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TI: I want to kind of get to, in terms of your, the pets that you got in camp, and I know you found, you guys were out there, I think you guys knocked down a magpie nest or something.

SY: Oh, prior to that, I had a lizard, because they were so abundant. And we had a cage inside of our barrack and so forth, and they move very little. Lots of horned toads, I had that with the lizard, and eventually we went hiking a little further, and we found a canal, and during the winter, embedded in the ice, was a salamander. I was so intrigued by that salamander, it can't swim because it was encased in ice. Cut the ice out, brought it back, and I had that in my house, or barrack, rather. Well, eventually, we felt sorry for the salamander, the horned toad, and the lizard, so I released them to the area that, where I thought I found them. And then at the dry riverbed, there was this, it wasn't a snake, it didn't have eyes, it didn't have a mouth, it looked like a worm, but it was hard, it was kind of a reddish purple color. And I brought it back, put it in a Coke bottle, put water in there, and that thing would swim around. I don't know what it ate. We put a knot on there and it would untie itself, and, to this day, I describe this to biology teachers and so forth, they can't understand what I'm talking about. But one guy described it as a horse hair, that, a horse went by, one of the hair came out, and that became that worm, and that's what I had as a pet. Well, it didn't do too much. Then the next thing, a lot of us kids, we had a bottle, we filled it up with sand, put ants in there -- we had a lot of red ants -- and we could see the tunnels and everything. And that became old, and so we discarded that idea.

So Shoshone River was a place to go hiking, and we said, at that time I told my friends it was about three or four miles away. It turned out, later on, it was only three-quarters of a mile, but it seemed like it was a long distance. We had to go under a tunnel, under the canal above. And what was interesting about that was our real purpose was to go swimming, and we touched that water, it's ice cold, and the current was so swift. And my friend Akira Yoshimura almost drowned there, and I was there, I could hear him yelling, "Help, help, help," and so I asked him, later years, I says, "Why did you, how come you almost drowned? You're a good swimmer." Well, he was trying to swim upstream. You can't swim upstream, the current was too swift, and fortunately one of the older guys grabbed him and saved him. But every -- it was the talk of Heart Mountain, a guy almost drowned, so we were afraid to go swimming there. But there was a little pond that we went swimming in, that, the pond water was next to the Shoshone River. I don't remember how cold it was, but it was a nice, brisk swim, and, in fact, my stepdad went there. He went under a rock and come up with a little trout. I thought, whoa, I know if I touched a thing that moved I would be yelling and screaming, you know, anything that moved. And then pretty soon, as we were swimming, he said, "Hey, look, there's a snake." I say, "Well, at least it's harmless." One of the kids looked at it real closely, he said, "Well, look, it's got rattlers on there." Well, that's the last time we went in that little pond, swimming. We swam in the ditch, we swam in the canal, and then one of the Boy Scouts in Troop 333 drowned in the canal, and later on found out that he had a bad heart. So some of the older people, probably the farming people, dug a hole, so it wasn't a swimming pool, it was a swimming hole. We used to swim there. One hot summer day, Ken Suo, who lived next door to us, was a year or two older than us, but he was the slingshot champ of Heart Mountain, and he was good. He made his own -- we didn't use the stalk of the tree -- he made it out of pine wood, it was real small. And I think he went to the motor pool, and whether he stole the tube or whether they gave it to him, he never told us the secret, but he was nice enough to give us the rubber tube. So we learned the technique from Ken Suo, and so we became pretty good. We had lots of marbles, abundance of rocks, so we never had to worry about rocks, and so we would practice and practice and practice.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.