Center Pivots in Divorce

A third generation homestead farmer .. roots go far back into sage brush .. drove a Humvee and sold drugs .. always talked on the cell phone in GPS coordinates .. got divorced. She took half the land and managed it just fine .. he got the other half.

The land in one area was "undulated" .. hills and gully's .. the center pivots had to keep the pipe in a straight line and was laser aligned .. they all are .. he dove me to a back section of his land .. and as he sat in his Humvee .. he told me how he had installed a tee and a valve in his pipe to flood the gully.

The said gully ran onto his ex .. and he would turn it on at night at sun down and flood her gully where her center pivot ran and it would spin out and become "unaligned" and stop .. for days at a time.

She finally got a court order which made him turn his contraption off because the sole purpose was to mess her up.

We picked the couple up at Raft River way before sun up .. Idaho State University bus taking students to class .. I got a free ride through two years of electronics driving the bus.

Sometimes they would not feel like sleeping and sit with me up front and we would watch the sun come up on Massacre Rocks .. and we would "tell stories." Her father took 27 sections out of sage brush and had them under center pivots to irrigate .. and one day he was cleaning up a corner where the circular pivot couldn't hit .. and there was a bank.

He found a depression near the bank .. then human bones .. then saw the trunks dug into the side of the hill .. full of old rotted clothes.

Raft River is the point where the California Trail separated from the Oregon Trail .. there are stories of friendships and hatred .. wagons parting without a word being spoken .. a hand shake or prayer. There are also stories about wagons turning around and going to an unintended place .. so friends didn't have to part.