Eight Things Learned in July

Most of these fall under the category of Cowboy Logic, but it is fun to learn and see them in action.

  1. When diverting flowing water from a trail, go to the highest point of trouble first; then look for the first best place to send it down to its correct channel. 
  2. When repairing a sinkhole in a road, put boulders in first and fit them together as close as possible; keep adding rocks of progressively smaller sizes, and put the dirt in last. Also, be sure to have a backhoe and an operator handy.
  3. Baby peregrine falcons could get blown out of their nests by the concussion if you explode a boulder nearby. But the real reason for not using explosives near a nest is that drilling the rock is the most upsetting sound to them.
  4. This Irish saying tickled my funnybone: “May those that love us, love us, and for those that don’t love us, may God turn their hearts, and if he can’t turn their hearts, may he turn their ankles so we know them by their limping.”
  5. Ever heard of a “tulipiere“? A friend told me about them. They are special vases, invented in Holland in the 1600s for holding tulips, which were considered expensive status symbols. (The tulips, not the vases). It is pronounced, er, never mind. Can’t write it correctly.
  6. When your radiator disintegrates, it is best to not be on a steep road on a hot day, but if the road is closed, everyone who shows up will be a friend. (No photos of Fernando disabled on the side of the road nor as he was being towed away; he is repaired now.) 
  7. Every heard of “24 7 Day”? It is July 24, which is 7/24 or flipped, 24-7. This has been turned into a day of appreciation for first responders, and many stop-and-rob stores honor people that day who have badges or are wearing uniforms of first responders. (“honor”– maybe they get free coffee)
  8. When you have a skittish cat with a booboo (nope, not showing a photo of Tucker with a fat face) who cannot be captured in a carrier or a box, it is good to find a traveling veterinarian and to have a large bank balance. (THANK YOU, DR. McCONE, 559-942-1101)

Thus we conclude a month of some difficult circumstances, new experiences, and random pieces of trivial information, (but no talk of hiking in Mineral King when it is closed to the public.)

P.S. Anyone know of a Honda or Toyota (no Civics, Elements, or Tercels) for sale with less than 100,000 miles and a manual transmission?? I am ready.

Cabin Life, Chapter Five

Utilities: electricity

Since there is no electricity in Mineral King (unless one uses a generator or is some sort of a solar genius), you might be wondering about some basics of life.

Let’s start with cooking. Lots of cabins have propane stoves, a few have propane/wood stoves, and we have a wood stove without a propane section. We also have small propane burner for quicker cooking when we don’t want to wait for the fire or heat the place.

Good thing I like to split wood. (Trail Guy makes it easy by providing smaller chunks for me.)

What about refrigerators? They come in propane. Ours isn’t top-notch (does that surprise you??) and in warmer temperatures it becomes more of an icebox with a good freezer on top.  So, we supplement with ice made in our freezer (or a neighbor’s) and sometimes we supplement with snow.

(HEY, SHUT THE REFRIGERATOR DOOR!!)

Those propane refrigerators have lots of troubles, beginning with the fact that the easy strike start-up device ALWAYS breaks first, and then it takes a gymnast to reach around the back with a match while someone else holds in the button, usually with a tool because it is really hard to push the button.

But that’s okay, because life is slower at the cabin.

Wait! What about light??

Again, propane.

Almost everything requires matches, and “Strike Anywhere” matches have become rare. (We call them “1 in 3s” because it takes 3 matches to get one that will actually light.) Lots of people use those plastic things that resemble curling irons with hard-to-press switches; I think they are called “lighters”, but the handle is longer than smokers’ types. And I bet they have a tiny internal propane canister. But plastic, ugh. So cheap, so unreliable, and so disposable, probably made in China. Sigh.

Cabin Life, Chapter Four

Gardening

What do we do at the cabin?

Sometimes I garden.

Gardening at a mountain cabin? What are you talking about??

When I first married into the cabin, I admired some bearded iris across the creek at another cabin.

Then, I transplanted some from our real house to the cabin.

We have had one bloom; it was in July, 2017. (Only took me 15 minutes to find that date. . . the photo was so unremarkable that it got deleted awhile ago.)

A neighbor has a lush front yard, and she graciously allows me to transplant things, which sometimes survive.

A trick is to keep the transplants watered, and to mark them so that people don’t just assume it is basic forest floor, free for unstructured trampling.

We have lots of currant bushes in the area, and they get full of dead branches. My theory about this is that the bushes will thrive and grow if the old stuff is cleared away. Sometimes I wonder if, when I pull out the dead stuff, the shrub is thinking, “HEY! I was eating that!”

It is possible that I have too much thinking time.

When the fire crews were clearing brush in an arbitrary manner during the fall of 2021, they made these very neat rows of their prunings. Random hacking, organized stacking. They won’t be returning to haul these piles away, so I am now using them when I do my own clearing.

Sometimes I rake, sometimes I use the large magnet on a pole to gather nails in a nearby driveway. (That’s another story, a long one.) 

And sometimes I wander around, wishing that I knew when and how to transplant things from God’s garden.

 

 

Cabin Life, Chapter Three

 

Puttering

What does one do in a place without electricity, internet, cell phones, or even a working landline? (“Working” being the important word, since we no longer have a phone but rely on our neighbor’s intermittent line.)

An aspect of cabin living at a slower pace is the concept of puttering. Puttering is aimlessly doing a bit of this, a bit of that.

Sometimes I just start polishing our wood stove.

 Sometimes I rearrange the collection of peculiar found items and pretty rocks.

Occasionally I wander around with my camera, looking for new angles and ways the sunshine hits things.

Recently I was curious about the various temperatures of all the flowing water. So, we walked around with a thermometer and recorded the temperatures, then played a guessing game with neighbors as to which was the coldest, and which was the warmest*.

Easily entertained, yeppers.

*Warmest: Chihuahua; Coldest: Spring Creek

Cabin Life, Chapter Two

Slower Pace

What in the world do people do at a rustic cabin up a difficult road in a place without electricity?

We slow down. We sleep more—go to bed earlier, sleep later (the sun doesn’t hit the cabin until around 8:30 a.m.), and some of us take naps. Could be the elevation, could be that it is cooler and there isn’t a great need to get up early to beat the heat.

We linger over coffee, usually while listening to the radio. (Remember those?)

The old wood stove provides heat until the sunshine hits; then the cabin doors get opened to the outside.

This stove is now history, because the oven didn’t work, and one time it tried to kill us. But that’s a digression, one I might share with you later.

In summary, at the cabin, we slow down. Or, as Trail Guy has often said, “We contemplate matters of consequence.”

Cabin Life, Chapter One

 

How I Got a Cabin

Welcome to Cabin Life, my way of staying in touch during this odd summer of Mineral King being closed to the public and my accidental stepping into a sabbatical (or something akin to it.)

Thirty-eight years ago I met Trail Guy. In a rash moment of bald honesty, I said, “I’d kill for a cabin in Mineral King”.

He replied, “There is another way”. (Maybe he said “better” or even “easier”.)

We got married the following year (in Mineral King, of course), and nobody has gotten killed.

This was all pre internet, pre personal computers, pre continual connectivity. (The first summer of marriage, we got a landline at the cabin, since we were living in two different places. Fancy.)

Nowadays (isn’t that a classic Old People word?) we live in an era of total convenience, instant gratification, continual connectedness, and complete comfort. 

So why do people go to a rustic shack up a terrible road to spend time without conveniences, ultra-comfort, electricity, cell phones, or the internet? What in the world do people do??

This series, called “Cabin Life”, will give you a glimpse, maybe a few answers to those questions, or maybe just more questions.

 

Just Thinking… and Getting a New Idea

 

 

(Not my front porch)

While at the cabin for a short week I did some thinking about the blog. After fifteen years of continual posting, it is hard to shut down the ideas. It is hard to think about just stopping. It is hard to have ideas that would be rude to share, since Mineral King isn’t open to the public this summer.

Many ideas were flying around my overactive mind: nope, not that; nope, not that one either; nope, better not write that. (“Nope” is the opposite of “yeppers” in my peculiar vernacular.)

Then it came to me that I could write a series about cabin life. I have a lot of experience and thoughts about cabin communities and living simply in a cabin in the mountains. Maybe you, O Gentle Reader (doesn’t that sound quaint?), would be interested in an inside look?

I wouldn’t be talking about the trails, the water, the flowers, the quiet, the beauty, although that would slip in simply due to the location. The goal would be to show you what in the world we do with our time “up the hill”, as almost all people in almost all mountain communities refer to their cabin places.

The posts won’t be five days a week, because there is no internet, electricity, cell service, or even a reliable landline available where I will be spending a great deal of time. If you comment, it might be a few days before I “approve” the comment so that it shows. But at least you’d know I haven’t quit blogging, and you might enjoy a new topic.

Sinkhole on the Mineral King Road

 

Yeah, yeah, I know I said it was rude to talk about Mineral King when it is closed to the public. HOWEVER, something happened that added to the reasons for the closure, and it is so interesting that I decided to break radio silence to show you.

The night before we headed up the hill, we got a call from a cabin neighbor about a giant sinkhole on the road. He said it was very narrow to get past, and quite deep.

We left the house around 7 a.m., and stopped by the maintenance barn to talk to the trail crew (who are all in the front country waiting for a some young peregrine falcons to vacate their nest so the crew can blow up the giant boulder above Lookout Point). The crew was available, so we headed up to the sinkhole.

First stop was at the backhoe, conveniently parked less than a mile below the sinkhole. Road Guy (formerly known as Trail Guy) changed into working clothes, and I followed him in the Botmobile to a wide spot in the road below the hole.

Holy guacamole, (Hole-y guacamole?) that is deep, and as reported, very very narrow to pass by.

The trail crew guys are very strong, and knowledgeable about moving rocks around in a non-random manner.

See the tiny pile of smaller rocks in the bottom of the photo? I schlepped any rock I could find to the guys, because it was fun to “help”. Masonry is a fabulous skill, one I might try in my next life.

It became a community event. People drove up from Silver City and walked down from West Mineral King (also known as Faculty Flat, a mile below the end of the road). One of the guys helped me gather rocks; I pointed out the ones that were too big for me and he obliged.

See that skinny little dude? Very, very strong.

This is Hengst Peak, just to give you an idea of where this road failure was located. We call the area “the Bluffs”, which is above High Bridge.

These guys were very specific about their rock placements. Biggest ones first, and they actually slammed some of them with a sledge hammer to shape them to fit. The idea is as few gaps as possible. Eventually when I brought rocks my instructions were simply to toss them here or there. Finally, the dirt that Road Guy kept bringing went in to bring the hole back up to the level of the road.

See? All fixed. The culvert is plugged, which may be the reason the hole appeared. It is the reason that water is still going over the road.

And those yellow barriers read “CLOSED FOR CLEANING”. Sometimes a crew just has to make do with whatever is available.

Road Guy returned the backhoe, I picked him up, and then he went back and forth over the site with the Botmobile to pack the dirt. 

Fantastic teamwork, incredible timing of available men with excellent skills.

Pressing Pause

 

This photo is from May of 2022.

Mineral King is closed to the public this year. The Silver City Resort will not be accessible. Cabin folks are strongly discouraged from going up the hill.

NOTHING can stop Trail Guy and I from going up the hill to our cabin.

This poses a question: is it wrong to post photos of and chit-chat about a place that people aren’t allowed to go?

I don’t know how to handle this.

In addition, I seem to have accidentally retired. Actually, I don’t want to be retired, so let’s say I am on a sabbatical. I think this means a paid break for the purposes of learning new skills or doing research. However, I don’t earn if I am not working, and I am not researching anything, so “sabbatical” might also be the wrong description. I simply don’t have work right now, an odd situation that I have never encountered in all my years of self-employment as a Central California artist.

I need time to think, and I welcome your thoughts on this odd situation. Meanwhile, I will be pressing pause on my blog for an undetermined amount of time as I examine what might and might not be the appropriate method of blogging about this current phase of life as your Central California artist (and Mineral King reporter).

 

A Trip to Oregon, Chapter 4

 

Perhaps this chapter should be titled “The end of the trip”. I HATE leaving places, whether it is home, or a place I have visited. Am I like Lot’s wife, looking back longingly, lingering in the past? Maybe. But with age and experience comes wisdom (sometimes), and that means I know looking forward is a better approach.

The perfection of the roses, the lack of deer in the yard. . . happy sigh.

We took one last walk the day I left. Each day we walked, I carried my cell phone to keep track of the distance. I think my phone lies. My sister’s step counter always showed a longer distance, and I assure you that we were going the same distance, and she was not walking circles around me.

The phone came in handy for a few photos, one last time of oohing and ahhing over all the beauty, so different from Three Rivers.

This classic is begging to be drawn.

After stopping at Trader Joe’s (because there isn’t one in Tulare County) and Winco (because otherwise I might have had to stop in Visalia on the way home) and Chevron (because I wanted to drive for 9 hours and had to begin with a full tank), I headed south. Another audio book would take me to a suburb of Sacramento, aiming for the house of a dear friend.

Before crossing back into California, I stopped for gas again. (It takes about 4 tanks to go the distance between my home and my sister’s.) I like Oregon’s luxury of not pumping my own gas and having my windshield washed for me. Alas, this law is about to change. 

What I didn’t like was the hideous bug that landed on my arm. I might have squealed a little bit. I heard a woman scream at the next row of gas pumps, and I don’t think it was due to the price of gas or any untoward behavior by the attendant. 

When I was safely inside the pick-’em-up truck, I saw the hideous bug on the windshield. Three of them, actually. It was alarming, but I managed to snap a couple of photos while staying in my lane.

Got another glimpse of Mt. Shasta on the way home.

I made my way to my friend’s house, where she provided a fine welcome. We had much to catch up, having been apart by a month, and we stayed up way too late. The following morning, I got up before she did, snuck out of the house, and was on the road before she woke up. It was only a 5 hour drive, and I was a horse heading for the barn (to quote my Very Wise Dad who had a saying for every occasion).

Thus we end our ongoing saga of a Trip to Oregon. Maybe someday I will get to live there. On the other hand, since I hate leaving places and am never moving again, it isn’t likely.