Prologue
The biting cold of the early spring morning took my breath away. April can be like that in the high desert of eastern Oregon. I suddenly shivered at the unknown. Minutes from now, my family will leave Jordan Valley and travel hundreds of miles away to a large ranch in northwest Wyoming, sight unseen.
I stared at the '49 Ford truck towing a flatbed trailer with side rails that Kurt had loaded for our trip. Our life's possessions are in that rig: a few pieces of furniture, used bed frames and mattresses, bundles of kids' clothes, and boxes jammed with household items.
I returned my gaze to the Rock House one last time. After Kurt and I settled into that little house next to his parents' pioneer ranch house almost five years ago, I believed I had finally outrun my past. Jordan Valley wasn't where I was born. But in my twenties, it became the first place that ever felt like home. I thought our children would grow up surrounded by the kind of family I'd never known. That I could build a real home. Earn a college degree someday. Become someone my mother never believed I could become.
But I was wrong. Though I was certain this rural ranch in eastern Oregon offered me a new start, our departure for Wyoming on this blustery morning, with great uncertainty about where we will land, has shaken my dreams.
Jo’s Story
My name is Jo. It’s not short for Jordan, as in Jordan Valley, despite what some people think. That’s strictly a coincidence. I wasn’t even born or raised in Jordan Valley, Oregon like my husband, Kurt. I came to live in this remote little town on the Oregon/Idaho border when I was in my twenties, after marrying Kurt when he was serving in the US Army during World War II, and after giving birth to our first three children in a span of two-and-a-half years.
Shortly before Kurt quit his first post-war job working for his cousin in the rock crushing business, laying pavement on lonely stretches of highway through the high desert of eastern Oregon, I had agreed with his plan to move our growing brood to more familiar territory, to sink roots into Jordan Valley like Kurt’s parents had done at the turn of the twentieth century. They came from sturdy pioneer stock. Men and women who had risked their young lives crossing the Atlantic from the Isle of Man and Ireland, driven by the lure of the American West in the mid-to-late nineteenth century when gold rushes sprang up in untamed places like Silver City, Idaho near Jordan Valley, and Canyon City, Oregon where I attended high school.
After Kurt and I settled next door to his parents in a tiny rock house built in the 1870s, I thought we were all set. He was excited to return home again after a six-year absence, and I was eager to try my hand at raising our youngsters on a cattle ranch far away from my charming yet devious mother who still lived in Prairie City, hundreds of miles north. My desire for putting down new roots reinforced my determination to not look back at a tumultuous childhood I had escaped at age thirteen.
Jordan Valley felt like a sanctuary where Kurt and I could cushion our children from life’s hardships in a stable, loving family who reveled in their pioneer history in the American West. A tight-knit family that had learned how to forge ahead in the face of adversity instead of becoming disassembled by it. Yet my certainty that this rural ranch in eastern Oregon offered me a new start and our young family a new foundation unraveled when unexpected forces disrupted our lives.