by Malcolm Terence
Redwood and I got cabin fever bad by January of ’69. Black Bear, the commune, was buried in snow, at least three feet deep and had been that way for many weeks. The summit into the ranch was blanketed six feet. The county road crew had their hands full even managing the main Salmon River Road. We were forgotten. Cabin fever, they say, comes in waves like malaria. In its throes, the commune seemed crowded and chaotic. We needed a cure, the get-out-of-here-for-anywhere-else cure.
“Let’s go down to the city,” Redwood said to me one evening in the teeming commune mainhouse.
“Right,” I said. “I suggest we fly.”
“Roselee has a couple pairs of snow shoes. It’d be easy. We walk to Sawyers. It’s only eight miles. Then hitch to San Francisco,” said Redwood. He was from Los Angeles, a graduate of Santa Monica High where first period classes were always half empty on days when the surf was good.
“A great idea. I’ll hit up Rose for the snow shoes,” I said. I was also from Los Angeles.
Two mornings later, just before light, we departed with food and people’s letters in our packs to the cheers of our comrades. It was just three miles uphill, five down and you were on the road in Sawyers Bar. The uphill went well except that along the way we crossed a stream that wet our snowshoes. After that, they started to cake with snow so we had to kick the ice off every few steps. Finally we tired of the kicking and just packed ten pounds of packed snow with every step. Redwood told me a story about surfing in Santa Monica. Then he told another. Finally we made the summit and our time seemed good. The sun broke through the overcast. We sat on our snowshoes during lunch and dangled our feet into the snow that was probably deeper than we were tall.
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