A Little House on the Hill

My home in Auburn for the first fifteen years of life

The house that my parents brought me home to was built in 1937.  We lived on the northern edge of Auburn on a hill called Los Altos Heights.  The hill had been subdivided by Judge Landis, Placer County’s superior court judge.   Virtually all of the homes were built around the same time with the exception of the Hamilton family home on the south side of the hill that had been built earlier.

Our home was typical of our middle class neighborhood.  The houses were scattered mostly around the western side of the hill with oaks and manzanita covering most of the other sides.  Like my father, several other men worked for PG&E, the electric utility that was one of the largest employers in the area.  Our other neighbors ranged from the local high school football coach, to several local business owners, the community college president, and several professionals.

We were a distinct little neighborhood isolated from the rest of town, and connected only by a road that climbed the south side of the hill and circled the crown.  Our home was located on the far north side of the hill, separated by several hundred yards from the nearest neighbor.  It was nestled into the hillside with a yard carved into the oaks and manzanita.  Two mature pine trees presided over the sloping back yard.

As an only child with no children immediately available to play with, I spent a lot of time by myself, especially during summer vacations.  It was never lonely, however.  This little house and the surrounding yard were special and homey.  There were also “friends” consisting of a menagerie of cats and dogs that composed the rest of our family.

With no one to talk to and speak back, my ears  were tuned to the natural, unseen background sounds of the surrounding woods.  In the summer, the air was always filled with the raucous squawking of the blue jays as they behaved like bad-mannered guests.  If you looked closely, you would almost always see the hovering dragonflies with their wire-thin brilliant blue bodies and double sets of wings.  Birds and insects fit into a fabric of trees and brush, and even poison oak over a ground cover of decomposing leaf mold that gave off a pungent fungal odor.   The air could seem heavy and almost dusty like the seed pods that fell off and decomposed from the oak trees.

Everything seemed natural and to fit together even in a child’s mind.  This was how it must have been going back in time; everything perfectly in balance.

In days during World War II the stillness of the air was only occasionally broken by the rumble of heavy freight trains gliding down the railroad track located at the bottom of our hill.  These trains were pulled by massive cab-forward steam locomotives, sometimes arranged in pairs to pull their heavy loads over Donner Summit at the crest of the Sierra-Nevada, then down the grade into the Sacramento Valley and on to the Army terminals in Oakland, then on to ships bound for the Pacific.

These wartime trains carried trucks and tanks and other war materials on flat cars, and sometimes you could even see the army soldiers who were assigned to guard their cargo.  It was a number of years after the War, that I understood the big picture of what was going on.  But even as a four or five year old, I knew that there was something called a war, and that these trains played their part in what was going on overseas.

Once, a B-17 bomber flew low over our house.  It was called a “flying fortress.”  It was all silvery and huge, and  the engines created a thunder that shook the ground.  It was all over in a minute, but these are the kind of things that little boys remember.

The other background sound that punctuates my memory was the chattering of children at recess at the Alta Vista elementary school that was probably a half-mile away to the east across the gully bisected by the railroad tracks and then several blocks of residential streets.

Looking back, I guess I was predisposed to be a schoolboy, if not a most accomplished one.  I’d daydream about being there with those children.  I’d have my own desk and I would be doing important work getting on with life!

A partially paved road adjoined the west side of our property that ran down the north slope of our hill.  About a hundred yards down the hill it was blocked by the remnants of an old barbed wire fence that had earlier served to keep cows inside a pasture area.  Beyond this point it was only a dirt road which ended at a PG&E ditch.

PG&E maintained a series of hydroelectric powerhouses in the Auburn area that were interconnected by a network of ditch systems.  Water from the after bay of one powerhouse was channeled by gravity down to the fore bay of the next powerhouse.  This way, the same water could be used over and over again to generate power as long as there was elevation for the water to descend.  I find it interesting that this same ditch system is still in place and functioning just as it did when I was a boy.

The ditch was located about two hundred and fifty yards away from our home, and, at that time, there was a small wooden bridge that allowed one to cross over to the ditch tender’s path on the other side.  If my memory is correct, my father and I took a walk almost once a week down to the ditch in the Summer and then turning right on the path, walk along a series of switchbacks until we reached a meadow where blackberries were plentiful.

Just before the meadow the ditch took a tight turn near the railroad tracks.  Right at this point there was a heavily shaded grove that abutted the bank of the railroad track bed.  Here was a hobo camp that was a very mysterious place, although a logical spot.  Southbound trains would typically slow down as they approached the Auburn station.  This allowed the knights of the rails to hop on or off trains.  Secondly, ditch water was available near the tracks for drinking and washing.

The camp was usually unoccupied during the day.  On several occasions, my father and I found tramps, and chatted with them.  Even when I was older and visited the camp by myself, I was always wary and felt and unseen presence; almost a heaviness in the air.  It was a spooky place.

During “the War” (i.e., WWII), tramps would occasionally come to the front door of our home begging for food.  My mother and I were always ill at ease, and she would always try and keep the screen door closed when talking to them.  Once, if I remember correctly, she took piety on one of these soldiers of the road and gave him some food.  Good Samaritans

Many years later when my family and I lived in Eureka during the 1970’s, I attended a Rotary Club meeting in nearby Arcata.  The speaker that day was a nutty professor of Native-American studies from Humboldt State University.  He through out a cock and bull story of being kidnapped by space aliens, and then being taken up in a flying saucer.  As the craft rose from the ground he could look a window and see glowing spots on the Earth.  He knew that these were ancient Indian gathering places or “power spots.”

My first thought was to flash back on the old hobo’s camp, even though I knew this was ridiculous.  Nevertheless, there’s something more than is seen at that place.  Perhaps, I should have Stephen King check it out for a novel.

By the spring of 1946 the War was over, and domestic civilian production was in full swing.  As a child of seven, going on eight, I wasn’t aware of the fact that Highway 40, the major east-west artery going through downtown Auburn and traversing the country, was going to be relocated and expanded around the outskirts of town.  The new route departed from the old highway at the south-western edge of town and then went directly north and east through some well established residential neighborhoods, then around the western base of our hill, Los Altos Heights.  Finally it followed the foot of the hillside at the base of the hill behind out house, bridging the Southern Pacific Railroad line, and then off toward the mountains.

The first people to show up were the surveyors.  They hacked their way through the manzanita brush driving stakes in the ground everywhere down the hill on the north side of our house.  While this was all new and exciting, I felt that the woods were being disturbed, even harmed.  I realized, even at this young age, that things weren’t going to be the same for me or the surrounding area in the future.

My parents were openly worried about the freeway’s location, and whether or not the right of way was going to encroach on our own property.  Would the State take our home?  Would we keep our home, but would the freeway essentially destroy our peace and quiet, and our way of life?

The answer was a little bit of both concerns.  When the State right-of-way agents contacted my parents, they said they wanted to take about a twenty-five foot portion of the northwestern corner of our side yard.  This meant that we got to stay, but the edge of the freeway right-of-way would only be about twenty feet from the corner of our home.  I think we got about $2,200 for the property and what they call “severance damages,” the devaluation of the remaining portion of our property.

Much later, when they actually graded a slope almost touching our corner fence, the construction crew started to knock down the fence that now encroached onto the State property.  My dad was home for lunch and my parents rushed out with the sale agreement in hand and pointed out that they would have to rebuild the fence on the new property line if they relocated it.

The foreman read the agreement and scratched his head.  He gazed up into the sky for a few moments and then yelled at his crew to leave the fence where it was at.  We guessed that he figured it was more trouble to relocate it than leave it where it was.  So God smiled on us that day.  We were kind of giddy because we had defeated the State of California.  The State may have owned half of our side yard, but we were going to get to use it just as before, and nobody would be the wiser.

It must have been well into the summer when the huge Caterpillar bulldozers showed up to start clearing a hundred yard path through the oaks and brush.  This was a small boys dream to watch these behemoths growl and snort gobs of Diesel smoke into the air while their big blades made the trees and brush tremble in a jittery dance before falling to their power.  Their metal tracks ground dirt into dust and provided a calliope of musical squeaks from their sprockets and rollers.

During summer vacation for several years I spent a lot of my time watching this extravagant production.  Slowly, one could see the logic behind what was going on.  They were carving down the west and north sides of our hill to create a gentle grade and enough earth to fill the gully on both sides of the railroad tracks.

When much of the rough carving was done, the bridge builders showed up to start building huge concrete footings and columns that would carry the large steel I-beams that would span the railroad tracks and their approaches.  What entertainment for a small boy usually with no one to play with.   This was as good or better than making dirt forts or fortifications of wooden blocks.  This was the real thing!

On a couple of occasions, the construction crews had to set patterns of dynamite to crack and break up the core of granite and quartz that made up our hill.  In the early evenings and on the weekends I, and sometimes some of the kids from down the street, would play in the construction area.  It was great fun to climb over the big Caterpillar dozers, pretending to be driving them, wondering just exactly how we might get one of them going.

One of the things that was fun to do was to pull out the electrical wires from the dynamite charges that had been placed into the hillside.  Air drills were used to drill holes four or six feet into the rock, and then dynamite sticks were pushed into the holes along with an electric cap.  Lightweight copper wires were attached to the caps, and as a last step, rock rubble was tamped into the hole so the explosion would expand the rock and break down the hillside.

The possibility that tampering with the wires would set off an explosion entered my mind, but this idea was immediately discarded.

This wire was all to tempting to this little boy who could use it for all sorts of projects including telegraph systems to tree houses.  I also wondered what kind of trouble this would cause the powder monkeys.  Would they have to clean out the holes and rewire the caps?  Would they just ignore my handiwork?  Would they come looking for ME?

Fortunately, I never found out.  The charges were set off with giant “whumps.”  It was always exciting, but scary.  Maybe like watching an atom bomb go off.  There was also the thrill of pulling those wires out, wondering whether or not everything was going to blow up.  Of course when you are young and indestructible, nothing bad is going to happen.

I don’t really remember when the freeway was completed.  Maybe it was 1948.  I remember that an exit that terminated across the street from my elementary school was still under construction and used as a carnival site for the first year of the Gold Show (1948, ’49, and ’50).  More later on the goings-on at the Gold Shows.

We got used to the freeway.  The traffic noise just became part of the ambiance along with the whistle of the trains and the background noises of the woods.  From the freeway, itself, you could look up at our house on the hill which was punctuated by our back yard pine tree which stood higher than everything else.  The view wasn’t exactly that of a castle on the Rhine, but I imagined that a lot of passers by must have wondered who lived there.

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