1973 (1) – A Seed Falls On Good Ground

The first time I saw Big Bear Lake, I was not quite 12 years old, and angry with my father.  Brooding resentment dominated my feeling at the time, but eventually relinquished its prominence over the years; like pictures that fall out of a photo album.  Those were replaced by more enduring images:  tantalizing mental snapshots of the lake, the sky, and the trees.  Like a paint-by-numbers scene left half finished, the memories composed an incomplete picture that begged to be filled in.  Despite spending less than an hour at the lake itself, I remembered it as the most beautiful place I had ever seen, and that was saying a lot because I had already seen much of the iconic scenery in America.

Our family enjoyed camping, but my father had a very militaristic way of ruining the pastime, which he inflicted upon us often before my mom divorced him.  We saluted smartly because we knew what was good for us, but behind his back we derisively referred to him as “Good Ol’ Dad” (if only because the acronym accurately described his opinion about himself).  He never laid a hand on us, but used his mind like a fist and his tongue like a whip to keep us in line.  For G.O.D., family camping was a captive chance to impose his will, and manifest his paternal destiny.   This usually took the form of a meticulous, disciplined land campaign with advance planning, precision packing, route finding, nonstop driving, synchronized unloading, and crackerjack set up … everything short of calisthenics on the picnic table.  The next day, our “family bonding” protocol would continue: up at the crack of dawn, a sleepy sullen breakfast, compulsory packing of the car, and grinding on the road again before sunrise, to reach the next destination.  Of course, the endless chores to support his mania were assigned to the “grunts,” being me and my 2 sisters, for whom camping was sometimes more like being on a forced death march.

Despite the emotional and physical hardships, camping with my father was a rare chance for me to act the part of the dutiful son, or a capable second lieutenant, or even to engage in a little clandestine R&R when G.O.D. wasn’t looking.  Fortunately, my mom had a talent for surreptitiously making the camp chores and obligations seem like fun for kids, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.  We developed a covert sense of irreverence and playful disdain for authority as a way to cope with the stress.  I actually enjoyed it more than anything else we did as a family, and camping and backpacking have become for me an antidote for the servile demands of work and the sometimes overwhelming responsibilities of raising my own family.

During my summer of puberty in 1973, my father’s latest plan for mobile domestic conquest targeted the Trinity Alps of Northern California, which back then were far less frequently visited than other accessible mountain destinations.  We had a modified VW bus that he had cleverly fitted out the previous summer (in frugal home-made fashion as usual), and taken on a lengthy trip around the entire country.  Our family visited 26 states, and as many National Parks and Monuments as we could cram into one campaign.  It was a veritable blitzkrieg of postcard destinations; executed as efficiently as possible in the 10 weeks between the sixth and seventh grades.  Our cyclic pattern of furious activity, separated by long, droning miles on the hot highways, was a bit like being an unhappy rock band on a whirlwind tour… but without the good music.  My assigned post was on top of the chemical “porta-potti,” which was wedged behind the driver’s seat.  It afforded an excellent vantage point, if somewhat lacking in prestige.  Judy, my bossy big sister who resented the world for not conforming to her opinion of how it should be, gazed sullenly out the window with an ear bud continuously plugged into a transistor radio.  She was fourteen and absolutely mortified to be trapped in a hot tin can with her family for weeks on end.  She begrudged not being able to see as well as I could, but maintained that big-sister air of superiority that comes from not sitting on a toilet all summer.  My younger sister Debbie surreptitiously feigned sleep in some misguided hope of waking up to find it was all just a nightmare.  The better to be inconspicuous, she folded herself neatly on the back seat with Heidi the beagle-terrier.

Our old “Turtle Bus” was well broken in for long camping trips, and our fearless leader had plotted on graph paper how to pack it so efficiently that everything fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.  I still remember a long tirade about how the camp stove had to be packed vertically; not horizontally.  For our mission, G.O.D. had already divined an obscure destination on his dog-eared road map by regal proclamation (presumably by throwing darts blindfolded at it).  Before the sun hit the balcony of our upper-middle-class home in San Rafael, we were pushing the limits of the VW’s cooling system (and our distended bladders) in a nonstop blastoff up Highway 5 for the Trinity Lake area.  Bathroom or meal breaks were for wimps, and we knew better than to ask.  The northern Central Valley of California was blazing hot during the late summer, and it hurt my eyeballs to look at it for very long.  A sweaty, half-baked snooze was the best way to pass through purgatory.  Anyway, talking was risky business because G.O.D. was alertly omniscient; swiveling his head in the driver’s seat like a radar dish, ready to turn any comment into a defense of his honor or an argument.  We ate warm PBJs in sullen silence, binding our thoughts tightly into knots lest they betray us.

Trinity “Lake,” once known as Claire Engle Lake, is a manmade monstrosity and the fourth biggest lake in California.  It’s as blue as a hotel swimming pool and rimmed with a brick red shoreline when low, like the world’s exhausted eye staring out at the heavens asking, “Why me?”  It was summarily dammed the year I was born for thirsty Central Valley ranches by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (one of the more tragically ironic names for a government agency).  They piled up tons of earth to plug the North Fork of the Trinity River above Lewiston, ignobly submerging many historic and aboriginal sites around the confluence of Coffee Creek.  When I first glimpsed the water, I was of an age where the adventure appealed to me more than the history.  We finally stopped at a “scenic vista point” for a bathroom break, which had a good view of the ugly scar they called a “lake.”  While waiting for the females in the family I read the bland informational signs put there by the United States Forest Service, which efficiently detailed the many boring facts about Trinity Lake.  The whitewashed factoids in their conservative government typeface revealed nothing of the area’s tragic past.  I learned later in life that this formerly pristine and beautiful wilderness had been veritably gang raped and scarred by the insatiable greed of my people in their fanatic gluttony for gold, while they committed a hasty and thorough genocide to remove the inconvenience of the human beings that had already been living there for thousands of years.  Then they submerged the crime scene under millions of gallons of water, as if to wash clean their shameful transgressions.

If I sound like I was on the side of the indigenous people, it’s not an accident.  I had absorbed an affinity for Native American people from my mother, who first introduced me to the history of the Coastal Miwok that had once inhabited our suburban Terra Linda (“pretty land”) neighborhood in San Rafael.  I spent many afternoons in the blond hills around our home, stalking deer in my mind, and gathering mahogany colored acorns to make a bitter mush.  For this trip, I had the foresight to look up the native tribes of the Trinity area from my school library.  I was on excellent terms with the librarian at my elementary school.  Mrs. Doolittle was genuinely impressed that I had vowed to read every book before I graduated from the sixth grade.  This was of course a fantastic goal that was not achieved to even a small degree.  However, I did wind up spending most of my time there during recess.  It was a convenient way of avoiding the bullies who had taunted me ever since I was introduced to my fourth grade class as “the new girl, Donna.”  You see, back in those days I had a very slight build and a Donny Osmond haircut, and I guess I looked kind of vulnerable, like a girl.  Anyway, I was always much happier in the company of books than with the bottom feeders that prowled around the sunbaked asphalt of the school yard.  I had learned not to try too hard to make acquaintances, as G.O.D. had imperiously moved our entire family five times in my brief childhood, and I had grown tired of losing friends.  We existed at the whim of a demanding, omnipotent deity, who with a wave of his hand could change our lives without a grain of empathy.

From reference brochures I learned about the Hupa people who lived along the section of the Trinity River that twisted westward alongside Highway 299 to Eureka.  Skirting their traditional hunting grounds, we headed north from the place where the river turned west.  We drove from Weaverville up Highway 3, to the area around Coffee Creek at the eastern edge of the Trinity Alps.  This was a mysterious region, about which I could find less definitive provenance regarding the local natives.  One brochure stated the valley where the North Fork of the Trinity River flowed south was the southernmost tribal homelands of the Yurok.  That tribe had primarily inhabited the Scott, Salmon, and Marble Mountains to the north.  Another source suggested it was home to isolated communities of the Shasta or Wintun tribes.  The Shasta’s traditional tribal lands stretched to the north and east of this valley, and various highly successful Wintun groups controlled most of the northern Central Valley, including the land between the northern Sacramento River and the Trinity.  I decided it must have been the Wintun who once walked these lands, as they were dubiously commemorated by a garish campground gift shop near Trinity Center called “Wyntoon.” We stopped there for gas and directions, and perused many tacky souvenirs related to the Indians in the area such as vinyl moccasins, rubber tomahawks, and a cheap plastic bow and arrow set.  I was becoming more interested in the original inhabitants of this unusually remote, scenic, and spiritual area of California, regardless of what they called themselves.

I had always been the type of boy who entertained himself.  I knew nothing of what others called “boredom” – an insipidly languid concept that seems unnatural to this day.  I loved to learn about the places where we visited, and had an encyclopedic memory.  It was exhilarating to experience the places where wondrous things from the books I had read actually happened; as if springing up from the pages like an educational film.  This type of self-directed field research was as natural to me as watching television, and more fun because I controlled the programming.  I consumed books greedily, the way other kids scarfed down potato chips.

We piled back in the bus and trundled a few miles further down the road to our campground.  The old Turtle Bus was backfiring now, and G.O.D. was growing more agitated.  The tension level rose noticeably in our rolling tin hothouse.  As I remember, this trip was supposed to be different than our alacritous cross-country campaign for many reasons.  First, we actually had a whole half a day to explore our new surroundings.  An accessible stretch of the Trinity River rippled right past the campground where Eagle Creek entered, offering a rare chance for fun.  We had our choice of campsites, but it sounded like the old bus barely made it.  Three kids and a dog burst out of it like sweaty, multicolored bits of popcorn, as if it was about to explode.  Our parents were no longer on speaking terms, presenting a rare and glorious opportunity for mutiny.  Mom defiantly kidnapped us from the servitude of camp life while Dad sulked under the door to the VW’s engine in the back, which for him remained the only thing on which he could impose his will.  Free at last! — or at least till dinnertime.  In our exultant, unfamiliar liberty down by the river, we invented a bold new game that took us further away from his oppression, and passed a delightful afternoon “scrooching” on air mattresses.  This was our word for rafting prone and headfirst down the meager rapids, while Mom kept pace on shore and cheered us on, walking us back upriver to try again.  We were all good swimmers, and the river wasn’t very deep.  The mutineers had a blast, and got sunburned for their treachery.

That evening, surrounded by the colorful plastic implements of domestic life that had been extracted from their precision placement within the camper, we devoured a desolate meal of charred hamburgers and overcooked corn on the cob.  G.O.D.’s outrage at our desertion hung over the picnic table like a wet blanket.  As often happened, I was the first to try and resurrect congeniality.  Recalling a story I had read about in my research, I broke the painful silence by announcing, “You know they had a kind of Thanksgiving here in Trinity with the local Indians.”  A desultory crunching of corn was the only response, so I continued, “The miners wanted the gold that was on the land where the Indians lived, so they invited them to a ‘friendship feast’ in 1850…  The only problem was, the food they served to the Indians was poisoned.  Over 100 Wintun Indians were killed.  So much for ‘friendship’.”  The crunching stopped.  My mom looked surprised, and a little impressed with my knowledge.  She glanced over at my stoic father for a commentary, but none came.  He could play the ‘silent treatment’ game like a monk, and she dared not utter anything that might be considered sacrilege, like a compliment.  Judy stared dubiously at her plate, on which were scattered the remains of her own substantial feast.  Debbie looked sadly at her half-eaten corn cob, and placed it delicately on her paper plate like it might explode.  Dinner was over.

We had only one tent, and I wanted to sleep outside, but the mosquitoes would have feasted on my thin suburban blood.  We rolled out our canvas cotton-lined sleeping bags in the prescribed pattern, with Mom lying protectively between us and a jealous G.O.D.  It was always this way when we went camping.  Nobody said anything after lights out, and we slept fitfully in the pitch dark.

The next morning he had us up again at first light, and we had to pack up everything in precision drill just to move two agonizing miles up the creek to a dusty, joy-forsaken campground called Horse Flat.  Apparently, the one where we were was no longer a defensible position.  After just a few minutes of bone-jarring travel at 10 mph on the convoluted dirt road leading to it, I had an idea why the stupid horses were so flat.  I couldn’t understand why we would leave a fun camp next to a river, and drive farther away from the highway to also make our next drive longer.  I didn’t think of it then, but this was probably my father’s way of making sure we couldn’t have any more fun with Mom on the river.  We were the only people in the sun blasted dusty camp, and had to stay around the campsite to do extra chores. It appeared that this less-frequented site had fallen into disrepair and the crew had to get it “ship shape.”  (Daniel I. Mayne, Jr. was in the Navy after he finished helping to build the bomb during WWII, so this was no idle metaphor.)

Mom had to find new and ingenious ways of having fun in the midst of the tyranny, and devised for us a task that was at once both practical and exciting.  The campground was infested with yellow jackets, because we had unwittingly camped right next to their nest in an empty campground.  Of course, G.O.D. would never admit a tactical error and simply move to another camp site, so we had to make the best of it.  Killing yellow jackets with extreme prejudice became an officially sanctioned activity, even if it seemed the troops were having a little too much fun.  We had a contest and tallied up the carnage, and still the desperate little pests kept coming after our food, as this was probably their only chance all summer.  We made up a silly little song to commemorate the slaughter, when it became apparent that they were more interested in food than stinging:

I think that I will never see
An insect stupid as a bee.
A bee whose nest will never rest
Until they wrest our chicken breast,
A bee who spends his lifelong day
Getting shooed, and zapped, and zonked away.

Final score: Don = 365, the rest of the family = unknown, and the wasps = 0.  (Yes the song was wrong – yellow jackets are wasps, not bees – but it’s harder to rhyme the word ‘wasps’.)  Not one of us got stung, and the legendary “thwack!” of my rolled up newspaper is still deeply embedded in the genetic code of the current-day yellow jackets of Horse Flat.

After camping the obligatory one night, on Saturday my father had ordained for us a new experience: backpacking.  Or at least, he had read about it in some magazine or book and wanted to try it out as a family in the northeastern corner of the Trinity Wilderness, which meant that all of us would be involuntary research subjects.  Actually, what we did then most folks today would call “day packing” because it was hiking without an overnight stay.  We overburdened, downtrodden beasts of burden simply called it “torture.”  It was another willful, wicked plot to stay on the move, to “see new things,” with vigorous attempts to regain control of the family from both parents, but what we kids wanted most was just to go hang out by the river.

My adventurous spirit was at least a little intrigued by the destination this time, even though I knew from past experience it was something I would probably see for a very limited time.  I figured that a place called “Big Bear Lake” had a pretty good chance of having bears around and, well – big ones, at that.  This sole thought was to be all that kept me going on the trail, but predictably, there would turn out to be no bears at all.  Nor a hint of bear tracks, bear sign, or even bear grass.  In fact, the entire area was so painfully devoid of bears that it could have been a Green Bay Packers sports bar.  Nonetheless, I would do my duty for G.O.D. and Family.  I would hike the good hike.