The Last of the Malibu Hillbillies

Chip insisted that his abilities were not extrasensory, but simply a heightened awareness of nature. “It’s like rattlesnakes. I know if there is a rattlesnake around, and usually where it is, before I’ve heard it or seen it. And I can usually walk right up to where they are, without having heard them, just because I feel them. And it’s the same thing with a fire.”

This awareness, Chip said, was rooted in something deeper than his own experiences. It reached downward into a bedrock of family memories. “I am tied into these people that are of homestead clans. I am tied into people that were raised in these mountains and literally had to eat off of what they were able to harvest, whether it was deer or rabbit or quail or fish. They lived off the land. By being raised with those people, I was raised on the stories, raised on their memories.”

When I asked Chip about fire insurance, why the ranch didn’t have any, he gave me a puzzled look.

“But we do have fire insurance,” he insisted. The brush was well-cleared, the water and gunnysacks were always ready, and the ranch was occupied by people who knew how to fight fires. “That’s your best insurance,” he told me, “not the monthly check that you send to some company.”

Millie took me on a final walk through her ranch, showing me her latest preparations for fires, introducing me to her horses, and paying tribute to the rattlesnake-laden den where her husband Jimmy was buried. At Jimmy’s grave there were no tombstones — just a small, half-dollar-size concrete plug in the side of a boulder. “This is it,” said Millie. Then she explained how this could be: Before Jimmy died, he asked a friend to drill a hole in this rock so that his cremated ashes could be deposited within. This was actually quite a fitting end for a dynamiter, explained Millie, for the hole was made with a dynamite drill and the ashes were poured in like ammonium nitrate. Afterward, the top of the hole was sealed off with a narrow plug of concrete. “This is just the way that Jimmy wanted it,” said Millie wistfully.

Later that evening, as Millie and I sat in the comfort of her parlor, she talked about her last days with Jimmy. “He died on the 8th of April,” she told me. “A bunch of us were gathered around his bed when he went. The next day Neptune came and picked him up — that’s the cremation people. Those Neptune people are constantly sending me advertisements,” she lamented. “It’s not that I mind that my time is coming, it’s just that I don’t like being pressured.”

I asked Millie what she did with the Neptune ads. She put them in the same place as the letters asking her to sell the ranch, she explained. In the trash.