Every ordinary life has extraordinary moments.
Above Palisade in East Orchard Mesa,
orchards are coming alive with the arrival of spring. Trees are budding while
snow still outlines the swan and bear, or rhino (as some people call the
images) on the west side of Grand Mesa.
Orchard growers both old and new
are out tending to the innumerable chores of pruning and cleaning out the
irrigation ditches around their fields.
Dewey Harris is
not new to this hard labor. “We had over 3500 fruit trees on 34 acres when we
started, but I’m having a little bit harder time of it now that I’m 90 years
old.”
He goes slower
with a bad knee, fading eyesight and hard of hearing, but he keeps working the
family business, Harris Orchard but on a smaller scale. Yet he remains the
family patriarch, a widower helping his two sons: one living in Panonia and one
living at home with medical issues.
His 65 year-old
son Ed has been a paraplegic since he was 10, but it hasn’t made either him or
his dad negative about life. Ed may be restricted to wheel chair mobility, but
he has two degrees (not counting that he is an ordained preacher), a writer
with many interests and “loves.” Ed loves to talk and laugh about everything,
especially about his dad’s actions.
“When Dad’s in the house, he rolls around
everywhere in my old wheelchair . When he goes out to do chores, he rides
either his all-terrain vehicle or the tractor.
“A few weeks ago
during a visit by the bookmobile lady, she looked up to see my dad roll off his
ATV. She ran out to help him. Dad
was okay, just bruised and embarrassed, so he brushed off the woman’s help.”
“I didn’t roll off.”
Dewey said indignantly, “I was driving under too low tree limbs that just
pushed me off.” Then both father and son smiled about the memory.”
Ed loves to
prompt his Dad to retell the stories of
how his dad and mom met, married and moved to their Palisade home.
Born in Branson,
MO, Dewey Harris visited the Valley over 75 years ago.
“I wanted to
travel west a little bit, and had a brother out here. They used to say if you
come over the hill and drank some of Palisade’s water; you’d always come back.
“After I left out of here for a
while, I did come back. It wasn’t for the water. I met my wife.” He paused and
smiled about that reason which brought him back to Western Colorado. In 1941
Edna McClellan was one of the prettiest senior girls at Palisade High School.
“I come back out
to see Edna. That was in 1942. Then the Army called me into service, so I took
Edna back to Missouri.” They got married in 1943, and she stayed with his folks
until she got to join him.
Dewey served as a
Military policeman for the duration of World War II. He doesn’t talk much about
those years, but he does remember what happened on August 6, 1945.
“Towards the end
of the war we couldn’t get the Japs from killing our men over there. So they picked a bunch of us MP
company, men good with a gun, and prepared them for a special combat.”
After basic and
specialized training, he was sent to Arizona. Those soldiers found they could
request to have their wives come there. So he requested Edna, and she worked
off base while he continued training for a secret mission.
Over 200 specifically
trained marksmen were assigned to be air-dropped on the island and take out all
the Japanese snipers who were killing the Americans.
Dewey Harris knew it was a suicide
mission.
“Because if I had
went, I wouldn’t have been coming back. There weren’t any of us coming back.
Their snipers were cutting our men down. We couldn’t shut them down.
“That bomb that
went off over there (on Japan), it saved my life,” this 90-year-old vet
explained. With the atomic bomb dropped that day, all orders were changed.
He and the other MPs
on this mission came home safe.
Ed had heard this
story many times, so he spoke up about all his dad’s talent as a marksman before
the war. “He killed two squirrels with one shot back in Missouri. He learned
from his dad, and Dad was a good shot.
“But after the Columbine
tragedy in 1999, Dad took all of his guns and gave them away to his brother in
Missouri. He just didn’t want any one to use his guns for such a tragic action
ever again.”
Harris and his wife moved back to
Palisade after World War II to become a “peach rancher,” a term the locals
called themselves. They bought 34 acres “across the road” from Edna’s parents’
orchard on East Orchard Mesa.
They built a good life in the fruit
business as Harris Orchard and Fruit Stand while raising two boys: Ellis and
Edward. They stayed active in the Palisade area. Dewey was a volunteer
firefighter for 34 years in the Orchard Mesa Fire station closest to their
orchards until Edna died in 2008.
Today Dewey and
Ed live on the remaining 15 acres of the original family acreage, surrounded by
new houses and neighbors living on acres that used to be their orchards.
They sold the land, “to pay off their
debts,” Dewey said, “Because we had to go into debt to buy the land.”
They look across
the brown fields to the north across the Colorado River and Palisade end of the
Valley at Mt. Garfield before turning their gaze to the familiar images on the
east side of the Mesa.
Ed smiles his
constant smile at his father to said, “I love this place.”
Dewey agrees with
an answering smile.
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