THE LORETTA REPORT: "It is a rare thing to laugh and cry at a rude gesture but I did both last week. Out here in the Anderson Valley we have our own way about things. It may be the geographic isolation or just the general oneryness of those of us who can stand to live out here. Or, more likely, that we can't stand to live elsewhere. Whichever way it is we are proud to get to be here and that was especially true for the generations that settled here before us. So proud that they came up with their own words for life in this region. From our dogbait pikes in and out, to the boarp, the breggo, tomker, huge tomker, the boshe, the blue tail, the greyske, the haireem and other such varmits. And of course the Brightlighters and other huskers, all manner of hood, burlappers, knuckleheads, appleheads, apple eaters, prack gormers and the just plain tuddish; from highrollers to deependers and even out to the Briney we are an odd bunch.
"SO, WHILE the physical therapist was running She Who Must Not Be Named through her "Give me a thumbs up; Good! Can you nod for me? Good! Stick your tongue out! Good!" daily trained dog routine I chimed in with "Can you give me a Boont Salute?" There was the immediate sardonic smirk and the raising of the right hand with the middle finger wave that we all recognize from heated exchanges. Especially for those of us in the Boont region who use it regularly to greet each other casually. Now for most of us that is a throw off gesture that comes as natural as can be. But when your grey matter has takin' a dreekin the likes of the one my eeld'm has then it is not so simple. This is all to say, in plain English, that Loretta is alive and well, humor in tact! There is a lot of ottin to go, but she is on her way back and will be out of the tongue cuppy nook soon enough. It will be a long, ot pike but she is plodding along it. The picture below does not have her beautiful smile attached as she is not ready for a full photo spread yet. But know that there is a keemwun keemle huge tidrick on the pike ahead with prackin, gormin, yattin and a hobneelch featuring a hob tween me and my darlin! (Roughly "a big party at which my love and I will dance and you are all invited!") Stay tuned! "— From W.Dan Houck's Treehouse, June 24, 2015
PHILO MARIJUANA MUSEUM MOTHBALLED — The censored pot museum at the Floodgate is having a grand mothballing event on July 4th from 11 A.M. - 4:20pm. Refreshments will be lying around, the remainder of the gift shop swag will be on sale, and there will be neither live nor dead music. Free. BYOM.* If you have loaned items to the museum for display, come pick them up. Items not claimed at the museum will be stored for one year. E-mail mmmcurator@gmail.com or call (707) 353-0074 to claim your stuff. Items not claimed will be offered to the 420 Archive’s museum project. Thanks to all of you who came in with artifacts, stories, and encouragement! (*Bring your own mothballs)
RIVER WATCH: These days I'm starting to feel a little guilty when I take a bath instead of a jump in - jump out shower. We're talking about 50 gallons of water twice a week. This morning I walked to the River to find Jeffery Skoll's Shenoa pump humming away. Collectively he, Wentzell and Balo have probably sucked over five acre/feet in the same one-week period. That's over one million, six hundred thousand (1,629,257.135) gallons. Goldeneye has pulled their pump - good for them. These are the folks that my weakening knees are able to watch. There are over 40 water rights to Anderson Creek water that I have not been able to monitor and 26 rights to the Navarro River. I won't let their rapacity downgrade my personal sense of responsibility. The rate of declining flow in the River has slowed. The algae has stopped blooming and started to decay forming scummy patches along Rivers edge and a layer of almost fluffy stuff on the River's bottom that billows somewhat like dust when you wade along. This morning I heard a bull frog below Goldeneye which reminded me that a couple weeks ago on a rare walk downstream from the Philo/Greenwood Road bridge my friend Joshua and I saw several big frogs in one place and a bunch of 3 to 4 inch pollywogs. In another place where a riffle fed a deep pool we watch as repeatedly a bunch of little 2 to 3 inch fishies jumped out of the water as I've seen them do when otters are around - but this time without that predator present, just us watching. Maybe they thought we were otters. Three weeks or so ago I came across the first dead deer of the year on the bank just above the River. Last year over a month or two I came across five and that was the first time in 30 years of River walking I'd seen any. Remember, dry farming grapes is not only possible it had been done for millennia until the University of California Ag people convinced the industry that shallow rooting and watering was a better way.
MEAT TO THE HEAT! Beginning this Friday, with maestro Guy Kephart on the grill at the Navarro Store, the very best grilled burger in all of Mendocino County, plus grilled hot dogs, chicken, tri-tip and everything else that tastes better grilled. Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Mondays, 11-4.
PHONE MESSAGE last Friday: "A mountain lion was just spotted at the Holcomb place in Navarro." Holy catfish, Batman, that's in the center of town! And confirmed by several Deepend residents, one of whom reports: "All those stray cats we used to have down here? Gone, and the white ones went first. The lion downed them like popcorn."
THURSDAY NIGHT'S (June 25th) Health Center meeting was held at the Boonville Senior Center. Management of our crucial local clinic seems to have stabilized its functioning after a turbulent year of pervasive dysfunction, making reports on the meeting of it's revived and re-focused board of directors unnecessary.
CAL FIRE has suspended all burn permits for "outdoor open residential burning." So, please don't burn your residences outdoors. Seriously, though, the burn ban began on Monday (June 29th) and will stay in effect until the rains come, if they come.
A PLEASANT young man from Hopland named Tom Reed stopped in a couple of weeks ago to drop off the Jefferson Declaration and related material, all of it being a pitch for us NorCal people becoming a new state called the State of Jefferson or State of Northern California or Shasta or "whatever people may vote to call it." Mr. Reed didn't have to do a hard sell on me. The smaller the better, I say, and good riddance to the present arrangement which, as summed up by the Jeffersons, amounts to "Politicians in the California political establishment believe a tiny ruling elite is justified in making decisions for the rest of us." True, that. As is the next paragraph: "You know your own life better than any government bureaucrat. Legislators from distant densely populated areas do not understand our rural lives, our issues, our values, what is important to us." True that, too.
GREG KROUSE WRITES: "I think I can safely say that most of your readers missed the interesting Grid Alternative talk at the Grange Thursday night. A few folks showed as Kevin Jones’ Capoeira martial arts class stretched physically and mentally during the presentation. Grid Alternatives is like Habitat for Humanity for solar grid ties and put good power on your roof. The snag is that you need to own the house, have a good roof, and a limited income. There is some possibility that you can do this on rentals for low income renters. I think she said it was $.30 a watt. The other not so obvious idea is to allow volunteers to enter the solar construction market by learning hands on. Hopefully the new battery technology will allow us to have local Solar pods that store neighborhood power and well rarely go down. The grid is old thinking. California will allow yet one more year of tax write offs for solar. Once you do this, the power monkey is off your back. The AV Solar Grange did it over 10 years ago and we paid off our investment. Clean power for nada! We hope to have the Grid Alternative folks back in the fall/winter when folks are more focused at home. Meanwhile, you can go to www.gridalternatives.org or call 510 731-1333. Or email sash@gridalternatives.org. An aside, Kevin’s class is pretty cool. It is 7 PM Tuesday and Thursdays at the AV Solar Grange. More stuff about the grange at avgrange.org"
HEARTENING to see the State Assembly begin the crackdown on unvaccinated children. Natch, there's a sizable number of credulous Mendo parents who don't want their children vaccinated, but if the State Senate acts on the Assembly bill it will be harder for the lethally uninformed to expose all children to resurgent epidemics. It was a measles outbreak linked to Disneyland last December that sickened more than a 100 people in the U.S. and Mexico. The pending California law would strike the state's personal belief exemption. Only children with serious health issues would be allowed to opt out of mandatory vaccine schedules. Unvaccinated children would have to be home schooled.
KEEVAN LABOWITZ'S SHOW now installed at Lauren's Restaurant, is one more incentive for a meal with Lauren. Ingenious gift cards, ear-rings, jewelry, and purses made of disposable plastic bags and invasive swamp grasses direct from Kenya where Keevan taught. The young Boonville teacher continues to raise money for the Manyatta Youth Resource Centre of Kenya. Info at www.GlobalGiving.org and search for Manyatta.
THIS WEEK AT BLUE MEADOW FARM. Summer! — Santa Rosa Plums, Strawberries, Walla Walla Onions, Zucchini & Patty Pan Squash, First Tomatoes, Peppers & Eggplant, Lettuce, Kale & Chard, Sunflowers & Zinnias Garlic & Walnut. Blue Meadow Farm, 3301 Holmes Ranch Rd, Philo. 707-895-2071
ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK. "No matter what the fundamentalist, isolate-yourself-in-a-cabin-with-four- years-of-dried-food people may say no one, absolutely no one, will remain unscathed in the coming meltdown, whenever it occurs.
Will Greece be the straw that breaks the camels back? No one can be sure. However the one thing we can be sure of is in the long run the camel’s back will surely snap. Get out of debt, try to get in shape-both physically and mentally and find a community that you can be a part of."
THE SKUNK TRAIN is presently running daily from Willits to the midpoint Northspur, departing at 9:45am and return time is about 2:00pm. On Saturday evenings we have a 3:30pm BBQ dinner trip that goes to Northspur as well. Starting next week we will be running short trips "Pudding Creek Express" from Fort Bragg. Be sure to visit our calendar page http://skunktrain.com/calendar.html for the most up to date schedule.
WALKING AROUND the Boonville Fairgrounds during Rasta Fest last week, I was struck by how many sales booths were packed in along the main walkways. Seems to lots of us that our Fair, with fewer exhibitors and entrepreneurs every year, might consider radically lowering fees so this county's many small businesses could afford to appear at the annual County Fair. Or simply turn the whole show over to the organizational geniuses of the Sierra Music Festival and get out of the way.
SUMMER at your beloved community newspaper brings three (count 'em) interns, all three high school kids, all three very smart and helpful as they sprightly volunteer for the most tedious tasks. Whether or not our interns will profit from the experience of long summer hours cooped up in a dingy office with a pair of seriously alienated old coots and the alienated old coots who stop in all day to chat, is for them to decide. But our prob, which we've discussed, is adjusting to the presence of teenagers who, to us, might as well be Martians, in that we share zero social-psycho-cultural anchors because we seldom have any contact with persons under the age of fifty. Translation: Gotta tone down the more estranged remarks. Myself, I'm not one for patronizing the young. Ask a question, get a serious answer, and hope the answer is clear enough that it's helpful and not simply scary for a young person to hear, as in, "Things are coming apart, kid. It's going to get rough out there. Keep yourself physically strong, stay off dope, don't get into thinking you need a lot of stuff or a lot of money to be happy, learn practical skills like small-scale farming, affiliate with people who have practical skills." Etc.
CALTRANS is pretty good about keeping Highway 128 trash-free, but at the Navarro end of The Valley certain people dump their garbage out on the road faster than Caltrans can clean it up. Trash disposal rates are so high at the Boonville Dump that lots of people simply don't have the thirty to forty bucks it costs to off-load a pick-up full. We need a sliding scale for trash disposal, maybe even an occasional free day but illegal trash is an ongoing problem here, and it ought to be addressed with a view to stopping it.
AARON BECERRA-ALVAREZ of Boonville's Future Farmers of America club was recently awarded a $1000 "Built Ford Tough" scholarship to Chico State by the National Future Farmers of America organization out of Indianapolis, sponsored locally by Ukiah Ford. Selections are based on leadership, academics, FFA and other school activities, and ag-related life goals. (FFA.org) Aaron Alvarez also received a $1500 scholarship from the Farm Bureau at last month's high school graduation. Congratulations to Aaron.
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