REPORTS out of the North County say lightning struck a tree near the Leggett Post Office and the resulting fire spread to the Post Office which has burned to the ground. The locally unprecedented event (so far as we know) occurred around 5:45pm Friday evening, March 1st.
TED WILLIAMS
Brian Lewis is a Volunteer Firefighter serving Mendocino County for 5 years in Leggett. On the night of March 1st, Brian was responding to a fire call after hearing the town post office was on fire after a large redwood tree had been struck by lightning. Brian was on his way to respond in the storm when his vehicle hydroplaned resulting in a rollover. He was uninjured but his only vehicle was badly damaged. Immediately after the accident he got a ride and continued to assist the volunteer fire department at the scene of the fire, helping to keep the fire and electrical lines form continuing to burn the surrounding homes and buildings.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/brian-lewis-vehicle-replacement-fund
IF FORT BRAGG held a contest for its most annoying citizen, Phil Zwerling, proprietor of the eternal Name Change Fort Bragg, would win in a landslide. The guy seems terribly attention-needy. Even negative attention will do, which he will get again, and then some, with a $3000 bribe to the Fort Bragg High School student who can write a Name Change essay that accords with Zwerling's skewed reading of Northcoast history.
AGAIN, and to simplify, as Zwerling insists, America was built on mass murder of the native peoples and 400 years of slavery and insult for black people, but on that sanguinary foundation, we've tried mightily, as government policy, to make amends, and today race relations have never been better. I said better, not perfect. Humans are tribal by nature, right?
CHANGING the name of Fort Bragg, or any other American place, erases history, and in this country of frazzled amnesiacs, erasing history also ceases to remind us of all the bad things that got US from bloody then to cell phone now. Changing Fort Bragg to, say, Zwerlingville, also defeats what seems to be Professor Zwerling's life work — deploying the worst of history to illustrate his own righteousness.
I'VE BEEN ENJOYING the recent reminiscences of back-to-the-landers. I don't think Peter Lit was a back-to-the-lander, but he built an historically significant institution with his iteration of the Caspar Inn, which he turned into a thriving, entirely implausible night spot complete with big time music acts. His story should be told.
YEARS AGO, I GOT AN INTERESTING call from Jerry Philbrick, one that coincided with a curiosity I've had myself for a long time. The late, legendary Comptche logger got right to the point. He always does.
LIKE MANY OF US, Philbrick was annoyed by the layers of government bureaucracy allegedly saving us from ourselves with all kinds of rules about how to conduct ourselves among trees and on the water. “But they're not seeing what's really happening,” he said, introducing his take on sea lions. Philbrick said the sea lions were presently eating fish at the mouths of county rivers at such a rate it was no surprise that some rivers, like the Navarro, are now virtually fish-free. “Sea lions are an endangered species,” Philbrick indignantly declared, “but they're everywhere. Fishermen used to keep 'em under control, but right now they're completely out of control. You go down to Gualala or Jenner, you can't even see the beach there's so many of them.”
HE WAS RIGHT. Sea lions are the thriving-est endangered species around and, as Philbrick pointed out, “They eat their weight in fish every day, and they finish off ten times that amount just for the heck of it. They'll bite the bellies out of female salmon for their eggs, and bite the belly out of a male because they can't tell the gender. The things weigh 1,000-1,500 pounds. Do the math.”
I DID the math as best I could, calculating that fifty sea lions at the mouth of a smallish river like the Navarro could just about finish off the entire run.
WITH the mouths of the rivers opening and closing until the first big rains blast them open for the rest of the winter, and the big rains are often late, “The salmon are waiting out there to get up stream," Philbrick said, confirming information provided by several fishermen I talked to. "The fish come in with high tides a little ways up stream with the sea lions right behind them, but they can't get any farther upstream because there isn't enough water yet. The sea lions chase them up and down stream all day, killing them by the hundreds. I'll bet we don't get one salmon in some of our streams this year.”
WHAT PARTICULARLY outraged Philbrick, and where the arguments are as plentiful as the sea lions, is where the blame is being placed for the lack of Coho salmon. “We're getting blamed — landowners, ag people, loggers — anybody who works on land with a river or stream running through it. But the sea lions are the biggest problem the salmon have.”
WITH the “endangered species” feasting on the unspawned fish that can't get upstream because it's illegal for ordinary citizens to manually open the river mouths, and the regulatory agency reps sitting placidly in their offices down in Yountville and Santa Rosa, and the environmentalists as always pointing accusatory fingers in only one direction, well, it doesn't look good for the fish. “We used to be able to go out with a little backhoe, a small tractor of some sort, and open up the river mouths for the salmon," Philbrick recalled. "Not now. The fish are dumping their eggs out in the ocean — they can only hold them so long — and the sea lions are killing them by the thousands.”
“OH YEAH, I called Fish and Game,” the disgusted Philbrick reported. “The guy says, ‘We're really happy to hear about this, Mr. Philbrick. We'll be checking it out.’ They haven't got a clue,” he snorts.
PHILBRICK said he was taking videos of the sea lion rampages through the trapped salmon. “Maybe if a bunch of us got enough pictures of what's going on someone would listen.” He didn't sound optimistic.
LOTS OF LOCALS have seen sea lions as far up the Navarro as Cape Horn, which is half-way between Dimmick State Park and the Greenwood Bridge. Some locals claim they've seen sea lions at the Greenwood Bridge. No question the beasts are out of control, and there's no question that the beasts have to be brought back under control if the salmon are going to have any chance of coming back.
MAYBE BLOB-ISM is everywhere, but in blob-heavy Mendocino County many of the people at the power levers are intellectually unable to function at an adult level, adult defined here as the basic ability to write and speak clearly and able and willing to engage with the general public in a plausible manner.
WHEN I WAS A KID, an opening phrase guaranteed to clear most rooms but, as your host, and since you're here, please hear me politely out for some following sports banalities. So, when I was a kid in the serene days before the great unraveling began, kids watched the big kids for lessons in how to play the various sports. Girls mostly didn't play sports, and when they did they were restricted to girl's rules, two dribbles and pass in basketball, for instance, on the theory that games were too strenuous for young women, not to say un-lady like. One of the major advances in our otherwise crumbling society has been the universal adoption of women's sports.
I WAS TOTALLY into sports as a child, but got zero coaching until I got to high school, and there the coaching was iffy, although football was up to the times, which were primitive by today's standards. So here come my grandchildren, a male and a female, 11 and 10, who have been playing organized baseball and basketball since they were six, with excellent coaching the whole way, and now, still not in junior high, they play both sports at a fundamentally sound skill level. Thousands of kids, of all ages, are involved in youth sports all over the Bay Area, which may do wonders in helping them elude the minefields of adolescence. Watching the grandkids’ games, I'm continually surprised at how advanced their teams are, hence Marin County's traditional strength in both sports. Football, at a couple of high schools, Marin Catholic for instance, amazes this old timer who remembers the sport most vividly from 1957. These kids would be way too much for us old timers, but we could hold our own in baseball, which hasn't changed all that much, although so many kids are bigger, faster, stronger than ever.
WOT THE HELL? Gazing inattentively at KTVU news this morning, I was startled to see among the news heds scrolled at the bottom of the screen, “Visit Mendocino County. Magic is real.” When it isn't surreal, I suppose.
THE STORY of Mendocino County seems to range from vague to false to self-serving to non-existent, but every once in a while a reference to the very old days pops up to remind us how little we know about the people who came before us.
From the Mendocino Beacon's Old Time Notes:
“November 3, 1900. Capitola, known to everyone in the country round about as ‘Old Captain,’ the oldest Indian at the rancheria near Manchester, died on Thursday of last week and was buried on Saturday at the Indian burying ground. Death was caused by extreme old age. The Deceased was well known to everyone in and about Point Arena, as he has been there as long as the oldest settler can remember. It is said he was 110 years of age at the time of his death, he himself stating that he had papers to show that he was baptized at the old Catholic Indian mission near San Jose 80 years ago, and was at that time 30 years of age.”
THE MOST ACCESSIBLE mini-history of Capitola's time I've read is Blaise Cendrars recreated life of John Sutter of Sutter's Mill and the Gold Rush called, “Gold: Being the Marvelous History of General John Augustus Sutter.” The book is sadly (and unaccountably) out of print, but I've seen it in used book stores for less than $10, and worth a hundred times that because it's enthralling front to back with the truth ringing out from every page, not to get too carried away here by a riveting little history.
HOW ACCURATE as history it is, is hard to say, but fiction is often more true to the facts than the facts are with the wrong hand on the pen. I also recommend Oakley Hall's wonderful novel, “Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades,” which is set in the San Francisco of the last part of the 19th century and the first part of this one. Hall's novel convincingly evokes both the town and the times, and contains some memorable true-to-life portraits of the Robber Barons and their robberies, too.
WHILE we're talking books, I've also recently enjoyed “The Nature of Generosity” by William Kittredge, a philosophical travelogue. I suppose it could be characterized without unfairly diminishing what is a unique attempt (in my admittedly limited experience) to tie the meaning of Kittredge's experience as an American to the ongoing assault on our topography. Lots of other people have tried to do what Kittredge does here, but this is the best try I've read.
KITTREDGE is a very good writer, and this is a very good book, which hopefully won't get lost in the annual tonnage of pure prose dreck. Susan Solnit's and Susan Schwartzenberg's “Hollow City” tracks in Solnit's strong text and Schwartzenberg's vivid photographs the evisceration of San Francisco by people with lots more money than affection for what has been until recently an affordable urban refuge for this country's talented oddballs. “I wasn't born in SF but I got here as fast as I could,” is a t-shirt inscription which nicely sums up the prevailing sentiment among lots of Frisco refugees.
HAVING ARRIVED in The City from Honolulu in 1941 as a pint-sized oddball, I've seen it change wholesale now three times, and until now, always for the better. Solnit intelligently laments what she and every other sentient person who thinks of The City as home or as a second home the destruction of the last great place in the country, but she does it systematically without a lot of romantic whining. There it goes, folks, as we meet here today, sailing out to sea beyond the Golden Gate and above the fog, the disproportionate personalities who were once snug in a proportionate city now halfway disappeared from an increasingly soul-free City playground as sterile and as stupid as the mindless monied classes who are destroying it. I also liked Ms. Solnit's book called “Wanderlust: A History of Walking,” although I thought it got a little too unreadably highbrow in parts.
ADAM GASKA, candidate for District One supervisor: "I got my high school graduate equivalency at 16. Left home, attended Mendo Community College and worked to live at 17. Started my business at 20. Formal education has its place as does real life experience. I have more of the latter." GASKA'S experience resonated with me as a liberal arts college graduate. My four years of college prepared me for exactly nothing. Oh sure, I was real good at lying down and reading a book, but that ability wasn't exactly marketable. I think now that if I simply had been handed a reading list and told to practice until I could write clearly, I would not have wasted four years of odd job hustling to get a college diploma.
I WENT straight from high school into the Marines, assuming at the time that college wasn't for me, which turned out to be true. With the exception of a couple of history classes, it was four years of intellectual torpor. I'd liked it in the Marines after boot camp, which in '57 was fifteen weeks of physical and mental torture that only very young guys would consider enduring, but I considered staying in the Marines simply for lack of work options. The Marines said that as a "tall sacka shit," as the sgt described me, I could probably get embassy duty, becoming one of those lean, mean fighting machines you see standing at attention in dress blues outside remote colonial American outposts. I implicitly trust the Adam Gaskas of the world, people who can do specifically useful work, much more than I trust liberal arts people, whom I trust not at all.
CONSIDERED on the short-term basis that obviously constitutes Sonoma County planning these days, it's probably true that water supply is presently adequate to more and more construction up and down the 101 corridor but what about the no rain years?
SOCO has been slurbing steadily north from the Marin County line to Cloverdale for 40 years now, but given the givens of the Northcoast's tenuous and finite water supply, unless the supply is magically expanded, the present draw is just about all the dying Russian River, and its partial Eel River supplier, can provide.
ON THE ISSUE of water, as on all major issues affecting the Northcoast, there is no leadership whatsoever, let alone anybody in the large-circulation media truthfully examining the false assumptions of more of everything for more and more everyones.
WHEN I HAVE a few bucks after the print bill is paid, I try to shunt them off to a handful of local high school kids who show promise but have zero advantages. If I had money for environmental causes I'd be inclined to give to groups that simply buy land to set it permanently aside, which is the only way to save things in our cash and carry society.
LIKE LOTS of lib-left people, though, I don't like the big salaries and the Democratic Party sell-out political assumptions of groups like the Save The Redwoods League and the Nature Conservancy. And even the Nature Conservancy with all its multi-bucks backing is complaining that the prices of crucial pieces of imperiled natural landscape are going up so fast that even the big endowments like them are often priced out by private developers.
I'M not a dog person. Or much of a cat person, although I prefer cats to dogs simply because cats mind their own business. The only time they become annoying is when they're hungry. Dogs are like having a four-footed human baby. They need constant attention. Still, off my one experience with an inherited dog, I understand how humans become so attached to them. But…
ONE NIGHT not long ago, before medical decrepitude had set in, I was getting in some serious aerobic pain by jogging up a steep Frisco hill. At the top, I walked around a corner and a dog jumped me. Not a real big dog, and not the kind of leaping canine assault where the beast simultaneously takes a bite, but startling all the same.
Regretting that I didn't have a club, I flailed at the thing, managing to propel its snarling form backwards when I saw that the dog was hooked to a thirty foot leash held by a medium-sized young guy with his baseball cap on backwards, a standard issue dude-bro cretin in other words.
"Why don't you shorten your leash, buddy?" I asked.
Dude-Bro had made no effort to pull his dog away from me.
"My leash? he responded, seemingly puzzled.
"Yes, your leash. It's too long. Your dog might as well be running around loose. He just attacked me. An older person might have been seriously harmed."
"An older person might have been seriously harmed?" Dude Bro echoed.
Yes, ashore, your leash is too long. Do we need a fucking translator here?
Dude Bro grinned at me, but he reeled in the dog, and walked off into the night, probably to troll for another unsuspecting pedestrian.
I'd estimate for every hour I've walked around The City, even a city the size of Santa Rosa, I've seen an average of three or four instances of bad dog owners, one more sign of civic decay, and one more tiny step in the direction of social collapse.
NO GOOD DEED goes unpunished, as the old saw has it. An older lady I know in a community not far from here felt sorry for a “homeless man about 40,” so sorry she invited him to shelter himself in the winter months in her spare bedroom. “I told him he could stay here until spring,” the Samaritan says. “He never drank, didn't seem to use drugs, he was always very polite, and he was very neat and clean. I talked to his father once on the phone, and his father was so happy that his son had at last straightened up.”
The Samaritan seemed to be still happy at the memory of the homeless man's father's long-distance happiness, as she resumed her story, me dreading the outcome since the initial revelation of her in the context of a “homeless man about 40” sharing her apartment could not have a good outcome.
The old lady continued. “His father died suddenly of a heart attack a week after I'd talked to him, but I know he died happy that his son was doing so well he'd even managed to go back to college. I have no idea what had happened to the son to cause his father to worry about him. I thought it would be impolite to ask, and the son was very quiet. I thought if he wanted me to know things about him he would have told me himself.”
The Samaritan said the homeless man was “very tall — about 6'4", very lean and strong-looking. He wore his hair in a ponytail.” I'm thinking, uh oh. Dangerous person alert, maybe even a major psycho, doubly dangerous because he's fit, silent, neat, unknown background. And he's done lots of institutional time, which is where his orderliness comes from. Fitness too, maybe. The truly dangerous often seem to be in pretty good shape, perhaps realizing that a fit psycho is a more effective psycho.
”But when I asked him to leave when the weather warmed up, he started stalking me,” the old lady said, her fear audible. “He'd knock on my door at odd hours and run away. Or he'd throw pebbles at my windows late at night. the police almost caught him one night but he ran away, and I guess he was faster than they were. They know about him, but they can't catch him. He was scaring me. I saw him on the street one day and I told him, ’Nobody's rejected you. Nobody hates you. You don't have to do this to me.’ Then, just last night, he called me up to say he was filing a complaint against me for harassing him.
"I got into my car and drove to the police station. It was almost dark. He was outside talking into that night telephone the police have outside when their office is closed. When two policemen came outside to see what was going on he started to fight them. I couldn't believe it! They got him calmed down, handcuffed him and took him inside. They told me not to worry about him, that they'd take care of it. But he was out of jail the next day, and I don't know what to do because he says he's going to get me."
He was out because the judge OR'd him, apparently ignoring the fact that the cops had had to take him into custody by force. I advised the old lady to immediately get a temporary restraining order and hope for the best. In the meantime, the police have stepped up surveillance of her place and everyone hopes for the best.
WAY BACK, when I was still young enough to be violence-prone myself, I got invited to a meeting of Coast Rotary because I was running for supervisor and they had to invite me. The “mixer” at the bar preceded an inedible meal and Rotary rituals, the whole affair painful beyond all reason. My assigned host, who I can still remember in a literal sweat out of the pure anxiety of his task, said to some guy at the bar, ”I'd like you to meet Bruce Anderson.” Without turning around the guy replied, “I don't want to meet you or Bruce Anderson,” as the other noon hour drunks laughed at his wit. I grabbed the guy by his shoulders and whirled him around on his stool and grinned into his rheumy eyes, “But I'd like to meet YOU!” and stuck out my hand. Which he shook. The next time I ran for supervisor, Coast Rotary didn't invite me to lunch, but once was enough. I bring it up to illustrate the point that violence, or the threat of it, is just about the only guarantee of civility we have left to us these days, especially in encounters with your outback Chamber of Commerce type, only two generations removed from the lynch mob. Thereafter, I mostly get hassled by the people I suppose you could call ”progressive” if you didn't know them. They sent crazy women and fey squaw men out to do their hassling, and if you even looked like you were going to put a hand on one of them they went for their cell phones for 911 and the Blue Meanies they were always complaining about. Myself, as an old school guy, I've always thought people should assume direct responsibility for their provocations whatever the consequences or shut up.
ADD LOOK-ALIKES: Lindy Peters and Steve Garvey
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] This morning – as I was thinking about getting out of bed to get ready for the day, I must’ve been still half asleep, and suddenly I had a “vision”, or an emanation from my unconscious. I saw a giant bloodshot eye staring at a giant clock. The eye was clouded over, and was not seeing that the clock was ticking down, time was running out….I’m not a psychic, but to me, this image of the giant eye represents unconscious humanity, not realizing how close to a collective disaster we are.
[2] The French Revolution happened because peasants were starving while the elite lived in luxury. That had been several previous peasant uprisings that failed, this was not a one-time thing, it was a series of revolts that got bigger and bigger until one finally worked. Respectfully, I do not see US citizens rising up en masse against their national government any time soon. They live in comfort, and aren’t going to take up arms because it costs more than it used to, to buy groceries, I think that the Texas Border Crisis could eventually escalate into a full-blown Secession Crisis, but again, I don’t see that happening soon, more as a possible threat for some point down the road.
[3] The Millennium Tower in San Francisco is leaning severely, wobbly, and ready to tumble over. Even a rumor of Seismic Activity will topple it. When that baby goes down I’ll see it as a sign, a harbinger of disaster, like the Titanic sinking two years before the start of WW1.
[4] When it happens, as it did in France, the political class will be the ones swinging from lampposts.
The reason America’s revolution was successful was because they had wealthy statesmen leading them.
We don’t have that. There are no leaders in America right now. There are no statesmen. Nobody trusts anyone or anything. A revolution in this Country scares the holy Shinto out of me. It will be France only hundreds of times more violent.
[5] A Democratic Party extinction event would be the most beneficial development that could transpire in this failing American Empire.
Second most beneficial would be a Republican Party extinction event.
What is abundantly clear is that nothing can be fixed in this nation any longer by adding on to existing political structures, but only by tearing some of them down – particularly of the National Security State. And that, of course, is why both parties so desperately wish for Donald Trump to be removed from the equation.
Trump 1.0 did not fully understand that fact, but Trump 1.1, as flawed as he is, damn sure does. Having him back in the Oval Office with vengeance on his mind is, to be sure, a risky proposition, but it’s our only hope at this point.
I, for one, would give him a bulldozer outfitted with an array of chainsaws to go at it, and hope for the best.
[6] Seeing Dr. Phil knock the women of The View back on their heels was a nice change of pace.
He talked about the harms done to children because of the covid policies and the children being trafficked to unknown parties due to the open border, and when the ladies tried to shut him down he wasn’t having any of it.
Someone who saw the exchange commented to me that she was surprised at how little concern they showed when Doctor Phil was telling them about lasting harm to very young children.
All they cared about protecting was the narrative.
[7] I saw something that to me was a rare moment of purity, which I wish to remark on.
There is a bridge between Indiana and Kentucky (I think) that goes over the Ohio River.
An unlucky truck driver went over the side of the bridge and the cab was dangling above the river.
It was the Clark Memorial Bridge, and the entire rescue operation was on live television.
I watched a video of part of the rescue afterward, and I couldn’t help thinking to myself about how this was government at its finest.
I suppose the guy in the truck could have maybe phoned his wife and asked her if she could get a few volunteers to come and get him; this person had plenty to worry about, but one thing he didn’t have to worry about was whether there were people on the way who were going to do whatever was humanly possible to get him out of that situation.
Government at its finest, purest state. Doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves, but really needed doing.
Then there was the journalism. We’ve all seen what our Fourth Estate has become.
Here we saw what it was always supposed to be. Honest reporting, to the best of their ability. Finding out who, what, when, where so we’d understand what was happening.
Television in its highest best use as well. Just plain letting us see for ourselves.
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