A BIT OF SURVIVING HARD TIMES

Well, when the news is as bad as it’s been on some fronts lately and I find myself starting to get overwhelmed by it, my mind turns to other sources than the media for inspiration, meditation and rejuvenation. I learned that from my infamous Grandpa Seamus.

When they were young and Grandma Molly used to get real upset about the Depression news, Grandpa Seamus would invariably just real calmly get up, cross the room and turn the radio off. Then he’d walk out on the porch, put his weathered brown hands on the rough pine wood rail, and let his eyes drift to the majestic snowcapped Trinity Alps which rose like ice-shaggy Nordic gods and goddesses all around him.

If, when he walked back inside, Molly had turned the radio back on, he quietly unplugged it, tucked it under his arm and put it on a shelf higher than she could reach. He never said a word and he wasn’t angry. She knew that and since she wasn’t either…

Then, he’d go out to the barn and saddle up their two horses, Morgans both, while she got on the telephone box, cranked it and got ahold of Thomas Lightoot and his family to ask them to watch the place for awhile. At first, that was just the ranch. (Later, after their second daughter ~ and the one who survived ~ was born, it included her, as well.)

Then together, they’d pack their saddle bags and their blanket rolls, check the bandoleers and clean and oil their 44 caliber Colt revolvers and the Winchesters each of them owned. Yep, just like Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, except Seamus looked like Glenn Ford and Molly favored Jessica Lange.

Together then, they rode into the peaks that had sustained them for so long and which hadn’t changed much in anyone’s recent memory. They lived off that land, as high mountain and allegedly barren as it might have appeared to those who didn’t know it. They fished by wading upstream and catching rainbow and German Brown by hand. They sparked flint to dry moss. They watched deer gather at dawn watering and sated eagles soar endlessly overhead, benevolent masters of their domain. They avoided brown bear by keen noses and cougar by knowing tracks and not crossing trail. They weren’t armed to protect themselves from these, but from men who came into the Alps for not the best of reasons.

And yes, now as I reflect on it, in some ways, it’s like they recreated themselves as Adam and Eve, with the snake being the radio Seamus unplugged and set on a high shelf.

I don’t know all of what they did on those rides and my experience is based on some of those times when Seamus and I did that. But yes, I suspect they also made love, teased each other, played tag, etc. That’s the way of it with folks born and raised in the Trinity Alps. And, I suspect, elsewhere. That "inner child" is still alive in most of them, right up to the end.

I do know for certain that Molly came back a lot calmer and embarrassingly (for her) in blush. And while she stabled the Morgans, Seamus got the radio down off the shelf, put it back where she listened to it, plugged it in and turned it on. Together they carried in the saddle bags, bedrolls, firearms, etc. While he started a cook fire in the Fraser potbelly, she called the Lightfoots to thank them and to say she’d be by to return the favor, meaning in this case, eggs from the henhouse.

In the years ahead, this ritual was to stand them well, even when it couldn’t always be observed in the specific. During the Depression, the army stopped buying horses and Seamus ended up riding shotgun on a prison van that delivered convicts from the county seat in Redding to the state penitentiary, Folsom Prison, not far from Sacramento.

It was one hundred eighty miles down a highway that followed the meandering and sometimes serpentine Sacramento River. In its early days, that highway was tenuous at best. Between the driving rains and the tule fog of winter and the hot and relentless jungle humidity of the summers, it posed considerable challenges even to hay wagons.

Seamus had a couple of close calls and Molly begged him to find another job. There flat weren’t any and when he didn’t, she took off on a train from Redding to San Francisco and stayed there for awhile. She had what we learned from her diaries after she died, some extremely interesting adventures. We never knew, completely, because he never talked about it, what it was like for Seamus to come back to a ranch with no wife.

Grandpa never asked her to come home, though, and it wasn’t because he was too proud. It was because he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. She had to come home because this remote ranch in the Trinity Alps, with him, was home. Her home.

Folks I’ve spoken with who remember them during this period have said that Seamus’ normally alpine blue eyes were gray a lot. And that he was considerably more taciturn than usual. This for a man who was even more legendary in the Alps for that than Calvin Coolidge was elsewhere.

The turning point for them was in 1938, I think, when a blizzard struck especially hard and out of nowhere. It froze the Alps and turned the Sacramento Valley into a flood plane that stretched as far as one could see. The prison van Seamus was guarding didn’t make it. But he did.

To this day, no one knows what he went through to get home. But, like I said earlier, it was one hundred eighty miles or so to Redding and it took him a week. He stayed overnight and then it was three days or so on snowshoes, with a pack full of tinned goods, back to the ranch, not knowing what to expect but mostly figuring on frozen hell.

As he crunched the final few yards through the snow cloaked forest which surrounded the ranch, he caught a gleam of light through the trees. His throat got thick, his heart started hammering and his eyes rolled to the Heavens in the briefest but sincerest of prayers.

On the porch waiting for him was Molly in deerskin, holding a lantern in one hand and her Winchester in the other. She was standing in the doorway next to a mountain lion hide stretched on the outside wall. And from their cabin came the smell of roasting venison. He looked at her and she nodded, so he came on ahead. And at the bottom of the cabin steps, he got out of his snowshoes and unslung his back. As she stepped aside to let him in, he handed her a brand new radio.

They stayed married for 55 years and he passed on first. She followed him less than a year later. The ranch on which they lived is now at the bottom of Whiskey Lake, in Shasta County, (Northern) California.

They’re gone now then; all physical traces absorbed back into the earth from which they both came, at some point in time or another. They’re at peace with the planet and the planet with them.

Has their time among us meant something and does it still? I suspect so. I’m still here. And I doubt seriously if I’m alone in those regards, eh?

Thanks, then, for the ear. Take care, stay well and God Bless. Until next time…

With thanks to Mike Browne and the Tomatoman Times TomatomanMike, for the example, and my god-sent brother Dennis for the nudge.

Rusty