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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