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To say that Bickel was a cat lover is an understatement. The Camp cat population seldom fell below 20 and, depending on the season, sometimes rose as high as 40 feline souls. These were Bickel Camp cats, which meant they were unfixed, growling, prowling, and fighting cat urine factories.
One thing people would mention after their first visit to the camp was the ubiquitous smell of tomcat spray. I would come home from a visit, and my clothes would reek. Most Last Chance Canyon regulars got used to the smell, or came to terms with it because they loved visiting Walt. Everyone I know has a Bickel cat story to share.
My sister Mary Butterfield tells of a cat jumping down from the rafters of the cabin onto the kitchen table. She noticed it had a missing eye. The eye socket was seeping and had been sown shut. "Walt," she asked, "what happened to this cat's eye?"
"Well," Bickel answered, "it got in a fight, and lost its eye. I had to pluck it out and sow him up."
I saw the cat come up and sniff her freshly poured glass of wine when she wasn't looking. She looked down in time to see the cat sneeze into her wine, leaving cat snot floating on the surface. Blaming this on me, I caught her trying to switch her glass with mine. When Walt wasn't looking, she secretly poured the wine in the slop bucket under the dishwashing pan. Anyone who wasted anything around Bickel Camp got a stern scolding from the old miner.
Mary said she noticed that around 1976, most Bickel Camp cats were white with one green and one blue eye. Harold Ericsson, however, observed in 1969 that most of Walt's cats were black. Big Boy, a cat I'll talk about later, might explain the black shift in the gene pool.
Alex Apostolides, a fantastic storyteller, once lived with Walt out in the canyon. He wasn't particularly fond of the cats, but had lots of fun with them. There was a retarded cat named Peewee who has suffered some sort of brain damage from a camp mishap. Peewee loved Alex, though it was an unrequited affair. Alex would hold the dazed confused creature and pretend they could communicate through telepathy. Peewee had a bobble head, and befuddled unfocused eyes. He seemed to live for the next word Alex would utter. Alex would amuse campers for hours sharing stories and observations the simple creature had "told" him.
Alex loved to tease Walt about sleeping with the cats, and would fabricate outrageous tales, ripe with sexual innuendo, that Peewee had supposedly shared. Bickel, to his credit, would sometimes almost fall from his chair with laughter as Alex wound on with the sorted details. One cat (who didn't yet have a name) became known as Walter in this way. Alex insisted, through Peewee, that the cat was the spiting image of Bickel himself for good reason. The cat did look a little like Walt. To goad Bickel, we would always refer to Walter the cat as Bickel's favorite son.
There were inside and outside cats at Bickel's and Walter became the lord of inside cats. As inside cat king, Walter came to hate John Bullock, a frequent camp visitor who lived up at Gerbach Camp. Bullock wore a black Stetson hat and carried a pearl-handled, 44-magnum pistol. There was a rocking chair behind the front door that everyone always gave up to John when he came. Walter saw this chair as his cat throne, and resented Bullock's temporary dominion. On one of Bullock's visits, Walter went up in the rafters pissed down onto John's black Stetson hat. John whipped out his six-shooter and was about to shoot the cat. Bickel managed to talk him out of it by pointing out, "if you was to shoot that cat, you'd make a big hole in my roof."
"It's absolutely true about Walter being the king of Bickel's indoor cats," Danny Needham remembers. Danny visited Bickel camp often as a boy with his Father Leo Needham. Leo was the Air Force officer who worked for six years to get President Reagan's citation letter for Bickel's invention of the cooling handle on the 50 caliber machine gun. Danny, who often did magic shows for the miners around camp went on to become known as
If anybody were to ask Bickel why he had so many cats, he'd say they helped keep the snakes away from camp by controlling the local rodent population. Yet, all one had to do was watch him interact with his feline friends to understand how they kept him company. There were long stretches of time when no one turned up the wash that led to Bickel's remote cabin.
He would talk to his critters in full sentences as if they understood his every word. "Now Angel Girl," Bickel would say. "I've told you time and time again, not to sharpen your claws on the bedspread. You go outside and do that." Angel Girl would look at him with complete understanding, go outside and sharpen her claws on an old carpet.
Bickel Camp would tell of periods when no one visited for weeks, so his cats filled the gap left by limited human contact. Local miners like Bullock would, of course, stop to visit. An occasional professor doing desert research might make a call, but it was the cats Walt talked to the most.
Alika K. Herring, the famous telescope maker, astronomer, and archeologist, first took me to Bickel Camp in 1958. I went to school with his son Jack, and he took us along to help work a dig near Fossil Falls. We stopped by to visit Bickel on the way back to Anaheim. Alika had cautioned Jack and I, who were young boys, to be on our best behavior around the miner as he tended to be grumpy. We were warned not to touch anything. The cats kept us busy while Alika and Walt talked arrowheads, ancient artifacts, and stargazing.
No matter how high the cat population soared, Bickel managed to have a name for every creature, and came to know their wants, needs, strengths and shortcomings. The names alone were telling. I can't remember most of them but they had a sort of general Bickel flavor.
The naming schemes often had Boy or Girl as part of the moniker, like Sparky Boy or Lady Girl. His cat names were never too creative, but they might speak of some trait or physical characteristic. I don't think he ever used the same name twice, but he might have added little or big to a newcomer's name. There might have been a Little Brownie and an original Brownie. Big Whitey might have been called so after, a long lost Whitey. Over the years there were so many cats, I really don't remember many specific names. Maybe a cat named Noisy, Sneaky, One Eye, Big Foot, or Blacky might have lived out their life in Bickel Camp, and only Walt really knew who went by which name.
Funny as Walt's cat names were, Bickel himself had humorous ways of pronouncing things. He called his Plymouth Fury, "My Flurry. " He'd study the skies at night with his Herring-made telescope and declare, "Come over here and take a look, I've got 'Judiper' in focus." A cat named Peanuts had bad eyes and required constant medication. Walt would say, "Y'all wanna hold 'Penis' walst I put Neosporin in the eye."
There is one cat I remember the most, and ironically it was the cat seen the least around the camp. This was Big Boy, and he was special. While he was one of the biggest cats to ever live in Last Chance Canyon, he was without a doubt one of the toughest cats to have ever lived anywhere.
He was a tomcat's tomcat and was almost never seen around the cabin. He preferred to hunt for his own food, and seemed to enjoy competing with the local bobcats and coyotes for canyon game. He was a feral creature who only came to camp when females were in heat, or he needed Bickel's help. Bickel is the only person I ever saw touch him or pick him up.
Tom Cody said he was once allowed stroke his back while he ate from a pan of food Bickel offered. He was still young and shiny then, and had come into camp to establish life's pecking order among Last Chance cats. After eating his fill, Cody said, he strutted outside to pose on the top step in front of the cabin. He casually licked his paws and surveyed his kingdom.
A foolish young male approached from the rear. Big Boy let the callow lad creep into range, continued to groom his shiny coat, and paid no attention. The young tomcat boldly sat about a foot from the alpha male. Big Boy gave a casual glance, spun with lightning speed, and hit the challenger with such force he flew several feet across the yard. He continued grooming, not bothering to look for other contenders. None dared.
In a fight with a bobcat, Big Boy had his scalp ripped almost completely off. Walt treated and sowed the flapping wound on the kitchen table while the cat stoically endured the pain. After that he returned several times to have cuts, punctures, and missing chunks treated by his friendly desert doctor. He came to be a black feline hunk of muscle and scar. First he lost his left ear. Eventually both ears became gnarled, grizzled nubs, and this only made his head appear bigger. The top of his tail was solid scar material and zippered stitch tracks were all over his body.
Big Boy was about 18 years old when two boys with 22 rifles came in to tell Bickel of a great hunting adventure. It seemed they had seen and shot a big black cat-like creature over in Bonanza Gulch. The boys allowed it was probably some sort of evil bobcat mutation.
Bickel sent the boys packing with a stern lecture, and then hiked over Sandy's Mesa looking for Big Boy. He followed a game trail that led from Bonanza to Bickel Camp, and found his crusty old friend had died trying to make it home for repairs. He lovingly buried Big Boy on Sandy's Mesa, where we scattered most of Bickel's ashes 20 years later.
When I visited Bickel Camp a few weeks ago, a strange, unexplainable yearning haunted me. At first, I assumed this was the usual feeling I've had since Bickel first left the camp in 1989. Yet, I've always understood that as just a nostalgic trip. I always wonder what happened to the old camp friends and dredge up memories of Bickel himself. This seemed to be something different.
When the caretaker Joel took me in the cabin, I began to understand what it was I was longing for. To this day one might detect a slight scent of tomcat spray, but maybe that was my imagination. I did find myself looking to the rafters for ghosts of pissing cats. I started to notice cat signs everywhere—an old pie pan they once ate from, claw marks here and there. The cats were gone and the place was missing their choreography.
There were rat droppings inside the cabin, too. It looks as if Bickel Camp has want of a few good rat eaters. Joel even mentioned he might get a couple cats. No need for as many felines as Bickel kept, but one can always imagine two cats in the yard. Bickel showed us, after all, how everything easier for those who enjoy conversing with cats.
