It Starts With One Little Annoying Sound There is no way that we will ever sleep in at my house, even on the weekends. It’s not that we have a 6-year-old and a 10-year-old—it’s the darned wildlife. As soon as the first light spills over the horizon, the cacophony begins at my house. It starts with one little annoying sound. I don’t know which bird makes this sound—I think it’s the mountain chickadee—but it goes from dawn to dusk at my house. “Twee-twee-bird” with the “bird” on a lower note, over and over and over again. By the way, in Lake Arrowhead, these birds add a note to their calls: “twee-twee-bird-bird.” Then come the squirrels. It’s amazing the heights they can jump from to hit my roof. Wham! Then rapid footsteps that sound like a machine gun ripping holes in my roof. That is followed by the second squirrel, which is in hot pursuit of the first. Wham! Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. All riled up from watching the squirrels fight and not to be outdone, come the Steller’s jays—“shack, shack, shack, shack, shack!” By this time, it is too loud to even have a conversation. Wham! Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. Twee-twee-bird. Shack, shack, shack, shack! Then the coyotes in a pack grab a cat or a dog, and I don’t need to tell anybody from Crestline what that sounds like. So my dog has to join in, running back and forth along the fence, barking and howling. By this time you couldn’t hear a jackhammer over the racket. I just want to run out there and tell them all to shut up, but I don’t want to wake the kids. I look forward to backpacking this summer. Then I only have to wake up to the sound of bears rummaging through my gear. That brings me to the next thing I wanted to say. I have seen a lot of volunteerism over the past week, and it seems to be contagious in this area. Over the weekend I went to an orientation for forest patrol volunteers in the San Gorgonio Wilderness. There was a lot of spirit there. People will be coming from as far away as Santa Barbara to do volunteer patrols and clean up and maintain the trails in the wilderness. The woman who came from Santa Barbara said she enjoyed the forest as a little girl living in this area, and she wanted to come back and do her part. When I was the editor of The Enterprise in Fallbrook, the only time you could get people together was when they were hopping mad about something. I have been mightily impressed with the people of Crestline. Last week I went to the meetings of two volunteer organizations that are making a difference in the town. Their members are not paid and their involvement is purely voluntary. The first is the Crestline Business Council. The scope of their work includes cleaning graffiti, beautifying the downtown area and Top Town, and creating a decorating theme for the business district. They’re also creating a business map of the town to help visitors find their way. A lot of their work is providing information for visitors and citizens. The second group is the Crestline Community Development Association, which has a similar mission as the first group—its mission is to maintain and improve life in Crestline. This group is responsible for the concerts in the summer and the clean-up days. On its last clean-up day, the group cleaned up 15 tons of trash from Highway 18 and hauled in $700 worth of aluminum cans. It’s refreshing to see people coming together for common causes and common good. In Fallbrook it wasn’t like this. It was the developers vs. the slow-growthers vs. the no-growthers, and sometimes brawls broke out. They could learn a lot by taking a closer look at Crestline. |
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