Taken with permission from Mountain Springs

One of my fondest memories of my mother is watching her apply this tradition while bending over the kitchen table, and with those rough warm hands of hers, wielding a toothpick with the same finesse of a surgeon intent on a delicate operation. With great patience and tenderness, she is extracting a baby chick from its shell’s thin membrane that has dried and become impossibly stuck. As though attesting to my mother’s prodigious skill in midwifery, that chick grew into a strapping rooster forever memorialized as Billy Toothpick.

Always willing to encourage me in my own investigations in natural history, she cheerfully allowed me to use our enormous claw-foot bathtub for short periods in the spring for my experimental aquatic nursery. As a result, countless generations of hellgrammites (officially, stone fly larvae), and frogs proliferated in the tub among a habitat of sticks, rocks, and cold running water.

But there were contradictory aspects of my mother’s nature that only later I came to understand fully. These were times, when, timid or not, she simply had to assert herself. When I was about eleven, a new teacher arrived in town. I think he may have imagined himself a kind of modern reformer, bringing a certain order to us rough backwoods folks. We girls were entranced. In our six-student classroom, we tried to act our most mature and charming for this blond handsome young man from Indiana, who, strangely enough, hung his fraternity paddle on the front wall of the classroom. We asked him teasingly what the thing was for. He answered with what seemed to us a mock ferocity. “That’s for when you don’t behave.” We twittered like robins. What a charmer this guy was, and what a great year we were going to have!

Our school population of six was like a stair-stepped family: one student per grade. We were, on the whole, well-behaved kids. The situation was far too intimate for any of us to be bad. Which is why, one fall morning, coming in from recess in the large field below the school after a particularly exhilarating war of throwing dried-up mullein stalks—spears for us—at each other, we were astonished at the reception we got. Our teacher’s face was as dark as a mountain winter afternoon, as he waited at the front of the class, slapping the fraternity paddle against his thigh. Throwing spears (a game we had enjoyed since our school had been relocated downtown to the lower floor of the Masonic Hall after the avalanche, and with no repercussions for this game from our former teacher, Mr. Jones) was now, with no warning, verboten. And there was a penalty, all too obvious. We protested with one six-leveled voice that we hadn’t been warned. Not to be deterred by childish logic, he meted out the punishment. While the rest of the class was required to sit silently and watch, each of us had to come forward to the front of the classroom, turn our back, bend over, and receive a whack on our backsides from the terrible paddle. My eyes ran with pain and humiliation. That night, the story flew around the town. My mother was enraged. She abhorred physical punishment, and her protest to the teacher was the first he heard. Considering himself completely justified while warming to his imagined power, he only increased the insults. Before long, our once exuberant little school lost its momentum. We hung outside the door in the mornings, not wanting to start the day. We became fearful because we had no clue about what might attract our teacher’s wrath. We became sullen; we lost our academic zeal. All of our reactions seemed only to increase the teacher’s determination to straighten us out.

By this time, my mother and the teacher were sworn enemies. My mother, her maternal cougar instincts thoroughly activated, laid her timidity aside and went to the county school board. Ordinarily nonpolitical, what she did know and held up to the school board, nevertheless, was her knowledge of the California state law prohibiting corporal punishment in public schools. In short, the teacher was in flagrant violation.

Mountain Springs can be purchased at the Downieville Historical Museum, Sierra Country Store in Sierra City, Bassett’s Station, Graeagle Store, or directly by emailing lcrosen@yahoo.com.