22. Accident, Archaeology, Coffee, and Other Stories: East Africa a New Life Adventure
I was injured in a car accident in 1973. The incident happened at our Lake Hazel property. I had stopped at the mailbox, which sat across the road from our driveway, and I pulled across the road without looking for traffic. I got T-Boned by a neighbor from a couple of miles west with force enough to throw my Saab coop, with me in it, into the field next door. The pictures in the paper showed my car which was a crumpled mess. For that matter so was I! I had thirteen broken ribs, fortunately none pierced the lungs. Recovery was going to take some time.
Barbara was my life saver. Not only did she take up the crucible of taking care of basically an invalid, but she knew immediately that she was going to have to be the breadwinner for a considerable time. She saw an advertisement in the paper for postal carriers and with the encouragement from Grandpa Cochrane, she took the exam and got an offer of a job as a substitute rural carrier which she gladly took. Barbara held the sub job for two or three years and as mail carriers retired, she was offered her own route and held it till she met the time in grade requirement to retire herself. I can not say enough about Barbara's ability to analyze her situation and adapt to fit the need. She always had a “Can-Do” attitude and acted on it. I do not know what to attribute all those characteristics to, but one can add up many contributing factors such as family life, being raised on a farm, genetics, schooling, friendships, etc. It comes down to the fact that she herself had the ability to take all of those things and put them together to make the productive individual that she was. Barbara was a commendable person to everyone she came in touch with.
As I recovered from the car accident Barbara and I joined the Idaho Archeology Society and were active in the organization for several years and were members of the Great Basin Chapter. With this connection we spent a good share of our summers working with The Passport for Time program, administered by the US Forest Service to help enlighten the details of how the early pioneers accomplished their activities. Through this connection we got involved in a Salvage Paleontology Dig at Tolo Lake out of Grangeville, Idaho, where Barbara and I, along with a team of other volunteers, excavated parts of several Columbian Mammoth Elephants, securing them in casks and shipping them to the State Depository at the Idaho State University in Pocatello. We then worked during the winter months in the laboratory preparing the bones for storage at the Museum.
I have not tried to coordinate all these events chronologically as they are sandwiched with other events such as yard work, building something, looking at a new property to buy, another Dig or Barbara’s job. But with that said, Archeology led us to an interest in travel with purpose. Barbara found an Ad in the Archeology Magazine for tours to Maya Ruins in central America. We took a couple of trips with them and found a new interest in archeology. The Maya culture had a sophisticated society that was capable of monumental structures as well as a written language that was readable by a significant no of society.
With a heightened interest in the Maya we again ran across an advertisement for a conference on Maya Hieroglyphics at the University of Texas. Barbara and I called the coordinator to check on prerequisites and the answer was “Time and Money”. The conference was to be held during spring break and lasted three or four days. Our first conference was 1991 and we went every year until 2000. Most of the time we drove to Texas, sometimes bucking snow in Colorado, because we wanted to see Diane, Leonard, and our grandchildren while there.
Studying the origins of language development was as fascinating as the buildings, cultural organization, and system of authority. New information and interpretations were overwhelming the first two years, and I found that I needed hearing aids to help me understand the proceedings. The learning curve was intense, and both Barbara and I built a library full of Maya references and practiced writing texts and inscriptions for everything we could, even presenting a lecture to a class at BSU. We lost track of the number of trips we've taken in all the countries of Central America to observe ancient ruins.
As to the college days’ objectives of seeing different cultures we visited around forty countries after we left East Africa. Travel became one of our most enjoyable and rewarding pastimes. Barbara and I never made it around the globe. A trip from Kiev to New Delhi or Moscow to New Delhi would have completed the journey.
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