Christ Returns

While I was working at the ski lift in Lassen Park, I was still living in my camper in the woods behind the Mill Creek Lodge.

The Mill Creek Lodge had a bar and three tables where you could eat pancakes and bacon and eggs in the mornings and chili and hamburgers the rest of the day.  You could buy beer at the bar and watch football on TV with the rest of the townsfolk in the evenings.

The owner of the Lodge was also the bartender and he became a friend of mine.  I did occasional work for him like painting and repairing the cottages he rented out to weekenders.

It was getting on into winter, which comes early and stays late in Mill Creek, when I stopped by the Lodge for coffee one weekend morning.

“Tom”, the owner said, “We’re having a Halloween party here the Saturday before Halloween and you’re invited. One free beer if you wear a costume.”

He had a couple of little kids and there wouldn’t be anything “Halloweeny” for them in the almost empty village (all the summer people had gone and the skiers hadn’t come yet) if he didn’t have a party.

I told him I’d be glad to come and thought about a costume.

I had a gray wool blanket I’d cut a hole in to make it a “poncho” and I thought with a “crown” of evergreen branches and a tallish walking stick I could go as “a druid” since I already had long hair and a full beard.   

Good idea.

A few days later I asked one of the neighbors what day it was since I didn’t want to miss the party and he said, “ Saturday.”

So I went into the forest, picked some leaves, made a "crown" and I was ready for the party.

I thought the party would start about dark since the little kids couldn’t stay up very late, so just as it was getting dark I started walking down the street toward the lodge.

It was dusting snow so I wore my snowmobile boots but other than that I thought I made a pretty convincing "druid".

The narrow country lane between the huge pines was already dark, but the new snow made it easy to follow. 

As I approached the Lodge an automobile pulled out onto the pavement and moved slowly toward me. 

The road was so narrow, I walked as far on the shoulder as I could get—even so the car would have to pass very near me.

The car got closer and moved slower and slower until it almost stopped. Then, skidding a little, it sped up rapidly, passed me and vanished around the curve in the trees. “Crazy driver!” I thought, and went on to the store. First thing I noticed when I walked in was that there was nobody else there.

The little girl of the family started yelling that she wanted to put her costume on too!

And she ran upstairs where the family lived to do it.

“I suppose you want a free beer,” the owner said.

“Sure”, I answered, “I’m in costume.”

“Yeah, you are”, he agreed, “But the party ain’t ‘til next Saturday!”

So I felt a little foolish but drank the free beer and played a while with the kids.  The little girl was dressed as “a ballerina”, and very cute ballerina too.  Her little brother was “a bear” in fuzzy pajamas and a mask.

The next day I was walking past the Lodge and the owner was out in front getting firewood.

“Tom”, he calls, “Thanks to you I’ve lost one of my best out-of-town customers.”

“How’s that?” I said.

 “Well, this guy always came up from the valley to have a few beers here in the quiet,” he says, “but he just phoned that he saw Jesus Christ on the road near here and that was a sign to him that he should stop drinking and fooling around—he says he won’t be coming up any more!”

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I Become a Skier

Every few years Lassen gets a LOT of snow.

The year the Lassen Ski Lift opened was one of those years.

By the time the lift opened there was snow piled six to eight feet deep and by the middle of the season there was some forty feet of snow on the ground.  There was so much snow the groomers had to plow under the chairs so they could lift the skiers up the mountain and the chairs were already high off the ground.

The highway coming into the park from the south as far as the Lassen Chalet parking lot was plowed with perfectly vertical walls of snow towering up from the edge of the tarmac.

I absolutely loved being the first human being on the mountain every day in the silence of the dawn and I soon grew to know and appreciate the customers that used the lift.

Lassen had just the one twelve-tower lift and two or three groomed trails but the closest mountain ski area competing for the skiers of the northern Sacramento valley was way over at Lake Tahoe—so I thought we did pretty well.

As I said, I had zero experience of skiing or the ski scene so I was content with our little mountain.

I had no experience with the fantastic hordes of skiers or the expensive costumes and equipment, racers, bars, hotels, pros, sports massage or any of the merchandising hype that are, of course, the main reason for the sport of downhill skiing to exist.

At first I hiked from the Lassen Chalet down to the lift wearing two pairs of jeans and snowmobile boots  and would carry a set of bongo drums with me up to the top of the lift where I would stay for my work shift in the cozy heated little booth with a sharp eye out for trouble.

I played different drum rhythms through my entire shift—trying to “rhythm entrain” myself with the mechanical pulse of the huge loop of moving cable which had been laid out on an exact East/West line (I had checked through the surveyor’s theodolite when they were aligning the towers at the beginning of the project and wasn’t I surprised to find that the lift cable was designed to be right where my imagined homemade ley line was going to be!.)

As a matter of fact I was trying to send out a message with my drumming and the message I was sending out into the cosmos through the entire huge vibrating cable was “Send Help”, not just for me but for all of us because even back then the “handwriting was on the wall” for the ecological destruction of this planet by us humans. (“We have met the enemy and they are us!")

 One of the best perks of working at the lift was the opportunity of skiing for free when not working––and we could also borrow boots and skis from the rental shop for free.

The management had set up a “Bunny Slope” rope tow near the Chalet and one of the little girls I knew from Mineral was one of their most enthusiastic customers. She would grab the moving rope and get a ride to the top and slide down and do it all over again all day long.

I borrowed some boots and skis and poles from the lift's new rental shop and the first chance I had I asked her to teach me to ski––which she was delighted to do.

She showed me how to hold the poles and how to slow and stop by forming a “piece of pie” with the ski tips.

So I rode the Bunny Tow with all the little kids for a few hours.

Then I asked her if she thought I was ready to try the new chair lift and she shared with me this profound Little Kid Wisdom: “If YOU think you’re ready—you’re ready!” (Sound of a gong!)

So I slid on down the hill to the big new chair lift, actually slid into position to be scooped off my feet by the moving chair and before I knew it––I was riding high over the snow with skis on my feet.

Sliding off the chair and down the groomed ramp at the top turned out to be a piece of cake and so, like everyone else, I did it again and again!

It was good fun!

The real hard-core racers using the new ski lift, sort of as a joke, issued me the #1 ski racer's bib and I became a sort of mascot belated skier!

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Top of the Hill Tom

Snow.

If there is anything more beautiful in nature than the first drifting snowflakes on an early winter morning in the high mountains, I really don’t know what it is––except maybe that perfect sunset at a perfect beach or that perfect rainbow hovering over a perfect waterfall or…

Well, you know what I mean.The first snowflakes of winter are awfully pretty!

We were making the final touches to the brand new Lassen ski lift—checking out the motors and machinery and making sure all was safe and sound when the first flakes began to fall in what was to be a long, snowy winter—one of the snowiest winters on record for the Mount Lassen area.

We were cleaning up one of highest foundation sites as the first snow fell when Little Joe made another demonstration of his amazing strength. He picked up a hand-powered cement mixer under one arm and two eighty-pound sacks of cement under his other arm and carried both armloads uphill for about 20 yards to a waiting pick-up truck to the accompaniment of the truck’s radio blasting rock and roll music. (I know it sounds incredible, but this really happened.)

On our last morning as a working team, the big boss called us together in the Lassen Chalet parking lot and handed out the last pay envelopes––and he asked those of us who lived nearby if we wanted to work when the lift started operating.

I jumped at the chance to work for pay on the mountain and he hired me to be the “Safety-man” who would sit in a heated glass booth at the top of the lift all day to make sure the skiers exited the lift and skied away safely.

My job was to push a STOP button which would stop the lift if there was any problem at the top.

This meant I would be the first person to ride up the lift every morning to visually check the shiv trains to make sure they were operational, to sculpt the snow exit ramp for skiers to slide off the lift and do some other morning chores, and I would be the last one to ride the lift down every evening—unless I wanted to ski down with the ski patrol who checked to make sure no one was left on the mountain after the lift closed.

After just a few days of snow there was enough on the ground to open so in November of 1982 I started working full time at the Brand New Lassen Ski Lift and I had never been on skis in my life!

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I Become a Shaman

We dug at the foundation holes steadily until they were finished—then we built some quick concrete forms and placed some bolt templates on top where they belonged and mixed and poured concrete in the easy-to-reach holes and the whole work day we were surrounded by the most beautiful and fragrant high slopes of the huge dormant volcano Mount Lassen.

What a great place to work!

I even liked sniffing the breeze when the wind came down from The Sulfur Works––one of the noxious steaming hot springs a short distance up the valley from the old Lassen Chalet.

In just a few weeks we had all the foundations ready for installing the towers.

The towers, heavy steel columns pre-manufactured to fit the foundation bolts and numbered for the different heights required by the mountain slope, were delivered by truck to the Lassen Chalet parking lot. Those on the upper slopes’ were going to be hoisted into place with the aid of a helicopter.

Concrete for the hard to reach foundation holes was also going to be poured from a big bucket thing dangling from a cable attached to the helicopter.

And there’s a little peculiar personal story connected with the helicopter that I will put in here––just don’t make too much of it, OK?

The boss asked us laborers to appear extra early one morning because the helicopter was going to fly in that evening, land in the parking lot and be ready to tote and fetch the concrete and the towers in the morning.

This sky-lift thing was a very tricky and dangerous operation and all of us were curious and excited about it.

I, of course, as a P&S Expert (Pick and Shovel) was not even a little involved in the helicopter part of the program. My job was going to be to carry a hand-held “stop” sign up the park highway above the parking lot to stop any cars from coming down when the helicopter was busy picking up materials in the parking lot.

Monkey simple.

When I arrived early in the morning, they handed me my stop sign—but there was a problem. The helicopter could not fly because a very thick fog had dropped into the valley—standing in the parking lot was like standing in the middle of a wet, dark cloud.

Freddy the foreman  came over to me and said: “Tom, we’re in trouble. This fog makes it impossible to fly and that chopper is costing us about a thousand dollars a minute just sitting in the parking lot. I know you’re into mysterious Indian things, could you maybe do a sun dance or something and get rid of the fog?”

He was serious, so I told him I would give it a try.

I put down the stop sign and bummed a cigarette and some matches from one of the smokers—since I was going to try what I imagined might be like an old Indian ceremony and for that I needed some tobacco––then I climbed through the fog up the mountainside to the top tower’s empty foundation hole.

I am not an Indian and I don’t know any sun or rain dances, but what the heck, yeah? Give it a try. I HAD read about ceremonies and deep down had a feeling that they should work…

So I reached the top tower’s foundation hole all by myself way up above the Chalet parking lot in the silent cold fog.

The big empty hole had a sheet of black plastic down inside it ready for concrete to be dumped in.

I knew from reading the Old Indian stuff that to help the ceremony work the shaman (ME! Cowa-bunga!) should make some sort of sacrifice. I hadn’t intended to make any magic that morning so I didn’t have much of anything to sacrifice, but I was wearing a sort of good luck charm a friend had given me on a plain chain around my neck––a little gold medallion memento from Hawaii with the state seal and motto on it. (“The Life of the Land is Perpetuated in Righteousness”)

What the heck, right?

  

I placed the “sacrifice” under a fold in the black plastic sheet, lit the cigarette and blew smoke in the four directions and asked the weather gods or whatever was in charge of the fog to bring out the sun so the chopper could fly. Then I scrambled back down the mountain to the parking lot and—you may not believe this—but when I got to the tarmac, the fog was lifting and the helicopter was revving up to fly.

When the big boss—who didn’t know that the foreman had sent me on a sun-dance “mission”––saw me, he shouted: “Hey slacker! You’re getting paid to work! Get your sign and get up that road and get busy!”

The foreman looked sort of funny at me but didn’t tell anyone about our conversation and that was how I became a very beginner, but successful, shaman on Mount Lassen.

 

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Little Joe Helps Clean Up My Act

This may sound strange or even impossible to up-to-date modern people like you but when we were growing up, no one in my family ever swore—that is, used “bad” words––at all.

Now I live in an apartment in a working class neighborhood and I am sometimes a little bit shocked to hear the language the neighbors shout all day and night at each other.

Even the very young children around here, who learn from their parents, of course––yell foul words at each other.

But I can honestly say I never heard either my father or my mother use a bad word—neither when I was a child nor when I grew up.

Such language simply did not exist for them.

About as uncouth as they could be was “darn”—but I really don’t even remember them even using that word—though we kids did of course.

In those primitive days all male US citizens had to spend a period of years in the “service”: army, navy or air force. (Sounds terribly old fashioned, doesn’t it?)

When I was eighteen I enlisted in the Navy Reserve and besides weekly meetings, I had to show up for two summer weeks training at the Great Lakes Training Center near Chicago and a year later had to go on a two week cruise from New Orleans. These periods of training were interesting enough for a young fool like me, but I found out quite early that I was suffering from a serious linguistic handicap.

I didn’t know how to swear.

Everything in the Navy was a f***ing this or a f***ing that. And of course all trash was s***, and all waste cans were s*** cans and so forth.

I was not really a language purist for moral reasons––foul language was just not my habit.

It took me a little while to learn but soon I was saying “F***ing s***!” with the best of them.

I spent my two years of active duty in Hawaii and when I got out I stayed there since it was about the nicest place I had ever been.

I played rock-n-roll in the dives on Hotel Street in Honolulu until I graduated from UH and then I taught English at junior and senior high schools.

I gradually lost my swearing ability since it was not needed in the night clubs or in the classrooms, but then I got a teaching position at the brand new Leeward Community College and discovered that for some unknown reason—maybe because it was the “seventies” with all the Viet Nam protests and the black power enthusiasms—all the cool students swore like sailors.

I wanted to be accepted as a cool instructor, so I resurrected the old familiar ripe language from my old Navy days so I could communicate with my students.

  

And I was quite cool.

Fast forward a few years and I am working on the ski lift at Lassen.

I am a little older than the other laborers but I am as cool as any of them, I think. Some of them swear and some of them don’t but I trot out my navy vocabulary and its f***ing this and so forth per the good old Leeward College days.

One day I am working with a gang that includes young Joe and I am using my best bad language when he casually says to me: “Didn’t you say you used to be an English teacher?”

His remark absolutely stopped my train and shamed me to my shoes.

I remembered myself all the way back to my father’s knee and I was shamed, ashamed, and embarrassed.

I stopped my swearing right then and now I am a lot more careful of other people’s ears when I speak.

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Little Joe Arrives

More equipment and manpower was expected from the Salt Lake City home office of the company which was building the Lassen ski lift. On the day the truck was due the foreman told us local laborers to be handy to the parking lot since some materials were going to arrive which needed to be unloaded. The word was that one of the new workers that would arrive with the truck was Little Joe, “one of the strongest men you’ve ever seen.” 

Well.

All of us had been working long hours with hand tools, digging and bashing earth and rock and we all felt pretty strong I think, but of course we were all very curious to see this new physical phenomenon.

When the trucks came in and the new men got out, none of them looked any different from the rest of us. The foreman introduced all of us and we shook hands all around. The new guys all seemed to be young, healthy and strong––but I never felt that this Little Joe, who was one of the new gang, looked any different from the rest. For one thing he was not so tall and not so weighty and he was only about eighteen years old.

Our first task was to unload some big flat cardboard boxes containing the metal chairs for the lift from the truck.

We gathered on the tarmac beside the truck and Little Joe was the first in line. I was second.

There were two men up on the truck bed and they slid the top box from the pile of boxes over to where Joe could reach it. He took the sliding box onto his head and walked with it over toward the edge of the pavement where we had been told to stack the materials.

I got ready to take the second box.

The men on the truck slid it over to where I could reach it, but as soon as it started to come into my hands I realized that I was never going to be able put it on my head and walk away like Little Joe had. In fact I realized that I was going to be squashed like a bug under that monstrously heavy package if I didn’t get some help mighty quick!

Of course some of the other guys had been watching and grabbed the thing and took the weight off me before I got hurt––but, boy, did I ever gain a LOT of respect for Little Joe’s strength!

It took two or three or even four men to carry every one of those boxes of steel chairlift seats, but every time Little Joe showed up in the line of carriers, he took the whole thing all by himself!

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Part Monkey Fred

 

The Lassen Ski Lift's work foreman’s name was Fred.

He was a good boss. He knew what to do and how to do it. He knew how to keep all of us workers hard at work––and working well and happily. Not “ha, ha” happy, but content with the job happy––which takes a certain skill as you probably know.

He was a little better at everything than anyone else too and that’s not so easy either.

Yet he was a regular guy. Not proud. Not a show-off, just a nice, regular guy, rather small and slight in build, but strong enough to do any of the heavy work as well as any of the rest of us—except probably Little Joe, who showed up later and who was a prodigy of strength.

One of the first days I was on the job one of the regular contract crew of ski lift workers from the head office said of “Freddy” that he was “part monkey”. I filed that information away since the digging work we were doing for the first few weeks was on the ground and there was no need for any monkey skills.

But when the towers came in and were set up on the mountainside some work developed that was more in the line of circus acrobat stuff.

Someone had to climb the towers and with the aid of heavy lifting machinery and power tools, fasten rows of heavy wheels, the “shiv trains”, to arms on the tower. One of these towers was 80 feet high and all the rest were way up in the treetops to lift skiers above the deep snow in the winter.

This was very dangerous “touch and go” work. I couldn’t do it, of course, and wouldn’t do it. It was far too risky. (They never asked any of us pick-up laborers from California to do this kind of specialized work.)

But Fred was absolutely in his element. He WAS part monkey!

He was up the towers and running around on the arms of the machinery and bolting the heavy wheels on like he had a little spider blood too.

I watched him with my heart in my mouth whenever I was not too busy with my work on the ground. He was taking risks I wouldn’t even think of as a matter of course and with a nonchalance that was, to me, incredible.

I swear this next bit is true.

I was watching from far below one time when Fred slipped off the cross-arm of the tower and as he fell he grabbed that steel arm, which was a rounded square and as big around as your body, whipped himself around it and came up sitting on top of the arm!

He saved his own life and kept right on working without missing a beat.

By golly I REALLY admired that!

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Dig Those Crazy Holes

What I had been hired to do was to help dig the big holes to fill with concrete for bolt-setting foundations for the towers that carried the rows of wheels (shiv trains) that carried the moving cable up and down the mountain.

We had picks and shovels to dig with of course, and the dirt in the valley was soft–– but as we went up the mountainside to dig the higher tower’s foundations, the digging got harder until we were finally digging through solid rock. For this job we switched from shovels to “rock bars”—six foot steel bars with a chisel point. You use this tool to bash at the rock and every few blows you get some chips to fly off.

We bashed eight hours a day and when I got back to my camper the first night after using the rock bar, I went to eat a sandwich and found I couldn’t open or close my hand! My fingers were paralyzed into the rock bar grip position! Luckily I could still move my hand close to the bread until I slid a slice between my fingers and managed to prepare and eat that yummy poor man’s staple, peanut butter and jelly on white bread!

But some rocks we couldn’t even dent with our rock bars and for these they had hired a dynamite expert—a kind of hippy looking guy. His tools were a heavy-duty portable pneumatic rock drill—like the things they break concrete with on road work––and sticks of dynamite.

First he would drill a hole with his rock drill––a heavy pointed steel thing—and the oddest thing about his work style was that all he wore  on his bare feet were flip-flop rubber sandals  while that  dangerous drill was pounding away boring a hole into the solid rock right between his feet!

I asked him once why he did it that way and he told me that by going almost barefoot he was twice as cautious with the drill. Maybe so.

Myself., I wore steel-capped safety boots when we were working.

When he had his hole drilled, this technician stuffed dynamite into it, warned us civilians away and shouted “Fire in the hole”. There was a muffled bang and a lot of gravel sized bits of rock rained down on us for a few seconds. That broke the rock enough so we could attack it again with our rock bars.

Once he shouted “Fire in the hole!” and there was no bang.

He came over where we were cowering behind some rocks and said “I hate it when it does this!” Then he had to go fish the dud dynamite charge out of the drilled hole and start all over again.

But he was getting paid more than the rest of us.

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Lassen Ski Lift

The Forest Service had signed a permit to allow a ski lift to be built in the Lassen National Park.

Visions of wealth and employment excited the few people who actually lived in the nearby mountains scratching out a living as highway maintenance people, gas station operator, school teacher, or cafe waitress, bar owner, motel person, trucker or, like me, firewood scavenger.

I drove the eight or so miles by the little back road from Mill Creek to the town of Mineral and found the boss of the ski lift project.

I knew zero about ski lifts or skiing, but I was in pretty good shape physically from loading firewood so the big boss hired me on the spot as a by-the-hour day laborer and on the appointed morning I joined the dozen or so other workers at the Lassen Chalet parking lot and we hiked down into the meadow below and started digging big holes.  (Lassen Chalet was a park restaurant and gift shop operated by the Forest Service.)

What I soon found out about ski lifts is that they are just a row of big steel-pipe towers which go up a mountainside in a straight line at higher and higher elevations. Each tower is bolted to a huge block of concrete foundation and has a cross-bar at the top on which are mounted rows of grooved wheels which carry a moving steel cable.

A big Diesel-powered horizontal moving wheel at the bottom called a bull wheel and another big horizontal  wheel at the top tower are linked by a big loop of steel cable. Clamped to the cable every few yards  are hanging chairs which swing high in the air over the snow to carry skiers up the mountain—since ours was to be a chair ski lift.

 I later learned there are also gondola things for carrying a lot of people at a time up a mountain and also simple “rope tows” with a moving rope strung between motor-driven wheels which skiers simply grab and hang on to as the rope pulls them up the hill––then they let go at the top and slide back down.

In fact, the whole big idea of downhill skiing, as I discovered, is to ride some kind of towing device to the upper part of a snow covered hill or mountain and then slide back down on skis and then ride up again and slide down again all day long.

No kidding. That’s what it’s all about and people spend thousands of dollars to do it wearing the latest style of skiing clothes and faddish skis! They also need expensive four-wheel drive vehicles to get them to the ski slopes and pricy hotel rooms and restaurants and bars and so forth nearby to cater to their whims. This expensive sport absolutely limits the participants to the idle rich and their servants.

Well, what the heck! That’s pretty much life, isn’t it?

But I’m kind of getting ahead of myself because the Lassen ski lift hadn’t even been built yet!

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