Back in action

Well my leg has finally healed from my fall down a bank at Bull Creek. I am going to review the purpose of the blog for new readers.

I lived in the backwoods of Humboldt County, California most of my childhood and did not appear in civilization until I was almost thirteen when my family moved to Santa Rosa, California where I continue to live.

Despite the early days in the Redwoods I graduated from college and became a school psychologist. I am now retired and writing a book called The Whitethorn Kid, True Tales of Whitethorn (somewhere near the Lost Coast).

The following is part of a chapter which takes place when I was in the third grade.



TALES OF WHITETHORN
Somewhere near the Lost Coast, California


CHILDREN OF THE REDWOODS


Barbara and I run the woods a lot. We have a big tree house inside a burnt out trunk of a huge redwood tree. It is in a grove of redwoods, which people say has been there for over 2000 years. The big old trees are so quiet and still, we think they have spirits in them or perhaps ancient Gods that are keeping an eye on the two of us.

Barbara read a book once about Lamas who live in a place called Tibet. I don't know what a Lama is, but we think that they might be the very spirits that are in our huge trees. Barbara says the lamas are magical women who are fantastically powerful. They wear bright colored clothes, and the most powerful Lamas are dressed in brilliant red robes.

One day we were scrutinizing our biggest, tallest tree and we came to the conclusion that this particular tree was so mysterious and hallowed, it was likely that one of those magical Lamas was in this tree. After that, we started watching for signs that would tell us if lama lived in a tree. After much discussion, and some outstanding detective work, we began to notice the mushrooms that sometimes grew between the scraggly red bark of the trees. The mushrooms came in all sorts of fantastic shapes and sizes. Some were flat and stacked like pancakes and others were built like lofty fairy castles. They came in all kinds of colors just like the Lamas who lived in Tibet. The mushrooms became our best clue that a lama lived in the heart of the tree. From then on, when we discovered colored mushrooms growing on a redwood tree we knew that a red Lama or an orange Lama probably lived in the tree.

When we are out in the forest we also find wild orchids growing, beneath our gigantic trees, in the spring. They are small, pink and real pretty. My mother says they are called Lady Slippers. Then there are these other flowers that looks like lady slippers but they are an ugly, greenish brown color, and they sink like the devil. Barbara and I found an old book that had a picture of one of those awful flowers and the name of it was Fettered Adders Tongue. We found out later that this means smelly snakes tongue. Now I never smelled a snakes tongue before, but I am sure it would smell just like one of those flowers. I wonder if the guy who named those flowers went around smelling snakes tongues? If he did, he sure didn't live here in Whitethorn. We have better sense than that around here.