Mineral and the Bodines
When I landed the job as a laborer on the ski lift project,
my circle of acquaintances expanded from Mill Creek into the nearby slightly larger town
of Mineral.
Mineral got its name some 80 years before from a land shark who
thought he could sell more property to fools if they thought there was gold or
silver or something here. The only mineral in town was dirt, but the pretty
view of Lassen and the clean little river, Battle Creek, and the forest are still “pay dirt”
for some real-estate people today.
Mineral, when I am telling about it, had an elementary school (three teachers, two
assistants, a time-share Principal and a janitor—six paid jobs!), a real gas
station (not just a pump like at Mill Creek), a real motel (about ten rooms and
a restaurant), a post office, a general store and a Laundromat. Maybe 150
people (counting kids) lived in Mineral all year round and maybe another
hundred were part-time seasonal residents.
To me the most interesting Mineral residents 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 could not exist without the
other, and yet Les and Muriel were both quite individual and unique characters
on their own.
The Bodines lived in a modern, three story wooden “cabin” on the
last houselot of Mineral town on the highway to Lassen Park. There was a
rushing, spring-fed stream gushing through their yard—one foot wide and one
foot deep. Big trout would sometimes pay
them a visit from Battle Creek down below.
In the summer they had a nicely kept vegetable garden with
plentiful flowers, and summer and winter a large bright American flag flew from
their 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 parents who became
friends to them too. I was on the loose as usual in those days—practicing the
piano at Mineral School (an honest-to-God antique Steinway!) and hiking in the
mountains all day long. And I would drop in 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 liked to show off the medals from
when he had been on the Ski Patrol at the Sun Valley Winter Olympics in my
father’s day. Muriel was Les’s Better Half—kind of sour and silent to his
boisterous enthusiasm—she was not as robust as he either and when I met them
she was almost blind. (She later had a falling accident that blinded her 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 a bit with age, I think.
They had a pedal-pump organ, which I liked to try to play,
and they usually had ice cream to eat since it was Muriel’s favorite food,
which I liked to help them eat.
I did some little chores around their house—one of my
favorites was to dress their outdoor lawn furniture with a
turpentine/linseed-oil mix which I knew from my wooden-boat days would make outdoor wooden furniture
last longer. I did this when the chairs were put out for the short summer
season and when they were brought in for the long winter’s storage. Though I
was always traveling in those years, I actually did that little yearly 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. We were
just good friends.
Les was a natural born teacher. He knew more “natural
history” lore than any man I ever knew, except one, (Naturegraph Publisher
and Baha'i Vinson Brown of Healdsburg, California.) and Les was always willing to share
everything he knew.
There are lots of springs around Mineral and Les knew them
all. One of his jobs was to check the
flow level of Battle Creek—and he did a lot of
other odd jobs for the Forest Service though he was officially retired. He would
often take me along to help. Les would talk as we went from job to job 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 know-it-all. He was humble, though also seemed proud of his
knowledge.
Since the Lassen Park ski area was new the main ski-runs had not
been named and there was no trail map for the skiers who came to the mountain.
Since I had some artistic skills, the management asked me to draw a simple
black and white trail map and to help name the runs.
There was a sort of birch tree filled meadow at the southern
edge of the groomed runs half way down the ski lift area which little kid
skiers soon discovered and turned into their own special playground. There were
lots of narrow ungroomed up and down paths between the trees—not a place most
adult skiers would enjoy, but a great place for little kids to play in and
explore.
Old skier Les enjoyed watching the little kids fool around
in “their” special area, so I named the area “Bodine’s Bliss” on the new ski
run map and the name stuck—they even painted a regular sign designating the
area and posted it on a tree at the entrance of the meadow
...
