Walking Up The Mountain
Walking up the Mountain part one (a narrative started in the last century)
I took a walk up the mountain today. It was a pretty walk, a bit too steep for my usual rambles but productive. Since I came home to live for a while--around mid-December--the water has been a bit quirky, and has been off around a third of the time. My father has been fixing it constantly.
My father's health could be better, and the mile or so walk up the mountain to work on the water isn't a picnic for a man who has had two heart attacks and two strokes, but when my youngest brother couldn't get the water running for more than a day or two at a time he began to make the walk. I asked him to take me from the beginning, but it was a "mans job" and I just wasn't suited for the task. After this last week, when he made five trips up and couldn't get the water to run for more than a few hours, he finally allowed me to help today, so I grabbed a shovel and some tools and headed up the mountain with my father to fix the water.
The first bit isn't too bad, steep but manageable, the hills are green now with thin wild grasses, and the first flowers of spring are beginning to bloom. There are some manzanita on the trail that are over one hundred years old judging by their size, grown over time from bushes into twisted red trees. Before we got very far the going got rougher.
From there until about an eighth of a mile from the top of the pipeline you can reach out and touch your next steps--if you brush away the leaves and pine needles first. There are a number of deep gullies to get around, the result of the old pipeline my fathers family built in the thirties to bring water to the lower ranch. Over the years it leaked so much that the mountain washed away from the constant flow of water.
Once past this it didn't really level out, the trail just ran across the mountain instead of straight up it, until we reached the creek that is the source of our water. The water used to be diverted into a wooden and tin flume, then through screens into the pipeline, but a bit more than ten years ago the people on the water line--no longer only relatives--decided that it needed to be updated.
Now the pipeline comes from a filtering box set down in the stream, and through a section of pipe into an overflow box where the closed pipeline starts. The filtering box is made of metal mesh--a cube around two feet per side--with a T shaped section of perforated pipe in the center of it that connects through the long side of the T to the overflow box. Packed in around the T are small rocks, to filter sand and debris from the water. I know this now, but I learned it today.
To find it out, I had to help my father dam the fork of the stream that feeds the pipe with sandbags, then dig out the contents of the filtering box until we cleared all the sand and silt that had stopped the water. We rinsed the sand from the rock and replaced it in the box to finish, and went home confident that the job had been done well, and the water was restored. Dad even said that there was more than twice the water at the top of the pipeline than he had seen recently. Job well done.
The trip down isn't easier, downhill is worse on bad knees, and I took a misstep or two that almost got me down the quick and dirty way, but we made it without real mishap and came home to find the water not yet fixed.
We knew that there was water at the top of the pipeline, so we went to check the pressure control valve about a quarter mile back up the hill. Yet another new thing I had never seen. I turned off the main pipe, and turned on a secondary pipe that pointed up and to the side above the valve. A huge jet of sand and water shot out of it. Dad and I decided the clog must have been washed away, and we set everything back to its original setting and walked back home. A bare trickle was all there was when we arrived.
Still not willing to let all the work go for nothing, I told Dad I would check the pressure control valve one more time. I went back up the trail again and turned off the main pipe, then opened the secondary pipe above the valve once again. I let the pressure of the water downhill pull air through the valve to dislodge any sand it could, then turned on the main pipeline and blew water through the secondary. This time there was even more pressure from up hill, and the water shot about 25 feet into the air. I turned off the main pipe again, allowed the suction to start, picked up a short piece of pipe and tapped the control valve a couple of times saying, "Now you be good!". Again all was replaced to its' original positions and back home I went. The water was finally on.
There is a five and a half foot clawfoot tub on the back porch, and now there is water to fill it. I'm so tired I really don't know if I will, but it would sure feel good.
When I was five or six, I hated to go to bed in the summer. It was still light outside, and I didn't want to be in bed when the world was still awake, but my mother would shoo us into the bedroom promptly at eight, shut the curtains on the smell of red clay dust and bear clover, and tuck us into bed before closing our bedroom door. My younger sister always fell asleep quickly, and my older sister was never far behind her, but I was usually sitting on the bookcase by the window, watching the light fade until it became too dark to see. Just at dusk one summer evening, as I was at the window wishing I was outside, a mountain lion jumped down the bank on the other side of our road, and silently padded down the side of our yard about fifty feet from where I sat behind a screen.
The ridge above the house was green then, only one dead snag in the whole expanse of it. My grandparents were married two turns away from where dad built his house on the side of this ridge. The shade beneath the trees was so deep that the shadows there looked blue black at certain times of day. Back then I was an intrepid explorer, I wandered the mountain alone and with my dog for fourteen years, and one of the places I loved best was at the bottom of the trail up the water line. It's just a small fold in the mountain, with a crease that runs with water when it rains. The mountain grows soft, thin grass there, just right for lying on your back to look up at the sky, but the best part was the flowers, Shooting Stars.
They were my favorite flower when I was a child. They are small, not more than 15" high at their tallest, with multiple blossoms that vary in color from pale pink to deep magenta and lavender. I picked them as fast as I found them, but only the ones with long stems, ones that only grew a few inches tall went to seed because I left them behind.
Shooting Stars smell like the Frosty Root Beer my dad would buy for me when he took us up to Cressman store for the Sunday paper and sweets. I always asked for a Frosty and some black licorice. I would bite the ends off the licorice and use it for a straw, then eat the gooey licorice. The smell of those flowers makes me small and easily pleased again. Even after more than twenty years the mountain remembers that dark blond child; the Shooting Stars that grow in that small fold of the hill are just the tiniest bit shorter than the ones higher up.
I noticed that this morning as I walked by riots of Shooting Stars. Dad has been sick this week, so it isn't a good time for the water to go out. Until he is well again, we need the water to be on, so I took another walk up the mountain. Like my favorite flower, the mountain lions responded to the pressure of the people who moved in around us over the years. Their numbers diminished, partly because they don't much care for people, partly because people were killing them. They have come back now that they aren't legal to hunt, and we have one in the area now.
I already knew that, but I saw signs of the pretty kitty on the mountain too. When I left the house I brought with me a kitchen cooking spoon--to clean sand from the overflow box--and some bite size candy bars for energy in a plastic grocery bag. I wasn't paying that much attention to where my feet were going; I was looking at all of the Shooting Stars on the trail. I stepped over the first few piles-o-poo without even looking at them, but eventually I noticed that there were quite a few of them, and they were awfully regular on the trail. I looked closer and decided that the local lion had claimed this trail for itself.
I started to feel very nervous.
The trail is a narrow corridor hacked out of the brush most of the way up the hill; one can go up or down but not off the trail. Some of the piles looked awfully fresh, so I went back home to have another cup of coffee.
Mountain Lions are a sit and wait kind of predator. They don't want to have to run too far for their food, so they often pick a likely spot to the side or above an area where their prey--in this area it's deer--might wander by. Water sources and trails, like the one up to the water, are the kind of places one might happen to find one of these solitary cats. The animal was marking the trail though, and any deer in the area must be long gone-so obviously the cat isn't hunting on the trail. I had nothing to worry about.
A full grown man usually has nothing to worry about from a Mountain Lion, but children and small women--did I mention how short I am?--are sometimes attacked. The dance of predator and prey has produced a cat here that has canines perfectly spaced to slip between the vertebrae of the local deer, and they teach their young to attack at the back of the neck. A well-executed attack kills the deer instantly, and the Lion doesn't wait long between dash and dine. I'm not a deer, and should I chance to meet the top of the local food chain I doubt I would have such an easy time. I still felt worried.
Worried or not, I had to go fix the water. I wasn't going to be able to deter a predator with bite sized candy bars, so I decided to take the shovel with me too. My dad told me to take his gun. It's a single action Ruger Bearcat handgun, a twenty-two. I know how to shoot it, but the idea of getting it out of the holster, cocking, and firing it while I'm looking at a lion who might be looking at lunch, was almost as silly as using candy bars.
I took the handgun. I put it on a belt, and attached the bag with the spoon and candy bars to the belt as well, picked up the shovel and started back up the mountain. I am no longer the intrepid explorer, when I was a child I just didn't know how many ways a person can get in trouble in the mountains, but I do now. My heart was working much harder than it usually does on the walk because I was terrified. I walked slowly, looking carefully up and down and into the brush on both sides of the trail every few steps. The animal had marked the trail at very regular intervals, and every few minutes I was reminded that I was on disputed territory. When I stopped to look around, the bag on my belt would sometimes shift, sounding like my steps on the dry oak leaves. I jumped the first few times it happened, but after that it just made me curse. About half way up I came upon a pile-o-poo that was no more than a few hours old. I took a break there, wanting to just go back down the mountain, but after a few minutes I continued the climb.
When I got to the top, and started working on the water, I realized that I should have brought a wrench instead of a shovel--l couldn't get the drain cap off the pipe. I shoveled sand out of the collection box and sat at the overflow box, scooping sand out of the pipe as the pressure pushed it through for thirty minutes. Had I been able to open the drain, it would have cleared on its own, but a partial job was all I could do. I did manage to increase the flow, and put the system back together.
The walk down was easier; I was still nervous, but not as much as I was before. The pipe began to fill with water, and I could hear it trickling as I walked down the trail. When I came to a place where the trickling stopped because the pipe had filled, I knew that I'd solved the water problem, at least for a while.
I'm almost home at the place where the oak leaves stop and the soft grass and flowers begin. The air smelled of Root Beer. I saw a perfect Shooting Star, and stopped to admire it. In all the years I've walked this mountain I've never seen one like this; it was a beautiful creamy white. The dark blond child wanted that flower. She wanted to take it home and put it in a jelly jar with some water; a rare prize captured. I knew it must be a recessive gene being expressed and I might never see another. I told her she couldn't have it, and left it to go to seed.
Of course, those poo piles weren't a mountain lion, and if I'd come by my knowledge of this animal in the woods instead of in a classroom I would have known that. The animal that is using that trail for a bathroom is the local singing group of coyotes. The deer are also still using the trail occasionally, and there may be a bear as well. The rotted logs at the top of the trail are being pulled apart, and Dad thinks that a bear may be up there eating grubs while waiting for blackberry season to start. Once Dad recovered, we went up and worked on the water again together, and fixed it--for a while.
Every time I climb the trail it has changed. Unlike in a city, the seasons don't pass slowly here, but in a headlong rush. The Shooting Stars fade quickly--surrendering in a wave from the bottom of the hill to the top--giving way to all kinds of Brodiaea, deep violet wild pea, and Baby Blue Eyes, which surrender in their turn to Farewell to Spring, Mustang Clover, and Mariposa Lily. These last signal the beginning of the dry season, and an end to the waves of color that wash up over us from the bottom of the hill. From now until the rains come the red clay dust will slowly begin to cover everything on the mountain, gradually muting all colors with a haze of burnt sienna. The air will smell of dust and the resins of Bear Clover hot from the sun. All the grasses go golden, and rattle with the passing of every small animal and breeze.
Now the afternoon wind will start, that moment after midday when air warmed in the lower canyons and valleys moves together, combing through the trees as it rushes up the side of the mountain with a sound so big and so deep that you feel it as much as hear it . You can watch it come if you stand in the right spot, watch the trees down canyon begin to tremble with the passing of that first strong push of the wind, listen to the sound as it builds and comes closer, then--like the feeling of drinking water when you're thirsty--the touch of the wind reaches you, blowing the resinous smell of canyons below.
The wind isn't here yet this year, it should be, but this year has been cold then wet, a year in waiting, a sneaky year. It has been a year that cannot be depended on--like the water.
My sisters had installed a new collection box for the water. The woven iron mesh of the old box had given way at the bottom seam, and the box was falling apart, so my oldest sister had a box made of thin sheets of stainless steel to replace the old iron mesh one. She had the person who constructed it put rows of slots, around two inches by an eighth of an inch, in three of the sides. The upstream side was left solid. My sisters and some friends installed the box and took some of the tools stored there back down the hill to be repaired and restored. The first storm came, and the force of the water, filled with silt and sand from the storm, began to fill the box with silt. The water couldn't flow straight through, so when the water slowed a bit, and the flow lessened, the box couldn't clear itself as it had sometimes done before. Filled with silt and sand the flow of water slowed until the water ceased.
No water. I think I'm getting a complex. I will never take running water for granted again, but will give thanks every time I open a tap and water comes out. I will wonder where it comes from, and who fixes it.
Dad and I and sometimes my siblings fix the water here, and it seemed to be Dad and my turn again. It's usually our turn, because my sisters are away during the days and have a water tank to store water so that the inconsistencies of our system don't create so much havoc for them. There is no tank at dad's house, so when the water goes out there, certain things come to a screeching halt--like washing clothes, doing dishes, taking baths, and flushing toilets. This last winter, after a storm that started wet and stopped the water turned bitterly cold and dry, I melted the powdery, dry snow for hours to get enough water to flush the toilet. There is no snow outside now, though, so it is either fetch water, or fix water.
Dad and I made the trip to go take a look at this new water box in the morning. The grasses, already going golden, were still wet, and the sunshine was intense but not very warm. The trail up to the water is already getting overgrown; just a few weeks ago it was clear and easy to see; now the wild plum and grasses have grown so that in places it seems to stop in a wall of bushes. The small, bright red splashes of shiny Poison Oak leaves have grown into tall shiny green bushes, and the Fremontia is bowing long arches of bright yellow blossoms over the tops of our heads. The mosquitoes are ferocious. All the water from this very wet spring is fostering a population explosion, and everything is responding. The plants are lush and growing into a hasty tangle, the insects and animals too are fecund and quick in their rush to take advantage of this wet year before the long dry summer, so late this year, finally begins. The fall will be as ferocious as the mosquitoes are now, I think, when all this lovely green has gone dry and golden, and has baked in the hot sun for months.
It's green now though, and grabs at my feet as I walk up the mountain. Walking this trail has put me in better condition, and I don't tire as quickly now as I did the first time. We take it slow, with lots of rests, and come to the top of the water line after about forty minutes. The new filtering box is hidden under a strong flow of water still murky from the storm, so Dad and I move sandbags and clear the drain of the collecting pool until we get the water to drop and reveal the pretty new box. It has filled to the top with sand and silt.
My sisters had taken the wood and screen box that we used to rinse sand from the filter rock, so I spend an hour removing rock and sand, and rinsing the sand from the rock. After replacing the cleaned filter rock, Dad decided to leave the top off of the box, to improve the flow, and we put the system back together and went home. The water was again running, although I no longer call it fixed. We are getting faster at this job now, and instead of most of a day it's taking a couple of hours.
Dad has walked this hill since he was a boy, and has seen it change through the years. On each trip he has something to say about this spot, or that hill down there. He points out the old logging roads, and the places where buildings or mills used to stand. He talks about the downed trees, and how long they have lain there. He speaks of the way things happen, and I feel the echo of that knowing, I have a bit of this mountain in my heart too. The rhythm of this piece of the earth has formed the structure of his lifes melody, and runs a counterpoint in mine, even though I will never be able to make this place my home as my sisters have.
The seasons rush by here, time passes quickly, yet the cedar stump of a tree cut before my dad was born is still there, slowly flaking away. A mega drought has started causing trees on the ridge to die for lack of water and from bark beetles that prey upon drought weakened trees. Gradually the ridge will turn orange, first in spots here and there, then splotches, then streaks of orange evergreens standing dead within the live ones. It's hard to see it because it's so gradual, but dad and I walked past the beginning of this over and over on the way to and from the water.
Leaving the top off of the box turned out to be a mistake, and some of the sand that came in through the top was too large to flow out the slots in the sides, the flow of the water to the house gradually began to decrease, and the day when the water was coming to a stop came when I had a friend up to visit.
He reminds me of a hummingbird. He came up to relax, he said, yet spent the time here in a constant search of things to do. He wanted to wash dishes, he wanted to fish, he wanted to walk in the moonlight. He was always three steps ahead of me. I wondered-were I to reach out and feel his chest--if his heart would be beating much faster than mine as well. He kept himself busy, moving and talking in a constant flurry, and when Dad and I talked of the water, he said he wanted to help.
We walked the path to the top of the water line while my friend peppered my father with questions. He wanted to know the names of trees and plants, the ways and places and times of this chunk of mountain were things he wanted to hear. My father obliged him. He pointed at a Ponderosa pine of average size, and said; "Now that's a big tree", and at that moment I decided that the afternoon must be spent in a giant sequoia grove near my home.
We reached the water and found the box filled to the top with sand. After moving sandbags to divert the flow, we began the task of cleaning out the filtering box. My friend was a great help, and did nearly half of the work. My dad was allowed--this time-to spend most of the operation smoking cigars and answering questions. I carried sandy buckets of rock to one side of the stream, rinsed them, and brought them back clean. The work was done quickly and we returned home. I took a quick bath and took my friend to have lunch and see the real big trees.
As many times as I have looked up at the Sequoias, I can never hurry the process. They are so big, so old. I don't touch them often, and when I do it's with careful hands. They whisper to me of a past that still lives, they wear the scars of the fires of a century ago. My hummingbird friend moved quickly through the grove. I gave him my knife to carve his name with thousands of others into the flank of a fallen giant. While he worked I breathed in the smells of the grove, of dogwood blossoms past their prime, of fresh summer on wet spring earth.
We didn't stay long; he needed to catch an early evening flight, and wanted to have a taste of my favorite brew at the place that makes it. The ride from the high country of the Sequoia grove to the city is a long one, and we went from the clean cool air and bright sunshine into the hot smog of the great valley of California in a bit more than two hours. A quick brew with some snacks on the side and we were headed to the airport. He walked quickly into the airport from the car, then I drove home at a leisurely pace.
Summer finally came, and almost as quickly left again. At the end of June record lows in the central valley and here in the mountains had us all chilled and wondering what was next. Sunset brought the temps into the forties the last week of June, and by the second of July sunset brought scant relief from eighty degree heat left over from the scorching days of summers return. The year had returned to normal and summer baked the ridge.
At the end of summer it's only cool at night in late September. The land is as dry as it will get all year, and every whiff of smoke smells like danger. Miles away, down Blue Canyon, the hills caught fire. For three days the sun was setting all day long. I woke up over and over when the smoke got thick at night, frightened from sleep by a fire fifteen miles away. The days faded into winter, getting colder and darker, but dry. The real storms don't come until January.
This winter I would see a five hundred year storm. Elena and I were home, dad was away, and she was asleep. There was nowhere to go, and for entertainment I watched the storm after the power went out. Lightning struck the ridge the water line runs down, so close I could feel the heat of it on my arm and the side of my face through the window.
The wind began to blow down bug trees along the ridge next to the water line. I could hear them cracking and crashing down into the brush and the other trees. By morning the road would be blocked in two places, and the mountain sounded like a giant beehive for days from the chainsaws. Dad and I eventually hiked up the waterline and sawed through three dead pines that had fallen across the trail to the top. I rolled the rounds of pine into the ravines, to stop the gully from getting bigger by slowing the water. The top of one of the trees was hanging from another tree across the ravine, but it wouldn't fall on the trail. The trail to the waterline was clear.
This was a good thing, because the winter had a lot more wet storms in store for us, and Dad and I would be walking the trail a lot. Three days later a large storm came through and the water went out. Dad had an idea for a different kind of dam. We had been moving the sandbags so much lately that they were disintegrating, and the sand was filtering down into the pool where the water box was located. He decided to use a check dam.
We took a large piece of plastic and weighted it down with rocks and some of the sandbags that were still in good shape, then dad and I draped the downstream end of the plastic over a branch and lifted the branch to make a temporary plastic dam. We wedged the branch between a rock and the bank to complete the dam and stop most of the water. At the bottom of the cement wall that contains the pool and the water box is a small hole to drain the pool, we used a piece of black pipe to clear the drain hole of sand and small rocks and then the pool drained completely except for the small trickle of water that was getting past the check dam. The job of rinsing the sand out of the rock was a lot easier with the pool drained. We cleaned the box, shoveled sand from around it, put the lid back on and released the check dam. The last part of the process was to reblock the drain hole with a branch, and to open the bottom of the pipe next to the overflow box to allow the sand to clear from the pipe. We cleaned the sand out of the overflow box then put it all back together and headed back down the mountain. I ran some water through the secondary pipe, gave the pressure control valve a couple of lucky taps, and went home to wash up.
After the next storm, I was away and Dad went up there on his own. He got too cold and began to have chest pains (he didn't tell me this, I had to figure it out). When he was finishing up he couldn't get the latches to seat properly so the box wasn't completely closed. The next storm through took the top of the box away--along with all of the filter rock--and filled the box to the top with sand. When we walked up to the top, he told me he hadn't fastened it all the way down and I nearly sat down and wept. I know he felt awful, I felt awful too. I was angry at him for a week until I figured out why he couldn't finish the job. I hiked up and down the stream looking for the top of the box but didn't find it. Because the rock and the top were both gone, I began hiking up the hill every day to clear the box of sand. I opened bottom of the pipe just before the overflow box, shoveled sand out until the pipe cleared, then closed it up and went home. This was getting old. I needed to replace that filter rock.
The next trip into Fresno I went to a sand and gravel outlet and bought 60 pounds of rock to take up to the top of the water line. I dumped half of it into a backpack and headed up the hill. I dumped the rocks in a pile not too far from the stream then walked over to clear some of the sand out of the box. As I was finishing up I decided to drop the rocks into the box to get some idea how many I would need. The thirty pounds I'd brought up with me barely covered the bottom of the box; I was going to need ten times that much. I felt like weeping again, but then I looked down into the pool and saw the faintest outline of a straight line under the sand. It was the top of the water box. I closed things up and went down to tell Dad that I'd found it.
Three hundred pounds of rock. That first trip with thirty pounds of it laid me up with a sore back for days. I was still hiking up there every day to clear the sand, but I couldn't carry any rock for a while. A friend of mine from the east coast was coming to visit, and I wanted to be in good health so I could enjoy the visit.
I was part of an online group of writers and poets, and I met my friend Peter there. I had also started a real time poetry group that met every Sunday afternoon, and grew out of the larger writing group. I was looking forward to meeting Peter and showing him the water line. I complained about fixing the water to all my online friends, and Peter was planning on taking some photographs. Peter and I are both poets, though he didn't participate in my poetry group on Sundays. Peter decided to go for the burn, and as I carried up fifteen pounds of rock he carried up a full bag of sixty pounds. We piled them up where I was storing the rock, and he walked off to take photographs of the creek. Those photos are beautiful. He took pictures of me and my daughter as well. We read each other's poetry. He went home too soon.
My high school friend Tim moved up to our road since the last time I lived here. I have seen him and his wife Cat walking their dogs on nice days. Tim has offered to help me take the rock up the mountain, and he and Dad and I are all taking the walk every few days. It only took a couple of trips to get all three hundred pounds up there, and we cleaned and filled up the box on the last trip. The rocks were covered with a white powder, rock dust, and the water turned cloudy as we filled up the pool at the end of the process. We latched all four latches, cleared the line by the overflow box, and walked back down the hill. One more stop at the pressure control valve to run some water through and we were done. The water was fixed, well fixed, and I didn't walk up the mountain again for over a year.
I found a job in Fresno, and once I got an apartment there my daughter, Elena, changed schools to join me. She grew to hate Fresno and so did l. It didn't hold a candle to Pine Ridge, or even Davis, and she wanted me to take her back to where she was happy. We did find a friend in one of my co-workers, Jennifer. We spent time in the bookstore with Jen, and went to movies too. I brought Jen up to the mountains to meet my dad and watch the snow fall. On one of our trips up there the water was out, so we decided to go fix it together.
The trail was wet, with patches of snow still on the ground, but we decided to go up there anyway. When we got there I opened the box without damming the water and found that all the rocks were missing. I stared in disbelief at the place where there was three hundred pounds of rock barely a year before. My back began to hurt immediately at the thought of replacing it. I walked down the hill to ask my Dad what could possibly have happened.
My dad told me a new neighbor had moved into his Cousin David's old place, and that he had gone up to work on the water a few times recently. I was furious about the loss of the rocks, and assumed that he had left the top off to make this happen. Jen and I walked down the road to his place to talk to him. My first words were, "do you own this place?" when he said he did, I asked him what he had been doing to the water system. He said he had opened it up and somehow a bunch of rocks had gotten in there, so he shoveled them out to fix it, and then put the top back on. I felt like I couldn't breathe. I carefully explained how the system worked, and that he would have to replace all the rock for it to work properly again, and then we left. Jen told me I had lacked a certain amount of charm and diplomacy. I told her that I felt like thrashing the man, so maybe I did okay after all.
My dad went to Georgia to visit my younger brother and his family the next winter, so the water line didn't concern me much. He looked tired when he returned, and collected his truck that had been left in my care and went home. My Dad had taken me and my daughter camping at least once a year most of her first ten years of life. The last few years we had stopped, but Laney wanted to go again, and my younger sister and niece wanted to join us as well. That next autumn we all went to the ocean and Dad fished and flew kites with his two oldest grandchildren. Laney and I slept on the top bunk of his camper, and he slept poorly. He was up multiple times; I knew his heart was bothering him.
I had been applying for jobs in the Sacramento area, so I could take Elena back to where she was happy. Just before the year 2000, I found a job there and I began to plan to move back to Davis. My Dad caught the flu right after the New Year and had a bad case of it. He began to feel better in a few days, and my older sisters brought him some fresh chicken noodle soup on Saturday and cleaned up the house for him. They came by the next morning to see if he needed anything and found him on the kitchen floor. He got up for a little more soup and his heart attacked him.
My sisters and brothers emptied the house, and my Mother passed it into the hands of my younger sister. It's quite amazing how homeless the whole process made me feel. I lost the place I went to when I was hurt or afraid.
I missed the shade in the fold of the mountain at the top of the water line. I missed the patterns of fall color change in the leaves of the pear trees Dad planted. I missed the sound and smell of the upcanyon wind.
Walking Up The Mountain (Part two, new century)
My daughter and I left for my new job a few weeks later. It was a rough landing back in Davis, but for my daughter it felt like a homecoming of sorts. We settled in without being really comfortable and negotiated a world where Dad's house wasn't a place we went anymore. Both of us mourned my father in our own way, but it was rough on Elena, losing a touchstone when you're a teen isn't easy.
I started my new fire service job as dispatcher at Statewide Headquarters. I worked there with the old guard, men who had slept rough out on the fire line. They considered all these firefighters that got cushy hotels kind of soft. They all had a "career" fire that they talked about, the fires that were long or bad or both.
I did a lot of radio communications, paperwork, and intel for fire sieges. I took classes to acquire incident qualifications so I could dispatch to incidents and assist with the fire efforts. I learned the quirky ins and outs of dispatch and resource processing programs that were built in house for our special needs and finance tracking, and eventually became qualified to go out on fire incidents and assist. This was work that felt valuable to me, and I was glad to do it.
I often got to do it on my birthday. The middle of August was always smoky, and usually the time when folks from HQ might get tapped to help out. The season was a bit more than two months old and folks needed to take a breather, so out I went to an incident command post usually within view of a big fire header. My first one was as a dispatcher in the Mobile Command Center for the incident. I worked the radios during the day, but eventually was put onto the night shift with a firefighter. He managed to stay awake for a few hours but then succumbed to sleep and I was there trying to stay awake without any help. There are TVs in the MCC, so I watched as Katrina drowned the 9th Ward in New Orleans, and got out the cleaning products and completely cleaned the MCC to stay awake.
I ended up talking to a lot of very smart people over the years, and developed working relationships with experts in arboriculture, engineering, metallurgy, forensic failure analysis and other kinds of sciences that can help determine the cause of a fire. I can't remember what he was called but I even found a poopologist once to help determine if a fire was caused by an enormous pile of horse manure. It ended up being my niche, and I learned a lot about fire in the process.
Through the years my birthday was often smoky, like sunset all day long except for the time right around noon when the light was shining straight down and the brightly lit smoke hurt my eyes. The wine country fires of 2017 were an exception, and I spent them mostly at my desk finding knowledge specialists to help with the investigations. Those fires ate up the wine country and communities all the way to Clear Lake, killed 40 people, burned a million acres, and caused a billion dollars in losses. This was the year I stopped believing in "career" fires. Mostly because they were beginning to happen every year. Then it was 2018.
The fire was burning through parts of the town of Redding. I was on the Carr incident in Cost Apportionment in July of that year. That fire position managed to be the most tedious and most interesting at the same time. I did lots of data entry to track equipment and people and where they worked on the fire to appropriately apportion the costs to the protection agency for that bit of land.
The interesting part was talking to the Division and Group Supervisors who were the directing hands of the fire line work. They were assigned resources at the morning meeting and would sometimes do some horse trading of the resources there to get the equipment and personnel that they believed they would need to work on the part of the fire they had been assigned. The resources and their Supes were 24 on and 24 off. I would see them come in after breakfast when they came to Cost Apportionment to tell us what resources they had and where they used them on the map so I could correctly apportion and record it in the data.
The good part was finding the story, they would point to the map and talk about the day they spent scratching bare dirt lines in front of the flames. I learned more about fire from them than any other time in my work, and about the people that work to put it out.
A couple days into my dispatch on the Carr, one of the supes came in while the lead debriefer was out, and I went in to debrief him alone. As I walked into the map room to start he dropped into the chair there. He looked like he was in shock. He looked up at me and said "I've been working fire for 30 years, and I've never had my ass handed to me the way it was in the last 24 hours." I began to go through the resources that he had been assigned the day before, and started recording where they were on the fireline. I asked about a Dozer that he had come by after the first plan but that had been written in on the updated plan. That was when he asked me if we would be billing a destroyed Dozer whose operator had died in the fire. While I didn't know the answer, I said no, and I gave him some water.
The supes that walked through the door that day, and clustered around the door outside comparing notes, looked exhausted, serious, contemplative. I felt heavy on their behalf, sad from the traces of confused anguish in their eyes. I kept trying to give them water.
The people on the fire the day before saw something unimaginable and terrifying, and scrambled to try to save who they could in circumstances that were impossible to fight. The heat of the fire and a marine flow from the coast combined to create a fire tornado that was 2,700 degrees. It tore through the fire and the resources that were fighting it, incinerating everything where it touched down. It was a miracle that there were only seven fatalities caused by the Carr incident. All that was left was bare ground and drifting ash where the fire tornado touched the ground. That fire felt like my "career" fire...for a short while.
Three months later after I came home from work, I saw a friend who used to work with me in my unit post a picture on social media. Beverly had taken a photo out of the window of her family truck, with her two boys and a dog in the second row seats, aimed past a travel trailer being towed. Behind them, but not far enough, was a huge header of smoke. The Camp incident was burning everything they had that was not in that truck and trailer. It took less than twelve hours. Eighty-four fatalities and almost all of the town of Paradise gone. Less than twelve hours.
The pandemic changed everything and nothing. I still went to work in 2020 and I still went to fires. The exposure that year got me a case of the plague, and I spent a few weeks after my Castaic Lake birthday fire trying to recover. On Friday, September 4th, after returning home and while I was waiting out my case of the plague, I heard that a fire had ignited between Huntington Lake, Shaver Lake, and Big Creek. That was at least ten miles uphill from Dad's house, but I began to worry.
Standing dead trees in the part of the Sierra Nevada mountains where I grew up were everywhere. Most of them weren't even orange from the dead needles anymore, but just ghostly trunks of dead wood weathering in place and groaning when the wind blew. At the time there were dangerously many places where 80% (or more) of the forest was standing dead. The ridge above Dad's house was one of them.
Fires behave predictibly, or at least they have in the past. Roads and waterways act as natural firebreaks, giving firefighters a place to anchor their fire lines and safety zones to shelter in should the wind shift.
My mountains have steep pitches that go down into the watersheds. The drop down into Jose Basin is local lore, and the Million Dollar Mile built by Southern California Edison to connect Powerhouse 3 to Powerhouse 8 was carved right into the rock. My mother used to drive a garbage truck down that dangerous road. There are three thousand plus feet between those two places where Stevenson Creek falls to the bottom. The bones of the mountains are on full view here, with giant blocks of granite lining Jose Creek before it joins the San Joaquin River. So much of this place is the border between stone and air with the water waiting below for anything that falls.
Fire wants to go uphill, like the heat it creates, but in places it can also fall. Old downed trees that have anchored rocks and debris lose their hold on the mountain when fire burns around them. Things begin to move, some of them are on fire. Burning debris travels where the slope and gravity demand it, and fire falls with them.
First it's little bits of debris and and smaller stones that begin to fall from the edges of exfoliating granite domes. Larger debris is next, some of it on fire from the heat of the extreme fire behavior that began very quickly after the fire start, dead snags fall and disintegrate as they hit the granite faces on the way down. All of it falling into the narrow canyon containing Stevenson Creek, Jose Creek, and the San Joaquin river.
When the fire reached that place of stone and air it must have been a sight. Falling flaming debris and trees and granite cascading thousands of feet down into Jose Basin. It was said that the fire jumped the river, but I don't know if that's the correct word. Soar comes to mind.
The fire was on both sides of the river down in a narrow canyon that acted like a chimney for the heat. It was creating it's own weather. It was moving fast and sounded like a large and dangerous machine.
Fire isn't supposed to run down slopes, but it did. Fire is supposed to be stopped or at least slowed by highways and other natural firebreaks like rivers, but it wasn't. It was burning north toward Mammoth Pool on both sides of the river, and south down the ridge toward my Dad's house. As it burned up the other side of Jose Basin, it began to burn southwest toward my youngest brother's home where he, his wife, and their three boys lived.
The Creek fire was burning extremely hot with powerful up-canyon winds. Around 18 hours after the fire start it began to produce a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. Radar and satelite confirmed that it was one of the largest events of that kind on record for the U.S. and probably for North America. Reaching 50,000 feet in elevation, it was a weather system all it's own with lighting and internal winds that were roaring with the force of heat. The cooler incoming air combined with the fire heated air and began to rotate.
There were two fire tornados on the second day of the Creek fire. One was thousands of feet higher than the other at Huntington Lake, and was the weaker of the two. One was at Mammoth Pool and touched down at the Wagner Campground, snapping two foot diameter trees in half 20 to 30 feet above the ground.
Many campers at Mammoth Pool didn't even know the fire was coming until they began to see the flames. It was Labor Day weekend, and the campgrounds were at capacity. Probably close to a thousand people were there for the weekend, and about three quarters of them either packed and ran or just ran when they saw the fire.
The ones who didn't make it before the fire burned over the only exit road began to escape to the water, directed there by 911 dispatch when they called, and they spread the word as they ran. Many of them gathered the hikers and vacationers escaping on foot into and onto their vehicles and carried them to the water. Because of the multiple calls for help via cell phone, local emergency agencies were aware that a potential mass casualty incident was imminent if not already in progress. With the limited information from the calls, the estimated number of people was thirty families, or roughly 150 people.
The lake was low because of drought so there was a lot of clear ground at which to shelter next to the water, but as the last of the campers escaped from the fire down to the water, the worst of the burn injuries and broken bones began to arrive.
From the beginning of the fire, multiple agencies had become involved in the fire effort, and the California National Guard was one of them. The CNG called in helicopter crews and told them there was a rescue Mission to accomplish. Even in the military and paramilitary world you can't order your personnel into some situations. This was a Mission that might not be safe enough to be accomplished. I'm certain that the crews and the commander who okayed the Mission Plan they prepared were very careful to make sure that everyone was okay to take the risk. It was absolutely a risk. They took it.
They had two helicopters, a Chinook and a Black Hawk, and they flew them into a fire that had already spawned two fire tornados, one of them at ground zero of their rescue Mission location. At that time air resources including CNG helilcopters didn't fly fire Missions at night, when cutoff happened all the wings from every agency landed because flying on a fire is so much more dangerous then. But they were night flying this one, and when they landed they realized that the estimate of the number of people was low...by a lot. They loaded up the casualties and the youngest children with their mothers. They took the first load out and down to the military side of the Fresno airport to be triaged and evaluated.
They went back into the fire.
At Mammoth Pool, the crews knew their flight time was getting short. The techs filled the choppers to bursting in case they didn't make it back, and couldn't close the Chinook's rear ramp on the crowd so they closed the gap with webbing and told the pilot he was clear to lift. The pilot of that helicopter related that it was the most gut wrenching flight he ever made, worse than his service in a war zone. The chopper was heavy and the blades were coning from the weight. It took twenty minutes to get to the airport, and every one was uncertain.
They went back into the fire.
They collected the last of the campers and brought them down from the mountain. 242 people and 16 dogs were rescued from Mammoth Pool on that Mission. No one died.
My youngest brother Bry supervises Corpsmembers that keep things moving at Incident Command Posts (ICPs). His birthday is at the beginning of October, and the work he does is integral to fire operations, so he gets more birthday fires than I do. Soon after the Creek fire began he received a dispatch to create order from chaos at the Creek ICP.
The fire was already coming for his side of the mountain and Camp Bullfrog where he lived with his family. He went outside and saw how much smoke was coming up out of the canyon and decided it was time to get everyone to better breathing conditions. His wife Carolyn and the boys packed for three days and drove toward family that were outside of the area of immediate danger to wait it out. He reported to his fire position.
The Creek incident was so large that it required two ICPs to support the suppression effort. The southern one supported fire resources building lines to contain it before it reached Camp Bullfrog and Pine Ridge. The northern one for the areas around Mammoth Pool, Cascadel, and North Fork. He was working at both of them, driving hours between them to supervise the Corpsmembers.
The fire was moving fast in all directions and sometime around four to five days after it ignited, Camp Bullfrog and the house my Dad built that my sister and her husband renovated to be a vacation cabin both burned.
While still on duty, he posted this brief message to his social media account: "Somebody got in our road and checked on Camp Bullfrog: It is reportedly all burned. I no longer own chainsaws, snow boots, Tick comics, or neckties. So packing for beach trips will be easier." His favorite chainsaw was named Vera.
I was at home and still ill from the plague, mostly on the couch or my computer watching it all play out in slow motion. As a former dispatcher I knew where to look for the information that would tell me the most. As those few days played out I began to grieve.
The Creek incident would become the largest single fire in California history (briefly) at 379,895 acres, and would be declared contained on Christmas Eve of 2020. There were certainly still hot spots here and there, but the edges were out and the winter's cold and expected rains were nearly certain to take care of whatever still smoldered. Eighty percent of the trees within the Creek fire perimeter were standing dead prior to the fire.
The Creek is my career fire. Many of the families I grew up with were still there when everything changed. It took the mountain that fed me black walnuts, pine nuts, apples, miner's lettuce, blackberries, and venison (once it even provided me a nibble of rattlesnake). The ridge I grew up on felt kind even with the normal dangers, the mountain felt safe, I held a deep love for where I lived that was real to me, like a touchstone.
It took me three years to return to the area. I didn't want to see it. I wanted my memories to be what was there and not what was lost. My older sister planned a family reunion in Shaver Lake in an unburned area within the fire perimeter, and I decided to go. I took a drive around on one of the days I was there, to see what was standing.
I wanted to start at the top, and drove out of Shaver Lake toward Huntington. Once past the lake the damage was telling. For miles millions of burned dead grey trees still stood. Up at the top of the climb, just before the lake, even the soil is still grey. Lower down the mountain from Shaver, on Auberry road where it hangs over Jose Basin, the devastated forest stretches farther than the eye can see.
I drove home. I recognized the bones of my mountain where the granite poked up through the earth. The poison oak is thriving, and the mariposa lilies made me smile, but the rest of my home was gone.
The cool shade of the evergreens over the road, the dogwood at the creek, and the blackberry thicket where I stained my face purple as a child have all been lost to me except for the place in my heart where they still exist in the deep shadows where that shade smells like water.
I know the place I lived. I am contained in the view out of every window, and the sound of the wind in the afternoon moving up the canyon in summer, scented with hot bear clover and red clay dust. Right there used to be the front door we never used.
It's all gone.
With climate change it will never be the same, but the mountain will recover, seedlings will appear around surviving trees and will begin to fill the gaps. New and adapted ecosystems will gradually appear because they can better compete in the changed climate. My mother the mountain will wear her finery again.
But I won't be alive to see it.