Mindego Gateway - A New Trailhead to Russian Ridge

A rainstorm at the Mindego Gateway parking lot   

There's a new kid in the neighborhood. Mindego Gateway is a new trailhead and parking lot in the Russian Ridge Open Space Preserve. In addition to connecting with ten miles of existing trails to popular locations like Borel Hill and the Ancient Oaks, the Gateway will provide access to a new trail in Spring 2016 that will climb Mindego Hill. For those who like short walks with gorgeous views, there is also a path from the new parking lot to a tiered deck.

While building the parking lot, we discovered hidden plants and animals, and clues that many others have touched this land before us.

Tracks Upon Tracks

A mountain lion journeys along the old stage coach road.

When Naiad and I returned to the house after our afternoon of tracking at the end of the road, we excitedly checked the memory cards from the wildlife cameras to see what "hits" we got over the last few weeks. Mostly cows, lots of cows. Cattle are irresistibly drawn to the ribbon of an open road.

The trusty old Recon camera, however, had a short series of very interesting photos taken three mornings earlier:

Tracks at the End of the Road

To find a raccoon, be a raccoon 

"We could go to the end of the road," I prompted Naiad, trying to keep her moving and distracted. "This is an old stage coach road. It probably went back to lumber mills and then the Shriner's camp before it became a state park." Now, I explained, the old road ends at a remote location on the Dipper Ranch where a steep ravine has been washing out crossings and culverts for a long time. "Maybe a hundred years!" I claimed to make the dirt road sound exciting.

Tatting Caterpillars

A lacy doily made out of petals of a cudweed

I have crafty caterpillars in my farmyard.  My five sisters inherited our grandma's skill in the fabric arts, so I notice these things.  My grandma used to decorate her fancy sitting room with doilies, so I was surprised to find doilies on the cudweed bush behind the Dipper Ranch barn.

Spilling out of the old pig pen, the bank on which the mysterious farmyard doilies appeared used to be a weedy jungle, a common problem around farm buildings where the soil gets enriched by animal waste.  The pigs are long gone and the pen is falling down, but every year I spend a few sweaty days there pulling out manure-robust mustard and thistle plants.

A Pink Button (the inside story)

 Sky cow

To get ready for the lead paint removal on the Dipper house, I decided to move furniture out of my bedroom which is closest to where the chips tested positive for lead and also has leaky windows.  Even though the contractor promised to seal the windows during sanding, I decided to move my bed and dresser into a room without windows subject to drifting lead dust, and drape the remaining furniture with washable sheets.

A bedroom slowly falling down the mountain and cracking on the way

Once the outside of the house looked freshly painted, I suddenly decided to paint my bedroom before moving the furniture back in.  Of course, it was a greater undertaking than I expected.  The house is slowly slipping downhill in this mountain landscape and every window and door in the bedroom had at least two cracks crossing the walls, while the window with the most fabulous view leaked during heavy storms.  I am an old hand at painting, but window repair was new to me.  I consulted fix-it guides and fix-it guys, went to the hardware store several times, and struggled with conflicting advice.

By my third trip to the hardware store, I was in desperate need of some courage.  Fortunately, it was Johnny Cash's birthday and I sat in the parking lot for awhile listening to the man in black sing about brawling and prison and love on the radio.  When I finally marched into the hardware store, I insisted the clerk lend me his utility knife so I could cut a sheet of moisture- and mildew- resistant sheetrock to fit into my car.  Afterall, I told him, the other hardware store let me cut my own sheetrock (a bit of an exaggeration) and it was raining outside.  Humming "I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole", I slipped a piece of purple sheetrock onto the warehouse floor and cut it in half.

In the first part of this pink button story, I talked about ranches and legends and the signs my predecessors left outside.  The inside of the ranch house has its embellishments too:  wagon wheel lamps, a copper tile backsplash in the kitchen, and a sliding glass door that was installed backwards and until I retrofitted it, couldn't be locked.

One item left behind inside the Dipper ranch house freaked me out.  A few days after first moving in, I poked my head into the attic through the overhead hatch door in the hallway between the bedrooms.  Looking around, I saw that insulation had been added to the unfinished floor, but otherwise the space was mostly empty.  Next to the hatch opening was a heavy but loose beam.  It had a rope tied around it.  I tugged on the rope and a hangman's knot flipped up.  I realized the beam was long enough to span the hatch opening.  I must have uttered a strange noise at this discovery because my son poked his head into the hall.  He too was freaked out when he saw what I was holding at the top of the ladder.  I shoved the rope and beam back into the attic, closed it up and tried to forget about it.  One can't hang oneself in a hallway I told myself; there were some strange tenants that lived here after Paul and Lola and it must have been a prank I told my son.

A few days later, a co-worker came by to check the wiring in the house for installation of a washing machine.  The house apparently never had a washing machine, although I found an old agitating wash tub with a wringer in the garage.  Since there isn't any plumbing in the garage, I assume Lola started wash day by wheeling the tub out to the hose, the one near the kitchen door pink amaryllis. I was hoping for a more modern setup, but every time the handyman opened a fuse box or electrical outlet, he groaned at the unorthodox wiring. Finally, I told him to zip it all back up and we would have to bring in an electrician.


To mollify his disappointment at not figuring out this old house, I asked if he could help me remove something from the attic.  He thought I was talking about a dead animal.  Nope just a rope, I told him.  He held the ladder while I went back into the attic and removed the loose beam and rope.  I mostly needed his moral support to face my imagined stories about this odd artifact.  While we both joked that a hangman's knot was not quite as bad as a dead raccoon, I untied the rope, commented that it looked brand new and never used, and stashed beam and rope in separate locations in the garage for future use on more practical projects.

I was surprised at how smoothly the replacement of the mushy window jamb in my bedroom went once I got the purple sheetrock.  To counteract the lingering effect of the attic rope and to thank a legend for his encouragement, I decided to glue a photo of Johnny Cash to the inside of the jamb before sealing it down.  Someday, some other resident may find that photo, and may wonder about their strange predecessor, however, this artifact should provide humorous rather than morose musings.

Thank ya' Johnny

In addition to the climbing rose on the garage wall, there are 8 other rose bushes around the house.  In April, when the does are bedded down with their new fawns, these poor bushes recover enough from the usual deer browsing that a few of the plants even get a chance to bloom.  They are all shades of pink.  One might guess that pink was Lola's favorite color.  Or, maybe Paul thought that pink was Lola's favorite color and so every birthday and anniversary, she would graciously accept another pink flowering plant.

The sky room

I painted the bedroom sky blue.  The view looks out the backyard, down a slope towards a pasture and across a heavily forested canyon.  You feel like you are in the sky when you walk into the room.  One day while I was painting, I realized there was a cow in the backyard.  They aren't supposed to be there but since it was only one cow, I let him mow my yard while I was stuck inside patching and sanding and painting.

 A white-washed ranch house

When the painters finished the outside, I walked around for a final inspection.  There were a few bugs stuck in the paint which is to be expected at this hilltop location in the country.  I was a bit annoyed that the painters had borrowed rocks from the garden pile, perhaps to anchor down the visqueen enclosure, and had neglected to put my rocks back.  But overall, the old ranch house looks quite good.  While walking around to pick up my rocks, I found a pink button on the ground by the kitchen door.  It wasn't my button, I don't wear pink.  I don't think the pink button belonged to the painters either, especially since they wore coveralls while they worked.  If you do laundry outside with an agitating tub and a wringer, you've got to expect to lose a few buttons.  Perhaps pink really was Lola's favorite color.

 Watching a storm arrive from the sky room

Legends, we like to listen to them, we like to create them.  Adaptation is an important survival skill for ranch living, not only to the challenging physical environment, but also to the changing cultural community.  We can borrow from the good parts of our history, and set aside the useless or harmful parts.  Perhaps listening to and making up legends helps us process our history and adapt to the change that is frequently occurring around us.  I think I will tack that pink button up on the freshly painted garage wall where the chicken door used to be.

 This legend hangs on a thread

A Pink Button

This old ranch house - not quite John-Deere green

This old ranch house got painted.  For a long time, the south and west exterior walls - the storm sides - had as much gray wood exposed as grimy white paint.  Some of the paint tested as lead, so the job got complicated.  We decided to move out of the house for a few days during the lead paint removal.  For 3 months, the family's bags and the pet crates were packed and unpacked as we waited for a few dry, windless days so the contractor could construct a temporary visqueen bubble, scrape off the remaining lead flakes, and cart them away.  Finally, in the middle of the rainy season, four projected dry days held and suddenly the job was done.

The contractor asked what color paint I preferred.  Well, the same colors, of course - white with dark green trim.  You can't change the colors of an old ranch house.

The squirrel thermometer smiles even when covered with grit on a 99-degree day.

To prepare for the painting, I took down decades of miscellaneous embellishments that had been tacked onto the walls and eaves.  The garage had a half-door contraption nailed to its exterior which at one time swung over the bottom half of the side entry.  Someone suggested it might have been used to keep chickens in the garage.  I pulled off its sagging green boards and corroded hinges, as well as two thermometers, an eagle-topped flagpole rusted and blown flat against the roof, and pulleys for some type of hanging screen long since rotted away from the porch.  Each week I worked out my annoyance over the rain delays by walking around the buildings with pry bar in hand and pulling off more random boards, nails and hooks all the while wondering who put them there and why.

Three rose bushes had tree-size trunks next to the garage.

A few years ago, a messy jungle and piles of debris surrounded the farm buildings from come-and-go tenant neglect.  We've been gradually cleaning it up.  To allow access for the painters, we needed to tackle more of the straggly plants.  I dug up and got rid of a rangy shrub next to the house to meet the defensible space requirements (clearing flammable vegetation near rural structures to reduce the potential for damage in the event of a wildfire), but I hesitated when taking my loppers after the pink rambling rose on the garage and decided to just trim it back instead.  As I pulled the tangled and decrepit vines from the wall, I discovered the live brambles were sprouting from woody stumps over a foot in diameter.  These modest-looking rose vines are actually very old plants.  I found myself trying to picture who planted them. Could I restore them to their former glory and still follow modern-day recommendations to reduce wildfire risk?

Gigantic mass of amaryllis bulbs and roots crowding the busy backdoor.

Next to the kitchen door was an amaryllis plant - the showy Hippeastrum type which are often sold as large bulbs in foil-covered pots.  Hybrids of South American origin, they are usually forced to provide colorful indoor blooms in the midst of dreary winter. At the Dipper door, this plant gets its pink trumpet blossoms in the summer, although its weather-beaten leaves never seemed to acclimate to this corner of the house.  When reaching for the hose or scrub brushes, I frequently worried I might rouse a snake hiding in its messy leaves.  I decided to transplant the amaryllis to get it out of the way of the painting and away from my backdoor cleaning center.  When I went to dig it out, I uncovered such a massive clump of roots and bulbs, I couldn't lift it out of the ground without first sawing it into smaller pieces.  Obviously, this plant had had a long residence next to the kitchen door and I wondered if I was crudely chopping into the legacy of a long ago birthday, anniversary or Easter present.  I found a sheltered spot for the amaryllis transplants in the front yard between two other old-time landscape plants, red-hot poker plants and a bed of narcissus.

The kitchen-door amaryllis bulbs sprouting at their new spot in the old yard.

Incidentally, there is another plant known as amaryllis and also pink-flowering that joins the old-fashioned landscaping at the Dipper Ranch.  A wide band of Amaryllis belladona covers the long bank between the front yard and the orchard. This African plant is commonly called Naked Ladies because months after its straplike leaves die back in the summer, bare stalks rise up like long lipstick tubes and explode with pink flowers.  I never liked the common name of this plant and used to consider it  gaudy.  I grudgingly appreciate that it is deer- and gopher-proof, and keeps out the thistles on the hardest part of the slope to mow.  One day while rereading the oral interviews with Paul and Lola Ortega, the original ranch caretakers that lived in this house, I noticed they mentioned pretty pink plants in their yard and bragged about collecting them from the former location of a hotel and stage coach stop on Page Mill Road, the stage coach road that used to cross the Dipper Ranch.  Now, I'm starting to like the Pink Ladies, as I prefer to call them, since they are the legendary booty of a stage coach heist, recycled and very practical in these rough surroundings.

Thick bed of Pink Ladies with their skirts protecting the edge of the orchard

I've heard talk about historical landscapes or historical landscaping.  Places that were planted around buildings long ago and became part of the historical culture. Some people think it is important to save and cultivate these historical landscapes along with the historical buildings to preserve the entire sense of place.  I don't pretend that the Dipper Ranch buildings have much historical significance, still I feel some responsibility to learn about and maintain the ranch's history where it is feasible and consistent with the new purpose of the ranch as an open space preserve. It is my version of thinking historically and acting locally.

The National Park Service defines historic vernacular landscape as " a landscape that evolved through use by the people whose activities or occupancy shaped it . . . the landscape reflects the physical, biological, and cultural character of everyday lives."  Estates of wealthy individuals and institutions may have fancy gardens and lawns, but the humble folk tend to create functional plantings to support their family such as orchards or vegetable gardens, or simple plantings that record a moment in their lives.

I recently found an interesting article by an architecture professor at the University of Colorado - Denver.  In Preserving Ranches: Not Only Possible, but Imperative, Ekaterini Vlahos ( I admit it, I found this an unusual name for someone researching history of the western US), talks about how "Traditional ranches are places where struggle and adaptation have etched themselves into the ground, weaving together culture, land, buildings, homes and lives."  She describes western ranches as places where people have needed to adapt to the oftentimes harsh environmental conditions, conserving their man-made and environmental resources, and often depending on the surrounding community and a local ranching economy to make it more than one generation.  In current times, as advocacy groups, recreation-based governmental agencies, and private buyers acquire traditional ranches, these new forms of ownerships often separate the ranch buildings from the land and the ranching culture.  Although I did not personally witness the transition, this discussion makes my head spin when I think about how much rural San Mateo County and its ranching history have changed over the past 60 years as the suburbs of San Francisco and Silicon Valley have expanded.

I spend most of my professional day as an ecologist trying to erase the destructive hand of man on the land - taking out erosion-prone logging roads, eliminating invasive species, and planting oaks and native grasses.  Living amongst the ghosts of the Dipper Ranch, I now sometimes get confused.  Furthermore, I think we have a tendency to wonder and make up tales about the people who lived on the land before us and we like to make legends out of them, sometimes quite exaggerated.  I am not sure why we do that.  And when and how do the new legends get started?  These are thoughts that followed me as I prepared for the ranch house painting, indeed, every time I repair, remove or alter the Dipper Ranch ground.

A Pink Button . . . to be continued

The Roessler-Rients farmstead.  In rural Minnesota, this farm has gradually changed in three generations.  I spent most summers of my childhood on this farm with my thrifty grandparents.

Garage Ecology

I've been cleaning the garage in preparation of the annual walnut harvest. I found an old radio in there. It probably belonged to Paul Ortega, the ranch caretaker who lived in this house for decades. On top of the old radio, I keep a pair of muddy glasses which I found in the dirt behind the barn last winter. Every time it rains, something shows up in the farmyard. The glasses remind me that we all grind down to dust one day, except for the junk we lose in the yard.

I assume these glasses were Paul's along with the muddy tools which keep showing up. I put the rusty tools in a bin in the garage with the mental label "Paul". The broken plates and glassware, I pile in a pot full of herbs with the mental note "Lola" (Paul's wife). I browse through Paul's bin now and then when I am thinking about what life used to be like on the ranch. Lola seems to be a constant pink presence in the yard. I am hesitant to clean the radio or the glasses because Paul touched them. I really don't know these things, but I make up stories about found items in an attempt to understand the past and to fit in with the time I sense flowing through this land.

--- Bucks and does gathering at the courting oak within earshot of the garage. ---

Farmyard deposition goes something like this: Paul loses tools in the farmyard while working, they get covered up with mud, more rain uncovers them decades later when Cindy finds them, Cindy puts them in the garage with all the other stuff that collects dust and requires annual cleaning, Cindy loses her stuff in the yard, somebody else finds them later, and so on. Be careful of what you lose in the yard because that will be your legacy.

--- Bucks passing calmly today. ---

Somehow this radio manages to tune in only AM talk shows from the 50s and 60s. An investment program ("Buy this book and you will be a millionaire.") and a Christian station ("Shameful dancers on the sidelines of football games") got me through cleaning up a lot of mouse poop.

--- Does resting on the other side of the hill. --

Meanwhile, through the open garage door, I could see the deer gathering under the courting oak. I kept an eye on the bucks, but today they repeatedly passed each other with no signs of aggression. The does were disappearing over the hill behind the courting oak, so I took a break from sorting nails to climb its back side and spy on them - the does were resting and the bucks were hanging out. Later, I noticed that the 4 x 4 buck was gone and the 2 x 2 buck was scent-tracking the does with outstretched neck. Below the house in a meadow, I could see a small male fawn attempting the same thing. The does just keep moving and grazing and ignoring the attention. I guess something happens eventually since there are new fawns every year.

--- Bucks don't seem to eat or rest much during the rutting season. ---

--- 2 x 2 buck steadfastly following a doe. ---

When dusk arrived, I turned off the radio in the hopes of hearing owls. I'd just gotten back from an animated talk by Garth Harwood to the South Skyline Association on Owls in Your Neighborhood. Within minutes, a big chunky owl landed on the utility pole in the orchard. I prepared my ears for detecting what species of owl it might be. Probably a great horned owl because of its large size, but possibly a long-eared owl which Garth says occasionally visits the Santa Cruz Mountains. And also to see if I could distinguish the higher pitched call of a female great-horned owl during the male-female duet. There's nothing like applying newly gained nature knowledge in your own backyard while cleaning the garage. Garth said the great-horned owls are starting their pair-bonding activities this time of year prior to breeding which consists of repeated calls back and forth. This explains the loud hooting from the maple trees next to my bedroom which have woken me up several times in the last few weeks. The owl gleaned his feathers, ignored my unsuccessful attempts to photograph him in the dark, hunted in the grasslands, but didn't bother to call.

--- Blurry large owl with ear tufts. ---

Later while sweeping the garage floor, I heard a loud crunching noise in the backyard near the two smaller walnut trees. As I walked in that direction, I heard the familiar sound of a deer trotting off. The deer are visiting the yard regularly, especially at night, to snack on the fallen walnuts. While I got distracted by star-gazing, the crunching started up again. Curious, I went inside to get a flashlight and waited. When the loud sound started again, I shined the light and was surprised to find a coyote under the walnut trees. He slipped away but at the spot he was standing, I found walnuts cracked open. I looked around and found more cracked shells with the nut meat missing.

--- To be tested for coyote saliva. ---

The Silva family used to own this land. The Silva girls told me their uncle planted the walnut trees behind the barn in the 60s and the nuts were a special heart shape and extremely tasty. They inquire how the walnut trees are doing, and I take the hint and walk across the country road with a big grocery bag of walnuts every year.

This is garage ecology:
The Silva uncle planted the walnut trees, Paul Ortega took care of them, now I harvest the walnuts and give many away, and every year the deer, woodpeckers, jays, crows, mice and coyotes visit the trees for an autumnal feast. While the fundamentalists pray on the radio, the deer court openly, the owls don't give a hoot, and generations of coyotes walk over buried tools and plates to crack open walnuts.

Youthful Wanderings & a Studebaker

What causes us to look up at a certain moment

or to travel in a particular direction?
Does our perception determine our trajectory and our fate?

When my college-aged son visits the Dipper Ranch, he first sleeps, or as he calls it, mandatory recharging. He was home in June after completing his sophomore year. With forty winks under his belt, he started wandering about the ranch.

One evening, he joined me on a hike to the lower end of the property to check on the cow-calf pairs. With his help, I was able to pry open the stubborn lid on the lower springbox and found it nearly dry, although both water troughs connected to it were still full. Not seeing many people on this far end of the ranch, the bulky cows pushed their mingling calves into the brush at the sight of us. Satisfied they were healthy and wily California cows, I asked my son if he wanted to continue westward to see the calf carcass that served as a plush rattlesnake throne last year. That got a definite 'yes'.

---leather on the hoof ---

We crossed a creek and ran into the cattle again. They snorted their disapproval as they trotted ahead of us on the old dirt road. Around a bend, my son asked about a wrecked car in the nearby trees that I had always ignored. We decided to investigate. It was a rusty, stripped-down sedan. The pair of 'suicide' doors on the passenger side was bent back on themselves as if the jaws-of-life had been used to pry out the occupants. We scrambled about the wreck, speculating on how it got there.


I noticed the glove compartment was marked "Land Cruiser" in raised silver lettering, but this car was too old to be a Toyota. Later that evening after an Internet search, I found that Studebaker made a Land Cruiser from 1934 to 1954 and the remnants of this vehicle look somewhat like the late 1940s models. In the mid 1800's, various Studebaker brothers built wagons in Indiana for farmers, the army and western settlers, and another brother made big money building wheelbarrows in California for gold diggers. The California brother returned to Indiana after a family religious dispute and invested his gold-derived money into the family business. Eventually the Indiana wagon factory turned to automobile production until the company went out of business in the 1960s.

---chrome and twigs ---

Post-WW II Land Cruisers had a reputation as luxury vehicles, and although most parts had been salvaged off this wreck, remnants covering the interior door panels appear to be leather with a crocodile-like texture. What is the story behind this car? I remembered a tidbit Paul Ortega, former ranch caretaker, reported in a currently unpublished interview with the South Skyline Association. He said thousands of men would congregate at the Shriners' summer retreat along Pescadero Creek, "[A] big shindig", he called it, "No women allowed". The Islam Temple Shrine of San Francisco owned land adjacent to the Dipper Ranch from 1924 to 1945 before they sold it to the state for what eventually became Portola State Park.

--- leather and twigs ---

Were a couple of Shriner boys driving back from a celebratory evening at the camp in their well-appointed automobile and didn't see a curve on the country road? Present-day drivers still occasionally miss a curve on Alpine Road and fly over the Dipper Ranch. The last vehicle left drag marks on the hillside where the tow truck had to haul it up twice (cable broke the first time). And what decays near the foot of this same hillside? The Studebaker wreck and the carcass mentioned above where a calf appeared to fall to his death last year. The dates and the geology sorta line up.

--- leather shortly after death ---

We continued down the road to the final resting place of calf-2008. By now, fifteen months later, the bones and bits of hide are widely scattered by the ranch scavengers. Some were cracked and split by coyotes, bobcats and vultures, and others have delicate scrapings on their edges from rodents reclaiming the calcium.

---bones dissolving in stomachs and soil ---

Twilight had arrived and we decided to leave this haunted place and hike home for a barbecue dinner. As we traveled homeward, we watched the ranch's changing of the guard. Deer were coming out of hiding to browse in the open pastures. Several of the does had one or two fawns following them. When a doe is steadily moving towards a destination, her fawns follow exactly behind her, sometimes falling behind but nevertheless tracking her same route. While her shoulders and rump clear the grasstops when she bounds, their ear tips are just visible at the apogee of their tiny leaps. When she stops to browse, the newest fawns tuck in tight by her side and select whatever looks like what she is eating. The older but still spotted fawns will wander a bit farther in their nibbling. If they are twins, they tend to stick together or maybe one is the leader.

When the ambulatory fawns hear or see something new, they stand stock still and stare. If the object of their obsession is loud or moves quickly, they bolt, seemingly any direction, and take cover, sometimes becoming separated from the rest of the family. A fawn came out of the willows towards me last week as I was closing the gate near the house. I had flushed a doe earlier as I drove down the driveway. I guess the fawn thought my subsequent quiet walk back up to the gate sounded more like animal than noisy human. As he cleared the tall grass and abandoned farm implements at the road edge, he gave me a few seconds of stunned stare, then bolted back into the willows when I murmured "Good evening." On my way back to the house, I heard a large deer crashing hurriedly through the orchard with two small silhouettes bouncing behind her, the family reunited.

While watching deer, I never see them give each other a warning when danger or a disturbance is suspected. One deer may look up from browsing, scan the view shed, swivel its ears, determine a threat and then bound away without a stomp or any gesture I can detect as a warning to its fellows. Any panicked motion by one deer sets the rest instantly in flight, often scattering several directions. No discussion, no evaluation, just departure. The fawns have to flee-fend for themselves at these times. I can't make sense of it, but I need more deer observation time to figure out what deer see and why they head one direction or another. With eyes in the center of my head, instead of the side, maybe I will never figure it out.

I spend a lot of time wandering the ranch and interpreting the stories behind the natural phenomena. I am curious about the human history, but too dull-minded to notice it. Ranch visitors tend to look and travel in different directions than I do, and so we get a chance to be history and landscape detectives.

With all my wild speculation about the Studebaker wreck, I do need to address one other possibility. A former long-term tenant of the property made his living by grading and other work-for-hire with his large collection of earth-moving equipment. He also made money grazing various properties and probably in many other ways as is typical of country folk. He could have acquired the Studebaker wreck, stripped its finery for resale, and left the carcass in this shady remote spot. Nevertheless, I see what I see, it's still haunted to me.

--- not my fate . . . today ---

See Also:

For information on the Studebaker business:

• More Than They Promised, Thomas E. Bonsall, 2002, Stanford University Press.
  
• Studebaker Museum