Valley People 12/20/2024

STEPHANIE MARCUM:

Times are tough. Living in Boonville is rough. Your comment about Boonville pricing struck a nerve with me though. The stores here get hit with higher delivery fees and a fuel charge for bringing goods out this way. Big box stores are pushing out the mom n pop businesses because they can order so much bulk and have many more customers, that their pricing CAN be cheaper than in a small store. You mentioned $16 mayonnaise but I think you need to realize that the store that purchased that case of mayonnaise probably isn't making much of a profit on it when you figure they're being charged 13 a jar +delivery+fuel.

The valley isn't the same as when I was a kid. People are rude and their kids are rude. There's no respect for other people's things. I heard about the gunshots but didn't hear them myself, but could have sworn I heard some last night (12.10)

My suggestion to everyone is stop remembering Boonville the way it used to be and don't leave anything you want to keep, where someone can take it

The mentality that we're dealing with now is, “I wanted it so I took it and I didn't hurt anyone, why you complaining?” Get cameras if you can afford it. Put a bat by your front door and sadly be prepared to use it.

Sorry long winded rant.

GIDEON BURDICK (Local emergency responder):

Our local ambulance is staffed 24/7 by volunteer EMT's. If you've been pondering how to get involved and don't want to mess with the whole “it's hot” side of fire/rescue, this is the first step towards joining our department!

You can contact Theresa Gowan: 707.467.1048 or tgowan@mendocino.edu at the college

OR!…

Imma throw Clay under the bus. Clay runs our EMS program here in Anderson Valley; call the fire house and ask for him if you have specific questions about volunteering locally. 707-895-2020.

MR. BAUTISTA is teaching a Viticulture class at AVHS. Today was the first practice of the Grape Vine Pruning team. It has been many many years since AVHS has had a vine pruning team. The team worked with Norman Kobler, an alumni of the AVHS Ag Dept and a past vine pruning team member. The team is learning how to prune quickly and correctly.

The team will be traveling to a number of CDEs (Career Development Events) to compete in vine pruning after winter break.

The continued support of the community is making this team happen.

Thank you to Norman working with the team.

Thank you to Atlas Vineyard Management for donating $2000 in support of the team's travel expenses.

Thank you to the Anderson Valley Lions Club for donating $500 to help buy the equipment the team needs.

Our FFA members are so excited!

(Beth Swehla)

BILL KIMBERLIN

This is my friend Nick, I was able to have him and his wife up to Boonville last summer. They are both paleoanthropologists at the University of Indiana and have their own research center there called, "The Stone Age Institute" of which I am on the advisory board.

I think that in order to answer the three most important questions of mankind, which are…"who are we, where did we come from, and why are we here?", we must study early man. For the most part paleoanthropology has now answered those questions.

PS. The allegations in the indictment of Donald Trump for conspiring to overturn the election of 2020 represent the American Founders’ nightmare. A key concern of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton was that demagogues would incite mobs and factions to defy the rule of law, overturn free and fair elections and undermine American democracy. “The only path to a subversion of the republican system of the Country is, by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1790. “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity,” Hamilton warned, “he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

PETIT TETON FARM

Open Mon-Sat 9-4:30, Sun 12-4:30. Right now we have sungold and heirloom tomatoes along with the large inventory of jams, pickles, soups, hot sauces, apple sauces, and drink mixers made from everything we grow. We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from our perfectly raised pigs and cows, as well as stewing hens and eggs. Squab is also available at times. Contact us for what's in stock at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com

THE LATE MARK REISNER'S posthumously published warning, "A Dangerous Place: California's Unsettling Fate," is a brusque reminder that most Californians have settled "where they shouldn't have," with some 80 percent of the state's population now teetering atop active seismic zones -- earth that wants to move.

BUT THIS LITTLE BOOK goes beyond the usual Chicken Little routine about earthquakes, familiar to any West Coast kid schooled in the basics of subduction and lurching continental plates. Reisner, who died of cancer in 2000 at the age of 51 before finishing the manuscript for "A Dangerous Place," made the history and politics of water in the arid West into a page-turning narrative for non-hydrologists with his 1986 opus "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water."

IN HIS FINAL WORK, Reisner links the prospect of the Big One hitting the Bay Area or L.A. to the staggering network of dams and levees that bring water hundreds of miles to California's sprawling urban centers (and also keep water from flooding the Central Valley's rich farmlands). When the plates of the earth shift, so does all that water, and that great sucking sound you heard is the echoing of this well-worn truth -- nature abhors a vacuum. In a 7.2 quake, Reisner fears not only for the thousands of lives likely to be lost in the collapse of bridges, unreinforced masonry buildings and cheaply built retail stores. He's worried about the state's whole way of life, which is balanced precariously on its improbable water supply. "If the contrived flow of water should somehow just stop, California's economy, which was worth about a trillion dollars as the new millennium dawned, would implode like a neutron star," he writes.

I THINK SYLVIA BARTLEY'S collection of local earthquake recollections is still available from local libraries. It's called “The 1906 earthquake on California's North Coast: a collection of the reminiscences of survivors and the scientific reports that followed.” Published in 2006 by the Fort Bragg-Mendocino Coast Historical Society and the Mendocino County Museum, I found this interesting little book at the Mendocino County Museum in Willits.

LILA ROHMER'S is one of several Valley recollections of the memorable 1906 event recorded by Mrs. Bartley: “I remember the 1906 earthquake. We were still living in Boonville. My father was out milking the cow and he said it shook the cow from one side of the corral and him to the other. He had quite a time getting to the house. When he got to the house, Mama had got all three of us girls into one bed because she couldn't get us outdoors. Here she was hovering over the three little girls. The thing I remember the most was lying there in bed with Mama trying to protect us and the bricks on the fireplace shaking loose outside and hitting the roof. Of course we were terrified!”

MONTE BLOYD REMEMBERED: “The Indians had a dam built out of willows at Grassy Flat on the Navarro River to trap fish. They made the dam like baskets with the sticks pointing out so the fish could swim down but couldn't swim back. When the earthquake came in 1906 they left. Big rocks came out of the mountains and landed in the river and the Indians stepped out and never did come back. They disappeared after the earthquake. It shook for years afterward. It shook the squirrels right out of the trees!”

MAURICE TINDALL, a near contemporary of Lila Rohmer and Monte Bloyd, and all three more of the 19th century than the 20th, told me that he was 16 when the Big One struck. Tindall said he was at a hunting camp up on Signal Ridge, awake and on his feet when, in the early light, he felt everything move at once and, looking east down into the Anderson Valley, he said the forests were violently swaying, but in unison, like a vast kelp bed in an underwater sea.

I READ SOMEWHERE the speculation that the earth is like a cracked boiled egg with the entire globe's earthquake faults connected, however tenuously.

THE ALL-TIMER was the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–12, a series of three large earthquakes that occurred near New Madrid, Missouri, between December 1811 and February 1812. It was said that one of the three was so great it caused the mighty Mississippi to run backwards for much of a day. There were thousands of aftershocks, of which 1,874 were large enough to be felt in Louisville, Kentucky, about 190 miles (300 km) away. The number of lives lost from the earthquakes remains unknown; however, scholars note that the number was probably not great, because the region had only a sparse rural population.

SAD SIGHT on Highway 128 last week. A bearded crazy man, probably at the end of prolonged crank run, maybe 30, wrapped in an overcoat, trailing a blanket, resembling Rasputin, talking to himself, walking rapidly towards Boonville from the area of the gravel pits south of town. He'd walk into the middle of the road, back to margins at the sound of approaching traffic. The County Jail is full of these guys, and if it weren't for the Sheriff's Department most of them would be dead.