Bill Tripp remembers a chilly morning when he was 4 and his great-grandmother Bessie Tripp, the legendary Karuk Indian elder, was still asleep. At first, he passed the time cracking acorns, but then decided to start a fire in the wood stove. Bessie woke and quietly intervened. Bill remembers that Bessie came around the corner […]
Malcolm Terence
Malcolm Terence is an editor, along with Susan Keese and Don Monkerud, of Free Land, Free Love, Tales of a Wilderness Commune. He is a frequent contributor to California Teacher and EcoNews. Before he moved to the Black Bear commune in 1968, he was a newspaper writer in Los Angeles. For other insights into the late 1960s, he recommends Sleeping Where I Fall by Peter Coyote, Fugitive Days by Bill Ayers and the documentary film about Black Bear titled Commune, directed by Jonathan Berman.
Posted inNews
Fire in the Six
The rains may have started, but locals and top officials of the Six Rivers National Forest met in Orleans recently for a candid look at the summer’s wildfires, especially the Nickowitz Fire, the only large fire in the Forest Service’s Orleans district. It was a meeting with two agendas. The first, the announced agenda, was […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Acorn Soup
First, a confession: I have many times pretended to enjoy acorn soup. The first time may have been at the table of Bessie Tripp, the legendary Karuk woman who lived to be over 100. She was only in her 90s then. I said the soup was perfect, then I asked for seconds of the fried […]
Posted inNews
Klamath: Direct Action!
ORLEANS — Molli Jane had clambered up the ropes not effortlessly but quickly. But now she hung there halfway up a large Douglas fir tree and strained to make the muscular transition to descent. Below, her coach, a veteran of many Earth First! forest actions, repeated the instructions. Molli Jane sucked in her breath, slipped […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Medicine Trails
As a young woman, Mavis McCovey was trained to enter a spirit world by her Karuk Indian elders — older medicine women. What’s unsettling is that McCovey, now an old woman in the Klamath River town of Orleans, sounds somehow believable. For us materialists, judging magic is simple. It’s all either delusional, illusional or confusional. […]
Posted inNews
Our Fire, Our Fight
I don’t think I’d ever seen Jim Bennett mad before this year’s fires came through his place. And Bennett is no stranger to fire. Before he retired in 1996, he’d worked 32 years as a fireman for the U.S. Forest Service on Salmon River. Fire had burned near his place in 1977. The canyon filled […]
Posted inNews
Return to Black Bear
We had celebrated the seasonal holidays, the equinoxes and the solstices, from the time we started the Black Bear Ranch Commune in 1968. I thought about those early days as we navigated the tangle of log roads leading into Black Bear for what would be the 40th summer solstice this June. A couple hundred people […]