A Little Game of Poker, Mountainstyle

A Little Game of Poker, Mountainstyle
Copyright Andrea Heyser 2009

The evolution of life on this planet has been a wondrous thing, for some of the developments found in life forms, including people, appear to be miracles. For example, life on the mountain is at times very quiet and others extremely frightening. Sometimes one and sometimes the other. But nature has been very kind to us in that after a frightening period and a period of quiet five hundred new genes turn on and repair all the existing proteins in our cells leaving us healthier than before. This does not happen at anyother time.

This has been so ingrained into us for over four hundred million years that to not have stress-and-then-quiet at times is damaging to our minds and bodies.

As an interesting aside, this stress-and-then-quiet routine can make people and other animals fall in love. I used to know a test pilot who told me that he could make any woman go to bed with him in just an hour or two. He described it thus. " I take her for a ride in my little sports car, and at a certain spot I go very fast and scare her half to death, then I stop and we get out of the car and lie down and I hold her and tell her how sorry I am and then we rest. After that it is easy." Look also at the greatest love of all, that of one soldier for another during battle. Look at mating rituals where animals meet, play and rest and then mate.

So strong is this need for unrest and then rest that when we have too much of one and not enough of the other our bodies and minds are uncomfortable until we change our behavior and comply with nature.

That brings me to the mountain. There can be so much rest that we feel as though we will go mad with BOREDOM! Some times on the mountain it is so peaceful we think we will actually die of boredom. We walk for miles to trade cheap novels, cowboy novels, and it does not take long until you are reading them twice. We associate with people we would avoid down below and feel grateful for their company. We would give people unrest cures, you should see the cabin we T P ed. Not the outside, but the inside, a joy to behold, we would hold satanic rituals, but finally all is lost and we have to do something new.

Enter the poker game played Paiute style.

An ordinary poker game would not suffice, it had to be special. So we would pick up a deck of cards and a few other things and head up the dusty road to French Meadow. We would crawl under the fence and go onto the grass which is about a foot and a half deep and rolling in a gentle wind. We would pick a spot in the center, under a bright blue sky, surrounded by cattle and the whispering sound coming from the trees when the wind rubs the needles together, and sit in a tight circle.

Next we would prepare our space by each placing a weapon in front of us on the grass. I always used the colt woodsman, fully loaded, Kampe would have one of his old military rifles in front of him, Fritz had a Bowie knife unsheathed in front of him and I think some one had a hatchet or an ax. And we would sit under the summer sky with the cows about us, eyeing us suspiciously and we cheated outrageously. We threatened each other, accused one and all of various crimes, laughed and joked and in general played like children everywhere.

We, the Heyser gang, knew how to have fun. The adults also played poker, but in the house with a kerosene lamp in front of the fireplace.

I remember one game in particular. The adults were playing as we children sat in front of the fire.

Joanne was as usual planning to rustle one of Nick's cows. She spent the whole summer on this project. But when she finally got a steer down in the place where she planned to kill it and she also had the proper ropes to hang it, mother refused to let her do it. She bawled for the whole next day, saying over and over, "I want to rustle a cow." She was only twelve at that time.

Anyway, all was quiet, each with our own thoughts when I noticed one of the men reaching down to his ankle from time to time. Suddenly with a loud scream he jumped up from the table nearly knocking it down and shouted "My God, something is crawling up my leg!" At this he ran for the door while the rest of us watched with astonishment. I grabbed a flash light and we all ran out to see a huge beetle crawling on the ground. The men argued for some time on how to kill it, and finally my father got his colt woodsman out and shot it. This beetle was about three inches long and had big horns on it. I don't want to run into any of these again.

All in all, however if this story should be read by the man who had the beetle crawling up his leg I wish to thank him for the many chuckles I have had over the incident, as over the years he has made a Heyser girl very happy.

More Memories at Tommy's Cabin

More Memories at Tommy's Cabin
Copyright Joanne H. Harris, 2008

We lived at Tommy’s cabin for at least a year, as best I remember. Daddy went into partners with Rollie and Oakley Horne at a sawmill on top of the mountain. He’d stay up there for a few days, and then he’d come down and be at the cabin for a few days, and then he’d go back up. That’s right – the sawmill and the girl who ran away! That was around 1939.

I remember very little of this story. We were at that sawmill. My cousin Beverly Austin, was there, too. There was a girl there cooking for the men. She couldn’t have been much older than Audrey and Beverly, and they were eleven or twelve. She decided to run away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. They went down off the side of the mountain, down and down, and nobody could find them. There was a great hue and cry, but they couldn’t be found.

Mother went to Nick’s ranch in Walker Basin because the mountain went down there. My mother told Nick that the girls were lost. She didn’t know at the time that one of them was running away, but she knew when they had left the sawmill. Nick took a look and said, “O.K., we need to leave about 1:00 o’clock.” Mother threw a fit but Nick said, “No, we don’t leave before 1:00 o’clock.”

About 1:00 o’clock they got into his car and he drove up into a canyon at the bottom of the mountain. He got out and said, “Now, you call.” My mother yelled for Audrey and Beverly and they answered. Nick really knew the mountain. Apparently, canyons being what they are and uphill being very steep, people funneled into this area. So that’s how Nick found them. The girl had been running away and took Audrey and Beverly with her. It was a very primitive place, a very primitive place.

Beverly had to have been with us when we were living at Tommy’s cabin. I remember Audrey and Beverly made me a dollhouse out of a box a foot-and-a-half square and about ten inches high. They took the box lids, the parts that folded down, and slotted them into the box to make rooms. Then they took sticks and made a closet. (I’ve never forgotten this because I always figured I was going to make something like this for a kid.) They cut out clothes and stuck them to the coat hangers and cut out paper dolls and put them in the doll house. It was an amazing little thing.

We thought we were having fun. We didn’t know we were poor. I never in my life thought we were poor folks.