BOONVILLE DISTILLERY
About Our New Executive Chef, Chris Morrison. He joins us with over 26 years of experience in the culinary industry, and is a Michelin star rated chef! He comes to The Boonville Distillery with inspiration, a strong sense of community here in Anderson Valley, and a passion for amazing food!
New Menu Highlights, House Smoked babyback ribs, Anderson Valley Beer Battered Fish & Chips, Boonville Distillery Tequila Lime Prawns, and Grilled Salmon with Vodka Cream Sauce. And that is just for starters! We are SO EXCITED to have you here with us Chris! You can try Chris’ creations Friday - Monday…
JIM ROBERTS
We are going to keep the fire burning…
Wickson Restaurant, like so many small businesses is continuing to pivot and evolve. We want to wish Jenny Ann all the best in her next chapter ahead as we move towards the fall with some directional changes. Jenny had really stepped up to the plate at a difficult time and for that we are so grateful.
Having a restaurant in a hospitality property, located in a remote area, after a global pandemic, has had it’s challenges to say the least. After much discussion and recommendations from others, we are steering away from a format of regular high priced prefixed menus which would probably make the most sense for a restaurant like Wickson. Instead, we want to continue to serve not only the visitors to our neck of the woods, but our friends and neighbors also. I will be perfectly honest, it has been a challenge to do both. Expect a thoughtful transition and a working team approach to provide good food and service. With a little 30 seat restaurant, rockstar chefs are not going to be in our immediate future, but we will lean on our local talent and community. (We are so fortunate that all of the restaurant staff wants to continue with the transition….such a solid team!!)
All of us at The Madrones want to share our enthusiasm and support for the new and reinvented dining options that we are so lucky to have in Philo and Boonville. As so many businesses have closed, we feel so grateful to have new or reimagined ones open. The Madrones will continue to support our local small businesses, be kind to their brave efforts and continue shore up a vibrant community.
More to come for Wickson Restaurant. We have a few private events coming up, but our new hours will be Thursday- Saturday dinner and Saturday and Sunday lunch (brunch coming in September)
A READER WRITES:
Disaster prep for Anderson Valley: Someone needs to contact the Social Services Director, work with the current Disaster Cooridnator there and request a shelter trailer to be stored either at the Fairgrounds or Fire Department. Contact the Red Cross in Santa Rosa and request shelter training and have members of the community volunteer to take it and be ready to report to the designated shelter site to set up and run a shelter until the County or Red Cross can respond.
School sites with gyms are a good option in a community wide disaster as well.
AV disaster prep should contact other small communities for advice, the South Coast FD had a great system in place and Jayma Shields in Laytonville was working on getting a community plan in place as well. Learn from them.
Also, just like Laytonville, AV has a ton of tourists passing through at any given time. That’s another whole group of victims to consider when disaster planning. What to do with them? They will have nothing unless they are towing an RV. Food for thought.
Preparation is key, congrats on everything you are doing. It will pay huge dividends in any future disasters.
ANDERSON VALLEY ADULT SCHOOL
Our fall 2024 class schedule is here!
We’ve partnered with Mendocino College to offer a lot of options, including Creative Writing, Conversational Spanish (3 levels!), Citizenship, English as a Second Language, Basic Computers, Child Development (in Spanish), Literacy for Spanish speakers, Singing, Watercolors, and Aikido.
Prices range from free- $60/semester.
Please spread the word! Most classes start the week of September 2nd.
KYLE CLARKE
The Boonville County Fair approaches and so does the need for volunteers for the AV Fire Department Burger Booth. We have shifts available for Sept 13th,14th,15th . We are offering 3 hour shifts (down from the previous years). Reach out to me with your contact information -phone, email and mailing- and I will send you the link to sign on to the shift)s) you desire. Kyphilo@pacific.net
MARY PAT PALMER:
Winter Wellness needs Echinacea. This is Echinacea purpurea.
It's hard to start from seed for me. I've gotten mine from friend Sam. Even after starting they can be vulnerable. One drowned from an irrigation leak. It is native to central and eastern US and was highly regarded by many tribes. Lots of differing opinions about the use and efficacy. We'll talk about differing theories on September 21st at the Philo School of Herbal Energetics.
www.herbalenergetics.com
EXCITED to head back home and play a show, especially since it’s right in the middle of hunting season!
Join me at the Anderson Valley Brewing Company on Saturday, the 24th, from 4-6 pm for some good brews and tunes.
Looking forward to seeing some familiar faces there!
AV PANTHER COACH JOHN TOOHEY
I am deeply disappointed to announce that we will not be fielding a football team this season. Due to declining enrollment, a lack of interest, and issues with punctuality and consistency, we have no other option.
PS. The football team will still meet. We will lift weights and still engage in team building drills.
We may be able to play a few games this season with teams at similar developmental levels.
We will finish out practice these next two weeks and try to attend the scrimmage in Potter Valley, but playing games is out of the question. The kids who have been coming to practice deserve at least the experience of the scrimmage
BLUE MOON over Anderson Valley (photo by Willie Housley)
BILL KIMBERLIN:
I remember looking at a large book of Ansel Adams photos where one was labeled with a remark by the author. The photo was of a grand giant bolder somewhere at Yosemite. The author said, “We don't know why Ansel left these two people in the very bottom of the photo of such a beautiful landscape.”
I felt like raising my hand because I knew. In photography and especially in film making scale is crucial to selling a scene. It is the only way to suggest that something is either very large or very small.
My old truck in this photo of my back yard in Anderson Valley gives it at least some idea of scale.
THE BOONVILLE CONNECTION
THE QUALIFYING ROUNDS (aka “elimination trials”) for the annual sheep dog trials are scheduled for this Saturday, August 17, at 9am to 2pm at the Boonville Fairgrounds.
Around 30 or 40 dogs and their handlers are expected to participate. The top eight dogs will be invited to compete for ribbons and awards at the Fair on Sunday, September 15. The popular event is free.
RON PARKER
SCOTT PRATT:
Hello Anderson Valley friends and neighbors. I wanted to let you know in the next couple of days we will be shooting with a .22 a bit of here at our place above Indian Creek. I know it’s a bit of a nuisance sometimes so we’re gonna keep it to a minimum but, we’re on a rat killing spree right now! We got inundated and this seems to be the only thing that works right now. Sorry for the racket!
AV ATHLETICS:
When the Sierra Nevada Festival was canceled, our Anderson Valley Sports Boosters lost a major source of funding for the upcoming season. This setback has put our sports programs in a tough spot, and we need your help to ensure our students have the equipment they need to play their best this fall.
Our kids work hard both on the field and in the classroom, and your donations can make a huge difference in their athletic experience. Every contribution helps our student-athletes reach their full potential and represent our community with pride.
Let’s come together to support our Panthers! Please consider donating today to help our students succeed this season.
You can Venmo our Booster club @AV_Boosters
Thank You AV!
PANTHERS PAD UP!
NOT LONG before a serious infirmity left me voiceless, a writer from San Francisco Magazine and a TV crew from France showed up in Boonville, The magazine wanted to know what “the community” thought of tourism, the French were curious about Leonard Lake, the long gone mass murderer and former Boonville volunteer fireman. “Yeah, yeah, Bruce, he was a psycho, but ya know what? He was the best recording secretary we ever had. The guy had the best handwriting we'd ever seen.”
WHAT TOURISM means to “the community”? I dare not speak for “the community,” but for me, well, we're all guilty of tourism at times, and life having long ago become an accelerating blur, it seems like only yesterday that on a full moon week day night it was possible to walk down the middle of 128 from Boonville to Philo without having to leap out of the way of so much as a single vehicle, and fun-loving drunks could butt recreational heads in the middle of the highway, one running out of the Lodge, the other running from the Post Office, and bam! Now, one waits for minutes at a time for a break in the turista flow to cross 128 from Anderson Valley Market to the Boonville Post Office, and when that break finally occurs one moves as quickly as one is able, looking in all directions and up and down too, lest one become a traffic statistic.
THE WHOLE of this dear place has changed so fast, with the events and people coming at us so fast and gone faster, what was slow in rural life is now full on frenetic, I often wonder where the country went and how this small city got here so fast.
USED TO BE you knew it was pot season in Anderson Valley when people you hadn’t seen since last summer suddenly reappeared. Welcome back, Bud! Now? The growers are local, and here year-round, no longer spending winters in Costa Rica.
I WAS IN UKIAH on my way to a court-related appointment many days ago when I felt a sharp pain around my right knee, and down I went in a beatnik heap on the sidewalk west of the County Courthouse. Quickly assuming a sitting position so as to merely appear a street mendicant in a modified lotus and not a mere drunk or early morning exhibitionist. A male pedestrian stepped around me, looking back over his shoulder to chuckle. (He bore a strong resemblance to Al Kubanis, which accounts for the chuckle.) No health insurance, of course, but as my foot went numb and a thousand sadistic harpsichordists plucked my hamstrings, I pulled myself to my feet, hobbled to my truck and drove to Adventist Hospital, where I sat in the parking lot debating with myself whether or not to enter the emergency room.
I CHOSE LIFE! And drove home to Boonville where there was a message from Susie Bright, the writer Herb Caen called a “sexpert.” Ms. Bright was staying in Philo. She said she would like to stop by for a visit. Why, moi? But I was prone and wanted to stay that way which, I suppose, wouldn’t phase a “sexpert,” but I didn’t want any misunderstandings. So I had to cancel, fearing that Ms. Bright would think I was faking it to avoid her. But the very next day, the sexpert dropped off a batch of chocolate chip cookies she’d baked all for me, me, me, along with a note saying she “hoped my back” was better, and then she had headed back south, convinced that I really was temporarily on the shelf.
BY AVOIDING the medical professionals and the third mortgage to pay them for the amputation they’d have insisted upon, my leg was soon back to about 80%, and again strong enough to hill hike at half-speed. A week later I was 100% and ready for whoever and whatever came through my door.
REAL ESTATE AD from 2004 from North Country Real Estate, Boonville:
“40-plus acres of Douglas fir & hardwoods. Located off Nash Ranch Road. A problem parcel that needs a problem solver or long term investor. No access, we can’t even show you the property, but we have maps and photos. Owner says make offer. $175,000.”
BUYER SAYS “Prove it’s there first then parachute me in for a look around and we’ll talk.”
ONE EASY DAY I was looking through the used books at Boonville's perennial Barn Sale, a trove offering up some real treasures, and one I always tried to plunder at least once every couple of months. That day, I was only half-aware of the three raggedy young hippies browsing next to me. I did note their bare feet on the cold day, and I wondered why the heck anybody, let alone a young anybody, would want to be a hippie almost 30 years after the last of the breed was extinct, although there are rumored to be a couple way to hell and gone in Spy Rock.
DON'T GET ME WRONG. Some of my best friends are hippies. Or were hippies, and I aspired to beatnik-hood myself as a youth, flush in the delusion that I was a poet. I never had the least desire to be a hippie, being fully committed to all the creature comforts consumer capitalism can come up with. I’m also fully committed to orderliness because life is a little simpler if you’re not always looking for things in an overall condition of chaos.
I ALWAYS thought the generic hippie’s commitment to doing everything the hard way, the 19th century way, was a class indicator: People who grew up in straitened circumstances were unlikely to aspire to an unheated, off the grid, dirt floor cabin while subsisting on a joyless rice-based diet leavened only by a few lean vegetables from a failed garden. The only people who wanted to live poor in the 1960s were people who weren't poor.
BUT HERE WERE these three, two young men and a very pregnant young woman. If she’d been my daughter I’d have had the deprogrammers on her in a flash. I had to restrain myself from trying to pry some info out of her while I tried to determine if she was underage, a pretext for summoning law enforcement to save her from herself. Barefoot and pregnant on a very cold Saturday in Boonville, standing there at the book shelves in a smock straight off the Little Match Girl in the chill of an early morning sales barn, a couple of stoned doofuses between her and catastrophe.
THE PREGNANT young woman pulled out a well-worn copy of Dr. Spock’s how-to baby book. I was relieved she had enough sense left to turn to Spock in her time of need. Spock might alleviate the squalor, mental and physical, of both her and the new American she was carrying.
“DO YOU think I can get this one?” she asked her engrimed mate. Her captor squinted suspiciously at the photo of the robust, confident-looking baby doctor on the book’s jacket. “How much is it?” he wanted to know. “Twenty-five cents,” the girl replied. “I think I can handle that,” her gallant assured her. And darned if he didn’t spring for the whole quarter!
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