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Show "caves", or cellars. Whatever they were called, they were holes in the ground with walls and roofs of ties. A thick heaping of dirt on top of the tie roof could help make this type deliciously cool in summer. Many women and children fled to their dugout for relief from the heat. It was of course a root cellar and fruit room in winter. I knew of a few persons who hid their valuables in a secret burrow behind the tie wall of the dugout. The year of the cloudburst, as I said, Father put up ice in shavings at one end of our dugout. We could freeze ice cream for neighborhood parties with that ice. Because the crops uniformly failed us, we dreamed impossible dreams of exotic or brave species that would defy the desert. In winter beside the hot stove in the store, one settler liked to expatiate upon his scheme to raise mushrooms in huge quantities. "I'm going to roof a big long cellar with ties and dirt. I bet I can raise mushrooms here better than any place." Another longed for spring so that he could test the remarkable qualities he saw in his homestead for producing ginseng root and other medicinal herbs. From a seed catalog printed in four colors Father bought seeds of a Himalaya Wonder Bean. (That fall we actually produced half a dozen of the fabulous beans, two feet and more long. They were hard as hickory and inedible for man or beast!) All sorts of mirages wavered in the smoke of tobacco around the stove in Father's store. But as the night wore on, one by one the loafers sighed heavily and plunged into the darkness to plod or ride the miles to their lonely shacks. One dream, however, gave promise of an industry and a payroll. A certain Californian believed we possessed the finest deposit of clay for bricks and tile to be found anywhere. Imagining that we had something strange and wonderful was not novel in Nada. But |