I almost died three times in the summer of 1963. Well, at least I thought I did. Each perceived brush with death is an example of a young girl who was woefully ignorant of the world in which she found herself. Not stupid, mind you, but uninformed. And in that sense, my reactions are understandable. They were a little dramatic, perhaps, but understandable.
My very young husband and I struggled to meet our financial obligations. Still, we were falling behind in our rent and car payments. We were relieved to find a less expensive rental that improved our financial situation.
The two-bedroom farmhouse, located seven miles outside the small Kansas community where we lived, lacked the conveniences of town living. There were no water faucets. We had to pump water at the schoolhouse a quarter of a mile down the road and haul it to the house. Instead of a bathroom, there was a two-hole outside toilet. The coal oil stove that dominated the tiny living room would be our heat source in winter. Undaunted, we reasoned: It will be almost like camping. And we liked to camp. We congratulated ourselves on a fantastic find.
The best part was the low rent—only ten dollars a month. Our farmer landlord explained that his insurance on the property was less if the house was occupied. I could do whatever I wanted to fix up the place within a ten-dollar-per-month budget. I only needed to provide him with receipts instead of cash.
What a girl with a bit of imagination could do with ten dollars in 1963 is fantastic. Married at sixteen and seventeen, my husband and I had been on our own for a couple of years but were still babes in the woods. We had no parents or older siblings to guide us. And, new to the community, we had no friends to consult. We were learning how to navigate the adult world by trial and error.
Although we were accustomed to "making do," we never considered ourselves poor. We simply didn't have any money. Despite the lack of funds, I enjoyed the challenge of making our cheap apartments as homey and comfortable as possible.
One of the things I did with my ten-dollar budget at the farmhouse was to paint the ugly linoleum kitchen floor, which was so worn the pattern was indiscernible. I painted it a lovely shade of gray and added a designer touch with artsy pink swirls. Lovely. What a lovely floor. I thought as I stood admiring it. I was proud of my handiwork.
Of course, a painted linoleum floor doesn't last long. Within a month, worn trails were threaded throughout the kitchen floor, from sink to refrigerator to stove to door. But it was a lovely floor for a while. The lesson learned: A cheap investment in funds and labor doesn't necessarily have long-term value.
I traipsed across the dewy lawn to the outdoor toilet one Sunday morning, still drowsy and heavy-lidded. I settled myself in place and released a stream of urine into the pit below. The sound of a rattle startled me awake and stopped the flow. A snake? Was that a rattlesnake? I jumped up, panties pooling around my ankles. Where is the snake? There's that sound again. Oh! It's in the pit! I ran screaming into the house, awakening my husband, Johnnie.
“I just peed on a rattlesnake!” I screamed over and over as I hopped around in a panic.
You can imagine my husband’s reaction to being jolted out of a sound sleep by his hysterical, half-dressed wife. Especially since I was so scared, I thought perhaps the snake may have bitten me on my butt.
Seriously, how would I know? Was it possible for the snake to lunge up and bite me where I was sitting? If so, how long would it take for me to die? Wasn’t Johnnie supposed to check my butt for snakebite? And then cut it and suck out the poison— or something?
Well, Johnnie was having none of that.
Giving in to my pleas, he glanced at my rear end, didn’t see any fang marks, and assured me I wasn’t going to die. We didn’t want to go near the toilet, but Johnnie, my hero, stalked around the outhouse with the hoe poised as a weapon, keeping about fifteen or twenty feet away, but no snake appeared. For several weeks afterward, we entered cautiously with a lot of noise and a flashlight to peer into the hole. Another lesson learned.
Hauling water to the house for daily use quickly became less fun than a weekend camping trip. It was hard work. Johnnie would position heavy galvanized milk cans under the hand water pump at the schoolhouse and then work the handle until it was full. It was a good thing he was young and strong enough to lift heavy cans of water. Once transported to the house, they were emptied as needed into the kitchen water bucket. If we needed hot water it had to be heated on the stove. Needless to say, we became very frugal with water usage.
Our landlord took pity on his young tenants and installed a water pump on the edge of the property. (Well, it was actually for his cattle, but it made life considerably easier for us.) The pump emptied the water into a huge tank for cattle grazing in the pasture to drink their fill. The landlord installed an electric fence to keep them out of the yard and off the highway. We were told the electric wire would shock the cattle or us, of course, if it were touched. To collect water for our use, Johnnie had to lean over the electric fence and carefully fill the bucket without getting wet. He was strong enough to do that with ease, but I wasn’t. It was his responsibility to keep the kitchen water bucket full.
One evening Johnnie was late coming home and the water bucket was empty. I needed water and was irritated that he hadn’t filled it before going to work. Being the determined, capable woman I believed myself to be, I thought Getting water from the pump couldn’t be that big a deal. The idea of being independent and not waiting on a man to meet my basic needs had a certain appeal. Humph! I would do it myself.
I marched to the pump where a small herd of cattle had gathered. They watched curiously as I clumsily leaned over the fence, splashing water on myself as I positioned the bucket on the end of the pipe. Suddenly, a powerful jolt of electricity shot through my body, knocking me off my feet. The bucket flew through the air, an arc of water drenching me.
I fell to the ground, screaming and crying, “Oh, God! I’m going to die. I don’t want to die! I’m too young to die!”
I rolled around in the grass for who knows how long, screaming, crying, and begging God not to let me die. After a while, I realized that, indeed, I had not died. I knew that criminals were sometimes executed in an electric chair. But then it occurred to me I had no idea how long it took for someone to die from electrocution. Should I go to the hospital? I honestly didn’t know. The landlord had told me not to touch the electric wire, especially if my hands were wet. Did that mean it would kill me if I touched it with wet hands?
I continued to roll around in the grass, crying and making bargains with God. The cows gathered at the fence, placidly chewing their cud, huge brown eyes watching my performance. Time passed. I still did not die.
Finally, I got up and brushed the grass from my backside. I felt okay but was still uncertain. I was concerned enough to call the landlord to ask how long it took to die when a person was electrocuted and if he thought I should go to the hospital. Embarrassing? Yes, but yet another lesson was learned.
Our drafty old farmhouse warned of summer’s end. Brisk nights huddled under our blankets reminded us we needed to learn how to operate that monster coal oil burner in our living room. A cold front was forecasted, and the temperature was expected to drop below freezing. There was no wall furnace or dial on a wall like in our apartments. Instead, we were dependent on a complex, intimidating piece of machinery.
We had the good sense to ask for help, or we could have blown ourselves to pieces out of pure ignorance. A kind neighbor came to our rescue and demonstrated how to operate the coal oil burner. We went to bed that night in a warm house, cozy under our blankets.
The next morning I awoke slowly, feeling drowsy and light-headed. I turned over in bed to see if Johnnie was awake and startled, I jumped up, yelling, “What’s wrong? What’s happened to you?”
Johnnie was, of course, awakened by my hysteria, and when he saw me, he began screaming as well. Both our faces were black, our eyes stark white in contrast, and our tongues bright red. What a sight we must have been to each other. It took a moment or two for us to realize the room was filled with smoke drifting and shifting about us as we stood facing each other and yelling at the top of our lungs.
We soon realized something was seriously wrong with the stove, and that’s why the house was full of smoke and soot. Johnnie quickly turned it off. We opened all the windows and doors and tried to shoo the smoke outdoors. Smoke does not shoo. It drifts wherever it chooses to go. A cold wind rushed through the house, chilling us to the bone and swirling the smoke in and out of open windows.
Meanwhile, we scrubbed our skin raw with icy cold water in futile attempts to remove the soot. Soot does not wash off easily, especially in cold water. It smeared and made an awful mess on any of our skin that had been exposed during the night. Eventually, we had to haul water from the pump and heat it on the stove, using gobs of soap and elbow grease to get the stuff out of our hair, our ears, and the creases of our skin. Cleaning the surfaces of the house of soot took days of hard work and what seemed like hundreds of buckets of water.
Later that day, our friendly neighbor checked the stove and declared there was nothing mechanically wrong with it. Perhaps something else caused the problem. He held a ladder while Johnnie clambered onto the roof and found the problem: Previous tenants had placed a board, held in place by a brick, over the chimney to keep birds from nesting there. Smoke from the stove could not escape through the chimney, so it circulated throughout the house instead. If the farmhouse had not been so drafty, Johnnie and I could have died of carbon monoxide poisoning in our sleep that night. Another valuable lesson learned.
It was out of ignorance that I had three brushes with death in the summer of 1963. (Well, actually, two times I thought I was going to die, but wasn’t; and the third time I could have died, but didn’t.)
From those experiences, I learned vital lessons in adulting: It is wise to pay attention to instructions regarding something important and potentially dangerous, the value of small details when undertaking a task cannot be underestimated, and few people have bragging rights about peeing on a rattlesnake and living to tell about it.
