Sarah had been raised on farms and in communes of every color and description by her crazy mother who had a half a dozen kids scattered from one end of California to the other. She told me that when she first left home she stayed in a chicken coop, then lived on the river bank, then climbed on the back of a Harley and never looked back. She said she had made money hand over fist when she was stripping and had phony ID her boss got for her that said she was 21 but he kept trying to bang her and turn her out into prostitution with the customers.

"Dancing was bad enough," this little girl told me, "All the geeks pawing at ya and tucking dollars into your g-string and giving ya 20 bucks for a table dance like that was some kinda big fucking deal. I had to stay so whacked out to be able to get up there every night, I spent every cent I made on dope. Stupid. The last thing I want is to end up tricking. I'm a musician," she said, proudly. "I gotta sax and a clarinet and I play a little guitar. I just picked it up, it comes to me natural." Well, music had never come to me natural, I always had to wrestle it to the ground and make it holler uncle. But, apparently, wood cook stoves come to me as natural as can be so I sorta knew what she meant. "I'd like to get a band or play with one, do blues and driving rock. I can pick out any tune I hear and I gotta OK voice. Loud, anyway."

We laughed about that and got our guitars out and sang up every song we knew between the two of us. People sang along and the pipe got passed. Sarah, a girl after my own heart, rolled bomber after bomber and when she got finished she blew that sax as sweet as could be and really tore into a bluesy number, improvising around and around on Moon Shadow.

The next six weeks or so went along pretty much the same. Patrick ran back and forth between the homestead and Suckapimento with Mick who was doing a graduate paper in Sociology as part of this project. Bodies came, bodies went. Sarah pruned the orchards, with much bickering and mega group discussions. I admired her because she would leave the group and go out and just do it. She reminded me of the Walt Whitman poem "The Song of the Open Road, the lines that went,

Leave the teachers at the lectern, teaching. Leave the preachers at the pulpit, preaching.

Mick and 'Trico had a who-can-piss-higher-on-the-wall sort of buddy-buddy relationship that Sarah and I both laughed about all the time. If one of 'em cut down a tree, the other would cut down a bigger tree. If one repaired twenty feet of fence aroundthe old meadow, the other would go out and repair forty feet. I just stayed high and cooked and started embroidering blue jean scraps for a quilt I was gonna make. That stove taught me everything I never knew I needed to know about cooking. I made bread and cookies and cakes and pies. Sarah showed me how to dry berries and apples; we had cases of them that someone had brought up and abandoned when they split back to the city. We built a rack that hung over the stove so that every time we fired her up to cook, we were also dehydrating pounds of fresh fruit that otherwise would have spoiled.

Sarah also found a root cellar under the house that held hundreds of bottles and jars of preserved food-stuffs, some of them dating back to the '30's, a lot of which was still, amazingly, good. There were cases and cases of home-made wine down there, too, only a few bottles of which had turned to vinegar. We drank that stuff like it was mother's milk and shared some horrendous three day hang-overs. It was nice and cool down in the root cellar, a hole dug under the house, with a bare earth floor and shelves of sorts knocked together along the length of either wall with free-standing shelves down the center. It was just tall enough for us to stand upright in and not tall enough for any of the men so we decided that it had been built by a female, for females, and declared it a male-free zone. No females seemed to stick in Bull Meadows although a lot passed through. There was, however, a woman down the road at a farm called Fat City named Suzi and a woman squatting way up in the woods, which was National forest land, named Missy both of whom came often to visit. Suzi had a husband named Jon and a seven year old daughter, Jenny, and although they were hippies through and through, they were a self-contained family unit. Missy, on the other hand, was living with a crazy man who blew his brains out with a .22 rifle one morning over oatmeal and after that she always had a different fellow with her.

We dragged an old carpet into the root cellar and candles and cushions and had many a fun tea party with a little sign hung on the trap door that said, "No Boys Aloud" (Sarah was a terrible speller but I adored her unintentional pun and kept that sign for years afterwards, losing it to a house fire in Alaska in 1984). We wrote a song called No Boys Aloud which was very funny in a mean-spirited sorta way and sang it, loudly, when working in the garden or pruning the trees in the orchard. Missy showed us how to companion plant pumpkins with the peas, beans up the cornstalks, onions with the tomatoes to keep the bugs out. I had never had the gardening experience before and was fascinated with the breadth and depth of folk-lore to which I had not been privy. They talked about the phases of the moon and when to plant what and why and I often asked, "How come no one ever taught ME useful stuff like this?" I thought about our ratty lawn at Arrowhead that never grew and that poor bedraggled cottonwood sapling that had hung in there all those years, dying for a little loving attention. When we had finished our chores, we would retire to our den of inequity and joke and smoke and plan bigger gardens with longer rows.

Summer ended and most of the hanger's on and passer's through went back to the city, to school and their real lives. Sarah stayed. Missy stayed. Mick finished his paper and disappeared in a puff of smoke. 'Trico was running back and forth between the homestead, San Francisco and Sacramento. He was running dope and most likely doing some petty-ass burglary on the side. He got his parole changed to Yreka and only had to check in once a month with his new PO, a wizened old woman who knew from nothing about big city dope fiends. He starting banging dope again as soon as it dawned on him that she wasn't gonna UA him.

We made a run over to Eureka to see Deb in a driving rain storm during which the road washed completely out and 'Trico confounded the locals by driving right through the mud slides in his parent's 4-wheel drive truck which he had borrowed for a couple of weeks. The nearest town to our place was called Horse Creek, which Sarah and I called Whore's Creek, a gas station, post office and small store. When we pulled up to check our mail and told them we had just come in from the west way, the old farts sitting around the barrel stove just dropped their jaws. "The roads been closed since late last night," they said. "Funny, I didn't see any signs," he replied.

Well, that made our reputation and when the river rose and washed the bridge clean out the next afternoon, they were all down there watching along with us and talked to him just like he was one of the boys, debating whether the bridge would drag out that portion of the bank when it went. It did. The bridge washing out was the biggest happening in the country since the big fire back in '56 and everybody came from miles around to watch it, on both sides of the bridge, and cheered when it went, standing out there in that rain that just hammered down on our heads like to beat the band. It became a great celebration, with neighbors talking to neighbors and everyone cheering and tossing their hats up into the air when that span of steel and concrete finally twisted away from the bank and collapsed, in slow-motion, into the rising torrent of muddy yellow water.

I discovered that day that everyone loves a natural disaster, especially if it only damages public property. The men were all pleased because they figured this would mean a lot of work available to put the bridge back in and replace the damaged road. The women were probably happy just because it was a break in routine. We shared thermoses of hot coffee and nips off bottles of brandy and stories about other storms and floods and wash-outs.

Sarah and I got drunker than skunks that night at the local road-house, much to 'Trico's disgust. By local custom, women didn't drink in bars in that neck of the woods so Sarah and I stood out like sore thumbs. Our bad-ass barroom attitude didn't help and running the pool table was the final insult to Malehood and the established order of things. There were probably three other females in the bar that night, sitting at tables towards the back, with their husbands. These wild hippie chicks who bought their own drinks and called their shots and danced together were quite a floor show. Hey, live entertainment.

While half the guys, the bachelors, thought is was an interesting novelty and probably harmless, another dozen or so kept giving 'Trico the business, telling him to get a handle on his female-folk. The wives were venomous, one cornering Sarah in the john and saying, "You're acting like a slut, you know."

"Well, that's OK," Sarah replied, "I pretty much am a slut." This went over like a lead balloon and when the two of us started necking at the bar, 'Trico came unglued. Sarah had gotten her hands on some acid from one of the lumberjacks and she and I had both dropped and were coming on behind the shots and beers we'd been sucking down. 'Trico picked me up and plopped me on a chair at a table and told me, "Jesus, act like a lady. Don't sit there with your legs apart like that and keep your hands off Sarah. What the fuck is the problem with you?"

I started to stand up and he pushed me down into the chair again. Sarah jumped off her bar stool and onto his back, hollering, "Keep your fucking hands offa her!" and the brawl was on. 'Trico smacked Sarah to the floor, a nasty roundhouse that put her down like she'd been poleaxed. I shoved a chair up against him and pinned him to the bar. Some fellow was pulling me off 'Trico while Sarah was climbing on THAT guy's back and the lumberjack, who it turned out was named Fisher, tried to pull her offa him.

The bar-tender rousted us all outside into the parking lot, in the rain, where 'Trico and I got into a knock-down drag-out, with Fisher holding Sarah back. A couple of guys were trying to stop the fight and a few were egging us on. I got 'Trico's thumb in my mouth and crunched down with my teeth to the bone. Blood was flying all over the place.

He punched me hard right in my face, blacking both my eyes, it turned out, and splitting my lip, so now I was bleeding, too. Somewhere, somehow, I got my hands on a polanski, a brush-cutting tool with a pick on one end of the head and a blade on the other, which I was swinging wildly. I was hell-bent and determined to kill that man. How DARE he imply that I should be a lady!?! At about the same time that Fisher got the polanski off of me, Sarah jumped into 'Trico's parent's rig, fired it up, popped the clutch and drove it straight off the eight-foot embankment onto the old highway below the bar parking lot. Sarah smashed her head through the windshield, so she was bleeding like a stuck pig, then took off wildly into the woods across the highway where she got tangled up in a tumbled-down barb wire fence, tearing the hell out of both of her legs. Fisher rounded up all the wounded warriors and talked the bar-tender into pouring whisky onto all our wounds and no one called the police. 'Trico and another guy got the half-smashed rig out of the ditch and hammered the front end out away from the wheels. Sarah and I danced and hollered and drank some more with the rest of Fisher's crew who thought this was even more fun than the bridge going out.

We were a sore gang that limped home around dawn, however, and when I saw my black eyes and split lip in the mirror later, I thought, "Jeez, Dad would be SO proud."

'Trico glowered and snapped at us for several days, but let me crawl puppy-like back into his bed. I don't know how he explained the wreckage to his parents. He returned with the old truck from his next run to Sacto. Life went on.

Sarah started keeping company with Fisher who was quite taken with this wild woman. She led him a merry chase, however, and we continued our baby dyke antics whenever we got drunk in public although we didn't much do that kind of stuff at home. Life was pretty quiet around the old homestead. As the snows deepened, visitor's became fewer and fewer which was just fine with us.

Food got scarce. 'Trico was spending more and more time down in the City, with Regan and the Rat to whom I had introduced him. Sarah, however, was quite a clever girl and discovered bags and bags of cracked corn and horse oats out in the barn and we ate those, boiled, with our stock of preserves from the root cellar and the harvest from our garden. With that and the wine, we were quite content. Fisher shot a deer, illegal as hell, and gave us a haunch which we hung up out in the wood shed and ate piece by piece. Sarah was very adept with her knife, cutting hunks of meat from that carcass till only a bony skeleton was left. We then took the bow-saw and cut the bones up and supped on venison soup. I had nothing but admiration for her hardy nature and good-humored disposition.

I'm So Hungry I Could Eat (Like) A Horse
There is actually no reason why people can't eat the same as a horse. The difference is that most people would rather eat the horse. We found out that the cracked corn could be boiled up into an edible mash after it sat simmering on the back of the stove for a day or two. We also found an old hand crank food grinder out in the tool shack which after we cleaned it up would grind that corn up into a coarse meal which we used to make corn cakes, tortillas, corn muffins and corn meal mush which we ate both hot and cold. Fried cold mush is very good except when you don't have a speck of sweet to put on it.

We learned how to cook the cracked oats after pounding them in a sack with a hammer and then washing them several times to get rid of (most of) the hulls which rose right up in the basin and got tossed out the back door. The oats didn't cook up like oatmeal, however, we discovered, but like the cracked corn had to be slow-cooked a long, long time, like a couple of days, to get soft enough to eat. We drank hot oat water like tea, however, as the oats boiled away on the back of the stove. This was probably the healthiest I had ever eaten in my life and I had energy to spare that winter. We had a big bag of beans but they gave us the farts so bad we preferred the oats and corn. The beans were so farty, in fact, we kept 'em for special ammunition and fed 'em to the Fisher gang, laughing like to bust knowing those boys were gonna blow the bottoms of their britches out.

We ground the oatmeal up, too, and added it to all the bread we cooked and it was delicious. If ya been feeling weak and sickly, I suggest ya spend the winter eating like a horse and cutting and splitting lots of firewood to keep an old wood cook stove stoked up enough to warm a two-story house with lots of cracks for drafts. I guarantee ya that by the time Spring rolls 'round, you'll feel like ya could eat nails and spit tacks.

My hair had been steadily growing in the six or so years since my last trip to the barber and had become a respectable mop for a hippie chickie from hell. I usually wore it down long or in one braid down the back and I still delighted in sticking feathers and beads and bells in there to make a joyous racket. This winter, perhaps due to our high-fiber diet, my hair grew faster than it ever has before or since. Several inches past my shoulder blades, it began to creep down to the small of my back. Missy also had long hair and we took turns doing each other's braids. She took off to the City one week-end and came back a few weeks later with a concentration camp hair-cut and a new name. "Call me Opuu," she gloated, "It means White Bird. Missy was my patriarchal slave name and I have shed it in a ritual of flame." I must admit I found her new buzz cut wildly attractive, very clean lines, down to the bone. But I sorta missed her old name. "Missy! It's like a cartoon character. Itsy. Bitsy. And Missy. No more of that for me." Missy split back to the City, apparently she had shed her woodsie image along with her mane and her name.

I made a couple of quick trips to the city with 'Trico. We got high and bought pot off the Rat-one and saw Regan, who looked like hell. Patrick was shocked to find out that I had a husband. Uh, oh yeah, I forgot to mention that. We made a screaming trip to Reno and I found out that Kymrie was dead. Of everything in my life that has Never Made Sense, this probably tops the list, or at least is right up there with the Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. Kymrie was the one friend I had that acted as if she was gonna be around next year. Health food, clean water, herbal tea, no drunken brawls, no drug-crazed weekends, no knife fights with hop-heads in dark alleys. She didn't even speed, but drove her little sport's car about like an old-lady school teacher. She had gone to bed early one evening, complaining of a headache, curling up in her sleeping bag, in her tent, on that dig in some Viking burial mound half-way up into the Arctic in Denmark and in the morning she was dead. I didn't know what to say and I didn't know what to do and Kat Loves Kymrie went echoing through my mind. "She can't be dead," I said, "She's the only one of us that has half a reason to live." For some reason I decided that Kymrie had gotten involved somehow with the CIA and they had deaded her but she wasn't really dead, just off on a secret mission of some kind that only a blonde-haired, blue slant-eyed student archaeologist who wears hand-made leather vests laced up the front so her little titties peek out each time she shifts her weight could do. She had dropped off the face of the Earth but she was out there, somewhere, doing her field notes and for years I had myself convinced she would drop back in when the time was right and she didn't have to hide out anymore. Well, of all the weird trips, this was one of the weirdest. I got into a big fight with 'Trico on our way back to Whore's Creek and he swore he was never gonna take me anywhere, ever, again

Sarah often took off for days at a time, too, leaving me to tend the homefires on my own. She would show up again, spectacularly drunk, usually with a stray male or two in tow. Once she brought a half a dozen Indian guys from Happy Camp, the reservation up the road, who were of the Yakima tribe, I believe. They all called each other "Coz", for cousin, and Sarah had become an honorary Coz. They were fierce looking fellows with feathers stuck in their black felt cowboy hats and they went on a rampage, really tearing up the town and road between Happy Camp and Yreka and all points in between. One night she came home and staggered upstairs and turned left rather than right at the head of the stairs, and passed out in the empty bedroom which was filled with tools and materials intended for an insulating job on the rafters that had never been completed. She wrapped herself up in a roll of pink fiberglass insulation, mistaking it for a sleeping bag apparently, and emerged the next morning with a hang-over and tremendous thirst and rash from one end of her body to the other from rolling around in that fiberglass. For some reason we thought this was funny, even though her face and arms and legs and back were bright red and inflamed for weeks.

One day she came home with a black kid, about nineteen years old, named Slack, who had attached himself to her down around Shasta City. Slack had mental problems, that was obvious, like he had taken too much acid and never come back to Earth, or something. He talked constantly about the Devil and evil and voodoo and curses unto the third generation and didn't make a whole lot of sense. He decided to stay on with us at Bull Meadows, making himself to home in the old chicken coop. Well, Sarah herself had lived in a coop for quite awhile, so this wasn't so strange. But, it gave her the creeps that he was convinced that her sax (which was her favorite instrument) was demon-possessed and after awhile this was his only topic of conversation. He kept trying to convince her that she should build a fire and burn that horn, which to Sarah would have been like making a sacrifice of her first born child.

When he wasn't threatening to murder her saxophone, he was always trying to climb into her bed. He was convinced that Sarah had demons, too, which could only be exorcised by semen ritual and he was an eager and adamant volunteer. Just about every other night, this would result in a screaming match up at her cabin, with Slack climbing at the ready into her bed and her crawling, hollering, out. One morning ''Trico and I were asleep when we heard Sarah storm in downstairs in the big cabin and start banging around, rummaging through things. 'Trico slipped on his pants and ran downstairs, me close behind. Sarah was standing on a chair getting the .22 rifle down from where Patrick kept it hung on pegs over the front door.

"Is this fucking thing loaded?" she asked him.
"Always," he replied. "An unloaded gun is about useless, isn't it."
"Well, how does it work?" she asked him.
He showed her the safety and pulled it off for her, then it dawned on the dim-wit to ask her what she might need it for. Bright, eh?
"I'm gonna get that Slack out of my cabin for once and for all!" she declared, and headed out the door. I stood in the doorway and watched her march purposefully back up through the pasture to her cabin on the rise. Her head was down and her shoulders were hunched up and she strode with determination, barefoot, through the frosty marsh. "Jesus, Patrick, she's gonna shot that dumb fuck. Do something." I don't know what I expected him to do except head out after her, which is exactly what he did, me following behind like a runt pup. We got to her cabin in time to hear Sarah shouting and Slack's incoherent replies.

"Once and for all," she screamed, "Get the fuck out of my bed, out of my place, out of my life. And, keep your fucking hands offa my horn."

"The lady resists the power of salt and spray. Come to the master. Come and be clean again. Vent your venom on the dark one, not this innocent lamb. Pray and be free," he recited in a weird deep voice that didn't sound like him or anything human. He had her sax between his legs and his pants down around his ankles as he stumbled around, raising the sax above his head, then rubbing it around on his dark belly and into his groin.

"Out. Now. Go. I'll shoot you, I'm not kidding," she stated, flat and cold, pointing the gun at him and motioning towards the door and the trail.

"The demon speaks, not the lady. Begone, demon, I cast you out in the name of salt and sea," thus spoke Slack, in that same spooky from the grave tone, holding the sax way above his head and making as if to dash it down upon the floor. There was a popping noise and then another and Slack's legs went out from under him.

'Trico snapped to and pulled the rifle away from Sarah who sat down and started to cry, "Why wouldn't he leave when I asked him to? Why wouldn't he leave my sax alone? I told him to leave. I told him a hundred times not to touch my horn."

"Bullet went right through his knee cap," 'Trico remarked, tending the fallen. "Other one missed and hit the floor here. He'll need a doctor to clean this, though, looks like it tore the kneecap up. I better take him into town."

The last we saw of Slack he was gesticulating madly in the front of 'Trico's old truck, still talking away a mile a minute about demons and salt. Sarah was in shock all morning long and was subdued when the Sheriff pulled into the long driveway to our cabin around noon. "You the little lady that shot that crazy nigger?" he asked by way of introduction.

Sarah's face flashed dark and deadly at that remark. "I didn't shot a nigger!" she hollered at him, showing the first animation she had displayed since she had picked up the rifle five hours earlier. "I shot a sick man who happens to be black."

The Sheriff eyed Sarah like maybe she was crazy, too. "Yeah, well, I just come up here to tell ya that he's wanted over in Yuba City for assault and that we ain't gonna press no charges against ya, little girl. He's in the hospital now in Yreka and soon as they get him sewn up we'll ship his sorry ass over to Yuba. He won't be back again to bother you."

I was glad to hear this as I wasn't too sure how to explain assault upon a sax or whether Sarah might not end up locked up, herself. Shootings were not that common, even in this rough and wooly neck of the woods. But, the Sheriff looked like he was enjoying the hell out of this whole thing. "Next time any niggers come up here bothering you, you just let us know. We'll take care of 'em, all right," he said, pushing his hat back on his head and wiping his greasy brow.

"Why don't you go fuck yourself," Sarah told him, squinting at him with that kinda black look I had learned meant she was about to go off on someone.

"Uh, thank you, Sheriff, for coming to check on us and we'll certainly let you know if we have any further problems," said the Lady of the Manor. Oh, 'Trico would have been so proud of me. "I am sure we won't," I added, trying to politely push him back out the front door.

"Well, next time, make sure you shoot higher. They oughta pin a medal on your chest, young lady," he said to Sarah, eyeing her considerable chest, and looking for all the world like Deputy Dawg, his eyebrows wiggling up and down.

Well, the Sheriff finally left without Sarah kneecaping him, too, which I viewed as a minor miracle as he just couldn't seem to get that this whole thing wasn't about race. But, for weeks afterwards, every time Sarah and I went out, rednecks from all over the valley wanted to buy us drinks and toast, "The little lady that plugged that nigger" "Tried to rape ya, didn't he?" one fat old fart suggested, one night at the roadhouse, to which Sarah responded, "It was my horn, my fucking horn, He was gonna damage my saxophone, man. Can't you understand anything?" But, they couldn't. So far as they were concerned, Sarah had been defending her virtue, and nothing she could say or do could change their perception of the incident.

Fisher had quite a case for Sarah, even though she was nothing like the kind of female he ought to like. He took us out poaching twice that winter, bringing home a deer each time which he spotted with a powerful flashlight mounted on the hood of his truck. One of the deer he shot was a female, gravid with fawn. He got grossed out when Sarah and I both put some of her belly blood on our faces as we were dressing her out and the almost completely formed fawn slithered out with the rest of her guts. "Why the hell did ya do that?" he wanted to know. He couldn't understand when we told him it was to honor the female power she had given us with this gift of her flesh. We took the meat that night to a woman that lived down in the hollow, with five kids, whose husband had died that fall in a stupid freak accident. The next time we went hunting, he took the meat to his granny Fisher, a women well into her eighties who cackled with glee and cooked us up a pan fulla liver. "You're that girl that shot that black fellow, ain't cha?" she asked Sarah, but she didn't say it with the gleeful tone the men had used and Sarah wasn't angry.

"Yeah," she said, "I hope he's the last two-legged I ever have to blast, too." Granny laughed long and hard and fired up her wood cook stove, saying, "This one's a keeper, if ya can figure out HOW to keep 'er," and she continued to chuckle and shake her head as she began to cook up that still hot liver.

Granny Fisher's Venison Liver
Liver's only good fresh and most don't know how to cook it right. Ya gotta getcher pan hottern hell with a buncha bacon fat or lard. While it's heating, ya slice the liver like this, crosswise, holding her tight. Gotta be careful ya don't getcher own fingers, knife don't know no different, cha know? Make up some white flour with lotsa pepper and salt and roll them pieces around in there good till they're all coated thick. When that fat's smoking, ya put that liver right down in there. Go ahead and crowd 'em in there and keep that pan hot. Soon's ya got 'em all in there, startcher turning them over and get 'em good and crisp on both sides, but fast. Pull them pieces out of that fat and put 'em in a pie pan like this and set 'er up on the back a the stove to stay hot. Fry up a mess a onions and then put them with the liver, too, then putcher flour in that fat and brown it up good and add a couple cupsa water to make a thick gravy and stir it good or y'll get all lumps in there. Now, this's liver. Eat that up with some bread and butter and maybe some ketchup and ya never had liver like that, I betcha. Gob them onions on there and pour that good gravy over it all and dig in.

Well, I could tell why Fisher liked his granny, she was a sweet woman and feisty and she had us laughing so hard our sides hurt, telling us about the good old days in the valley, when the lumber camps where thick all over the mountain side and men knew how to do a day's work for a day's pay. She really cracked us up when she claimed that Horse Creek HAD used to be Whore's Creek. "I used to stand on my porch looking over at them girls on the other side of the valley. They'd be prissing and primming in front of a mirror and preening around in their fancy girls clothes and I'd a be scrubbing Old Man's bib overalls by hand onna scrub board and I use ta think to myself, they got the right idea. Their hand's weren't all burned up and raw from lye soap and when they went to town they bought with cash money, not on account, like us poor wives. 'Course no decent woman'd speak to 'em, 'twern't seemly. But, many's the time I sorter wished I coulda been a fallen woman and had nice clothes and money in my pockets." Her liver was as good as her stories. She urged Fisher to bring us to church with him Sunday morning. "Wouldn't that be a hoot 'n' a holler?" she crowed. But, we didn't go, as we were all nursing some serious hangovers.

We had been digging around in the garden and Sarah had found an asparagus bed all down the shady side of the big cabin. We were planning a busy summer and were very excited that the grape vines, long so dead and grey and twisted looking, had begun to sprout little green leaves. The old lady that owned the place and had rented it, all 140 acres and both cabins, to Mick the previous year, passed away suddenly. We had diligently taken our rent money to her past middle-aged son's house in Yreka at the first of each month and had imagined he might be so pleased with the work we had done on the old place that he might be willing to give us a lease. No sooner was the old woman buried, however, than he drove up to the place in his long white Caddy convertible and served us with an eviction notice.

"What'll we do?" we wondered. "Where'll we go?" Sarah decided she would go to Eugene or up around Roseburg, Oregon. "I know some people up there and maybe some one of 'em will want to put together a band. Maybe I'll go on up to Portland." She was headed North, anyway. I don't know if it was harder saying goodbye to Sarah or that big old wood cook stove. My eyes were burning hard that day and we made a lot of jokes about trying to take the stove with us but I don't know how we could have short of dismantling the cabin. 'Trico and I decided to decamp back to Suckapimento although we went by way of Placerville, Rough and Ready, Gardenerville and Yuba City, all places where he had buddies from the joint or from running the streets. Back to sitting with the new old lady and talking about the ex-old lady and I was bored and disgruntled.

We ended up at a place on the south fork of the Yuba River, a place the maps all call Devil's Slide but the locals called Pan's Camp. Pan was a skinny guy with long matted blonde hair in his early thirties who had split from a California Youth Authority camp when he was fifteen and had never gone back into the real world again. He had a cave way up in the woods above the river where he lived in the winter and a summer camp down on the river bank, a hut built out of dirt and moss where a huge tree had fallen across several granite boulders and formed a natural shelter. He had been there for years and had a wife named Jane, a three year old son named Abraham and another child on the way. Pan's Camp was a clothing optional zone and he and Jane and their little boy were all brown as berries from the son and spent almost all of their time outdoors, in the woods or at the river. No one worried about clothes except to protect their feet from the sharp stones and brambles and usually everyone wandered around in near or total nudity. This, however seemed as natural as putting clothes on when ya went to town. It definitely feels odder to be standing around fully dressed when everyone else is naked as a jay bird then it does to shed your cumbersome clothing, after all. There were no overtly sexual overtones to the nudity and I never felt awkward at Pan's Camp. I think I finally understood that everyone's body is weird looking, fat and thin, bulbous and bony, flat-chested or tits that just won't quit. Our equipment is all basically the same, with some little design quirks. I liked Pan and I adored Jane who could do a full kip dive off the rocky ledge down into the pool fifteen feet below while nine months pregnant, a feat that amazes me still. She was the epitome of grace.

The Yuba River was crystal clear and cold and the deep pool spread out into a wide shallow riffles just below Pan's Camp, with a long white sandy beach perfect for sunbathing. There was a rock we called Big Tit Rock out at the far end of the pool that jutted up into a wide expanse of mossy granite, perfect for reclining in the sun and which the woman-folk used like a slant-board so they could flop their tits up backwards onto their shoulders and tan the undersides. We lounged around out there for hours, rubbing coco-nut oil on each other and braiding one another's hair and giggling and gossiping and getting browner and browner. It was a designated Male-Free Zone, the same as our root cellar had been, although children were welcome and Abraham thought it was the funniest thing in the world to be offered status as an honorary female.

"'Cept I won't ever get tits, no matter what, right?" he always said to Jane, who agreed with him, assuring him he could only be an honorary female till he grew up and got hair on his chest, instead of breasts. Much relieved, he would then swim and play with us on Big Tit Rock and then return to the men in camp to report, "They're getting all oiled up again."

We used so much oil on our bodies that the rock became too slippery to move around on and any sudden shift of weight could cause you to lose your grip and slide off down into the chilly pool. Much squealing and splashing and laughing could be heard from early morning till late at night. We always stood at the edge of the pool and held our hands high over-head and said good night to the sun as it slipped down behind the mountain rise.

Jane cooked over an open camp-fire and prepared simple meals for everyone. She cooked lots of beans and rice, the hippie staples, and rabbit stew or squirrel stew. Pan fished for squirrels all afternoon, casting his line way out onto the rocks towards the woods around camp, baited with a piece of cheese or candy bar tied to the small hook. He left the line out till it would start moving or running, then blam! hit the spinner with his thumb and reeling the line in, laughing like a wild man. "Squirrels are plain dumb," he declared. "They've been seeing their buddies disappear this same way for years but they never catch on."

Pan's Camp Squirrel Stew
Takes a mess of squirrels to feed a group of people, there's no more than a few bites of meat on each. No matter. Get as many as ya can, knowing they have litters of six to eight every three months or so, you're not gonna run out of squirrels soon. Cut their heads off and line 'em up on the fence around the garden as a warning to all their little cousins to Keep Out. Cut their tails off and save 'em. They make nice dangling decorations on a jacket. Open their bellies, toss the guts into the woods. The blue jays'll eat 'em up quick. Pull 'em inside out from their little skin there. It's way too thin to tan. The jays'll eat that up, too.

Now rinse that meat good in cold water with a little salt. Let 'em soak in salt water while you build a fire and let it get burning good. Put yr pot over the fire on a rack or held with a forked stick planted deep in the dirt. Be careful you don't set fire to yr stick, though, that'd be a bummer. Put them squirrels in there and let that come up to boiling and keep feeding sticks into the fire. Add onions, either wild or yellow, a bunch of 'em to the pot and carrots if ya got 'em, and cut up potatoes or add some rice. Let that keep boiling. Add some salt to taste and cook that till the broth reduces down and the meat is tender. If ya cook it too long the meat will fall of the bones but the bones get soft enough to eat, too. Only problem with squirrel, or rabbit, for that matter, there isn't hardly a speck of fat on 'em and ya can get skinnier than a stick eating rabbit with no bread and butter. Lots of pepper and salt.

Pan set rabbit snares and sometimes poached a deer but given his druthers he would never have any more food on hand than he could eat that very day. He made runs to town and hauled loads of out-of-date cheese and damaged vegetables that had been tossed into the dumpster behind Safeway's. Dumpster diving was every bit as noble an enterprise as squirrel fishing, so far as he was concerned. "Our culture encourages waste," he preached. "We throw away enough food every day in this country to feed most the hungry people in the world, I bet. It's criminal," and he described sitting on a cliff at the ocean in Southern California and seeing a long line of dump trucks, one after the other, dumping tons and tons of oranges into the water below, "To keep up the price," he said, "Our country is so rich and productive that the government pays farmers to destroy crops or simply not plant them at all just so the agri-businesses can maintain their profit margin. It's sick. That's when I knew that no matter what I was never gonna become a part of that machine. They don't care about people, only profits. I don't need any of their goods and I'll do all my shopping right out of the garbage can."

Pan had hauled a fortune in trash home to his camp where broken sofas provided a nice place to sit along the river and you didn't have to worry about them getting wet when it rained; they were already ruined. He had built an outdoor kitchen with counters and shelves out of scraps of wood and crates he'd found or scavenged and had quite a practical and comfortable home set up for himself and his family. He had a bed of sorts, in a bower in the trees, with a tapestry across the top to provide shade and he had another bed in his hut which stayed nice and cool even on the warmest afternoons. Pan was particularly proud of an oven he had built, right into the wall of the hut, with a large fireplace below and pipes with baffles to trap and slow the heat so the oven would get hot enough to bake bread.

I met a woman named Acorn that lived in a cabin way up the hillside from Pan's Camp in an area he called Dyke Heights. There were probably a half a dozen women living up there, off and on, coming and going. They were mostly gay and seemed to be pretty active politically, working in safe houses and shelters for battered women they had set up and funded by their own initiative to address the issue of domestic violence, as well as teaching classes in Women's Studies or volunteering at Women's clinics. This stuff just blew my mind. We'd had Women's Studies courses at the University in Reno and women had begun attending Consciousness Raising sessions in their own homes to discuss sexism and encourage each other to make effective changes in their lives. But, apparently, while I had been fucking around with Sarah, raising hell and selfishly having a good old time, these women had started a freaking revolution of their own, all over.

Acorn was the nicest person I had ever met, a gentle soul, with yellow eyes and spikey brown hair she chopped off herself every time it grew long enough to start flopping over. She was the least fanatical of those wimmen and didn't sound as angry as they all were. "Men can't help being hostile and aggressive," she told me, "They got their sex organs hanging outside their bodies and that's what makes 'em so defensive all the time. You would be, too, if your privates were popping out in public like that. It's anatomy as destiny. Wimmen need to teach men to take better care of their balls. But, it's a job too big for this one!" and we all laughed and laughed. What she said sure made sense, though. She told me that men think differently than wimmen, too, and that made perfect sense as well. "They're all the time in their left brain, logical and sequential, too busy looking at all the parts to be able to see the whole."

'Trico didn't much like Acorn, I could tell, which was funny as he was always telling me that men and women were different, that women were some kind of animal that wasn't understandable to men. I wanted to ask Acorn how come I kept falling in love with women, like Havalock and Robin and Kymrie and Miss X and Sarah. How come I kept getting crushes on and getting involved emotionally with all these women but having sex with men. It was very confusing, even for a person who had grown up with Stuff That Makes No Sense on all sides. Sarah and I had ended up in bed with each other a couple of times, having clumsy sex and never talking about it afterwards which was quite a puzzle. But, of course, by this time, I had a big crush on Acorn and kept all my silly sounding questions to myself, but watched her closely, thinking, "See. Here's another way of being a female." What I liked the most about her was that she loved women but didn't seem to hate men. I mean, they are half the species, there must be some reason why they're here besides fixing trucks.



Kat McElroy has contributed several excerpts from her "White Trash Cookbook" to Grrowl!.


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