Marijuana was by no means the first boom crop to delight my home county of Humboldt, here in Northern California, five hours drive from San Francisco up Route 101. Leaving aside the boom of appropriating…
Posts tagged as “essays”
Boonville, California, the town which provides a home for the Anderson Valley Advertiser — the newspaper you’re reading — has a population of about one thousand people. I know three of Boonville’s citizens: Bruce Anderson,…
Sporadically deadly, choosy in its victims, the COVID-19 era is staggering into the dumpster of obsolete diseases. Luck and science will soon end it and medical historians will then go about comparing it to previous…
Claud Cockburn —father of Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick, three brilliant journalists— was the original model. In 1967 his three volumes of autobiography were consolidated and published by Penguin as I Claud... It's hard to find a copy,…
As I rambled along in my previous Floodgate stories articles, little vignettes would illuminate themselves in dusty corners of the cerebral warehouse where the larger memories were stored so many years ago. Some of them…
On October 15, 1879, four gunmen ambushed a constable's posse in the woods east of Mendocino. Two civilian members of the posse were killed and a third wounded. Evidence at the killers' camp led to…
The fascinating account of early 20th Century Mendocino Sheriff Ralph Byrnes in Zack Anderson and Deborah Silva’s history of the Herman Knaesche case brought some praise from several on-line readers, but not everyone in Mendocino…