Category Archives: Stories

Wilsonia and Mineral King

While working on the book The Cabins of Wilsonia, sometimes people would ask why I was doing a book on Wilsonia iwhenI have a cabin in Mineral King. These are the top three reasons: 1. cabin communities matter; 2. I call my business Cabinart; 3. I like to document and portray the good things of Tulare County. *

But did you know that Wilsonia and Mineral King are tied together by the cabin that I married into?

In the spring of 1983, (2 years before I met my husband Michael), his family cabin in Mineral King blew up and burned down. It was next door to the Mixter cabin, whose permit had expired and was ordered by the Park to be torn down.

Over the course of the next 2 years, my husband pursued rebuilding his cabin and also the possibility of buying the Mixter’s cabin and turning his empty lot over to the Park to satisfy the law. Lots of red tape, lots of bureaucrats saying no, and then someone knew Someone who knew SOMEONE, and permission was granted to exchange his bare lot for the Mixter’s cabin with its expired permit.

While I was working on the book, Neal Mixter and I became friends. I gave him all the paperwork from Michael’s cabin exchange so he could study it and learn if there was a way to apply this experience to Wilsonia. He and other hard-working cabin folks went to endless meetings, and eventually they made a plan.

Maybe this is the reason that the Park has made its offer to exchange their unused cabins for private vacant lots. Maybe it isn’t, but I like to think that Michael’s experience with the Mineral King Mixter cabin and the Park got the ball rolling.

The Botkin cabin, formerly the Mixter cabin, Mineral King

*4. I already did a book on the cabins of Mineral King, called The Cabins of Mineral King; 5. I love to draw; 6. Several cabin folks in Wilsonia asked me to do a book on Wilsonia

Place of Honor

A friend recently sent me this photo.

What a place of honor! Of course, it could have been just set up for a photo shoot, but still. . . this cabin looks to be the perfect combination of rusticity with elegance. And knowing my friend, I’m sure it is fabulous!

You too can have your own fancy looking book called The Cabins of Wilsonia. (But you’ll have to find your own table-top easel.)

Libraries and Connections

It has been almost four years since The Cabins of Wilsonia was published. This summer it occurred to me that the local libraries, both in Tulare and Fresno counties ought to have copies.

I called the Tulare Co. library not knowing who to speak with, and the one who returned my call was my old friend Carol from Redwood High School, class of ’77. We see each other occasionally, and it is great fun to have that old connection. She said to send a couple of books to the library so the review committee could decide if it would be beneficial. I was able to take them to the local branch and have the inter-library delivery service get them in the right hands.

Then. . . crickets. . .

Two months later I called Carol and asked her who to talk to. She sent me to Jonathan, someone I would have had no way of reaching through the library’s phone tree. (See? Who You Know always matters!)

Jonathan and I had a great conversation about cabins, cabin communities and Wilsonia. His next door neighbor in his hometown had a cabin in Wilsonia! He told me the man’s last name, and I sent him to page 117. He can’t remember if this was the cabin or not, but will ask his former neighbor when he sees him next.

We also discussed cabin leases, learned that we had both worked at Hartland Camp, and he told me of a book coming out soon about Big Creek, a Southern California Edison mountain community near Shaver Lake. I have several friends who grew up there, so I am interested in that book.

Stories, connections, things in common. . .

. . . and pretty soon, or maybe even by the date of this blog post, The Cabins of Wilsonia will be available through the Tulare County Library System.

P.S. I LOVE libraries and grew up with the Ivanhoe Library as my primary source of books. The first time I went into the Visalia Library, I was beyond thrilled!

Second-hand Encounter

During the months of July and August, I don’t give drawing lessons. I do stay in touch with my drawing students, because we almost always become friends and every one of them is dear to me.

One of my students emailed me over the summer to say he attended a wedding in Wilsonia! He then told me of the delightful folks that he met who said nice things about me and invited me to return. (Aw, shucks. . .)

I haven’t returned in body, but I am slowly returning in my heart.

This is the cabin where the wedding took place. During most of my time in Wilsonia while working on The Cabins of Wilsonia, this place was referred to as “the Plywood Palace” because it was under construction.

The reconstruction obviously was finished. It is now large, beautiful (shingle siding is my favorite), and must have been an excellent venue for a wedding.

Old Friends, New Cabin

This past spring, some people I have known my entire adult life bought a cabin in Wilsonia. They already are part of a shared family cabin, but those situations are rarely ideal for an expanding family.

These folks have been a large part of my family’s life for many years. The man was in my older sister’s wedding in 1979; the couple’s daughter roomed with my niece in Visalia for several years; the couple hosted my younger sister’s daughter’s wedding at a moment’s notice (the story is here); in 2016 we all went to Israel together (part of that story is here.)

You’ve probably heard me say many times that Tulare County is very small. Yeppers, it is.

The cabin my friends bought is directly across the street from the cabin where I spent most of my Wilsonia time. It is one that has generated a great deal of curiosity through the years. The new cabin owners have the ability to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, and this cabin was never a sow’s ear to begin with.

I expect it will be a real show piece, a traffic stopper, and a magnet for looky-loos, one of whom will be me.

A Mistake?

Back when I was spending regular time in Wilsonia working on The Cabins of Wilsonia, a Mrs. Cabin Owner said to me, “You made a mistake on our cabin.”

Oh? That was an interesting conversation opener! What was the “mistake”?

I had included a shutter that was leaning against her cabin. Since I work from photos, I draw what I see. It looked as if this is where the cabin owners stored their shutter on purpose, so that’s how I drew it.

When she told me that she didn’t like it that way, it was too late to change things because the book was on its way to press.

But I made the change anyway and then never got in touch to let her know. That was because I thought she’d be too annoyed that the shutter would appear in the book drawing, and doing a book was hard enough without having people be annoyed at me! (Yes, I am a chicken.)

After encountering her on the Mineral King Road, I remembered that conversation. So, I have rescanned it and done all the computer machinations to make the screen version look like the paper drawing. This version is actually closer to the look of pencil on paper, lighter than necessary for book printing purposes.

I wonder what she’d think of it now. . .

Laurel 2.2, 9×12″ original pencil drawing for “The Cabins of Wilsonia, unframed, $200 plus tax.

Chance Encounter Near Mineral King

This oil painting, Long Way There, shows a tiny portion of the Mineral King Road. It is available for sale on my other website, www.cabinart.net.

After getting this blog repaired, I thought I’d post regularly. But, I didn’t have anything to say! Why not? Because I didn’t visit Wilsonia this summer, had no book signings, and nothing of significance in my little world of The Cabins of Wilsonia happened until this week when I had a chance encounter.

I was driving down the Mineral King Road, coming home from my own cabin, when a red car caught up to me. As is the custom with mountain driving etiquette, I pulled over. The red car passed, and I stayed a respectful distance behind, enjoying the chance to follow a good mountain driver.

A little further down the road, the red car pulled over for me to pass. I pulled alongside, put down my passenger window, and the driver also opened her window. I complimented her on her skillful handling of the very winding narrow road and said I’d been enjoying following her. She thanked me, said they pulled over to look at a rock and that she would enjoy following me for awhile.

When we were almost to the bottom of the hill, I saw a propane truck heading our way. I took the nearest turnout, making room for the red car behind me, and while we were waiting for the truck to pass, the passenger got out of the red car and approached my passenger window.

I opened the window, and he said, “You are the Cabinart artist! We are from Wilsonia!”

Oh my. CABNART is my license plate. I’m glad I was a courteous driver that day. I may have said something brainless such as, “What are you doing in my mountains??” (probably not quite that stupid, but possibly close. . .)

I had met these folks and didn’t recognize them in a completely out-of-context situation. We had a nice quick chat, I recommended a place for lunch in Three Rivers, and we were soon on our way.

What a hoot!! Tulare County is very small, and it is impossible to remain invisible or anonymous.

Possibly The Most Interesting Cabin Owner in Wilsonia

A cabin owner wrote this as a comment. At first I thought it was one of those long spammy things. Then, I read it and realized that I have drawn the cabin about which he is writing. I’ve done a little editing –please forgive me, Professor Dirks. I’m guessing that since you put it in as a comment, you don’t mind your story going public.

“The Last of the Log Cabins” on Laurel Lane at Hazel was built with 53,000 lbs. of lodgepole pines from Twisp Mills on the Canadian border in Washington.They lay on the ground but with the help of pioneers Harold & Naomi Hansen (Jana’s note: I changed the spelling from “Handsen” to match what I’ve seen in Wilsonia) we built it to celebrate our Bicentennial in 1976.

But we had to get congressional and county approval in hearings in Fresno. (Note from Jana: Wilsonia is in Tulare County.) They said we had to prove that these logs met the heating standards in California. We found there were approved log cabins near Shasta.

In 1975 after we bought the two lots, we found the Lincoln Log design in a lodge on the Athabasca Glacier in the Colombian Ice fields, moving down the mountain, which meant it could withstand California earthquakes.

As a Eagle Scout who ran the John Muir trail every summer, and as a professor of Biology and History, I wanted the cabin to fit the ecology of Wilsonia. I built schools in Kenya, a year before Obama was born during the bloody Mau Mau rebellion, after I’d climbed the snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro, speaking Swahili in 1960. The next year I was in JFK’s first Peace Corp, and built schools in Ghana and Guinea. Then I returned and used the Peace Corp spirit, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!” As President of the AFT I built LASW College after the Watts Riots, then founded LA Mission College in a poor area of NE San Fernando Valley in 1975, being named by CA Senate, Assembly & Chancellor as “The Faculty Father of LA Mission College” for the LACCD “The only Faculty (nonAdmin) ever to build a college in California.

We built the roof stretching well beyond the cabin so it is sheltered even in deepest snows, based on our observations of other Wilsonia cabins. A draft portrait of Woodrow Wilson hangs above my desk, with the other one in the White House, painted by my cousin who knew him before he was elected in 1916 by S. Seymour Thomas. (Jana’s note: Wasn’t Wilson elected by the voters?) Thus the Wilsonia tradition will stay alive with your book. Thanks from our hearts. (You are most welcome, Professor Dirks!)

I met my wife Xiaoping Liu, when I was the only college professor to get into forbidden Tibet in 1988, taking my students through Lhasa and the Dalai Lama’s Palace and to monasteries above 16,000 feet behind Mt. Everest. I met her during the “Democracy Movement” at the University in Xian, in the Chin Kingdom (Chin – China) where she’d been Presidents’ Carter, Reagan and Queen Elizabeth’s doctor in China. A year later when the leader of the Democracy Movement died, a million people gathered in Tian An Men Square in April and in May when Gorbachev had the summit meeting but couldn’t go to the square because of the millions still there, (Jana’s note: I’m confused!) so Dr. Liu left thru Hong Kong the week before the Tien An Men Massacre. She came here, became a professor of Microbiology and Napa, (Jana’s note: What is a professor of Napa?) then came down here to find that mad professor (Jana’s note: by “mad professor” I think the author is referring to himself) from Mission (Jana’s note: I think he is referring to LA Mission College) who predicted the massacre if they pushed democracy too hard. She found me, we became friends and then family and our son Darwin evolved, East meets West and 1/2 + 1/2 is twice as smart.

75 year old teachers talk too much, sorry…Charles Please forgive me, a proud historian. Thanks!

And thank you, Professor Dirks, for sharing your most interesting life and cabin story with my blog readers! (I removed many personal details about your son to protect his privacy, which I also would have done if this was published as a comment on my blog.)

People Say the Darndest Things

Remember that book by Art Linkletter Kids Say the Darndest Things?

I don’t. I just remember the title. Who was Art Linkletter anyway?? (We didn’t have teevee until I was in 5th grade so I had to sneak-watch at Grandma’s or a babysitter’s or a friend’s. . . Now I never watch. Don’t ask me anything about teevee because you will be simply astonished by my ignorance.)

Sorry. I got lost.

On someone’s cabin porch . . . that location keeps the deer from eating the flowers.

On my recent visit to Wilsonia, I interviewed people about cabin life. I had a list of questions to get people thinking.

One or two people answered a specific question, but mostly they just started talking. I’d listen, and suddenly I’d hear a gem. They’d be talking, and I’d be scribbling as fast as possible.

We all talk a little messier than we write, sort of jumping around and repeating a little, maybe a little out of sequence at times. Because we are conversing, we can ask one another questions for clarity. When someone repeats something, it is for emphasis, or perhaps to remind himself what he is trying to convey. Very few people report their ideas or experiences in sequential order, so it takes some intense listening to figure things out.

People talked, I listened, scribbled, translated, and then read it back. We all laughed, and then I asked permission to use the quote and their names in the book.

Here is my favorite so far:

We would have invited you to breakfast, but it was too cold.

I wrote it exactly as he said it, and we all knew what he meant. The inside table only seats 2 people; when there are guests, everyone eats outside. This quote takes a little different translating than the ones where people are relating a story. (Were you wondering what it meant?)

Cabin life is a fun and lively and interesting thing.

Questions for You, Oh Wilsonia Cabin Owner

I’m drawing a book called The Cabins of Wilsonia. Drawing it, not really writing it. There will be a preface, an introduction and a conclusion, along with explanations of street names, and I have written most of this already.

It is my hope that Wilsonia cabin folks will do the writing.

The point of the book is to show what it is like to have a cabin in Wilsonia in pictures and in the stories and thoughts from the cabin folks.

When people are asked about their cabins, the tendency is to recite a list of previous owners by name and approximate date of ownership. Since it is my goal to shoe what it is like to have a cabin NOW, clearly I haven’t been asking the right questions!

A friend of mine helped me formulate a list of questions to trigger ideas and thoughts and memories and impressions and information and personal stories about cabin life.

I know it is a pain to write. It is a pain to email. We are all busy. So, for starters, I will just ask questions.

Perhaps over time, these will cause you to have ideas, and when we talk in person, you will have thought about or answers to a question or two. Or maybe I should mail out a questionnaire. . . or put something in the Wilsonia newsletter. . . or email those of you who have shared your eddresses?

Let us begin with several questions to ponder:

The Cabins of Wilsonia

A picture book about a cabin community