Mill Creek Memories page two

Firewood and Fishing

I had arrived in Mill Creek in May from the coast expecting the winter to be over–– and it was at the altitude of the town of Mill Creek, but Mount Lassen still had lots of snow on its upper slopes so I couldn’t climb around on it like I wanted to. When I had discovered what a good place this little town of Mill Creek was, I decided to live here for a while even if there was not much work available.

Then I heard there was a very remote fishing camp maybe ten miles further into the wilds downstream from the town called “Hole in the Ground”.

My good old Ford pick-up made it down to the camp and I found it was a very lovely, quiet, free Forest Service camp with parking places, tables and fire pits right on Mill Creek. A fisherman was already there with his camper but he had his own camp and minded his own business. . I didn’t fish. I didn’t have a license or any tackle.

About the second morning I was there a tanker truck arrived and the driver started transferring nice, big trout from the opened top of the tank to the river with a long-handled fishing net. This was something new for me. There were more fish than I could imagine going into the river right at my feet. One big trout leapt out of the net and landed at the feet of the fisherman. He grabbed it with his bare hands and tossed it into the river with its buddies.

“Man, you had that fish! You caught it fair and square––why’d you throw it in the river?” I exclaimed.

“Aw, that’s no fun.” He said.

I stayed on a few more days. No one else showed up and every day the fisherman would give me a couple of trout for breakfast so he wouldn’t go over his limit.

So. You see, I imagined Hole in the Ground to be a perfect quiet fishing place.

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My firewood boss Harry kept a very neat firewood cutter’s camp. He was very proud of the neat cords of wood he carefully stacked before we loaded them into the old truck he rented to carry the firewood down to Chico. He also loved to fish and when he wasn’t taking care of his camp like a Boy Scout he was off fishing in the narrow deep streams of the meadows.

I was getting stronger and more agile tossing two split pieces of firewood at a time into the big truck and rolling the big “rounds” of cut wood to the pickup truck and hoisting them in.

I didn’t do much cutting because the chainsaws were pretty expensive and I never bought one––but there was more than enough other work

Harry told me we would take the Fourth of July off which was OK with me!

Then he asked me if I knew of any good fishing holes nearby where he could indulge his passion. I told him about The Hole in the Ground and offered to guide him there.

So the next morning, which was the Fourth of July, Harry picked me up at my camp in Mill Creek and I showed him the dirt road that led down to my quiet fishing hole.

But, Holy Mackerel, there must have been two hundred fishermen with their wives and children all over the camp––wall to wall trucks and campers and tents and smoky campfires smelling of hot-dogs––unbelievable!.

So Harry tossed his line in with all the rest and took it all with good humor. I wasn’t faking my astonishment!

But just after the fourth of July Harry told me that the area of trees his license allowed him to cut was about finished and he was packing his camp and heading back to Chico to his regular job as a bartender. I would have to find another job.

I wanted to stay in the Lassen area very much—I discovered that I really liked it!

But there was nothing much for me to do to earn money––even the humble subsistence level I needed.

I learned that there was a big construction project just starting for the Lassen Volcanic National Park late that summer. The Forest Service had signed a permit to allow a ski lift to be built on a high slope in the Park. Visions of wealth and employment excited the few people who actually lived in the nearby mountain towns scratching a living from the land in any way they could (state highway maintenance, gas station operator, school teacher, cafe waitress, bar owner, motel people, truckers and my people, the firewood trade scavengers).

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Mill Creek Memories

Mill Creek, CA an Introduction

I am going to tell you a few yarns about some experiences I had and some people I met in the mountain towns near Mount Lassen in northern California.

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More than a few years ago I wanted to work in the high mountains. I lived in California but planned to go to the highlands of Ecuador to find a suitable place to work on a project I had in mind––I'll tell you that story later, if I have the time––and I wanted to get accustomed to living and working at a high altitude.

A friend told me about Mill Creek, a pretty, tiny mountain town near Lassen National Park which she had discovered way, way off the beaten track––a town so small it didn't even have a center stripe painted down the paved street going through it to separate the lanes of traffic––and in California that means a VERY small town.

I was living in a "camper" at the time––a little portable house on the bed of an old Ford pick-up truck, so I could live pretty much wherever there was a road and I needed practically no money to survive. I was enjoying the freedom.

I found the town and it was as nice as my friend had described it: one general store with a cafe and gas pump and a post office and that was about it. There were thirty or so very old privately owned summer cottages in the village since this had been a deer hunter's paradise in my grandparent's day. That pioneer generation had wiped out most of the deer, of course, and had also eliminated most of the native fish and all of the native people (Ishi's tribe) and cut down the saleable trees. But the forest had made a comeback in the sixty or seventy years since this had been a flourishing hunting camp, there were a few new deer left for today's generation of sportsmen to shoot, fish were put in the river from state fish farms for today's fisherfolk to catch; and though the native people were extinct, Euro-American people had arrived in sufficient quantities that the "town" still rated the closet-sized post office and had not totally disappeared.

In the days I am talking about there was a free campground back in the trees and I was its only user except on hot holiday weekends when a few other campers from the blistering Sacramento River valley far below would come up to stay for a night or two.

I heard about a man called Harry who had a firewood cutting contract with the Forest Service over near Child’s Meadows––just off Highway 36. I found him and got the job–– hand loading firewood onto a two-and-a-half-ton truck. The pay was lower than the legal minimum, when I got paid at all, (Sometimes I got paid in firewood, which I could sell, or trade.) but it was fun and very educational

I love working outdoors and the men and their women who follow the firewood trade are curiosities to say the least.

For example, one of Harry’s sawyers had cut a window-sized hole in one of the tree trunks near Harry’s camp and he delighted to open his “window” to peer at us from behind the tree. The same guy loved to toss his empty beer cans around where we were working in the deep forest. I scolded him once about littering and he told me “I want people to know I’ve been working out here––that’s why I leave the cans!” To show there were no hard feelings he let me use his chain saw a bit so he could call me “Tom Sawyer”.

We were all dirt poor. One day the grandson of one of the old-time sawyers showed up with his new teenage bride to work with us since there was no work down in the valley (Sacramento, Chico, Red Bluff, Etc.)

When I came out of the woods later that day, I found that the new man had accidentally swung his hand too close to a running chain saw and cut off the ends of a couple of his fingers––and this was before he had even picked up a single piece of firewood! None of the other workers in the camp had enough gasoline in their trucks to carry him to the doctor in Chester so they wrapped his fingers in a handkerchief and he and his bride hitch-hiked out for help.

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Bernice's Hand

All Cold-blooded animals

"All cold-blooded animals spend an unexpectedly large proportion of their time doing nothing at all, or at any rate, nothing in particular."

(Charles Elton via Jerry Baird)

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Jerry's hand

The fact is

The fact is that we are painters in real life, and the important thing is to breathe as hard as we can breathe."

(Vincent Van Gogh via Jerry Baird)

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Magic Hands

Tanya and Tom's Hands.


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Problem Environment

Dreams and Visions

"War is an environment that will psychologically debilitate 98% of all who participate in it for any length of time and the 2% who are not driven insane by war appear to have already been insane, aggressive psychopaths before coming to the battle field."

On Killing by Lt. Col. Dave Crossman

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Patience

Vinyard, Valley of the Moon, California

Patience

Patience is the rule, the way and the goal.

Nothing good can be accomplished before its time, so have faith and relax.

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