A CELEBRATION of the life of Carolyn Eigenman will be held Saturday, May 18th at the little red school house in Boonville from 1-4pm.
THE FLOODGATE BUILDING in Philo will re-open as La Mexicana Market #2 on April 15 serving the Deepend of the Valley. Proprietress Rosa Portillo Valle already operates the popular La Mexicana Market #1 in Fort Bragg. #2 in Philo will offer similar fare, primarily Mexican themed (but not exclusively) groceries, produce and associated household items. No cooking or deli on premises.
VAL MUCHOWSKI, white courtesy telephone, please. We are hearing that you are hospitalized with a broken hip sustained when you fell recently. Let us all know how you are doing.
RUSS EMAL: The Ron Tinkler Track
In the late 80s early 90s Anderson Valley had nothing that resembled a track. But what we did have was a man named Ron Tinkler. Ron had children now entering high school and he realized that there was no track nor track team. Ron himself was a past track star competing at the state of California level as well as a fullback in college playing with Daryl LaMonica. Ron decided a track must be built.
The existing oval was built with Ron’s guidance and the support of many valley residence that Ron gathered together to create what is now thought to be the track. It was successfully used for a number of years and Ron was the first Anderson Valley high school track coach.
It would be my suggestion, I feel a very appropriate one, to name our new track, the Ron Tinkler Track and Field.
POST-OP REPORT: It's been a slog since my total laryngectomy three weeks ago, but I'm finally able to walk outside for twenty to thirty minutes at a time and even do a few push-ups. The major hassle for my martyred wife is the frequent suctioning required to keep my new orifice clear of phlegm, great stalactites of cascading phlegm rerouted to the new hole in my throat from my former throat. Since I now breathe through my new orifice, the burdensome vacuuming is crucial to keep me breathing. We have a little suctioning machine attached to which is a plastic tube martyred wife gingerly places in the new orifice to suck up the mucous stalactites. It's a brief process but one that reoccurs 6-8 times a day, and round the clock. Got radiation coming up plus voice lessons. I estimate I'm three months away from more or less normal functioning. My energy level remains in sapped mode.
GOT one of those “365 Ways to Live to 100” calendars for Christmas. Every day I get either an errant piece of advice therefrom. Sunday's instruction was, “If you must boil fresh vegetables, don't throw the water away. Cool it and drink it as a vitamin tonic.” I'll stick with V-8, thank you.
On Monday I was advised to go for an “evening walk because an evening walk can prevent prostate cancer, but you need to walk at least forty miles a week.”
As I understand this particular affliction, it and most others are prevented by sticking pretty much to unprocessed foods and regular exercise. Besides which, fear of a stranger exploring one's rectum tends to keep one at the salad bar.
Tuesday, my calendar advised, “Gerontologists believe that people who really engage in life usually live longer than others. So get out there and live. It's not just more fun, it's actually keeping you alive.” Or dead, depending on the nature of your engagement and the people you're engaging with, but don't most of us know that life hangs by a thread and is an arbitrary business no matter how you live or with whom you live?
Having just experienced two surgeries advertised as life-saving, I'm trying to re-gain at least a semblance of my prior energy. It's slow going. I get winded about 30 minutes into my morning walk. When I paused this morning in mid-shuffle, a nice lady asked me if I was “ok.”
Since I can't talk I fumbled for my notepad to reply, Thank you but I'm fine. Recovering from a throat re-build. “Oh,” the nice lady replied, “but I was talking to my dog. Good luck to you.”
Which is what I get for assuming it's all about me, me, me.
My flat, lengthy street is heavy with walkers, and more effete dogs than I thought possible for a relatively small population heavy on effete people.
And I like dogs, kinda, thinking of my old dog, Rosco, the gift of a relative. Rosco, who came in at around 60 pounds, wouldn't fit in here. Too aggressive, too wild. Half Pit who looked like a fully, he'd flunked obedience school. Twice. And he was a terrible racist, lunging at dark-skinned passersby who must have assumed that I was some sort of Klan-symp for owning a dog like Rosco.
Outrageous as he could be, Rosco was good company, downright fun when he had room to roam like he did in Boonville. But he was unmanageable in Frisco and its suburbs. I think now that I could have been a better master, but I never had the time to be other than a low maintenance owner. Rosco's lack of social skills was totally my fault.
LOCAL FIRE OFFICIALS are worried about the impact of some extensive new regs that Federal OSHA (Occupational Safety & Health Administration) is proposing on small, local volunteer fire and ambulance departments in an attempt to improve the safety and work conditions of firefighters, ambulance staffers and other first responders (like hazmat crews and search & rescue operations). A recent memo from Elk Fire Department board member Ben Macmillan to his fellow fire officials notes that the “proposed new OSHA requirements for Emergency Response agencies … include significant changes to existing regulations affecting Fire and EMS Agencies, especially small and all volunteer departments. While the intent certainly is good, carrying out the proposed changes may be a wall too high to climb. Significant costs are certainly involved, but the additional hours required of volunteers to satisfy the requirements for training and certifications may exceed what's possible.” And that’s just one example on one category of affected organizations. One would hope that waivers and exemptions would be included in OSHA’s regs as they move forward. Otherwise, they could lead to the decimation of already stretched-thin departments limited resources, both economically and for recruitment and staffing.
(Mark Scaramella)
THE DEBATE about how to manage the mouth of the Navarro hasn't changed much over the years. I've unearthed one from 25 years ago featuring the colorful, plain-talking Comptche logger, the late Jerry Philbrick, who always got right to the point, which was only one reason local bureaucrats tried to avoid him. The other reason natural world managers scuttled off in the opposite direction when Philbrick appeared was because much of what he had to say was at least worth discussing.
People who work outside tend to know more about the natural world than people who work indoors.
"I GOT this letter the other day," Philbrick began, "from a woman named Cynthia Rodham Bloom or something like that. She said she wanted to go out and look at streams. I called her back and left a message for her that she was missing the real problems with the county's streams. She called me back. She's fun to talk to but dumb as a box of rocks."
WHICH is where indoor people say to themselves, "I think we've got trouble." Out loud they say, "We don't allow personal attacks or any other forms of negativity in our office, Mr. Philbrick, and you've already caused 25 of us extreme distress.
MS. BLOOM may or may not be dumb, but pretending to be dumb is a smart career move if one is headed up the bureaucratic ladder. But more and more often the regulatory agencies are putting "chicks up front," as the demonstration tactic of placing the most attractive and vulnerable demonstrators in the front ranks of 60's was called. The theory was that the cops were less likely to beat on women than men. Which was another theory undone by reality.
PUTTING A YOUNG WOMAN up front to explain Fish and Game's shifting party line on how to put fish back in local streams seems pretty cynical to me, but government is a pretty cynical business these days.
Look at it from Ms. Bloom's perspective: she's got layers of bosses — all men — all far from Mendocino County who'd toss her over the side in a quick minute if it was to their advantage. The big boys in Sacramento go with the political flow, even when Mendocino County's rivers have ceased flowing, and the fish are backed up at the mouth of the Navarro like commuters during a BART strike.
"WHO THE HELL are these people?" Philbrick demands. I've got the same question. Who the hell are these people, and who's in charge of them? What's the policy? Where can I read it? Why are they allowing our rivers to die?
"RIGHT NOW," Philbrick points out, "Salmon Creek, Alder Creek, Greenwood Creek, Mill Creek, Pudding Creek, the Navarro, and Ten Mile are all closed at the mouth. I told the Fish and Game lady that we don't get the early rains any more, and unless the streams are opened at the mouth like we used to open them at their mouths when they silted up, a whole year's worth of fish will dump their eggs out to sea, if the sea lions don't get 'em first."
PHILBRICK was about an inch short of apoplectic. "You know what she said? 'I don't believe in the philosophy of opening up the mouths because I think it washes the young fish out to sea too soon. They're not ready for salt water’."
"I COULDN'T BELIEVE what I was hearing," Philbrick said. "I was going to take her out to the rivers and show her the situation, but I guess her boss found out and that was that. There will be no fish again this year unless we get a seven or eight inch storm between now and the 15th of November. And there's hundreds of sea lions out there."
IT USED TO BE that people who lived here could do what needed to be done to free the streams for the fish, but....
"IN THE OLD DAYS," Philbrick recalls, "we'd go out and dredge open the streams. We'd open them just big enough for the salmon to get in; we'd help them get through the tide water. It doesn't take a monster storm to get them up stream; three or four inches of water, they can go. But it takes a monster storm to get the stream big enough to break through a sand bar, and we've got sand bars at the mouths of these streams right now. Worse, nobody is allowed to open them just a crack for the fish! Nature will take its course, but sometimes man has to help nature a little bit."
PHILBRICK is up on his history. "The policy of not going near the mouths with a tool bigger than a sugar spoon began in the early 1980's. We used to open them up with backhoes. The weather has changed over the last few years. I've been rained out of the woods when we got the good early rains the first of October, and those were the best fish years. But we haven't got those early rains any more. Maybe we will again, but for the last ten years or so, there's been no early rain big enough to open the river mouths. The policy of Fish and Game is just let things alone. They don't understand that leaving things alone is taking the salmon runs away from us. If the early rains don't start again the mouths will stay closed, the fish will drop their eggs out in the ocean, and there'll be more sea lions than fish out there. I agree that nature should be left alone in normal rain years, but during these dry years when you have a lot of sedimentation and siltation in the streams, and most of it from Caltrans and the County, the more of it washes down towards the mouth and the ocean forces it back into the sand bars we see at the mouths right now. Man has to go out there and help out a little bit because not only can't the salmon get up stream, the sea lions show up behind them and murder them as fast as they can!"
I CALLED FISH AND GAME, finally reaching a man named Albin. He sounded like a young guy, not that there's anything wrong with young people except lack of experience, the only real teacher any of us have, when it comes down to it.
MR. ALBIN listened patiently as I relayed Philbrick's sense of urgency about the condition of the streams as fish habitat, adding that I not only agreed with Philbrick but I, too, had watched the big early rains of late September and early October disappear and had seen the mouths of the rivers silt shut earlier every year. I'd also seen clusters of sea lions massed at the river mouths, chowing down on the fish schooling up like so many millions of hors d'oeuvres because they couldn't get upstream.
"IF THE FISH run in early," Mr. Albin said, "it might expose them to more poaching, spearing with pitchforks and things like that."
I DAMN NEAR dropped my phone. Even the most committed poacher gave up pitchforks by the age of ten. Besides which, people have been pretty good about not poaching the local streams. Everyone wants the fish back, even the poachers. It's no secret there are serious problems with the annual fish runs, and poachers are the least of it.
ALBIN partially redeemed himself with more plausible arguments for not forcing open the stream mouths. "Even if the fish get through they're still stuck in the lagoon; they can't get upstream and the sea lions follow them in. And the water temperature in the streams is too hot right now for the health of the fish. It's illegal to open up the mouths of the rivers. You need a stream alteration permit to do it, and it's not something we want to provide. For many years, the sea lions were shot by fishermen, but sea lions are sacred now."
MR. F&G'S comment about the protected status of the exponentially reproducing sea lions was said with what sounded to me like an ironic chuckle. Albin sounded like he'd like to crank off a few rounds into a sea lion himself.
I ASKED ALBIN what his fish prognosis was for the coming year. "Hard to say locally," he replied. "It seems to be a good year for salmon off our coast, but those fish are mostly Chinook from the Sacramento and Klamath rivers, with some from the Eel."
HOW ABOUT the impact on the Navarro and the fish from the large-scale water diversions by Anderson Valley's wine industry?
"THERE'S A WATER THING going on in Anderson Valley," Albin laconically conceded, "but I'm not involved with that. I know there are discussions going on between the State Water Board and Fish and Game."
THE "WATER THING" is likely to be with us for some time, but it seems common sense is pretty much confined to the old logger from Comptche, Jerry Philbrick. He'd like to see the fish get upstream again with a little help from the only real friends they've ever had — the people who live here.
THE BOONVILLE LODGE, or the Bucket of Blood
Has breathed it's final breath
We could only stand and watch
As it died a fiery death
It didn't go down easy though
It fought a valiant fight
All through the hours of the afternoon
And well into the night
Than finally when the flames died down
And the smoke began to clear
I could hear the clinking of glasses
And the sloshing of ice cold beer
I could hear the banging of pool balls
And the juke box’s sad, sad song
And the off key voices of a couple of drunks
As they tried to sing along
I could hear the shuffle of feet
As couples danced across the floor
And the creak of rusty hinges
As someone came in through the door
But then there was only silence
Smoldering embers all that remained
Life in our little country town
Would never be the same
— Ernie Pardini (written in December of 2019, just after the Boonville Lodge was burned down)
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