by Chris Duffin
A few weeks after I was told I couldn’t go with Pat to his friend’s camp anymore, my mother borrowed a car from the family whose dwelling we bathed at. She told us we were all going into nearby Potter Valley—her, Pat, my brother, and my two sisters. We drove around for a while and then stopped in a parking lot where we waited for several hours. Mark and I got bored and found some cherry trees adjacent to the lot. We entertained ourselves by climbing them, picking the fruit, and eating it. I have a picture of my family on that day. My brother is holding a cup full of cherries, while my mom holds Janis. We are all covered in dirt, like stereotypical mountain folk.
My brother and two sisters in the town of Potter Valley, while the murderer in our neighboring camp was being arrested.
At the end of the day, we piled back into the car and drove back into the mountains. When we got to our campsite, my parents told me that Pat’s drinking buddy was gone and that we wouldn’t see him again. When I asked why, they told me that the police had come and taken him away. Naturally, I pressed for further details and they explained that he had reputedly murdered someone twenty years earlier over twenty dollars. He tied the guy to a tree and beat him to death with a tire iron.
Later in life, I learned that he had disclosed this story to Pat during a drinking session. Pat didn’t want to freak him out so he continued visiting regularly, but that was when I was barred from joining the party. Just as Pat handled rattlesnakes by keeping the danger close until it was time to strike, he reassured his former buddy that everything was normal, then called the police while we evacuated the scene.
A Near-Death Experience
Our third home in the area of Sue and Tom’s Mountain was up another nearby peak. I believe it was known as Mid Mountain. Our house on Mid Mountain was on top of a ridge. Once again, there was no running water or electricity. It was a one-story building with a high ceiling and a balcony that functioned like a second story which served as a bedroom. We reached the balcony by climbing a ladder. There was also a giant steel ball that hung from the ceiling and reached all the way down to a few feet above the ground floor. I think it was an old bomb, which had been turned into a fireplace.
Due to the lack of running water, we got our supply from a truck that filled the huge water tower on the property. At the time I didn’t realize why we needed so much water. In hindsight, it’s obvious that it was so Pat and my mother could grow weed. This was undoubtedly a big reason why they chose to live on Mid Mountain. One of the snapshots I recall from this period is sitting at the dining room table, trimming a gigantic pile of buds and prepping them for sale. It was the first time I began to understand what we were doing to earn a living.
The balcony was protected by nothing more than a small railing. My brother, Mark, and I slept up there. One time when I was six and he was three, it nearly cost him his life. He fell from that balcony, the height of a second story, and landed on his head. I vividly remember him hitting the ground headfirst, bouncing three times, and coming to rest. His heart stopped and he stopped breathing.
Unlike on Sue and Tom’s Mountain, we did have a vehicle—an old Buick—while we were living on Mid Mountain. We rushed Mark to the hospital. At this point my memory becomes blurry. I don’t remember whether he received CPR. Considering how long it took to get from the mountain into town, I can only surmise that he must have started breathing again before we reached the hospital, otherwise he would have died.
A Life Less Ordinary
Many of the stories I’m relating may sound bizarre or outlandish; in comparison with the childhoods of most people growing up in affluent areas, they are. To me however, these experiences were normal. As a child, I had nothing to compare them to. Killing rattlesnakes, dodging bees, and narrowly escaping being crushed to death were simply a part of life.
When we killed rattlesnakes, Pat pinned their skins to a board and left them to dry in the sun. He wanted to keep our local area as free of rattlesnakes as possible, for our own safety. He also thought he could make some money from selling the skins. We had two small dogs living with us; one day they attacked the board and destroyed the skins. My primary response to this was disappointment. I remember thinking that Pat had worked so hard to capture and skin so many snakes and that all that effort had gone to waste. It never occurred to me to think that it was weird to live by a little creek off a meadow, with rattlesnake skins nailed to a board outside.
It was while we lived on Mid Mountain and my parents were busy growing weed that I started going to kindergarten. It was not a pleasant experience. I was used to roaming freely around the mountains, living almost communally with kids from other families. As soon as I got to school, I felt strange and different. It was obvious that the other kids in my class didn’t spend their free time knocking bees’ nests out of trees or skinning rattlesnakes. Kindergarten was the first place where I confronted my experiences and began to see them as unusual.
Lesson: Confronting Fears
I learned to confront fear so young that I wasn’t even aware it was happening. I never made a conscious choice to place myself in dangerous situations, they simply arose as part of my life. As an adult reading this book, you have that choice. You can determine the fears you want to tackle and decide how you want to address them.
What are the big fears in your life right now? Once you’ve identified them, go a step further and list the obstacles that are preventing you from moving forward. For example, are you frightened of jeopardizing your security, or a relationship, if you change your career?
Once you’ve pinpointed your own fears, you can put together a plan for dealing with them. Fear exists for a reason and simply ignoring or overriding it doesn’t work. If I had simply ignored my fear of rattlesnakes, I wouldn’t be alive to write this book. I’m still here today because I acknowledged that fear and learned how to manage it. The key thing to recognize is that through learning how to handle and kill rattlesnakes, I not only limited my exposure to fear, but I also made myself objectively safer.
How can you turn your fear to your advantage and use it to develop your skillset? You may not need to capture and kill rattlesnakes, but none of us are immune to fear. We may lose a job or a relationship and find ourselves in an insecure position. The question is not how we can avoid fear, but how we can mitigate it effectively. What process can you develop for engaging productively with fear? How can you use it to make yourself stronger? How can you turn your fear into a source of power?
Fear is a signal. It tells us that we have an opportunity to grow. When we encounter our fears, we have an opportunity to adapt, grow stronger, and improve in whatever realm we are currently developing. If we wish to grow, we need to spend time in the unknown. If we’re not exploring the unknown, we’re not growing, we’re not adapting, and we’re not getting stronger.
Becoming familiar with fear is a practice. To a degree, we all need to consciously choose to live in fear—to prepare ourselves for the times when big opportunities come our way. If we haven’t built up our resilience to fear in small ways, it will be much harder to master our fears when big changes come around.
Find the things that scare you. Chase them. Own them. Control them.
Hyampom: The Next Adventure
We pulled into Trinity Valley in northern California. Trinity Valley is a stunning environment situated a little to the south of the Trinity Alps—a series of striking peaks which are almost impossible to traverse. The area is mostly wild, with few roads and plentiful lush green valleys. In the summer, the temperature rises to well above one hundred degrees. The rivers fed by the mountains, however, remain ice cold, creating a breathtaking contrast. Up in the mountains, old cart tracks from the gold rush years are still visible, making the area look like it’s come straight out of the movies.
The small town of Hyampom is set between the north fork and the south fork of Trinity River. Did I say town? Hyampom is more of a small cluster of buildings. It con
sists of a school, a general store, and a community hall that serves as a meeting place and activity center. The general store also includes a bar and a post office. When we arrived, the entire vicinity had a population of fewer than one hundred people. Hyampom’s history as a gold rush location might have led to it becoming a tourist attraction, but for the fact that it’s so difficult to reach. Traversing the twenty miles to Hayfork, the nearest moderately sized settlement, takes a queasy hour along winding roads.
Without that remnant, Hyampom and its surroundings would have been uninhabited.
I didn’t fully understand why we had left Mid Mountain, nor that Hyampom would be my home for the next couple of years. Although picking up and moving was a common experience for me, the trip to Hyampom was by far the longest journey I had known. It also represented another degree of isolation. On Sue and Tom’s Mountain, I could see a town of five thousand people. In Hyampom, we were an hour’s drive from Hayfork, which even today has a population smaller than 2,500. Nonetheless, I was already getting used to the nomadic existence that would form the blueprint of my childhood.
Chapter Two
2. Handling Uncertainty, Pain, and Loneliness
1983–1985 (Age Six to Eight), Hyampom, Trinity Wilderness, California
The whole of our lives was packed into the trunk of our old four-door Buick sedan. On our drive we passed a lake called Lake Whiskeytown, beside which an old mining town was once situated. When the town became obsolete, the river was dammed and the entire population moved away.
Further along, we drove through the county seat of Weaverville, which lives on today as a tourist attraction themed around gold mining and the Old West. An hour past Weaverville was Hayfork, another small mountain community. From Hayfork, Hyampom is only twenty-four miles away, but since the roads are so narrow and twisting, the journey takes more than an hour.
Once we arrived in Hyampom, we stopped by the general store and purchased a watermelon. It was the beginning of summer, with temperatures in northern California reaching higher than 110 degrees. We then drove down to the river and sat by our car on the stony ground near the river’s banks. The ground was littered with gray stones, many of them worn smooth by the motion of the river. My brother and I dug around in search of flat stones we could skim across the surface of the water or, alternatively, hurl into the trees in an effort to knock pine cones to the ground. When we succeeded, we smashed the pine cones open and ate the seeds as an accompaniment to chunks of watermelon.
I didn’t know why we had moved to Hyampom, nor what Pat and my mother planned to do while we were there, but I felt a sense of serenity in our beautiful natural surroundings. Following lunch, we set off down one of the smaller forks in the river’s path where we located a campsite and set up our tents. We only had pup tents, which are usually used as auxiliary tents for storage or pets. It appeared that we didn’t have a more permanent place to stay, nor any solid plans.
A couple of days after we set up our tents, the rain set in. It rained for two weeks straight. Each member of my family was stuck in their own individual pup tent; so small that there was barely enough room for a sleeping bag. Every so often, we ventured out into the pouring rain and dug trenches around our tents to divert the flow of water and ward off the risk of flooding. We had no place to dry our sleeping bags, so we were desperate to ensure that they didn’t become swamped.
Pat got a little stir crazy and went out in the rain looking for something to do. He found a big post and started carving it into the shape of a human head. Pat never could sit still. He was dissatisfied unless he was making or doing something.
Eventually, the rain stopped. We packed up our makeshift camp and moved further into the woods, up old dirt roads that wound deep into the mountains. For a curious six-year-old, this was an interesting journey. By the side of the road lay evidence of the old mining communities that were dotted around the mountains in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We saw small tracks, much smaller than railroad tracks, that were used for transporting dirt out of the mining claims. Although no section of track was totally intact, large sections of these old gold mining lines lay alongside the road on raised platforms.
After we’d driven for a while, we parked the car and pitched our tents in a picturesque spot beside a creek. The woods were dense, and the creek was fed by a small waterfall that created a pool suitable for bathing. The pool was home to an abundance of water spiders that skirted around the edges and intrigued my brother and me. We sat there watching them for hours at a time. We also liked to hike through the mountains, exploring the old, overgrown roads.
Meanwhile, Pat and my mom were scouting for territory to grow weed. They were investigating the creeks to decide which ones could be used as water sources for our growing operations. Trinity Valley is separated from Humboldt County—one of the most recognized weed-growing areas in the world—only by a mountain range. At the time however, I didn’t know any better. I hiked, picked berries—checking which ones were edible—and enjoyed the sight of the flowering bushes that lined the former mining roads.
Theme: Uncertainty, Pain, and Loneliness
The stories in this chapter illustrate the dizzying variety of changes that took place in my life by the time I was eight years old. Sometimes it seems as though the only constant in my childhood was change. By this time in my life, I was becoming used to my family’s repeated moves. Every year or two, I was ripped out of a familiar environment and transported somewhere new, leaving behind everything and everyone I knew, except my family. With these frequent moves came a necessity to make new friends and establish myself in a new place. The only constant was the mountains, the trees, and the wilderness.
Although I grew to expect these sudden transitions, I never became totally comfortable with them. It was disorienting to find myself plucked from one environment and shifted to another. At such a young age, these repeated upheavals were dizzying. I felt as though the circumstances of my life were out of my control. As soon as I settled in one place, became comfortable with my surroundings, and made friends, I was forced to adapt to somewhere new. This naturally led to a lot of uncertainty, pain, and loneliness, along with a struggle to belong. The wilderness, however, was a source of comfort. I loved to hike the mountains alone, immersing myself in the natural beauty of the northern Californian landscape.
Settling in Hyampom
By the end of the summer, we had secured a place to live. There was an old logging village where two forks of the river came together. In the short period of time that the mill had been operational, the occupants of the community had built several small homes near it. Since then, the mill had closed, and the original tenants had left. We moved into one of the homes near the former mill housing complex, which was populated by approximately ten other low-income families.
There was little work in the area and Pat began to cut firewood for local residents as a way to bring in some money. My brother and I tried to augment his efforts by picking blackberries. Below the housing complex, between the river and the house, was a giant patch of blackberry bushes riddled with tunnels and trails. The main trail, which led through the bushes to the river, was always kept open.
Mark and I used to venture down into the bushes with five-gallon buckets and collect as many blackberries as we could carry. My mom cooked the blackberries into pies and offered them for sale to residents of the complex and other local people. At other times, my brother and I wandered freely around the valley, exploring, and playing games. We often played in the tunnels under the blackberry bushes and spent long summer days running wild.
Housing projects in the remote mining town of Hyampom, which were built for mill employees, but later closed.
Another source of income came from mushrooms we foraged. In the early 1980s, most people were nervous about eating wild mushrooms, but my mom did extensive research on the subject. She figured out which types were safe to ea
t and how to differentiate between those and the ones that were dangerous. Some poisonous varieties looked extremely similar to edible varieties, so it was important to be 100 percent certain.
There was a lot more shade in the Trinity Wilderness than there was on Sue and Tom’s Mountain. Instead of oak trees, the area was thick with firs and Madrones. The Madrones grew to great heights, casting huge shadows that provided ideal mushroom-growing conditions. Pat wanted us well out of the way while he worked, to make sure that we didn’t find ourselves in the path of a falling tree, so he gave us the task of collecting as many mushrooms as we could. While Mark and I foraged for mushrooms, Pat dropped trees and my mom rolled the rounds to the truck. We replaced the Buick and purchased a flatbed truck that we used for transporting firewood.
One of my favorite types of mushroom had a flavor and texture eerily similar to venison. It even seemed to bleed. When broken, it oozed a viscous red substance. In a time when food was hard to come by, it felt sustaining and nourishing. We loved these mushrooms and ate as many as we could find.
Unfortunately, there was another mushroom growing on the mountains that looked identical. They must have been part of the same family. There was only one crucial difference: the second variety was fatally poisonous. The only way I could distinguish between them was to look closely at the substance that leaked out. While the tasty, health-giving variety bled red, the “blood” of the deadly variety had a slight yellow tinge. We knew that we had to be exceptionally diligent in our testing, because if we made one wrong pick, we would be dead. One day, the local sheriff came to town. He warned us that we would wind up killing ourselves one day. Thankfully, we never chose incorrectly.
