I’ve been trying to write a book since I was sixteen. My biggest inspiration was the very beginning of the Last of the Mohicans. I loved the way James Fenimore Cooper described the land:
“A wide and apparently, an impervious boundary of forests”, “struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains”.
It inspired me to write this:
“In a vast, docile wilderness, a wind chill whipped through an abundance of pine trees, generating a rippling effect of green from an eagle’s view and from the windows of the autumn mist. Cutting through the mountains a few hundred feet to the west, was a river of cold blue, turning itself over the rocks and rapids and housing a school of salmon which jumped from their sanctuary in smooth repetition. Bear would gather at the mouth and wait for a flash of silver to jump unknowingly into their jaws. Scattered gold light lit the passage of fox to run among the roots of the forest floor, which was littered in cones and decaying flora. Nearby a doe and her fawns would trek through, pausing for a minute to warm in the god rays.”
My favorite series, hands down is the Harry Potter series, of course. I’ve always been mesmerized by the way J. K. Rowling can tie any loose end together and make underlying connections that still have yet to be discovered by readers. I love how reading and re-reading her books always offer something new. In fact it was one of the books in the Harry Potter series that inspired my next excerpt. She mentioned Hagrid’s Patchwork quilt, and thinking about the quilt, led me to write this:
“The front door’s frosted patchwork of stained glass colored the snow where the light fell, and the merry sounds of music and laughter muffled behind it. This was it. I pulled the heavy door open with a loud rusty creak and stepped over the threshold. Every nail in the mud room was packed with traveler’s cloaks, coats, woolen sweaters, hats and scarves, hiding both of the log benches. Wet and muddy shoes and boots lined the red wool rug, soaking the floor in dirty puddles. I hung my cloak on one of the lesser burdened nails and went through to the front room, where a woman in a commoner’s clothing stood behind a wooden desk.”
Whether or not these excerpts will form to become a book is unknown. Whether I will ever write an entire novel and publish it is unknown. But for now, I know this:
I can write, my writing is good. I am talented. I can write a novel.
So typically around this time of year, I’ll start to see pictures on Instagram of girls in sweaters posing with pumpkins in the pumpkin patches, or pictures of Starbucks coffee dates, or twinkle lights with blankets and Netflix. I envy those girls. For one thing, my phone camera sucks, for another I don’t feel all that photogenic and my boyfriend isn’t a photographer.
From our trip to Hawes Farms, I have nothing to show. Also, because I have a tendency to live in the moment and completely forget to take pictures, completely forget to post those pictures on social media and then I beat myself up later for it because I could have documented this year’s “fall shit” in a scrapbook when I’m married with kids.
Hawes Farms is a pumpkin patch. Or it just started out that way. It’s a pumpkin patch with a corn maze, a cow train, haunted corn mazes, food, concerts, etc. I’d never been there, I didn’t even know it existed.
Dustin’s mom bought passes for us to go and kept pushing them on us on the weekends.
So we went for the night time part.
I’m not one to complain, but this place was definitely only for kids. The cow train had oil barrels that you sit in and you get taken around the length of the farm, but they were small. There was zip lining that was maybe ten feet long and not very high off the ground. There were go carts that went in a very small circle.
Instead of picking pumpkins like I was expecting there was one pallet of pumpkins with a price tag next to them. The corn maze was fun, although we never actually got very far and we were spied on by a drone.
We sat down with drinks and garlic fries and people watched for awhile. We watched while a concert started up in the back. The woman who was serving made my crown and coke at a 90:10 ratio and I had to chug it before we went into the haunted corn mazes. So I was feeling pretty good. So was Dustin, who was four or five beers deep by then.
The haunted corn mazes turned out to be not very long and full of jump scares. It wasn’t very scary, instead we found entertainment in scaring the actors. Dustin 1 – Kristin 1.
Dustin scared a “Doctor” who was performing some sort of disembowelment surgery. He was following the last group of people and Dustin walked right up behind him and he jumped when he turned around but then immediately went right back into character.
The next haunt, I sneaked up on someone who was pacing in a small storage unit, and yelled “boo!” and made him jump. We made a game out of it and came out laughing.
The last thing, one of the most exciting ones – at first, was the zombie paintball. We were herded into a storage unit, explained what to do and the safety part of it, then herded out to a tractor hauling two trailers. The paintball guns were attached to the rails of the trailer and could only move on a pivot, the “zombies” were just people in padding that looked nothing like zombies whatsoever and the area was a junkyard full of crap. We only got fifty paint balls, and maybe I was just irritated by that point but the high school kids supervising the ride were annoying.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to shoot the pumpkin cannon, pick a pumpkin or anything like that, because that was the morning part and I forgot to bring the tickets for it.
So Dustin and I left to meet our friends at the bar. Which we ended up leaving early, because Dustin had to work the next day and the Monster Truck show was letting out so there were tons of people flooding in.
The tickets, which were supposed to be season passes ended up only being good for one use, even though they cost $300+.
The town defies the laws of physics with it’s street-front porches and barns that lean. It’s country dilapidated; being once a bustling source of gold and lumber in the sixties. Now, due to lack of jobs, it’s a town of biologists mainly studying salmon, or retirees that don’t mind the cold.
In the winter, the roads close, so no one goes in and no one comes out. It’s a hunker down, canned goods, generator operated, hunter and gatherer bitch of a winter, but its the kind of thing that a hearty soul like most that live there can handle. Although some still leave in travel trailers for smoother tides before the everlasting winter rears it’s ugly head.
We went straight through the town and into the mountains. Passing cars on the narrow road is a game of survival of the fittest. One side is a mountain face and the other is a three hundred foot drop to the river below.
There’s three completely different habitats there. In the shadier areas there’s a rain forest, there’s a normal forest where the sun shines, and a desert atop the peaks.
The land is ripe with grapes, blackberries and elderberries, and teeming with game like deer, bear, quail, grouse and dove, or so we thought.
On the left side of the river and across the road from camp, up a mountainside littered with half-burnt pine trees (from a wildfire a few years back), poison oak, loose rock and shale, is the spot I chose from last year. Trudging through is the hardest part because the steepness varies in grades and it only gets worse the higher you climb. Some of the time I had to run on the balls of my feet and catch a pine tree to anchor myself, with my pack and my .270.
Even though its difficult to climb, there’s worn deer trails with week old scat and tracks, and a prominent bear trail with a few days old scat. These trails criss-cross up the whole face of the mountain.
Opening Day at 7:00 AM, I was up and slipping into my Gulch Gear, of which the owner of the company happened to be a friend of Dustin’s dad and was with us on the trip. He gave me the camoflague in the Inceptor style, which has a more desert look to it, but blends well into all terrains, even though it wouldn’t seem that way. It blends into the Oak and Pine habitat surrounding us particularly well.
I went up the mountain, with Dustin, taking four or five steps up and stopping to look around and make sure we weren’t spooking anything.
Halfway up to our spot, I saw something move about a hundred yards ahead of me. It was the brown ass end of something, moving behind the trees. I stopped suddenly and watched a cinnamon colored black bear walk out into the open. There weren’t any cubs trailing it, and it was much bigger than the legal fifty pounds. My heart started pounding adrenaline through my body, and I was excited and terrified at the same time. I dropped to my knees, sliding down the mountain a little, and waited as Dustin raised his rifle, I watched him wait until the bear was in full stride for an open shot at his heart and lungs, with my ears plugged. Then he took it and silence filled the air. The bear dropped and rolled, and almost immediately, Dustin chambered another round that just so happened to jam in his gun.
Our reloads were crimped wrong, since the dies were set for the nickle plated brass ones Dustin’s dad used, and we used the same die on his brass. All of our reloads were crimped wrong, we found that out a few months back when we tested them at a hundred yards. His dad’s gun jammed, and then mine, and Dustin cut his hand opening my bolt to get the round out, and sprayed blood all over my action. We forgot about it of course, and it didn’t get cleaned again until we left for this trip.
While Dustin was struggling to open his bolt, I watched the bear get up and run.
The deal was, if anybody heard a shot they had to turn on their radios to listen to the shooter announce whether it was a miss or not. In a shaky voice, I told Dustin’s dad and brother that he shot a bear.
They came up ten minutes later to begin following the blood trail. We found the initial shot, where there was a spot of dark blood and tissue sprayed across the mountainside, and where the bullet pierced through a leaf. From there we followed the blood drops, down some deer paths, in between pine trees, oak trees, brush and rock. We followed the drops for three hours, losing them for sometimes fifteen minutes, before finding them again and continuing on the path. We followed the blood trail up three hills and down three ravines until we determined that the bear bedded itself down in the last ravine, which was full of chest high blackberry and poison oak. There was no way of getting into it. It was too thick. So we called it a loss.
Dustin’s brother later in the week, shot a bear and lost it in the same kind of situation; in a poison oak infested thicket.
Surprisingly the buck population dropped quite a bit, owing to bear, mountain lion, bobcat and probably genetics. The only buck that was seen was by Dustin was when we were riding around on quads up some back roads. It was a spike, still in velvet.
We captured pictures of doe with fawns, single doe, foxes, squirrels foraging for acorns, decent sized bucks, bobcat, big bear, mama bear with cubs (one had a blond cub), and a rare photo of two mountain lion walking close together on a camera that we’d left up across the river all year, although the camera only took pictures until March. Before leaving, they would wade across and change the SD card and batteries for the next year.
The first few days we were out there it didn’t stop raining.
Cheyenne in her dad’s Gulch Gear camouflage.Trail to the river.
One of the most interesting places in the area is the old homestead. It was said by the locals that it burned down, but some say the government burned it down. Nobody said what happened to the grouchy old man that lived there, but its been abandoned for a long time.
Handmade fence
More fencing
Road with a sign
Road with an old shed
Up close of the shed
Where we think the house used to be
Dilapidated fence
Stone foundation of a structure
Ivy covered walls
Old plumbing
We think this might have been an irrigation system or a well
The vineyard
One of the other most interesting spots was what we called the Bullock’s camp. A group of girls made a summer camp spot down by the river with a sign that said Bullock Girls ’94.
The way to the Bullock camp
Foot bridge
A wind chime
Handmade bench
The camp
Weather stones
Lastly there was the mining camp. There were a lot of mining claims up there, but I don’t think anyone has done any digging since the sixties. We got as far as we could, past the camp of a man who’d been living there but was currently vacant, and into blackberry bushes. The blackberry bushes had overgrown the trail so much that we couldn’t get any farther to the actual mines.
The footbridge to the mining camp.
The view off the footbridge.
An old mining cart.
Old work benches.
Memorials.
Dustin leading the way.
The view from the farthest point we could reach, looking across the river.
This week we’ve started our preparations for our annual hunt trip. It became annual tradition for me only last year, so it will be exciting for me to get a second chance at a buck. The Hunt Trip is such a big deal in this household that it deserves it’s own capitals. Everything revolves around this trip; Weddings, Birthdays, Anniversaries, Pregnancies. My boyfriend’s sister had to change her entire wedding plan to accomidate. Don’t plan a wedding for September, I’ve been told, It’s hunting season.
Rifle season for our zone (B6), starts October 21, so my boyfriend’s dad planned our trip for October 18-28.
We hunt in a remote location in the mountains of Siskiyou County, outside of a small town (or village, basically), called Sawyer’s Bar. It’s about three hours from our house, or half as the crow flies; an hour and a half from my childhood home. To get there takes about two hours of Interstate travel to Yreka, where you turn left at the stoplight and pass two gas stations – one which is still under construction, four fast food joints (a Taco Bell where I started my first official job), a Starbucks, an Autozone, a strip mall containing: a Jcpenney’s (where I started my fourth job and quit in frustration with management), a lovely privately owned restaurant called Linda’s Soup Kitchen that makes amazing sandwiches (with gluten free options!), a Sally’s Beauty which I heard was going out of business or already did, a Papa Murphy’s – the only place we’d buy pizza, a Dollar Tree, the ruins of a Payless Shoe Source – where we bough our school shoes each year, a Raley’s, the DMV, a building that has never been occupied as long as I can remember, an O’Reilly’s and a Walmart Supercenter. Then there’s a second smaller mall across from it that used to have a Blockbuster that I would go to with my mom back in the day, that’s now some sort of cell phone or internet service center and an army recruiter. Once you get through the forest of coorperate America, you take Highway 3, over forest mountain, all the way to Scott Valley, my childhood home.
The first town in the valley is Fort Jones, where I grew up. You pass straight through town, past the Post Office, the Creamery, a little Boutique that went out of business that my friend used to work, a restaurant named after the Bob Marley song “three little birds”, where the Mayor works as a cook – that my brother used to work also as a cook, a doctor’s office, a dentist, what used to be a cute little florist shop now turned into some dance studio for children, the hardware store, the bank that used to be the first branch of Scott Valley Bank – the oldest independent bank in California – where my mom used to work, now turned into some bank that charges fees like taxes, the tiniest stone museum you’ll ever see in your life (that has a taxidermied two headed calf inside), a boarded up restaurant (from a water heater explosion), a restaurant and bar, a church, a laundromat, what used to be a Deli now turned into an apartment, a cafe made out of an old property management company that closed, a Ray’s (small grocery store), a restaurant called Dave’s Place, the only gas station in town, a tire store, a Napa Auto Parts, a minimall that used to be a bowling alley, pizza place and doctor’s office which has been turned into storage and offices and then a bridge over the Scott River and miles of alfalfa fields.
Onto the next town (or a village), Greenview, which has two businesses up against the highway, a feed store and a privately owned gas station, and then you pass by Kidder Creek, and down through the pine trees and fields until you come up on a church that my great-grandparents built with ten year’s worth of donations, it’s tall and proud stained glass window featuring Jesus, a work of art designed by my father.
Etna is the biggest town of the three, it’s the only town with a high school, two Breweries and a Distillery. You have to take Main Street through town to Sawyer’s Bar Road, passing a Dotty’s (a burger joint named after the original owner who served the best soft serve ice cream and burgers and owned a pet Elephant), a historical statue, a motel, a church, the Elementary school, a Ray’s, the bank, the police station, Paysteak Brewing (my favorite bar and restaurant with gluten free beer and bread!), Denny Bar Restaurant and Distillery (which used to be a drug store with an ice cream parlor where my grandma would take me after church sometimes, that my brother now works at that I worked at in the Spring as a hostess and temporarily a cook. Down the road is the cemetary, where my step-grandpa (but we don’t count half or step in our family) is buried, and recently with his brother (my great-uncle) right beside him. Then we go over Etna Summit which is one of the peaks on the PCT trail, and follow the windy road until we reach the town of Sawyer’s Bar, and then a few miles farther to the camp ground where we stay.
Up there, we’ll spend the next two days getting settled in our camp, before we venture out to hunt Mule Deer, Black Bear and Mountain Quail.
This year I only have a deer tag, but I might stop and buy a bear tag.
It’s been over a year since I pulled out my .270, which still has my boyfriend’s blood in the bolt from our fiasco with testing reloads. We bought Barnes copper bullets 150 grain (California outlawed lead for hunting, so now we have to use steel or copper), Winchester brass, Hodgdon Varget powder and primers. During the winter we reloaded our own rounds and put them to the test, some of mine jammed in my gun and it cut my boyfriend’s hand trying to get them out.
Why do we reload? Because copper rounds vary in price – mine are $35 – $40 for 50 rounds depending on where you go. California has also suspended online purchases for ammunition, and implimented a background check for every box of ammo you purchase, charging $1 per check and a check per every single box of ammo, not just a total purchase. So rather than cater to new laws, we decided to buy reloading equipment and make our own rounds so that they will be all the same, weigh the same and shoot the same. Incidentally we will also be using steel shotgun shells.
Contrary to popular belief, I am not a cold blooded killer. As a hunter I do my job to help protect the species. By hunting, we make sure that deer and bear don’t overpopulate and create a lack of food or habitat and bring on disease that might kill off the entire species. After killing the animal, you thank it for providing for your family and you wear it’s blood to honor it. That’s why hunting as a sport is regulated. In Calfornia at the very least, you must have a tag or stamp to hunt as well as a liscense.
So we’ll prep from now until the eighteenth.
Oddly enough, the cat still finds space to sleep on the bed.
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