When I was a child I had a dog named 'Ranger'. He escaped from our car when we were living in Montana once. We looked all over for him. My mother kept calling "Raaaannnnnggggeeeerrrr" over and over. Suddenly a Forest Ranger popped his head up from down in a ravine. He didn't look too happy. "What the hell do you want???" he yelled back? I had a very strange childhood.
For Christmas time in Big Sur I remember for our Christmas Tree we had a Holly Tree. The 'lights' were all the red berries. I stung construction paper chains around the tree. This was when I lived up in hills of the famous Stone House.
The Stone House (made virtually all from large boulders) when I lived in it, had no roads leading to the house. You drove up two miles from Highway One on this winding(all roads in Big Sur were "winding") dirt road that ended suddenly at the base of a steep hill. The stone house was a mile and a half up from that spot. Once a month when we went into town, we got groceries and my dad had to pack them all up the hill to the stone house. The first half was hiking up a goat trail, virtually straight up, until you came to a leveling off point. This was the 'rest stop', half way up and under a giant Sycamore tree. From that point on it was a more mellow meadow climb of only several hundred feet elevation gain. We had no electricity (kerosene lamps for light and a wood burning stove for heat and cooking), no refrigeration, (water my dad piped in from a stream up above the house was used to 'cool' some food over a wood box and burlap sack). My mother made a lot of my clothes with her foot pedal sowing machine. My mother once saved my life by shooting a diamondback rattlesnake through the head with a .22 handgun just out front of the house. The thing that I remember the most about living at the stone house was the view. I could see ALL of the pacific ocean for as far as the eyes could see from down south to far north.
I once live an entire winter in Montana in a 'house' that my dad constructed from giant rolls of plastic. The floor, the walls, the ceiling were all plastic. I'm guessing about 500 sq feet of living space. He took young trees that were about five inches in diameter, removed all the branches and buried them several inches in the ground in all the corners of the floor plan. He than rolled the large thick rolls of plastic around each 'tree' until he had laid a floor, walls and ceiling. We actually had a full size wood burning stove for heat and cooking. We had a kitchen and 'living room' and a bed room for my parents. The plastic was totally clear. I slept in the living room on the floor. It was a very interesting time. One thing that I do remember was the lightening storms were awesome. I would lie on the floor and look up as the rain fell directly down towards me, before it settled on the plastic ceiling or roof...leaving large puddles that my dad would every few minutes use a broom handle to push the water off the ceiling (actually the underside of the roof, LOL)...than the sky would light up in the most awesome display of light a child could imagine. And the thunder...my Great God rolling over in bed I was told, would literally shake the entire house. I had a strange childhood.
I don't remember wearing shoes until I was six.
I once spent an entire year in Big Sur with my bedroom being a tent. Each night my dad and I would try to get out the mosquitoes out of my tent before I went to bed. We never got them all. I was "locked in" with those demons. I still remember that high pitched "squeal" of those mini dive bombing bloodsucking insects. I hate mosquitoes.
At that same place, my dad had a marijuana field behind our house. We lived up in the hills of Big Sur. I remember ever time a plane flew over our house he would run outside with a torch ready to set fire to the field.
One of my fondest memories of a child growing up in Big Sur was eating watermelon with my dad. He taught me to salt watermelon...sea salt of course. We would go down the cliffs off Highway One (Pacific Coast Highway) and hike down to the massive rocks that clung onto the sides of the cliffs and kept the Pacific Ocean at bay, and scoop large quantities of salt from pools of water since evaporated from the morning. There was an art to it. He knew all the best places to get it. He was known for his sea salt. He would give large mayonnaise jars of it away as gifts. To this day sea salt is the only salt I use.
Nobody who drove a car in Big Sur wore a seat belt. That's because almost everywhere you drove was a hill on one side and cliffs on the other. Most roads up in the hills of Big Sur were one lane or one and a half at the most. You never knew who, when or where you would meet an oncoming car coming the other way. You don't want to be buckled in when driving off a cliff. My grandmother came down from the big city of Seattle to visit us having never or rarely visited before. She had a problem with alcohol. The problem was she drank it. She was asked to drive me home after drinking one night from the restaurant that my mother worked. We ended up upside down skidding down a steep hill many, many miles up a windy Big Sur road. It was pretty impressive that she made it that far. Anyways, I digress. Where were we. Oh yah, we are upside down on the roof of her Plymouth Valiant (having gone onto the bank of the hill and NOT the many mile drop of the cliff on the other side) careened off the bank and skidding down the dirt road. I remembered we crawled out of the car. I remember that I was not scared. Even with all the flying glass and being thrown around (no seat belts remember) I was not scared. But I do remember that after we crawled out of the totaled car, I remember climbing up the hill, stopping and turning around and seeing my grandmother, prim and proper city girl, squatting, taking a pee. That was much more traumatic to me.
This all happened before I was in 1st grade.
