Meanwhile back at the ranch (read- farm), these last several weeks have gotten busy. Every-day-is-a-12-hour-day busy. I resoled both of my nine-year-old leather Wolverine boots just to cut through them with the rototiller the next day. I ran up one of the steepest paved roads in America. I picked up an old hitchhiker who lives in a tent on the Klamath River. I saw redwoods. I learned about calf branding and castration from a 60-year-old OG western cowboy. I was informed in a long conversation about Spinoza and Thomas Paine from a local Happy Camp resident. I ate a squirrel.
Beyond ranching knowledge, the biggest takeaway I got from an afternoon spent getting drunk with the old cowboy was one joke.
“What’s the word for bra in German?”
“Dat schud stoppem frum flappen”
Anyway, I’ll skip past Thomas Paine, you all can read the Wikipedia page on his essay Common Sense without me, and get straight to the squirrel. The old wolf-dog here caught it as it ran out from the greenhouse. I figured as long as I’m sleeping in a tent living off beans and cornbread I might as well dive in deep with the rest of the wilderness living skills. Which of course requires sauteeing it with garlic and shallots in a red wine sauce after refrigerating it in a liquid amino marinade for 24 hours, served over brown rice with a black-currant gravy. I don’t cook meat often, but it turned out as well as one could have hoped. Now I just have to get better at skinning.
I made it out to the Redwoods and have done some hiking in the Marble Mountain Wilderness, which is where I finally got some first-hand knowledge of the California Conservation Corps. I saw a rattlesnake and mountain lion tracks on the trail just before treeing a very small, very loud black bear cub with the mother nowhere in sight. I had the binoculars out and once I honed in on the source, just a hundred yards away, m hiking partner and I booked it. The folks working for the Cs live out there for the duration of the project which can include trail construction and cleanup, a task often taken for granted with the hundreds of thousands of miles of trails maintained by the US government for public use each year.
The Redwoods, America’s greatest national treasure, never lose their grandeur. I managed to hike 20 miles that day and only see one person. How can the world’s most impressive living beings stay so unknown to the curious public? If everyone got to see the redwoods at least once in their life I can’t imagine there could ever be another armed international conflict. And the best part, it’s free. Just pay your taxes (or get your friendly neighborhood billionaire to).
On the way home I picked up a man hitching his way upriver to a tent he had stashed down the side of the canyon alongside the Klamath. He said he was retired and spends half the year livign outdoors fishing for trout and salmon and half volunteering in the Sierra Nevadas. As I drove slowly along the twisting canyon road he told me more about Rhinovirus (the common cold) than I could learn in a day’s college lecture and said he’d traveled over 1,000,000 miles in his life, hitting almost every continent more than once. I saw some part of myself in this wayward man and was a little scared.
Between this and the bear which left its prints in the lettuce patch last night, life is staying interesting. I’ll try to finish up the motorcycle story before the ultra-rare squirrel prion disease sets in.
kalvin dot life 