This, from the beginning of my 12th
season in Bridgeport. My first day-off, spent exploring. I invited my friend
Monica (a young woman on our fire crew) to take a walk and since the mountains
were still snow-covered this early in the season, we visited a lower-lying area
near Conway Summit (the 8000 foot pass on Highway 395 that separates Bridgeport
Valley from the Mono Basin). This is a place well known to travelers on the
highway for the dense aspen groves that put on one of the best displays in the
eastern Sierra come fall. ◦◦◦◦◦ There’s a tiny cabin—more like
a shack—visible from the highway, tucked amongst those trees maybe half a mile
from the roadway. Few of the speeding travelers ever notice it; while clearly
visible (if you know where to look) it’s far from obvious. I’d wanted to check
it out for years….
28 May (Sat) Monica stopped by Wheeler last night,
just arriving to start her second season on the district. Told her I’d drop by
the women’s barracks today. ◦◦◦◦◦ Hung around Wheeler all morn. Mark [our trail
crew foreman] showed up with Tamarack [his dog] who looks bigger than ever;
he’s a bit under a hundred and ten pounds sez Mark but with all that fur he looks
more like a hundred & fifty. The cats took cover in a hurry (Fenix behind
the fridge, Dan’s kitten under the couch). I can only imagine what that giant
Malamute looks like to Dan’s gray kitten: a four-story-high Godzilla-of-a-dog. ◦◦◦◦◦
To the compound [Forest Service housing area near Bridgeport] about noon. I
needed to take a walk and Monica was game. Had no concrete plan; too early to
go up high. Something in the hills with plenty of new greenery was in order. ◦◦◦◦◦ Ended up driving out the Green Creek road to
the lower slopes east of Dunderberg Peak. In all these years I’d not yet visited
Sinnamon Meadows (named after James Sinnamon, a pioneer miner of the Mono Diggings).
He left his name on maps with this meadow and the “Sinnamon Cut,” a
hydraulically mined slash above Monoville where he apparently found enough gold
to buy a chunk of Big Meadows [a.k.a. Bridgeport Valley] and settle as a
rancher. Monica and I walked down off the road and through his namesake meadow—abused
by sheep for well over a century—and over a ridge into a country of dryer slopes covered with sagebrush
& bitterbrush interspersed with sedgey meadows and aspen groves (all this
area clearly visible from Highway 395 as you drop down off Conway Summit). And
there up ahead was the sheepherder’s cabin I’ve spied from the highway for
maybe a decade. ◦◦◦◦◦ Started seeing obsidian as soon as we climbed out of the
meadow up onto the rise the cabin sat on. (I could tell it was an Indian site well
before we got there.) Strolled over to the little shack, which looked well-maintained.
The entrance was on the far side and the two of us headed around opposite
walls. I paused to chuckle at the construction of a shed attached to the side
of the obviously older structure—it was a hilarious (but functional) patchwork
of odd-sized pieces of plywood. When I rounded the corner, I was most surprised
to see Monica standing before the shack’s occupant. But not nearly as surprised as Monica, who’d
been looking at her feet and hadn’t seen him until she was a yard away. A
ragged-looking man was sitting in the doorway reading a magazine, having just
lit a hand-rolled smoke. ◦◦◦◦◦And so I got to meet yet another unique
character, another outsider. George Bartlett is a societal drop-out, wildman
and professional wanderer. Hard to say how old…maybe 40 or so. He seemed not at
all surprised to have visitors despite the fact that he hardly ever sees
people, having spent the entire winter there in that bitterly cold, windy, lonely
place. A local rancher (a Chichester) [prominent local family] had invited him
to stay there and had helped him put up his firewood (in the shed George had
built that I’d been amused by). George had built fence for this guy the
previous summer and had spent the long, cold (but relatively mild) winter in
this tiny one-room hovel living on “beans and pancake flour.” His former
employer was going to provide him with two burros so that he could continue his
journey: he was walking to Alaska. ◦◦◦◦◦ The guy was only 5’5” or maybe 5’6”
but built very athletically. Jeans, worn boots, T-shirt, and camo “fisherman’s
cap” over long, stringy black hair. Graying beard, exceptionally tan. As soon
as he started talking it was clear George Bartlett was half crazy but his eyes
were clear & bright. After telling us he’d wintered in the shack (no
windows…) the first thing I asked was, “What do you do?” He replied that he—an “amateur archaeologist”—had walked all
around looking for arrowheads. Virtually no snow fell before February, and
little after, so there’d been lots of time to poke around. ◦◦◦◦◦ George had all
sorts of bizarre ideas about what’d
gone on in this place, Piute-wise. What I’d
seen so far was a very heavily used site (quite a large concentration of obsidian
chips) [leftovers from projectile-point manufacture] on high ground next to a
meadow—typical location. (And, as it happens, a nice spot to build a little
cabin.) George’s theory was somewhat different: he seemed to think that these
sites were occupied by distinct groups year-round and that in his vicinity
there were two “tribes” that hated each other but had a truce up until a big
battle; one side ran the other off. He’d deduced all this because of the
presence of a “neutral zone” between camps where there were no obsidian
shards—no one was allowed to go there. And then some really weird thing about
“tops and bottoms” of arrowheads (finding “tops” in one place and “bottoms” in
another). Then, to cap it all off, something about how the “braves” had stood
in this one spot and shot their arrows over a hill after the fleeing
survivors—he’d found a lot of points on the other side of the hill. He admitted
not being certain about any of this
but was pretty confident that he’d figured it all out. I guess he’d found a lot
of good stuff and had mailed it all to his son back east but did show us recent
finds: a nice point of obsidian, another of quartz,
and an incredible ¾ “ long, tubular bead of soapstone, beautifully drilled from
either end and polished. A wonderful find. And a real shame that all these
treasures were ending up in some box all the way across the country. ◦◦◦◦◦
George was from San Bernardino but had lived for twenty years in Mississippi.
He’d been married, was a plumber by trade…had lived in Alaska for several years
and, while there, had gone down the Yukon River—Huck Finn style, on a log raft
with a tent pitched on one end. He’d had a German partner along on that
adventure up until they crashed into a snag and almost got the chop. (One was
supposed to always be on watch but they’d both fallen asleep.) The German,
thrilled to be alive, bailed out and George hooked up with an Australian to
finish the journey. Now he was walking back to Alaska, working along the way
and holing up during winter. He expected the whole trip to take ten years. Then
he was planning to “do the Aleutians” (whatever that means….) and write a book about it all. Told him I’d be
looking for it in the bookstores in ten years. ◦◦◦◦◦ I just love to meet these
kind of people—they’re all a little bit crazy. Well, maybe more than a little
bit…one of the very first things George said to us was, “I’m a miracle man!” I
don’t doubt it. A certain breed of people, dreamers all, have what is a kind of
innate skill or talent: the ability to harness powerful desires, mixed with
patience & will & good timing, to make things happen. Rationally &
logically you can’t prove this but I’ve seen it work too many times. ◦◦◦◦◦ Like
a thirty-something fella that I met in Saline Valley this last winter who
called himself “Prana” [Hindu term for the “life force”]. He—coincidentally—took
a year & a half of his life and peddled his bicycle (solo) from Anchorage,
Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Prana told his story to a bunch of us soaking
together in one of the pools. He never had an un-fixable breakdown, never got
robbed, and made oodles of friends along the way. Claimed that he never got
sick, drank the water (“Water filters always break down and I wouldn’t have been
able to replace one.”) and ate the food served him by all the people who
invited him into their homes. The odds of even surviving this trip are fairly small. ◦◦◦◦◦ These people have two
things going for them: faith and patience. That’s what struck me most about
George: the amazing patience and fortitude…to be able to spend six months in a
windowless shack eating dried beans and instant pancake mix. (I can say this: not
many Americans could pull this off. Certainly not me.) He wasn’t exactly unscarred by his experience—he admitted that
the howling winds took their toll on his mind. And I could see him in that windowless
cabin (failed to ask if he had any light aside from the fire) spending hours
dreaming up his Indian battle-scene, replaying it in his head over & over….
◦◦◦◦◦ Monica and I finally wandered on, over toward Dog Creek, and followed a
drainage back uphill that was lined with tailings, piles of stream cobbles many
feet high, left over from the earliest mining ventures back in the 1850s.
They’ve been sitting there now for going on a century & a half. ◦◦◦◦◦ Back
at my truck we let the cat out for a bit then drove to another sheepherder
shack—the one at the top of Upper Summers Meadow. Back to town. I dropped
Monica off at the gal’s barracks and headed back to Wheeler, ready for some supper.
→ 4 miles
→ amazing encounter
Quotes written inside this
volume of my Piute Log:
“Necessity is the mother of ‘taking
chances.’” —Mark Twain
“What
we can and should change is ourselves: our impatience, our egoism, our sense of
injury, our lack of love and
forbearance. I regard every other attempt to change the world, even if it
springs from the best intentions, as futile.
—Hermann Hesse
“A man cannot live intensely
except at the cost of the self.”
—Hesse, again
“Who cares?” —Jim Kohman, subtitle on the cover of his
1987 Piute Log
©2016
by Tim Forsell 4
Mar 2016
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