Reasonably Educated Bumpkins

I had a very scary dream last night. Wind-whipped flames were shooting sideways at my house, sure to catch it ablaze any second. We were forced to evacuate, and everyone around me worried only about ordering Korean barbeque take-out.

Seriously. I have stupid dreams. But this time, at least, the scars uncovered, I can trace the source of the dream -- the seeds of the fear that manifests itself as an incredibly stupid nightmovie: the current southern California firestorm that rages out of control, with no end in sight.

The house my little family and I now live in actually was threatened by fire about 17 years ago, long before we were even a family. 17 years ago . . . 1990, or thereabouts. I was single and waitressing for a living at the time -- one of my Bad Waitress phases -- and I was very familiar with the volunteer fire department. Several of their ranks came into our restaurant every afternoon for coffee and tea and camaraderie, often with various members of law enforcement. They paid their check with coins, usually, and often those were bounced at me, contemptuously. Sometimes I had to pick up the nickels and pennies off the floor, and forget about a tip! Was I really THAT bad as a waitress? I don't think so. Well, maybe . . . In any case, they seemed to dislike me, for whatever reason. I took it in silence, truly mystified.

The day I really needed those firefighters came in the midsummer heat. The berry bushes lining the northern edge of the property caught on fire and burned. The conditions were very similar to those of the southlands this week: very hot (over 100 degrees), very dry, and with a strong, hot north wind to fan the flames. The man who accidentally started the fire was trying to do everything right. He had a burn permit and a water tank on a trailer. He was burning weeds, I guess, on the other side of the berry hedge, and it got out of his control. He must not have known that the lush green berry vines burn like a torch, especially when blasted with north wind.

When the two volunteer fire departments from Orland and Capay responded they had quite a battle on their hands. My boyfriend (at the time) and I ended up helping, though I can't believe they let us anywhere near, wearing shorts and tank tops and (probably) flip-flops as we were. I remember holding a garden hose -- one that must have been linked to seven other garden hoses to reach out into the pasture -- and spraying the smoking remains of the berry hedge, guarding against flare-ups.

The fire blew out all the north windows in one of the mobile homes on the property, and melted some of the belongings inside, but somehow didn't actually burn the home. The flames jumped the road and burned west, licking the edge of the old calf barn in this photo. Right on the other side of that barn is the house we live in now.

Somehow this firetrap didn't burn, so the house was saved as a result. Two things happened to save that house, and probably every other building on the property, which would have gone down like dominos: one, the firefighters were fantastic, as usual. Two, the wind switched. Suddenly the blaze was pushed from the southeast, and it roared northwest across the wheat field that was due to be cut the next day; crop a total loss. This is the field (from this spring).

The fire didn't stop there. It jumped the road and burned down the barn owned by the same unlucky neighbor who owned the wheat. The barn housed his car collection -- I don't think the cars were in mint condition, or anything, but still . . . how much can one guy take? Four different insured parties and insurance companies, a year and a half later, and my parents, at least, were compensated for damages. I don't know about all of the others.

Back at the restaurant . . . my first afternoon shift after our fire I was ready for the coffee guys. The usual group straggled in, ordered, sipped, talked, and asked for their check. "Not today," I said. "The least I can do after you put out our fire is to buy your coffee. Thank you," I said. After all of the crap I'd taken from their group, this was not easy to do, really, but I truly was grateful for their heroics.

They looked at me. One or two said thank you. The ornery one who gave me the most trouble, the alpha dog of the group, gave me a long, hard look. Then they left, and that was that.

No one ever threw coins at me again.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 11:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I wrote this a while back, one warm spring evening, for no particular reason other than I was hit with a sudden inspiration.

I don't get hit very often these days.

My blogging friend Jeff wrote about the Orland Water Project a couple of weeks ago. Reading Jeff's blog reminded me of my essay about irrigating, so I had to go dig it up, changing only a few things. While irrigation season is wrapping up now, the feelings that inspired me to write this essay a couple of years ago can be fanned quickly into full flame by the scent of pasture on the wind.

(photo stolen from these guys)

Thoughts On Irrigating

Irrigation season is in full swing here in Orland. If you're lucky enough to be a part of the Water Project, as my parents are, it's just a matter of waiting the twelve day interval for your turn to get the water.

When Mom and Dad are on vacation (perhaps it's simpler to determine when they're not on vacation), Chas and I occasionally irrigate for them. Usually Chas, these days. With two little ones at home, irrigating, or "getting the water," as we call it, can be tricky. It involves a minimum of three hikes out to either of the ditches, and it's no place for anyone under four years old. So, since at any given time one of us will be at work, the anointed irrigator has to take the girls along and leave them safely strapped into their car seats for a few minutes.

But let me back up a bit. The manager of the water distribution is called a ditch rider. He'll call a day ahead to remind you that the water is coming, give you an E.T.A., and tell you to whom you're turning the water when you're finished (usually the same farmer year after year, but sometimes there's a change-up). The water, which originates in the Stony Gorge Reservoir, flows downhill and dumps into Black Butte Reservoir, about 10-15 miles away in the Coast Range foothills to the west. Water has been allotted to each property in the project based upon acreage. For example, Dad receives about fifteen hours of water every time it’s his turn, which represents the time it takes for his acre/foot allotment to flow out of the ditch. He never needs all of his allotment, but the allotment is a fixed amount, and the pasture gets what it needs, so it isn't a problem.

Being a member of the Water Project is a part of the property rights, but it is also a responsibility. Unless you sell your water every season and forfeit your turns, you take the water when it comes, middle of the day or night. Which brings me back to my part of the story.

The ditch rider calls. When you learn the approximate hour the water will come, you plan it out in your mind. "If I water the north side first," you reason, "it'll still be light when I change it an hour later." Or, "I really want to watch Washington Week in Review [or, more likely, SpongeBob Squarepants], so I'll do the south side first . . ." and so on. Late yesterday afternoon I planned it all out as I was driving my fussy children home from Chico. I left the girls in the car (which I could not do in late July or they'd be little cinders when I returned), raced into the house to change my clothes and shoes (sling-back mules, though fashionable, only signal to the cows that you are a major rookie) and grab some fruit for the kidlets. Drove out as far as I could, parked in the shade of the hay barn, left the girls strapped in their car seats with wide-open windows and fruit-smeared faces, and tromped west to the gate.

The evening could have been lifted from a Marlboro ad. As I walked west through the pasture toward the slowly dropping sun, the world was bathed in yellow light. Cloudless blue skies were rippled here and there by swooping barn swallows. Sharp shadows from a line of ground squirrels standing at strict attention just ahead of me; the persistent north wind gave away my advance. Like synchronized swimmers they raced for their burrows and disappeared en masse. No squirrels upwind of my path even noticed me. A couple of sleek red cows, Dad’s prized Limousins, munched at the manger, pausing only a moment to wonder what I was doing there. "Keep eating, girls," I told them. More red cows ahead, most idly chewing, some tense as I passed too near a quivering red calf. Some cows were gold-edged black forms silhouetted against the blazing yellow sun. All soon went back to eating. Magnificent. Even without a horse, I was the Marlboro Man*.

The roar of water churning against the gate broke the spell as I approached. Now it was time to get down to business. Tip-toeing along the slim north edge of the ditch to the concrete slab above the gate, I nearly lost my balance as a strong gust of north wind caught my back (just what I need, to fall into the ditch in front of those mildly disapproving cows). Pulled up the gate and out gushed the water. Back across the ditch edge to close the east gate. There's something almost exhilarating about cranking down a gate (turning an iron wheel against a threaded iron bar, which slowly lowers the wooden plank gate and cuts off the water flow). There's very little load against it, so the wheel just flies. You settle into a bobbing rhythm as you spin the wheel as hard as you can. The gate drops quickly and easily, the turbid water rises and seeks a new escape. Quite a different story from raising a gate against a full head of water. That's where muscles come from.

Turned around. To the east across the valley lay the Sierras, indigo. Mt Lassen, still spotted with snow this early June evening, peeked at me around and above the barns as I walked back to the waiting car. I felt a renewed connection to the land and animals, to the place where I grew up. Silly, maybe, but not as silly as the Marlboro Man visions in my head -- man controlling beast and working with nature, carving out a life from the land, blah blah blah. I may be a girl (a euphemism for "female"), wearing waterproof Birkenstocks instead of cowboy boots, and keeping close to the fence in case the bull is cranky, but I was still the Marlboro Man.

My reverie evaporated as my daughters' whines drifted against the wind to my ears, and I realized that the Marlboro Man probably never had to babysit while out on the range.

__________

*Coincidentally, the author of one of my favorite blogs, Confessions of a Pioneer Woman, refers to her husband as Marlboro Man; I SWEAR I didn't copy that! This was written two or three years ago!

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This was my view from my kitchen window last summer.

Well, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not by too much. Summer is the time when the "ants" work -- laying in feed for the winter. I am a "grasshopper." While I understand what the ants are doing, I'm still secretly annoyed by it.

This summer, mercifully, I did not have a haystack in front of my kitchen window. There is still a lot of hay around the ranch, but someone gave it a little more thought, and it's been stacked in less obtrusive places. Also missing from last summer: the hay truck, loaded with hay, and abandoned in front of our living room window. It sat there

all

summer

long.

I came home from work one autumn evening and the truck and its load were suddenly, magically gone, thank goodness, but they could very easily have become a permanent part of our landscape. At least the load of hay was worth enough for someone to come deal with the ancient, decrepit, pretty much worthless truck.

As the days get cooler, the grass becomes less interesting to the cows, and you have to feed more hay. The funny thing is, the only time we have bright green grass around northern California is the winter and early spring; regardless, cows draw a lot of their winter nutrition from hay. So the ants bring more hay, and stack it.

Just not in front of our house this time.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Here are a few pictures of things that endure on the ranch.

This barn is still very much in use today, both as a hay storage barn and feeding facility, and as a good place to sort and separate cattle. The barn was built in the mid-70s. We used to have one of the best, if not the closest, views of Mt. Lassen in the north valley, and Dad had to go and build a barn in front of it. This became our view out the kitchen window. If you look through the barn, toward the northeast, those mountains are the northern Sierras. Mt. Lassen is behind one of those pole supports. Mom was irritated.

Another old barn suffering from lack of use. It was right in the heart of the action back in the days when the dairy was a 24-hour operation. Now it's home to wasps and spiders, probably pigeons and maybe a few cats, and not much else.

This large, empty and decaying room is the tank room. Imagine a huge stainless steel tank, about eight feet tall, filling every square inch of this room. That was the milk tank. Milk was pumped into it three times a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, without fail. The milk truck, a semi truck-and-trailer tanker, came and picked up the milk once every day, also without fail. Late in the afternoon it was fairly impressive to climb the ladder, open the hatch, and look down into a swirling vat of icy cold white milk, stretching back to the wall, farther back than even the light from the open hatch would reach. If I gave a casual tour of the dairy to a friend or visitor, I always ended with a trip to the tank room.

For a while it was my job to clean the tank. If I stop typing here I'll leave you picturing me in a haz-mat suit, scrubbing away inside the tank with a broom. Nope -- everything was automated. It was a clean, easy, boring, push-button job, but it was critical. Anything dealing with health and public safety is very regulated, and there's little room for sloppiness. Push that button. baby.

There used to be a phone here. Not a good place for a casual telephone call. It's right outside the milk parlor, and the phone (which was removed; you can see the holes and the outline where it was bolted to the wall) was mostly for calls to the electrician, to come fix the barn, or the milker, to get his late butt to work, or Surge, to come fix the milking equipment. With very loud motors running for seven-hour stretches, and people coming in and out of the barn at all hours, this was not a great place to have a phone chat.

When you're in a hurry you can write numbers with your finger, apparently. I don't even want to know what was used for "ink." See the vet's number? Gerry is still our vet -- but now it's just for our stupid cats.

Most places have a john for their facilities. We had a FRANK. It was named after one of the guys who worked there. I'm not sure he appreciated it. I'm quite sure no one cared.

I wouldn't have used that potty for any amount of money.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 11:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Whatever isn't tied down is blown away. Whatever is anchored by gravity is slowly subsumed by Nature.

She's a hungry beast. This was once a hay barn in the middle, with calf pens on each side, each "wing," as it were. That's the doorway of one calf wing, nearly covered over by grape vines.

It's hard to see, but there is a fence under all these grape vines. Probably not for long.

This marsh, just to the north of us, gets bigger every year. Pretty soon the frogs will be in our bathroom.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and apparently the unused silos were just big empty pains in the hiney to Nature; She's brought in the big guns to remedy the situation: fig trees.



Fig leaves are large and showy. I understand why Adam and Eve favored them.

These wasps are retarded. Who would build a nest on a diesel tank, especially the side facing the rain? Well, at least no one will ever set their nest ablaze. No one smarter than a wasp, anyway.

I have more pictures, but it takes me forever to post these with dial-up. Now that our water heater debacle is over, I am slowly getting back to normal again (in relative terms, of course).

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 09:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I avoid obituaries.

I have a keen ability to take on other people's pain and make it my own, so reading tributes to loved ones lost usually leaves me dabbing at my eyes.

So when my friend Kristin (my compatriot from the days when I owned Tom Foolery) called me to tell me that our customer and friend from the store, Carol Conley, had passed away, I was unprepared. Kristin called last week, and I am only now able to write this. I've had the time, but not the heart.

Carol was well-known around areas of north Chico. She put many, many miles on her electric wheelchair, making the rounds among her favorite shopping venues. There, I said it. The first thing a person would notice about Carol was the wheelchair that kept her active in the world, but while the chair set parameters for her, it did not define who Carol was.

Carol was a wife, mother, and grandmother. She had a life of her own, however; I never saw her out and about with anyone else. I believe she was fiercely independent about her comings and goings. There were days, I know, when Carol could not leave her house. She never complained -- not to me, anyway. When she could leave the house, she took full advantage of her mobility, coming in to shop or just chat in my store, in K-Mart, the Chico Christian Book Center, and several other places I knew she frequented. She even took the bus downtown on Friday nights to attend the Friday night concerts in the downtown plaza. That took effort, guts and probably a stubborn streak.

Carol and I had a system when she made a purchase: I retrieved her wallet from her purse, wrote her check for her, entered the check in her register, and then she signed it. The car accident Carol had suffered at the age of sixteen left her hands and arms quite limited, but she could sign her name to her check. I was honored to be trusted digging around in her wallet like that, and over the years we built a nice friendship on that trust and respect.

On days when Carol stayed in, she brought the world into her home through her computer. Typing, I imagine, would have been difficult for her, but surely not as difficult as using a mouse. In any case, Carol preferred to type commands without the benefit of Windows, she told me; she much preferred DOS. I can barely spell DOS, much less have any idea how to use it.

Carol loved a computer fantasy game that she played on-line, making friends literally all around the world. She kept up with their lives, and once shared some pictures with me that had been sent to her from some far-flung acquaintance. (This was maybe ten years ago, when I could e-mail with my computer, and that was about it.) She also collected post cards from around the world. Now, no one wants postcards from Orland, but I asked my parents to bring home a few postcards from some of their overseas travels, to give to Carol.

There were bad days, occasionally, when Carol was very quiet, or tense, even grumpy. Sometimes her medication seemed to bother her. But for all that, she was out in the world, running her errands, living a life.

Since closing my store six years ago I've seen Carol only once or twice, but we used to send each other e-mail jokes. They've been slowing down recently, and come to think of it, I haven't heard from her in a while. We were casual friends, but casual friends who went way back.

I have enormous respect and admiration for the way Carol lived fully, within the boundaries her life had handed her, maybe even pushing them some. To her husband, children, and grandchildren I extend my condolences and best wishes. I will miss Carol.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every once in a while, my brother (I call him Mantel Man in my writing) will write something for me to post on my blog, Foolery. I haven't posted his work at Bumpkins yet (have I?) but today is the day.

Oh, and don't be fooled: Mantel Man may now live in the wilds of Phoenix, Arizona, but he's a Bumpkin, through and through.

(Photo stolen from this guy)

“Poor Sports,” or, “The Swilling Fields”

September 1: dove season opened today.

Long before dawn, we pulled off the freeway south of Phoenix and parked the truck at the Cracker Barrel restaurant and waited for our hunting partner to arrive. Nearby, men stood next to other pickups, apparently for the same purpose. It was way too early for the restaurant to be open. We all might just as well have met outside a wine bar. Wouldn’t that be a picture, now?

A Ford pickup appeared, and soon the three of us were driving down the dark highway past the small town of Maricopa, to a property they had purchased for future construction of homes. For now the land was still covered with palo verde trees and other flora. This morning it also hosted an unusual amount of uninvited fauna.

Turning off the country road, we drove into the property and searched for a spot to park among the pickups owned by trespassing hunters. They were either standing around loading their shotguns in the predawn twilight or relaxing in lawn chairs drinking beer. At six in the morning. Drunk trespassers. With guns.

“Oh. Uh, I didn’t know.” We heard this lame response numerous times as we informed the men that this was private property and thoroughly posted. Even in twilight, it would have been hard to miss all the reflective NO HUNTING signs that we had put up two days before, assuming their trucks’ headlights worked. Moreover, given the number of empty beer bottles on the ground, some of these clowns would have seen twice as many signs.

I haven’t hunted since I was a kid, but I remember the rules: if you want to hunt on someone else’s property, find the owner and ask permission. Offer to share your game with him afterward. And don’t just offer dead birds: give him something plucked, cleaned, and ready for cooking.

The season officially began at sunrise. Half an hour before the sun appeared above the Superstition Mountains, the world around us sounded like a combat zone. Evidently shotgun shells are as underpriced as mass-produced beer. Panicked doves were flying in all directions, and by the time it was legal to fire, the vast majority were long gone.

Returning to our truck an hour later, we noted the trespassers we had asked to leave, still on the property and cleaning their birds. They left us all the parts that were not suitable for cooking. I strolled around their gatherings with a gun over my shoulder, hoping to look slightly menacing while not actually provoking any actual confrontations. I was sober, but I was outnumbered.

Whatever happened to sportsmanship in hunting? Driving home, we pondered our options for next year. The best idea was a barrier across the driveway, with tire-popping devices hidden under the dust just behind it. Now there’s sport! For that I would hide in the bushes with a video camera. The footage would be far more entertaining than the hunting could ever be. Even the doves might laugh.

Posted by Laurie LaGrone at 09:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)