Tom Sawyer

I decided to find work and earn a little money until the snow melted on the higher slopes of Mount Lassen so I could start my pebbly ley line,.

I heard a man named Harry had a firewood cutting contract with the Forest Service in nearby Child’s Meadows—just off Highway 36 a few miles east from Mill Creek village. I found him at his camp in the woods and he offered me a job—loading firewood piece by piece onto his beat-up old two-and-a-half-ton truck. The pay was not much—when I got any money at all since sometimes Harry paid me in firewood which I could sell or trade for things I needed— but the work was fun and very educational and, like I said, my gypsy life-style didn’t take much cash.

I love working outdoors and the men and the women who follow the firewood trade are curiosities to say the least.

For example, one of Harry’s sawyers had cut a window-sized hole in one of the tree trunks near Harry’s camp and he delighted to open his “window” to peer at us from behind the tree. The same guy loved to toss his empty beer cans around where we were working in the deep forest. I scolded him once about littering and he told me “I want people to know I’ve been working out here—that’s why I leave the cans!” To show there were no hard feelings he let me use his chain saw a bit so he could call me “Tom Sawyer”.

We were all dirt poor—living on white bread and peanut butter. One day the grandson of one of the old-time sawyers showed up with his new teenage bride to work with us since he could find no job down in the valley. (Sacramento, Chico, Red Bluff, etc.)

When I came out of the woods later that day, I found that the new man had accidentally swung his hand too close to a running chain saw and cut off the ends of a couple of his fingers––and this was before he had even picked up a single piece of firewood!

None of the other workers in the camp had enough gas in their vehicles to drive him to the doctor in Chester twenty miles away, so he wrapped his hand in a handkerchief and with his bride, hitch-hiked away for help. The Chester doc sewed him up and he spent the rest of the summer working with us.

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Hole in the Ground

Someone in Mill Creek village told me there was an even more remote fishing camp maybe five miles further into the wilds downstream called “Hole in the Ground”.

My good old Ford pick-up made it down to the camp, a very lovely, green, quiet, and best of all, free, Forest Service camp with a half dozen  parking places, tables and fire pits right on Mill Creek.

One lonely die-hard fisherman was there with his camper but he had his own camp and minded his own business.

I didn’t fish.  I didn’t have a license or any tackle.

About the second morning I was there, a tanker truck arrived and the Forest Service driver started transferring  big flopping trout from the opened top of the truck's tank to the river with a long-handled fishing net.

This was something new for me. There were more fish than I could count slipping into the river right at my feet. One big trout leapt out of the driver’s net before he got it to the river and landed, flopping, right at the feet of the die-hard fisherman who grabbed it with his bare hands and tossed it into the river to join its buddies.

“Man, you had that fish!” I exclaimed. “You caught it fair and square––why’d you throw it in the river?”

“Aw, that’s no fun,” he said.

I stayed on a few more days. No one else showed up and every day the fisherman would give me a couple of now plentiful and hungry trout for breakfast so he wouldn’t go over his limit.

I had discovered in Hole in the Ground: my very own quiet, private, perfect fishing hole.

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Camper

There was a free campground back in the trees behind the old lodge building (you have to pay a fee now) and I became the campground’s only resident except on weekends when a few other campers from the blistering Sacramento River valley down  below would drive up to stay in the cool for a night or two.

The handful of  people living year round in Mill Creek were friendly and the village and the forest and especially the big mountain nearby were excellent. I felt right at home.

There was still plenty of snow on the upper slopes of Mount Lassen so I couldn’t climb to the summit or even go very high to visit the famous hot volcanic pools and such, but I thought when it was later in the year and the snow melted I would start making my very own ley line.

Well, why not?

Since nobody knows anything for certain about ley lines anyway, I thought I might as well get started in my own small way. I had some brought some detailed maps of the Lassen area with me and had plotted a course due eastward from Lassen Peak.

I thought maybe leaving some pebbles at various spots along my proposed ley line would do as temporary markers since there was no way I could make a nice straight path through the forest.

Making my own little hobby ley line was a fairly minor consideration for me at the time though.

I wanted to live and work in the high mountains of California because I hoped to go to the really high mountains of Ecuador to find a suitable place to work on another project I had in mind—I'll tell you about that later if I have the time—and I wanted to get accustomed to living and working at a high altitude.

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Mill Creek

 Mill Creek Lodge

A friend told me about a mountain town near Lassen National Park which she had discovered way, way, way off the beaten track––a town so small it didn't even have a center stripe painted down the paved street going through it to separate the lanes of traffic––and in California that means a very small town jndeed: Its name is Mill Creek.

I was living in a camper at the time––a little portable house on the bed of an old Ford pick-up truck, so I could live pretty much wherever there was a road and I needed practically no money to survive.  I was enjoying the freedom.

Mill Creek was as nice as my friend had described it: one general store with a cafe and a gas pump and a closet-sized post office, thirty or so old privately owned summer cottages since this had been a deer hunter's paradise in my grandparent's day.  That pioneer generation had wiped out most of the deer and had also eliminated most of the native fish and all of the native people (Ishi's tribe) and cut down all the saleable trees. 

New-growth forest had made a comeback in the sixty or seventy years since this had been a flourishing hunting camp, there were a few deer left for today's generation of "sportsmen" to kill, fish were put in the river from state fish farms for today's fisherfolk to catch and though the native people were thoroughly extinct, Euro-American people had arrived in sufficient numbers so that the town still rated a post office and had not totally disappeared.

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Old Straight Tracks

 

 

The “Old Straight Tracks”

 

I had read about “Earth energy” or telluric energy as it is sometimes called—subtle currents that some people think circulate in paths or patterns around the planet

 And I had read about some ancient “paths” in Britain which run in arrow-straight lines across the countryside called “Old Straight Tracks” or “ley lines”. Sometimes ancient churches were built where the ley line paths intersect each other. The paths do not follow natural valleys or hills like roads or walking pathways would—but run arrow-straight across the landscape, ignoring ponds or natural barriers. They often converge at ancient stone circles and barrows such as those at Avebury. Some people believe that there is indeed some sort of energy passing along these paths.

I wondered if these mysterious ley lines conveyed some sort of earth energy that maybe was related somehow to the peculiar sound I was hearing.

At any rate, I decided to go to Britain some day and investigate the ley lines for myself since I thought I might be able to hear the sound better when I was on the old straight tracks.

In the mean time, for me, there was no rush to do anything or go anywhere.

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