CRUCIAL HOOPS! That would be Friday night, January 8th, early season showdown between the league's top two basketball teams, Boonville and Mendocino, tip off at 8pm.
FUNDING FOR OUTBACK post offices, and post offices generally, keeps on getting cut. The ladies who staff the Boonville and Philo post offices work doggedly right on through their long days, seldom even taking a break, as do the women (mostly) at all the County's post offices And Jan The Mail Lady — Jan Walker — drives the mail six days a week from Cloverdale to Point Arena and back again, while Rachel Olivieri, The Willits Mail Lady, does the same from Willits all the way to the Trinity County line in deepest northeast Mendocino County. Without Jan's and Rachel's jaw-dropping labor all these years, a few thousand hill muffins would have no roadside mail service. Our post office people are hugely under-appreciated. Despite working under-staffed and under onerous conditions while maintaining courteous demeanor, the Post Office is again trying to cut rural service. The busy Post Office in Mendocino is facing immediate cutbacks. Mendo people are rallying support, and one way you can support all our post offices is to buy all your stamps from them and to fill out the attached survey, emphasizing your dependence on yours. Our post offices really are community centers where we daily meet and greet people and have opportunities to chat with neighbors we otherwise seldom otherwise see. The address for the survey is: https://postalexperience.com/Pos
END OF THE YEAR KUDOS to Jim Roberts of the Madrones (Philo) for restoring the grove to the park-like beauty and tranquility of the redwood grove adjacent to Indian Creek State Park.. Roberts has also restored what I had always assumed was an unrelated cabin or mill shack up on the hill next to the Philo mill, itself being revived by the Islands of the Philo Lath Mill.
TIM MULLINS got away with building his Balo’s Barn under Class K, erecting it in plain view at the Philo end of Anderson Valley Way. As a veteran of several red tags myself, I'm envious and wonder how Mullins got away with his Class K sleight-of-hand.
SLOWEST LOT SPLIT in Mendo History: John Marks of Yorkville filed for permission to convert his two rural parcels to three so that he could build three houses, for himself and his two sons on March 14, 1997. After going through a slo-mo multi-step permit and rezone involving denials and appeals and more applications, the Board of Supervisors finally narrowly approved the simple lot split in March of 2015, 18 years after Marks' initial application.
ANDERSON VALLEY CITIZEN OF THE YEAR — Dave Evans: Navarro’s master music Impresario and unofficial mayor of the Deepend. Dave not only brings lots of work and tourists to his wonderfully welcoming Navarro Store, he's become the site of major summer performances by many famous musicians. Runner-up, Tom Cronquist, who tidies up central Boonville every morning as the tourist tide recedes.
ANYBODY'S guess, but the Floodgate has been fortified in the manner of a 19th century frontier trading post, which may or may not open as a restaurant on January 21st.
ADD SIGHTEMS, as the late great Herb Caen like to say, and I like that flock of wild geese settled in on the high school soccer field.
LIKE even better the sight of a large school of steelhead moving upstream at the Philo-Greenwood Bridge.
THE BOONVILLE PLANNERS, the semi-official name of the ad hoc group being organized to consider a water and/or sewer system for downtown Boonville, is now scheduled to meet on Tuesday, January 12 at 7pm in the Boonville Firehouse. Although technically not required because it’s an “an hoc” group, meetings will be open to the public, agendized, noticed and minutes prepared (and posted on the CSD’s website, www.avcsd.org, in accordance with basic Brown Act requirements. Up for initial consideration: explore technical options, pros and cons, meet with engineers, review administrative processes, surveys of downtown property owners, and future meetings.
I'VE GOT A '98 HONDA CIVIC with 246,000 miles on it. I call it The Silver Bullet. As a Senior Citizen I'm hoping my final collapse more or less coincides with the final collapse of my vehicle, which has only collapsed once on me so far when the water pump blew up. "See," my relatives said almost in unison, "that's why you need a cell phone and a new car."
I don't need either one, and between the two, I couldn't say which I desire less.
The time The Bullet went down with the blown water pump I just stood by the side of the road looking befuddled and pathetic and, sure enough, a young guy soon swooped in to ask me if I needed help. He offered me his cell phone which, of course, I didn't know how to use. He dialed a tow for me and wouldn't take any money for his help. That episode proved to me I emphatically did not need a cell phone, and The Bullet drove on for another 50,000 miles without a hitch. Until Sunday, when a dashboard light flashed on that said, “check engine.” And the transmission started slipping, but not so badly The Bullet couldn't get me over the hill to the Honda agency, North State Street, Norm Thurston, prop.
I think we bought The Bullet from Thurston back in 1998 when he was still on the east side of Highway 101. His agency is quite grand these days, a complex of buildings way out on North State divided by function — offices, service, parts, new and used cars. I imagined Norm sitting in a kind of skybox watching all his moving parts hustling around down below.
I was about third in a fast-moving line. People were efficiently getting their questions answered and checking their Hondas in for this and that. Since these vehicles are so perfectly engineered they seldom break down, most people were there to have their cars lubed and tuned up.
So, in walks this big guy in a Warrior's shirt. High school forward, I thought. Maybe a little JC ball. Stupid and obnoxious. The kind of guy who shouts insults at the NBA players he watches on television. “You people are pathetic,” he began, which I first thought was an unprovoked scattergun reference to me and the other two people in line. “This is the third time I've been here with these wiper blades. You gave me the wrong ones twice. Here I am on trip number three. Think you can get it right this time?” he sneered. He went on like this for a while. “We'll try, sir,” said the old man behind the counter, a man of 75 years he would tell me as we later and jointly lamented the incivility of the times. We remembered when people were mostly polite, and the people who weren't polite were simply viewed as victims of defective parenting. And, if male, got beat up a lot. Now that feral citizens are pretty much the norm, aggressive rudeness is no longer surprising. It's everywhere.
I wanted to ask the old guy at the counter why he was still working, but it was none of my business and rude besides. I see lots of my peers still enslaved to time clocks. When Mr. Stupeedo had finally stormed out — he should have been in the parts department in the first place — the old guy said to me, “You know, if you're forty years old and the biggest problem you have is the wrong size wiper blades, there's no real reason to complain and less reason to act like that.” I agreed, and thought to myself how nice it was to find a wise man in, of all places, a Honda agency in Ukiah.
A most excellent Honda agency, I must add. They had The Silver Bullet running like new in less than an hour, and everyone I encountered there was polite and friendly. They'd all been raised right, it seems.
BOONVILLE’S SEASON RAINFALL TOTAL thus far (July 1 through December 31) stands at 13.5 inches.
COLD FINISH TO THE YEAR: Boonville lows the past nine mornings: 33, 29, 29, 35, 29, 33, 30, 28, and 30. The forecast for the next week looks like rain off and on almost daily with daily totals ranging from a quarter to three quarters of an inch, heaviest on Sunday and Monday.
JUDGING BY THE SHERIFF'S LOG, every day in Mendocino County is New Year’s eve. The annual big night in the outback might put a few more drunks on the road and a few more jubilant gunshots into the frigid night air, but the volume of police calls New Year's eve was about average. Boonville's downtown spas were packed with low key revelers, not one of whom picked up an arrest. There were two explosions in midnight SoBo, but that was all we heard as 2015 staggered into the history books.
DAVID SEVERN WRITES: In Valley People of two weeks ago you mentioned that your favorite local wild place was that stretch of Rancheria Creek from Mt. View Rd. down to Philo. You said it was so wild there weren't even signs of pot gardens. I know the following is long-winded but I think it is of Valley People interest.
When young I think I could have made the trek in one day starting at Sunrise but in the few trips that I've made I never did, usually spending one night on the river. My last full walk included three of my grandkids Otto, Angus and Maria. We spent two nights and had parents moaning "What has Grandpa done with our children?" as it got closer to the end of the second day. The man that is probably the most knowledgeable person about that very inaccessible AV back country, Charlie Hiatt, had been contacted to prepare a search. I had a hand-held radio but finding just the right spot to get out was difficult. Finally and thank god, I hit a repeater on Sanel Mountain above Hopland and was able to reach Jan Wasson-Smith who was then able to get the word to Saffron et al that we would be spending an extra night. Whew!
Actually, the story I want to tell is of an earlier trip I made with Pom Pom the little fluffy, black Philo shitless dog that I inherited from my daughter Dandelion who got him from Joe King who used to live where Witching Stick is now. (In those days Roger Hecht went around telling everybody that he wasn't Joe King.) We started out in the afternoon and wandered upstream until moved to set up camp for the night.
In those days there were decent waterflows in the warm days going into summer so you mostly waded, sometimes chest high and even, in places, swimming. There were very few gravel side bars to walk along on as with current conditions. My interest was the ancient Native presence in the Valley area, so as I walked I watched for flat areas beside the stream that might make for good Native camps.
Rising early and after a couple hours we came to a barely visible, overgrown little stream coming down from the North. It seemed alluring so Pom Pom and I started working our way up this little tangled tricolor when soon the smell of death was all around - the further we went the stronger it got. Having some experience walking in the woods and stumbling on the occasional carcass I didn't think much of it. Around a bend I could see sunlight on an area that seemed to be a flat bench above the little creek, a perfect site for an old Indian Camp. I clawed my way up the steep bank and crawled out on all fours right into the middle of a large pot patch. Oh Shit! My brain went off like a firecracker fused with the smell of death. While I was brought up with the counter culture, drop-out crowd of pot growers the new breed that were starting to get a rep for defending their staked out hard work with rifles. Could that dead something not be a hapless wild animal but a person? The only time before that I have turned and scrambled so heedlessly, verging on panic back in the direction from which I've come, was years before when I came literally face to face with the cold, beady eyes and flicking red tongue of a coiled rattlesnake beside a railroad tunnel just outside of Alderpoint, Humboldt County.
It didn't take long to get back to the River, but by the time I did I believe I composed several promises (mental begging for my life) in both English and Spanish to whomever it was growing the pot that if they didn't shoot me I wouldn't come back and steal their crop or even tell anybody else where it was.
Another couple hours upstream I ran across Gary Wakeman rafting downstream with his two kids. He had done it several times he said and was surprised that I had gotten as far as I did on foot. I kept my promise and didn't even mention the marijuana patch.
An old story tells how the ancient people of Lemkolil (Boonville) ate the flesh of a monster and turned into deer. Two people only, a brother and a sister, did not eat and remained human. They lived over the mountains southwest of Boonville, along Rancheria Creek. They were wild people but did ordinary people (deer) no harm. In fact they taught the proper and respectful way to hunt and would capture anybody who hunted improperly. I like to think they are still taking care of the area.
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