Mill Creek Memories page eight

I Become Top of the Hill Tom

Snow.

If there is anything more beautiful in nature than the first drifting snowflakes on an early winter morning in the high mountains, I really don’t know what it is––except maybe that perfect sunset at a perfect beach or that perfect rainbow hovering over a perfect waterfall or…

Well, you know what I mean. And the first snowflakes are awfully pretty!

We were making the final touches on the New Lassen ski lift—checking out the machinery and making sure all was safe and sound when the first flakes began to fall in what was to be a long, snowy winter.

We were cleaning up one of the foundation sites in the snow when Little Joe made another impression on me of just plain strength when he picked up a hand-powered cement mixer under one arm and two eighty-pound sacks of concrete under his other arm and carried them uphill for about 30 yards to a waiting pick-up truck.

On our last morning as a working team, the big boss called us together in the Lassen Chalet parking lot and handed out the last pay envelopes––and he asked those of us who lived nearby if we wanted to work when the lift started operating.

I jumped at the chance to work for pay on the mountain and he hired me to be the “Safety-man” who would sit in a heated glass booth at the top of the lift to make sure the skiers exited the lift and skied away safely.

My job was to push a STOP button which would stop the lift if there was any problem at the top.

This also meant I would be first person to ride up the lift every morning to visually check the shiv trains to make sure they were operational, to sculpt the snow exit ramp for sliding off the lift and other do chores and I would be the last one to ride the lift down every evening—unless I wanted to ski down with the ski patrol who checked to make sure no one was left on the mountain after the lift closed.

In just a few weeks there was enough snow to open so in November of 1982 (I think it was!) I started working full time on the Brand New Lassen Ski Lift and I had never been on skis in my life!

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Tanya at Lassen National Park

Mount Lassen

Tanya photo

Mount Lassen from the North in early June 2008. The park road was open and the drive from Manzanita to Mill Creek was lovely.

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Mill Creek Memories page seven

Part Monkey

The work foreman’s name was Fred.

He was a good boss. He knew what to do and how to do it. He knew how to keep all of us workers working too––and working well and happily. Not “Ha, ha.” Happy, but content with the job happy––which takes a certain skill as you probably know.

He was a little better at everything than anyone else was too and that’s not so easy either.

Yet he was a regular guy. Not proud. Not a show-off. Just a nice, regular guy.

He was rather small and slight in build, but strong enough to do any of the heavy work as well as any of the rest of us—except probably Little Joe, who was a prodigy of strength as I have said.

One of the first days I was on the job one of the contract crew of ski lift workers from the head office said of Fred “that he was part monkey”. I filed that information away since the digging work we were doing for the first few weeks was on the ground and there was no need of any monkey skills.

But when the towers came in and were set up on the mountainside some work developed that was more in the line of circus acrobat stuff.

Someone had to climb the towers and, with the aid of heavy machinery and power tools, fasten rows of heavy wheels, the “shiv trains”, to arms on the tower. One of these towers was eighty feet high and all the rest were way up in the treetops to clear heavy snow in the winter.

This was very dangerous, touch and go, work. I couldn’t do it, of course, and wouldn’t do it. It was far too risky. (They never asked me to either!)

But Fred was absolutely in his element. He WAS part monkey!

He was up the towers and running around on the arms of the machinery and bolting the heavy wheels on like he had some spider blood too.

I watched him whenever I was not too busy with my work on the ground with my heart in my mouth. He was taking risks I wouldn’t even think of as a matter of course and with a nonchalance that was, to me, incredible.

I swear this next bit is true.

I was watching from far below one time when he slipped off the cross-arm of the tower and as he fell he grabbed that steel arm, which was square and as big around as your body, whipped himself around it and came up sitting on top of the arm!

He saved his own life and kept right on working without missing a beat.

By golly I REALLY admired that!

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Mill Creek Memories page six

Little Joe Helps Me Clean Up My Act

This may sound strange or even impossible to you but when we were growing up, no-one in my family swore—that is, used swear words––at all.

I live in an apartment in a working class neighborhood now and I am sometimes a little bit shocked to hear the language the neighbors shout day and night at each other.

Even the very young children around here, who learn from their parents, of course––yell foul words at each other.

But I can honestly say I never heard either my father or my mother use a “bad” word. Neither when I was a child nor when I grew up.

Such language simply did not exist for them.

About as uncouth as they could be was “darn”—but I really don’t even remember them even using that word—though we kids did.

In those primitive days all male US citizens had to serve a period of time in the service. (Sounds terribly old fashioned doesn’t it?)

I joined the Navy Reserve and had to show up to the Great Lakes Training Center near Chicago and a year later had to show up for a two week cruise from New Orleans. These periods of training were interesting enough for a young fellow like I was. But I found out quite early that I was suffering from a serious linguistic handicap.

I didn’t swear.

Everything in the Navy was a f***ing this or a f***ing that. And of course all trash was s***, and all waste cans were s***cans. Etc.

I was not a language purist for moral reasons––foul language was just not my habit.

It took me just a little while and soon I was saying f***ing s*** with the best of them.

I spent my two years of active Navy duty in Hawaii and when I got out I stayed there––it was about the nicest place I had ever been.

I played rock n roll in the dives on Hotel Street until I graduated from UH and then I taught English at junior and senior high schools.

I gradually lost my swearing ability since it was not needed in the night clubs or in the classrooms, but than I got a teaching position at the brand new Leeward Community College campus of UH.

For some unknown reason, maybe because it was the “seventies” with all the Viet Nam protests and the black power enthusiasms, but all the cool students swore like sailors.

I wanted to be accepted as a cool instructor, so I used the old familiar foul language from my old Navy days right along with the best of them.

And I was cool.

Fast forward a few years and I am working on the ski lift at Lassen.

I am a little older than the other laborers but I am as cool as any of them I think. Some of them swear and some of them don’t but I bring out my swearing vocabulary and it’s f***ing this and so forth per the good old days.

I am working with a gang that includes young Joe one day and I am using my best foul language when he casually says to me: “Didn’t you say you used to be an English Teacher?”

His remark absolutely stopped my train.

It shamed me to my shoes.

I remembered myself all the way back to my father’s knee and I was shamed, ashamed and embarrassed.

I stopped my swearing right then and now I am a lot more careful of other people’s ears when I speak.

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