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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Mill Creek Memories page five

“Little Joe” arrives

More equipment and man power was expected from the Salt Lake City home office of the company which was building the Lassen ski lift.

The day the truck was due the foreman told us local laborers to be handy to the parking lot since some materials were going to arrive which needed to be unloaded.

He also said that some new workers were going to accompany the materials and the word was that one of the new workers was Little Joe, “one of the strongest men you’ve ever seen.”

Well.

All of us had been working long hours with hand tools, digging and bashing earth and rock and we all felt pretty strong I think, but of course we were all very curious to see this new physical phenomenon.

When the trucks came in and the new men got out, none of them looked any different from the rest of us. The foreman introduced all of us and we shook hands all around. The new guys all seemed to be healthy and strong––but I never felt that Little Joe, who was one of the new gang, was any different from the rest. For one thing he was not so tall and not so weighty and he was only about eighteen years old.

Our first task was to unload some big flat cardboard boxes, the chairs for the lift, from the truck. We gathered beside the truck and Little Joe was the first in line. I was second.

There were two men on the truck and they slid the first box over to Joe. He took the sliding box onto his head and walked over toward the edge of the pavement where we had been told to stack the materials.

I got ready to take the second box.

The men on the truck lid it over to where I could reach it, but as soon as it started to come into my hands I realized that I was never going to put it on my head and walk away like Little Joe had. In fact I realized that I was going to be squashed like a bug under that package if I didn’t get some help mighty quick!

Some of the other guys had been watching and grabbed the thing and took the weight off me before I got hurt––but, boy did I ever gain a LOT of respect for Little Joe’s strength! It took two or three or even four men to carry every one of those boxes of steel chairlift seats, but every time Little Joe showed up in the liner of carriers, he took the whole thing all by himself!

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Mill Creek Memories page four

I Become a Medicine Man

The crew dug at the holes steadily—then we built some quick concrete forms and placed some bolt templates on top where they belonged and mixed and poured concrete in the easy-to-reach holes.

The whole work day we were surrounded by the most beautiful and fragrant high slopes of the great dormant volcano, Mount Lassen.

What a great place to work!

I even liked sniffing the breeze when the wind came down from The Sulfur Works––one of the noxious steaming hot springs a short distance up the valley from the old Lassen Chalet.

In just a few weeks we had all the foundations ready

The towers, heavy columns pre-manufactured to fit the foundation bolts and numbered for the different heights required by the mountain slope, were delivered to the parking lot and were going to be hoisted into place with the aid of a helicopter. The concrete for the hard to reach foundation holes was also going to be poured from a big bucket thing dangling from a cable attached to the helicopter.

And there’s a little personal story connected with the helicopter that I will put in here––just don’t make too much of it, OK?

One day the big boss asked us laborers to appear extra early the next morning because the helicopter was going to arrive that evening, land in the parking lot and be ready to tote and fetch the towers and the concrete in the morning. This was a very tricky and dangerous operation and everyone was curious and excited about it.

I, of course, was not even a little involved in the helicopter part of the program. My job was going to be to carry a hand-held “stop” sign up the park highway above the parking lot to stop any cars coming down when the helicopter was busy picking up materials in the parking lot.

Monkey simple.

When I arrived in the morning, they handed me the stop sign but there was a problem. The helicopter could not fly because a very dense fog had dropped into the valley—standing in the parking lot was like standing in the middle of a wet, dark cloud.

The foreman of the labor crew came over to me and said, “Tom we’re in trouble. This fog makes it impossible to fly the towers and that chopper is costing us about a thousand dollars a minute just sitting in the parking lot. I know you’re into mysterious Indian things, could you maybe do a sun dance or something to get rid of the fog?”

He was serious, so I told him I would give it a try.

I put down the stop sign and bummed a cigarette and some matches from one of the smokers since I was going to try what I imagined might be like an old Indian ceremony and for that I needed some tobacco––then I climbed through the fog up the mountainside to the top tower’s empty foundation hole.

I am not an Indian and don’t really know any sun or rain dances, but what the hey, yeah? Give it a try. I HAD read about ceremonies and deep down had a feeling that they should work…

So I reached the top tower’s foundation hole all by myself way up above the Chalet parking lot in the silent cold fog.

The big empty hole had a sheet of black plastic down ready for concrete to be dumped in.

I knew from reading Indian stuff that to help the ceremony work the shaman (me!) should make some sort of sacrifice. I hadn’t intended to make any magic that morning so I didn’t have much of anything to sacrifice, but I was wearing a sort of good luck charm a friend had given me on a plain chain around my neck––a little gold medallion memento from Hawaii with the state seal and motto on it. (“The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness”)

What the heck.

I placed the “sacrifice” under a fold in the black plastic sheet––lit the cigarette and blew smoke in the four directions and asked the weather gods or whatever was in charge of the fog to bring out the sun so the chopper could fly. Then I hiked back down the mountain to the parking lot and you may not believe this but when I got to the tarmac the fog was lifting and the helicopter was revving up to fly.

When the big boss—who didn’t know about my “mission”––saw me, he shouted: “Hey slacker! You’re getting paid to work! Get your sign and run up that road and get busy!”

The foreman looked sort of funny at me but didn’t tell anyone about our conversation and that was how I became a very beginner medicine man on Mount Lassen.

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Mill Creek Memories page three

Years later--Tanya on Mount Lassen.

Building the Lassen Ski Lift

I drove the eight or so miles by the back road from Mill Creek to the town of Mineral and located the boss of the ski lift project.

I knew absolutely nothing about ski lifts or skiing, but I was in pretty good shape from tossing firewood so the big boss hired me as a laborer on the spot.

In the morning I joined the dozen or so other new hires up at the Lassen Chalet parking lot and we hiked down into the meadow and started digging.

What I soon found out about ski lifts is that they are just a row of towers which go up a mountainside at higher and higher elevations. There is a big drive wheel at the bottom called a bull wheel and another at the top tower and a traveling cable links them. Clamped to the cable every few feet are chairs which swing high in the air over the snow—since this was to be a chair ski lift.

I found out later there are also gondola things for carrying a lot of people at a time up a mountain and there are also simple “rope tows” with a moving rope strung between wheels which you grab and hang on to as the rope pulls you up the hill––then you let go at the top and slide back down.

In fact, the whole idea of downhill skiing, as I discovered, is to ride some kind of towing device to the upper part of a hill or mountain and then slide back down on your skis and then ride up again and slide down again all day long. No kidding. That’s what it’s all about and people spend thousands of dollars to do it wearing the latest style of skiing clothes and the latest style of skis! They also need expensive four-wheel drive vehicles to get them to the ski slopes and they need fine hotel rooms and restaurants and bars and so forth nearby. (Indeed, what fools we mortals be!) This expensive sport absolutely limits the participants to the idle rich and their servants. Well, what the heck! That’s pretty much life, isn’t it?

But I’m kind of getting ahead of myself because the Lassen ski lift hadn’t even been built yet!

What I had been hired to do was to help dig big holes to fill with concrete for bolt-setting foundations for the towers that carried the rows of wheels (shiv trains) that in turn carried the moving cable—one huge loop of steel cable––up the mountain!

We had shovels to dig with of course, and the ground in the valley was soft but as we went up the mountainside for the higher towers the digging got harder until we were finally digging through solid rock. For this job we switched to “rock bars”— six foot steel bars with a chisel point. You use this tool to bash at the rock and every few blows you get some chips to fly off.

We did this eight hours a day and when I got back to my camper the first night after using the rock bar, I went to eat a sandwich and found I couldn’t open or close my hand! My fingers were stuck in the rock bar grip position! Lucky I could still move my hand close to the bread until I slid a slice between my fingers and managed to eat that yummy poor man’s delight, peanut butter and jelly on white bread!

But there were some rocks we couldn’t dent and for these they had hired a dynamite expert—a kind of hippy looking guy. His tools were a heavy duty pneumatic rock drill—like the things they break concrete with on road work––and dynamite. He would drill a hole with this rock drill––a heavy steel pointed thing and the odd thing about his work was that he wore flip-flop rubber sandals while this dangerous drill was pounding away boring a hole in the solid rock right between his feet!

I asked him why he did it that way and he told me that by going almost barefoot he was twice as cautious with the drill. Maybe so.

I wore steel capped safety boots myself.

When he had his hole drilled, this technician warned us civilians away, stuffed dynamite into the hole he’d dug, shouted “Fire in the hole” and there was a bang and a lot of gravel sized bits of stone rained down on us for a few seconds. That broke the rock enough so we could go attack it again with our rock bars.

Once he shouted “Fire in the hole!” and there was no bang.

He came over where we were cowering behind some rocks and said “I hate it when this happens.” Then he had to go fish the dud dynamite charge out of the drilled hole and start all over again.

Well, he was getting paid more than the rest of us.

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