An Ancestor’s Journey Retraced

By Melissa Lee Kinsey

We were walking on Fir Grove Road, somewhere between Fairfield and the Little City of Rocks north of Gooding, when a truck bounced toward us. We had walked about six miles on this dirt road that parallels Highway 46 and all we’d seen were sagebrush, lava rocks, and the shadows of small rodents that scurried to the side of the road as we approached. So we were excited by the truck and wondered who was behind the wheel.

A young man brought the truck to a stop, leaned out his window, and grinned. “Just out for a stroll here?”

It was a pretty casual greeting for the circumstances. We learned he was working Fir Grove Ranch and was driving to check on the cattle, as he did every day. Given the remote location, I can’t imagine he saw people very often, especially a group wearing cushioned running shoes and compression socks and carrying walking sticks. He must have been shocked by the sight of us four: two of my brothers, my husband, and me. He may have thought we were lost, or nuts.

My oldest brother, Dann, introduced our group and said our dad’s family was from the area—our grandparents had owned a ranch nearby. We were walking this route to commemorate the trek our grandpa, Hyrum Dixon Lee, had taken to get to the hospital in Gooding for the birth of our dad. It had been an impressive journey through the night and over deep snow in February, 1936, driven by doctor’s orders that he get to the hospital, whatever it took.

His wife, who was forty and had lost a baby some years earlier, was due anytime. The roads were closed because of a recent blizzard, so he rode his horse to the train station seven miles north, patted Ol’ King on the rump to send him home, and then found that the train was not running. He walked back to the ranch, ate dinner, readied a pair of skis, and headed south towards Gooding. Some thirty miles later, he arrived in time for the birth of our dad, Del Ray Lee.

“Where’re y’all from?” the young guy asked.

My brother told him: Birmingham, Alabama; Memphis, Tennessee; and Chicago, Illinois.

“Y’all are from some pretty lousy places,” he said in a friendly tone. I think he felt sorry for us. It made me think of our dad’s family, who had wondered how he could have left Idaho, trading his home patch with its rugged beauty and open spaces for a suburban home in Orange County, California, where he and our mom raised us.

I’ll tell you how. After high school he wanted an education but didn’t know what he wanted to study, so he joined the Marines. Not far into his tenure he met our mom. End of story. It was love and a growing family that he left for. They did return to Idaho, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Idaho in Moscow. But then they moved back to Southern California, where the jobs—and her family—were.