Mendocino County Today: Monday 4/8/24

Warming | Westport Shack | School Day | Toddler Tragedy | Amy & Marty | Water Authority | Flight | Azucena Perez | Camellias | Palace Thoughts | Noyo Bluff | Narrows Work | Leggett Bear | Salmon Disaster | Turkey Tails | Ed Notes | You Tell Me | Weed Odyssey | California Girl | Pear Sheds | Yesterday's Catch | Ah, Clayton | Scenic Drive | Never Apologize | Eclipsing | MLB Hate | Mark Fidrych | Prison Yard | Another Swing | Toxic Food | Wrong Way | Killing Humanity | Dance | Dark Age | Talking Heads | Not Guilty | Intimate Stranger | Couple

A WARMING TREND is underway as an expansive ridge of high pressure builds into the region. Dry weather will persist while daytime high trend higher through late this week. Precipitation chances increase by Thursday ahead of a late season Pacific low. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): On the coast this Eclipse Monday I have great eclipse viewing weather with 44F under clear skies. It will be breezy again today. Clear skies are forecast this week with warming temps. Rain is forecast for Friday night into Saturday.

REMINDER that school is IN SESSION Monday! We look forward to seeing your student on time! We are excited to welcome them back!

Louise Simson, Superintendent

AV Unified School District

SARAH KENNEDY OWEN

Thank you for running the “Santa Rosa Press Democrat” article covering the trial held yesterday regarding the tragedy that was the death of a one year old in Ukiah two and a half years ago. I noticed the UDJ and Mendo Fever neither have thought it important enough (as opposed to the “big news” of a stolen Lexus, lol). Thank goodness for AVA, which retrieves Ukiah and possibly the entire county from a wasteland of informative activity. The article, however, omits certain important information, which omission tends to put the blame more on the mother of the babies than on the perpetrator of the crimes against them. The truth is the mother and perp may have been romantically involved, but the night of the incident, the mother was semi-incarcerated in a motel due to her and her two toddlers having Covid (quarantine). The perp was supposed to be truly incarcerated (in jail) himself, but had been released by a judge’s order, (!?) and sent to “rehabilitation” where he was then released to the unsuspecting public due to “having Covid”. He then appeared at the doorstep of the mother of the two children, who apparently got into a dust-up with him (no word on what that was about). She was then arrested for “domestic abuse” and the two toddlers remitted to the tender care of said felon by sheriff’s deputies, with no supervision or check on infants’ welfare. This was never widely reported but I came by it by reading the news reports (mostly in Mendo Fever) carefully.

Such is the quality of our social network here in Mendocino County. Even more could be said regarding the quality of effort that was put into trying to locate the children after they were reported missing by their mother, the day of their apparent abduction, after she was finally released from jail and realized they were no longer in the motel room or anywhere else to be found. Maybe I am saying too much, since this is an ongoing trial, but, through no fault of this publication or the Press Democrat, certain facts have failed to emerge. You may ask “what does it matter?” and I would say it matters because we need to learn from this, and better institute reform in our law enforcement and social services so that these things don’t happen. We also need to check on the judgments of the courts, as there are far too many releases with little to no supervision, which is irresponsible, to say the least, but probably more likely truly negligent. As I recall, a Grand Jury decided that these reforms, such as better oversight of our county departments, was in order, but so far it seems no such reforms have been initiated.

AMY GOODMAN, of Democracy Now! leaving the stage after talking to a packed house at SPACE Theater on Friday evening for a KZYX fundraiser. 

Marty Durlin, General Manager, Executive Director of KZYZ, is in the background.

Goodman presented stories of those who have been personally affected by the horror of the Israeli bombing of innocent civilians in Gaza since the Hamas kidnappings on October 7^th.

The death toll in Gaza now tops more than 33,000 including 14,000 children. The Biden administration has recently authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel including more than 1,800 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs which can be used to level entire city blocks. 

(Karen Rifkin)

UKIAH VALLEY WATER AUTHORITY DEBUT: New Water District Uniting Regional Water Districts Holds First Meeting

by Monica Huettl

The Ukiah Valley Water Authority, a newly formed entity resulting from the consolidation of several water districts, recently held a special meeting to kickstart its operations on April 2, 2024. Led by Chair Adam Gaska and Vice Chair Jerry Cardoza, the committee gathered to establish its structure and plans for the future, with legal guidance from Phil Williams. Proponents argue the formation of the UVWA marks a significant step towards improving water security in the region.

UVWA is the result of Millview and Redwood Valley County Water Districts consolidating with the City of Ukiah’s Water Agency. The Executive Committee is composed of two members from each district:  Douglas Crane and Juan Orozco from the City of Ukiah, Jerry Cardoza and Tim Prince from Millview, and Adam Gaska and Tom Schoeneman from Redwood Valley. 

Attorney Phil Williams provided counsel throughout the special meeting to ensure that the Committee understood the legal guidelines. Also participating were attorney David Rapport, Ukiah Director of Water Resources Sean White, Millview and Redwood Valley General Manager Jared Walker, and Kristine Lawler, Ukiah City Clerk. 

Adam Gaska was elected Committee Chair, with Jerry Cardoza Vice Chair. Sean White will be Secretary, with the decisions about Treasurer and Alternates being tabled for a future meeting. A majority of 4 out of 6 members is required for a quorum. If one of the two members of an agency is absent, the other member may vote by proxy for both.

UVWA will contract with the City of Ukiah for staffing and operating and management services. This will be effective January 1, 2025. White said, “We have already been working together. During the interim period between now and January 1, we will start shadowing each other in each direction.” Ukiah, Redwood Valley, and Millview staff will learn about each other’s operations. Walker said, “The next 6 to 9 months will be pretty intensive in terms of cross-training.”

White gave an update on the consolidation through the SAFER program, designed to bring water security to small communities. UVWA is working with water engineering consulting firm Carollo to guide the agency through the grant funding process at the Department of Water Resources’ Department of Financial Assistance. 

White said, “It appears that a lot of SAFER money has been protected,” and that this project is high priority for SAFER. There had been concerns expressed at prior Redwood Valley County Water District meetings that the grant money might expire, but for now it looks promising. There are two grants needed: the planning grant that funds design, engineering, specifications, and CEQA; and second, the construction grant. Carollo will help UVWA apply for both grants. The details on this will be discussed at the next meeting.

The web site for the UVWA has a list of frequently asked questions and information about the agency. 

The next meeting will be on May 7 at 5:00 pm.

(mendofever.com)

POPULAR ADVENTIST HEALTH HOSPITAL TECHNICIAN KILLED IN HEAD-ON CRASH

by Frank Hartzell

About four years ago, Mario Bracamontes and Azucena Perez found the dream town where they could raise their family.

Perez, a radiological technician, was hired at Adventist Health Mendocino Coast Hospital, when the pandemic had made all medical work more hectic and stressful, but not for the always cool Perez. Bracamontes went to work at Mendo Mill, where he is known by many as the friendly delivery driver.

They bought a house in the middle of the city of Fort Bragg. Perez worked long hours and the family had two children. 

First her son, Echo was born, then in February, she had their second child, daughter Viera Rose.

She proudly took her long graceful strides up and down the hospital halls with a baby bump out front and bore the questions about due dates with smiles and stories.

Perez, 32, was a favorite of patients and staff alike, always energetic, outgoing and at the same time gentle with people getting X-rays or other digital imaging work done. To keep patients from struggling with her name, she became “Lily”.

Perez was a force for positive energy. If one complained about the rain, she would say she loved it and how nice it was to live here, away from all the traffic and bustle of the crowded parts of California they had left.

The family’s dreams were crushed at 2 a.m on March 31 when they were driving on Interstate 580. Their 2023 Kia was hit head-on going west on Interstate 580 near Corral Hollow Road. The other driver, Harold Liberty, 18, of Antioch was also killed. Liberty drove onto the freeway the wrong way, entering by an exit ramp, pulling directly into the path of the oncoming family. Both cars flipped over from the head-on crash. Liberty was killed when he was thrown from his car. Perez died at the hospital. Viera Rose was rescued at the scene but died a day later at just under two months of age. Bracamontes suffered what the police report described as major injuries, while Echo had very minor injuries.

There are donation cans available at Mendo Mill as well as at other locations around town.

Perez’ best friend Amelia Smith also has begun a Go Fund Me fundraiser to benefit the surviving half of the family.

“Our hearts and prayers are with the Perez family. Azucena was a bright light in our Imaging Department,” said hospital president Judy Leach. “She always put the needs of patients ahead of everything else to ensure patient safety and high quality were coupled with compassionate communication. She was a force for good in every conversation and was a beautiful convenor and team builder among the staff. She and her beautiful family created a strong connection to our coastal community.”

“The family has formed a ‘Go Fund Me’ and we encourage anyone who loved Azucena to donate,” Leach said. The link is here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/azucena-viera

“Support services were immediately deployed for staff including chaplain support, grief counselors and space to honor and reflect a treasured member of our work family. The hospital will also be honoring Azucena’s life and the memory of her sweet family in the near future with a brief service in our garden courtyard at a time that works best for the Perez family,” said Leach.

California HIghway Patrol Sgt. John Dyer, from the Tracy office, said an investigation is underway to determine if drugs or alcohol were involved and to find out why Liberty ended up on the wrong side of the freeway. He said there were no obvious signs that Liberty had been intoxicated, such as beer cans. He said the laboratory testing could take as much as a month for the laboratory results and autopsy to come back from the San Joaquin County coroner’s office. 

The death has devastated her hospital family, especially in her digital imaging department. The hospital was hit by the death of another staff member, Nadia Amani from the pharmacy, in another crash, on Dec. 22 on Interstate 5 in the Sacramento area. Also fondly remembered, hospital staff had a memorial for Amani. The hospital’s chaplain staff also is available and involved when tragedy strikes staff. 

Said coworker Milan Spadoni, “Azucena moved here for this job, brought Mario with her and bought a home within a few months. This was going to be their forever home. She loved this cold gloomy weather. She was a beautiful person inside and out. She loved music, going to concerts, baking, delicious food and traveling. She loved and adored her family more than anything. She was a wife, mother, sister of seven brothers, daughter, daughter-in-law, aunt, and a wonderful friend. 

“She wasn’t just a coworker, she was our friend and a part of our family. She touched many lives in this small town with her care and kindness. She had a smile and laugh that could light up any room no matter the situation,” Spandoni said.

Hospital staff are in shock this week, and hope the community will support a family that came here to serve. Perez was always moving fast, with tremendous energy at the hospital. The tall woman with long black hair created smiles and lowered stress in busy emergency situations. Her even taller husband Mario is also known for his outgoing and helpful personality. “They were birds of a feather,” said Spadoni.

Many coworkers remembered Perez as one of those rare outsized personalities one meets only once in a lifetime. “Azucena, you sweet kind beautiful soul. The past several years of working with you will be cherished forever!” said coworker Breanna Small. 

“I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact I won’t be blessed with that beautiful contagious smile in the mornings to come. All the sweet memories we got to share will be held dearly within. May you rest peacefully with your baby girl Viera,” Small said. Dad and son are staying with family in Southern California. Its unknown if and when they return to their home in Fort Bragg, but co-workers from both Mendo Mill and the hospital are in touch.

Wrong-way freeway drivers don’t cause many accidents but most are terrible because of the speed involved. The death rate is 27 times higher for wrong-way freeway crashes than any other type of accident. Wrong-way collisions account for only about three percent of accidents on high-speed divided highways, but they are much more likely to result in fatalities than other types of highway crashes. Most wrong-way events on controlled-access highways are head-on collisions caused by drivers who are severely intoxicated.

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reported that more than 2,000 people were killed in wrong-way accidents on divided highways from 2015 to 2018. This averages out to 500 fatalities every year. 

After several highly publicized wrong-way freeway crashes caused deaths on California highways in that time period, especially in San Diego and Sacramento, Caltrans tried several pilot projects, including new flashers at exits to alert those entering. A triggered flasher automatically contacts the California Highway Patrol and Caltrans. One of the most effective prevention measures included in the three-year pilot program — reflectors that alert drivers they are entering the roadway in the wrong direction — was so successful at deterring wrong-way drivers that Caltrans has already installed the reflective markers on hundreds of miles of highways. There was no information on whether those have been installed on 580. Two-way reflectors show up as red when headlights of wrong-way drivers hit them. Caltrans and the CHP advise drivers who see a wrong-way driver to move over as soon as safe and call authorities as soon as possible. 

A California Public Records Act Request has been made for Liberty’s autopsy. Janny Som with San Joaquin County acknowledged the receipt of the request. A follow up report will be made.

(MendoVoice.com)

RE: THE PALACE HOTEL

A reader writes: 

What bothers me the most (but doesn't surprise me) is the lack of any discussion of the future of the downtown core of Ukiah. Here they are spending millions and millions on central streets (while ignoring the side streets which need serious work), saying nothing about the upcoming new Courthouse and abandonment of the old courthouse, and yet they seem to prefer a vacant lot to a decent multi-use rehabbed Palace Hotel building. Do they want downtown Ukiah to just wither and die, along with the Palace, but with fancy new streets? Who's making these decisions? What's the next phase, not to mention the long term?

* * *

Another reader responds:

I never kept a close eye on Ukiah until recently. What I have learned leaves a lot to be desired. For example, replacing sidewalks and putting in planters etc. as part of an expensive program to get to aging, century-old sewer and water lines makes sense in some regard. But the total disregard for the declining core of town, the vacant stores, the certain exodus in a few years when the lawyers etc. follow the courthouse out of the core, the fate of the white elephant of the old courthouse etc. seems to warrant little attention. I keep asking, and I keep getting, “Oh, we're meeting on that.” With Mo, I guess.

When an experienced investor/contractor comes knocking on the door, wouldn't you think City Hall would twist the arm of a low rent Palace owner, and tell them to get serious? Especially a guy who is a former president of the “Greater Ukiah Chamber of Commerce”? Why would the city sit back while he and a rag-tag tribal group, known for scheming for an ill-fated casino on San Francisco Bay and described by federal prosecutors back east as a prime example of “rent a tribe” skirting of banking regulations, try to foist a Palace deal on the public? I just don't effing get it.

‘NARROWS’ PROJECT ON HIGHWAY 101 NEARS NEW MILESTONE

Caltrans has announced a “traffic shift” scheduled for April 11 as work continues

by Don Frances

Work on the notorious 16-mile stretch of Highway 101 between Petaluma and Novato known as “The Narrows" is about to hit a new milestone, Caltrans announced – but first a ”traffic shift“ must take place as crews link up old and new parts of the highway.

Crews will be performing “paving and K-rail adjustment work leading to a traffic shift ... in both directions from Novato near Olive Avenue to San Antonio Road,” the agency said in a news release. Although announced for Thursday, April 11, the agency noted that work is dependent on the weather and “specific times and dates and nighttime ramp closures will be announced in the coming days.”

During the work, “southbound traffic will be realigned away from the temporary median lanes, into the newly constructed Southbound U.S. 101 road section. That section has been raised to match the median that was opened back in June 2023.” In addition, “northbound U.S. 101 traffic will be realigned into those same temporary median lanes now moving in the opposite direction, as the next phase of construction begins to reconstruct the old northbound road section.”

Caltrans describes the new lanes as part of the "final phase of a decade-long widening project in Marin and Sonoma counties meant to relieve traffic congestion on the corridor.“

A year ago, “Caltrans diverted southbound U.S. 101 traffic onto new elevated lanes spanning San Antonio Creek to just north of Atherton Avenue in Novato. This was the first major milestone for the project.”

Drivers are asked to watch for signs and messages along the 16-mile stretch as timing for the roadwork nears. California Highway Patrol officers will be present during the work.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat)

SALMON DISASTER SPEND PLAN

On April 6, 2023, the Pacific Fishery Management Council (PFMC) acted unanimously to recommend a full closure of California’s 2023 commercial and recreational ocean salmon seasons due to extremely low population estimates for Sacramento and Klamath river fall Chinook salmon. Within hours of the recommendation, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced his administration’s request for a federal fishery disaster declaration to support impacted communities.

The U. S. Secretary of Commerce approved this request on Oct. 30, 2023, which began the process of providing federal assistance to communities and businesses impacted by the disaster. On Feb. 15, 2024, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) was notified that $20,625,729 had been allocated by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to respond to the disaster. Following the announcement of fund allocation, and with support and input from industry representatives, CDFW developed the draft 2023 Salmon Disaster Spend Plan to distribute these disaster funds.

CDFW invites the public to submit comments on the draft 2023 Salmon Disaster Spend Plan. CDFW is asking for input on the proposed allocations of relief funding to fishing sectors, qualifying criteria, individual payouts and other components of the plan. Following the comment period, CDFW will finalize the plan for submission to the Department of Commerce. Comments may be provided via email through 5 p.m., April 19, 2024, at SalmonDisaster@wildlife.ca.gov.

Looking ahead to the 2024 season, the PFMC will consider the alternatives for the 2024 salmon seasons at its meeting April 5-11 in Seattle. This meeting is open to the public. Although returns of Sacramento River fall Chinook salmon are higher than last year, they are still well below historic averages. The Newsom Administration stands ready to seek additional federal fishery disaster assistance should California’s iconic salmon fisheries and fishing communities continue to be impacted into 2024.

More information about federal fishery disaster relief and ocean salmon fishing seasons is available on the CDFW website. More information about the PFMC and the public meeting on April 5-11 in Seattle is available on the PFMC website.

ED NOTES

WHEN I bought the Boonville weekly 40 years ago, I published the promise below on the front page of my first issue. Bold as it reads, bold is not how I felt. I didn't know if I could make a go of it, by which I meant sell enough papers to at least pay the print bill. Almost all the advertisers fled the first month, and the local authorities had to be hounded to send me legal ads rightfully belonging to Anderson Valley’s “newspaper of record.” The first of many ensuing libel threats appeared. Our downtown office was vandalized. My vehicles were destroyed. But the paper grew, and if it has never exactly prospered, it has survived for four decades. Why? Because right from the start, really good writers sent us really good writing, as lively a weekly collection as any publication in the country, and within a year or two the Boonville weekly was perhaps the best known small town paper in all the USofA, not that that specious fame brought in much hard currency, but it did bring in even more good writers. As all of you know, print has been swallowed by telephones, and lively prose of the type appearing here is less valued, and we're old and unable to continue the hard slog of weekly print production. I thank all of you who made this adventure the wild ride it has been, and I hope you'll stay with us in our cyber-form.

Intents and Purposes (AVA, January 4, 1984 Vol. 32, Issue #1)

This newspaper stands against wealth, privilege and all branches of local, state and federal government. These positions are subject to change should the management of the Advertiser become either wealthy or privileged. Since there isn't any wealth to speak of around here, and less privilege, government, especially local government, will be the focus of much attention. 

We will print the stories that go untold in Mendocino County because of the timidity and allegiances of the existing press.

We are neither liberal nor conservative, believing that ideology is for idiots and dictators. We are enemies of dogma and rigidity for which we will roll out the big guns. 

We will attempt to publish articles and features of interest to all segments of our diverse community, something for everyone. 

We will present lengthy features on such subjects as the likely impact of the Roederer Corporation on Anderson Valley; what it is like to be an illegal Mexican worker in Mendocino County; items of historical interest; the economics and problems of: sheep ranching; licensed children’s homes; the Mendocino County Schools operations in Anderson Valley; the local schools: interviews with local movers and shakers; and lots of gossip, the life's blood of the small community.

lf there are stories you'd like to see, let us know: If we become shrill, boring or humorless, let us know. When we’re dumb or dishonest, let us know. Better yet, sue us.

But make no mistake about it, we fully intend to do as we please, mollifying no one, least of all our advertisers and subscribers.

Bruce Anderson, Editor

THE WEED ODYSSEY

Editor,

Remember when we just put some seeds in the ground, and waited for October to come around?

In those early days the plants were always healthy, and after a few years we all felt wealthy.

From living on food stamps to thousand dollar pounds, there was never any powdery mildew around.

We were beginners with the crops we were raising, it was a moment in time, the money amazing.

Hiking for hours up and down mountains, looking for springs and places for gardens.

There were lessons to learn especially about mold, the enemy within that destroyed the gold.

Wood rats, ripoffs, and Camp claimed their share, copters invaded and the hippies got scared.

We hid plants under trees and even up in them, with loppers we carved out our camo kingdom.

After Camp came the nineties and the greenhouse years, hiding plants behind Remay calmed the fears.

Then the mites joined the mold in a symphony of terror, vacuuming webs off buds the most stressed-out era.

When predator mites failed with Pyrethrum you bombed it, then the last hippie ethics were spewed out like vomit.

Growers counted the cash as the prices were soaring, exotic beaches in Costa Rica needed exploring.

With houses and land the hippies became entangled, as the sinsemilla boomed across The Triangle.

When coke came along we were like Hollywood, snorting that sweet powder whenever we could.

The frisky hippies had sex and then crying babies, and built country schools in the booming eighties.

It was an unusual way for those kids to grow up, learning not to call the cops no matter what.

Teenagers got the green thumb and planted out Usal, and biked the crop home in backpacks every fall.

When medical was legalized the price dropped lower, every stoner from everywhere came to be a grower.

If you still wanted to continue making bank, you had to grow a hundred plants of dank.

It was harder to sell if your weed lacked aroma, the market wanted clones that put you in a coma.

Hordes of wannabe trimmers came for awhile, foreign girls on the street greeted us with smiles.

Everyone was in it for the cold hard cash, the colorful workers vanished after the crash.

The whole mess was legalized in twenty sixteen, and the enforcer John Ford showed up on the scene.

So that's the story of a very green dream, we rode it for decades starting when young and lean.

It was an utter surprise which dropped in our laps, a forty year boom which finally collapsed.

Paul Modic (hillmuffin@gmail.com)

Redway

PEAR SHEDS

by Bob Dempel (with Jillian Stemen)

One night in 1954, I was coming out of my driveway and could see a red glow in the sky to the south. As I came closer to the town of Hopland, the red glow became more intense. At the edge of town, I could see flames shooting upward. Knowing the town, I could realize that only one building was large enough to create a fire this big. My suspicions were confirmed as I reached the south part of Hopland. The fire was burning down the Molton Pear Packing Shed. The only packing shed in Hopland at that time. However, I am told at one time there were up to five.

The new Patrich-owned Molton shed was rebuilt not looking anything like I remember. It also included a scale for weighing the pear loads that came from the two owned orchards. Before being rebuilt and including scales, the loads of pears were weighed at public scales that my grandfather owned at the corner of Highway 175 and the railroad tracks. Having two scales in town , and not having the Molton business and the addition of having the addition of a second scales in town cut into my grandfather’s revenue for owning and operating his scales seasonally.

Molton had two daughters. He purchased two pear ranches so that as I remember the husbands of each daughter could raise pears for the pear shed that when packed would significantly increase the income from the pears.

The first pear ranch was just north of Hopland east of highway 101. This orchard was operated by the local Judge J.F. Pat Manning. This was a time when local Judges did not need to be attorneys. Judge Pat held local court in one room of his big white house just at the edge of town on the west side of highway 101. His primary caseload was presiding over people who received CHP speeding traffic tickets. 

You did not want to stand before judge Pat. He would give you a two-hour lecture before passing judgment. Be sure you came to court with enough money to pay the fine. If you came back a second time you would get the same lecture over again.

The second pear orchard was located on Old River Road east of the Russian River. This orchard was also operated by a son-in law B.C. (Red) McFarland who ran a very good operation. All of the pears were hauled down to the Molton packing shed in Hopland. 

I don’t remember where the fruit went the year after the fire but the shed was rebuilt complete with scales. Eventually pear packing stopped in Hopland and all the pears were sold to canneries. Today there is only one pear grower in Hopland. A changing of the times.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, April 7, 2024

RUTILIO ESCOBAR, Novato/Ukiah. DUI, reckless and wrong-way evasion, suspended license.

MICHAEL LUCAS, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

TIMOTHY MARINO, Ukiah. Vehicular manslaughter in commission of unlawful act without gross negligence.

MICHAEL MENDEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

WILLIAM OWENS, Ukiah. Parole violation. 

NICHOLAS RHOADES, Boonville. Domestic battery, damaging communications device, probation revocation.

NATHAN RILEY, Ukiah. Misdemeanor hit&run.

LUIS ROJAS-RUIZ, Petaluma. Disorderly conduct-alcohol&drugs.

VICTORIA VASQUEZ, Ukiah. DUI.

BETSY CAWN:

Ah, Clayton. Just seeing the name of that town (in the on-line Catch of the Day bookings) brought back a flood of sensory memories from the late eighties, when my meanderings into the countryside from once bucolic Livermore would find me on Morgan Territory Road’s miles of pasture sprinkled with grazing livestock, to Marsh Creek Road, Mount Diablo looming to the west and the balmy delta to the east. From Highway 4 (turn right on Morgan Territory), the afternoon could leisurely pass with a return trip via Byron or all the way to Tracy and the Altamont Pass heading home, or a charming repast at Skipolini’s Pizza and Italian Food (turn left) — still a happiness hangout, although the town of Clayton — incorporated in 1964 and boasting a population of 11,070 huddled in its 3.84 square miles — endured a major wildfire in 2013 that began in its defunct mercury mine, and a drought from 2011-2017.

In those days, spent enclosed in a pressure-cooker corporate cave in Hayward, “self care” consisted of a long dawdling drive to stops along the way where just lolling in the warmth flowing through my open windows and murmuring moos replenished my soul’s ease as I sat transfixed alongside the hushed oak woodlands, a landscape that is echoed in our outbacks where escapees from metro madness take their ease and defy society’s insistence on conformity. Long live the AVA… and all the fine folk who dare to speak their minds, whatever your political persuasion.

THE PRETTIEST COASTAL ROAD IN NORTHERN CALIFORNIA YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF

by Ashley Harrell

Unless you’re from Humboldt County or you’ve traveled extensively in California, you probably haven’t heard of Scenic Drive. A 300-mile journey north of San Francisco, this short but astounding coastal road isn’t advertised anywhere, but really, it should be famous.

The narrow, crumbling lane snakes along the dramatic California coastline, extending down from wind-whipped Trinidad to boulder-strewn Moonstone Beach. Stops include hidden, platinum-sand beaches flanked by verdant forests and rocky headlands, and unspeakably lovely viewpoints spotlighting a vast, crashing ocean, dotted with sea stacks and teeming with marine life. When the drive is done, there’s a mashed potato waffle cone waiting, and it can be loaded with various meats.

I live about 10 minutes from Scenic Drive, which means I go all the time, usually to visit one beach or another with my dog. But this week I decided to cruise the entire thing and stop at every beach and viewpoint along the way, some of which I had never experienced. To learn about the history of the road, I also stopped by the Trinidad Museum.

Located in the center of the eponymous coastal enclave, the museum is housed within an Italianate Victorian bungalow, and its five rooms feature exhibits on the village’s history. Inside, I found historic photographs of Scenic Drive from 1910 and 1940, and the museum director Patti Fleschner told me it started in the 1800s as a trail used by Native Americans and as a wagon road. The road was paved in the early 1920s, Fleschner said, and that’s when it became known as the Old Redwood Highway. Only in the 1960s did it receive its current understatement of a name. 

With great beauty often comes much trouble. And like Highway 1 in Big Sur — or the Devil’s Slide near Pacifica — Scenic Drive has always been tough to maintain. Back in 1967, when the road was transferred from Caltrans to Humboldt County, the road needed $15 million in repairs. Today, the figure is over $40 million, and there’s a concerted effort by a group called Friends of Scenic Drive to make it happen.

The road is undeniably sketchy, and plagued with cracks, potholes and minor landslides. Earlier this week it was driveable for any vehicle, but with a few safety barricades marking dangerous areas. I came up from the south, exiting Highway 101 at Westhaven Drive and quickly turning off on Scenic Drive toward Moonstone Beach.

It was an overcast, breezy day — not exactly beach weather. But this coastline is downright enthralling in moody conditions, and Moonstone Beach was popping with activity. Rockhounds were scouring the caves for sea jade on the northern end of the beach, while climbers were scaling a sandstone cliff nearby. People and their dogs were frolicking on the sandy expanse and along Little River, which empties into the ocean, and a group of kids were digging themselves into a giant sand hole.

Moonstone is arguably the spiritual heart of Humboldt County, a place to feel the pulse of its kind and crunchy community. On solstices and equinoxes, people hold sound healing ceremonies here, and spectators bundle up and sprawl across towels, vibing with the gong music. There have been weddings here, fire-dance performances and even funerals. Such events also happen at the lesser-explored beaches to the north. Basically, this coastline is where locals come to feel their feelings.

Back on Scenic Drive, I roll past towering cypress trees and spiraling ferns along the roadside. Eventually the greenery falls away and the Pacific comes back into view. Just offshore, thousands of rocky islets protrude from the churning sea, providing crucial breeding habitat for seabirds like storm petrels and pelagic cormorants. These sea stacks are part of California Coastal National Monument, a collection of islets, reefs and rocks protected along 12 nautical miles of Northern California coastline.

My next stop along Scenic Drive is Houda Point, where a majestic bluff features trails to stunning viewpoints and staircases down to two rugged beaches. The place is sometimes referred to as Camel Rock, thanks to a prominent sea stack that resembles the animal’s two distinguished humps.

During my recent visit, there were surfers in wet suits descending the stairway to the northern beach and paddling out. The tide wasn’t low enough this time, but on other days I’ve come here, a large sea cave has been accessible, and I’ve found tidal creatures like anemones and sea stars clinging to the walls. It’s the same cave that provided a backdrop for the disturbing opening scene in the 2016 film “Swiss Army Man,” which I don’t recommend watching.

I’ve never surfed here, not only because I’m not a good surfer, but also because great white sharks might be around. When I asked a surfer coming up the stairs about whether he’d seen them out there, he said no, but added that he knows five people who have been bitten by sharks in the area. My greatest fears confirmed, I headed back to the car and continued to Tepona Point, an overlook that I’d never visited.

There, I followed a short trail over a narrow promontory to a viewpoint from which the entire glorious coastline was visible in both directions. To the south, it looks back on Houda Point and Camel Rock. To the north, there’s Luffenholtz Beach, a rocky and isolated cove bisected by a small creek at this time of year. Unsurprisingly, people like to get married here.

After gazing out at the azure water, unsuccessfully scanning for migrating whales, I returned to the car and drove a minute north to reach the trail down to Luffenholtz Beach. I scrambled down the steep path and found just two other people enjoying the beach. I stood for a while, watching the rough surf crash against the large rocks that line the shore. A variety of seabirds regularly perch amongst these rocks, including storm petrels, snowy plovers and even tufted puffins. I did see one interesting bird at the top of a tall rock, and it looked a bit like a storm petrel, but I couldn’t say for sure.

About a mile up, my final stop on Scenic Drive was yet another area I had never explored — Baker Beach. The trail to this one can be tricky to find, as there’s only a small sign, and no parking lot. Since the beach isn’t visible from the road and few people hike out to the nearby viewpoints, this is apparently where the nude sunbathers gather. The day I went, though, there were no people at the beach or on any of the nearby forest trails. My only companions included spruce, Douglas fir and alder trees, though it is possible that one of the elusive mountain beavers known to inhabit the area spied on me.

This beach, and the previous two that I visited, are owned and maintained by the Trinidad Coastal Land Trust. The nonprofit also has an easement over at Moonstone, enabling the public to park and access the beach. Long before the land trust existed, this coastline was part of the Yurok Tribe’s ancestral land, which extended from Damnation Creek more than 50 miles north, down to Little River. 

As Scenic Drive winds the rest of the way to Trinidad, it crosses through Trinidad Rancheria territory, where the Cher-Ae Heights Indian Community of the Trinidad Rancheria opened Cher-Ae Heights Casino in 1988. I stop in for blackjack from time to time, but on this trip, my growling stomach had other plans. It directed me on to the Lighthouse Grill in Trinidad, which is known for savory waffle cones. They come with mashed potatoes and gravy (which can be vegetarian), and you can also add bacon, cheese and slow-cooked beef brisket.

After hitting every stop on the prettiest drive in California, I recommend doing yourself one more favor: get the works.

“It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.”

—P.G. Wodehouse

2024 TOTAL ECLIPSE LEAVES US AWESTRUCK

by Elizabeth Dias

The moment she saw the sun, something inside Julie McKelvey changed.

She was hanging from a rope on the side of Mt. Everest, four hours from the summit. The night was frozen, the slope some 60 degrees steep, the oxygen thin as she ascended to the highest point on earth. In the dark, she felt the fear and power of the mountain. She focused on exactly where to put her foot, her hand, alongside her fellow climbers.

Then, peripherally to her right, she saw an orange flash.

“I see this sunrise that I will never forget as long as I live,” she reflected. “The colors — it is just red, and then it is orange, and then it is yellow, and then the blue is coming. It was so incredibly spiritual for me, and beautiful.”

Ms. McKelvey, a mother and executive from central Pennsylvania, searched for words to capture the emotion of that moment. She felt so connected with something so much bigger than herself, something that she believed loved her. “The whole thing is very awe-ful. A-w-e,” she said, meaning full of awe.

On Monday, millions of people are hoping for their own sun-powered experience of awe. A total solar eclipse will sweep across North America, from Mazatlán up through Indiana to Newfoundland. More than 30 million people live in the path of totality, where for a few brief minutes the moon will entirely block out the sun, and darkness will swallow the light of day. A halo will glow white behind the moon, the sun’s corona.

Amid the rush to purchase eclipse glasses to protect one’s eyes and to check if clouds will disrupt the view, a deeper human experience is unfolding. The eclipse taps into a primal emotion, and evokes for many a sort of mystical moment and childlike wonder, as awareness of the celestial encompasses the earth. It is a present reminder to everyone, on the same day, that life can be magical.

For a nation pulled apart by every manner of division, the eclipse and the awe it inspires offers a moment of unity, if brief. It is a reminder of the collective experience of being alive, of the dance between spirituality and science, and the sheer astonishment at being part of the greater story of things.

“Astronomical phenomena have probably likely always been a source of awe and fear, from ever since Homo sapiens could stand upright and look at the night sky,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, a professor of astronomy at Yale University. “In these really turbulent times, these experiences of collective awe are probably extremely helpful in showing us to transcend the day-to-day noise and chaos of our lives, and of nations’ lives.”

In ancient days, communities in India believed an eclipse was a demon swallowing the sun, Ms. Natarajan said. But now an eclipse is an opportunity to pay homage to the explanatory power of science. And in modern secular society, it offers a sense of belonging, a collective moment like the religious expression of prayer and gratitude. “The question is about transcendence,” she said.

Even NASA, in its scientific, moment-by-moment breakdown of the eclipse, urges “stealing a peek at the people around you — many people have a deep emotional response when the sun goes into totality.”

Brother Guy Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory, the pope’s official astronomical institute that dates back to the Renaissance, hopes to see the eclipse from Indiana through his small Celestron binoculars.

He remembered the feeling of awe he felt returning from Antarctica and being able to see the Eta Carinae nebula for the first time. And the moment in the lab studying meteorites when he saw a pattern in the data that he had never before seen.

“The universe is elegant, it is beautiful, and it’s beautiful in a way that surprises you,” Brother Consolmagno said. “Maybe it’s a sense of what God is like.”

If you had no idea the eclipse was happening, it would be terrifying, he said. But when you can predict down to the second when it starts, when it will be at its maximum and when it will be finished, “it becomes a delight that I can be so in tune with the universe,” he said. “That, to me, crystallizes what it is to be a scientist, to be clever enough to predict, but then open to being surprised.”

The English word “awe” comes from early Scandinavian around the 12th century, meaning “fear, terror, dread,” at times mixed with reverence in relation to God or the divine, according to lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary. By the time of Shakespeare, the word was used in reference to great earthly rulers, the sense of fear mixed with reverence and wonder.

But by the 18th century, in the Age of Enlightenment, which emphasized reason and science, awe shifted from a religious context to the power and beauty of the natural world.

The semantics of the word are linked to fear, but awe is actually a positive emotion, said Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote a book on awe.

“Awe is an emotion when you encounter things you don’t understand,” he said. “Wonder follows experiences of awe because you want to explain the mystery of it.”

The sense of the transcendence in religion is not that different from what he sees as a scientist in encountering evolution. “We are probably talking about the same experience,” Mr. Keltner said.

Today, half of American adults report feelings of loneliness, and technology disconnects people from lived physicality of the human experience. Virtual realities promised an “awesome” future but have not delivered, Mr. Keltner said, and people are hungry for something more, for transcendent emotions, for a sense of loss of self.

“There is something profound about sharing our awareness of meaningful events,” he said.

Ancient Sanskrit texts like the Bhagavad Gita mention adbhuta, describingan expression of awe and wonder that is scary, said Deepak Sarma, professor of Indian religions and philosophy at Case Western Reserve University. Even though adbhuta has something fearful in it, it is beautiful.

“Maybe something that is wonderful ought to be something feared,” said Professor Sarma, who uses the pronouns they and them. The eclipse will pass right overhead the professor’s home, and they plan to go outside and invoke various Hindu prayers and Wiccan rituals, with their partner and cat.

The eclipse is egalitarian, available to everyone, and not just humans. “All sentient creatures are going to experience this, even not sentient creatures,” they said, noting that even the stones on the ground will cool when the sun disappears.

During the 2017 total eclipse, Daniel Beverly, a postdoctoral research fellow at Indiana University, measured what happened to individual sagebrush leaves when the sun went dark. The plant showed biochemical signs of stress, as photosynthesis stopped and carbon uptake slowed, he said.

This time, he has experiments set up to measure the impact on an entire forest of sugar maples, white oaks, tulip poplars and sassafras. It is a rare chance to learn how an eclipse affects not just one individual, but an entire ecosystem, Mr. Beverly said.

“We never get to make an entire forest go dark for four minutes,” he said. “It is an opportunity to connect dots we don’t normally get to.”

Awe is found not just in the skies. The eclipse will not pass over Arizona, but at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Sarah Haas, deputy chief of science and resource management for the national park, is filled with awe looking up from the Colorado River.

“You are getting a snapshot from the bottom of the earth, looking back, the colors and the sky, from the river,” she said. “There is something very connecting to the soul about that experience.”

Away from technology and cellphone service, there is a sense of being part of the story of the canyon, carved over millions of years. Ms. Haas feels it in the smell of being in the riparian zone at the river’s edge, in the sight of how the red boulders have landed over time and in the surprises of water coming up from springs.

“The river is this living entity, that is moving and adjusting over time, and you are just on the ride of that day’s experience of the river and the rocks and the rapids,” she said.

When a group leaves to travel down the river with a group, it quickly becomes self-reliant, and strangers become family, dependent on one another for survival, Ms. Haas said.

“You have to keep in mind there are things that could hurt you, or things the canyon needs to do to evolve and to grow that you have to be aware of, like flash flooding or rockfalls,” she said.

A year after she climbed Mt. Everest, Ms. McKelvey is still unpacking the emotion of the enormity of the mountain. She recently finished another summit, becoming one of few women in the world to top the highest peaks on all seven continents.

Like the experience of the eclipse’s totality, which lasts only a few minutes, her time at the summit of Everest was brief, maybe just 20 minutes, she said. Perhaps that may be part of the revelation.

“What I am realizing is, it was the process the whole time. It was never about the top of any of the mountains,” Ms. McKelvey said.

Most awe-inspiring of all was simply being present to the moment, both to the world and to those around her as they suffered together in the cold and cheered each another on, she said.

“That is where the magic is,” she said. “I’m not living in the past, I’m not living in the future … I am just here.”

* * *

ECLIPSING THE ECLIPSE

Here's a list of the exact dates and times of solar eclipses visible in what's now Los Angeles, California between the years 8 AD and 2997 AD: eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcirc/SEcircNA/LosAngelesCA2.html

The 2012 one, I was out in the parking lot with Juanita's neighbor. I put a stack of sunglasses on top of each other, but that didn't work right nor seem safe. By my car, the sun was shining through leaves of a tree, so there were hundreds of small holes in the shadow of the tree on the pavement, each one was an image of the sun with a chunk out of it, and as a breeze moved the leaves, the images moved and twinkled and made me think of the song Summer Breeze by Seals and Crofts.

You can put a hole in a piece of t-shirt cardboard and it will project the image on whatever's beneath it. Many holes, many images, but they're small. Jim Heid's binoculars idea looks good; just resist the temptation to look upward through it.

I remember being little, four or five, probably, playing in the alley between my grandparents' house and the Italian restaurant they had. I looked at the regular sun (through L.A.-gray-white sky) and tried to hold my eyes open with my fingers, thinking that it would, I dunno, /do/ something. It left a coruscating spot of blindness that lasted a few minutes and gradually went away. I tried it again but it was just too hard to do, so no more. I went to the restaurant, where the adults were all sitting in the big booth at the back of the front room, all prep done, waiting for dinner people to start coming in, and I declared, "Now I know I am from Mars, because I looked right at the sun and counted to ten and nothing happened." (I counted fast.) My mother jumped up, said, "Oh! Your poor eyes!" She wanted to wash my eyes with water. I said, "I'm fine. I'm fine. I can see fine." Everybody thought that was pretty funny but, again, I was told, "You never look at the sun. Never," in the same tone of voice that my grandfather used, to tell me, "Honey, we never throw away good food," when he found out that I'd been throwing away my bag lunch every day for two weeks in second grade so I could be the first one to the ball box for lunch recess. You got your choice of kind of ball until they were gone, and the one who got a ball got to say what game to play with it. I didn't care which game, I just wanted to be the one to decide.

The other day I was out with Juanita, in jammed traffic on 101, and I noticed that the air in Santa Rosa felt like the air in L.A. when I was little. It was clear and blue between white clouds, that wasn't the same as L.A., but it burned somewhat, felt dry and scratchy, smelled like diesel smoke and sand, and it reminded me.

Marco McClean

MARK FIDRYCH, SHOOTING STAR

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

The harsh gods of baseball have rained heavy blows upon me in recent years by stripping the name and emblem from a Cleveland team I’d been part of all my life. 

Next, Oakland’s owners are shipping the A’s to a foreign land. I’d adopt Detroit as my team but fear its plane would crash mid-season.

Instead, I’m burrowing into videos half a century old; last night I found a game from 1976, Yankees at Detroit. Tiger starter: Mark Fidrych. 

Talk about the harsh gods of baseball. He’s 23, in his first year and ninth game, and the most talked-about player in baseball. In the game’s 100-plus years there’s been no one like Mark Fidrych.

I’d never seen him play. Baseball was not on my menu in the 1970s, and by 2024 all the Fidrych rumors, legends and lies had evaporated into the mists and myths of baseball history. But in the game played 48 years ago he was so new the TV announcers called him Mark “Fyd-reek” and nine innings later no one had corrected them.

I sat transfixed, simultaneously thrilled by his presence and burdened with my decades of hindsight. I know (but in 1976 he doesn’t) that his glory will fade as sure as the setting sun, and almost as quickly. But on this night he runs a complete game chainsaw through a Yankee lineup destined for the World Series. Detroit, in last place two years in a row, will end up seventh.

Fidrych’s nickname was Big Bird, a tall, gangly, puppy-like kid with tousled hair, oversized teeth and an approach to pitching no one will ever copy. Every inning he bounced out of the dugout as if from a slingshot, sprinted to the mound, dropped to his knees and with bare hands began carefully manicuring his tiny patch of earth, a square foot of dirt at the edge of the pitching rubber. 

Peering in at the hitter, Fydrich gives spoken instructions to the baseball. He demonstrates for all the world to see, including the hitter, by stretching his right arm out and twisting it: Straight zinger, arm dipping left. A slider is on its way.

The batter, alerted to the coming pitch, freezes anyway. Strike Three! Inning over! Mark races back to the dugout and turns to shake hands with the right fielder who had moments earlier made a terrific throw.

This is his moment. By season’s end he will be 19-9, Rookie of the Year, the AL’s starting pitcher in the All Star game, runner-up in CY Young voting and maybe the happiest man on the planet.

He’s on the cover of all the magazines, but his 15 minutes of fame already are dwindling. Harsh gods of baseball, indeed. In spring training a few months later he will hurt a leg, then his arm. His career will be over. 

A DARK STAR hangs over baseball. Is there another sport in which great young players are so often cut down? The game’s history is a desolate trail of bleached bones of young heroes cut down long before their peak. Ask any fan and he’ll recite a sad list that might or might not include Herb Score, Pete Reiser, Tony Conigliaro, Joe Charboneau or Mark Fidrych. 

The same gloom hangs over baseball fiction. In Robert Coover’s ‘Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor,’ a lonely accountant invents a board game controlled by dice. A mere toss mis-aligns the stars and his beloved rookie pitcher is killed by a batted ball. J. Henry is distraught. Dare he undo what the Gods of Gambling have wrought? 

In the teen fiction ‘The Kid From Tompkinsville’ John R. Tunis’s heaven-sent young star is dealt nothing but cruel blows when he joins the Brooklyn Dodgers. Roy Tucker pitches a no-hitter in his first game, and minutes later in a postgame celebration his arm is broken.

The team manager loves Roy like a son, gets hit by a taxi and killed. Roy returns to the Dodgers as a power hitting outfielder, and on a cool gloomy night in the final game of the season, on the final page of the book the Dodgers lead 4-3, two outs, bottom of the 14th.

Long drive to right field! Tucker races back, leaps, snags the ball, crashes into the wall. Did he catch it? Drop it? Dead? Alive? He’s carried off on a stretcher. The book’s final sentence: 

“There was a clap of thunder. Rain descended on the Polo Grounds.”

Mark Fidrych was by far the most delightful, lovable ballplayer of our generation. A few years after his short career was over he was laying on his driveway working under his truck.

It collapsed, pinning him underneath. Two hours later he was found, alone, the gods of baseball having finished with him. 

ESSENTIAL BASEBALL

Editor--

Tom Hine's ‘Mark Fydrich, Shooting Star’ is the best baseball column you'll ever publish.

Some of your readers already know that and will have reread it, savored it 3, 4, 5 times. Those who missed it in their at bat get another swing, online.

Jonathan Middlebrook

Redwood Valley

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

We raise chickens, layers and meat birds. The first ones give us eggs, the second ones give us meat. Layers live for 3-5 years before they lose productivity. Meat chickens are a cross breed (“Cornish-cross”) and you only have to raise them 8-10 weeks before they are butcher weight. They get huge, quick. Normally you can order them from a farm supply store as “vaccinated” or “unvaccinated.” They traditionally use an aerosol spray to prevent lung infections. We’ve always gone with unvaccinated chicks and non-medicated feed. Now they are only available vaccinated and they are now vaccinated with mRNA “vaccine” — which isn’t even really a vaccine. Isn’t that crazy!

So we are following our supplier's advice and switching from Cornish-cross to broilers. Our food supply is increasingly and intentionally toxic.

IN FLORIDA

by Michael Hoffman

We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department, perhaps the humanities as a whole. When I started at the University of Florida, thirty years ago, the department offered sometimes thin but fairly uninterrupted coverage from the Middle Ages to modern times. Or even Modern Times. There were sidelines in film studies, gender studies, children’s literature. Some other things. There was a faculty of eighty. Now it is a little under half that. All idea of coverage has been binned. We have someone who teaches the 18th century. An impresario who sometimes does Shakespeare. One or two that teach poetry. We have been hollowed out. We have certain specialisations, called ‘concentrations’. These enable us, without directly competing with them, to draw students away from other universities. We follow the trend. We chase the customer.

And ‘we’, the tail or the soul, not in any spiritual sense, but as an appendage – an ornament, if you want to be nice about it – ‘we’ are two fiction writers and three poets. Creative writing has been taught at Florida since the early times, the 1940s, when it started in Iowa and then quickly spread pretty well everywhere. An MFA programme has existed here since the 1990s. In America, if you want to do something, you have to organise it, and organise it defensively. Nothing but an institution will survive the chill winds of practicality, which usually means dollar signs. Informality doesn’t stand a chance.

Fifteen or twenty years ago, we were sitting pretty. The programme had just shifted from two to three years; the postgraduate intake was six poets and six fictionistas; there were enough English majors and undergraduate writing classes to keep our MFAs employed and interested (because in this system, the graduates teach the undergraduates); their stipends were not lavish but competitive in an inexpensive town, and the thing chugged and hummed. Or wagged and beat. Our MFAs had time to write and teach; many went on to publish and find jobs and win prizes; we, the faculty – while basically, as I well understood, being paid not to write – taught graduate and undergraduate classes, but were nevertheless able to write some; we competed with the best schools for the limited pool of interesting applicants; our undergraduates left having learned something of reading and writing. It felt like a virtuous circle, the parts interacting with the other parts to the benefit of all.

Anything that happened could only shake our little idyll. Though then again, we were so obscure, so inoffensive, so small, so efficient, what could possibly happen? We began with a measure of autonomy. There was the always touching display of people who are good at something else (Pope, as it might be, or Dickens, or Ford Madox Ford) taking turns at being briefly administrators. (Unlike our vaunting administrators, who so far as I can tell are good at absolutely nothing.) It was like playing house. There were little bits of money to subsidise travel, to invite guest speakers. And the whole thing was devolved government, grass-roots democracy. We ran our little show. We knew what we needed and were sometimes able to get it. We put people forward for this or that. Did our committee work, chose our intake, replaced faculty who left.

Things got bureaucratic and fiscalised. There was more jargon, more acronyms, more metrics. Fatuous measurements were introduced, to express in hopelessly inadequate numbers what we were endeavouring to do with words. Pepsi got a monopoly on drinks machines. Students were discouraged from using their offices on campus. We had to account for our own presence there. In our brutalist 1970s building – designed, it was said, to be indefensible and sit-in-proof – there were no longer any chance conversations at the copy machine or the water-cooler. It’s always midnight now, all the time.

Managerial layers that once protected us from administrative curiosity – to put it no higher; others might speak of mischief or idiocy – were stripped away. People who once might have been expected to stand in the way seemed rather to turn on us; the downward transmission of power became the rule. Our laborious and trivial autonomy became merely burdensome, a foolish pretence, a charade. Think of replacing the threads in a mobile with metal coat-hangers. There is no give, no movement, no flexibility, no sway, no grace; only a tautening; a jerky, creaky, clanking, humourless expression of will over long distances, with little to choose between push and pull.

The pace of change accelerated in 2019 when Ron DeSantis became governor of Florida, and again last year when the boyish Nebraska senator Ben Sasse pulled the plug on his (I thought, perfectly viable) political career to become the president of our university. He quit as though in a hurry, in the middle of a six-year term. For some reason, he was the only candidate for a million-dollar job; faculty and students voted against him, not that we had a vote; the trustees of the state university system – political appointees, fundraisers and donors – enthusiastically installed him. He fits the 18th-century concept of a ‘placeman’ more closely than anyone I can think of.

Since February 2023 he has been here among us, but not with us. ‘Missing’ posters have been put up with his face on them. A cabal of Nebraskans – I thought of Mandelstam’s line from ‘The Stalin Epigram’, ‘big friends from home’ – protects him. The contrast between him and his kindly, ineffectual predecessor, Kent Fuchs, who spent weeks saying public goodbyes to all comers – he had a desk put out for him under the trees in front of the library – is absolute. Sasse does not use the office set aside for him, nor does he speak to any of the locals, even when they are his employees and colleagues. I imagine him with a Nebraskan chef, a Nebraskan valet, a Nebraskan taster. His homeschooled children are – oh, somewhere.

It seems there is only one model for today’s ‘man of action’, and that is Shock and Awe. Overwhelming force deployed suddenly and overwhelmingly. A theatrical performance with no audience as such, only a houseful of victims. The lions eat the circus and then tweet about it. Ask no questions, tell only lies, and double down, triple down, quadruple down. The ineffably stupid ‘move fast and break things’ that has so much to answer for in our time. Our new ‘Innovation Hub’ has an asinine three-word slogan: ‘Grow Ignite Disrupt’. It would make just as much sense to have ‘Paper Scissors Stone’ for a motto. And rather more to have ‘Smash Grab Run’.

Sasse wanted, it was claimed, to spend a few months to take ‘soundings’ but he’s in fact as unresponsive as Ulysses lashed to his mast. (Nor does he answer letters, not even when personally addressed, courteously written and submitted in triplicate via US Mail, campus mail and email.) More than $4 million is being spent on an analysis of the institution by McKinsey the management consultants. (It so happens that management consultancy is Sasse’s business background.)

A New York Times photographer, Mark Peterson, managed to snap him lurking in or issuing from an unidentified building on campus in running kit in the very early hours. It is one of the most haunting photographs I have even seen. The phrase ‘aggressively furtive’ came to mind. An accompanying piece by Michael Sokolove, who had to travel two hundred miles into the Florida Panhandle for the privilege of catching a rare, semi-secret public appearance from our president, managed to quote a chunder of management speak (‘techno-futurist patois’ is Sokolove’s phrase), words spoken fast, distressingly ugly, and making no obvious sense. All of which is exactly the point. You flood the zone with shit, as Steve Bannon nobly explained.

While we wait for the former senator’s moves – and he for McKinsey’s expensive and predictable wisdom (what price ‘Grow Ignite Disrupt’?) – his minions, our bosses, are displaying their anticipatory obedience. ‘One whistles, another meows, a third snivels,’ Mandelstam writes, in that poem again, in the translation by W.S. Merwin and Clarence Brown. There is nothing like the experience of working for people who hate you – or maybe they don’t hate you, they just have a funny way of showing their appreciation. Or perhaps their unawareness that you exist.

We are forever being told there is no demand for our product, that the number of undergraduate English majors is on the skids, though a 2 per cent decline from a previous year hardly seems dramatic; true, the graduate applications are volatile and contingent on the general economy, but there are always dozens in poetry, and scores in fiction. There was said to be a hole in the college budget. It was stressed that we weren’t being asked to make up for it; it sure felt like we were. Menacingly, we are told that no university houses 199 academic units, as we do. This number – our glory? – is by some opaque reckoning too big. A new humanities institute, the Hamilton Center, has sprung up with apparently limitless separate funding, and is everyone’s blue-eyed boy. There is endless noise about AI.

Meanwhile, tenure is being nibbled away at. We are looking at a ‘post-tenure review’. We are offered new hires, but with strange strings attached. Staff are taken away from us; a need is identified, and a vacancy confirmed by someone in HR; but they are not replaced. The workload of those remaining goes up by 20 or 30 per cent. We are told we have too much leave, and that we are not sufficiently productive in our research. No sense of a contradiction there. Nor when the president tells us, indirectly of course, that we are a rocket ship of a university, and that we need to move very fast and make lots of changes. At least, with his ‘break things’, Mark Zuckerberg was a little honest.

Covid provides cover for anything and everything. We taught remotely then; so why not now? Our reduced complement of MFAs are teaching workshop classes of over twenty, while we for now share our wisdom with four or five of them; out of pity, the third years agree to attend, even though they are under no obligation to do so. If we had a bigger intake, we could have proper ten or twelve-strong workshops, and the MFAs would have manageable classes to teach. What happened to a humane arithmetic? There is a push for more ‘student contact hours’ – bigger classes – that ignores our delicate workshop model, but also such things as the health and safety rules of laboratories. For some reason it is proposed that all classes in anything be the same size. Nineteen is a number. Twenty-five is another. Procrustes may be forced to rethink there.

We are frightened by the relaxing of gun laws, by the banning of books, the impugning of subjects, the politicisation and subsequent termination of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), the stacking of boards, the close supervision of gendered bathrooms, the dissemination of all our materials. (Governor DeSantis’s flightpaths over Iowa, New Hampshire and California remain a closely guarded secret.) There are new laws that warn us we may be recorded by students in class, though only for the purposes of bringing a suit against us for political indoctrination.

The Wall Street Journal recently put us at number one on a list of American public universities, but we took it rather as the impassioned if unnecessary expression of a political point of view than any accurate or considered reflection of anything. This happens when you are ruled by people who have neither understanding nor respect for what you do, for whom you are reduced to ein Politikum, a plaything, a way of sticking it to the libs. In a recent survey of the faculty, over 80 per cent of us would not recommend going to Florida to study; frankly, I’m surprised it’s not 100.

From early on in DeSantis’s governorship, it was apparent that here was someone who took extreme pleasure in malice and cruelty. In him, the political is personal. Which is to say he has no politics beyond the reach of his shadow, neither care nor imagination nor interest. Here was someone who had witnessed and approved force-feeding at Guantánamo. He told asylum seekers there was something waiting for them, and flew them to the middle of nowhere (he alone had the pleasure of knowing it was the playground of the enemy, Martha’s Vineyard). He took funds away from schools that, against his wishes, kept mask regulations in force. He sacked a public prosecutor in Tampa who said he wouldn’t criminalise abortion, and another in Orange County who refused to turn a blind eye to police crimes. He fired a data scientist who collated coronavirus statistics. He seems to have special antennae attuned to the category ‘small opposition’. And these individuals – librarians! – he goes after with his thunderbolts, with the astonishing array of state power. Not bad for a party that claims to want to drown it in a bathtub.

His special animadversion is education: teachers, school libraries, syllabuses, test preparation. Dreary enough, ordinarily, to kit out the most colourless political career imaginable, but because invested by DeSantis with a kind of berserker fury, and because the annihilation of his tiny targets implies a vast inversion, an extraordinary attention to detail and limitless reserves of force, terrifying. How does he know? What does he care? Why does he bother? It all makes for a formidable politics of intimidation. This kind of thing feels like it’s only ever been deployed historically in spy-riddled, denunciatory or panoptical societies, but the new technology makes it possible; first the discovery of the hold-out, the lone exception, and then the magnification of the consequent annihilation.

In Sarasota, in South Florida, DeSantis took it upon himself to take a small liberal arts college, New College of Florida – six hundred students, founded by Unitarians in 1960 – and give it a conservative overhaul. He named Richard Corcoran, former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, president, appointed a bunch of mostly out-of-state ideologues to the board, and settled back to watch the damage. It’s the small target that really gives bang for the buck. The faculty quit, the students were terrorised, the press was agog, intellectual standards plummeted, jocks enrolled and sports teams were started up. (Previously, there had been no sport other than sailing in Sarasota Bay.)

It all looks suspiciously like a dry run for the fifty-times-bigger UF. It’s strange to think of the mortality of institutions. Things that are the product of many lifetimes ending in one’s own. How easily and cavalierly the works of decades and centuries are demolished. ‘The real end of the world is the destruction of the spirit,’ Karl Kraus wrote; ‘the other kind depends on the insignificant attempt to see whether after such a destruction the world can go on.’ Already Sasse’s Nebraskans have seen off the advanced degree in Latin. And now onto the soft subjects among the other 198. These almost unnatural, intricate, baroque human formations now feel like road-kill, or water-kill: like the manatees, overwintering on supermarket lettuce because the seagrass has been killed off by algal blooms gorged on nitrates, huddling in the warm waste water of the Crystal River power plant, to be scabbed and traumatised by passing airboats. Florida, not Austria, is Kraus’s crucible for the end of the world, the Versuchsstation des Weltuntergangs: the state where education, like so much else, increasingly goes to die.

ON LINE COMMENTS 

Nicole Harvey:

After closely following the debacle at New College, I had been hoping to hear from Hoffman on the endangerment of scholarship in Florida.

Having been witness to program dissolution at a university where I was a teaching assistant, his report was chilling. While my own (allegedly) liberal school was motivated toward cuts for purely financial reasons, it's hard not to read into the situation when trustees are often a who's who of the managerial class. 

That school bureaucracy is now touched by ultra-conservative dogma is the natural progression for Florida: it was just last month that Viktor Orbán visited Mar-A-Lago, and a failed presidential run for DeSantis means he has more time to double down on perfecting an ideological state.

* * *

‘Harriet’:

Is it the desire of all institutions to destroy? Isn't government, by its very nature, designed to oppress the will of its subjects? It appears to me that only a complete psychotic would run for office. The best and the brightest have departed the world of governance. A dark age is hovering over the West; the United States will provide the match that will strike the flint.

TALKING HEADS OF PROPAGANDA

The composition of people on television is increasingly limited to people who’ve either droned somebody to death or ripped them off in a mortgage scam.

— Matt Taibbi

THE INTIMATE STRANGER

by Olivia Dugan (December 2000)

His face? A red mosaic. Blood and glass. A work of art that glittered in someone’s headlights. Whose headlights? Which car? Not the half-ton Ford pick up with the recently inflated driver’s-side airbag. Certainly not the blue convertible Porsche driven into and underneath the pick up. 

Someone had turned on a set of headlights so we could see. Someone else directed the few passing cars around the lane we occupied. Others stood still and stared or wept or paced. I didn’t see any of them. I dreamed them. Their voices were echoes. They jabbed at my consciousness from the noisy and frantic world of the living. So where was I? I was with Yoshihiko Shimada, 39 years old. A man who was not breathing, but gasping. Occasionally.

I came upon the accident on Skyline Boulevard, in the hills of Palo Alto, seconds after the impact. It was 10:30 on a Saturday night, December 16. My friend and I were heading home from a Christmas party, and pulled over when we saw the wreckage. Michael Schmidlin, 40, of Santa Cruz had climbed out of his smashed pick-up and stood with wide eyes. He wasn’t injured. He held a cell phone in one hand and waved for help with the other. 

Two young men who had stopped just before I arrived stood at the driver’s side door of the Porsche. 

“Are you OK? Can you hear me?” one man said. Then, “There’s no pulse.”

I stepped around the flung-open passenger-side door and saw Shimada leaning toward me, still buckled into his seat. I placed my fingers on his warm neck, to the left of his adam’s apple. The soft rhythm I take for granted was missing from this man. I kept my hand there and looked down at him.

Then he gasped. I wouldn’t call it breathing now, but I did that night because I was overcome with calm, but senseless, optimism.

“He’s breathing,” I said. “He’s trying to breathe. He wants to breathe.”

I should have known by the gurgling sound that his lungs were just offering a farewell show. 

The young man across from me pulled a pocketknife from his pants and cut away the seat belt. He placed the blade at the collar of the wool sweater Shimada had on, then sliced through the fabric as I helped pull it apart. The sweater was gritty with broken glass.

I asked what about neck injuries? Back injuries. The young man said, considering the injured man had no pulse and no breath, neck injuries were the last of our worries. He was right.

Schmidlin couldn’t reach 9-1-1. Up in the hills, cellular range was limited. My friend got back in the car and raced to the nearby Fogarty Winery to use the phone.

I gathered two handfuls of wool at the still man’s shoulders, and pulled. I pulled him across the center console and passenger seat, onto the road. His arms lifted and his head fell back. 

His legs slapped against the pavement. Compound fractures had pushed red bones through his skin and dark-colored slacks. He looked like a man in abstract. The rules for the way he inhabited his body, and the way his body inhabited the world, were suddenly changed. His bones broke rules in their haphazard angles. His blood escaped the traditional boundaries of the vein, the artery. My perception of how to encounter a body and its soul stretched, and I wasn’t disgusted or afraid. 

The young man with the pocketknife helped me drag Shimada away from the Porsche. I climbed onto his body — straddled his belly — and opened his light blue button-up shirt. The buttons flew away like tiny white moths. The commotion around me was muffled — barely audible. I saw his smooth, bare, brown chest. I found his sternum, then measured two fingers’ width above it as I had learned in a lifeguard training class ten years earlier. I placed my two hands, palms down, on his chest and pressed in deep between breaking ribs and crackling cartilage.

Schmidlin finally got through. He asked me, how is this man? He had dispatch on the line. I said, “There’s no pulse, but he’s trying to breathe,” I said, “He still has a chance. He’s still trying to breathe. Tell them to hurry.” It was another ten minutes or so before paramedics zig-zagged their ambulances into the hills and up to where we were, and the air-lift helicopter thwat-thwatted overhead.

But I didn’t stop. I pushed into Shimada’s chest and touched his heart. I leaned over him and looked him in the face. “Don’t get blood in your hair,” someone said to me.

The gasping sounds continued and I decided to clear his airway.

I called to my friend, who had returned from the winery. I said to go find the pair of leather gloves in my bag. I put those gloves on and pushed two fingers past clenched teeth into Shimada’s throat. I swept his tongue away and turned his head to the side so any fluid could drain without choking him.

Then, each time I pressed into his chest, thick blood spilled from his nose and mouth like paint. I realized he was bleeding internally and that the gasping noises had changed, from the body attempting to breathe to the body reacting to the CPR.

I tried to look into his eyes but he couldn’t see. I tried to listen to the random gasps that his chest pushed out. They were nothing but gibberish. His left ear, though, was untouched. No cuts and no blood. Perfect and vulnerable flesh. A tunnel to the life left in him. So I leaned over his body and put my mouth against his ear and I whispered to him. I said, “Breathe. Please breathe. Don’t be scared. Just come back.” 

I whispered, then sat up and spoke to him out loud. Back and forth. I never stopped talking to him. I spoke to him because I knew he was still around. I spoke to him because, during those minutes, I loved him completely. I spoke to him because I felt like he and I were the only two people alive. Alive. What a funny word to use. 

And I was drawn in, without realizing it, to a surreal and comforting place. Saying good-bye. And when the paramedics arrived and I stood up and walked away to join the onlookers, it was like emerging from deep water. The noises and people were a shock. Coming back to the night and the highway and the ambulance lights seemed so cold, and I wondered why we try so hard to live.

The paramedics worked on Shimada for another 15 or 20 minutes before they pronounced him dead. They unfolded a yellow body bag and draped it over him. Shimada’s outstretched arm was still exposed. 

I didn’t cry. I felt OK. My hands and arms were covered in blood and my shoulders ached. I felt sufficiently sad at having lost Mr. Shimada, a stranger who I loved inexplicably and mourned. But I didn’t break down mentally. Instead the reaction was physical. That night on the highway my legs started to shake and soon I was unable to stand. The following day my stomach burned and I felt exhausted. The third day I came down with a cold, though I had just recovered from the flu a month earlier. I started sleeping for a few extra hours every night. 

I learned later that Yoshihiko Shimada was married with a three-year-old daughter. He was the chief executive of a high-tech company called Hyac Corp. in Fremont, and he lived with his family in Sunnyvale. 

The California Highway Patrol speculated that Shimada was driving at a “very high rate of speed” when his new Porsche — still sporting temporary license plates — drifted onto the shoulder. He probably overcorrected, then shot like a bullet into the oncoming lane at a 45-degree angle, striking the unsuspecting Schmidlin before either of them knew what was happening.

And before I knew what was happening I had been whispering into a dead man’s ear. I wondered later about the source of my optimism and sudden love for the stranger who died in that accident. I wondered if I had unconsciously projected my own instinctive will to live onto him, or if he had somehow communicated to me his desire to survive. 

Shimada and I did not engage in intellectual debate regarding the pros and cons of dying in a car accident during the holidays. 

But his body wanted to live. I knew that because my hands were on him and I could feel his lungs work for breath. And the person he had been in that body wanted to keep living in that body. I knew that because I whispered to him and something came back. Like two tin cans tied to the ends of a stretched string. A tunnel to the life left in him. A two-way tunnel.

I couldn’t save him, though. So I stepped into his death with him and whispered a soft and spontaneous bon voyage. The life left in him was outside of him then. It didn’t disappear. It just grew more and more obscure in terms of my conscious perception. 

To know a person based on the most crucial foundation of his human existence — to love him so suddenly and strongly that it drains my body for weeks, without ever having met under traditional circumstances, is certainly the most intense form of intimacy I have ever experienced. Despite the sadness I usually associate with death, and despite what many would call a gruesome end, this man’s last moments here were beautiful.

Though his family’s loss must be awful, Yoshihiko Shimada’s death was not.