The Owl Hoot Trail

My brothers and I grew up in Livermore California, originally a ranch and vineyard area established in the early half of the 1800’s while California was still under Spanish Rule.  The town of Livermore finally incorporated in 1876 some 75 years before a Vandermolen set foot within the city limits.  For most of those 75 years the town had slowly, quietly, and sedately charted a course towards modernization.

I would like to point out for the record that I was not the first hooligan to roam the streets of Livermore.  Not only had my two brother’s beat me to that distinction, but so had several of the residents in Boot Hill out west of town.  

No, really, we had a hill on the west edge of town called Boot Hill, and yes, it really was a cemetery from the days of the Mexican war and gunfights, cowboys and gunfights, and prohibition and gunfights, and  well, heck, if’n you had known some of the characters around town when we were growing up, just gunfights and gunfights.

Yep, ol’ Livermore had been slowly passing time for more years than most folks had lived staying mostly the same. Then my brothers moved to town.  And there are those who would tell you the old town was never the same again.

But I digress.

The town came to be well before electricity arrived in that back country part of California.  In fact, one of the early events in the electrical field was back in 1901 when Dennis Bernal (the founder and owner of Livermore Power and Light Company) donated an electric light to light up the inside of the fire station.  That light was screwed in and the switch was thrown.  The bulb was originally rated as a 60 watt bulb and threw a glorious glow over the horse-drawn hand pumpers as they sat housed in the double bay of the brick fire house.

That was now some 115 years ago, and that light is still burning.  Admittedly its puny 4 watt consumption does little to provide safety for the firemen these days, but as the (by far) recognized oldest operating light bulb in history, that feeble glow seems to abnormally warm the hearts of the local politicians.

Let’s see, what got me started on that…Oh, yeah.  Electricity.

Since the town had been around long before electricity the residents had only three choices when it came to water supplies.  Bucket trips to the arroyos, dig a hand pump well in the yard, or for the really rich, build a windmill that would pump water up to a second story water tank.

The advantage of the elevated tank was that you could then plumb water directly into the house and do away with the whole bucket toting idea altogether.  

Ultimately Dennis Bernal did come to town and he did found the Livermore Power and Light Company and with that the city got into the water business.  The city acquired selected hill-tops (though not Boot Hill as it already served a purpose) and built water tanks on the top of those hills, sometimes on 60 foot high towers, sometimes, just on the ground.

With the electric motors they pulled water up out of wells, charged those tanks and let gravity carry water to all the households the city sold water to.  Yep, pretty soon everyone was dumping the bucket in favor of running indoor water.  And the rich were dumping their own water tanks in favor of ones owned and maintained by someone else.

Why is that important?   Well, because that meant that all over town there were these steep sided outbuildings that had 2000 gallon or so wooden tanks on top.  And those wooden tanks fell into disuse.

And after a few years of disuse, those tanks started to break open one slat or maybe two at a time.  Or several shingles would blow off the top during a storm.  And by the time Barry, Jeff, and I were old enough to get interested, most all of those old tanks had been taken over by barn owls as nesting sites.

Dad had employed my brothers and I to build chicken and pigeon coops all across the back of the garage and we were in the bird business pretty good.  Eggs, fryers, squab, whatever, if it flew and we could raise it, it was headed for a dinner plate someday.

We boys had been reading along about that time about Knights and Kings and hunting with falcons.  And while we never saw a falcon nest anywhere other than in the top of a couple hundred foot tree, we figured out while out in the early mornings throwing papers where the Barn Owls nested.  

One thing and another and next thing you know we were all experimenting with sneaking up the steep side of someone’s well house to get to the top of the tank and worm our way in to liberate baby owl.

It might surprise you to know that the best time for hunting baby owls is when it is full on dark.  That time is best for two reasons, first is that  the mother is usually off hunting in the early dark hours and second is, you don’t want any part of trying to liberate a baby owl while the mother is anywhere within earshot.

If the beak or claws miss you, the dang wings will beat your head silly.

And so, off and on growing up the chickens and pigeons uncomfortably spent time close to a feathered “friend” they would have been just as happy to have never met.

We were never allowed to keep those wild critters very long.  Usually a month or two while they finished growing their full flight feathers, or ‘fledging’ as it is known.

After that point, we had to turn them loose to remain wild.

So for a month or two most years, my brother’s and I took turns feeding voracious ripping machines odds and ends of trimmed uncooked meat and old out-dated liver from the grocery stores while their feathers developed and their flying abilities were exercised in the fairly large cage they had.

Both of my forefingers carry scares to this day, cause a baby owl that is trying to latch onto a meal tends to close his eyes and once his beak sinks in, he is of no mind to let go.

But the pain then and scars now where more than off-set by a close up opportunity to watch a bird of prey develop, both physically and mentally.  As the bird grew we switched from near rotten liver to dead mice for their diets.  And for a short time tethered live mice, until finally just live mice loose in the pen.

We used to make live traps out of 2 and 5 pound coffee cans.  WH would drill and screw what nowdays would be thought of as an “old-fashioned” wooden mousetrap to the rim of the empty can with the trigger inside the can.  Then we would use thin wire to fix 1/8th inch mesh to the trap’s wire bail, finally adding a broad trigger pad to the trap.

Once set and baited, anything the crawled into the trap had to push against the large trigger plate releasing the wire mesh to be flipped up and close of the can’s opening.

We would set those improvised traps all over town.  Some in fields with lots of tall grass and little anmial runs, some downtown in garbage canned alleys, out along the vineyards, or over by the railroad tracks.  We ran a trap string back then that would have been the envy of any mountain man of yore.

And from them would come the mice to train the barn owls how to not starve.

Our time with those owls were all too short.  But we learned any number of truths trying to raise and release those Owlets.  Remembering makes me want to build a cage and  go sneaking around a few old buildings.

©Copyright 2016 Marty Vandermolen All Rights Reserved

Life so often sneaks past us.

Or in the words of various individuals throughout the latter half of the 20th century; “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans”.

The “great choices” of life, those that carry with them true life changing results, and that shape the destiny of each life, so seldom call attention to themselves.  They come and go, dressed up as small events, tiny irritants, and miniscule frustrations.  We tend to them without thinking, and sometime later if we are lucky, we realize that we tended to them poorly. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have several epiphanies in my life that clearly and immediately rebalanced my future.  Diving into cold dark waters seeking a drowning child, hanging stuck 300 feet up an exposed granite rock face while free-climbing, looking along the sights of a loaded weapon at another human being, falling 30 feet off of a building to crush my spine, performing CPR and resuscitation breathing on a wilderness trail; each of those events presented moments of clarity for me where I realized that the decisions and actions that had led me to those points, and the decisions and actions that would lead me forward from those points, were going to be pivotal to my life.

But the most impactful epiphany I have ever had borne none of the immediately recognizable potential of any of those other three.  My most impactful epiphany occurred one evening, as I was rushing home on the highway, late, again, knowing that my wife would find ways to express her displeasure.

Like uncountable men before me, and uncounted men since I was supposed to have broken off work and been home at a prescribed time.  And with the digital clock inconveniently located right next to the speedometer, it was obvious that the car couldn’t move fast enough to get me home before I was going to be close to 2 hours late.

And like uncountable men before me, I blamed the unfairness on the world.  I was supposed to be the “breadwinner”, my wife expected me to climb the corporate ladder and provide; cars and homes, and tuitions, and vacations.  And I was doing that.  We had agreed before we wed, her job was to finish school and bear and raise our children, mine was to drop out and take the opportunity to move into management with the retail company I worked for and build a career around that.

And I had done so, hadn’t I?  I had become a department manager, and then an assistant manager trainee, and on through being an assistant manager to “first” assistant, and finally to store manager.  Each time I was moved from store to store I dug in afresh.  I learned more, taught better, harnessed experiences and built a better more rounded suit.  I was damn good at it.  I was the very pattern of retail success.

But it had come at a price.

Time.

Time away from home.

Time away from family.

Time that wasn’t my own.

And that time, the same I was racing against that night, that time had robbed me of my family, as surely as it had robbed my family from me.

For you see, I was going to be 2 hours late for my son’s 9th birthday.

And as I thought about that, while willing the speedometer to pass 80 and move on to “time travel”, I had my epiphany.

My Son.  My son was 9 years old.  When, how, why hadn’t I seen?  And being done with 9 he was entering the time in life when he would soon come face to face with pivotal choices of his own; drugs, girls, cars, college, career, all of those issues that begin to close in on people somewhere between 5th grade and 12th.  

And I realized that when he faced those choices, he was going to have to face them alone, or worse, armed only with the council of his peers.

Because, well, because he didn’t know me; and because I didn’t know him.

There was no reason to think he would come ask my advice.  For all of his awareness I was gone when he woke up, and came home about the time he went to bed.  For all of his days I worked an average 70 hours a week.  Six solid days, and often some time on the seventh.

 I had wasted fully half of my son’s life.    

I say half because my real epiphany was that after my son turned 18 and moved out (to college, or work, or whatever life brought) I would be lucky to see him another 250 days in the rest of our lives.

Think about it.  Thanksgiving, Christmas, part of a weekend here, an evening there, maybe a few days in the summer if schedules allow for coordinated vacations.  Say 8 days a year at best.

From birth to 18 years old, six thousand five hundred and seventy days.

From 18 to his or my death, maybe 250 additional.

Ninety-six percent of the time I would ever have available would be before he turned eighteen.

My epiphany during that drive was that my son was half way to 18 and I had already wasted 3,285 days 

It took some time to arrange it, but I walked away from my retail passion.  I stepped out from the known and confident into the unknown and unsure.

And to be truthful, there have been some financially rough times since.  Times were our accounts bled red ink all over the statements.

But I got involved in Cub Scouts, and Boy Scouts, and 4-H, and my son and I and daughter and I camped, and hiked, and boated, and fished, and explored.

We read together every night before bed, and built bikes and cars.  And I drove them to races and college, and theatre rehearsals.

And none of that was easy, I worried more than when I had been working 70 hour weeks.  I worried about how to make the mortgage, I worried about how to pay the bills, and buy the clothes, and afford a movie now and then.  Our income dropped by some 60%, my “vacation” tiem was consumed whit some youth group for 15 years or more, I had evening meetings schedules most nights for 18 to 20 months out ahead of me.

The house slowly fell into disrepair as I would look at a chore and say “I can do that, or I can spend some time with Bryan or Allison, and time with always won out.

Now they are grown and gone. My son lives over a thousand miles away, My daughter most of the same (when she and her husband are actually in this country).  And I am back to 60+ hour weeks and focusing on improving the home property.

And I have realized that while hopefully I have many years ahead, my best living was between my son’s 10th birthday (my daughter’s 8th) and both of their 20th birthdays.  Those were the years I truly lived.

It’s not that I am not doing now.  I am painting, and wood carving, writing books and poems; I’m building structures and growing vegetables, gardens, shrubs and myself.

But, that was when I was “Dad” and when I created time, and opportunities, and memories that will stay with my children and flow to their families.  

That was when I was fully alive.

©2019 Copyright, Marty Vandermolen, All Rights Reserved