There are things I miss about a place called home. Clem Cox was a major uber old-time rancher and he used to grin that he had lived in nine different cities and never moved once. People just kept changing the name of his ZIP code, beginning long before there were ZIP codes. And, yup. Sand Canyon has been known legitimately as the Soledad Township, Little Santa Clara River Valley, Solemint, Newhall-Saugus, Saugus, Canyon Country, Santa Clarita Valley, the city of Santa Clarita, and, unofficially and my personal favorite, Armpit Acres.
Clem’s long gone. Sold the farm. It became a golf course. Clem became the same, wonderful Clem, but a millionaire. Even got a cell phone.
Just a 3-iron with a bounce down Sand Canyon Road was the Rolling Stone Ranch, home to Country Hall of Fame musician and producer, Cliffie Stone, along with his family and my dear double-buddy and nemesis, Curtis. Likewise, music was very good to Curtie. He was a founding member of the band, Highway 101, and a Grammy winner. I associate Curtis, aka, The Foonman, with our endless pranks, practical jokes and life of hilarity together. Never can it be duplicated.
We were at that little cowboy coffee shop, The Way Station, on Main and 9th, several years ago, reminiscing, lamenting how the SCV had been sullied with a tidal wave of grinning yuppies. In a booth, we didn’t notice this ancient elderly woman at the counter. I was munching on my usual hash-&-eggs, biscuits, gravy and a pint of Tabasco to kill the taste on a plate larger than an 1954 Oldsmobile hubcap. Curt, being a vegetarian, had the usual — single egg white omelet with a side of air. This great-great-great grandmama climbs out of her swivel chair and starts poking Curtie in the sternum, confessing she had to suffer eavesdropping through our conversation about newbies. Poke. Poke. Poke.
“I know exactly what you boys mean about newcomers,” said the woman, alive during the construction of Atlantis. “I’ve been here since 1920 and it’s YOU people who came straggling in during the 1950s and RUINED things.”
I stared accusingly at Curtis and said, “Yeah!”
Even before that dear, old lady, there was the Big Oaks Lodge.
Four of us motored up there regularly for mischief.
That would be, Me. Curtis. His girlfriend and my dear buddy, Laura Raynor. And my then-wife, Ellen Wayman/Mrs. Cieplik. We’d drive up to the Big Oaks WAY up Bouquet Canyon. We were in our 20s. Cruel time. That has to be last week, not a half-century ago. Absolute great steaks. Not that Curtis, the vegan sissy, could eat one on a bet. His brother, Jon Stone, joined us midweek one night. Place was emptier than Hillary Clinton’s dance card. We three boys took stage and entertained — allegedly — our two trophy girls. Curtis on guitar. Jon on drums. Me, vocals.
Kinda.
I miss the Big Oaks Lodge. I just took my baby girl, not so baby anymore at 23, for a road trip up Bouquet. We stopped at the ruins and I bored Indy Pie with another of my stories about where the dirt used to be. The original building and foundation was constructed in the late 1800s. Place burned down, for the last time, eight years ago this August. There shall never be another place like it.
For a century it had been a spartan boxing camp, training all sorts of pugilists, from heavyweight champ “Gentleman” Jim Corbett to contender Jerry Quarry in 1983. I remember the outdoors training ring since I was a kid. Quarry bought it from the “Rocky” and “Rocky II” movies. The Big Oaks would host amateur boxing contests, along with drinks and dinner, from the 1920s to ’50s. A featherweight world champ trained there in the 1930s. The Great Depression KO’d him and the champ turned feral, living off trash can scraps. Emaciated, starving, he was hit by a speeding truck on the Ridge Route. The driver swore it was suicide.
The retreat could be miles apart on the Human Civic Discourse Scale, a wonderful, bucolic, magical and even romantic place. In a blink, it could be an overflowing bucket of blood. The Lodge was a weekend haven for the three kinds of bikers: Tame, Outlaw and Yet-To-Be-Classified. Fish & Game filled Bouquet Creek with hundreds of trout. With the stream being all of 9 inches wide, it wasn’t hard to catch dinner.
The place was its own little community. After World War II, it had a grocery store, gas station, saloon, restaurant and even rented motel cabins. (Ten of the original 12 cabins burned down in the January 1990 fire.) In 1947, the then-owners lost their liquor AND dancing license. Seems management was selling “malteds,” and we don’t mean “milk,” to kids as young as 15. Ah, government. One must have a license to dance.
In my lifetime, fires have decimated Bouquet. Oaks a century and older lined the curvy road. You could hardly see a star or full moon under their thick canopy. Holding a cold beer. Conversation. Blessed silence. A smile-bringing major barroom brouhaha. Besides the boxing, there were so many fights. One, in 1983, ended in a gun battle between locals and passing yahoos. It ended with dozens of rounds fired, yet only one man was shot. Poor chap. Besides being hospitalized, he was arrested. Seems he was the one who fired the first shot and was perforated with several answering shotgun volleys from homeowners.
Which is why we have the Second Amendment. (:- )
Both the secret and magic of the Big Oaks Lodge is forever gone from our modern, AYSO-centric valley, along with the ability to languidly float between the dimensions of civilization and the lure of the wild.
I so dearly miss the Big Oaks Lodge, back in the day when the Santa Clarita wasn’t so blasted sterile and tame …
Pick up “Naked Came the Novelist,” John Boston’s sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” at JohnBoston-Books.com. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
