ANOTHER RETURN TO SIMPSON CAMP

 …a Memorial Day Tradition…

 

On or about Memorial Day in good years, I’ll make the trek up to Simpson Camp (western edge Glenn County near Mendocino Pass) with a loved one or a few to reminisce about 1960s-era visits to that old sheep camp with the sheepherder who worked the area forty years before. [Details are recounted in “Eden Indeed: Tales Truths and Fabrications of a Small Town Boy” pages 186-203] Our family reveled and relaxed in the beauty and solitude of the cool evergreen forests, velvet soft glades and clear starry nights. 

     In 2020, we fulfilled one of Mom’s final wishes and held a memorial for her at Simpson Camp, leaving her beloved shillelagh tucked beneath a fallen timber. Within months, the devastating August Complex fire roared through searing the trees, wiping out any sign of the camp, and leaving only a trace of white ash where Mom’s stick had lain.  

 

Back in the sixties, a small cluster of oak trees grew at the top of the ridge, visible from camp. Dad said it looked like a Greek Chorus, whatever that was. On a clear day, standing near to those oaks, looking west, one could see the fogbank of the Pacific shore; looking east, Lassen Peak: the whole of my northern California growings-up. As we lunched after Mom’s memorial, I called a granddaughter and a nephew to visit that stand where they watched as I drove a wooden stake in the ground, observing the knowing nods of those from the next generation.

 

This recent visit found the old camp regenerating. Amid the blackened spires of standing deadwood, thickets of gooseberry and chemise were taking hold. The meadow was back and foresters were awork downing some of the standing deadwood and yarding it into piles for later care; all under the ever watchful gazes of a couple of circling red tails.

     Curiously, that copse of tiny oaks had somehow survived the great fire. My stake in the ground was still my stake in the ground, confirming that, at some time-point in the future, I’ll witness ~ and be one with ~ the rebirth of Simpson Camp.

 

Photo Album 2025

 

Stepping out of the car at the top of the ridge.

 

Life returns to the meadow.

 

Someone has replaced the Zibe’s sign lost in the fire. (I had hoped to do this.)

 

 Nail of particular importance (see page 201-02)

 

Jethro waits for Dad (me) who needed an 'alone-time' moment back at camp.

 

Final view of the road winding down the hill.

 

My stake in the ground.

© 2025

Church of the Open Road Press

SOME BOOK MAGIC

 In praise of a good reference book…

…and a little kismet

 

For reasons I cannot recall, about a half century ago, I picked up a copy of Erwin Gudde’s California Place Names, the hardbound edition, at the used bookstore on Broadway in Chico…  

…Maybe because new it was listed at $15.95 but this one was marked down to $13.50… 

I’d probably picked it off the shelf and looked up Chico [page 62]… 

…then Paradise [page 238], then Butte Creek [page 44] and learning useful trivia about the origins of the names of the places near which I’d grown up.

 

The wisdom of that purchase was confirmed a few years later when I served as a Fourth Grade teacher in Durham [page 96]…

…and kept it on hand in the back of my classroom. At the conclusion of my reading Scott O’Dell’s classic Island of the Blue Dolphins to the class, one of my students asked if the island was real and what was it really called. Pulling Place Names from the back counter, the kids learned about San Nicolas Island… 

 

…and the Santa Barbara islands and a bunch of other one-thing-led-to-another- type stuff found in such a volume. After lunch recess, we always engaged in ten-minutes of silent reading. A little boy pulled the reference book from the back counter. He wanted to find out about the town where his grandparents lived. The next day another one picked it up.

 

Two or three years into my tenure as a fourth grade teacher, someone donated an aquarium to the class. (There’s a lesson here.) I gladly accepted it, and one Friday afternoon, set it up and filled it with water thinking that over the weekend the water would warm enough to be suitable for a goldfish or a guppy. Monday, I discovered not an aquarium filled with warm water, but a countertop backed with water-logged books. Including Place Names… 

…Tossing out some, having to pay for others, I kept Gudde’s volume knowing it was still serviceable once all the pages dried out. Yet, over the intervening fifty years, I’ve felt a pang of disappointment every time I leave through its crackly pages. So much so that I was always on the lookout for a replacement. I even purchased the 40^th Anniversary edition (2004) in paper, but that fell short of relieving my angst.

 

During those Durham days, I was a regular attendee of the Bidwell [John Bidwell, page 28 (entry) and 376 (glossary)] Presbyterian Church in Chico. I even served on their Session ~ the elective body that oversees policy for the congregation. The session was comprised of long-time members, many upstanding members of the Chico community: doctors, lawyers, university types, educators. Not sure how I qualified.

 

John Nopel, decades my senior, was one of ‘em. He and his wife always sat a few pews in front of me and the family I’d married into during my first attempt at matrimony. In reviewing his lovingly prepared obituary, it became clear that Mr. Nopel garnered many claims to fame beyond being an elder in the Presbyterian Church. A life-long member of Scouting, in 1934, he worked on the construction crew building Camp Lassen, the Boy Scout Camp where 54 years later, I wed [See Eden Indeed: Tales, Truths and Fabrications of a Small Town Boy pages 210-15]. As a school principal, Mr. Nopel opened Chico’s Hooker Oak School in 1948 and later served as an associate superintendent for the school district before moving to the county office. Career coincidence found me a member of Chico’s Phi Delta Kappa educational fraternity with him, later employed opening two new schools (elsewhere) myself. But, perhaps, most significant, he was the heartbeat of the Butte County Historical Society maintaining files and photos of the earliest years of my old stompin’ grounds. His library of historic texts and references must have been exhaustive.

 

 

Why might I think this? A couple of weeks back, I engaged in another of those searches for a copy of my long-damaged book. To my surprise, AbeBooks so called ‘sellers of books, fine art and collectables’ had one listed. In excellent condition. Priced at  thirty-five bucks! (AbeBooks, it turns out, serves as a means for individuals to market their wares to an online audience. Note: I normally avoid shopping for books online.) Confirmation of my purchase came with a bit of information about the seller. Enough to tell me to whom this copy might have once belonged. The Chico address rang a bell.

 

The book arrived. The cover, sheathed in plastic perfect. The pages pristine. Side-by-side, it was an exact match for my waterlogged copy. I can’t say my throat didn’t constrict a bit.

 

That evening, I settled into a favorite chair with a thimbleful of favored scotch and began to thumb through. All the listings I’d referenced before were there as, of course, were entries about the new places I’ve explored…

 

…and before I knew it, an hour-and-a-half and fifty years magically dissolved.

 

Mr. John Nopel (1914 – 2006): Perhaps your greatest calling was that of teacher. Know that even now in 2025, you’re still in the business.

 

© 2025

Church of the Open Road Press

My Beloved Spitfire

Ode to the Joys of First-Car Ownership

 

Commuting on a Honda Trail 90 wasn’t gonna get it anymore. Feeling like an adult at nineteen, I needed a car. I was drawn to British roadsters likely because one of my most memorable toys was the red Hubley MGTD Santa left when I was about four. My ninth grade English teacher, Mr. Reed, drove a baby blue Triumph TR3; the county sheriff’s kid, a year or two my senior, had an Austin Healy 3000. But I liked MGs: Midget or B. Either one. British Racing Green if possible.

     Life, I was continually discovering, is nothing if not a series of compromises. One day, motoring south on Park Avenue past Arnie’s Kwality Kars on my Honda 90, I spied a yellow Triumph Spitfire parked at the corner of the front row. Pasted on the windshield was the bargain price: $1299. I rode around the block and puttered by again. Working half time at the wholesale house and making about two-and-a-quarter an hour, I somehow amassed most of that, so on day two, I stopped in for a closer look.

     The sales guy was as nice as could be although his breath smelled like an ashtray that no measure of Hai Karate cologne could obscure. I wheeled down Park Avenue on a test drive with him. Although it was far from an MGB and yellow certainly wasn’t BRG, I was feeling a bit obligated because the sales professional ~ it may have been Arnie himself ~ told me he could make a good deal if I acted today. My experiential file in this regard contained only blank index cards and in less than an hour, $1200 lighter in savings, the ’67 Triumph Spitfire Mk3 was mine. So pleased was I with my coming-of-age purchase that the little cough or two it gave up leaving the lot would be of no concern.

     My plan had been to park the Trail 90 and use it only on weekends up in the national forest, but plans have a way of not going as planned. After the Spitty stalled out multiple times at stop lights and Mr. Cigarette Breath said, “Gee, son, that’s too bad,” I found a foreign car service that would give my baby a good once over. The ensuing tune-up wasn’t too expensive but more than I wanted to pay and the mechanic said he’d had “a hell of a time” trying to sync the carbs, but I nodded and paid and drove away. Two days later, I was back and the kind mechanic said he’d give the carbs another shot “free gratis.”

     Ultimately, I figured that a bit of sputtering must be the spit part of owning a Spitfire, so I decided I’d enjoy the ride in this sleek British marvel even if the ride wasn’t always so enjoyable.

 

 

A couple of months into ownership, I hooked up with Brother Beebo who was home on leave from the Army. Beebo knew more about cars than I did, which arguably still wasn’t much. “You just need to blow the carbon out,” he said.

     “Blow the carbon out?”

     “Yeah. Let’s hop in and take it out to Seven Mile Lane and just get ‘er going and blow the carbon out of the system.”

     “Ummm… Okay.”

     Seven Mile Lane is (or was) a straight stretch of country road bordered by acres and acres of corn. Rural, it proved a mecca for hot rodders on Friday or Saturday nights engaging in “run it for pink slips.” I never quite knew what that meant but it didn’t matter because this was a Thursday or a Wednesday afternoon.

     Top down on the little roadster, we turned off Dayton Road on to Seven Mile and Beebo said, “Hit it!”

     So I did. Within about 20 seconds we were going a good sixty miles an hour. Then sixty-five. Then seventy!  Seventy-five! The little four cylinder topped out at 82. I checked the rearview mirror to, indeed, see a cloud of black smoke gushing from the tailpipe.

     Over the roar of the engine, Beebo yelled, “Let’s find out what the brakes will do!” So I crammed on the pedal.

     God or someone who’d engineered Seven Mile Lane made sure the shoulders of the road were wide. There must have been a good fifty feet between the pavement and the concrete irrigation ditches that lay parallel on either side.  Across that expanse, gravel would give way to dirt then to weeds then to that water. 

     As it would turn out this day, half of the brakes worked just as commanded. I think they were on the passenger side of the car because as soon as I crushed the pedal, my little Spitfire’s ass end swung around in front of me, off the far side of the road, spit up some gravel and dough-nutted in a cloud of dust that took a good two or three minutes to clear. In those initial moments, I wasn’t sure how I hadn’t flipped the damned thing and, as Mom would often aver about young people who died doing stupid things, “Become a statistic.” 

     I killed the engine, waited for my pulse to subside and crawled out to tiptoe along the edge of the irrigation ditch and assess what, if any, damage, might have occurred to my Spitty. Beebo, by this time, was at the back of the car, sort of laughing. He had endured this near-death experience from the passenger seat. Although perhaps thinking active duty was somehow safer, he was gracious enough to drive the thing back home for me.

 

 

North Valley Volkswagen was at the north end of town. A week after the ‘incident,’ I dropped by. In 1971, VW had just come out with the Super Beetle, a marginally larger version of the car that so many Americans had grown to love. An orange one had just rolled off the transport truck, and after accepting $300 as a trade in, I found myself comfortably tooling around in a vehicle that was much more my style.

     A week into ownership, I cruised down Park Avenue, and sitting at the prime corner position at Arnie’s Kwality Kars was a yellow Triumph Spitfire Mk3. Attached to the windshield was the bargain price: $1299.

 

© 2025

Church of the Open Road Press