Revisiting the site of Poison Rock Lookout.
Hiking in Mitchell Canyon at Mount Diablo State Park and on other nearby trails, I often think of the events that made me, a Los Angeles city boy, become an outdoors lover, a blessing I often give thanks for. The first was a weekend camping trip to Sequoia National Park when I was 10 or 11 with my Aunt Betty and Uncle Clarence Vigario and some friends of theirs, and the second was a summer spent on Poison Rock Lookout in the Mendocino National Forest of Northern California the year I turned 15. After the second of those two experiences it likely would have been easy for anyone with a knowledge of poetry to predict that Gary Snyder, Han Shan and the classic Japanese haikuists would be my favorite poets.
I recall of the Sequoia trip several exciting moments: Putting up the heavy canvas tents that folks had in those days; cooking out over a fire and sleeping out by myself under the big trees and stars in a sleeping bag and waking up early the next morning with a blue jay perched on my knee, which seemed a miracle to me, it was my outdoors "AHA!" moment; and seeing Tharp's Log Cabin, a cabin literally inside the fallen trunk of a giant sequoia.
It was only a two-night trip, but was my first awakening to the wonders of the outdoors.
The summer at Poison Rock was the other “great outdoors” turning point in my life. It was a pivotal time. I was about to turn 15 and had just completed my second year of high school at Lynwood Academy. I was not terribly happy or well adjusted, being abnormally shy since my move from the long familiar and small environment of Huntington Park Seventh-day Adventist School with its grand total of 51 students in eight grades. My graduating class there was three people! I was in early adolescence and beginning a very awkward
transformation from boy to young man, the same one my peers were experiencing, but we each experienced it at different rates and in different ways. Some were fully grown by age 15, but of course others didn’t reach full growth until a year or two or three later. Yet we were all judged (and judged ourselves) by the same standards. Failure to fit the cookie-cutter mold of our ideal of what we should be meant deep personal agony and shame, at least for me.
Nor was there anyone with whom I could talk about such things. Oh, I could have talked to Mom, but these were boy/man worries and I had no father figure or mentors to confide in. Or at least didn’t think I did. So, the fire lookout summer came at just the right time to allow me some breathing space in an entirely new environment, to experience living with people I normally did not live with, and to do things that helped me shed my baby fat, both mentally and physically.
My mother and her husband-to-be, Dr. H. Brinton Allison, arranged it with Lawrence Albright, who had been my teacher in the seventh and eighth grades. I don't recall exactly how it came about, only that it became known that Larry, as he was called, and his wife June wouldn't mind having a little help with their children, Laurie (another Lawrence), who was I believe 3 or 4, and Forey (Forrest), who was about 1, since June was very pregnant and would need some assistance with chores around the lookout and another set of eyes to help watch the kids. I'm sure Mom and Brint were glad to have some time to themselves and of course I was thrilled at the chance to spend a summer on a fire lookout.
The summer began with a long drive north from Los
Angeles to Angwin, CA, where there was a Seventh-day Adventist school, Pacific Union College, and where the Albrights -- Larry, his mother and father and grandparents, the Leffingwells, owned a house. They rented the house to students and/or instructors from the
College during the school year, and the parents and grandparents spent summers there. So the trip north included Lawrence, June, the two kids, me and Mrs. Helen Albright, Larry's mother and my teacher in first through fifth grades at Huntington Park Seventh-day Adventist School, all crammed into one car, as I recall a big old four-door sedan of some kind. The car also pulled a two-wheel trailer loaded with food and goods to take to the house and the fire lookout.
Even that innocent journey provided a bit of social awakening. We had a couple of blowouts on the way, one along Highway 152 near Los Banos. We stopped at OK Rubber Welders to buy a recapped tire. They were very commonly used in those days before steel-belted radials. That stop provided my first up-close look at a migrant workers' camp next door, and I recall being appalled at the conditions, this being well before even the rudimentary reforms won by Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union. I was a little frightened at what I saw and wondered how people could live in such squalor. Of course, I had very little idea of the issues involved.
We spent two weeks in Angwin before heading for the lookout. Larry and I worked much of that time rebuilding the four-cylinder engine of his World War II surplus Willys Jeep, which he had outfitted to run on much cheaper butane, thus becoming an environmentalist well ahead of his time into the bargain. We worked in the big old garage/workshop building behind the house. I
slept in a sleeping bag on a piece of plywood placed over the roof joists in the attic of the small house. It was airless and hot up there, but I didn't complain much because it didn't do any good. I suppose I could have moved outside, but no one, including me, thought of it. I remember how relieved I was when we hitched the trailer to the overhauled Jeep and loaded it. The next morning we got up with the sun and headed farther north up Highway 101, me and Laurie and the dog, whose name I cannot recall, a mongrel hound of some sort, in the back metal jump seats of the Jeep along with more stuff and the big butane fuel tank, and June and Larry and Forry in the front seats. All of us were in a state of exhilarated anticipation, glad to be out of the crowded little house and on our way to the back country. The little 4-cylinder Jeep would not go much more than 45 mph while pulling the loaded trailer, and it seemed an incredibly slow and long drive, cramped as I was in that hard back seat.
We finally turned off Highway 101 somewhere around
Laytonville and began a narrow winding road that soon became dirt. It was about 60 miles to Covelo, the wee town where the main ranger station was. We stopped there to check in, Larry picked up a couple of things needed at the lookout and then we headed off on the dirt road to the lookout, another 15 or 20 miles of rough going. We
had to keep an eye out for dust clouds approaching from the other direction as logging trucks were rolling in and out of there with little heed for anyone else. If we saw a dust cloud, we'd start looking for a place to pull off the road. This happened several times each time we used the road all summer. By summer's end the dust on the road was a foot deep. I can only imagine the muck it must have become when the first heavy rains of fall or winter hit.
Finally, we arrived at the lookout, where Larry and June had previously worked each summer for several years, a three-story wooden building that tapered a bit from bottom to top, and housed a garage and storage area on the first floor, a dormitory-style bedroom on the second floor with eight or 10 metal cots for fire crews (where I and the two kids would sleep) and a fire lookout/main living area on the top floor where June and Larry lived. There were big windows all the way around to top floor and a catwalk around the outside. It had a bed, a stove, a wooden table and chairs, and in the middle of the room, an azimuth fire finder set up atop a topographical map for pinpointing the location of any smoke or fire in the days before satellites and GPS. A radio was bolted to the ceiling next to the fire finder for contact with other lookouts and the main ranger station. It hissed and crackled all day long every day from sunrise until signoffs by all the lookouts at sunset. There was a weather report and forecast each evening over the radio. Poison Rock Lookout was razed in the late 1950s, so I was lucky to spend a summer there before its demise. The concrete pad under the building is still there.
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The Cold War (United States versus the Union of
Soviet Socialistic Republics; democracy v. socialism) was still in full sway that year, in fact still gearing up to full speed, so one of our lookout duties was to catalog and identify as best we could any passing aircraft. We had binoculars and a handbook listing various types of aircraft, U.S. and foreign, and we would peer into the sky and study the aircraft silhouettes in the guidebook whenever a plane passed, hoping to help prevent any foreign attacks, never doubting the idea that such might occur. These were the days, after all, when schools still ran regular nuclear attack drills, having students crouch under their desks whenever the “alarm" was sounded. We were cautioned not to pick up items like ballpoint pens laying in the street as they might contain toxic substances or germs planted by communists. Needless to say, we never spotted any foreign aircraft while on the lookout, and in those days there was no fear of terrorists hijacking U.S. planes to stage an attack. The world simply hadn‘t come to that yet.
The lookout duties included many that I would never have imagined. For instance, each day we took weather readings from a weather station enclosed in a post-and-deer-wire fence just below the lookout. We had to clear away a fire break for 10 feet around the lookout and the weather station, which we did with a tool I'd never seen before called a McLeod, a combination hoe and heavy rake that is used by firefighters. It was hot, hard work in the sun and we capped it off by "testing" the back pumps kept in the garage for fighting fires. These were large metal tanks of water held in backpack frames. They held 40 gallons of water that could be hand pumped through a hose and nozzle. They pumped a fairly powerful stream of water about 20 to 30 feet. Our test consisted of a laughter-filled chase and “firefight” that was really nothing more than a water fight with unusually large water guns. It was a great way to cool off and even get a shower in the bargain after all that hard, dusty clearing work.
As the Albrights' guest, I wasn’t really an employee of the forest service, so I had more free time than Lawrence and June, who had to make hourly walks around the top-story catwalk with the binoculars to carefully watch for any smoke that might herald a fire. There was only one real fire while I was there, a snag on a ridge that was hit by lightning. Lawrence took the Jeep and the back pump and other gear to fight it. He was gone most of one day, and reported that it had been a hard one to extinguish, since getting to it involved hiking downhill through rough terrain with the backpump and other gear. Then he had don spurs and safety harness to climb partway up the snag in order to top it and extinguish the blaze. It was dangerous work, especially since he was alone. The real fire season didn't start until August, when fall lightning storms often touched off blazes. In those days the philosophy was to fight all
fires, whereas now some are left to burn themselves out as part of the natural order of things.
There was no running water at the lookout, so we
had to drive five miles about once a week to Fouts Springs to fill four or five milk cans with our drinking and bathing water supply. The springs were otherwise little-used except during deer season, about which more later. It was in a forest service campground set among forest trees. The water gushed into a set of wooden, hollowed-out half-log troughs and was cool and crystal clear, the best water I have ever tasted, before or since. That made for one of our first official tasks: We spent one afternoon cleaning out the source and the troughs to make sure they were free of blockages. The drives to and from the springs required constant vigilance for those approaching dust clouds that signaled logging trucks.
Whether logging was occurring on Forest Service
land or private property, I can’t remember, if I ever knew. A man named Barnes, who reputedly owned the largest school bus service contract in the state, owned a 50,000 acre ranch in the midst of the government land, so it might well have been on his property. He lived in a ranch house way up in the mountains with two grown sons. I was in awe of them, as they were strapping specimens well over 6 feet tall whose muscular arms and shoulders ballooned like those of superheroes or L’il Abner hillbillies from beneath the straps of their coveralls. We paid one visit to the ranch just before deer season and they were quite friendly, but it was such a long drive into the ranch that we did not repeat the visit.
By far our biggest chore was the beginning of a project to restore and repair downed telephone lines into the mountains. Lawrence and I spent many a day pruning tree limbs and restringing phone line. I don’t believe the project was completed while I was at the lookout. But the hours I spent wielding axe and two-man saw and stacking fallen limbs and cleared brush with Lawrence Albright were part of what transformed me from a somewhat flabby 14-year-old into a slender, strong 15-year-old that summer. On some basic level they also satisfied me in a way that nothing I had done up until then ever had. It was the first real, valuable use of my energy and I felt proud that I could do a man’s work.
Each day started shortly after daybreak, with a breakfast of white rice cereal with honey and the first vigil around the catwalk. Rice, beans and bread were our main sustenance that summer, we had hundred-pound bags of rice and beans; this was another factor in my great physical change. Breakfast was usually a bowl of rice with powdered milk and honey and maybe a slice of pan-browned bread. I patrolled the base of the lookout each morning and afternoon to be sure no rattlesnakes were lurking about, potential dangers to ourselves and especially to the kids. I saw only one there all summer, and it quickly slithered under the structure, making me extremely careful to watch my step thereafter.
And yes, that was the reason it was called Poison Rock Lookout. It was situated on top of Sally Ridge, which ran all the way from the road down to a fork of the Eel River, as I recall a distance of three or four miles. Just a quarter-mile to a half-mile or so below the lookout down the ridge was an outcropping of
rocks that was the real Poison Rock: A huge pile of geological rubble that was honeycombed with tunnels in which literally dozens, maybe even hundreds of rattlers resided. You could stand a short distance from this reptile condo complex and toss a rock into it to set off a full orchestra of rattling. We went down the ridge that far only once, during deer-hunting season, and encountered a hunter and his companions coming back up the ridge. The one in front was holding a fat, five-foot rattler that he had just shot. He held it proudly aloft, and Lawrence said, "Yes, you could stand here shooting them all day until all your ammo was gone and you wouldn't even make a dent in them!" The guy shook his head and walked on with his compadres while we went on down the ridge checking for campsites and fire permits.
We made only three or four long-distance trips away from the lookout during the time I was there, but memorable events occurred on at least two of those, and a memorable disappointment of adolescent puppy love on another.
One was a drive into Covelo to pick up supplies. Not anything terribly exciting, but we did fail to detect the approach of an empty, highballing logging truck until too late to look for a place to easily pull off the road to let it pass. Rather than take on the rig head-on, Larry drove the Jeep right up a four-foot embankment. We sailed over the top and through the air for several feet then hit the ground with a jarring thud, and the truck roared past, the driver laughing and waving. We were unhurt, as apparently was the Jeep. The only loss was the dog, who flew out the back hatch (which had been removed) as we went over the top, but he also survived
unhurt. We checked him over, loaded him back into the Jeep and went on our way, eyes still wide as we exclaimed to each other about the close call.
The second memory involves puppy love. There was a family of Seventh-day Adventists who lived on a small ranch in Covelo and on one of our trips there (it had to have been on a Sunday), we visited them and stayed for dinner. Among their passel of kids was a girl about my age who was to me the most beautiful creature. I was smitten. She was brown-tanned, with long dark hair and brown eyes and wearing a simple knee length smock, barefoot. I can't recall her name. She looked like the prototype for the hippie girls who were later so enchanting.
I spent the day playing with her and her brothers and silently rejoicing in her presence, too shy to say much. When we left in the late afternoon, she was etched in my heart and mind and I looked forward eagerly to the next visit, assuming it might become a regular occurrence. Alas, this was not to be. The only other time we visited, we did not stay for dinner, and she was not home, nor did she return before we departed. I never saw her again. But I remember her to this day.
The best trip away from the lookout was a Sunday drive of 20-some miles (as I remember) to visit Hull Mountain Lookout, not too far from Lake Pillsbury. Larry often chatted by radiophone with the fellow who was working there. On one of the Albrights’ days off we headed there to break the monotony of Poison Rock. The "road" was a dirt track that at one point seemed to all but disappear. One big thrill was going straight up a very steep hill in four-wheel drive, so steep that June and I had to keep a close eye on the kids and dog to be sure they didn't bounce out the back. The sturdy, four-wheel-drive Jeep chugged right up.
A little later, we rounded a curve and came upon
a doe and her fairly new fawn at the side of the road. The doe bounded off into the forest, leaving her fawn lying at the edge of the road as still as possible, head cradled between forelegs, playing dead so we wouldn't see it. We all got out of the Jeep and looked closely at it, but heeded Larry's warning not to touch it because the mother wouldn't have anything to do with it if she came back and caught human scent on it.
We got back into the Jeep and rolled on to Hull Mountain. The visit was quite short because we had to allow time to get back to Poison Rock for evening radio check. The biggest thrills of the trip occurred on the way back, the first going back down the steep grade we'd climbed on the way in (like being on a roller coaster) and the second when we rounded the curve where we'd seen the fawn. Lo and behold! A mountain lion was sniffing around the spot where the fawn had been when we came through on the way to Hull Mountain!
There was a bounty on cougars in those days. They were considered predators on livestock. The $50 stipend was a lot of money, especially to a private school teacher with four mouths to feed (five for the summer, counting me; six counting the dog). Larry reached for his .22 rifle, which was down between the front seats, but by the time he’d grabbed it, that big cat was gone up the mountain and into the woods, moving as swiftly, silently and gracefully as anything I've ever seen, before or since. It was so quick that you almost had a hard time believing you'd actually seen what you'd seen. I was glad the cougar had gotten away and marveled over the beauty of it. I still do. It's the only time in my life at age 80 that I ever saw a cougar in the wild.
The only other notable occurrence on the trip was
the skunk who ambled down the middle of the narrow dirt road, slowing our progress considerably. After 50 yards or so of carefully following him at a crawl, with us keeping a respectful distance and Larry commenting "I don't want to have to shoot him or we'll all have to bathe in tomato juice," the varmint finally wandered off the road into the brush and we gathered speed on the dusty road back to the lookout.
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Speaking of Larry's .22 rifle reminds me that one of the other great pleasures, and a bit later, one of the great lessons of that summer was being allowed to learn to shoot. My Uncle Joe had loaned me his very nice Remington .22 bolt-action rifle, and Larry instructed me in its use. It was surprisingly easy to become fairly adept at shooting, and it was a skill we put to use often, bagging rabbits and squirrels to cook over the Sterno stove for the dog. That saved Larry and June the expense and hassle of carrying along large amounts of dog food. It also set the stage for another sort of awakening.
One afternoon Larry and I were on our way back to the lookout from a day of phone-line work, and saw a jackrabbit browsing in the brush just off the road. Larry stopped, and we got out our rifles and began blazing away at the hapless creature. It bounded away and kept on going and going like the Everyready bunny as we fired again and again, amazed that we could be missing so badly. Finally, the rabbit toppled over in the brush. We went to retrieve it and discovered that it had been hit 22 times but had kept running. To me this was an eye-opener about how much all living creatures want to live, and how cruel it is to take their lives. Shooting small creatures lost its allure for me that day. For the rest of the summer I fired above any live targets, but didn`t say anything about it to Larry for fear he would not appreciate my sentiments. To him, it was a perfectly fine thing to hunt, so long as you used the meat and weren't just killing for pleasure. But I could not shake the memory of that poor rabbit's valiant effort to outrace our bullets even though the gae served a real purpose in feeding the dog.
It now seems a bit curious that although Larry Albright was a Seventh-day Adventist, and as such a conscientious objector to the taking of human life, he apparently had no compunctions about shooting wild creatures. He had quite an array of weapons, including the previously mentioned .22 rifle, a .30-06 rifle, a .45-40 and a .357-magnum pistol. He also reloaded his own cartridges and had the necessary tools for doing that. He let me fire the two other rifles he'd brought (they about knocked me down!) and we did quite a bit of target shooting. Since I'd been raised on cowboy and war movies it was exciting and fun.
Larry was careful to teach me basic gun safety. He looked forward with some trepidation to the opening of deer season, the only time our neck of the woods became literally crammed with camping hunters. It was the most dangerous time of the year, he explained, as too many hunters gathered in a concentrated area, many of them drinking excessively. Every year there would be at least one hunting "accident" wherein a cow or another hunter would be shot. While we were there, a man blew part of a knee away while climbing through a barbed-wire fence with his rifle's safety off.
Part of Larry's job was to circulate among the campsites, the majority of which were randomly located outside regular camping areas, and make sure they were cleared of fire hazardous material and that hunters had fire permits. The gun hunting season was preceded by an archery season. Only three or four such hunters came to our area, and they were no problem. I and Larry agreed that their kind of hunting was much more sportsmanlike, in that they had to be really stealthy hunters to get close enough to get a good shot at a stag, even though they used powerful crossbows. They also seemed to be more aware than the majority of gun hunters about fire safety and respect for others and others' property.
The gun hunters were another situation entirely. The afternoon before their deer season opened, a state Fish and Game warden paid us a visit to sit with us atop the lookout and watch the snaking lines of vehicles -- bumper to bumper -- crawl into the area and set up camps. The warden explained that he was one of only 12 fish and game officers responsible for covering the entire state and enforcing hunting and fishing laws, an obvious impossibility.
I was amazed at the seemingly endless stream of vehicles into our area, and we watched their headlights snake along the road well after sunset. We saw some who obviously had headed off-road and were spotlighting: illegally using spotlights to try to find and shoot deer. There was, of course, no way to try to drive against the traffic to try to enforce this. Besides that, the warden was equipped with only a standard American sedan with no four-wheel drive while many hunters were in four-wheel-drive vehicles. We could only watch and bemoan the invasion.
The next day, Larry and I took the Jeep and visited as many campsites as possible to check fire permits and safety. Larry carried his .357-magnum in a holster on his hip. It would, he said, discourage any belligerence from overly lubricated hunters. We had no trouble with most of the campers, but near the end of the day we arrived at the campground at Fouts Springs. It was filled with camping groups of hunters, including one group that had obviously had a bit too much firewater. Among them one big fellow who had had even more than most and became surly when Larry criticized the way their fire was set up and asked to see a permit. This fellow stood up, picked up a rifle and started down the slight slope from where he had been sitting, bellowing that he didn't have to have any
damned permit. He went only a few steps before stumbling and falling flat on his face a few steps from us, where he lay passed out.
Larry angrily lectured the group, warning that if they didn‘t clean u;p their act, he would order them to leave the next day. The other hunters apologized and said they would take care of their fallen comrade. Larry wrote a citation for the lack of fire permit, and we went on our way, Larry relieved that he had not had to utilize his considerable judo skills or his sidearm.
It was a great relief when the weekend ended and most of the hunters went home. There was even one who stopped by the lookout to report himself for accidentally shooting a doe. He had the carcass in the trunk of his car. Larry told him that he could do nothing about it and had never had anyone turn himself in for that crime, and told him to check at the ranger station in Covelo on his
way out to see what should be done.
Once hunting was over things quieted down again, but with fall approaching, Larry watched for smokes with renewed vigilance. We knew that soon lightning storms would touch off fires to be quelled. Other than the one snag fire, that didn't happen while I was there. I had to go home to resume high school before the real danger began.
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A few other memorable things occurred during that summer on the fire lookout. Once I saw a mama porcupine scurrying away in some rocks below the lookout as I approached on one of my little hikes. I went to investigate, and discovered a her den in a shallow cave in the boulders. Inside were about four of the cutest future
prickly pears you've ever seen. Of course, when I went
back the next day to check on them, mama had moved them away.
Then there was the first "long" hike of my life. It
occurred because of an argument with Larry and June about
washing dirty diapers. I don't remember the details, but it concluded with Larry ordering me away from the lookout for a while until I thought I could be civil.
I gladly stomped off, relieved to be freed of a nasty, difficult task, which involved heating water, filling a washtub, and scrubbing the diapers on a washboard. There were no disposable diapers in those days, and of course we had no washing machine. I crossed the dirt road and walked off down the ridge and away, too mad to think much about where I was going or what I would do once well away from the lookout. I was a pretty good walker anyway, because like others of my generation, I hadn't spent my life glued to a TV set or computer. We had always played outside and run up and down the block and ridden our bikes, and I had walked to school and home for eight years, which was probably a distance of about two miles a day. If we went to a movie, we walked. If we went to the grocery store or barber shop we walked. So I was at least to that extent fit and ready, and that had been augmented by the telephone line work.
After some time and distance, however, my anger cooled and I began to wonder if I could backtrack my way home. I hadn't really paid enough attention to where I'd gone to feel confident about doing that, and just about the time the first tinges of fear began to set in, I came to another dirt road. I had ridden in the Jeep around the area enough to be pretty certain that this road led back to the road to the lookout, so I turned in what I thought was the right direction and started along it. Again, just about the time I was thinking it was much farther back to the main road than I thought it should be, there was the main road, so I knew I was on the right track. What probably seemed a longer walk than it really was brought me to the lookout where Larry and June greeted me with relief. I had been gone so long that Larry had worried and had tried to track me, but quit when my tracks led to the second road, figuring I'd know where to go from there. My guess in retrospect is that I’d taken about a five- or six-mile ramble, and I was rather proud of myself for doing that and finding my way back. It was a confidence-builder for a teen-ager who was none too sure of himself.
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Alas, the summer ended all too soon, with my
parents driving to the U.S. 101 turnoff toward Covelo to meet Larry and pick me up for the drive home. They found a very changed young man, three inches taller and 23 pounds lighter. I wasn't aware of it fully at the time, but it was the beginning of a long period of rapid changes in my life and the trip home included my first visit to San Francisco. That planted the seeds of my later desire to live there. But that's a story for another time.
