On Mountain Terms Visitors and new residents are in for a vocabulary and context lesson when they move “up the hill.” That’s the first lesson. We don’t say “up the hill” much here because we’re already up the hill. But we do say “down the hill” a lot. For residents, this term is second nature, but visitors can be confused. At the end of his first visit I told my father-in-law, “Be careful going down the hill.” He looked puzzled, because he was probably thinking: “Yeah, which one are you talking about?” He didn’t know whether I meant the 40-degree grade just down from my house with the dogs lying in the road that jump up and chase your car around the blind hairpin turn, or the one with the 270-degree arm-twisting curve that has a giant incense cedar on the inside which sports flecks of paint from every color of car you can imagine, or the sloping grade down Bowl that has a surprise blind corner at Forest Shade, or maybe the last one before town on Wildwood where you nearly have to use the foot and hand brakes together to stop at the sign at the bottom. My father-in-law doesn’t know that I’m talking about Highway 18, which he considers to be a piece of cake after surviving all of that other stuff. When I write news articles for this paper, I usually want to make sure that I’m getting quotes from people in Crestline. Who wants to hear what somebody in Arrowhead thinks about something in Crestline anyway? So I ask, are you all from Crestline? One guy named Jim answers for all of them: “Well, I’m from Top Town, Bill here is from Dart Canyon, Ted there is from Cedarpines Park, Nancy over there (she waves) is from Valley of Enchantment and Alice is from Skyland.” So in the story I write, “Crestline residents Jim, Bill, Ted, Nancy and Alice...” It only takes me eight words. A reporter from down the hill would be perplexed, especially when he gets out his map and tries to find all of these places. He doesn’t realize that the whole spiel was just Jim’s mountain way of answering, “Yep.” So a whole paragraph of the flatland reporter’s story ends up being devoted to trying to explain where all of these people live. “Back-up” was another term I didn’t know when I moved here. One of the many problems with the money pit I bought up here was water pressure. Gradually, our water pressure was rising so high that our water heater kept spouting off and leaks were starting everywhere. So I asked my neighbor about it. He said it was a broken water pressure regulator, and added, “You’ll find it down in the back-up.” Many people call it the build-up but his term was back-up. Now to this former flatlander, a back-up is just an awful mess that you clean up off of the bathroom floor when your toilet decides it’s going to work northward instead of southward. I imagined I’d have to go underneath somewhere and lay down over a knee-deep pond of sewage and put my arm in shoulder-deep to pull some plug. My neighbor saw I obviously didn’t have a clue. So he said, “Your back-up, you know, the crawlspace under your house with the dirt floor—need me to show you?” I knew he knew where it was; long after I moved here I found out that at least four of my neighbors have keys to my house, so they know it as well as I do. But I knew where it was, because I had spent time there before fixing something else, and the sewage pond was starting to sound sweet. If you ever wonder whether you’re claustrophobic, wait until you’re alone at home, crawl into your back-up, sit down in the dirt, then be an idiot and drop your flashlight, let it roll down next to the wall and go out, then spend the next three minutes trying to find it. If you’re not whimpering or screaming after the three minutes, you’re probably not claustrophobic. I won’t say which I am, but let’s just say I sprung for the plumber on the water pressure thing. But people down the hill don’t have back-ups, because they don’t have upslope or downslope houses. To a person who lives perched on a sea cliff in Orange County, a downslope house is that one a few houses over that has been lying on the beach in pieces with yellow tape around it since last winter’s heavy rains. A downslope house is nothing to brag about, and thank your lucky stars that you have an upslope house while you still have one. “Rim” is another term. If you say there’s a fire over The Rim, that’s a much different thing from saying there’s a fire at Rim. One is a brush fire and the other is a structure fire. And when people here say we’ll meet you at the beach, nobody has to ask which one. Your guest for the weekend, curious about the itinerary, asks what is on tap for the afternoon. You answer that you’re going to visit with your brother at the Stockade for a few hours. “What’s he in for,” your guest asks. “Oh, just drinking,” you say. “You mean drinking and driving?” she asks. “No, he never does that,” you reply. “Drunk in public, then?” You reply, “Yeah, well, sometimes.” Being up here changes your perceptions and terminology about things down the hill as well. Last weekend we took my daughter, an animal lover, to the San Diego Wild Animal Park for her 11th birthday. Also along on the trip was my 7-year-old son, who is not crazy about animals like his sister, but is accustomed to seeing them in the wild. He was grumbling about how could they call this a wild animal park when all the animals are penned up. When our visit to the park was nearly over he finally saw something that got him excited. We were pumping quarters into the duck food machine while he fed some wild local ducks and coots in a pond there. Suddenly, a 10- to 12-pound catfish broke the water, opened its huge maw and gobbled up the duck food. On the next pass, another huge catfish almost swallowed a coot’s head as the two animals lunged for the same morsel. My son giggled with joy for the first time that day and exclaimed, “Now that’s what I call a wild animal park!” |
. © 2003 Winning Words and Crestline Courier-News For our search engine optimization and search engine placement services, go to:
|
