HIGHWAY ONE north of Fort Bragg was closed Tuesday for a photo shoot for an Audi car ad. Burrito Productions of El Segundo clicked away from 1 to 9pm Tuesday south of San Juan Creek to 0.2 mile north of Hardy Creek, five miles north of Westport. On Wednesday, the photo shoot moves to the area of MacKerricher State Park from 1 to 9pm, 0.7 miles south of Ten Mile River Bridge to Camp Ten Mile Road. Traffic delays of about 10 minutes are expected, and off duty CHP officers will be responsible for traffic control.
QUOTE OF THE DAY from economist Dean Baker: “The plan is that we will get the rich folks’ deal regardless of who wins the election…. The deal that this gang … is hatching will inevitably include some amount of tax increases and also large budget cuts. At the top of the list… are cuts to Social Security and Medicare. Social Security amounts to 90% or more of the income for one-third of US seniors. For this group, the proposed cut in benefits would be a considerably larger share of their income than the higher taxes faced by someone earning $300,000 a year as a result of the repeal of the Bush tax cuts on high income earners…”
ROSEANNE BARR ANNOUNCES RUNNING MATE FOR PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN. Roseanne Barr announced yesterday that Cindy Sheehan will be her running mate in her bid for the Peace and Freedom Party’s nomination for President. Sheehan is an anti-war activist who first gained national attention for her protest camp outside then-President Bush’s Texas ranch. Barr said, “Cindy and I are the ‘Throw the Bums Out’ ticket and the ‘Ballot Access’ ticket. We want people to register in the Peace and Freedom Party so that the party can keep its ballot status in California,” Barr said. After the passage of the “Top Two primary” in 2010, alternative political parties lost one of their ways of staying on the ballot. The Peace and Freedom Party needs approximately 40,000 more registrants to maintain its ballot status beyond 2014. “We also want people to start Peace and Freedom,” added Barr.
BACK IN THE DAY — A retired couple came out of the Mosswood Café last Sunday morning and, as they were getting into their car with outtastate plates, the woman said to the man, “I feel like I just stepped out of the 1970s!”
That morning the Mosswood was full of people from the Not So Simple Living Fair. In its third year now, the Fair celebrates the back-to-the-land way of life so many people dropped out for back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And while there are a great many of back-to-the-landers in this area, this Fair attracts a great many more from surrounding areas and across the country.
The Not So Simple Living Fair began on Friday evening with an opening ceremony around a campfire. It consisted of storytelling, singing, lectures, drumming, a clown, joke telling, fire dancers. It was an informal open-mic quasi-camping arrangement and a great many in attendance participated, especially local personalities representative of the era.
It was a fine summer night and the entertainment went on until well after all the babies had fallen asleep and the older crowd — the ones from the 70s — had left to find their beds and their meds, legal and illegal.
On Saturday morning the Not So Simple Living Fair began vigorously at 10 and ran rigorously all day, ending in a concert of 70s music that lasted late into the night. The workshops were well attended and the booths were selling lots of stuff — although booths with stuff for sale wasn't quite the theme of this Fair. It was more about show and tell, featuring old stuff from the 70s, back when we all were building our first houses, planting our first vegetable patch, building our first rabbit hutch or chicken coop and, in some cases, choosing a little home industry like blacksmithing, home brewing, soap-making, spinning wool and knitting.
Some people turned these avocations into profitable businesses and continue to find markets for hand forged hardware, scented soap, microbrewed beer, organic eggs, and wool sweaters. But in the 70s it was the common understanding that a great financial disaster was imminent, and that we would find ourselves in a great depression and, in 40 years’ time, be reduced to living like the salt of the earth folks who invented these old fashioned technologies. Many people still imagine a great financial fiasco will reduce us all to subsistence farming, hunting and fishing, gathering native herbs, living in handmade huts, and cooking over an open fire. The editor of this newspaper thinks along those lines and even goes so far as to say he's looking forward to it.
My niche in that era was POAs and burros, which I didn’t see at this fair. Ponies of America are wild mustang horses; the burro is a native donkey. These animals are available from the BLM because the wool and beef industry wants the land they live on to graze sheep and cattle. My specialty in the 70s disaster preparedness days was taming and training these animals to haul necessities for hardscrabble living — firewood and water, chiefly. Raising ponies and burros is still fun and rewarding, but it is not a hobby one can afford on a newspaper reporter’s wages.
Getting set for the worst, then, is the main impetus of the Not So Simple Living Fair, and even though the world economy has been looted a half a dozen times or more since the 1970s, there still exists a strong belief that it can’t hold up much longer.
Whether you agree with this doomsday scenario or not, it is still sort of nostalgic to wander around the fair and look at all the things that are so reminiscent of an earlier day, a more innocent time. Here was hand-made furniture from tree limbs, there were homemade knives, a sailboat, a pig trap, a spinning wheel, a loom, a solar oven, some people running a blender with a bicycle, welcome mats made from old tires. I looked especially fondly on the teepee that was set up as a nap area for the kids. It was a Sioux teepee and the poles were set for a Cheyenne teepee, so it hung rather stupidly, too long in front, too short behind — like a little girl who’d gotten into her big sister’s dress and mismatched the buttonholes — but it still reminded me of happier days when I lived in a teepee during the 70s.
The workshops and lectures were well-attended. The ones that interested me were of the home improvement kind, and I paid especially close attention, and took copious notes, on how to install adobe flooring and plaster a new shower in my own rustic domicile. Also, the lectures on fruit trees and gardening seemed pertinent. It became obvious that even though the financial disasters continue to grow exponentially more colossal every year, the economy — as far as working people are concerned — is still stuck where it was back in the 1970s, and any improvements to my lifestyle will have to come from my own hands, using the cheapest materials available.
There was one thing missing at the Not So Simple Living Fair, though, and it took me all weekend to figure out what it was. Cellphones. There was not a single cellphone or iPad or laptop computer at the fair — by God, it really was like going back to the 70s! — Bruce McEwen
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