Writing Exercise: Big Bear Girlhood Summer

 

I finished Old Friend From Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir by Natalie Goldberg. Since it is a library book which needs to be returned soon, I took notes but have only done a few of the exercises.

However, last year I read The Right to Write by Julia Cameron. I am typing up an exercise that I did for that book. I was to choose one of the places where I had lived and write in first person, present tense and put myself back into the time I lived there. I chose Big Bear Lake, California where I spent several months each summer at a complex of family-owned cabins for over a decade. I put myself in my early elementary years.

From the mountainside the lake is my compass. As long as I don’t cross the stream below, I know I can climb back up, and the blue beacon will guide me home. I am free to roam, to explore, to imagine events playing out on the massive granite slabs and in the crannies. A small plane passing overhead is the enemy. Quick! Crawl into the cave-like void to hide. Or gather flat stones to hold pretend meals. Oh, oh. I sat in a gooey glob of pine pitch. Hope the Borax gets it out. I probably should head back to the log and rock cabin. Don’t want to miss the walk to Boulder Bay store for ice cream.

Tonight we play Pit with my aunt and 3 cousins in the big two-story cabin. Those worn bull and bear cards are hard to trade. Everybody knows the faded colors of the undesirables. I don’t like losing. Mom says I need to be a good sport and not cry.

We carefully make our way down the hill in the narrow beam of our flashlights. Best not to leave the porch light on; attracts too many bugs, especially those fat June bugs. Besides, Granddad and Grandmother may go to bed early and don’t want the glare shining into the Home Cottage where they live across from our one-room log cabin.

Mom builds a small fire so we can hang our pajamas on the mesh screen. Even the warm PJs don’t quite keep out the coldness of the sheets. I doze off as the flickering fire casts shadows.

When I wake, I look out the knothole and see sunshine and the hand pump on the flat meadow. It is more work to get to the top bunk, but my twin below only wakes to a rock wall. The chill of a Big Bear morning is dispelled by the cheery flames in the massive stone fireplace. I keep centered at the hearth as I dress; stepping a few feet away causes shivers.

After breakfast, my two sisters and I fill buckets at the pump and trudge up the rock steps positioned into the soil for  the steep climb. Mom heats on the stove a teakettle of water so we can wash and rinse dishes in the 2 giant aluminum tubs. Some water will remain in a bucket on a table for dipping a drink, and in a bucket set on the cement slab outside to use in the chipped white enamel basin for hand washing.

With no plumbing, our hygiene at our summer home is rather primitive. Sitz and sponge baths in the same tubs we use to wash dishes; tooth brushing leaning over the ledge where buckthorn hides the spit-out toothpaste; a walk half-way to the flat to the outhouse. A chamber pot in the cabin is used for nighttime peeing if needed; the thunderous echo wakes everybody.

As I open the bottom drawer of the dresser to retrieve my coloring book and paper dolls, I spy the little metal steam roller. I had much fun smoothing out my farm next to the porch so I could plant my moss crop. The long rock on the trail to Mummy’s Cave not far from Aunt Betty’s cabin has plentiful dried-up moss. Scrape some off, “plant”, water, and the brown turns to bright green. I don’t do that anymore though. That’s for little kids. I’m in elementary school now. I cut out paper doll clothes, color my Grace Kelly book, read, and help with the jigsaw puzzle on the card table on the shaded porch, looking out towards the distant lake.

I and my sisters sit on the big rock in front of our cabin and the Home Cottage every Friday watching for Daddy’s Pontiac turning onto the dirt road along the edge of the mobile home park, rounding the bend, and then down the lane next to the pump. Sunday he’ll take our stack of library books back to Whittier.

Sometimes we sit on that same rock looking for the Helm’s Bakery truck driving up and down the trailer park lanes. Grabbing a nickel from Mom, we race down the road to buy a jelly doughnut. Occasionally an ice truck shows up at the Park, and my grandfather takes our big metal tubs in his car to buy a block for his icebox and a block for ours. Granddad’s Studebaker is our Big Bear transportation since my dad has our car in Whittier to drive to work. We climb into the Studebaker to go to the Safeway grocery store and early in our stay to the dime store to stock up on our coloring book and paper doll set for this summer.

The myriad stars in the clear mountain air awe. Once I used some binoculars to stare at the moon. A creepy feeling that something might be staring back sent me inside. We have no TV here, just a radio. My dad flips on the radio on the weekends; otherwise we ignore it. Some evenings we sit with my grandparents in their cabin looking at the drive-in motion picture on the screen in front of us on the main road. We can’t hear anything so my grandfather listens to the Dodgers baseball game on the radio. I remember a film where the scientist becomes a fly and fears for his life as he sees the world from an insect’s perspective. We interrupted the baseball play-by-play with gasps as the flyswatter came close to the scientist-now-a-fly.

Granddad often sits on our porch catching up on family news while we work on the puzzle. He’s a good story teller, especially of when he helped fight forest fires. He’s a great horseshoe thrower. He patiently waits while we retrieve our shoe that tumbled in the pine needles far from the stake.

We don’t look at the clock much. We eat our biggest meal midday, a bowl of soup most suppers. We eat when we are hungry, not at any set time, though we make sure to finish the evening meal with plenty of time to make an outhouse stop and brush teeth before it gets dark. Nobody wants to use the cob-webby outhouse when you can’t see what’s in there.

I like the whisper of the wind in the Ponderosa pines, the sun warming my skin as I sit on the rocks behind the cabin reading. On the weekends the surrounding cabins are occupied and busy, but during the week it is quiet except for the wind, the chatter of squirrels and chipmunks, the squawk of a jay.

Return to Big Bear Lake

 

 

 

It has been about 35 years since I have seen the 3 cabins where I summered as a girl and teenager in Big Bear Lake California. This July, my husband and I stayed on the property for 2 1/2 days. My mother sold out her interests when I was in college to her brother. At that time, his children who had lived in San Diego region began to locate in Los Angeles and Orange counties so could use the cabin more. My mother’s sister retained her interests in the 2-story cabin and eventually took over the cabin that my grandparents used in the 1940-1970 era. My cousins graciously offered us the use of the rock and log cabin when they heard we would be in Southern California this July.

The land was purchased about 100 years ago by my great great aunt and uncle. Over a decade, they hired people to build 3 structures. A small log cabin they called Home Cottage with a board platform in front of it for open air sleeping in tent cabins was first. During my lifetime, this was where my mother’s parents stayed during the summer months. The board platform was no longer there though.

The second building was a stone and log gathering place, all one room with a fireplace at one end. This was converted by my parents to living quarters with a bunk bed, suspended bed with ladder, and a double bed underneath; sofa and chair; picnic table with benches; and a small kitchen. It was still all one room. My mom, I, and sisters spent many weeks here across from my grandparents’ place. My father would come up on some of the weekends. We would sit on a ledge on that big rock in the center of the photo early evening, trying to spy his car as it turned off the main road. Those were the days when families had 1 car; my grandfather took us to the grocery store during the week since my father had the car for work. Except for the grocery store, dime store, and occasionally a visit to church on Sundays, we didn’t spend much time in the Village. My dad would take us for drives on the fire roads sometimes where we would look for meadows of flowers and deer.

 

 

I relived some of my girlhood activities. I didn’t do much hiking because I wasn’t sure of the strength of my ankle yet, but I sat on the porch reading, did a jigsaw puzzle while looking out at the lake, and at my husband’s request I climbed on the rocks behind the cabin with a book so he could photograph where I read as a girl. When we were young, my mom took us to the dime store where we were allowed the purchase of one coloring book and one paper doll set to last the summer. We made s’mores by roasting marshmallows in the fireplace. Some nights we would visit my aunt and 3 cousins in the upper cabin, playing Pit, popping corn over their fireplace with a metal mesh shaking basket with long handle. We had to be sure to take our flashlights because when we were done visiting it was dark and we needed to go down the slope to our cabin. (Now they have solar lights strung along the path.) When we had melon, we put the scooped out seeds on a smaller rock in front of our cabin for the chipmunks.

When my grandmother started a family, her aunt decided it would be best to build the 2-story cabin up the mountainside so the children would not disturb the other guests. It was completed in 1922. This cabin was the summer home for my mom and her family from toddlerhood to adulthood. It is remarkable because it sits so high up; most neighboring cabins were built on the flat meadow. It originally had a sleeping porch where beds could be pulled out into the fresh air and under the stars. My aunt’s son recently enclosed that.

Many changes have taken place. We used outhouses and went with buckets to the hand pump on the flat. Now outhouses are not allowed. My relatives have wells and electric pumps so there are bathrooms and sinks and showers and running water. I can’t say I missed the outhouses. The smaller cabins have been expanded and remodeled slightly to accommodate kitchen cabinets and bathroom fixtures. Home Cottage also has a deck added for outside seating and dining. Board steps have been installed to help older relatives navigate the path from the flatland to the first set of cabins.

 

Still, many familiar things remain. The padlock and chain set-up for locking the cabin amazed my husband. The chain would be pulled inside at night thru a hole in the door, with a big heavy bar lifted into a slot for no entry. Can you see the chain here? Maybe not; it is pretty dark wood.

 

 

 

The old dish/food cabinet and the picnic table (now on the porch) and even those TV trays were part of our 1950s and 1960s décor which remain.

Because we had an ice box (had to buy a block of ice from time to time), we could not keep ice cream in our cabins. Many evenings we would walk across the flat meadow, ford a small stream, and walk a few blocks to Boulder Bay store to buy an ice cream bar of our choice. It seemed like a long walk, but I walked to the stream this summer and couldn’t believe how short it was.

Today, there is still a small store there, but close by is Boulder Bay Park, a wonderful development.

People fish off a dock, rent kayaks, sunbathe on sand beaches, and picnic. We got some sandwiches from Von’s and ate our first lunch in this park.

Lots of big newer houses surround the bay now.

My husband rented a kayak from Pleasure Point Landing over in Metcalf Bay. None of these rental places open until 9 a.m. though which means you miss the nice smooth glassy lake of early morning.

 

We actually spent our first night at Grey Squirrel Resort which is close to Pleasure Point. We ate breakfast at Grizzly Manor, an interesting experience. The walls and door are covered with cartoons and sayings and pictures, definitely not pc monitored. The pancakes are huge. I had been forewarned so did order only 1, but couldn’t even finish all of it.

 

My nostalgic visit to Big Bear was enjoyable, but tinged with a bit of sadness that I no longer live close enough. I am glad my cousins and their children have opportunities to relish the beauty of Big Bear.

 

 

A Place Dear to My Heart

Around 1910 cars were just making their way into Big Bear Valley, California, first coming from the north thru the desert, then east to cross near the dry bed of alkaline Baldwin Lake to the Big Bear Lake south-shore town of Pine Knot. From the south, it was an arduous trip up steep mountain roads such as Clark’s Grade, but people slowly started buying land to build cabins as summer retreats. In 1912, Jim and Fannie Barlow of Rivera had Bill Knickerbocker, keeper of the dam recently completed in 1911, and another man build them a log cabin on their new property south of Metcalf Bay of Big Bear Lake. It was named Home Cottage.

July 2012 my mother and extended family celebrated the 100th anniversary of this event. Fannie Barlow was my grandmother’s aunt. She had taken her namesake niece Fannie into her childless home as a companion and as a way to provide more opportunities for the young woman such as education at Pasadena Polytechnic College. I did not attend this celebration so far from my home in Indiana, but I have wonderful memories of summers spent in Big Bear from toddlerhood thru early teen years.
In 1914, the Barlows added across the way and facing their log cabin a rock and timber ediface which they called Owl’s Nest. This was meant to be a reading room/social room with a stone fireplace. People came to the mountains for the fresh air, and thus slept in canvas tents that sat on a wooden platform between the two buildings. This platform did not exist during my years at least not that I can remember. My grandparents lived in the Home Cottage for the summer, and my family lived in the Owl’s Nest which had been converted to a one-room abode with a stove and an icebox, a double bed, and bunk beds for sleeping. No plumbing. Outhouses and a hand pump on the flat meadowland below the cabins served those needs.
                                                                                                                   
I always just accepted things as they were, never questioning the history of these buildings. I don’t think I had a clue as to their age until a decade ago. I always thought it was “special” that they sat part-way up the mountainside rather than on the meadow like the  neighborhood cabins. Now I realize that to clear space for the Owl’s Nest meant blowing up rocks. We had huge slabs of sloping granite that came right down to the back edge of the cabin.
When my grandmother married and started bringing her children to Big Bear, the Barlows had a large two-story cabin built further up the mountain for her. It sat 60 feet up from the flatland. It was completed in 1922, more than a year before the baby of the family (my mother) was born. By 1925, the Rim of the World Highway that went thru Arrowhead and Running Springs was tied into a new road across the dam to the south shore of Big Bear Lake. One could make the trip up the San Bernardino Mountains in less time.
                                            
The first two cabins actually left the possession of my family in the late 1920s as the widowed Mrs. Barlow decided to give them to the Bible Institute of Los Angeles for use by missionaries on furlough, etc. With the Depression, my grandfather was able to buy them back from BIOLA as it no longer had the funds to maintain them and pay the property taxes. My mother sold her interest in the property in 1971 though our relatives have always generously allowed us to use them when available.
The 1950s and 1960s were times of summer stays. My aunt and cousins lived in the two-story. We had great Pit card games, popping corn in a metal basket in the fireplace, hiking to bamboo slide, mummy’s throne, crow’s nest, and places left unnamed but that grew familiar thru the years. My mom bought us a coloring book and a paper doll set at the beginning of our stay to entertain us. My dad who only came up on the weekends was the library book shuttle service. We sat on the porch of Owl’s Nest doing jigsaw puzzles gazing out to Big Bear Lake in the distance. It was a simpler way of life that gave appreciation for pioneers and homesteaders with outhouses, carrying pails of water, doing sitz baths in metal tubs filled with water heated on the stove, buying a block of ice periodically for the ice box. We walked to Boulder Bay store most evenings to buy an ice cream bar since we had no freezer.
This place, Big Bear, is tied to my fondest memories of childhood. A child should be so lucky.
  This site greeted us shortly after crossing the dam.