The last two River Views columns recounted the feud between the Frost and Coates families of Little Lake (think southern Willits and you’re there), seemingly culminating in an 1867 gun battle that left five of the Coates clan dead as well as the oldest Frost brother, Elisha. In the shootout Elisha’s brother Mart Frost gunned [...]
Last week I completed a class I never intended on taking. In fact, I have been running from that whole sector of the academic world for half my life. I even transferred to obscure colleges to circumvent certain requirements. I am not proud. I felt guilty, of course, but I figured I would never need [...]
by Todd Walton
“When we express our true nature, we are human beings. When we do not, we do not know what we are.” — Shunryu Suzuki Planting sugar snap pea seeds yesterday, I was thrilled to find the raised bed rife with earthworms, young and old. We garden in soil known hereabouts as pygmy, which left to [...]
by John Wester
Paris was not as he dreamed Rebellion was not as it seemed Witness to a ravaged whore His mother pounding at his door Ignoring her as his mind burned Poor heart dribbles at the stern * * * I’m reading The Day on Fire by James Ullman, a novel written in 1956 inspired by Arthur [...]
Slim, bespectacled Jean Jacques Brun was pouring a modernly designed 2009 Brun Avril magnum that was cork tainted — i.e. smelled of bleach. I was his first taster of the afternoon and he eyeballed my reaction to the wine, which began as one of intrigue and concluded in chalky dismay. To aid in the calm [...]
Garvanza Elementary School was white except for a handful of kids of Californio descent. No blacks could live anywhere in the Highland Park district of Los Angeles and, come to think of it, I don’t remember ever seeing any Chinese, Japanese or Pilipino kids, either, which were about the only kinds of “Asians” you’d see [...]
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” That line from John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance proves apt for tales of the Old West time and again. The shootout between feuding members of the Coates and Frost families on Little Lake’s (southern Willits) dusty main street in October, 1867 was fictionalized [...]
by Todd Walton
“Humor is just another defense against the universe.” — Mel Brooks Once upon a time, so many years ago it might have been another lifetime, I got two kittens, a boy and girl, and after much thought and research named them Boy and Girl. Boy was an orange tabby, Girl was a gray tabby, and [...]
If it bleeds it leads. Mendocino County has never been a stranger to senseless bloodletting. In the broader spectrum of history the tragic deaths of Jere Melo and Matthew Coleman last summer were merely another couple of notches in a long line of violence that goes back to Mendocino County’s first years.Subscribe now to access [...]
by Will Parrish
It took until March for a smattering of steelhead to run up flat-bottomed Gibson Creek, a watercourse that flows past the house where I live, in a fastidiously well-manicured section of West Side Ukiah (water-intensive dark-green lawns are perhaps these streets’ definitive artifact), on a descent into the Russian River. The heavy dump of rain [...]
