Mount Lassen in Snow--December 2008 (Tanya photo)
Mineral, CA. & Les & Muriel Bodine
When I got the job as a pick and shovel expert on the Lassen ski lift project, I enlarged my circle of acquaintances into the next, and slightly larger, town from Mill Creek: Mineral, California.
Mineral had been named about 80 years before by a land shark that thought that he could sell township property to fools if they thought there was gold or silver or something valuable there.
The only mineral in Mineral was dirt, but the pretty view of Mount Lassen and the clean little river (Battle Creek) and the forest is still "pay dirt" for some real-estate people today.
When I knew Mineral the village had a charming little elementary school (three teachers, two teaching assistants, a time-share Principal and a janitor--six paid jobs!), a real service station (not just a gas pump) a real motel (about ten rooms and a restaurant) a post office, General Store and a Laundromat. Maybe 75 people (counting kids) lived there all year round and maybe another hundred were part-time seasonal residents.
Two of the most interesting of the Mineral residents to me in those days were Muriel and Les Bodine.
Les was known as the "Mayor of Mineral", a purely honorary title since the town had no organization, and Muriel was his wife and partner. They were one of those man-and-wife teams, which seem totally inevitable--one plainly could not exist without the other-- and yet Les and Muriel were both quite individual and unique characters on their own.
They lived in a modern three story wooden "cabin" on the last house lot of Mineral town on the way to Lassen Park. There was a rushing, spring-fed stream in their yard––one foot wide and one foot deep––a trout would sometimes pay them a visit swimming up from Battle Creek. In the short high-mountain summers they kept a small vegetable garden with plentiful flowers and summer and winter they flew a large bright American flag from the front second floor balcony when they were at home.
We liked each other very much. Les and Muriel had no children and I was like a grown son to them--later they met my blood parents and were good friends to them too. I was very much free and on the loose at the time––practicing the piano at Mineral School (an old Steinway!) and hiking in the mountains all day long. I would stop by for a chat and a cup of coffee once or twice a week.
When I met them, Les was retired from the Forest Service. He had been a great skier as a young man and once showed me some mementos from when he had been on the Ski Patrol at the Sun Valley Winter Olympics in my father's day.
Muriel was truly Les's Better Half––kind of sour and reserved to his boisterous enthusiasm and she was not so robust as he. When I first met them she was almost blind and she later had an accident that blinded her even more completely.)
A neatly painted sign outside their front door described their house as "the House of Perpetual Commotion", and there were residual traces of that kind of excitement around the place when I knew them, though they had mellowed some with age, I think.
They owned an old-fashioned pedal-pump organ, which I liked to try to play, and they usually had ice cream, since it was Muriel's favorite food, which I also liked to eat.
I did small outdoor chores around their house––the one I especially enjoyed was to paint their outdoor lawn furniture with a turpentine/linseed-oil mixture that I thought would make the wood last longer. I did this every season when I put the chairs out for the short summer and again when I brought them in for their long winter's storage in the attic. Though I was always travelling in those years, I actually did that little painting chore for them several times. They paid me––sometimes with a sandwich and sometimes with a five-dollar bill, but ours was not a boss/employee relationship, but a genuine friendship.
Les was a natural-born teacher. He knew more "natural history" lore than any man I ever met, except one, and he was willing to share everything he knew.
There are lots of springs around Mineral and he knew them all. One of his jobs was to check the water flow level of Battle Creek,––and he did a lot of other odd jobs for the Forest Service, though he was retired, and he would often take me along to help out. He would talk to me all along the way and he was spellbinding. He knew every plant and every stone it seemed, and why they were just the way they were. Yet he was never a boring “know-it-all”. He was sure of himself in his Lassen environment––humble but also proud of his knowledge.
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