ADAM GASKA on reduced wine grape harvest:
No shocker there. There are a lot of unpicked grapes. Lots of vines getting yanked, some vineyards getting mothballed for a season or two waiting to see what happens. Even for people that picked, many were squeezed down on price.
It's going to be bad the next few years and it doesn't seem like it will fully recover. We will just produce less.
ONE AFTERNOON, as a cruel late summer wind drove a dense fog down California Street in The City, I hopped on the Muni 44 to get across the park where I would catch the N-Judah for the ballpark. Don’t believe the naysayers. Muni gets you anywhere you might want to go in San Francisco. I had my Giants ticket and I had my lunch, three VietCong rice balls I got for less than a buck each from the Korean lady at 7th Avenue and California. The 44’s door is open, the driver, a Chinese guy, behind the wheel. It’s a safe assumption, ordinarily, that a bus with open doors and a driver behind the wheel is in service. “No! No!” the driver shouted as if I’d pulled the pin on a fragment grenade and was about to lob it at him. “No power! Get off!” A couple of years ago I had a similar encounter, that one at the foot of Market as I tried to board a fully operable Number 2 Clement. That afternoon, the driver was just sitting there, doors open, engine idling, recreationally power-tripping me and a subsequent parade of old ladies and their shopping bags, enjoying telling us to get off the bus while he plumply sat there in his Muni uniform. The afternoon I’m telling you about, though, the batteries on the bus really had died, but the driver’s English, as I was to discover, wasn’t good enough to explain the prob so he’d resorted to command mode. “Get off bus!” I retreated into the wind and the fog, as did several more thwarted travelers, but a pair of elderly Chinese women, the ultimate in pure, immovable human force fields, climbed aboard, and there followed a high decibel exchange in Chinese. The old ladies were reasonably demanding that they be allowed to sit down out of the wind whether or not the bus was mobile. Their indignant demands continued for several minutes. They were seated and not about to disembark. The driver yelled back at the old ladies, and every time he did they double-teamed him. He seemed to wince a couple of times as they zapped him in their mutual tongue, which sounded like the Frisco-prevalent Cantonese. I’m sure the old ladies peppered the driver with all kinds of Confucian reminders having to do with the traditional Chinese respect for old age, and didn’t he have a mother? What I wouldn’t have given for a translation! I recalled a slur I’d had translated overseas. “Frog-humping son of a bitch.” The three of them were still yelling at each other when a back-up 44 pulled up. The black woman driving it couldn’t help but hear the beef. “What’s up?” I explained the situation as I interpreted it. She approached the Chinese driver. “You’ve got to remember,” she told him, “that you’re a human being before you’re a bus driver.” The two old Chinese women, as they climbed down the dead bus launched a parting dual salvo at the driver, now thoroughly defeated and looking it, and we all climbed on the operable 44. Four hours later the Giants had won 4-2, Tony Bennett had left his heart up on Nob Hill, and the whole city seemed happy.
MUSK. I don't think the guy is wearing well, but he's all of a piece with the rest of Batman-quality villains gnawing away at the crumbling foundations our doomed country. But then I didn't think Trump would survive, and I thought that well before his statement on national television that Haitian immigrants were eating America's household pets. It's possible that a guy that wacky can be president? Yup, I saw it myself. I was certain Trump was so obviously defective that not even the remedial readers would go for him, and here we are with Musk and Trump successfully, so far, carrying out the coup the American fascisti have dreamed of for many years.
SO FAR. But the counter-coup will begin as soon as the weather warms up. Trump has seriously estranged forces far more numerous than his Maga legions, and what an interesting summer we'll have.
THE FOX NEWS guy in charge of the Defense Department was roundly criticized this week for saying what has been obvious with Putin's war on Ukraine from the beginning: Russia will keep the areas of Ukraine it's occupied for more than ten years, and Ukraine won't be able to join NATO which, you historians out there will recall, was supposed to be a temporary construct to keep Russia from swallowing Europe after World War Two. The Fox News Guy revealed his bargaining chips before the ceasefire negotiations began, but everyone knew what they were anyway. Then the vice president criticized Europeans for their lack of commitment to free speech, a har de har hot one coming from the guys who just banned AP for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
THE LOSS of faith in the media (and government) was solidified in the fragged American brain every time Biden tottered out to slur-stumble through a teleprompter address. Media nevertheless treated him as if he was all systems go when it was obvious he was ga-ga. “Damn! If they lie about what we can see with our own eyes isn't true, they're lying about everything else, too.”
TRUMP'S election was then inevitable when Biden's handlers shoved Kamala up front in Biden's place, with the Democrat puppeteers ignoring the price of eggs while they trotted out the daughter of the most evil figure (so far) in American history, Liz Cheney, as if that non-coup would cause the Magas to desert their orange totem. (Mendo's Democrats, natch, are throwing a fundraising costume party in a few weeks to make sure we get more of the above.)
IF ALL POLITICS is local, how come the comment lines are clogged with discussions of national and international affairs when right here in Mendo we have a board of supervisors who just paid a “facilitator” $5,000 for an day's presentation to their slack-jawed, credulous selves while our DA burns through public money in a conjured pursuit of a County Auditor simply because she challenged his attempt to write off a holiday debauch as a “training”? The DA's fake court case then stalls in an 18-month-long preliminary hearing because the judge says she's gotta go on vacation or she won't get her reservation money back! Multiply this minor league swindling and millions of the fed up opt for Trump.
SF CHRONICLE: “Mission Bay lacks most of the qualities San Franciscans tend to celebrate in their neighborhoods.There are no colorful Victorians, cable cars, steep hills, funky mom-and-pop corner stores, family-owned pho spots or burrito. It doesn’t have alleys lined with colorful murals or music spilling out of cozy corner bars. It’s flat and much of the architecture feels boxy and institutional. But, 20 years after UCSF opened its community center and student housing building, the neighborhood has emerged as one of San Francisco’s most successful redevelopment experiments.”
IN LIVING FACT, and I speak as a guy who has spent lots of time at Mission Bay over the past year, the old Frisco of deserted warehouses was majorly superior to this soul-less panorama of Stalinist high rises, but the medical complex in its spaciousness and ease of accommodation is radically superior to tired, teeming old Parnassus, even with its panoramic views of The City.
I WAS AT MISSION BAY just last week for an appointment with my ace speech therapist, Erik Steele, and my surgeon, Dr. Ryan, the surfer-looking dude who installed the neat little hole in my throat in pursuit of the cancer that was choking me to death. I managed to croak, “NetFlix” and Erik went away happy. Then a young female doctor appeared for a look and to say, “Dr. Ryan is running late.” I'll say. For a noon appointment I left without seeing him at 1:40. No hard feelings and total understanding on my part that a highly skilled guy like him has tons of more urgent priorities than a worn out old beatnik.
LEO NOMELLINI
Nomellini was an Italian-American professional football player and professional wrestler. He played college football for the Minnesota Gophers and was selected by the San Francisco 49ers in the first round of the 1950 NFL draft. He played 14 seasons as a defensive tackle in the NFL, all of them with the 49ers, playing his first three years as an offensive tackle as well. Nomellini was a seven-time tag team champion in wrestling for two different tag teams. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1969 and to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1977. “He was as strong as three bulls,” said 49ers teammate Joe Perry. “He'd slap you on the back and knock you twenty feet.”
THIS MENTION of Leo Nomellini reminds of my childhood when I was a close neighbor of the Great 49er.
Leo ‘The Lion’ Nomellini, star tackle for the 49ers from 1950-1963 died of cancer at age 76, October 22, 2000, at Stanford Hospital. Several of his football friends contributed tributes and anecdotes for a couple of pretty good Bay Area obits for the big bruiser the following day. We had our own. It happens that Mr. Nomellini was a down-the-street neighbor of ours when I was a kid growing up in Palo Alto from 1953 to 1955. Mr. Nomellini was born in Italy and grew up in Chicago. He was a tough but friendly man who was well known to the neighborhood as the big 49er lineman down the street who always waved, smiled at, and occassionally chatted with the star-struck kids who rode by on their bikes. These were the days of hand-powered push mowers. Nomellini, who stood 6-feet 3-inches and weighed upwards of 270 pounds, impressed us kids by being able to stand on one side of his front lawn and give his push-mower a giant shove. It would somehow mow 20 or so feet of grass before it came to a stop at the other side of Nomellini’s front lawn. Nomellini would then stroll across the new-mown strip, turn the mower around, give the mower a couple of short pushes to catch whatever it had missed on its prior one-shove dash across the lawn, then shove the mower back across the lawn again, and again, and again in single bursts, back and forth, until it was thoroughly mowed. By the time he was done, Nomellini usually had ten or twelve awestruck kids standing around watching and applauding each shove. He didn’t pay us much attention though — when mowing, the future Hall of Famer was all business. — Mark Scaramella
SITTING in a bar the Scotsman says, “As good as this bar is, I still prefer the pubs back home. In Glasgow there’s a wee place called McTavish’s. The landlord goes out of his way for the locals. When you buy four drinks, he’ll buy the fifth drink.” “Well, Angus,” said the Englishman, “At my local in London, the Red Lion, the barman will buy you your third drink after you buy the first two.” “Ahhh, dat’s nothin’,” said the Irishman, “back home in my favorite pub, the moment you set foot in the place, they’ll buy you a drink, then another, all the drinks you like, actually. Then, when you’ve had enough drinks, they’ll take you upstairs and see that you gets laid, all on the house!” The Englishman and Scotsman were suspicious of the claims. The Irishman swore every word was true. “Did this actually happen to you?” asked the Englishman. “Not meself, personally, no,” admitted the Irishman, “but it did happen to me sister quite a few times.”
JOHN STEINBECK saw the Magas coming back in 1969: “America suffers from a subtle and deadly illness. Immorality doesn’t describe it, nor does lack of integrity or dishonesty. What’s been lost are the rules — rules concerning life, limb, and property, rules governing deportment, manners, conduct, and rules defining dishonesty, dishonor, misconduct, and crime. Americans are like highly bred, trained, and specialized bird dogs cooped up in a kennel rather than allowed to hunt. In a short time the dogs become quarrelsome, fat, lazy, cowardly, dirty, and utterly disreputable and worthless, and all because their purpose is gone and with it rules and disciplines that once made them beautiful and good.”
TIBURCIO VASQUEZ was, for a time, the best known outlaw in America and, as described in a fascinating biography called ‘Bandito’ by San Francisco-based John Boessenecker, Vasquez was certainly among the most active highway robbers in America’s flush history of banditry.
Vasquez was a Californio, that doomed race of Spanish-descended Californians who began arriving in the state when it was a northern frontier of Mexico, some of them former conquistadores who rode north to what became San Francisco with Junipero Serra while Serra himself, ever the ascetic, walked the whole way from Mexico City.
It’s always striking how fast our history is moving, especially when you consider that Father Serra staggered into the Bay Area a mere 224 years ago. Serra’s string of missions comprised California for the next 70 years or so until the missions were secularized, i.e., became the private property of connected Mexicans when California became the native home of several thousand rural aristocrats presiding over vast ranchos from San Diego to, of all places, Hopland here in Mendocino County, the whole of it casually administered out of Mexico.
The brief generations of the “Californios” ancestral home was Monterey, which is where Vasquez and, earlier, General Vallejo, were born. The Californios, and their gracefully vigorous rancho lives were overwhelmed by the Gold Rush of 1850 when the Californios aristocracy was dispossessed by the gold-deranged hordes. By then California had been formally annexed by the United States.
Vasquez was one of many dispossessed Californios who spent the rest of his life dispossessing Yankee travelers of whatever valuables they had on them, right down to their boots.
The bandido’s biggest heist occurred when he and his gang robbed an entire town near what is now Fresno.
In between forays holding up stage coaches, rural stores, drinking establishments, and the occasional Anglo whorehouse, and in between stays at San Quentin where he organized an all-time record four break-outs, Vasquez, revered by Californios and Mexicans as a Robin Hood figure, depended on remote settlements of his admirers to hide him from the law, what little law there was from 1850 to 1870 or so. (Lynch law was more prevalent than the courtroom type.)
The man had flair. He read poetry and even wrote some. He also sang his way into the arms of many women, married and single.
‘Bandito’ is a lush picture of California as it was from the Gold Rush through the full establishment of a coherent state, which only really commenced about 1880. Vasquez, incidentally, hid out for a while at the Feliz ranch based in Hopland, and there’s an account of him being chased into the hills above Anderson Valley in 1865 by the legendary Mendocino County lawman, Doc Standley.
I was pleased to see that Boessenecker’s fascinating biography of Vasquez is dedicated to the late Jack Reynolds, who died in Willits many years ago. Jack’s late wife, Rosalie, is also cited by the author for her help with his marvelous book. She is fondly remembered by many in the Anderson Valley where she lived for many years following the death of her husband.
The author says the Reynolds, retired from the antiquarian book business, were of huge assistance to him in locating the source material for his project. Boessenecker is clearly a formidable researcher. He has tracked down people, towns and even two-shack hamlets deep in the Coast Range that haven’t existed for a hundred and fifty years. This book is highly recommended for anyone interested in the true history of the Golden State.
BILL HURD of Reidsville, North Carolina, writes: “In Derrick Jensen’s book, ‘Endgame,’ he reports a quote from B. Traven which appeared in the August 18, 2004 edition of the AVA, perhaps on page 8. Would it be possible to obtain from you the exact reference to B. Traven’s work from which the quote was taken? I first became aware of Traven when I shipped as a deckhand on a small, Danish freighter out of Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 40 years ago. One of the few books in English in the ship’s library was a tattered copy of ‘The Death Ship.’ Later I read and came to love ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.’ This quote might have been from ‘The Death Ship’ but I don’t remember it: ‘Whether it takes me four weeks or 14 hours to get to Hamburg from Munich is less important to my happiness and to my humanity than the question: How many men who yearn for sunlight just as I do must be imprisoned in factories, their healthy limbs and lungs sacrificed in order to build a locomotive? For me the only important thing is: The more swiftly our thriving economy is brought to ruin, the more pitilessly the last remnant of industry is wiped out, the sooner people will have enough to eat and have a small measure of that happiness to which every man has a right’.”
The AVA’s erudite readership will surely be able to tell Mr. Hurd which of Traven’s books this quote came from. We grouped on it here at the office, preliminarily concluding, as The Major put it, “on a best guess basis,” that the quote comes from Traven’s “The White Rose,” in which, we vaguely recalled, there’s a reference to a trip to Munich.
I WOULDN'T particularly recommend it as a peaceful walk, but every few years I walk across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sausalito, then ferry back to The City from that baubled little town, thinking about how i remembered it as a coherent little town when we fished off the piers with drop lines we bought for a dollar at the drug store.
UNPARALLELED viewshed aside, the bridge part of the walk is unpleasantly noisy from the vehicles streaming ceaselessly past only a few feet away. In its unique way, the bridge walk has become hazardous because of the two-wheeled lycra lunatics weaving in and out of the foot traffic on their $5,000 bicycles. Doctors and lawyers and other high-end compulsives I thought to myself, as one of these hurtling man-boys startled a little old lady almost over the side mid-span as he brushed past her at about 30 miles an hour, his emaciated form in shrink-wrapped black, the whole of him covered with advertisements for imported this and imported thats.
IT'S A RELIEF to get off the bridge and commence the trash-strewn mile or so walk into contemporary Sausalito's two miles of bad art, cappuccinos and pizza slices. But like I said, the magnificence of the vistas redeem the littered close-ups.
ONE MEMORABLE DAY, the first water borne trip of the Sausalito morning back to the city, a bargain at six bucks, landed me at Fisherman's Wharf from where I trudged up Columbus and over to Grant to meet my friend Nadya Williams for coffee and communism at the Cafe Trieste. Well, better not put it that starkly, but Nadya's an old friend, a long-time lefty who also splits time between the Mendocino Coast where she used to live in Elk, and where her children still live, and San Francisco.
I HADN'T BEEN in the Trieste in years. I tried to get in years ago when I happened to spot Steve Schwartz haranguing a table of old beatniks. Steve has since transgendered himself and now goes by Lulu LaFlamme. I wanted to get close enough to the pre-Lulu Schwartz to inspire one of his inimitable denunciations of me and my newspaper that he used to write to me in Boonville. With his buzz saw voice and the passion he brings to it, there's nothing like getting it from the man himself. But the place was stuffed, and I couldn't get close enough to Schwartz to set him off. He was a communist when I first encountered him attempting to disrupt a Trotskyist's presentation by Bertrand Russell's secretary, Ralph Schoenman, at the CP's old headquarters on Market Street.
MY NEPHEW, Robert Mailer, was a coffee jock at Trieste where he frequently jousted with the pre-Lulu Schwartz. When Schwartz learned of our relationship, he said to me, “I guess that makes you the monkey's uncle.” Schwartz is very smart and can be very funny, and one of the great characters of lost San Francisco.
ABANDONING the city and the left, Schwartz moved to the East Coast where he became a social friend of Christopher Hitchens, whom he called “Chris,” and also became a Muslim, calling himself Ali bin Babble or something like that. I almost fell out of my chair one night when Ali bin Schwartz appeared on CNN in full desert Arab mufti, introduced as an expert on Wahhabi Islam!
THE TRIESTE that afternoon I met Nadya was not only uncrowded at 11am, the only person there besides the staff was the poet Jack Hirschman, an artist more appreciated in other countries than here, but then that's an old, old story with American artists, isn't it?
There are still lots of good writers around the Bay Area, but North Beach is kind of wan anymore, more like Sausalito, unfortunately, than the stimulating bohemia it once was. These days, argument most places is regarded as bad form or, worse, “negativity,” and anyway most of the people you find in bohemian coffee shops like Trieste are conversing with their telephones not each other.
NADYA appeared and we enjoyed an hour’s gossip before I headed for the Ferry Building, pausing to pick up a loaf at the Acme Bread Company, the only business in the building that offers the real deal at a reasonable price, and one of the only places in all the city where you can find good bread but not quite as good as they make right here in Boonville at the Boonville General Store.
AS A KID I thought bread was Wonder Bread. Then I read Henry Miller's liberating essay on the staff of life and I haven't downed a slice of Wonder since. Outside, at the north end of the Ferry Building, and enjoying the smell of the fresh wheat loaf coming from my backpack as I contemplated the passing parade, a middle-aged couple, tourists from Michigan, they said, pointed at Coit Tower and asked me, “What's that?” I explained that a wealthy spinster named Lily Coit had always loved firemen. She hung around the station with the boys who sometimes even let her go out on runs with them. But Miss Coit's tightly corseted times being what they were, and Freudian interpretations of human behavior and symbols not much known, the repressed Miss Coit, her longing for her heroes unconsummated, had left this unconsciously phallic memorial to, well, the persistent upthrusts of her restless imagination, you could say.
MOST HISTORIANS will tell you that the tower is merely Lily Coit's tribute to the firemen of her time, but San Franciscans know better. “Interesting,” the Michigan man said as his skeptical wife, who hadn't bothered to look away as she rolled her eyes at my explanation, pulled him on their way.
https://wherearethosemorgans.com/coit-tower-san-francisco/
I WATCHED a street guy rummage badger-like through a trash can, throwing its contents into the air when a clean shaven young man in a black leather jacket walked toward me with that telltale white guy's bouncing jailhouse gait. He brandished a stack of computer disks. “Sir, me and my sister, sir, are selling our music, sir, and for a small donation you can have it, sir.”
WHITE GUYS who've had overly many encounters with law enforcement tend to overdo their “sirs.” I gave him the four singles I had. In black magic marker my disk was inscribed, “The Fontenheads.” So, a lot of musicians can't spell, so what? At least the kid was trying to make an honest buck. Anyway, for a mere four skins I just might have in hand the next Sonny and Cher. I just might be helping birth a star! There were also two 916 area code telephone numbers magic markered on to the disk. I watched him sell three more discs to passersby.
WHEN I got back to Boonville, I put the thing into my computer. There was nothing on it. I laughed. The kid was selling blank disks. For the hell of it, and just to be sure I'd been scammed, I called the 916 numbers he'd written on his blanks to further legitimize them for average suckers like me. At the first 916 number, an old guy answered. He didn't know anybody selling anything in San Francisco. I laughed. The other 916 number had been disconnected. Ha-ha. I got to laugh again. I'd been had, but I can't remember having had that much fun for four dollars and, taken as a whole, it had been a good day.
ADAM GASKA:
The Mendocino County Board of Supervisors voted not to financially support the building of Coyote Dam back in 1950 primarily because coastal supervisors didn’t want to pay for a project that would only support inland water supply. People in Ukiah and south to Hopland organized a property tax measure to fund bonds to pay for a portion of construction to get some water rights. The community of Redwood Valley didn’t support the property tax because they didn’t see how they would benefit not being located below where the dam would be built and didn’t see how they would pump water over the hill to Redwood Valley. 25 years later, Redwood Valley borrowed $8 million to build a water system, treatment plant and install pumps to “pump water over the hill.”
Most recently, former supervisor Gjerde balked at the County financially supporting any efforts to support efforts to save the PVP as he felt the cost should be paid for by water users. In the 3rd district, there is also a good amount of support to decommission the dams hoping that it will help in the recovery of salmonids.
Currently we are in a similar situation. The County doesn’t have a stand alone water agency to focus on County water issues in large part because the different regions of the County are focused on their own issues and are reluctant to support each others interests when projects don’t directly benefit them. My feeling is that we need to work together to have a stronger voice at the state and federal level in order to increase our chances of getting funding for water projects.
MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: My uncle, Joe Scaramella, was elected Fifth District Supervisor as one of a four-man “reform” slate in 1952, two years after Mr. Gaska says the Supervisors made the fateful decision to not put up much money for Coyote Dam. He served as Fifth District Supervisor until his retirement in 1970. As I remember his remarks on the subject, Joe Scaramella said that there were other opportunities after that 1950 vote to contribute to the dam construction and even then Joe Scaramella was the only supervisor who voted to contribute more. Joe Scaramella told me that his fellow Supervisors simply didn’t think there was a need for much more water than they already had access to considering how much money was involved. They thought they could meet future needs without Lake Mendocino. Joe Scaramella himself was somewhat torn on the question because Lake Mendocino would have (and did) take a large number of taxable ag parcels off the County tax rolls. But nevertheless he was in favor of contributing more than the other four supervisors would support.
FRONTIERS OF FREE ENTERPRISE: The cheese & cracker sample table at Safeway, Ukiah, was once described as an “instructional tasting event” where a pleasant woman was available to “instruct” shoppers on the diff between Velveeta and Smoked Gouda.
ASSEMBLY BILL 605 allowed “free beer, wine and liquor tastings inside large supermarkets and large liquor outlets,” but with this caveat: “An instructional tasting event on the subject of wine or distilled spirits shall be limited to not more than three tastings per person per day. A single tasting of distilled spirits shall not exceed one-fourth of one ounce and a single tasting of wine shall not exceed one ounce. An instructional tasting event on the subject of beer shall be limited to not more than the tasting of eight ounces of beer per person per day.”
CONTEMPORARY AMERICA, as described by former governor of Pennsylvania Ed Rendell: “My biggest beef is that this is part of what’s happened in this country. We’ve become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butts in everything.” The governor was upset that an Eagles-Vikes football game was moved inside because of a snowstorm. “If this was China, do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium; they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down.”
“MR. WALLER ordered lunch with the care of one to whom lunch is no slight matter. Few workers in the City do regard lunch as a trivial affair. It is the keynote of their day. It is an oasis in a desert of ink and ledgers. Conversation in a City office deals, in the morning, with what one is going to have for lunch, and in the afternoon, with what one has had for lunch.” — P.G. Wodehouse, 1910; from ‘Psmith in the City’
THERE are “spirit rocks” at various sites around the county, mute reminders that the native peoples managed to live here without disfiguring it beyond these ancient signboards. The spirit rock at Cloverdale is a registered archeological site sequestered from vandals behind a formidable fence not far from the Russian River. The spirit rock at the headwaters of Feliz Creek west of Hopland, east of Anderson Valley, is not easily accessed, fortunately, although vandals are determined and resourceful, especially when they think there's a sale to be made. Archeologists say both ancient monuments go back at least ten thousand years. The spirit rock at Feliz is more of a boulder than a rock, huge and covered with symbols carved into it. Feliz Creek, at Hopland, where we see it as we pass over it on 101, is a desolate, battered, lunar-like streambed that comes briefly to life only after a big rain. But at its headwaters deep in the hills between the Anderson Valley and Hopland, Feliz is a lush, Edenic stream, replete with landlocked summer time trout, flowing through a large meadow bordered by acorn-bearing old oak trees, the whole of it nourishing generations of Indians who lingered there long enough to chisel their forever presence into the big rock.
SOME YEARS AGO, Supervisor Pinches invited me and several interested friends to view a spirit rock Pinches said rested deep in the Eel River Canyon but accessible through his place, which itself is a very long haul east from Highway 101. The supervisor led us down to the abandoned rail tracks of the long-gone Northwestern Pacific RR, then left us with directions to the site while he, in the hundred degree heat, retreated back up the hill to his ranch house in his air conditioned truck. We trudged north along the tracks until it occurred to me that we just might be on a snipe hunt, my first since I was seven or so when a cousin left me holding a paper bag over a hole in the ground waiting to trap the creature that never appeared and didn't exist. But we soon forded the hip-deep Eel and there they were, cryptic signs carved tentatively, it seemed to us, into the stone on a boulder beside the river at an unsustaining juncture of vertical hillsides and rushing water. Why would the Indians have gathered here? The abundance of the Feliz Creek headwaters, in contrast to Pinches' alleged Eel River spirit rock, made Feliz an obvious place to settle in. When white settlers were hunting Indians like deer circa 1850, remnant inland tribes had fled to the hills west of Hopland, east of Yorkville, and may have also sought earlier sanctuary at the bountiful headwaters of Feliz when the Spanish soldiers attached to the missions at San Rafael and Sonoma rode north to capture Indians for work and salvation. Unaffiliated slave traders also beseiged the Indians as early as 1840, carrying off children to sell in the Sacramento Valley. From the time of the missions until today, Indians are beleagured, a huge irony considering that the rest of us in Mendocino County are a mere 200 years old, and our spirit rock is State Street, Ukiah.
I think this spirit rock is from Nevada but similar in inscriptions to the spirit rocks of Mendocino County.
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Buffy St. Marie. A sad thing, really. All that wonderful, powerful music, and her life was based on a lie.
She performed in Covelo, must’ve been twenty years ago or so. Folks were so excited, she was idolized. And the concert was fantastic.
Now…I think a lot of people feel betrayed and ripped off. Rightly so. Shame on her.
[2] It is a constitutional crisis when an unelected plutocrat unilaterally takes control of the purse strings constitutionally defined as belonging to Congress. It is a constitutional crisis when federal agencies funded by the legislative branch are being shut down by the executive.
It is a constitutional crisis when unjustly fired appointees to the National Labor Relations Board know that, in exercising their right to bring their case before the judiciary, they may imperil the nation because of the Supreme Court’s ideological alignment with the wishes of the president.
[3] I too have to resist the urge to turn away, turn off the TV or turn the page of the newspaper to something soothing and frivolous instead of cringing in horror at President Trump flouting the Constitution, practicing open racism and misogyny, and promoting crackpot 19th-century ideas about social Darwinism and imperial power.
I’m 80, and joining a march on Washington, as suggested by another letter writer, is not an option. Besides, this administration is capable of ignoring marchers or, worse, attacking them. But I have to do something.
Here’s what I have decided: I can contribute to the campaigns of moderates. I can donate to organizations that defend or care for immigrants. I can write letters to the editor and to members of Congress. I can subscribe to news media that challenge Trumpism
I can vote, no matter how seemingly inconsequential an election is. I can volunteer to do whatever I am capable of. I can speak up when I hear MAGA nonsense. Anything is better than doing nothing. We have to keep the moral lights on.
[4] Everything about health-care in America slouches in disrepute and ignominy, from the doctors hostage to their private equity taskmasters to the faked drug trials at FDA to the deliberate data mismanagement at CDC to the grant-and-kickback game at NIH and NIAID, to the hellscape of medical insurance fraud, to the revolving door between pharma and government. Yet just about every single red-blooded American is trained to think and say, “Canada has socialized health care! Commie bad! Commie bad! U-S-A! U-S-A!” like a bird-brained parrot.
[5] Given that atheism has increased with human wealth and power and prosperity, we can say that some people who adopt this stance are doing so from a perspective of historically unusual comfort, in a society that fears pain and death as special evils in part because it has contrived to hide them carefully away. And such a society, precisely because of its comforts and its death-denial, might be uniquely prone to overrating the unbearability of certain forms of suffering, and thereby underrating the possibility that a good God could permit them.
[6] Wait! I may be wrong about “progressives” today.
To me, American progressives represented the view back in the late 1800s thru the mid 1900s that the benefits of burgeoning science and technology should be harnessed for to improve peoples' lives, not to make the very wealthy even wealthier.
I associate free public schools, a 40-hour workweek, public health, standards on food quality and drugs, workplace safety, with progressives. Laissez-faire would not provide these outcomes. These were noble ideals that had to be fought for, which many of today's “conservatives” take for granted and have forgotten.
Today's progressives, certainly their leadership in the Democrat party, celebrate deviate behavior, and government coercion. And they do that at the behest of big capital, that owns them.
Is big capital monolithic? Perhaps not, some of it appears to support Trump. Trump himself is a money manipulator, but he's found a niche promoting many (certainly NOT all) common sense policies that appeal to people who work, pay taxes, raise families. But still, given a “choice”, Trump's base chooses the lesser of the evils. Time will tell if Trump disappoints them, and by how much.
[7] Today, it seems as if Americans cannot ignore social media or the telephones that distribute social media, even though they are addictive, bad for the people who use them and bad for those of us who have to be around those who use them. A significant industry has been erected to perpetuate, promote and defend their use. I suspect that 70 years from now, we will look back on social media in a similar manner: a toxic relic visible mainly in old shows from this time.
[8] If the worldwide reaction to covid was “let's not do anything at all because this is just a bad flu year” millions of lives would have been saved and the economy wouldn't have been destroyed as we racked up trillions in unnecessary debt. You do know that every year in the northern hemisphere, death rates rise dramatically among the very old, very obese and very unhealthy right? Trump's first thoughts were correct. While it is true that his ego won't allow him to admit “Warp Speed” was a disaster, his first thoughts on how to deal with the issue were correct. The “pandemic” was primarily fake numbers scammed with over-cycled PCR test data, deaths in the general population increased from ridiculous and harmful medical protocols and all the theatre around shutdowns, masking, plexiglass, social distancing, etc. That doesn't include the useless but dangerous shots. If you don't wake up soon you are going to be wandering around muttering “What is wrong with all these people. How can 99.9999% of the population be wrong? Am I the only sane one who really knows?'
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