was that I found myself with my boots on wading up the creek which Frank Evans had cleaned each year.  What a mess it was!  One half-mile stretch of the ditch was lined with rocks and cottonwood trees.  The ditch was so choked with limbs and rocks that the water left the channel in several places and flowed out in the fields.  In the rest of the places the water moved so slowly that much of it soaked into the banks and stream bottom before it could reach its destination.

The secret to getting water to the Evans place was to have a clean, fast-flowing ditch.  Foot-by-foot, branch-by-branch, and rock-by-rock I cleaned the ditch.  I learned what Frank Evans had faced each year.  I passed a house by the ditch which hadn’t been there in Frank Evans’ day.  Two boys lived there.  They had a platform built on a big limb which lay across the creek.  The structure impeded the flow of water somewhat.  The temptation was great to remove the structure; but remembering my own boyhood experiences, I disturbed it as little as I could.  But now I understood Frank Evans’ actions. My heart softened toward him.  I had walked in his shoes and understood that he had only been doing what had to be done if he was to make a living from his land.