This is the 52nd column that I have written for the Tehachapi News in 2024, and of course, it is the last one for this year. Each week I try to inform and entertain our readers with photos and stories about our surroundings: the landscapes, local residents, wildlife, plants, native lifeways, weather, earlier times and more.
The quartet of four seasons that together made 2024 brought many changes, some seasonal and others permanent. For me and the Pen in Hand column, it has been a year of learning new things, revisiting past history and simply celebrating the people, places and culture of the Tehachapi Mountains.
In the past week, as the final days of 2024 approached, I’ve been reviewing the year’s columns with gratitude and love for the various topics that were featured.
I profiled Piute Mountain School, a remote rural school in the mountains of east Kern that is about 35 miles from Tehachapi by road, though it takes about an hour to drive there because of the winding road through Caliente Canyon. By the direct flight of a raven, it is probably only about 20 miles over ridges and canyons from the city of Tehachapi.
The school is the only campus within the Caliente Union School District, which serves children living within a 250-square-mile chunk of ranches, countryside and undeveloped land, with some houses here and there. There are very small communities and occupied areas, like Caliente, Back Canyon, Piute Mountain, Loraine, Indian Creek and Twin Oaks, but there are no towns.
School enrollment averages 50 to 60 students, who are grouped by similar grade levels and divided among the three or four teachers at the school. The school is like a little throwback to an earlier time.
I shared with readers a project called “Returning to Our Roots,” which was funded by a grant from the Library of Congress’ American Folklife Center. It was initiated by tribal elder Merlene Everson and language preservation specialist Laura Grant.
Nuwä (Kawaiisu or Southern Paiute) tribal members gathered at the Rankin Ranch in Walker Basin in April and August to harvest plants in the secluded mountain valley they traditionally knew as Yaatiip (pronounced yaah-teep) which translates as the “Carrying Earth,” since the flat-bottomed valley was shaped like a giant basket.
“The main purpose of this ongoing effort is to reconnect younger generations of Nuwä people with their traditional gathering practices in their homeland of Yaatiip,” explained project coordinator Laura Grant. “Most of the Nuwä people are a diaspora now, and they are scattered.
“They have to travel long distances to do simple things they once did, like harvest traditional plants in season. So the project involves teaching younger Nuwä tribal members how to harvest and prepare Native foods, and to document that traditional knowledge.”
Another column explored an ongoing effort to document California’s native desert snail populations, which brought Dave Goodward to the deserts of Kern County. Goodward is a field biologist affiliated with the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and he is working on a biological inventory of these unusual land snails.
The snails feed primarily on already decaying plant matter or compost, and don’t bother the green vegetation on growing plants. Desert snails spend a fair portion of each year dormant, withdrawn and self-sealed inside their shells using a membrane called an epiphragm to keep from drying out. It takes them about five years to reach maturity, and then they can live for a number of years as adults.
So, why would the snails choose to live in places like the desert that are so obviously hostile and challenging places for them? Well, it seems likely that they didn’t choose those surroundings — the snails remain from an earlier, wetter time, when conditions were much more favorable and there were a lot more lakes and surface water.
As the environment changed and the landscape dried out, relic populations of snails retreated to the only locations where they could still survive, and they have persisted there ever since. And continue to do so, as unlikely as it seems.
Another story documented the original history of the state prison in Cummings Valley, which has been a men’s prison for the past 70 years, but began in 1933 as the first women’s prison in California.
Prior to that, state female inmates were housed in the men’s prison at San Quentin, originally side by side with the men, and then later in a separate women’s wing.
Keeping male and female inmates in close proximity led to problems, naturally, so it was decided that female prisoners needed their own facility, entirely removed from a men’s prison.
Construction on the new penitentiary, known as the California Institution for Women began in Cummings Valley in 1931 on 1,683 acres of land that the state bought from Lucas Brite. It took a couple of years to complete the buildings, and the first 30 female inmates arrived in September of 1933.
Although it was a prison, CIW didn’t look like one. And in many ways, it didn’t function like one. At least not a typical prison.
All the work the inmates did was voluntary, not compulsory, and in addition to a sewing shop, female inmates also worked doing all the groundskeeping and gardening, raising chickens for eggs and meat, as well as rabbits, and they had a barn where they milked several cows for dairy supplies for the prison. Inmates grew vegetables and fruits to consume, and they did a lot of canning during the harvest season.
CIW inmates were on the honor system and were not closely watched. It was the prisoners themselves who did all the cooking and meal preparation. They did have a mandatory morning “get-up” time of 6 a.m., and a nighttime “lights-out” at 9 p.m.
Although it was a groundbreaking and seemingly successful example of alternative incarceration, on July 21, 1952, the experiment all came crashing down. Literally. The Tehachapi earthquake of 1952 heavily damaged many prison buildings, and the female inmates were housed in tents on prison grounds for the rest of the summer. They were then moved a new facility at Frontera (Chino). The unique confinement and rehabilitation approach in Cummings Valley was over. When the prison was rebuilt, it became a conventional men’s prison, and has been ever since.
Other columns highlighted things like a wonderful and successful wildlife project in the Tehachapi Mountains that is now in its 25th year: the Tehachapi Bluebird Nest Box Program. Led by Karen Pestana, the project maintains and monitors about 60 nest boxes in Brite Valley, from which more than 3,800 Western Bluebird chicks have successfully fledged.
We lost some amazing community members in 2024, including Kay Uli, Nancy Yeager Rice, Jerrie Cowan and a number of others. Their buoyant, unforgettable personalities and many contributions will long be remembered and appreciated.
So now it’s goodbye to 2024 and hello to 2025. I would like to give an enormous thank you to the readers who continue to show me their support, encouragement and love throughout the year. I have been doing this steadily for 43 years, and I look forward to continuing to celebrate this remarkable place and its people.
Have a good week.