Hawkes, Raymond and Leah

              Eric Walz History 300 Collection
Raymond and Leah Hawkes – Life
During the Teton Flood
By Raymond and Leah Hawkes
October 22, 2005
Box 9 Folder 6
Oral Interview conducted by Josh Wilwand
Transcript copied by Josh Wilwand October 2005
Brigham Young University – Idaho
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JW: What effect did the flood have on your family?
LH: On June 5th, 1976 I was out trying to plant the last of my corn in my garden. We
lived three miles north of Sugar City. I was in a hurry because I had to go pick up my son
in Idaho Falls because he had been to Boise to Boy’s State. I had to be there by 2: 00. And
I made our 10- year- old daughter Betty stay in the house until she got her Saturday’s work
done. Otherwise I never would have gotten the call, I would have been out in the garden
when the water hit. Anyway she was in there and she came to the door and she said that
Mr. Rodriguez wants to talk to you, which was a neighbor of ours that I had only seen
once. And I said, “ Well what does he want?” And she said, “ He wants to know what it
looks like out here.” And I said, “ Well it looks like it always does,” and I was kind of
disgusted because I was in a hurry and in a minute she came back and shouted out the
door and said, “ He wants to know how it looks out here, the Teton Dam has broken and
there is a 10- foot wall of water coming down from Teton City, 7- 8 miles east of here.
You need to get out as fast as you can.” Well, that woke me up to as why he was calling,
and if she hadn’t been in the house I wouldn’t have known until it had hit me out in the
garden. So that alarmed me and then I went in and as soon as I went in I got another
telephone call from a friend in town who said, “ Did you hear the news? Did you hear the
news?” I said, “ Yes, I just heard.” She said, “ Get out! Get out! Leave right now and get to
Rexburg, and you are to go up on the hill.” And so at least they told us where to go and
that was good. So then I ran around and all at once I was just panicked. I had my 14- year-old
boy Grant, and my 10 year old daughter Betty with me. And that was all I had there
and I ran up and down the hall a minute, I hardly knew what to do and there was going to
be a big stake dance festival or a multi- stake dance festival that night up there and our
boy that was 16 up there at our dry farm which is twenty- five miles or so from here was
going to be in it. So I thought I better take his costume, which was his best Sunday outfit,
his pants and white shirt. And we had been in several floods in the years we have been
there about 20 years. And in those twenty years or so we had been in two or three little
floods. The spring run off and ice blocking in the winter and all we had ever had was
raising water not rushing water. It just came up a little bit and the next day it was back
down because of ice blocking. We were just real close to the Teton River. And I just
thought rising water and it had never gone in the house so I had never dreamed that
anything in the house would be damaged. So, I just take his dance costume and I had our
little dog, and our daughter, 10, and our son, 14. And if I had only realized what would
have happened I would have grabbed the drawers of the filing cabinet because we could
have each carried a drawer out and put it in our station wagon. We left with an empty
station wagon, except those 2 people and our little dog. I happened to see my genealogy I
had been looking at on the table the Sunday before and I had grabbed my genealogy
boxes. So that is what I took. If I would have known I would have gone through and
taken every valuable picture off the wall. I would have taken the drawers of that filing
cabinet, because that would have saved us countless hours of trouble by taking that. Well
anyway a person doesn’t know and so this friend that called said to go get my cousin’s
genealogy. She lived in a little mobile home on our property and I knew she would never
forgive me if I didn’t. So I went out and got it. And by now I was kind of panicked and
we got the car out and I realized it was practically empty of gas. But I thought I better go
anyways so I started out and I made it to Rexburg, but there were lots of cars going to
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Rexburg. But the minute I got across the bridge I filled up and I am sure I was the last
one at that gas station to ever get any gas. And I got it as quick as I got over the bridge
and got into Rexburg. It’s a blessing that I filled up on gas for what happened later that
night. And they had told us to go right up to the hill but I had to get my main pressure,
the main thing I was worried about what that my mother was blind and living in the
northern part of Rexburg and she lived where the Maverick is on North 2nd East. And
what is that place next to it? Checker Auto. That had been my home for 46 years, the
house that was there. And my mother was blind and there alone and I could just imagine
her not having the radio on or anything and all of this water coming in on her and so that
is what I was worried about, getting there and rescuing my mother. And I had a hard time
talking her into it. She said, “ All of those Sugar City floods never [ d] o get over here.”
And I said, “ Well this one is supposed to though, come on.” And I finally got her out of
there and while I was trying to get her out, I grabbed some of her blankets, I got thinking
that we might have to sit on the hill all night so I grabbed some of her blankets and then I
got thinking about food. Just in a hurry I grabbed some raisins and some crackers. One or
two things to keep going on and some water to drink and stuff up there just to make it
through the night, that is just what I thought we would need to keep warm through the
night. So I finally got her up there and the neighbors said they can still remember all the
trouble she was giving me that she didn’t need to leave that there would never be any
water there in Rexburg. So anyway I finally got her out of there and we got up on the hill
and I could see our place in Sugar from the hill and I thought, “ Where’s the water?” And
they said, “ Oh, you can[‘ t] see it coming,” instead it was just a big dust cloud because the
water was traveling really fast and it was taking out all of these barn yards and
everything. It was just tumbling and it was taking all of this lumber and everything with
it. And it was taking everything in its path and it was just a big dust cloud, it wasn’t that
you could just see some water coming down. So I couldn’t actually see it hit my place,
but I could estimate that it was hitting it. And it sure enough did, the clock stopped at
1: 00 it was either twenty to one or 1: 00 when it hit there. And I was up there on the hill
for 4 hours until 5: 00. I was up there at 1: 00 and it was about 12: 00 when I got that
telephone call or when I was running around in the house. It seems to me that’s what the
time was when I got the word and then we sat up there until 5: 00 and during that time
different people would hear from their families that had airplanes going around in the sky
and different ones had family members that had told them that their house was gone like
out in Hibbard which is out west of town. There was one person who had her son told her
when he had flown over that their house had disappeared. There was weeping and
wailing and gnashing of teeth up there on that hill and bawling, and really very
devastated. I didn’t shed a tear because we had a terrible tragedy happen to us about 3
months before that. Our oldest son had been killed in a car accident in Roy, Utah and had
gone o[ ver] the top of [ the] overpass when he spun after hitting black ice. He was killed
instantly and he was 28. I had grieved over that for the last 3 months and that is all I
could think about for the past 3 months so it didn’t even phase me. So while everyone
was up there bawling and crying I just kept saying right out loud it was just material
things, it’s only material things. You learn that when you’re grieving over some other
kind of loss that is more important that material things. And so we were there for 4 hours
and we could see down right down North 2nd East and the court house and Wal- Mart and
everything. It was a beautiful sunny day, like this today. You could hardly believe
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something so terrible was happening on a beautiful day. We could see the houses, it was
like little boats just going along and around the corner of Main Street. You could see all
of this stuff. It was just unreal, you couldn’t believe it was really happening; it was just
like a movie. We were up high enough we couldn’t hear the animals bellowing, but they
said it was a terrible noise, the animals you know, the cows floating over, swimming
along as far as they could, some of them injured, it was a terrible noise down here but we
couldn’t hear it up on the hill. So that is where I spent those 4 hours and I was concerned
about my husband because he had been up to our farm that was up in Drummond which
is about 26 miles northeast of here. He had been up there since the day before and our 2
oldest sons, Brian 24, and Richard 16, went up that morning with there dinner and lunch.
My husband had been there since the day before so they had been up there and no
telephone or way to communicate with them. I wasn’t worried about them because they
were way up high except that I thought if they had heard about it they would be really
concerned about us and I wanted to tell them we’re safe but I had no idea how to get in
touch with them. So, at 5: 00 they told us up on the hill to go down the the Manwaring
Center and find the area where your stake president would be because they needed to get
a count. Over the news 5,000 at least were dead up here. You could imagine the panic
that stirred with all the relatives, wanting to know what had happened and who was safe.
We went down there and we got in our area and I sat down for a while and I wasn’t one
bit worried about him or our 2 boys because I thought they were way up there in the hills
except that I was concerned about him worrying about us and telling them we were okay.
All at once somebody that I knew came back, oh the place was packed of people coming
and going, they said, “ Well I saw your husband and son, and they are looking for you.”
And I thought, “ How did they get down here or how did they know anything about this?”
That concerned me when they said, “ Your husband and your son, not sons.” That was the
first I had really gotten upset in the whole day because I thought everything else was just
material things. I thought where is the other son why is it just son? So I left there and
started looking and I ran across Ray and Brian. Then I said, “ Where is Richard?” and he
said, “ We don’t know.”
RH: Anyway I was filling the tractor up with fuel and I had the radio on and was listening
so I became excited and instead of shutting the fuel off I filled up on the tractor and it ran
over onto the floor.
LH: That’s not like him.
RH: So, what car was it that we had? Was it a Maverick?
LH: Yeah, a Maverick and a pick- up. Your first thought was to get out there and rescue
us; he pictured us out there north of town not knowing about it yet just like we would
have been if it hadn’t been for this neighbor that called us up.
RH: Anyway, we took off in these two outfits, the pickup and the Maverick. I think Brian
drove the Maverick. I sent Richard down in the truck down Hog Hollow Road which is
going up the back country.
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LH: He sent shovels with him and bags he thought sandbagging everything around the
house. That was his idea and sending someone in the truck when there was no house left.
RH: When we got to Saint Anthony there was a police blockade. They wouldn’t let
anyone through the blockade. It was on this highway out here, number 20, but I didn’t
pay any attention to the blockade, I just [ went] around it. We got down to Sugar; we had
a flat roof house out there that we had built.
LH: It had been there about 20 years.
RH: For some odd reason there was a ladder leaning against the house. I told Brian to
climb up on the roof and see what you can see. He said, “ All I can see is a big wall of
brown, muddy water.”
LH: Coming down through the hill from the east.
RH: I said, “ Let’s get out of here.” He said, “ Where should we go?” I said, “ Let’s head
for the overpass.” There was an overpass over the railroad right there.
LH: Tell him about the cow, how funny the cow acted.
RH: We had a few livestock. Do you remember how many there was? There was a horse
and some cows. We opened the gate and tried to get them out, but they sensed that
something was wrong, and they wouldn’t run out, they just kept running around in the
pasture, right there by the house and as we were headed for the over pass we were
looking at the power lines on both sides of the over pass. When the water would hit those
power lines it snapped those power poles right off just like they were match sticks. When
it snapped the power and the power lines had live power lines in them and there was a big
arch of electricity going through the power lines and I thought well, the deadliest thing
that could happen to us would be to be electrocuted. Then there was a big fertilizer plant
and I thought if we had to we could swim over to the fertilizer plant and hang on to the
ladder there on the fertilizer plant so we wouldn’t drown.
LH: Tell him where you parked the 2 cars.
RH: The overpass had a gravel road and when the water hit it kept washing the gravel
away from the approach and I thought well, if we have to we will just swim out to the
fertilizer plant.
LH: First of all he didn’t go clear up on top. If he had he would have been gone because
the minute the water hit, the whole top went like that and they would have been dumped
right off and the whole thing collapsed, but they were as high as they could get back here
on the north edge. When you put rocks along the bottom you can measure, tell them
about that.
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RH: We put rocks along the bottom, to see if the water was rising or falling and we found
out that the water was falling so that gave us a little bit of comfort that way. Then what
was the next thing we did?
LH: You stayed up there for five hours.
RH: Yeah, we stayed up there on that perch for 5 hours. We finally were spotted by a
helicopter that came along the overpass. They took us in the helicopter up to Teton.
LH: There were airplanes going all over all day, weren’t there? That was an excited 4
hours or 5 hours up there. It was really wild with all the people that were trying to rescue
people and how exciting.
RH: How did we get from Teton to Rexburg?
LH: You said you hitched a ride with somebody. See Teton is here and you went along
up in the upper country and up to the hill and got up to the college through a back kind of
road that was up higher. It wasn’t covered with water and that is the way they made it up
there. The minute that I saw them, our boy that was 16 wasn’t with them and I said,
“ Where’s Richard. And he said, “ We don’t know, we sent him down through Hog
Hollow in the old truck with sand bags and everything and we were supposed to meet up
at the house.” He went on through the middle and they went this way and they were to
meet up at the house. He said, “ He wasn’t there and we never did see him.” The minute I
heard that it was the first time I really got upset in the whole thing and I just got sick
again. I had already lost one son 3 months before and where they sent him was exactly
where the flood hit, that’s right down from up above where the dam broke. Then he
didn’t have a radio in the truck and he would have been going along and wouldn’t have
known what hit him until this great big wall of water hit him. I was so sick when I heard
that I could barely stand it.
RH: Anyway, Richard came to this little place called Little Hog Hollow, and the water
was really backed up there at Little Hog Hollow so he couldn’t get through so he just
went back up to the Ranch. Saved his life!
LH: Yeah, one part of the water went this way and there was an area that was lower and
that is what they call Little Hog Hollow and they went up this way and cut him off, he
couldn’t quite get to St. Anthony. Because everyone who got to there had to turn around
and go back up into the dry farms. He was on the north side of the dam and he was alone
all day and he didn’t know what had happened to any of us. He had no telephone, it was a
horrible day in his life not knowing whether we drowned or what happened. He had no
telephone and he went back up and spent the day pacing and upset and not knowing what
to do. Do you want to tell anymore about it?
RH: Anyway, that night she was over at the college in the station wagon.
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LH: Thank goodness I had just filled it when I got to town or we couldn’t have done
anything. That service station well the remains stood there for 2 or 3 months. I was
probably the last one who got gas there before the water hit. Thank goodness I got gas
there when I did or we never could have gone back up to the ranch that night. I just
couldn’t stand it to not know what happened to him so we went along on top of the edge I
don’t know what we went on but we went on some higher roads because this was all
water down here for several days and then we went up around Teton and got on [ a]
highway up to our ranch, a hard way to get there. The farther we went the sicker we got, I
got so sick inside, that is the sickest I had been for a long while. Even though I knew our
house wasn’t there and I had lost everything, nothing had fazed me until I had thought I
lost this son. I thought, I just can’t stand to get there and him not there. I just got sicker
the farther we went, just this terrible feeling. It’s a funny feeling as you can’t stand not to
know yet you don’t want to know. I don’t know if that makes sense?
RH: We were on old highway 33 which takes us up to the junction where highway 32 is
and we followed highway 32 back down to the ranch.
LH: It was a long ways around, but the regular highway you would normally go up was
all torn up. You couldn’t use that highway for quite a while. I don’t know how long it
was until they got that fixed again. But anyway, we went up there and when we drove
down our road to our ranch house I couldn’t see a light down there at all and I just sick,
and as we got closer still no light there and I just thought, “ I don’t want to know. I can’t
stand to know.” And as we turned in the driveway it looked to me like nothing was there.
And all of the sudden, my husband said, “ Oh thank goodness!” I said, “ What did you
see?” He said, “ The reflector on the old truck. The truck is back here.” That was all I
needed to know, that meant he had turned around back and he had come back to the
ranch. And when we had gotten there he wasn’t there, we had gone into the house, there
was a note that said, “ I have had a terrible day, I can’t stand it any longer, I have gone
with Walter Clark ( he was a good friend of ours he had come to see what he could do) he
has taken me to St. Anthony to see if we could find out anything about you.” He was
afraid we were all dead. We went up to the neighbors to use the telephone, we had 2
children at BYU in Provo and we wanted to tell them that we were okay because over the
news they were saying that 5,000 were dead up here you know so we wanted to hurry and
tell them before they heard and got terribly excited. So we called them and told them that
we were okay and not to worry about us. Then we came back down 2 miles to our house
and when we got there or while we were up at our neighbors when we came out of there
these friends had stopped with Richard, they had him and where bringing him back and I
never shed a tear in that whole horrible day until we stepped out of those people’s house
and saw him standing there. I can see him just standing there by the car and I was so
thankful to see him and to see that he was alright and I rushed out and that’s when I
finally let down and started to cry and was so thankful that his life was saved that he has
been turned back down here and couldn’t get in or he would have been swept away for
dead. He wouldn’t have had a chance at all. And so we all went down, we had been
fortunate, most people went down in the college housing, and stayed that night, and
stayed awake all night and grieved over there houses and we went down there and I had
set this big pot of stew up there and of course no one had eaten all day and we were so
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thankful that we were alive and we had another home to go to. We went up and heated up
the soup and we all sat down and ate, took our showers and went to bed like tops. We
were so thankful that we hadn’t lost another family member, but we had lost our house,
and all of our livestock and our new barn and our big machine shed full, and there wasn’t
one thing left of our machine shed or anything that was in it. When we got down 2 days
later and got to look at it and our house was just completely ruined. The water came in
from the east, a big gush of water, and it knocked out the whole side of my kitchen, a
great big, the thing was it wasn’t the water that did such damage but all of the debris and
all of these big trees were all floating through. A great big tree smashed the whole side
and my dishwasher and sink and all that and the water went in from east and right
through the house. And we had great big Florida ceiling windows that were bigger than
that all on the south side of our living room. The water went in the east side and then out
through those windows and the Teton River ran right through our house for 3 weeks.
Then it dish- washed every single thing away in that part. The only thing that was left was
our bedrooms down in the west end. Up high we had built- in areas and everything that
was way up high in these closets, but the water stood in there what 7 feet high for days.
And our house was 9 feet high, we had some storage room in the bedrooms. We had a
boy that was in Argentina on his mission and before he left he packed all of his clothes
and put them way up high. I said, “ Why are you doing that Kelly?” He said, “ I don’t
know but I just feel that this is what I need to do with my things.” And his stuff was all
that was left. They were all there when he got home from his mission a few months later.
And as he was doing that I was thinking this is so weird why are you doing that?
Anyway, 2 or 3 days later we were able to come down and they could finally get down
the road, the water had receded enough, but I will never forget that.
RH: We had to come in canoes.
LH: Yeah, some people said our house was gone, that they couldn’t see it at all. And I
remember coming down on that first morning that I had tried to get down and I was
almost sick afraid to come and even see if it was there. I was sure it wasn’t there. And
where I got where I could see that it was still standing, even any part of it, with some of
my things in it I just started to cry and hard as I could to know that there was anything
left of our lives there. We had to park a block away and come in by canoes. The only way
we salvaged any of our stuff that was up high was that our cousins in St. Anthony, our
boys and Ray went in canoes and they would get a canoe full of what they could salvage.
A lot of my pans and my dishes were still in the cupboards. Things like that because the
cupboard doors were closed they were salvaged. All of my very best china and silver and
things were washed away. A neighbor found one of my silver spoons a mile west of the
house sticking out in the mud. I mean, they found one of our boy’s trumpets way down in
Hibbard which is 2 miles west in their fields. Our stuff was just washed that direction
clear to the sea. Anyway, we were very fortunate that we had anything left and the main
thing is the family survived.
RH: My cousin was living in a mobile home right there in the bottom of our house and
the water just raised that motor home up and it just floated it about 2 miles down to the
west and somebody called us up after a few days and asked if we knew anything about
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this mobile home sitting here in our pasture? The amazing thing about that was she had a
big blue vase, on one of her cabinets, and that vase was still standing upright after being
swept away a few miles away.
LH: The genealogy I was supposed to grab, I grabbed the wrong one. There was some
that was her genealogy her main genealogy was in this book case and it had gone face
down in the water and ruined, but that vase hadn’t. The storm did very odd things. But,
the sad thing was, we called her up, she was on a trip at the time, she was on a trip to
Arizona, or California, and we called her up and told her that it went to pieces and
everything in it disappeared. And that was a terrible blow to her. And then 3 weeks later
we get word that it is sitting down there in that pasture. I guess that it was in tack. And
her boys went down and loaded everything up and towed it all in a truck to Arizona to
her. And one interesting thing that I didn’t know is that she had a baby early in her life
that had passed away and she had it cremated and the ashes in a box that she had always
taken with her and it was in there. She hadn’t told us anything and here she had lost those
ashes she thought. And then when we gave her all the stuff then she told us that her
baby’s ashes had been in there and she had gotten them and they were not wet. So she
had it buried that time. Anyways, that must have been very traumatic to know that
something that precious disappeared. Anyway, we cleaned up my mothers house, it went
right off the foundation, it needed to be demolished and we got all of her furniture out,
and all of her dishes, and worked and worked to get up to the ranch. And we worked our
way all the way through our stuff and all of Dorothy’s stuff to Arizona. We worked
through summer just our boys were about worn out from doing it. Thank goodness the
day of the flood they finished our spring work and got the end of our crops planted way
up high and the flood wasn’t up there at all so we were really fortunate because we had a
crop grow that wasn’t devastated like all the farmers around here who didn’t have any
income that year. That was a great blessing financially. Our money still came in and then
by the fall we harvested a crop and we lived up there on our dry farm all summer and
then worked on cleaning up our stuff. We were very fortunate compared to other people.
RH: Anyway, there were papers from the filing cabinet. We found a few of those papers
that had mud on them.
LH: When they went over the drawers opened up and were all muddy and a big mess.
RH: We had this machine shed there and it was all over the machine shed floor so that it
would dry out. We were able to save a lot of things like important papers that had gotten
muddy.
LH: They never did look too good. Did you have any questions? We came off alright. We
thought I had cancer, but we found out the day before that I did not have cancer, and we
were so happy. The next day the flood hit. After having cancer and grieving over a death
a flood doesn’t seem so bad. That is why I did not cry on that hill. I just kept telling
myself it was material things. That is what you learn that way. Well, that is our flood
story.