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!

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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