A Blink Of An Eye And It All Went Bye
Sixty-eight years on the planet, and I find it tough recalling the early years most days. Gotta concentrate on images and connections from those little long-ago snapshots in the brain to piece the memory-weave together to form some manner of context. One of the pictures that pops into the old noggin from time to time shows a modest cabin built upon a hillside with a big oak tree and swing arching over a screened front porch. The leaves gather on the slope as the swing glides over the precipice. A wooden carved signboard is affixed above the porch with the words Casa de Suena (House of Sleep).
The cabin offered a great escape from the everyday for adults and kids of the two related families, who over the summer months would take the modest drives from Bakersfield to Breckenridge Mountain. My grandfather with my dad, and some paid skilled labor assistance from plumbers and carpenters they knew and hired, had built the cabin over a lengthy period of time from the late 1930s until its completion a couple of years after WWII. It had a small gas generator to keep on a few lights, a radio and a small black & white television set.
Television in those by-gone days of the 1950s was a big deal, but with very limited choices. In Bakersfield we had three channels. At the cabin during our usual weekend stays I prayed for just one channel to actually come in on the little set. That was the CBS channel where Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese would broadcast the usual Yankees versus the you-pick-the-team Tigers/Indians/Red Sox/Orioles/White Sox/Athletics/Senators- baseball game of the week. A lot of snow on the screen, a little sound with much antenna shuffling and maneuvering to try and catch the plate appearances of Mickey Mantle. "We didn't come up to this beautiful spot for you to watch TV", I can hear my mother say.
So most of the time was spent exploring the great outdoors along trails the original parcel owners of the land (a few of the mucky-mucks of Kern County in the 1920s and 1930s) had purchased and semi-developed with varying structures at the Breckenridge community. Cattle grazed in some of the meadows, and a few little creeks meandered through the mountainside. Fools gold shone through these small waterways. Mining for real gold filled a kid's imagination along with adventures of the old west brought to life on dusty pathways with the potential of bandits and bears lurking everywhere. On one trip my cousin, Jim, and I discovered an archeological
find....well, okay it was some poor cow's remains of bones in a bog that
we dug up and laid out for the world to see. I think we got a couple of
"attaboys" from the adults.
Water was precious, and a large water tower had been installed to
service the very small community of cabins that made up this old
hideaway. The
cry from adult men and women alike all through the mountainside abodes
was, "Don't drink the water!" And so, every adult I witnessed drank
large amounts of beer, vodka, gin or bourbon to quench their thirst.
Kids downed soda-pops. Although,
there was a toilet with indoor plumbing in our cabin there was also a
Marine toilet outhouse which everyone occasionally used. "Don't use too much water now."
Hunting rifles and pistols were common in most cabins I visited on the mountain. Our cabin had a deer head mounted over the fireplace. A trophy from one of my grandfather's hunting trips to Yosemite many years before. The synapses fire up old black and white photographs of my grandfather with men and women on horseback with a snowy background all holding some variety of rifle in a long lost Yosemite wilderness area ready for the hunt.
I learned how to fire a pistol and a rifle from my dad over many of our weekends we spent at the cabin. Learned how to clean and maintain guns. My father was actually quite a marksman. I stood next to him as he shot a rattlesnake at ten paces away when he stopped on one of our treks up the winding road from our home to the cabin. Hit the snake right in the head. Lucky shot? I saw him take an old bb-gun and nail a mouse moving up our cabin wall from 20 feet away right between the eyes. The old man could shoot. My father collected an odd assortment of guns over his lifetime. Flintlock rifles, WWII M-1, an old Winchester 25-20, some shotguns and a few old pistols from the 1880s of differing calibers. Most of these were the artifacts of history and were a testament of his fondness for that "old west" period he just missed. My dad got his talent from my grandfather's family with colorful and sad stories of mining, logging and craziness. Here are a couple of shots from long gone relatives of mine way back in the 1890s. AS you can see the women in our families always wore the pants. My gramps is the young "lass" second from the left. Old times, good times!
During my cabin years, so to speak, westerns were a big deal on the television networks. Shows like Wanted Dead Or Alive, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Maverick, Bonanza, Cheyenne, The Lone Ranger, Bronco, Colt .45 along with many others from this dusty oft-used genre filled the evening schedules to compete against the many variety shows and Perry Mason episodes. The western settings from a long ago America with a few major characters working out various moral questions or dramatic situations fit the evening bill from the late 1950s to mid 1960s. Guns and plots were pretty simple. It was a black and white world.
Thanks for stopping by to check in on a time and space snap shot from quite a few miles back. This was a favorite motto for those days.
