Pilgrim mask

Tanya Photo

I call this mask "The Pilgrim".

Here The Pilgrim is walking a trail to some pilgrimage goal.

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Tanya Photo

Me as Frog

Hi.

I have a LOT of good memories of Mill Creek, Mineral and Lassen Park but for now I would like to change the subject for a little while.

I am going to teach a short course soon--a VERY short course--in making paper mache masks-- and I want to show a few of these creations on this, my blog page.

The class will be held at the Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding, California on September 21 and September 28, 2008. Then the "students" wearing their mask creations will be in a short theatrical performance at the new Redding Art Hop.

Thanks.

Thomas

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Chapel, Tower, Bridge

Some things do not change much.
Tanya on My Bridge at Mill Creek Resort

I have heard that every man should build three things before he dies: a chapel, a tower and a bridge.

I am happy to report that I have accomplished those three things.

"My" chapel: a one-seat meditation chapel half-way up the hillside garden at my parents little A-frame house between Ventura and Ojai, California. (You had to walk through the duck yard to get there and don't forget to close the gate.)

I decorated it with a goldfish pond--a tile mural featuring the New Mexico ZIA symbol made by my mother-- and a memorial to "DUKE" carved into a small granite stone with a candlestick attached. (Duke was the departed brother of a friend of mine.) The roof was an old oak tree.

I believe the entire scene-- parents, chapel, garden, oak tree and ducks are all gone now. (What do you expect in Southern California?)


"My" tower: the top tower at the Lassen Ski lift.

I helped build it and put a ceremonial medal under its concrete block foundation. It was made of steel and I really did think it would outlast me.

Nope.

There were a few dry years without sufficient snow and the whole ski lift--towers, machinery and all-- was removed and sold somewhere back east where it could make somebody some money.


"My" bridge: is no Golden Gate--but it IS a bridge and though I did not build it from scratch, I DID restore it and make it usable for a few more years when it was falling down.

And it is still there!

It is a footbridge across a brook behind the rental cabins at Mill Creek Resort and when you get there think of me when you walk (or dance) across.

My chapel. My tower. My bridge.

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Mill Creek Memories page ten

Mineral, CA & Les & Muriel Bodine

When I got the job as a common laborer on the Lassen ski lift project, I enlarged my circle of acquaintances into the next, and slightly larger, town from Mill Creek: Mineral, California.

Mineral had been named about 80 years before by a land shark that thought that he could sell township property to fools if they thought there was gold or silver or something valuable there.

The only mineral in Mineral was dirt, but the pretty view of Mount Lassen and the clean little river (Battle Creek) and the forest is still "pay dirt" for some real-estate people today.

When I knew Mineral the village had a charming little elementary school (three teachers, two assistants, a time-share Principal and a janitor--six paid jobs!), a real service station (not just a gas pump) a real motel (about ten rooms and a restaurant) a post office, General Store and a Laundromat. Maybe 75 people (counting kids) lived there all year round and maybe another hundred were part-time seasonal residents.

Two of the most interesting of the Mineral residents to me in those days were Muriel and Les Bodine.

Les was known as the "Mayor of Mineral", a purely honorary title since the town had no organization, and Muriel was his wife and partner. They were one of those man-and-wife teams, which seem totally inevitable; one plainly could not exist without the other, and yet Les and Muriel were both quite individual and unique characters on their own.

They lived in a modern three story wooden "cabin" on the last house lot of Mineral town on the way to Lassen Park. There was a rushing, spring-fed stream in their yard––one foot wide and one foot deep––a trout would sometimes pay them a visit swimming up from Battle Creek. In the short high-mountain summers they kept a small vegetable garden with plentiful flowers and summer and winter they flew a large bright American flag from the front second floor balcony when they were at home.

We liked each other very much. Les and Muriel had no children and I was like a grown son to them--later they met my blood parents and were good friends to them too. I was very much free and on the loose at the time––practicing the piano at Mineral School (an old Steinway!) and hiking in the mountains all day long. I would stop by for a chat and a cup of coffee once or twice a week.

When I met them, Les was retired from the Forest Service. He had been a great skier as a young man and once showed me some mementos from when he had been on the Ski Patrol at the Sun Valley Winter Olympics in my father's day.

Muriel was truly Les's Better Half––kind of sour and reserved to his boisterous enthusiasm and she was not so robust as he. When I first met them she was almost blind and she later had an accident that blinded her more completely.)

A neatly painted sign outside their front door described their house as "the House of Perpetual Commotion", and there were residual traces of that kind of excitement around the place when I knew them, though they had mellowed some with age, I think.

They owned an old-fashioned pedal-pump organ, which I liked to try to play, and they usually had ice cream, since it was Muriel's favorite food, which I also liked to eat.

I did little outdoor chores around their house––the one I especially enjoyed was to paint their outdoor lawn furniture with a turpentine/linseed-oil mixture that I thought would make the wood last longer. I did this every season when I put the chairs out for the short summer and again when I brought them in for their long winter's storage in the attic. Though I was always travelling in those years, I actually did that little painting chore for them several times. They paid me––sometimes with a sandwich and sometimes with a five-dollar bill, but ours was not a boss/employee relationship, but a genuine friendship.

Les was a natural-born teacher. He knew more "natural history" lore than any man I ever met, except one, and he was willing to share everything he knew.

There are lots of springs around Mineral and he knew them all. One of his jobs was to check the water flow level of Battle Creek,––and he did a lot of other odd jobs for the Forest Service, though he was retired, and he would often take me along to help out. He would talk to me all along the way and he was spellbinding. He knew every plant and every stone it seemed, and why they were just the way they were. Yet he was never a boring “know-it-all”. He was sure of himself in his Lassen environment––humble but also proud of his knowledge.

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Mill Creek Memories page nine

I Learn to Ski

Every few years Lassen gets a LOT of snow.

The year the new Lassen Ski Lift opened was one of those years.

By the time the lift opened there was snow piled six to eight feet deep and by the middle of the season there was some forty feet of snow on the ground.

The highway coming into the park as far as the Lassen Chalet and the parking lot were plowed with tremendous perfectly vertical walls of snow towering up from the edge of the tarmac.

I absolutely loved being the first human way up high on the mountain every day in the silence of the dawn.

And I soon grew to know and enjoy the customers that used the lift.

Lassen had just the one lift and two or three groomed trails but the closest mountain competing for the skiers of the northern Sacramento valley was way over at Lake Tahoe—so I thought we did pretty well.

As I said, I had zero experience of skiing or the scene so I was content.

I had no experience with the huge mobs of skiers or the costumes, the racers, bars, hotels, the pros or any of the merchandising hype that is, of course, the only real reason for skiing to exist.

I wore some snowmobile boots down to the lift before the morning opening and would carry a set of bongo drums with me to the top where I would play rhythms—trying to “rhythm entrain” myself musically with the mechanical pulse of the huge loop of moving cable which had been laid out on an exact East/West line (I had checked through the surveyor’s theodolite when they were aligning the towers at the beginning of the project.)

As a matter of fact the message I was sending out into the cosmos through the entire vibrating cable was “Send Help”, not just for me but for all of us since even back then the “handwriting was on the wall” for the ecological destruction of this planet by humans.

And, of course I was very alert to anything that would require me to push the "stop" button!

One of the best privileges of working at the lift was the opportunity of skiing free when not working and on our days off––and we could also borrow boots and skis from the rental shop for free.

The management had set up a “Bunny Slope” rope tow near the Chalet and one of the little girls from the town of Mineral was one of their most enthusiastic customers. She would grab the moving rope and get as ride to the top and slide down and do it again all day.

The first chance I had I asked her to teach me to ski––which she was delighted to do.

She showed me how to hold the poles and how to slow and stop by forming a “piece of pie” with the ski tips.

So I rode the Bunny Tow with all the little kids for a couple of hours.

Then I asked her if she thought I was ready to try the chair lift.

She gave me this profound Little Kid Wisdom: “If YOU think you’re ready, you’re ready!”

So I slid down the hill to the big new chair lift, slid into position to be scooped off my feet by the moving chair and before I knew it–– was riding high over the snow with skis on my feet.

Sliding off the chair at the top turned out to be a piece of cake too and so, like everyone else, I did it again and again!

It was fun!