Having lived in California for several years in the mid-1980s, I missed it every day until moving back here in November 2005. I have had so many great adventures out here! 

  

I remember one pack trip in particular.  We left the Johnston Ranch in New Cuyama, California with my pal Michele and our friend, rawhide braider, buckaroo, cowboy poet and general smooth talker, Dick Gibford.  On that wild ride up to the cow camp (I was on his broke horse — Michele was on a dead-broke ranch horse who hadn’t bucked in years; judging from the rodeo on the way home, he must have been saving it up for her! and Dick was on the 2-year old being ridden for the first time that morning…) he pointed out more native plants than a botanist would have, picking bay leaves for cooking and showing us the plants that the Chumash Indians of the area had used to make arrows.

  

Dick told us of his teenage years spent there on the Montgomery Potrero, riding with his pal Emery, whose folks had grazing rights on this huge and ridiculously beautiful piece of Spanish land-grant history.  He told of riding his horse one day when a California condor passed overhead, with a shadow so large that at first he thought it was an airplane!

  

He took us up to a Chumash Indian cave and showed us cave paintings, and we sat  in that cave and watched the sun go down, drinking wine from a bottle that we had hauled all the way up those miles of switchback trails.  We couldn’t swear to it because of the wine, but we all thought we heard a low growl from above us as we sat quietly in that cave. We speculated that it might have been one of the mountain lions that frequent the area.

  

We left Black Willow Spring after just a few days because a front came through, and we were already wearing all the clothes we had brought, as well as half of Dick’s, and some of Emery's dads' too, and besides, the wine was gone. He teased us later that it was our fault that the bear broke into the little cabin after we left. Said we made him leave in such a hurry that he forgot the cowhide that he was soaking in a bucket in the kitchen. (He’s a rawhide braider, and that hide represented several weeks’ worth of very raw material). The bear must have decided he liked the smell of that old rotting hide and went in after it, taking the hide and trashing the place…

  

 Do I love living here? Is it great for my spirit? Every day.