Home Sweet Home!

Janis and Twizzle.
(Twizzie was glad to see me too!)


Be it ever so... Whatever. There is no place like home!

Only a few of us know what it feels like to come back into the South Fork of the Eel canyon after being gone for an extended period of time. (Three Days or more) So those few of you know how good I feel right now!

We headed up North, really down the river, and dove into the South Fork Canyon mid-Long Valley. There was about two hundred Tule Elk lying in the rich blond grass at the divide of the drainage, where the South Fork and the Main Eel diverge. The temperature was 81, the sky was blue. The last image of a waning moon hung just barely visible over the green, and slightly blue mountains in the distance. The valley where my ancestors are buried.

As we started down the hill north of Piercy, we were pressed with the beauty of the fall season. The various and obvious different colors of green that the Tan Oak, Madrone, Fir and Redwoods give to the viewer. They are pleasing, and familiar, to our local eyes. The same Tan Oak that my ancestors used to tan the hides of the deer they made their clothes out of. The same Madrone and Manzanita that they used to forge the iron that they needed to shoe their horses and build their wagon wheels. The same Fir and Redwood that they hand split to make their houses and homesteads.

The Buckeye trees are striped of their leaves, and they stand in bare, stark beauty, with their light grey bark, and their starchy balls hanging at the tips of every limb. They are like little children proclaiming that they are first to be dressed for winter. (neener neener)

The Poison Oak teases the unfamiliar with the temptation to pick their raucously loud red leaves, only to turn bright red themselves. The kids in Laytonville, who didn't get poison oak, would take their unaware teachers bouquets of them. The kids soon found out that the teacher was not as dumb as they thought, and they got to write on the blackboard for their efforts. Not me!... I think that it was my Great Grandfather. It's one of those old family tales now, that has become as familiar to me as my genetic love of this canyon.

The Maple trees spot the green hills with their bright, golden yellow leaves, like flakes of gold in a miners pan, proclaiming their rich and rare beauty. As children we would pick the twin-winged seeds of the Maple tree, break them apart, and throw them high into to air to watch them spin to the ground like a slow moving helicopter. We considered it great and good-luck if we found three seeds in one winged cluster, kind of a South Fork canyon version of a four leaved clover.

The Oak trees are lost in their fickle confusion of what color they want to be. They keep trying on colors to see how they look. They throw out the beautiful green color that they have had on all summer, then they try on yellows and reds and oranges then browns, like an aging woman trying on make-up, to make herself appear young and frivolous again. Then she throws them all away in resignation of the inevitable, and gives up her beautiful leaves for another season, where she will once again become young and new.

The oak won’t be giving you acorns this year, she gave you her all last year, and they just laid there ground and went to waste. People have lost their taste for the nutritious Oaks acorns. The Black-Tail deer enjoyed them thought, and they got fat, and there was more than one sighting of triplet fawns this year, so Mrs. Oaks abundance didn’t go completely unappreciated.

The grassy openings are tinged with green edges of grass eager to grow from our, right-on-time, fall rains. Grass, bravely bursting forth in the threat of being killed by a hard winter frost, only to try again, and always succeed.

The tweety birds are gone for the season, and the winter birds are showing up. The Ospreys are gone, and soon the Bald Eagle will come to dine on Northern Pike fish that have almost squeezed out our once generous supply of salmonids.

I just came home from one of the most beautiful places on Earth, Hawaii, and mingled with some of the most friendly people that I ever met, and ate some of the best food I ever ate. But, to come home, is a sweet feeling like nothing else, it is like coming home to the warm arms of a long trusted and faithful lover.

Some of you know what I mean!