Remembrances of a Half-Century Ago
Phil Barker finds differing customs in Ohio and California
Submitted by: Phil Barker, 5/5/2007
This entry relates to the past
Category(ies) of this entry: Coming to Davis, Nature, Holiday -
Christmas
California poppies along the roadsides filled us with awe and joy when
my wife, Mildred, and I arrived in the great valley of California upon
moving in our new VW bug from Columbus, Ohio, to Davis in summer
1957. I gathered a bouquet of California poppies from the
roadside the following spring to take to Mildred, who had just
delivered our first-borne at the Woodland Clinic Hospital. To my
surprise, she was concerned that I had decimated California’s landscape
by plucking those California poppies, which I’ve never done
again!
On our first holiday season here, following custom I had known when
growing up on a farm near Logan, Ohio, my wife and I cut two little
Christmas trees from the wilds in the Sierra Mountains, several miles
east of Placerville. We tied them across the back bumper of our
VW bug and headed home. Shortly, we were stopped by a highway
patrolman and were confronted with a sobering embarrassment. The
patrolman excused our naïve behavior and allowed us to heave those
precious little conifer gems back into the dense woods.
Next year, we drove to a U. S. Forest Service-authorized Christmas tree
cutting area; dutifully affixing legal cutting permits on the two trees
we cut there.
One weekend we drove on narrow logging roads far back into the forest
northeast of Auburn. There we encountered an abandoned logging
camp. Still hanging on a post at this camp was a triangular-bent
iron rod, which obviously had been a “dinner bell” to call the sawyers
from the woods at mealtime. It symbolized to me the lifestyle of
early-day woodsmen, which Stewart Holbrook so vividly had described in
his book, “Holy Old Mackinaw.” We left that tempting souvenir
hanging on the post as continuing evidence of by-gone days of old
growth timber harvesting in California’s rugged Sierra Nevada
Mountains.
Today, half a century later, I wonder if that “dinner bell” yet hangs
on the post in yonder mountains and doubt that my having gotten
California poppies from the roadside has diminished the population of
this ubiquitous California native.