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.
Monday, January 26, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Tommy Thomson's Cabin
Tommy Thomson's Cabin
Copyright Joanne Harris 2006
Most of the events described here happened around 1937-38, somewhere in there.
I’ve thinking about when we moved to the cabin and when Mother worked on it. The trees burning. There was quite a bit of burning done around the cabin, snags and downed logs, things like that. We couldn’t have been living there at the time.
Once Mother, Daddy, Fritz and I, maybe Audrey, but I don’t remember who else, were working on the cabin. They had been burning and there were places where stumps had been burned out. You know how you can walk on ashes and make patterns in them? I walked into an ash pile where a stump had been and my foot sank into this pile of embers and ashes. I was wearing high top tennis shoes without shoe laces and my foot came up full of coals. Fortunately I was very near the creek. I shrieked and made a mighty leap into the creek. Even so, I had blisters all around my ankle and the upper part of my foot.
We had brought with us a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a roll of toilet paper that day. Mother smeared my burns with peanut butter and wrapped the foot with toilet paper. There were scars on my foot for a few years. It was not a life-threatening accident and my foot still functioned. The main problem with it was pain.
We must have been staying at Tommy Thomson’s cabin while we were working on ours. Tommy had a cabin over near Frank and Jenny King’s. We stayed there off and on for almost a year. At this stage, I remember this thing and that, but not in order, and now everybody’s dead except my sister Andrea and me. My brother, whom I used to refer to when I wanted to know what was going on, is gone, so I have to rely on my memory and the pictures we have of that era.
We had a few adventures at Tommy’s cabin. That’s where we met Louie Parenti, or “Louie the Indian.” My mother said he was a French-Canadian Indian. But we just called him Louie the Indian. There was no racism in that. He was just one of the mountaineers.
Louie lived straight up the mountain above Tommy’s cabin, about a mile with his pack of wild dogs. In fact, our German Shepherd dog that we had for several years, Mamie, was one of Louie’s pups. So we saw him from time to time.
Once Louie killed a mountain lion. He heard his pack of pups barking, and he went down to see what was what. The pups had treed a lion. The lion was sitting in the tree deciding which pup he was going to eat first, but Louie shot the lion and killed him.
We ate part of that lion. When you live in the mountains and shoot your own food, you don’t always get a deer with a rack of antlers. The trusty hunter doesn’t always come in with a month’s food over his shoulders. You get what you get.
We had a couple of goats when we lived there. Mother had them for milk for us kids, and I can see my uncle, my mother’s brother Norwin Austin, trying to catch them to milk them. In my mind’s eye I see him running and whirling a lasso over his head.
Mother said that if anybody left the door open the goats would run in and jump on the bed and piss. Once she was sitting outside reading a book when somebody drove up. She put the book down and went over to the car and when she turned around, the goat was eating the book. These goats were a lot of fun and a lot of mess. Audrey had to milk them. If I was five, she was eleven. She had to do quite a few things like that.
Once Audrey, Fritz, Beverly and I had been told to “clean up our area,” whatever that area was. Somebody had thrown sweepings into the stove that included a 30.30 cartridge. We were all standing around the stove when the cartridge exploded. It was a tin stove, not cast iron. Little pieces of shrapnel flew and mother got some in her leg. The stove lid flew into the air and lit on my sister’s head. It was exciting. I was the youngest one. I don’t remember if my cousin, Dana Austin, was there, but he would have been just my age.
More about life at Tommy's cabin next week.
Monday, January 12, 2009
First Years on Paiute
First Years on Paiute
Copyright Joanne Harris 2009
The year after Walker Basin, 1938, Mom went up on Paiute. We didn’t have any place on the mountain, but she found an old, abandoned cabin. The neighbors said, “Oh, boy, you better leave that alone.” That was the Gherenger Claim. I can’t remember his first name. But people said, “That’s his claim and he doesn’t want people messing with it, even though he hasn’t filed on it recently.”
So my folks talked to him and he said, “Naw, take it, I’m never going to use it again.”
The folks filed on it. It didn't have much of a cabin, fifteen feet by twenty. But we started living there. Daddy wasn’t around very much. Mama decided – you know, she was a natural engineer and I guess she knew what the rest of us didn’t – she decided that she was going to work on the cabin.
It wasn’t in very good shape. The bottom logs were rotting into the ground. I guess Daddy must have fallen the log sized trees, forty- or fifty-feet tall, so she could replace the rotted ones. She borrowed an old white mule and a rock sled from Nick Williams.
A rock sled is a little tiny sled with very heavy slides on it, runners made out of two-by material with tin on the bottoms so they’ll slide. They have a cross piece where you can chain the butt of a log, and then it doesn’t dig into the ground when you drag it. That's how she started dragging in logs.
I don’t suppose I was peeling logs then, because I was pretty young. But Fritz peeled logs. How they did it, I don’t know, but they jacked up the cabin and put new, peeled logs under it. Mama raised the roof, literally. This was her project for years.
When she was at Paiute, she didn’t have any problems she couldn’t handle. So we spent a lot of our time at Paiute.
We had a house in East L.A. and Fritz went to school. I was much younger, and I will always remember Audrey and Fritz being there, and my cousin, Beverly. My mother’s brother, Norwin, had two children, Beverly and Dana. He abandoned them completely. Well, their mother abandoned them too. Beverly lived with us off and on for years and years. Dana lived with us for almost five years. During those years Mom was always working on the cabin and we were playing around.
The cabin was in a place called French Gulch. It had no amenities like running water or electricity. In later years we had the first flush toilet on Paiute Mountain. It was an outhouse built up the hill by the mine tunnel. There was water running out of the mine tunnel, so we put a bucket there and the water ran into the bucket. You flushed the toilet with the water in the bucket because Mom had built a toilet with a 55-gallon septic and about 50 feet of leach line. We used it for years and years.
Mom was always working on the cabin. Mystical. In those years it wasn’t mythical or mystical. It was just where we lived. We played around and as we got older we took longer trips. We’d go walking, Audrey and Beverly and Fritz were older than I. How far we wandered! You know, I don’t ever remember being told to stay home.
Audrey and Fritz and Beverly built themselves a little log cabin down the creek a ways out of logs laid cross ways. It had a door and a roof on it and, of course, this was their play house. But I wanted to play there too. It was, “Oh, Joanne, go back, go back. You’re not welcome. Beat it.” And finally they said, “Look, if we build you a cabin out of boards and rock up on the mine dump, (across the creek and up the road three- or four-hundred yards, oh, maybe not that far, but a long ways away) you’ll stay away from ours.” Some place there’s a piece of paper. My cousin Beverly had a legal mind. She’s the one who wrote it up and we all signed it.
So they built me my cabin, and you can guess what happened. I didn’t want to be up there by myself.
We lived there for years and years and years. I had adventures with the horses. We had to shoot our own meat when we were there, so there was a lot of hunting done. Beverly wasn’t living with us then, but I think by the time I was ten years old I was carrying a gun. The rules were really, really rigid.
I remember one spring when I was around twelve (1946). Ammunition was expensive, but every spring we all got to shoot off two or three shots at some cans across the creek to warm up and sight the guns in. And sight ourselves in. I hit the can and I turned around and yelled, “I got it!” As I turned, the gun fanned across other people. I will never forget that because I was upstairs and in bed and I didn’t get to speak to anybody until next morning. Never, never forgot it. Wonderful lesson.
We had guns in the house. We had a 25.20, which my brother bought about the end of the Second World War with some money he’d saved from a paper route. And we had the 30.30 and we had a 4-10 shotgun. And the 22s came and went. My father had a Colt Woodsman .22 semi-automatic, which was the gun of choice for packing. Those guns always sat there loaded, and we all knew they were loaded. It was never a problem with any of us kids. Never a problem. And if we had an accident with a gun, we never told anybody about it, that’s for damn sure.
Copyright Joanne Harris 2009
The year after Walker Basin, 1938, Mom went up on Paiute. We didn’t have any place on the mountain, but she found an old, abandoned cabin. The neighbors said, “Oh, boy, you better leave that alone.” That was the Gherenger Claim. I can’t remember his first name. But people said, “That’s his claim and he doesn’t want people messing with it, even though he hasn’t filed on it recently.”
So my folks talked to him and he said, “Naw, take it, I’m never going to use it again.”
The folks filed on it. It didn't have much of a cabin, fifteen feet by twenty. But we started living there. Daddy wasn’t around very much. Mama decided – you know, she was a natural engineer and I guess she knew what the rest of us didn’t – she decided that she was going to work on the cabin.
It wasn’t in very good shape. The bottom logs were rotting into the ground. I guess Daddy must have fallen the log sized trees, forty- or fifty-feet tall, so she could replace the rotted ones. She borrowed an old white mule and a rock sled from Nick Williams.
A rock sled is a little tiny sled with very heavy slides on it, runners made out of two-by material with tin on the bottoms so they’ll slide. They have a cross piece where you can chain the butt of a log, and then it doesn’t dig into the ground when you drag it. That's how she started dragging in logs.
I don’t suppose I was peeling logs then, because I was pretty young. But Fritz peeled logs. How they did it, I don’t know, but they jacked up the cabin and put new, peeled logs under it. Mama raised the roof, literally. This was her project for years.
When she was at Paiute, she didn’t have any problems she couldn’t handle. So we spent a lot of our time at Paiute.
We had a house in East L.A. and Fritz went to school. I was much younger, and I will always remember Audrey and Fritz being there, and my cousin, Beverly. My mother’s brother, Norwin, had two children, Beverly and Dana. He abandoned them completely. Well, their mother abandoned them too. Beverly lived with us off and on for years and years. Dana lived with us for almost five years. During those years Mom was always working on the cabin and we were playing around.
The cabin was in a place called French Gulch. It had no amenities like running water or electricity. In later years we had the first flush toilet on Paiute Mountain. It was an outhouse built up the hill by the mine tunnel. There was water running out of the mine tunnel, so we put a bucket there and the water ran into the bucket. You flushed the toilet with the water in the bucket because Mom had built a toilet with a 55-gallon septic and about 50 feet of leach line. We used it for years and years.
Mom was always working on the cabin. Mystical. In those years it wasn’t mythical or mystical. It was just where we lived. We played around and as we got older we took longer trips. We’d go walking, Audrey and Beverly and Fritz were older than I. How far we wandered! You know, I don’t ever remember being told to stay home.
Audrey and Fritz and Beverly built themselves a little log cabin down the creek a ways out of logs laid cross ways. It had a door and a roof on it and, of course, this was their play house. But I wanted to play there too. It was, “Oh, Joanne, go back, go back. You’re not welcome. Beat it.” And finally they said, “Look, if we build you a cabin out of boards and rock up on the mine dump, (across the creek and up the road three- or four-hundred yards, oh, maybe not that far, but a long ways away) you’ll stay away from ours.” Some place there’s a piece of paper. My cousin Beverly had a legal mind. She’s the one who wrote it up and we all signed it.
So they built me my cabin, and you can guess what happened. I didn’t want to be up there by myself.
We lived there for years and years and years. I had adventures with the horses. We had to shoot our own meat when we were there, so there was a lot of hunting done. Beverly wasn’t living with us then, but I think by the time I was ten years old I was carrying a gun. The rules were really, really rigid.
I remember one spring when I was around twelve (1946). Ammunition was expensive, but every spring we all got to shoot off two or three shots at some cans across the creek to warm up and sight the guns in. And sight ourselves in. I hit the can and I turned around and yelled, “I got it!” As I turned, the gun fanned across other people. I will never forget that because I was upstairs and in bed and I didn’t get to speak to anybody until next morning. Never, never forgot it. Wonderful lesson.
We had guns in the house. We had a 25.20, which my brother bought about the end of the Second World War with some money he’d saved from a paper route. And we had the 30.30 and we had a 4-10 shotgun. And the 22s came and went. My father had a Colt Woodsman .22 semi-automatic, which was the gun of choice for packing. Those guns always sat there loaded, and we all knew they were loaded. It was never a problem with any of us kids. Never a problem. And if we had an accident with a gun, we never told anybody about it, that’s for damn sure.
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