Personal History for Austin

Austin Farley
Personal History

I was born on January 4, 1984 to Jon and Julie Farley. Looking at me now you nobody would have guessed that I was the smallest baby my mother had. I was a whopping 6 lbs. 12 oz. and was 19 inches long. Being their first I was obviously their favorite, until my other siblings were born. I was bald for the first year or so of my life. When I was born I had some hair but it fell out soon after and didn’t grow back for a long time. Then when it did grow back it was blonde and curly. I had big curls all over, and my mom hesitated on giving me a hair cut because I finally had hair.
I wasn’t an only child for long; on September 13, 1985 my little brother Eric was born. I was excited to have a little buddy to play with. We did everything together. Both of us hated being in the house, so we spent as much time as we possibly could outside. It didn’t matter if it was 100 degrees or 10 below; we were ready to explore whatever new adventure awaited us outside. We had some pretty wild imaginations, as most children should, and we would pretend we had forts and battles and tree houses everywhere. There wasn’t a single tree in Parker, Idaho that we hadn’t climbed, or at least given our best efforts to try. The trees that were in our yard didn’t have a single branch that hadn’t been explored. With that much time spent climbing there is always sure to be some falls. We had a few accidents but no broken bones or anything to serious, just some minor cuts and bruises. There was one time that I was about ten or fifteen feet off the ground climbing on one of the less popular routes and I lost my hold and fell to the ground hitting a couple of branches on the way down. When I gathered myself up from off the ground and checked for injuries I realized something wasn’t right. It felt like something was missing. I looked around and noticed something hanging from a branch in the tree. I looked closer and realized what it was. My underwear had snagged on a smaller branch and ripped them right off. Another time Eric and I were climbing around and he fell and his foot got wedged, and he was hanging upside down. His head was about five feet off the ground and I tried to lift him up enough to get him down, but I just wasn’t tall enough. The funny thing was that the person that came to the rescue was a guy who was inside cleaning the carpets of our house noticed Eric hanging upside down and came running out and helped him down.
Well there wasn’t just the two of us for long. On April 10, 1988 Kace was born. He was a funny little kid. He had a wild imagination, and was full of stories. I remember we would visit my grandparents on both sides quite frequently, and my mom’s dad, Grandpa Chapple, would always sit him on his lap and tell him to tell him a story. He could come up with some crazy ones.
We were pretty close to my grandparents. My dad’s parents lived less than a block away from me. I would visit them at least once a week and almost every holiday and birthday they would come over for dinner and cake and ice cream. My mom’s parents lived in Ririe which was only a twenty or thirty minute drive or so. So we visited them quite often also. My mom has two siblings, an older sister and a younger brother. They were all pretty close while growing up and this carried over into their adult lives. My Uncle Clint died when I was around four. He had never been married and had no children, so the only cousins on my mom’s side was her sister’s children. My aunt Cindy had two kids, Jake is two years older than me, and Halli is my age. We did tons of stuff together. We would go camping multiple times each year and would go skiing and snow machining. Birthdays and holidays and pretty much any little event was an excuse to get together and have dinner and hang out. I remember that Kilgore was and Palisades were the two most popular places to camp. The usual camp site in Kilgore had a creek right below it, and a hill side above it. We would take our bikes and ride up a trail to the top of the hill, and like a wild bunch of kids should be like, we would ride straight down the steep side of the hill and would weave in and out of the trees. Dodging the trees was only half of the craziness. When we would reach the bottom of the hill we had to make sure and stop as fast as we could because there was a dirt road and then the bank of the creek and then the creek. One of the times I was cruising down the hill on my blue huffy, everything was going pretty good until I tried to start slowing down and when I pulled back on my handle bar brake nothing happened. So as I got closer to the bottom of the hill I knew what was going to happen, so as I sailed across the road and when my tires left the ground after hitting the bank I braced myself for the impact of the water. Splash!! It was pretty wild, I didn’t get injured but I didn’t have any intentions of doing it again.
On November 6, 1991 we got another brother named Bryten. A couple of months after Bryten was born I turned eight and was baptized on my birthday. It was cool being able to be baptized on my birthday. A couple months after that just before Easter break I had the opportunity to go with my dad on a three day trip. He’s a truck driver and had to take a load of bark to somewhere and pick something else up and bring it back. It was a Thursday afternoon and school was almost out for the break and there was no school on Friday so I wasn’t going to miss much. We started out and things were going good. We packed plenty of snacks and food for the trip. My dad’s truck had a sleeper in it which is a space behind the seats that has a bed and some storage places. It’s big enough to stand up in and put a bed in probably a little smaller than a single sized one. We made it to the Hoback Junction just past Jackson and I was getting a little tired and decided to take a nap in the sleeper. Next thing I knew I was upside down and it was dark and my dad was yelling my name. I don’t remember how I got out of the truck but he helped me and I realized why I was upside down. The truck had slid off the road and rolled down the side of the bank of the river that ran along side of the highway. It rolled three and a quarter times and came to a stop on its side at the bottom of the bank. My dad was torn up pretty bad because he went through the top of the truck when it came to a stop. The sheet metal cut him up pretty bad. He almost lost his eyelid and had stitches all over his head and face. He had three broken bones and a punctured lung. My injuries weren’t as noticeable. I had a couple of cuts that needed stitches and a broken nose, but I also broke my back. We both climbed up the bank and some passer byes stopped and helped us and one of them went and called an ambulance. We were both in the hospital for a week and then went home. My dad’s injuries healed enough he was able to go back to work after a couple of weeks and I had to wear a back brace and be in a wheelchair. They took some x-rays and it didn’t look good for a long time. The doctors didn’t sound very optimistic at first. I had to go in for regular x-rays and checkups weekly for a three or four months until my doctor decided everything finally looked good enough to walk again. It was one of the most painful things I have ever done. My legs had lost all the muscle in them, and I would try and crawl around the house but my mom would tell me to walk because it would build the strength back up in my legs. About another three or four months I was able to start taking off the brace and my legs were pretty much back to normal. I was able to be involved in many sports and activities that I never thought I would be able to after that. I played basketball, baseball, and football to name just a few. Luckily my injuries have never hindered me in any way. I am forever thankful for the blessing that my father and I were able to have a full recovery.
I attended school at Parker-Egin Elementary school from Kindergarten through sixth grade. My house was about 100 yards from the school, so me and the local neighborhood kids would spend a lot of time over there. There were some sleeping willow trees that lined one edge of the school grounds. We would pull the bleachers from the baseball field over to the biggest tree. We would reach up as high as we could and grab a big bunch of branches and then run down the bleacher seat and jump off the end and let the tree branch swing around. Usually after a couple of days we would have to move to another tree or wait for a couple of weeks for the branches to recuperate.
My parents added on to their house in the summer of ’93 because the house was getting too small and they were expecting another child later in the year. It was finished in the later fall, and my only sister was born that winter. On December 23 Denae was born. My mom got here wish and was finally given a girl. They decided their family was complete and ended with four boys and one girl. I was almost ten years older than her. I thought that was quite the span in years, but I didn’t compare too many families to mine or else I would have realized that wasn’t much at all.
I was involved in sports while I was a child. Basketball in the winter from the time I was in the fourth grade, baseball in the summers from when I was five. I always wanted to play football, but wasn’t given the opportunity until I was in the eighth grade, but that’s a story for a different time.