High Noon

Walnut and oak burning in the fireplace on this rainy, rainy night.  What movie to watch tonight?  My new hobby is watching old, classic movies in the apartment downstairs with a projector, large screen, and surround sound.  I take the time to watch all the special bonus features in these remastered DVDs; usually interviews with the directors or writers.

Last night it was Gary Cooper’s “High Noon” released in 1952.

This was an anecdotal milestone for me, my “bar mitzvah”.  Bruce Rancadore and I decided we wanted to camp out for a week at my parent’s property up behind the planned Lexington Dam in the Santa Cruz mountains.  It was July, I had just turned 14.  We brought a lot of things, unfortunately not much of what we needed.  We had guns, .22’s, and explored what is still probably a wilderness area.  I had previously hunted up there with my father and his friends for deer and quail.

Parenting has changed since then.  There were no cell phones.  There was a family with a telephone four miles away.  We were on our own, a pair of kids for a week in the hills.

After three days of boredom, and a craving for junk food, we decided one morning to walk into town, Los Gatos.  As the road goes, we figured 10-11 miles.  But cross-country, we could halve that.

The planned dam had used imminent domain to clear every habitable domicile or structure that would eventually be under water.  We took a bee-line through underbrush, there being no path or road to follow.  It took us a few hours, but we arrived in Los Gatos, just in time for the first showing of “High Noon”.  Full of popcorn and Coca Cola, we wandered around for a while and then decided to see it again at 3 pm.

We weren’t anxious to go back to our camp site, and we toyed with the idea of calling home and admitting defeat.  But we gained courage from the movie plot line of, “a man has got to do what he’s got to do”, so we stuck it out and watched it a third time, letting out about 7 pm.

We started back in twilight, but the dam-site was low and surrounded by mountains.  It became quickly very dark.  Traversing underbrush in pitch blackness means lots of falls, mis-steps, and wrong ways.  We navigated by the sun in the morning.  By night, we were lost.  Our campsite was 3-4 miles up there in the hills somewhere.

The sounds of the night, dogs howling – “how far away?”  We became very scared, jumping at every sound.  We veered over to what we thought was the road, and we were right.  It took longer bur we knew we’d eventually get there.  It was past eleven, when we found our camp.  Crashed in our clothes.

Awoke the next morning, from head-to-toe itching from poison oak.

The poison oak got worse [In the next 66 years, I never got another case of Poison Oak, even though exposed many times].

We walked the four miles to the telephone and called home.  My parents would come the next day, Sunday, in the morning.

I was 14, developing my thoughts on maturity, roles I should play.  That movie helped to set me on some of the pathways I have followed like a respect for the law and governance.  Rebellious and leftist as I was in college, I became a Pershing’s Rifle guy in ROTC and loved it.  I enlisted in the Army, where others were complaining of toe-bone spurs.  Maybe I like the Grand Jury so much because of these morals.  I feel it is right to serve one’s community.