Mountain Dweller’s Paradise

Still here in the mountains all these years later. Thought several times that I might leave, but no dice. I’m stuck in a cabin and can’t get out.

Well, while here I’ve been doing some reading. There are a few good memoirs of people who used to live in this mountain river valley (Klamath River Valley.) One is In the Land of the Grasshopper Song: Two Women in the Klamath River Indian Country in 1908-09 by Mary Ellicott Arnold and Mabel Reed. These two women came here for the government, to help civilize the Klamath’s Karuk natives. The young women moved into a cabin in the vicinity of Orleans and discovered that their neighbor had two husbands. One Karuk husband, and one white husband.

The story continues with their efforts to provide church and education for the Karuks. Though this seems intrusive by today’s standards I think it was a lot better than hauling children off a reservation to educate them in boarding schools… a barbaric act that our nation is still paying for today. I am so totally against forcing separations of children from their parents, especially at an early age.

Another superb memoir I recently read was Dear Mad’m by Stella Walthal Patterson. She was an eighty+ year old woman who came to the Klamath River Valley to live on a mining claim about fifteen miles downriver from Happy Camp in 1946. Her story is a remarkable triumph of woman over nature, over fear, over expectations… the expectations of others to put her into a nursing home and take care of her in her old age.

She wanted to be where people needed her, not where people felt they just needed to take care of her, and she found that kind of sweet interaction with her neighbors on the bank of the Klamath river in a very remote, rough place in the center of a forest.

People all over the country found this inspiring back when it was first published in the 1950s, and three women from the East Coast came here to Happy Camp to live on her property after she died, to take care of the gardens she’d planted there.

This posting isn’t at all what I intended to write about. I wanted to write about Bigfoot to tell you about my blog, Bigfoot Sightings, and to explain why I’m a Bigfoot believer. Well, maybe next time.