Precious Memories of Home
Myself and my horse Appy. Photos/Colene Paradise.
By Colene Paradise
July is here; I have been home since March 13th, not by choice. COVID-19 has hit the entire country hard. It is like a World War has started, except it is not man vs. man, it is man vs. virus.
The first week of being home, I was like a caged animal, not knowing what to do with myself, although I had a lot of things to do. I walked back and forth in my house until I thought I was going mad. I could not watch TV or read; it was a difficult way to feel, out of control in body and mind.
One cold evening I stood outside and watched a beautiful sunset. I started to think of when I was a child, I never left Mud Creek. Mud Creek was my entire world. I never really left my home all summer, and I had no interest in leaving. Everything I needed was there, my friends, my family.
Mud Creek is a district of Duck Valley Indian Reservation. This is one of the canals we crawled around in.
Since that evening I have spent many days reminiscing about my childhood. Fun times from riding horses to swimming in every canal in Mud Creek. I cannot believe these memories were hidden in my mind, and truthfully, they would not have come out if I still had my busy life. I was staying too busy and forgetting to relax and enjoy the simple things in life.
So, I will take you down the memory lane of my youth.
My best friend was Lenny Sope, we were always playing in the canals, even when the water was so low it was almost mud. We went outside everyday and made sure we got home by dark.
Other crazy things Lenny and I would do is ride our horses to the swimming hole and stand on our horses' backs and dive off their backs into the water. To this day I wonder how we are still alive.
Mud Creek is a valley that extends about three miles or so and it has homes on each side and hay fields and slough that divides the valley. Off the slough, the canals run in different directions.
We helped with branding, haying, and winter feeding of our stock. After we worked, then we played. One specific memory that stands out is one winter when we would gallop our horses, put the brakes on, and slide on the pavement. Our horse slid sideways and stepped backwards into a badger hole. He rolled over into the snowbank. I flew over his head straight into the snow. When I looked up, I saw my dad standing over me, he was mad as hell. He said, “What the hell are you doing, you could’ve killed your horse.” He told me to “Get my butt home now.” I knew I was in big trouble, but when I looked at Lenny, as my dad drove away, we busted out laughing.
Another funny story that sprung up in my mind is when Lenny and I were bucking bales, and her brother Reggie was our driver. We loaded the bales on the back of the truck, it was an old stick shift truck. Let me explain - you had to push the clutch in and shift gears on the wheel. Reggie was grinding the gears, and Lenny and I thought it might be fun to ride the bales with hay hooks so every time Reggie had to gear up or down, we would lean back and act like we were riding a bull. We got bucked off the back of the truck, after Reggie hit a pothole on the dirt road. We flew off the back of the truck, bales and all. I think back about that wild ride and count my blessings that neither of us got stabbed with our hay hooks.
COVID-19 has kept us cooped up at home, but it has also helped to unlock cherished memories from our minds. I now ponder how or why we grow up and rarely have time to say hello to those people who helped create those special memories. Lenny still lives in Mud Creek. and she is an EMT now, while I work at the school, and our day-to-day lives rarely cross. It is our busy lives that keep us distant.
Colene Paradise is a member of the Shoshone-Paiute Tribe from the Duck Valley Indian Reservation in Owyhee. Her family brings the greatest happiness to her, and she spends as much time as she can with them. She has worked closely with Owyhee youth to help them find their voice as citizens and gain appreciation for their culture and history. She has been employed since 1997 at the Elko County School District at Owyhee Combined School where she now serves as a parent liaison. Colene has worked with middle school students on The Deep West Videos, in which students have become filmmakers and created short videos about their heritage and community. In 2016, her students made Paiute or Shoshone language versions of Deep West Videos to draw attention to their community’s loss of indigenous language. Some of the films won a Bronze Remi award at the Houston Worldfest International Film and Video Film Festival for excellence in film production. She is also a 2019 recipient of the Nevada Humanities Outstanding Teaching of the Humanities Award.
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