Valley People 8/9/2024

RANDY BLOYD was last seen several days ago on Indian Creek Road. Old timers will remember that Anderson Valley's famed, self-taught botanist, Blanche Brown, lived at the east end of the road. Ms. Brown used to commute on horseback to her teaching job at the Peachland School. There was a trail home, abandoned now for many years, led from Ms. Brown's home up to Peachland. Indian Creek Road ends at the old Brown place, beyond which is a vast wilderness running almost to Ukiah.

A CALLER REPORTS THE SAD NEWS:

Randy Bloyd was found dead off Highway 128 near the curve at Nash Mill Road on Sunday. He was apparently going too fast and lost control of his motorcycle on the turn. His body was discovered by a local hitchhiker who had hitched a ride but wanted out and was let out in the area and was walking around and smelled something. Turned out to be Randy behind some bushes with only Randy's feet visible. Bloyd’s bike was found a little further down the road.

SAMANTHA PEREZ

We found Uncle Randy Bloyd on Sunday. He is with his parents now. Unfortunately he didn't survive a bike accident. Thank you to everyone who helped look, sent information, prayed, and reached out. I will be making a gofundme page to help my dad and uncle cremate and bury him with our family in the old cemetery in Philo. Thank you again and I'm sorry to anyone who loved him. He was a great person and we all have lots of memories. Thank you

A READER WRITES:

I happened to be at the crash site of Randy Bloyd Monday monring where someone had chalked a big message on the pavement reading Randy Bloyd Love You, when a CalTrans crew came along. They had been sent out to paint over the message.

I tried to talk them into leaving it for a couple of days but, as they had been specifically sent to eliminate it, they didn't have any flexibility to work with. Expressions like that are considered potentially hazardous to those driving along. Flowers and whatever that are well off the highway at the back of the right of way will potentially be tolerated, but anything that seems like a sign will not. Peaceful thoughts to all.

JUMBO’S OF PHILO ABOUT TO OPEN

We are excited to open our doors very soon!

We need two people to fill two full-time kitchen positions at Jumbo’s Win Win.

We promise a fun working environment, great food and good pay.

Jumbo’s will be open 7 days a week, 11-8.

Please reply here or call Scott at 510–414-2352

We are as excited as you are for us to get open! Thank you

AV HISTORICAL SOCIETY EVENT: Valley Chat as Bill Seekins, a dedicated local researcher and historian, unveils his fascinating findings on the Anderson Valley railroads.

THIS WEEK AT BLUE MEADOW FARM

Abundance!

(strangely, only 3 sunflowers have bloomed so far)

BILL KIMBERLIN

Did a book signing in San Francisco with some of my old colleagues. It was billed as “the creators,” meaning those who actually did the creative work on Star Wars. There was an artist who used to come to my aunt's resort in Anderson Valley. He had a shock of white hair as an older man and some of the children asked their parents, “Is he an old man that looks young, or a young man who looks old?” In any case I sold a hell of a lot of my books in a little over two hours to a bunch of Star Wars fans up from Los Angeles for this event.

ANDERSON VALLEY ATHLETICS NEEDS VOLUNTEERS!

With the fall season quickly approaching, we need help from our community:

Junior High Volleyball

Nearly 30 students have signed up, and the schedule is being put together, but we need coaches!

We are looking for a head coach to manage the entire program or 2-3 coaches to handle each skill level. This is a huge opportunity to create meaningful and impactful experiences for these students.

Junior High Volleyball Referees

There is a significant shortage of officials in the area. We need volunteers to help referee 5-8 junior high home games.

Junior High Flag Football

Junior high flag football is a new sport and league being developed among nearby schools. We need coaching volunteers to help organize the league structure and rules.

Historically, we have only offered volleyball as a fall sport, leaving many of our junior high boys without a sport to play. This new league will fill that void.

Drivers Needed for All

Managing five sports this fall will be a huge challenge, especially regarding travel logistics.

Volunteering to drive a van is one of the most needed positions we have. Most away games are around an hour one way, and it would be a shame to cancel a learning experience for these students due to a lack of transportation.

If you would like to help our students, please send me a message directly or you can email me here: jtoohey@avpanthers.org

Thank You AV!

— John Toohey, Athletic Director, Anderson Valley Unified School District

JANE BOYD-ZENI: Do you in Boonville know this ass. Passed on double yellow around a blind turn on 253. License Plate looks like BSDN536 (or close to that. Blew threw stop sign, passed on another blind turn then tried to pass this truck on left at stop sign.

A POSTCARD of J.T. Farrer's store in Boonville, circa 1948. Plus an unusual note on the reverse. Poor focus, but the only such view I've seen.

“Deady” was J.D. Farrer, J.T.’s son.

— Marshall Newman

PACIFIC INTERNET’S SCALED DOWN email service continues to be spotty and problematic. We went without email all morning last Thursday. At least they called back with a partial workaround after we left a message. Full functioning was restoried mid-afternoon. We have been loyal customers going all the say back to the early 90s when Jim Persky first established Pacific Internet as an email and web hosting service. The problems are mystifying. All they have to do is keep a basic email service working, and we’d continue to pay and not bother them. But every time there’s a hiccup, friends from other email services tell us, again, that we should jump ship. We don’t want to, but if this keeps up… (Mark Scaramella)

BOONVILLE/AV FUTURE FARMERS OF AMERICA

Day 1 at the Redwood Empire Fair was all about rabbits and chickens. We showed from morning until after dark. We had lots of successes and a disappointment. It was a terrific day overall.

Rabbit Market Show - Lupe’s rabbit meat pen places 5th and Viri’s placed 4th. Sadly, Jennifer’s was DQ because of an imperfection that went unnoticed.

Poultry Meat Show was awesome!

Nayely earned Champion FFA Meat Pen. Jaciel earned Reserve Champion FFA Meat Pen! They both have worked so hard and have made a great team!

The FFA members also participated in showmanship and the bred shows.

The intensity of FFA Novice Swine Showmanship.

Great job Samantha! Second place!

PHILO VINEYARD EXPLOSIONS

[1] I just made a post regarding the explosions I'm hearing here in Philo. I got an answer that it was propane cannons for vineyard harvest. I made an exasperated comment regarding the Vineyards. I deleted my post, but would like to clarify. I really sincerely get that the vineyards are beautiful, bring life and work to the valley. We all need to survive. I guess I feel like there are millions of vines in this tiny valley. I live right on the river. The last two years, the river has filled with obnoxious algae starting in July. Making it unusable for recreation. The resort next to me has unswimmable water and I am sure their guests are unhappy. My hypothesis is that the last two years of heavy rains washed the fertilizers into the streams and created massive blooms in the summer heat.

Internet source:

“Algal blooms can be dramatic and are a result of excess nutrients from fertilizer, wastewater and stormwater runoff, coinciding with lots of sunlight, warm temperatures and shallow, slow-flowing water.”

So yes I am resentful. It's 110 degrees but the river is unusable. If anyone can give me a reason why the massive amounts of vineyards are not the culprit, I will listen. I understand the revenue for our town. But you will have a hard time convincing me the loss of this summer resource is worth it

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[2] Wait till you learn about all the deteriorating redwood septic tanks. And the reason the valley needs a water district/treatment plant. Pro tip: E. coli. One of the many reasons we need good training and education within our county. To deal with, prevent, and innovate around the business sectors and environment we currently have. We can do better but that starts with empowering our community to learn and grow. More AG (TEK and other approaches) and Fabrication needs to be a part of our schools. From young to old.

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[3] Part of the reason for failing septic systems is the result of a housing shortage caused by the influx of vineyard workers, forcing overcrowding of the existing homes and overworked septic. The wine industry, while making huge profits, has contributed absolutely nothing to alleviate the housing shortage that they have created, have invested nothing toward educating the children of the workers they employ. They have taken and taken and have given nothing back to the communities they have disrupted. They have ruined our waterways, have been largely responsible for the dwindling fishing industry, wining and dining our elected officials, and have turned a blind eye to the damage they've done.

NOT ALL THAT LONG AGO, the Boonville Hotel was even more famous than it is now. The venerable 19th century structure was falling down when Vernon and Charlene Rollins bought it, circa '86, from, as I recall, Eddie Carsey, a Boonville native. The Rollinses re-dubbed the hotel as the New Boonville Hotel.

MOST LOCALS today would rather forget them and their New Boonville Hotel, but the Rollins' restaurant was made for the proliferating food media, and then for the general media from California to Paris when the Rollins absconded. They were famous.

WHEN THE ROLLINS' fled Boonville literally in the middle of the night, a posse of irate creditors on their heels, they owed Boonville guy Tom Cronquist, a Vietnam veteran, $18,000. Cronquist had been a waiter at the New Boonville. He had deferred wages because he'd been convinced by Vernon Rollins he'd be made whole as the restaurant did better and better.

THE NEW BOONVILLE did do better and better, especially in the media, where it and Boonville was a must visit stop on the gastro-trail.

THE ROLLINS owed lots of people money. Which is why they took off. Were they crooks? No, at least they weren’t when they fled. Are they crooks now? Kinda, because they soon established a thriving restaurant just across the California-Oregon border near Ashland that was on all the gourmet Must Eat At lists. They had the money to pay off their debts but left their Boonville workers unpaid.

SO, WHY DIDN'T THE ROLLINS’ pay Cronquist the money they owed him? Because they’re crooks. Kinda. The Rollins’ claimed they sent money back to Boonville to pay off their creditors. Maybe they paid off a few, but there are a bunch they didn’t pay, including Cronquist, now in failing health and a patient at the Vet's Hospital in San Francisco. The Rollins’ didn’t intend to rip anybody off, it just happened. Which was their story and they stuck to it.

THEY HAD TRIED to create a first-rate hotel-restaurant, borrowed lots of money from lots of people to do it, got so far in debt they couldn’t pay much of it back, and, besieged by creditors, Vernon and Charlene took off. If the New Boonville Hotel hadn’t become so famous nobody except their creditors would have noticed.

THE ROLLINS’ NEW BOONVILLE HOTEL was, they said, modeled after a French pension which, I understand, is a small French hotel-restaurant out in the French countryside. The idea in France is that everything in the restaurant comes from the backyard garden and the animals raised out behind the garden.

THE ROLLINS' did harvest whatever was in season out back, but mostly, given the volume of business they soon developed, they had to order off the truck or, in extreme emergencies, jog across the street to Anderson Valley Market for a brace of pork chops.

BUT the credulous write-ups about the place gushed about how all the poultry and meat came directly from the New Boonville Hotel’s animal pen. That animal pen was like a petting zoo. How anyone — even a food writer — could be so naive as to believe the Rollins’ dozen bedraggled beasts, most of them elderly, could possibly supply their kitchen… well, the writers bought it.

THE WRITERS believed. They wrote that six raggedy chickens, a thousand year old goat, three abandoned Easter bunnies, a turkey that looked like he'd escaped the Pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving, a couple of haggard pigs, and a dwarf duck comprised the larder of one of the best known restaurants in the United States. The food writers reported that, just like in France, the Rollins’ animal menagerie was the freshest of fresh food, and darned if the duck fol de rol had only minutes before been quacking at the goat not 25 yards from their plate!

THE ROLLINS’ GREAT ESCAPE was assisted by David Colfax and Sons. Mrs. Colfax undoubtedly was in on it, too, although the Colfaxes’ soon moved on into what passes for respectability in Mendocino County, America’s largest open air witness protection program, where every day at sunrise history starts all over again, when David Colfax became Fifth District supervisor.

TRUTH TO TELL, I, too, was belatedly in on the heist that was part of the Rollins-Colfax escape plan. In exchange for a lot of the quality booze the Rollins’ had stored in the wine cellar but hadn’t paid the distributors for, and for some of the most expensive pieces of art, also not paid for, the Colfaxes’ gave the Rollinses a getaway car and helped the fleeing couple with packing and other logistical tasks related to unlawful flight. I got the stuff the Colfaxes didn't want.

ABOUT A WEEK after the Rollins' midnight flight, and with Colfax denouncing me as “a liar or so drunk you can’t write straight” for reporting that the Rollinses had been spotted heading north on I-5 in the Colfax-provided vehicle, Colfax invited me into the Rollins’ deserted home on the north side of the Hotel where I helped myself to a bunch of the books Vernon Rollins had left behind. Colfax also gave me the art that he didn’t want which, except for one painting that’s so bad I can’t even give it away, I later sold for a hundred bucks in a time of great need.

CRIME OFTEN PAYS, especially when it’s committed by folks with the gift of gab, and Vernon Rollins was a master salesman. Colfax became Fifth District supervisor, and the Rollins’ reappeared as proprietors of a famous restaurant — Sammy’s Bistro, Talent, Oregon. Colfax was positively apoplectic that AVA writers Cockburn and Gardner, in their account of ‘Escape From Boonville,’ had quoted Balzac’s old saw that “behind every fortune there’s a crime,” denouncing it as “the worst kind of cliché,” as if he and the Rollinses had committed a literary crime rather than real life larceny. As the world turns, a crook is a crook, and I’m an accessory-accessory, I’d say.

MY MOST MEMORABLE BIRTHDAY, July 22nd, 2003:

DON MACQUEEN wrote, “Saw your distinguished profile featured in the July 22nd Press Democrat.” Wasn’t me, Don. I’d recognize myself anywhere. Even my wife says it wasn’t me. I’m not “distinguished looking.” I like to think I look like Gene Hackman, but the truth is you can’t tell me from any other more or less ambulatory old white beatnik type guy. But here’s the rest of the story:

JULY 22ND is my birthday, and if any of you say, “I knew you were a Cancer!” you are permanently prohibited from reading this newspaper. I’m way, way too old to care about birthdays. As they do for all of us, birthdays come faster and faster as the abyss grows closer and closer, so I’m just pleased as heck to wake up for another one.

ANYHOO, it was my birthday. Like every Tuesday it was a work day. I rose at five. Put the coffee on. Tottered out to get the morning paper which, in Boonville, is the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. I can’t help but note that there’s a story about my attempt to stop the county from paying public money to a private lawyer to defend a lunatic the County had hired.

A PHOTO of a man who isn’t me sits in the middle of the story. The photo is of one of the pedophile priests the paper is always writing about. I’m not a priest, and I’m not a pedophile. And how did the Press Democrat know it was my birthday?

SO, I’ve been awake for ten minutes and I’ve already been defamed. We’re off to a bad start, birthday boy. The mail arrives. I receive a single birthday card. It’s a computer-generated congratulations from my insurance agent, a person I’ve never met. The day grows warm, then hot. The work day grows long, then longer. But Tuesdays are always long. So are Mondays and Sundays and most other days in this business. Outback newspaper publishing is a fool’s game. I’m right where I should be — old and broke in Boonville. Nevertheless, I anticipate a slab of Safeway birthday cake on which I’d planned to erect a single candle and sing happy birthday to myself and my wife. But she’s watching the Fox Network and says she can hear me from where she is if I feel like singing happy birthday to myself. I look for the cake. It’s not where a cake should be. It’s outside on the porch where it was 105 two hours ago. The cake is a pile of grease. My colleague, The Major, “forgot” to bring it inside.

TO REDEEM what’s left of the day, and just as some Fox fascist begins barking in the next room, I decide to take my dog Perro up into the hills for a quick, restorative, pre-sunset hike. My birthday wasn’t over yet! Pleasure was still a possibility! (Fox Network’s Greta Van Susteren is my wife’s fave, but she invariably stays around for O’Reilly, too. I like Greta, but Bill…)

DEEP IN THE EAST HILLS above Boonville, in the middle of literal nowhere, a dog the size of a small bear suddenly appears! Bear-Dog charges straight at Perro. Perro’s not very smart, and he’s no fighter. He runs up to Bear-Dog like Bear Dog is going to be his new friend. Bear-Dog barrels into Perro and they’re immediately locked in mortal combat. Perro is up on his hind legs fighting a rear guard action. The lady with Bear-Dog is tiny. She tries to separate the animals. Even if she weren’t tiny, and even if I wasn’t mesmerized by the fight raging around us, both of us together couldn’t get the dogs apart. Perro is very strong. Bear-Dog is even stronger. I’m watching the fight and waving my walking stick around as if I’m somehow helping restore order when it occurs to me that my pathetic gesturing is not only ineffective, it’s inane.

BY NOW, Perro is fighting for his life. He has no choice. Bear-Dog is trying to kill him. But Perro’s got about half of Bear-Dog’s huge head locked in his jaws. Bear-Dog has his mammoth jaws sunk bone deep in Perro’s bad leg. The snarling combatants tumble down an embankment and into a stream. The tiny lady follows them, still trying to restrain her Bear-Dog. I remain above the fray on the road where I resume waving my walking stick. Bear-Dog tires. He’s old, fortunately. If he were young Perro would be a goner. Me too, probably. Bear-Dog un-jaws Perro. Perro un-jaws Bear Dog. Perro runs off on his three functioning legs as Bear-Dog sucks in restorative oxygen. I catch up with Perro and hide him in a copse of young fir. Bear-Dog has gotten his second wind and is jogging up the road looking for us. Bear-Dog wants another round. Perro and I are well-hidden a couple of hundred yards away. Bear-Dog can’t see us. He turns around and jogs off towards his apologetic owner. Perro’s beat up pretty good. Bear-Dog is beat up, too, especially his face. Perro’s exhausted. I lift him into the truck and we drive home. Perro immediately goes to sleep. I head for the freezer for some birthday ice cream.

THERE WAS NO ICE CREAM.

THE NEXT DAY I call the Press Democrat’s corrections desk. “That wasn’t me in yesterday’s paper,” I said to the lady who answered the phone. “That was a child molester.” She laughs. “Are you sure?” I can check with my wife again if you want, I reply. She laughs again. “We’ll certainly print a correction,” she says. For the next five days I look for the correction.

THE CORRECTION appears on the fifth day after my name had been besmirched beneath the perv’s photo. Here’s what it said: “A photograph accompanying a story about Anderson Valley Advertiser publisher Bruce Anderson that ran in Tuesday’s Empire section was misidentified as Anderson. The photo was supplied by the Los Angeles Times.”

SURE IT WAS. Santa Rosa called LA and said, “We need a picture of Anderson. He’s in the big file just before Bush and Kobe Bryant.” The PD is run by true idiots.

THE LA TIMES my ass. They blame the LA Times for something like this? Obviously, they were taking a shot at me just to annoy me, as I apparently annoy them. It was mildly flattering that they went to the trouble. That very day I happen to encounter a PD staffer. PD people are under strict orders not to be seen with me, not to communicate with me, not to associate themselves with me in any way. I’m a one-man no-go zone, and may the newspaper gods keep it that way. But PD reporters often communicate with me on the qt. This one says, “I heard that photo was a picture of some guy we took at the California Newspaper Publishers Association meeting.” I’ll stay with the perv jacket, thank you. Newspaper publishers these days are a lot worse than any perv I can think of.

A READER ASKS: How are things on your health front? Has the mucus accumulation game gotten any better? Has any decision been made regarding chemotherapy? Are you venturing out more?

APPRECIATE your concern, bro. Basically, I've got a new throat, accessed through a hole south of where the original lay. The old throat, with which I was perfectly happy, had to be removed to get at an iceberg-like cancer pressed up against my lung, a large white thing poised to carry me off instantly if that genius of the scalpel, Dr. Ryan, who looks like a surfer dude high school kid but manages to convey the required gravitas, hadn't removed it in a grueling (to him, I was unconscious) 7-hour excavation.

The trade-in for the new throat cost me my senses of smell and taste but, on balance, it was a good deal because it gave me life, for how long who knows since I'm already in triple overtime given my years. Travel requires that I carry a little machine to vacuum accumulations of phlegm plus a supply of hme's, protective plugs for the hole in my new throat. Gradually, my new throat will handle the phlegm run-off just like the old one had for 84 years, during which I abused it terribly by pouring down through it way too much whiskey. Presently, I'm undergoing heart and eye tests whose outcome will determine the chemo strategy, which won't be chemo but pills and one blast from a chemo-like device. Passed the heart test — “You have the heart of a 16-year-old, Mr. Anderson,” and the mind to go with it. The eye tests I don't quite understand but I gather it is to make sure they can withstand the meds, to prevent my eyeballs from popping out and going blind. I walk three miles in the morning, do a bunch of push-ups at night plus hefting some light weights. Still and all, I'm weakened. Unless the medicos are shining me on, I will be shuffling on for another few years and fully intend to be back in Boonville by the end of September.

COYOTES. A pack of the crafty creatures killed a tiny fluff dog at Frisco's Baker Beach the other day, much to the understandable horror of the dog's owner and onlookers. I've seen more coyotes in SF and here in Marin than I've seen in 50 years in rural Mendocino County, probably because ranchers shot, and maybe still shoot Mendo coyotes on sight. The coyotes you see in Mendo are understandably shy.. But the Frisco-Marin critters have been welcomed into the neighborhoods by the city-prevalent anthromorphs. The city beasts are eating cats like popcorn, and they attack dogs when dogs get too close to coyote pups and their nests. And, of course, the morphs are feeding the coyotes, which means they will only proliferate until… The bears move in.

OUT FOR A LONG WALK one achingly beautiful late Fall afternoon, I finished off an hour's amble by climbing down off the east end of Ornbaun Road where the rains of '64 carried off the bridge that once crossed Anderson Creek to link Ornbaun Road with Anderson Valley Way, footing it up the sprawling streambed to where the creek parallels Anderson Valley Way in the same area as the Stilt House, former home of the Luffs, the last native Pomo speakers in the Anderson Valley if not all of Mendocino County.

THERE'S A HUGE CULVERT carrying winter rains off the east hills at Evergreen Cemetery and beneath the pavement of Anderson Valley Way on into Anderson Creek. This winter stream is called Cemetery Creek, but it's no creek in the winter as it swells to twenty feet across as if the entire winter run-off of Anderson Valley was being fired into Anderson Creek out of the huge water cannon the culvert becomes in big rains.

IN THE DRY MONTHS the culvert is walkable. I can propel my entire upright bundle of crumbling flesh through it without bending my head.

THAT DAY, as I approached the culvert from Anderson Creek, I saw a coyote at the cemetery end of the mammoth pipe, and the coyote saw me. We stood there staring at each other for a ridiculously long time — maybe three minutes — before it occurred to me that the impudent little beast seemed to be playing a sort of stare-down game with me. I resolved to outlast him, so I stayed on without moving at my end of the culvert, perhaps 40 feet from the wise guy creature mocking me at the other end.

I STARED, he stared. We stood there staring at each other for another ten minutes or so. Even my minor twitches and foot-shifts didn't cause the coyote to bolt. I sneezed. The coyote handled my sneeze’s reverberating echoes without flinching. He was laughing at me.

THE COYOTE finally won. It was getting dark and I was hungry. I took a full step up the trail adjacent to the culvert. Looking up toward the roadbed, I watched the coyote turn for a last look at his human foil before sauntering off into the blackberry thicket bordering the graveyard. I understood why Native Americans regarded the coyote as magical.