<Begin Segment 13>

RP: What happened when it rained in Minidoka?

MH: Oh my, when it rained since, you know, it was pretty muddy. And my poor mother had boots. None of us had boots particularly. So, so she would carry the youngest of us and I guess I was young enough that she put us on her back and carried us to the mess hall so we wouldn't have to walk through the mud. That, that's my mother. And all of our wash... they didn't have washing machines so we had to do it on scrub boards.

RP: Did you help your mom with that?

MH: Yeah, it was, it was, there was a laundry room. You know and they had laundry trays etcetera and... but everything had to be done by hand, wrung out by hand. And so big things like sheets we could hang in the laundry room. But the little things we had actually lines all over our, our apartment in order to dry things out. Right. The first, I don't know how long, probably at least the first three to four months, the latrines were not working so we had outdoor latrines. And fortunately the outdoor latrine wasn't too far from where our, our apartment was. And then once they got the water working then we could go and take showers, etcetera.

RP: And you're coming from, you know, a community, a lush kind of wet area. And now you're in the Idaho desert and, you know, the desert's known for all kinds of interesting creatures and characters. Do you remember some of the sights and sounds of the desert and were they frightening to you or exciting?

MH: I don't think I've ever heard a coyote howl as much as I did over there at night. If we walked into the desert... and the canal was not too far from where we lived and we could walk down there. Then we had to be really careful of ticks, scorpions, rattlesnakes. Those were the three things. When we came back we always made sure that we brushed our self off really good and sometimes we did find a tick attached. But I was able to get it off without burning it out like some people had to. They had a swimming hole later on, not too far from where we were and so we could go down and swim in the swimming hole and I don't think I ever did though. It was just a big old mudhole. People did swim down the canal. Some of the boys were ambitious, courageous enough to swim across the canal and leave camp and walk over to Eden, I think it was the closest town.

RP: That's how you get to Eden. That's a pretty swift flowing canal.

MH: It, it was, right. There was kind of an eddy where, where we were. So it wasn't too bad. But it was, it was entirely different.

RP: How about ice skating? I've seen a few photographs of kids skating, you know, on ponds out there and...

MH: Right. I didn't have any ice skates so I never got to ice skate.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.