Surviving the Sand: My Family's Struggle to Farm the Pasco Desert

Helen Lingscheit Heavirland spent her early years in Oregon, where her father's work as a logger provided a comfortable home. But Wayne Lingscheit dreamed of farming, and Columbia Basin Project irrigation opened a new opportunity. In 1954 he and his wife Gladys moved their family-seven-year-old Helen, baby Hazel, thirteen-year-old Frank, and sixteen-year-old Emma-to raw land in Pasco, Washington. Mostly bunchgrass and sagebrush, its only structures were a roofless outhouse, a six-foot by ei...