Old Line Shack

  Old ag is interesting… people had to work so hard, and so long.  I am so lucky… I watch videos…. go and do some weedwacking while I listen to music in my earphones…. I box a few cactus leaves…. and hop into the truck for a ten mile drive to town and the Post Office…. while in town we buy most of our groceries.

   There’s a 130 year old stone building down the road from us… it was used in the old days as a line house for the cowboys when they’d round up the cattle here…. back when it was all open range and the cattle mixed anywhere. All the local ranches would send the cowboys to round up all together because all the cattle would wander all over the hills… the brush is very thick…. the topo is rough…. and they’d spend a few days in each canyon starting at the end and working their way to the coast… driving all those cattle down to the little flat area (coastal plain) that is along the sea.  While they spent the time in this canyon, they had the stone house to stay in.  One woman here says her granddaddy told her the old stories from when he was a cowboy about 1900…. he was in the stone house getting drunk with the other cowboys, and got in a fight with one he didn’t like, when he finally beat him unconscious he threw him into the fireplace and tried to burn him up… but the other fellows pulled him back, and rescued the victim from the fire.

  Revenuers used to come into the canyon to get the whiskey stills….they never got the people… (one was the fighting cowboy who tried to burn his buddy), the locals could ride their horses through the oak woods….. the revenuers stayed out of the woods for their own safety.

   We also had smugglers bringing booze onto the beach from boats that would bring it from Canada.  There is an isolated beach (now a nude beach) called Pirates’ Cove and another called ‘Smuggler’s Cove that were used…. rowboats would get the bottles from the boats offshore, and row to the beach. If you don’t know the rocks and tides and waves and be able to navigate around them at night, you won’t get your booze to safety. I am sure there’s some cases of Scotch under those waves.