Up Ash Creek

Amanda Hall

During grade school, I lived up Ash Creek Road, about ten miles outside of Yreka, CA. I lived in an old cabin with my mother and step-father. Our cabin was made out of bare pine boards that revealed the knot holes and imperfections of the wood. Our roof was covered with shiny sheet metal that amplified the drip drop of the rain during mid-August storms. We didn’t have modern conveniences like electricity, a phone, or indoor plumbing; nature was our only real resource. While many students learned science and history by sitting in a classroom absorbing the lecture of the day, I spent my time outdoors learning from Mother Nature. Because of this, my education separates me from most suburban and urban students. Following Aldo Leopold, in A Sand County Almanac, “I here record some of the many lessons I have learned in my own woods,”(Leopold, pg 78, 1966).

Springtime was the most beautiful time of year up Ash Creek. While the blooming Indian Paint Brushes, Lupines, and Douglas fir trees painted a colorful landscape, the butterflies were the real treasure. Ash Creek is unique because it is home to some of the world’s rarest butterflies. Directly down the dirt road from our cabin, a waterfall flowed out of the crevices of a rock embankment and seeped into the top soil of the dusty old road. Large maple trees grew out of the creek bed and created a shady getaway for the butterflies. Swarms of different colored butterflies would flock to this area. Among the masses were the Lourquin’s Admirals with black wings, white bands and a small spot of orange on the tips of the upper parts of their wings, Tiger Swallowtails with stripes of glowing yellow and deep black, tiny baby blue Summer Azures that reminded me of blossoming Morning Glories, and Monarchs with bright orange wings outlined with black bands and white spots (Big Sky Institute). A group of retired teachers from the east coast came up the creek every year to see which butterfly species they could find perched on rocks or gliding through the clear blue sky. They gave me my first net and guide to the different species. From them, I learned how to catch, identify, and preserve butterflies.

During the summers, I spent most of my time playing in the creek. We had stairs made out of pieces of railroad ties that led down to our swimming hole. An old rope hanging from a large Maple Tree provided us a swing. The swimming hole was icy cold from snowmelt, but the gleam of the suns rays warmed it up just enough for me to pleasantly cool off. The creek dried out during the hot summers so no fish or water based creatures could survive. Many water skippers skimmed the surface, while pebbles and fallen leaves from the nearby maple tree covered the creek bed. The water acted as a magnifying glass helping me catch the stick bugs crawling around on the silty floor of the swimming hole. I first learned about engineering from the creek. I helped my step-father build a slow sand filter out of an old metal drum, clean sand, and gravel from the creek bed for our water system. I also learned to build dams by stacking up rocks in narrow parts of the creek to make the swimming hole deeper.

My classrooms consisted of old mining caves, a pair of large Manzanita bushes, and a large meadow filled with soft green grass. A cave about 200 feet deep resides in what used to be my backyard. There are several caves like this that were likely created by old miners back in the Gold Rush days. Near the back of the cave, water seeped out of the mossy cracks and gathered into shallow pools on the muddy rocks below. I learned about the Gold Rush from the large rock deposits left near the mouths of the caves. I often wonder whether Abraham Thompson, the first person to discover gold in the area in 1851, ventured into my caves while pocket hunting (Jefferson Enterprises 2007). I wonder whether he sat “tailorwise in the sand, with his coffee-pot on the coals, his supper ready to hand in the frying pan,” in my backyard similar to the Pocket Hunter described by Mary Austin in The Land of Little Rain (Austin, pg 19, 1996).

One of my hideouts was a pair of Manzanita bushes. The bushes grew so large that they intertwined around each other, creating a shady canopy. Large, thick brush grew along the east side creating a third wall. The west side served as the doorway to my own personal fort. Inside, I would gather oddly shaped sticks, colorful rocks, and little round speckled puff balls that I later determined to be a kind of fungus. I first learned about business inside that bush. When my step brothers would come to visit, the younger one and I would play “Store” out of the bush. I would sell him the small treasures that I had collected and he would pay me with the leaves from nearby trees.

My favorite place up Ash Creek was a large meadow that I had discovered one day while hiking with my Siamese cat Smoky. The meadow was formed in a clearing on the ridge of one of the two mountain peaks that overlooked our cabin. Bright green wispy grass filled the meadow. I spent many afternoons lying in the meadow, listening to the birds chirping and the creek rushing by down below. The meadow provided a great vantage point for the surrounding topography. From there, I had a clear view up the canyon of my neighbor’s property, my own cabin below, Ponderosa Pine trees lower on the mountain range and the thick Douglas fir trees up higher in the Klamath National Forest. Because the meadow was so high up, I learned how erosion had shaped the landscape over time. The winding creek snaked through the hills carving out a narrow valley. Ash Creek flowed into the Klamath River creating a large T shaped valley about a mile and a half from where I sat. The surrounding mountain peaks jetted up to the heavens, seemingly unscathed by the abrasive forces of wind and rain. On clear days, Mount Shasta emerged in the distance with the cinder cone of Shastina left on its hip from the Holocene era (USGS 2007). Mount Shasta was as much “a noble landmark” to me as it was to John Muir when he described The Mountains of California (Muir, chap. 1, pg 4, 1898).

I also learned about agriculture while living up Ash Creek. We didn’t raise our own animals but we grew our fruit and vegetables. We had gardens filled with different varieties of tomatoes; little cherry tomatoes that popped when you pushed them against the roof of your mouth, yellow tomatoes that resembled tiny pears, and big, deep red ones bursting with juicy seeds. We also had an old tractor tire filled with zucchini, cucumber, watermelon, and pumpkin plants. A small orchard filled with different fruit trees grew in our backyard; two Bing cherry, an apple, a Black Walnut, a peach, and a lemon tree made up the majority of our produce section. We also had wild grapes growing up the side of our shed that we used to make wine. What we couldn’t grow, we gathered. Along the hillside across the creek from the cabin grew a plant we called Icknish, which we picked, dried, and ground as spices for spaghetti, steaks, and anything we felt needed an extra flavor boost. Up Ash Creek, autumn meant blackberries. My family and I would walk up and down our dirt road collecting blackberries in old gallon milk jugs tied around our waists for pies, cobblers, and wine. I learned to make blackberry wine before I was old enough to drink it. My parents would combine the grapes and blackberries we had picked and put them in a large tub and make me step on them to squish out the juices. I hated squishing them because they felt like icy eyeballs under my heels and between my toes and they left my feet stained purple for a week.

While I went to public school and learned science and history through standard book methods, I also had the chance to amplify my knowledge through real life experiences. I learned history not through the words on a page but through the forces of erosion and soil deposits created in the 1800s. I learned about animals by touching them. I had the opportunity to live off my own land like in pastoral times. Living up Ash Creek provided me the perfect opportunity to “close up those barren leaves” and go “forth into the Light of things and let Nature be [my] teacher,” (Wordsworth).

References

Austin, Mary (1996). “The Land of Little Rain.” Dover Publications, Inc. Don Mills, Toronto, Ontario.

Big Sky Institute. “Butterflies and Moths of Siskiyou County, California.” Montant State University and the NBII Prairie Information Node. Last accessed June 6, 2007. <http://www.butterfliesandmoths.org/map?dc=5325&_dcc=1&si=5>

Jefferson Enterprises. (2007). “Yreka, California: The Golden City.” Last accessed June 6, 2007. <http://www.jeffersonstate.com/yreka/>

Leopold, Aldo (1966). “A Sand County Almanac.” Oxford University Press, Inc. Toronto, Canada.

Muir, John (1898). “The Mountains of California.” The Century Co. New York.

USGS (2007). “Mount Shasta, California.” United States Geologic Survey Bulletin 1503. Last accessed June 5, 2007. <http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Shasta/Locale/framework.html>

Wordsworth, William. “Expostulation and Reply.”

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