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THE CASTE system is not exclusively
the tainted property of the Hindus.
1 have some well-heeled friends from
college days who make a fetish of trying
to figure the market trends. They cool
their breakfast coffee by panting over it
until the morning paper comes with the
latest quotations. They have reams of
1 nose-leaf notebook pages covered with
mathematical hieroglyphics and mystic
symbols they say are the basics of "charting"—and
would you believe it, these
Brahmins think I'm a crazy wild-eyed
gambler chasing a needle-in-the-haystack
just because I like to prospect and look
for buried money with a metal detector.
If the whole truth were known—and
reduced to batting averages—I have a
hunch my "gambling" odds are almost
as respectable as their "earnings-to-capital-gains-ratio"
mumbo-jumbo!
So this is written for my own caste;
the understanding, respectable haystackers
and doodlebuggers—who lack the funds
to fool with ticker tape, and have their
own ideas of who's crazy.
At the mouth of narrow Mill Creek
canyon, up above Redlands, California,
is a Southern California Edison Company
powerhouse built many years ago. The
water that spins the turbines is diverted
out of its course several miles up Mill
Creek above this generating plant. It runs
at an easy gait in a ditch and flume combination
along the south wall of the canyon
until it reaches the nose of the ridge
directly above the powerhouse, where it
spills into a reservoir kind of thing called
a forebay.
12
"We want
those checks!
'/TO ~ by Ken Marquiss
A big steel pipe connects the forebay to
the powerhouse, and by the time the
water drops all that distance it really has
plenty of zap when it hits the turbine
blades.
The amount of water power needed for
the generators fluctuates considerably with
the time of day, and the load on the
electrical system. The electrical engineers,
not being politicians, know the logical
place to stop trouble is at the source—
and so today the flow of power is regulated
at the forebay by big electrically
controlled valves at the head of the pipe.
In the old days (which were not so
long ago) before the big automatic valves
were put in, the water flow was regulated
by a large hand wheel turning on a hefty
worm screw that, in turn, opened and
closed the valves. Turning this wheel was
the job of the forebay tender. The amount
of flow needed was phoned up from the
powerhouse, and the tender set the valves
accordingly.
It was a very necessary job, quite easy
and with a lot of fringe benefits—but
boring, and very confining. However, it
suited "Old Man Wagner" to a tee so
he kept the job for a long time.
He seems to have been a bachelor—
whether officially or not I don't know—
and he soon enough had figured out the
rhythm of the flow levels, so that he
could almost set the valves by the time
the big outside bell for the phone rang.
The tender's house the company supplied
was nice and snug; the climate was
brisk and bright, and Wagner found he
had almost unlimited time at his disposal.
Visitors were infrequent and so like
Robinson Crusoe, he set about to make
himself comfortable—AND to develop a
food supply.
The tender seemed to have been endowed
with strong squirrel instincts—in
more ways than one, as it later developed!
He had free rent, the need for clothes
was reduced to a functional minimum,
and if he could raise the major part of
his own food—then the salary checks
could be mostly gravy (or nuts) to be
cached away. This pleased him no end.
The last time I was at the forebay the
cement walls of his above-ground potato
cellar and pantry were still standing, the
fruit trees in the orchard still made a
mecca for the deer in the fall, and what
was the garden plot was weed strewn
but still reasonably level.
Not having known old man Wagner
myself, I can't vouch for what follows—
but I talked to several people who did;
and their stories were like a horsehair
rope; multicolored and differing in
minor details, but all tieing together and
going the same strong way.
The forebay tender soon developed
certain pecularities that irritated the accounting
department down in the big
office. But he was too steady and reliable
to fire, so all they could do was fume
and send "please note" memorandums
to the personnel office complaining that
Wagner took his own sweet time to cash
his paychecks and was lousing up their