Adventures in Harolds Mindt

In 1974–? I became a member of a communal life-style church called “Gospel Outreach” from what I learned on how it all started in the latter years of in the 1970’s? four to five years before I arrived. Out at a DE-commissioned Coast Guard station on a point of land called “Table Bluff” near Loleta, Ca. A man whose name I don’t know had bought the buildings at the Coast guard station and had changed it’s name to the “Lighthouse Ranch” I could be wrong on that early history and have it all backwards? It became a haven for those early Hippies who had left the cities to find spiritual enlightenment in rural settings. Some of these Hippies had become Christians, but had no one to teach them the path but wanted to evangelize in the town of Eureka, Ca. by opening a Christian coffee shop. They had come to a reality business whose owner was Christian minister named James Durkin who was put off by these Hippies and outlandish clothes and long hair as he was about as straight as one could be, but he saw a fervor in these young men, and their acceptance of the Christ centered life.

He invited these early converts to Christianity to his church much to the dismay of his congregation. He, started to go out to the “Lighthouse ranch and give them sermons. As there were young people hitch-hiking up and down highway 101, the cars and trucks that would go into town would pick up these hitchhikers to bring them back to the ranch for a free hot meal and a place to stay for a couple days as they were preached every second they were there. Some stayed and became new members, and some left to continue there own journey through this life. Through the ministry of Mr. Durkin, the church grew and grew, until it became clear that a team of men and women should be sent out to start a new outreach somewhere in the world and I think that place, was Anchorage Alaska, though again I could be wrong. and have all my vague memories about those times all mixed up.

Before I truly entered the happenings of joining “Gospel Outreach, several things were being set into gear which would open a door and close others. From my employment at the fire-fighting camp at “High rock” outside of town of the little hamlet of Weott, Ca. In my last year there, they wanted to form a new vanguard of fire-firefighters to go down to San Luis Obisbo, Ca.to a Army camp, which had some barracks we could use as our base camp. While there I met a young lady who had been hired to be a cook for our team of firefighters. We started to date? or just spend every waking moment with each other. A couple things happened close together, We became romantically involved, I back slid from being a Christian , I got fired for being a complete doofus! during a lunch break, out at a state park, a buddy of mine decided that to get some relief from poison oak rash, that it would be a good idea to take off all our clothes and go take a swim in the ice cold Pacific ocean. Well. the startled tourist family didn’t think much of our little adventure and went and complained to our supervisor.

After getting a good dressing down by our boss, we were both given our walking papers. After getting all my belongings from the camp I moved in with my lady friend for either a week or two until that got way old, I decided that I wanted to get my old job back up in Weott, Ca. I called up to the camp, and they said okay on my plan. I wanted my girlfriend to come with me, and she did! I got her a place or she got it for herself? in the town of Weott, Ca. Time , passed until much later through a whole series of events I rededicated my life back to Jesus and I joined the church as well as my girlfriend, The elders decided that for our separate growth, that we should be separated, so I went to another commune called “Living waters ranch” and the lady stayed there at the coast guard station. “The lighthouse ranch”.

It’s 1974- ? Our tree planting team from Eureka Ca. “Gospel Outreach” had (20) young men who a accompanying elder and his wife with a single young woman who was to help the wife in cooking, doing our laundry and all the chores of camp life.

Our first job was to set up camp, using our new canvas tents which were a step up from having slept in storage shed, and sleeping on it’s floor. in our damp sleeping bags. At that time we had gone out into the surrounding forest to chop down boughs of evergreen tree limbs to serve as a form of mattress.

It smelled really good, though the sharp ends tended to poke oneself in the back during a fitful sleep. In this new location somewhere in a mountainous region of Oregon. We were camped out in the elements, perhaps at a winter campsite, minus the regular campers and their mobile homes.

Not having to sleep on the ground, but in our canvas cots, that had to be carefully gotten out of or it would fold up like a trap with you inside. Being way out in the middle of nowhere with-out electricity, we had to learn how to get by using Coleman lanterns for being able to see. In the very early morning our wake-up alarm clock was the sweet voice of the sister who that morning was her first day at making breakfast.

As we were asleep on our feet, standing around a smoky fire, waiting to be given a bowl of gruel and a cup of coffee. What we didn’t know until later was that the sister had put water on for coffee but hadn’t put any coffee into the pot. We stirred in our sugar and milk and thought dreamingly that the coffee never tasted so good.

Loading up in the trucks to go to our rendezvous with our supervisor from one of the many contracts we had to plant trees. Either the forest service, B.L.M., or Weyerhauser, getting there early or late we followed him or her up a winding narrow dirt road till we had all fallen back into a restless sleep.Except for the driver who we hoped was very awake as he kept the truck away from the steep cliff face.

Getting to our starting out place, the supervisor had already off-loaded the paper bags of fresh from a nursery the trees we were to plant that day. As the best time to plant is when it’s as miserable as it can be with rain, sleet and sometimes snow. We loaded up our strap on dual bags that we carried on either side of our hips.

Standing around in a circle we would begin the day by singing Christian songs much to the amazement of our much older supervisors, who were in their 30’s to 40’s? without further procrastinating , it was time to begin our journey into new realms of hardship. The point-man who had earned these distinction from the billions of trees he had planted thus, far. And doing this troublesome task faster than any of us.

From having come from a fire-fighting job I wrongly thought that I was up to the job, that I was a physically fit young man who could tackle any kind of labor with no trouble. As I fell further and further behind the main group and became what is known as a straggler. I was demoted to ” Here! give your trees to the other team-mates which didn’t earn me any points with that idea.

My new position was so lowly, I was to carry a roll of a tape thats made from soybeans, it’s a bright yellow, and being made from soybeans, when the deer eat it, thinking it’s edible it’s digestible. I was to follow the person who was slower than the person in front of him, but he didn’t have to bear my shame of the one who is so slow has been delegated to tying tape along his trail.

At the end of our sweep across the hillside the point man would turn around and be able to backtrack following my bread crumbs. Climbing over burned tree stumps, tangled burnt bushes and slogging through a morass of ash and left behind cables from logging crews. Hopelessly dejected I crawled into the burned out shell of a tree to mourn my plight and utter to the forces that had transpired to bring me to ruin.

Being able to vent my frustration, was a little help, as I was able to voice my complaint somewhat verbally. It didn’t happen right then and there but gradually I was able to kick it up a notch, and pass the baton of being dead last to the brother in front of me.

In a strange and happy place on a fine day without the always present rain to make one to resemble a water logged rat. Climbing up the side of a heavily forested tree line, to my left about a 100 ft. was the actual brilliant blue sky of a day to remember forever. Dropping my saddle bags, and the tool that was a part of my hand for at least (8) hours, the “Hoe-dad” I walked over to the gently rolling landscape , with distant farms, pastures, but, everything was brilliantly lit as by a incandescent flashbulb.

To, see something so out of context with everything that had already gone before with all the things that led up to that one special moment in my life, that to try and explain it, it truly cannot be done, as it means something more to me, than perhaps it would to anyone else.

Our newly formed tree thinning crew, made up of the top notch tree planters. Drove up to the barred entrance to the mountain road that would take us to our campsite. Our crew leader/elder from our church, “Gospel Outreach” had the instructions on where the key to the gates lock was hidden. It was under a rock near the metal post with the lock, so the 20 of us men began a search in the late afternoon.

I didn’t find the key but I did find a baggy of marijuana under another rock, which when I showed it to the elder, he dumped it’s contents out onto the scattering of rocks. We never did find the key that early evening, so we drove the way back the way we had come. To the first motel, where all of us crammed either to one room or it was two?

I ended up sharing a bed with the elder, I told him to never speak of it again. But, later in front of the whole congregation back in our hometown of Eureka, Ca. he informed the entire gathering of church members. Everybody laughed, except me.

The next day we met the forest service truck with a ranger, who we followed up, and up the mountain with a cliff on one side and a sheer wall almost straight up. By this time our limited outdoor experience , had taken us from using a large room that we had brought in from the forests, boughs to put our sleeping bags on.

Now we had state of the art canvas tents that had a built-in chimney for our wood stove, these tents could house (10) men, sleeping on cots. It was like having a mansion up in the woods. There was one rule never to be broken, which in a rain storm, never, put ones finger to a blob of water that would form on the inside of the tent. Because water would start to drip there? for some reason which I never figured out.

Even, though I had gotten over my mind numbing fear of using a chain saw to thin trees, way back in my mind, was a caged beast, that was growling to get my attention everyday, that one false mis-step and I could cut off my foot. I never even got cut, but I did have some close calls, with working late in the day when the afternoon light wasn’t at it’s brightest, I was trying to cut down a sapling, not knowing that my chain-saw’s chain was grinding itself to death against a unseen cable that was in the gloom at my feet.

When we got there it was summer and very hot to be working out in the woods, carrying a 1/2 gal. of engine oil, a sharpening tool for the chain. Then when you ran out of gas had to go hunt down the gas can, which maybe the elder would bring closer to the crew. I think that we wore canvas chaps to protect us from the chain saw , which could flip back, if the angle was wrong, and you hit the tree with the chain as it went around a half circle.Out about three ft. from the motor. or maybe it was two ft.?

Being young men with no sense of completing a job when the sun is shining. Not having learned the proverb of the ant and the grass hopper, we would stop work to go to the river and play all the rest of the day. We, did that all summer,and our daily quota of how much acreage we were supposed to be covering got further and further pushed back, until summer turned into winter!

We, went way past the term of our contract with the forest service and we lost our shirts on that job. No, matter how much we did to get back to where we started , it was too, late. Everyday we were trudging through the snow, a new blizzard would bring into our camp a fresh layer to further bury us in white oblivion. I’m a little ahead of myself here, before it really snowed, we all went to bed and got woke up in the middle of the night, with two ft. of snow on top of our collapsing tents, the sister’s tents did collapse.

All the brothers moved out to let the women move to our tent, the fire was built up in the tent to a degree of fierce hotness. All the brothers slept in the crew cabs of our Dodge trucks.

During a tree thinning job our crew would head into the town of Remote, Oregon, to visit with another church and it’s members. In a conversation with one of it’s young members, a young man was telling me a funny story about the time that his grandfather had asked him to stop by his house periodically to check up on his house, in that the grandfather was going away for a couple months.

Being a young man he never went over there until the day before the grandfather was to come home. As he was going into the house which he knew it’s layout like the back of his hand. The phone was ringing, and not taking the time to flick on the kitchen light, and was passing the dining room table, where he knew there was a bowl of granola, he grabbed up a handful.

As, he was talking he was thinking to himself, that the granola tasted kind of stale, that his grandfather should replace it with new. After the conversation ended, and he looked at the bowl, he saw that it was covered with every bug and mold ever conceived in the minds of depraved people. ” The moral of the story is when you are supposed to do something, don’t put it off.

In another alternate setting, where a funny story was told to me by Greg in his room at the lighthouse ranch. Out side of Eureka, Ca. About the time that he and his wife went to go visit his grandparents who lived on a farm. At the farm, he had gone off with the grandfather to take a walk around. As the wife stayed in the kitchen, later the two men came back and were standing at the kitchen door. listening to the grandmother, as she was telling the wife how everything grew so big, like the carrots, the zucchini, the squash. When at that point, the grandfather who was notorious for having a quirky sense of humor. Said, do you want to see something really big, and unzipped his zipper and reached in and pulled out through the slit, his shirt tail, and held it’s tip out about two feet long. And said have you ever seen a shirt tail so big.

Grandmother just rolled her eyes as she knew of his famous humor which could make a grown woman, blush.

I had it all wrong as when I lived at “Living Waters Ranch” a couple miles to the south from the town of Whitethorn, Ca. My first job wasn’t as a tree planter, it was joining a crew of tree thinners who were already out on a job somewhere in Oregon.

I think I was being driven up to where the crew was, with a visiting elder? It’s kind of foggy on how I showed up there. What I do know is that I was there for only a short time, As I was afraid of the type of chain saw that was being used. It was a special type of bar that was tear shaped that the chain ran on, the little end was at the motor, and extended out about 3ft. there was a little spur that stuck out, it was where the tree you were going to cut down was placed into a “V” . instead of having to get low to the base of the tree, with the bow bar, one could stand up, and cut it down, the trees were small, no bigger around than 3 to 4 in.

You had to be careful, because when the bar hit the tree, and the tree wasn’t put into that “V” made by the passing chain, it could kick out the bar, any direction, and even the whole chain saw out of your hands if you didn’t have a firm grip on the saw. It also could flip backwards toward you and hit you in the chest.

After about 5 minutes I made up my mind that I couldn’t do it, much to the amazement of everybody as I suppose nobody up to that point had said that they couldn’t do the job. Not knowing what to do with me, they finally put me with another crew who were using a branch shredder, which was just as dangerous as the bow bar, as if you didn’t let go of the branch it could pull your hand into the whirling blades.

The young man who got saddled with me,told me our job would be to drag the cut down trees along side a rural dirt road, back from the forest, to the shredding machine which was on a tow bar being pulled by a run down pick-up truck. It was a lot of work, being that it was in the middle of the summer, to haul these trees, so the man came up with a plan, to make it easier, which was to stand the trees up in the forest along side live trees. Not one to question authority, I helped him implement his plan, after we had stood up about 50 trees, he realized that when these trees died, it would look funny, and not in a good way, that our supervisors would see a bunch of dead trees in a bunch of live ones.

So, we had to go back and pull these aforementioned trees to the shredder. At the end of that day or another just like it, at the end of the day we were hauling the shredder back to our camp site on a dusty dirt road, when I happened to look out the window and saw a wheel rolling across the field along side of our truck? The wheel on the shredder had completely snapped off and the axle was digging a groove into the ground?

Since , there was no plan (B), we had to continue to drag the axle in the dirt for a couple more miles, until we came to the highway, which we had to cross, so somewhere in perhaps upper Ca. or Oregon there is a deep gouge running across the asphalt. Back at the camp, several plans were formulated on how to get the shredder back to our home/ranch, one plan, but was discarded was to somehow get the shredder up on a hill with a steep drop straight down, that the pick-up truck bed would be underneath, so as to push the shredder off the cliff onto the bed.

Plan (2) was to haul the shredder back down the road, further etching it’s signature into the road, back across the asphalt highway, thus making a double groove. The way that we had initially come, had past a heavy equipment company, we would ask if they would lift up the shredder into the air so we could back up the truck underneath, and at the right moment gently let it down onto the rear of the truck.

A heavy equipment operator agreed to do as we asked, a heavy chain was fixed to the shredder, and the biggest back hoe I’ve ever seen, at it was lifted up, but for some reason it started to spin, first several times one way, then several times the other way. After a couple times of watching this twirling business, at the critical revolution junction, before it could make it’s journey back to start all over again,The operator released the chain , and dropped the shredder right into of the back of the pick-up truck with a resounding ka-boom! It was perfectly placed, it was as if an angel, had said enough with this Tom Foolery, lets get this show on the road.

Our tree planting crew had some down time as the weather wasn’t co-operating with our wish to re-forest the surrounding countryside with Douglass firs. The forest service wanted to use at least (6) able bodied men who could go and work loading up a huge metal box with fertalizer, each one of us, were to pick up a 80 Lb. bag Five bags each,and pour the contents into the topped screen motorized delivery system. as I had been volunteered to have as much fun as the (5) others.

It was pouring down rain, from the hovering overhead heliocopter that was straight up over our heads, it’s downwash was driving the rain in a fierce gale, with each droplet as if it was a bullet. After straining to swiftly pour my bag, which I had to lift up the side of the box, which was approx: 5 ft. tall, to run my bag cross wise over metal teeth to open the bag to let the pellets drop through the screen. When the heliocopter had it’s box filled it would lift off straight up, it must have had a on board weighing device, if it had too, much weight it could activate a motorized sprayer, that when used for it’s purpose would spray out the pellets everywhere on the ground.

With too, much weight it would lighten it’s load by spraying the pellets out of the hopper, some of it’s load would come right at us and hit us with it’s stinging rain, and even though we were wearing rain gear it still hurt. Just when I thought I was going to collaspe from how much effort it took and I was praying that somehow it would, stop. The forest service decided that it was too, windy that day to continue.

At another time, we had a contract at Klamath Falls, Or. to plant trees, and we were staying at an abanden college, in one of it’s dorms, on a ground floor. It was during the winter, and our whole team of young men slept on the cold floor in our sleeping bags, I think we had foam pads. To take a shower, as there was no water, or electricity, on a Saturday we all get into our trucks and drive into Klamath falls to go to the Y.M.C.A. I happened to notice one time driving through town that a homeowner had put up a barb wire fence across his front yard ?

Our job of tree planting was normally done using a tool called a “Hoe-dad” which was like a axe handle with a flat blade that was about a foot long and three inches wide, and it’s thickness was one fourth of and inch. the tip of the blade was rounded like a soft nosed spear. the opposite end was square , with a cutting edge, for being able to cut through roots. To plant a tree, which we carried in bags (2) strapped to either side of our waists, being able to carry, at least a couple hundred, depending on the age of the type of tree we were to plant.

With a mighty swing you would try to plunge the blade into the ground at a verticle angle, lift up a little with the axe handle, thus making a below ground a triangle shaped cavity, quickly pulling out the buried blade and pulling back the soil, exposing the hole, from one of the pouches depending if you were left or right handed. Pull out a tree grown in a nursery, and with a flick of the wrist , let the root system fall first into the hole you have made, pulling out the blade, letting the dirt further straighten out the roots. Then lighly tapping the dirt around the base of the freshly planted tree, that whole process took less than (5) seconds, then onto the next hole, ( 6 ) ft. away.

On this job it was all different, as the soil was from a bilion year ago volcanic eruption, and it was mostly glass like, which had to be planted in a new way thought up by people whose only job is making it as phyisically hard as possible. We were given a new tool called a ” Dibblestick” who thinks up these names? It was like a fixed “Pogo ” stick with no moving parts, it’s end was a sharpened spike, above it about ( 5 ) inches was a metal bar that extended out in a straight line for (4) inches, that you put the toe of your foot on to drive it into the glass like soil. to make a perfectly shaped hole, that went down (5) inches?

The tress had been grown with a plastic tube around their roots, which had to be smacked against something to loosen the soil wrapped roots, which would pull out of the tube, with the roots inclosed in chemically enhanced dirt. This whole process took even less time than doing it the conventional way that we were used to. As the one step of tapping the soil around the base of the fresh planted tree. As The volcanic soil, with it’s sharp edged bit’s of glass like paticle’s, We could skip doing that! So, instead of the delivery taking (5 ) seconds it took maybe (3) seconds.

The tree planters who in a race to be the fastest tree planter, would get exceptianally high numbers, Even me, as got up into a high level, I never was able to reach those stratosphere ones. Soon ,it became to hot to plant trees during the day, the high tempatures were drying out the trees. So our large team of approx: 40 men, was split into two teams, with one group working in the early morning, say even before sunrise until around 10:00am. then our team would be done for the day, the other team would start just before sunset, and using miners lights on their hardhats would work approx: (5) hours. I was in the morning crew, which made some sort of lasting impression on me, as today I’m more of a morning person.

Then things took a turn for the bizzare, when we had exhausted all our acreage that was to be planted, we took a left turn into a new direction. The next phase, was to wear strapped onto our backs a portable tank with a spraying wand , which when holding the trigger would shoot out a stream of foul smelling pink goop, to spray the trees we just planted with a anti-deer preventive paint that was made from some sort of organic subtance. It’s ingredients would continually clog the tip of the sprayer, which we have to stop and try to unclog it with our special wire tool.

One time a fellow wanderer , who was trudging through barren sands looking for a tree top to spray with sticky pink rotting salmon, yellow slime from migrating herds of slugs. His sprayer malfunctioned and the top of his sprayer burst with too much pressure, as we were able to put more pressure into our tanks, with a side handle that we could pump up and down, until the strength of our stream would let us shoot out to the length of 15 ft, or so.

As, I like to wander in and out of where I liked to be in the string of men as were canvased the terrain, sometimes I was the point man, way out front of everyone else, what I liked about that , it was as if I was the very first person to be seeing what-ever it was that I was seeing. One time I came upon a abandoned train track out in the desert, the tracks just came out of a sand dune, and disappeared back into one. We had a young Weyhauser supervisor, who was in charge of the quality of tree planting, he was a young man just like us, Being goofy young man, I stated to pretend that my “Dibblestick” was a rifle and started to shoot my gun at a the closest compatriot, the supervisor joined in to blast away with his walking tool, until it dawned on us that anyone coming upon us would think that we were acting like kids, so we reverted back into being young adults.

At our first stop before getting on highway 101, to drive up the coast to the next big city of Crescent city, Ca. Our truck load of tree planter’s went to the churches donut shop, where men would push wheeled carts around town selling their goodies to homeowners and local businesses. We picked up the day old donuts that didn’t get sold and on the way would manage to demolish, bear claws, cream filled, chocolate and vanilla’s bars. By the time we pulled into town our bulging stomach’s were giving all of us acute distress, with undissolved dough!

Our new home was a building along side of a church , perhaps a “Assembly of God” who said that we could stay in this building during the time of our tree planting contract. It was just a huge empty room ,where we set up our sleeping bags on the floor. The pastor of the church would let us use the church for our own assembling, but we also attended their church. During a Saturday, while walking around outside, all of a sudden a fire alarm that was a city alarm siren started to sound, but it just kept going and going for five minutes, I didn’t know what was going on.

Until later when I was told that it was in reference to the earthquake of 1964, which triggered a tidal wave that just about destroyed the town. Everybody who was a regular, in town was just going about as if this was just a every day occurrence. While of us out of towners thought it was the end of the world. Or at least the advent of world war 3 ?.

At a non-random later time, after our evening meal, a brother was selected to help a sister, or a elders wife to help wash all the dishes, which involved mostly of having to boil water as the hot water would quickly run out. On this particular time it was my turn to get dish pan hands and stay up late washing all the dishes and the pots and pans that were used to prepare the meal. Getting done at almost 12:00 o’clock, then go to bed, until it was time to get up before sun up. Have breakfast, then pile into the trucks to follow caravan style the lead forest service vehicle to where it was we were going to.

On this thrilling occasion I was in a old 1940 style bread truck that was all the rage in the middle years of 1960. Asleep with a bunch of men in the back we were all being slowly asphyxiated with a leaking muffler whose fumes were leaking up through the van’s floor. Someone in half dead group got the elders attention, so that he stopped the truck on a old mountain road that had ice glaze to make all the gravel all sparkly. I laid down on the road to breathe as stars and dancing pitchfork demons swirled in my head. Climbing back into the death trap, we continued on up the road to our destination, Fortunately it was short.

Going out to work outside of the main community of Gospel Outreach to earn the capital for the running of the day to day business of a self reliant organization. To me it was great fun to go out to some camp grounds or of the renting of a motel for the duration of a tree planting contract. All, of our team were men whose ages were possibly no greater than in their 20’s. So with limited experience of an older maturity we had to make decision’s that were based on what seemed right in our own view of life.

When it wasn’t a question of how to judge between right and wrong, or how to act in a certain situation that was morally correct according to the teachings of the Christian faith. Just trying out how to make things work in a reasonable fashion, that wasn’t to much of spinning our wheels unproductively.

It seemed that we were destined to have to learn as we went about figuring out the hows and whats, one faltering step at a time. Like the day our appointed wood gatherer went out in search of some logs to cut up with his chain saw. As we were camped out on forest service land, as he was driving down a dirt road, he saw a thirty ft. log just laying on the side of the road, down in a ditch.

Cutting it up and getting the rounds back to camp, we had great merriment using our sharpened axes to make firewood. Which when our forest service ranger in charge of supervising our tree planting technique, to make sure that the trees would survive.Saw that we had cut up a telephone pole he was mildly amazed that we city folk could have done something so stupid!

In a different location and another job, our camp was on or near the top of a mountain. It possibly was a Saturday and our two crews were going to go to town, in our relatively new “Dodge” four wheel drive pick-up trucks. As we were always in some sort of competition on the slopes which at that time of the year had snow on them.

Driving down the winding road, one truck would get in front of the other so as to lose sight of the one following, stop. and everyone would get out to make snowballs and have a pitched battle when the other truck would come around a bend.

As, we did several times, even having the time to fall a tree with a chainsaw across the road, at that place of mayhem, there was little snow on the ground, and a rock was gathered up into the making of a snowball and when thrown in the direction of a combatant it hit the back window of a truck thus shattering it into a million pieces, ending that days frolicking.

At that same camp, in the summer months that would all to quickly transform into the early stages of winter. Some inventive person had come up with a great idea, that I would never had thought of.

They had brought a 100ft.long fire hose to haul up the back side of a hill behind our camp. To force one end into and down into the bottom of a stream, bringing water to our camp. Going one step further, with his idea of proving a hot shower for everyone?

A 50 gal. steel drum was placed on top of a circle of huge stones, so as a fire could be built underneath, the drum was filled with water, and the other end of the hose was coiled into the barrel, but it’s end was coupled with a shower head. A closed in shower was erected and personal modesty was preserved for individual privacy. As the water heated up, one could take a shower for a couple hours, before it got to hot.

At, another time on a tree planting job up in Klamath falls, Or. at the camp, someone whose name I used to remember, but the 25 years that have lapsed since then has dulled my memory. This young man, found a torn up canvas tarp and with some talked into enlisted help, not me, built a sauna along side of a ice fed mountain stream. During the day while the two teams of men were out planting trees, the left behind women(sister’s) would build a fire, then would get river rocks and roll them into the fire to get blistering hot all day, or until we got back to the camp.

By the time all the evening chores had been done and whomever wanted to take a sauna, me ! me !. taking off all my clothes except for strategically place loin cloth, would sit inside around a smoky fire and almost choke to death on wet steaming air, made by pouring sprinkles of river water on the super heated rocks, after getting radiated enough would go outside to lay down in the ice cold almost frozen stream, it was so, beautiful, as it was high night with a full moon being reflected in the water.

The one thing that I couldn’t get used to was the diet, which was 100% vegetarian. Just coming from the fire station job where my three meals a day had some form of meat included and even then the added vegetables were looked on with distaste.

From a early childhood dinner when I didn’t want to eat my vegetables, I would comically pretend to cough, and spit the vegetables into my hand, thus fooling my mom, and put my hand under the table to add my to my collection of dried and crusty vegetable conical formation’s. Built along a brace bar was an artist’s rendition of a wagon train of biblical proportion.

As I arrived riding my motorcycle and had no real need for it, on a visit to my hometown, I sold it to one of by buddies. With the money from the sale I would walk into town, which was at least a couple miles to go to the country store to buy candy bars, peanut butter, a loaf of bread. Not getting much as I had the same walk back in reverse.

For some strange reason I was to build a pig faring, which I had no idea what that was, until I was shown the one that they already had. Having never built anything except a two by four replica of what I envisioned a WW2 bomber would resemble while at the Vandenberg Air Force base, living on base in a suburb, somehow I got the heavy wooden plane up on the garage roof, layed down on it and flew off the roof, instead of like a bomber it was more like a jet plane in a nose dive towards the driveway.

Since I was good at drawing I copied the original onto a piece of paper, I assembled all the available boards in every shape and size, and using nails that I had to hammer back into usable nails, a rusty saw and with no carpentry skills I banged together something that somewhat looked like it could be used for it’s intended purpose.

One of my new duties was to get the fire started in the main building, it was a double barrel wood stove, as our little community was out in a huge grove of redwoods and there was no short supply of wood to burn. The brother, as all single men were called who had been elevated to what ever the next step up from my position was to be for him. He gave me a hands on demonstration of how to build a fire, as to all my other own expierence just involved flipping a switch.

At 5:00am in the morning, after stumbling from a fitful sleep to walk through the dark woods hoping to not meet up with a skunk. Inside IO prepared all my ingredients to have at hand as I carefully tried to remember the instruction’s of how to build a perfect fire right out the gate. 50% of the time everything went according to a detailed plan , other times it seemed for no good reason things didn’t work out, no matter what I did.

To pay for things needed on the ranch, everyone hand delivered a free newspaper in the town of Garberville, Ca. We would drive into town in our motley collection of used vehicles in various state’s of antiquity. To wander around town attempting to hang these inky newspapers, on people’s doorknobs, which would make ones hands black.

The main money maker was through the planting of trees, for the Forest Service,Scottzellerback, and perhaps something called “Wherehauser” (SP)?, unfortunately, my iddylic stay at the fantasy forest playground was short lived as I was sent out from my happy home out into the work-force to join up with a crew of approx: 25 men and one married couple who were Elder’s, in the church, and a young woman who was to learn how to cook by a gas lantern, wash our clothes in a stream, and make hearty meals on dishes that had not been rinsed in hot water.

Having worked as a firefighter, I was reasonably fit, or so I thought as we had to climb up and threw a tangled weave of unyielding bushes and trees, soon my mangled pride of my youth, that I was up to the challenge of getting up before the sun had even risen, to be jammed into a car better suited to be driven on pavement than up a steep mountain road.

Not wearing any cold weather clothes just what we had when we came to the ranch on our backs, we were ill prepared for working, in the rain, in the snow and trying to dig through the ground that was muddy ice. After being way up on or at a mountain top, the supervisors in charge of our teenage/man crew gave us a reprieve as said that conditions were adverse, not fo us, but the one year old trees.