During my last stretch home in Ukiah I promised myself a leisurely trip out Mountain House Road. I cashed that promise in and left Hopland, heading south.
I’ve lived 40 years in Ukiah, and like everyone I’ve been hemmed in by highways and concrete laid down in their cooly efficient manner. It’s made me appreciate the barely travelled remote, narrow country lanes that meander off from approximately nowhere to somewhere a little further out, maybe around that big bend you come to when you cross the one-lane bridge.
It’s the prettiest inland road we have. Give yourself time to roll among the valleys and aromas, the fence lines, clouds and birds, and you’ll be well rewarded.
Mountain House Road offers a blink of a vision of the formation of the Earth itself, a small fraction leading to this speck of time, and me standing in it. Boulders and rocks have been shoved through surfaces of dirt as though from planet-shaking underground explosions gone massively right.
Big stones are nestled among soft yellow waves, with rows and clumps of greenery at the edges all ‘round what my limited imagination can perceive as the only natural, obvious, harmonious locations, i.e., the view as it is exists right now, right here.
Where I stand might have, and could have, looked jagged and hostile following eons of earthquakes, tsunamis, tectonic upheavals and glaciers roaming to and fro, all operating with their own independent agendas to produce a chaotic and inhospitable landscape. But no. That’s not what we see.
Instead it’s a tame and orderly panorama of undulating hills, rolling meadows punctuated by comely trees in lines and groups, with ranches and roads, pastures and skies all laced together in a lovely landscape of unintentional order and understated beauty.
Mendo County residents are blessed with visual splendors, here in a land of understandable fencing, winding roads generously sneaking past, over and around small hillocks, valleys and probably more barns, hopefully surrounded and improved by dogs, chickens, deer and sheep. Buzzards also welcome.
On the more travelled Hwy 253 to Boonville are vast vistas and gape-worthy sceneries probably looking the same as 50 years ago, or 500 or 50,000. Deep ravines waiting in stony silence (how else?) for the next earthquake or glacier or comet to visit that will upend, rearrange and defeat what now exists, then resume the long wait for another geological age.
Or rains that last a century (a wink of an eye, geologically) to wash it all away and replace it with tidal waves that bring another reality.
Or a car pitching over the edge, rolling and tumbling a thousand feet to a bottom from which it will never return. And the driver too.
But I’m happily mired in 2024 and find my stonescape perfectly staggering and agreeable. There’s nowhere I’d rather be standing, nothing I’d rather be viewing.
Medical Miracle Update
It’s been legal a long time and yet we continue to get no word of recent breakthroughs in medical marijuana. But when Big Weed was promoting legalization it seemed to churn out never-ending stories of pot being the next great curative.
By the early 1990s marijuana was credited with curing glaucoma, cancer, hair loss and roof leaks. Now that doctors and researchers are free to run tests and experiments, pot prediction prevaricators have gone silent.
Car Talk
Why do I think supervisor Ted Williams is so loud in opposing a gas station north of town? Because it gives him a chance to shake his fist and stamp his feet and let the world know he’s taking a bold stand against Big Oil.
Ho hum, Teddy Boy. Pipe down. Do what’s best for the County.
Meanwhile back in Ukiah, city council hacks are putting on a big show, starring themselves, promoting electric cars. First they want taxpayers to install charging stations so Elon Musk doesn’t have to spend his own money.
Next, go get yourself a Prius so you can start saving the planet, or better yet buy two and save it twice as fast. What Mari Rodin and Susan Sher tell you is all about saving fuel.
What they don’t tell you is that if you live somewhere that gets hot, or cold, your battery mobile is great until you turn on the air conditioner or heater. Mileage drops drastically when juice is diverted to nonessential uses like trying to stay warm going over Donner Pass in December.
Also, when your electro-car winds down and leaves you stranded 40 miles outside Provo, will you hike back to a charging station and get a bucket of fresh electricity?
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