IRON WOOD

(Circa 1949) The Whitethorn Lumber Mill shut down because it needed a new part. I went to Eureka, California with my mother and stepfather to get the new part. What a surprise. The new part was a piece of wood about 3 feet long, 2 inches wide and 1 inch thick. I had been expecting something made of steel or iron. When my stepfather handed me the wood, I was flabbergasted. It was as heavy as iron. He called it iron wood.

On my recent trip to Humboldt county I found a little store that actually sold iron wood carvings. The owner told me they were machine carved because they were too hard to carve by hand. Remembering the trip to Eureka in 1949, I had to have one of the carvings. I bought a 4 inch bear. As expected it was as heavy as iron.

I later looked up iron wood on the net and found it is only grown in the Sonora desert. It will not float on water. Live trees are not used for carvings but from fallen limbs and trees. Most of it is machine carved because it is so hard.

Fire

The fires in southern California are still burning and hundreds of homes have perished. The winds are supposed to die down soon and hopefully the fires will be controlled.

The fires remind me of my childhood in Whitethorn in the 40s. Amazingly I don't recall any fires during the years I was there except for a small mill that went up in flames. Ironically enough we kids built many campfires during the hot summers. We used them to cook small fish we had caught and bake potatoes we brought from home. We all knew how to make fires safe and we never left a a campfire without churning it up and covering it with dirt. Most of the time our fires were on the gravel shore of the the Matole River but sometimes they were in the redwoods or in my backyard.

Copywright 2008

Status of Women

I have been thinking about the election and the wonderful election of Obama. I truly think that some good things are going to happen, not the least of which is raising the self-esteem African Americans, especially the young. It was so heartening to watch the school children on TV tell the world they feel they can do anything now that Obama has won.

However, I feel the status of women has been dearly wounded and may not recover for years. Think about it. After watching the way Hilary and Sarah were scorned and humiliated, what woman would dare to run for president? Hilary was viciously vivified. Remember the Hilary nut cracker? It was one thing to not want her for president, but why demonize her. And then there was Sarah Palin. Plucked from Alaska and misused by the republicans , she too was demonized and made a laughing stock. Yes, she was not qualified to be vice-president but why spread lies about her. Why not just talk about her lack of qualifications in a factual way and not make outrageous personal attacks.

And all the while the nation did not want Palin because she was not qualified, they didn't want Clinton either, a woman who was one of the most competent and qualified person in politics.

Yes, the glass ceiling had 80 million cracks in it but sadly many women and men used the opportunity to push the glass shards on the top of these too women heads.

This blog is mostly about northern California and my childhood in the 40s and I don't plan to write about politics in any significant manner, but the way women were treated in this election has saddened me and I feel that I have been pushed to the back of the bus. There could have been a less distructive message to women in this historic election.

Keep YOUR TOES flexible and out in front

I am back. I have been so caught up in the election, I have not had time or interest in my blog. I am currently trying to recover from a fall I took on my recent visit to Humboldt County, trying to climb down some big boulders on the banks of Bull Creek. Having played as a child on these same banks, I forgot I was approaching seventy. I happily enjoyed stepping from one boulder to another when I tumbled down the bank. I did not break a bone so I must still have strong bones, but I did suffer multiple bruises on my legs and arms. Everything is now alright, except for my left shin bone. It is still swollen and bruised and aches if I walk around the house very much.

One important thing I learned about this fall. I stepped on the ball of my foot rather than using my toes. For the past few months I have been working on using my toes when I walk. According to some experts a major cause of falls in the elderly is losing the use of toes when walking. I learned this when I discovered I was inexplicably falling when leaning over a pot of flowers. I was not using my toes for balance as I did naturally when I was younger. I now realize when I took the fall I was slightly nervous and must have scrunched up my toes and landed on the ball of my foot. Not having the support of the all valuable toes, I toppled down the pile of boulders.

Be careful out there. Keep your toes flexible and out in front.

Bull Creek, California

I went to second grade in 1945 at a little logging community called Bull Creek. I have just returned from a visit to the land that once held this thriving community. There was almost nothing there because of two great floods that happened in the mid twentieth century.

TALE OF BULL CREEK. Pronounced by the locals as Bull Krick.

In 1925, my mother and her family packed up their old car and left the state of Wisconsin in hopes of finding better times in California. The journey took them many weeks, stopping at times to work on farms to get enough money for food and gas. At last, they reached northern California and they settled in a small logging community called Bull Creek. Other family members eventually followed from Wisconsin, and while none of them found their fortune, the logging industry provided them with enough money to survive. My great aunt and her husband established the Bull Creek grocery store and rented a few small houses to permanent or temporary residents. Bull Creek’s tiny stream ran along side the store. It was a friendly creek, and in the summer happy children sat on its banks and caught small fish. In the winter, the creek rose high enough so salmon could successfully fight their way up stream to spawn. The locals joyfully claimed part of the migration for fish dinners. It never crossed anyone’s mind that Bull Creek might not last forever.

But to everyone’s astonishment, all of Bull Creek was swallowed by the great floods of 1955 and 1964. Even the graveyard was wiped out. Corpses washed out along with the town and dead people who hadn’t been seen for years floated out with the living. Everyone was amazed at how well preserved the bodies were. People who had not seen each other for years got reacquainted. Of course there were a few bodies that had been buried so long no one who was alive knew who they were.

But in the end it made no difference if the living or the dead passed down that bloated creek. Bull Creek and its people were forever gone.

My visit continued: Driving up the little Bull Creek road the landscaped was so changed I couldn't even guess where the local store or mill used to stand. However, I was very surprised to some upon the Bull Creek Cemetery. Although there were some graves there an inspection of the stones revealed that most of them had been buried after 1964. A large stone had been erected citing the names of the people who washed out in the flood. An even bigger surprise for me was I found the grave of my long lost cousin Arlie 'Bud' Bishop 1918-1980. The grave was wildly decorated including a hound dog toy, a wooden fence and flowers. Although I had not seen him since I was about 10 years old I remember him clearly as a gifted artist, guitar player and singer. He was a whole show that evening. The other interesting thing about him was he spent months at a time up in the hills with his pack of coon hounds. He was definitely the original hippy.

An Apifera-a-Day: Original - "Pretty Sure He's Here Somewhere"

An Apifera-a-Day: Original - "Pretty Sure He's Here Somewhere"

Greenchain answer

My stepfather, Al Sharpe, owned the Whithorn Lumber company sawmill when I lived in Whitethorn in the 1940s so I learned alot about the mill and the logging industry. The greenchain was a platform that had chains on either side of the top of it. When the logs were pulled out from the log pond, they were cut up into different size boards. The lumber was of course green and had not cured like the wood we put into a fireplace. Green wood is heavy with sap. The men would stand beside the greenchain and as it rolled the lumber along and pulled the boards off, according to size. They then carefully stacked them on a pile of lumber sitting just below their station. As the boards on the greenchain rolled past a man, he would pull 2x4s or 4x4s or other sizes that were the same size as the boards on his particular stack. It wouldn't do to have boards of different sizes on the same stack. The lumber could then be loaded on a truck for shipping according to order.

An interesting phenomena sometimes occurred when a man from a town such as Eureka, often called a "city slicker" hired on to pull the greenchain. City Slickers or people who lived outside the Whithorn Valley usually weren't welcome. When an "outsider" tried to pull the greenchain, the lumberjacks would have the greenchain speeded up so everyone had to pull faster. Of course the "outsider" who was generally not in shape for that kind of heavy work would fall behind. His boards would go to the end of the greenchain and fall off the end of it. This often resulted in the man giving up altogether or getting fired by the owner.