A FEW weeks ago, the cops and a platoon of rescuers were called out to look for an older woman who'd managed to get lost in Jackson State Forest while mushroom hunting. She was out overnight. Not to be too harsh about it, but anybody, local or not, who manages to get lost in Jackson State, should not be allowed to go anywhere unattended. It's not possible drunk or sober to get lost in Jackson State because you're never more than a mile from a road, or the sight or sound of your fellow human-type beings. Another person managed to become completely befuddled last weekend in the vicinity of “1.25 Ten Mile Road.” Yo! Lost people! The moss always grows on the north side of the tree, which would be to your left. No, no. Your other left.
20-20 HAD called me, of all people, to drive to Fort Bragg to comment on a famous murder case wherein the vic had shot the chomo. I said No. That's all Fort Bragg needs is me on national television spouting off about a case I know very little about. I did talk with the producer for quite a while after I nominated Lindy Peters to talk about Fort Bragg on the show. Lindy would be great, I said. He's photogenic, he can talk and he knows everybody and everything about the place. I told the producer that I, and my hard-hitting writers, had done lots of Fort Bragg stories over the years but I live an hour away, and anyway I didn't have anything special to offer. To me, I said, Fort Bragg, much as I love the place, is kind of like that old tv show, Twin Peaks, always odd and faintly menacing, with a strong under-current of violence. “Oh!” the producer gasped, “That's perfect! Won't you reconsider?”
THE WAY IT IS. I was trucking back from the ballpark one night about ten, part of the mass of jubilant baseball fans singing their way home along the Embarcadero where the crowd thins, and finally disappears at the Ferry Building, siphoned off into parking lots and street cars along the way. I walked on to the foot of Clay Street to get the 1 California bus to my place on 7th Avenue at the time. That night, a properly brought up young woman at the pedestrian crossing at the Ferry Building asked, “Excuse me, sir. Will you walk with me across the park?” The park is an unlit forty yards to the north of the Vaillancourt sculpture, that jumble of unsightly concrete that looks like a Caltrans rock pile. The brief wooded area is a shortcut from the Ferry Building to the bus stop. There's always a gauntlet of murk-lurks to be run in that unlit space and even, ah, large, relatively fit men like myself are aware that hand-to-hand combat might be necessary to successfully get from the Ferry Building to the bus at the foot of Clay Street. Sure enough, there was an animated crazy guy pacing around muttering to himself, a half dozen winos engaged in a sing-along, and a couple of bums asleep on the benches. No menace except, perhaps, the crazy guy, who glared at us as we passed. And that was it. We arrived safely at the bus stop. “I would have walked up Market and then over to Sacramento to get the bus if you weren't there,” the young woman said, as I simultaneously felt gallant as all heck and aware that if I didn't look like an aged but ambulatory Gabby Hayes she would have considered me as also one more urban menace.
TOMMY WAYNE KRAMER once asked a series of chin-first questions in his weekly column beginning with: “Have you ever visited the Yolla Bolly Wilderness Area? Know anyone who has? Would you go if offered a free trip? For a thousand dollars cash? Do you think anybody in their right mind would go?”
I TRY to get over there for a day hike at least once a year. Whether or not I'm often in my right mind can be debated, but I love the Yollas. For a thousand dollars I'd leave for the Yollas this very minute. I'm happy no one but me and my friends Don and Merril Morris used to go there, careful as we were to stay on the trails to elude the summer drug cartels rumored to have moved in. Fort Bragg and Covelo are my favorite towns, and the Yollas? Well, if you really enjoy getting so far away from contemporary life that you're beyond even its industrial hum, the Yollas are for you, and they come complete with well-kept trails, two little lakes teeming with trout, the untamed stretches of the Eel, and miles and miles of trees, and silence.
A READER sends along an article from an Iowa newspaper describing that state's swine drives of the late 19th century, which reminded me of the stories the late Wayne McGimsey told me of similar drives from Anderson Valley over the hill to Ukiah where the hogs were herded onto southbound trains for the Frisco slaughterhouses, then located in Butcher Town, now Hunter's Point. In the old days, hog and cattle drives from The Valley to the Ukiah rail connection were a common annual occurrence. You are also probably aware that a scant sixty years ago you could get on a train in Fort Bragg and get off a train late the same night in Southern Marin, from where you rode a ferry to the bright lights of San Francisco.
THE YOLLA BOLLIES
Mike Williams:
The Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness is worth the effort to get to. From inland Mendocino County the main access is through Covelo and on up to Indian Dick Station across Balm of Gilead Creek to Upper Glade. For the very hearty continue on to Frying Pan Meadow, the actual headwaters of the Eel River. An easier access point but longer drive is to go out to the valley to Corning turn back west to Paskenta and take the Forest Service road to the Square Lake trailhead. It’s only about a mile and a half to Square Lake where the feel is that of the High Sierra, on the edge of Mt Linn the highest point in the Yolla Bolly, over 8,000 feet. A couple miles farther is Long Lake and connecting trails to the Middle Eel River. Another entry point is to go north to Ruth Lake and then take the Forest Service road south to North Yolla Bolly Lake. This area is over 250,000 acres of remote undeveloped wilderness. You might not see anyone for days, at least that’s the way it was some years ago.
Kirk Vodopals:
A few years back I piled my family into the van and headed out to the Yolla Bollies. Our destination was Balm of Gillead Creek recommended by a friend.
We were heading up the M1 around dusk through a scorched landscape with the occasional burnt out vehicle when my wife turns to me and says nervously, “this is where all the murderers dump the bodies.”
We barreled on in the dark up the ridge about nine miles until they’d had enough of the bumps and the dust. I parked the van at a wide spot and hopped out with the dog to enjoy the stars and a beer. My wife promptly locked the door with her and the girls inside.
Woke up the next morning and, amazingly enough, we were at a (maybe the) trailhead. Hiked two miles down to the creek and found a small but lovely swimming hole. The missus and the girls packed as many slate rocks as they could as we hiked back up the ridge. Never found Balm of Gilead.
Spent one more night on a mosquito infested and warm ridge sipping champagne and eating snacks. Rolled out the next day hearing noises from the engine. Water pump broke in Ukiah. Called a friend and got a ride home. Great trip!
Also did another trip about 20 years ago with some high school friends. Never saw so many rattlesnakes in such a short hike ever. Interesting place!
STEVE HEILIG:
Well, can’t say I quite grasp what y’all talkin’ about poor Bob here [on the AVA comment line], he has always refused all labels, esp. political, but on a more local level here’s a little slice from West Marin, c1973….
Peter Rowan: I had moved to Stinson Beach on the coast, north of San Francisco, where I was reunited with Earth Opera partner David Grisman. David was producing my two younger brothers, Christopher and Lorin, for Columbia Records. Dave and I were starting to jam with Jerry Garcia in what became the bluegrass band, Old & In The Way.
I got a call from Seatrain lyricist, Jim Roberts, over in Bolinas. Bob Dylan had shown up at his door. [He] must have been on a walkabout from life as a rock and roller! Jim said that Bob was looking to replace his favourite guitar, which had been stolen. I had my treasured 1936 Martin 000 Sunburst guitar and [he wanted to know] did I maybe want to sell it to Bob? Well, Bob got on the line and we talked. But I still thought it was a hoax, a prank, a joke on me.
I gave Bob directions how to find my place, Old Sheriff Selmer’s barn-workshop-home. ‘Yeah, ya just follow the Bolinas Lagoon south and turn at the first unpaved road that heads towards the ocean, Stinson Beach. Call from the phone booth right there.’ So he called. ‘Okay, ya see that wooden tower just to your right? Drive up and park in front of it, the big yellow barn. Calle del Ribera. That’s me upstairs in the window!’
I watched the blue van pull up. Out stepped a man in brown corduroy clothes and cap. I watched him find his way and listened to his footsteps on the wooden stairs. In the room was my partner Leslie, and Milan and Mimi Melvin (aka Fariña), just returned from Tibet. We were used to visits from various world travellers and alias members of the Free Mexican Airforce. We waited. Only Bob’s nose entered the doorway, sensing like radar the vibes! I went to greet him, he seemed taller than expected, wearing shades. ‘Someplace we can go?’ he asked quietly. We went downstairs to the empty front room with ocean light filling it. We both were wearing Ray-Ban shades against the glare of the wave-tossed sea outside.
I took the old Martin 000 out of the case and handed it to him. He strummed it gently and hummed a melody. He handed it back and said, ‘Here, you play it.’ Really? So I sang him one of my songs, and asked him for one. He took the guitar and started to sing all the material from the unreleased Blood On The Tracks. We sat there for hours trading songs. The ocean outside with wild-horse waves, the glinting afternoon light reflecting on the old wooden walls of the room. It grew dark, and still the songs came! My brother [Lorin] showed up. It was dark and the candle lit, and still he wore his shades, so I kept mine on! Upstairs was silent, not a shoe scrape. ‘Hey, ya know where Jerry Garcia lives?’ And he went on his way in the blue van …
Late the next day I went up to Garcia’s house and his wife Caroline – [the] ‘Mountain Girl’ – and I were talking. I tapped an ash into a full ashtray and she said, ‘Careful, those butts are Dylan’s cigarettes!’
HARRY MERLO (remember him?) was once named Oregon’s Tree Farmer of the year, 2010 by, ta-da, by the World Forestry Center, founded by Merlo in 1989 about the time ol’ Har was mopping up a broad swathe of Mendoland’s forests. The former CEO of timber goliath Louisiana-Pacific whose cut and run practices in Mendocino County put an end to the local timber industry, Merlo famously said of L-P’s local forests, “It always annoys me to leave anything on the ground when we log our own land. We don’t log to a 10-inch top, we don’t log to an 8-inch top or a 6-inch top. We log to infinity. It’s out there, it’s ours, and we want it all. Now.” Until he died in 2016 at the age of 91, Merlo owned and managed 12,000 acres near LaGrange, Oregon. No clearcuts on Har’s ranch, I bet.
SUPERVISOR JOHN McCOWEN still deserves high marks for pulling an ongoing Brooktrails scam off the Supervisor’s consent calendar early in his tenure as Supervisor. Roughly 2,000 of the 6,000 lots in the Brooktrails subdivision northwest of Willits were never buildable. The lots can’t be connected to sewer and will never have water available to them because the Brooktrails sewage disposal system is maxxed out, as is its available water and, besides, certain blocs of perennially available lots are not “served” by either sewer or water. But the unwitting buy these lots from unscrupulous real estate firms, many on-line, that sell them again and again when their owners, many of whom have bought them sight unseen, cease making payments on them or paying taxes. The County of Mendocino then forecloses for back property taxes, the unscrupulous real estate firms again buy the lots in bulk at auction and again sell them. And the whole show just kept rolling along, the same lots being sold over and over again to annual crops of duped buyers. Mendocino County thus became complicit in the scam by foreclosing on the same unbuildable parcels over and over again, making it seem to the fresh crop of suckers that the lots are viable properties because the County has foreclosed on them and sold them, sold them to the same crooks who had been buying the lots cheap and selling them high for years. Of, say, 70 properties auctioned off by the County, 40 or 50 were in Brooktrails back in the early 2010s. McCowen rightly thought that the County should make sure that the deeds to these turkeys should say that they do not have sewer or water hook-ups available to them.
BACK IN 1996, the County moved to reduce Brooktrails lots to a total of 6,000 with an ultimate goal of 4,000 by combining the eternally unbuildable lots. The company benefiting from the foreclosure racket made a property rights issue out of this commonsense proposal, gulling the easily gulled into believing that the reduction in the number of lots was interfering with the American dream of a home in the country. There are people who believe that there will eventually be a break in the water moratorium, but people who already live in Brooktrails have never been keen on the prospect of 2,000 more neighbors even if water and sewage service magically appears where none has been.
BROOKTRAILS was subdivided in the mid-sixties. The County eventually assumed responsibility for the subdivision’s roads as, old timers believe, some major monkey business qualified those roads as soundly engineered enough to be included in the County system. Ditto for the subdivision’s sewer system. But our information is that one County man was told it would be to his financial benefit if he signed off on the sub-standard Brooktrails road complex and, when he refused, he was fired. The developers soon found a more amenable fellow and here we are many years later with probs everywhere you look at Brooktrails, from 2,000 unbuildable lots to existing homes hollowed out for indoor grows which remain hollowed out though the industry has collapsed.
A FORT BRAGGER is rightly alarmed that some of the children in her community are not being vaccinated. Needless to say, Mendocino County is home to quite a number of deluded parents who think all kinds of scientifically implausible thoughts about vaccination, ranging from government plots to grow children with two heads to schemes by the pharmaceutical companies to exploit the fruit of their loins as chemical funding units. Anyway, before a child can be legally enrolled in either kindergarten or again by the 7th grade, that child has got to be inoculated against tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis and measles. Unfortunately, however, 7th grade parents can opt out by signing a form that they don’t want their kid to get his shots, which is a heckuva note and perilous as heck to the entire community. Fort Bragg, says our correspondent, is way behind on the paperwork, meaning a lot of little toxics are running around the playground.
WHY so much anti-vax opinion? IMO it’s because only us ancients remember when our friends and neighbors died from disease. I won’t ever forget classmates confined to iron lungs from polio.
FROM THE SF CHRONICLE of February 23rd, 1936: “Marijuana — a dread name, with terrifying implications — has appeared on the American scene to give officials of the United States Bureau of Narcotics a more difficult problem than the treacherous opium of the Orient, morphine, cocaine or heroin. From this unusual plant, so these officials say, may be traced many of the most horrible crimes in recent history. Once almost totally unknown in the United States, marijuana has become so common that it has been dubbed the ‘roadside weed.’ This commonplace weed is known by various names — hay, greelo, muggles, Mex hashish and loco-weed. The fight to stamp out the weed is handicapped by the fact that there is no federal law controlling it.”
HE WAS NEVER SEEN AGAIN. Eric Christopher Grant, 30, was a biologist with the Mendocino Redwood Company. He was single and lived alone in Fort Bragg. No known enemies, not a drug guy or otherwise likely to have been impaired. Grant’s MRC truck was found on October 27th 2011, in the parking space called Navarro Headlands Vista Point near the junction of Navarro Ridge Road and Highway One. He was last seen at about noon in the King’s Ridge area off Navarro Ridge Road’s east end. Grant’s truck was found about 6 p.m. that day at the vista point lot where Grant was known to take lunch breaks.
FIRED EPA WORKER: “I know I’ll bounce back and land another job. I’m grateful that I’m young and that I have support and I’ll be OK. The thing that I can’t get over is that the actual richest man in the world directed my fucking firing. I made $50k a year and worked to keep drinking water safe. The richest man in the world decided that was an expense too great for the American taxpayer.”
“MEN WHO LOOK UPON THEMSELVES born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interest, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.”
– Thomas Paine, ’Common Sense’
IT WAS THE WEEKEND before the Arab uprisings in 2011, six weeks before Mother Nature swallowed Japan. On Clement Street in San Francisco food prices for staples like coconut milk and rice had just about doubled over the past six months and gasoline was more expensive every week. More things than usual seemed to be flying apart, although nothing like things are flying apart in 2025. I headed for the ballpark where the Giants were throwing an open house. In anticipation of extraordinary Saturday morning demand by Giant’s fans, Muni of course was running fewer and shorter trains, meaning most of the city would have to take a bus downtown and then walk a mile or so to the ballpark. On the normally uneventful 1 California, an attractive, nicely dressed Chinese woman of about forty moons handed me her business card, which identified her as an accountant and an acupuncturist. “Call me,” she said in immigrant English, “I do your taxes.” And puncture my last illusions for free? When attractive women strike up conversations with you on the bus, and young attractive women smile at you on the sidewalks, you are officially harmless, that from then on it will be walking sticks and dentu-cream until the Neptune Society’s final furnace renders you to the contents of a small brown takeout box in exchange for a swipe of your descendant’s Visa card. Intimations of mortality aside, it was a nice day for an open house at the ballpark. Frisco is mostly nice days, cool but sunny, and even in the foggy summer months there’s always warm weather in the neighborhoods to the east. The ballpark mob stretched halfway to the Ferry Building, and soon I was walking past a very long line, one of the longest lines I’ve ever seen. “What’s this line for,” I asked a young couple. “Autographs,” the young man replied. “Whose autographs?” I wondered, assuming they’d be after Lincecum or Buster Posey, like most fans. “We don’t care. Anybody’s,” the young man laughed. Reminding myself not to be judgmental because I, too, was on a version of the same pointless quest, I plodded on towards the Willie Mays statue at the main gate where I joined a relatively short line which, in a half hour or so, would funnel us rabble into the park. A contemporary togged out in the full Giant regalia, declared, “I saw Dave Righetti pitch in the World Series,” he said. “Oh yeah?” I replied, “I saw Dave Righetti’s father, Leo, play shortstop at Seals Stadium.” Inside, there were more autograph lines, and when Pablo was introduced to a huge approving roar we could all see that he was definitely slimmer. Pablo said he was “Berry berry hoppy” to all the questions he was asked, and so was I because at 280 Pablo had definitely been having probs picking up ground balls at third. Reassured, I left the world champs to their autograph books and headed north up Third Street past mysterious businesses called Coalesce and Gallery 16 and Urban Digital Color, marveling at the diversity of free enterprise but thinking of the superior relevance of Mendocino County and how I wouldn’t trade any of this gizmo-based nebulousness for Doug Mosel and Boonville’s small farm movement. Popping in at the California Historical Society, consistently more interesting than the trend-o-groove-o displays a block away at SF MOMA, one of the glass exhibit cases contained AB 3317 proposed in 1911: “If you are an illegal possessor or user of narcotics, or a prostitute, pimp, panhandler or sexual pervert and are here for illegal purposes, please leave,” which would exclude just about everyone in San Francisco’s present population from ever eating out. I walked on north to North Beach to see how the AVA was doing at City Lights. It was either sold out or hadn’t arrived, and it was on to Washington Square and then back to Chinatown for a three dollar lunch of Mongolian beef on Jackson, then south through the Stockton Tunnel where, at all times of the day or night for 50 years now there’s at least one person yelling or honking his horn to test his echo. I walked around Union Square admiring the greatest show on earth. Finally, I took the 14 up Mission to 18th and Mission, hoping to get the 33 that goes up 18th, over the hill, finally coming to rest on the lower slopes of Pacific Heights. At 18th and Mission I waited. And waited. A very old and very tiny and very bent-over gnome-like little man shuffled up to me in tiny tired steps. It seemed to take him an hour to traverse maybe thirty feet. “Can I stand next to you, chief? It’s dangerous out here,” he said. I was flattered that he thought I represented sanctuary in the urban jungle. “What happened to that place out at the beach where they had the laughing lady?” he wanted to know. “I used to go there. I was born in Sinaloa. I jumped the fence and came here. I live here for years already.” An old timer myself, this kind of free association never throws me. Playland is long gone, I said, but Laughing Sal, or at least one version of her, is down at Fisherman’s Wharf. She’s still laughing, I said. “That’s good,” the old man said, and now he had two assurances, my harmless bulk and Laughing Sal. “I live on Dolores with my girlfriend,” he said. Girlfriend? I felt like shaking his ancient hand. “I come down to Mission to buy my bread from the Chinaman,” he explained, pointing at the four loaves of Wonder Wheat he was carrying. “The Chinaman makes good bread. Every Saturday I come here. I’m going home now. It gets dark and I get robbed.” The 33 finally rolled up. It was jammed because it had been nearly an hour since the last one. The driver let the lift down for the old guy, as much younger people, no respecters of age or anything else probably, streamed around him and onto the bus. At Dolores we had to yell at the driver to let the old guy off, a debarkation that took several minutes and elicited exasperated sighs from several passengers. At Castro, the driver suddenly announced, “This is as far as I’m going. Everyone off.” Which made no sense, and was totally unanticipated by the 60 or so riders who’d already waited 45 minutes or longer to get on the 33, hoping at last to get up and over the hill to the Haight-Ashbury and points north. A man yelled, “You coulda told us that when we got on.” Yes, the driver could have forewarned us, and probably would have on any other public transportation here or any other place in the world, but he worked for Muni. I looked back down 18th. I could see all the way to Oakland. Not another 33 in sight. Up and over the hill on foot, but I finally caught a 33 at Frederick, and in ten minutes I was getting off at Arguello and Stanyan, six blocks to home, secure in the glorious knowledge that the Giants already looked good and the Muni hadn’t changed in the 50 years I’d been riding it.
A READER WRITES: “We liked Scaramella’s recent (sarcastic) suggestion that the Board of Supervisors move public expression to after they’ve left the building. Hell, maybe we could pay the five of them to stay away full time. The new Supervisors don’t seem to be interested in calling out the BS and dealing with real county issues. So it will continue to be a bad Groucho Marx movie, kinda like DC.”
ALEXANDER COCKBURN often visited the Anderson Valley. On one visit, over lunch at the always excellent Mosswood Market, The Major and Cockburn noticed an older couple take an AVA off the rack, younger couples tending to regard the print medium as kryptonite. Cockburn, always curious about the AVA demographic, asked the man buying the paper, “What do you like about it?” The gentleman replied, “Oh, we always buy it when we’re in town. We really like that guy Cock-Burn. He always makes us think.” “You mean ‘Co-Burn’?,” The Major corrected with a showy verbal emphasis on the glottal stop k in the correct pronunciation of Cockburn. “Oh, yes. Sorry. I guess so,” the freshly instructed fellow replied. “And this is him,” ungrammatically declared the Major, neatly canceling his authority as a linguist as he gestured proprietarily at Cockburn. The delighted man introduced himself and shook the famous writer’s hand, explaining that he was a retired UC Davis professor who had some property in Anderson Valley and was on his way to it for a weekend visit, a visit perhaps made memorable by his encounter at Mosswood.
A READER WRITES: “Sound familiar? ‘We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political and material ruin… Corruption dominates the ballot box, the [state] legislatures and the Congress and touches even the bench… The newspapers are largely subsidized or muzzled, public opinion silenced… The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few’.’”
A FORT BRAGG FISHERMAN FRIEND told me a long time ago that Noyo Harbor has a long history of rogue waves roaring in from the Pacific and on up the channel, and that a recent tsunami would have been “a lot worse than it was if it had happened at high tide,” but was really just one more scary sea event in a long history of them. Another old fisherman friend, Miguel Lanigan, now a Lake County landlubber, writes: “What you say about rogue-waves is true and they can come up suddenly in shoaling waters out of a flat-calm ocean. That reminds me. Most of us small-boat fishermen — members of the ‘mosquito-fleet’ — had fallback skills to get us through the days when it was too rough to get out. One of mine was boat carpentry. One fisherman — more of a “wisherman” as he came to fishing later on in life from his job as a San Mateo fireman — hired me do some work on his Monterey boat, the Solo Mio. I replaced the rotten back deck, and also cut in a small fish hold. He left our harbor and went to fishing out of San Francisco. Butch loved his nose-candy, and one night, after a three-day speed bender, he somehow managed to broadside a passing sixty-five foot party boat and sprung several leaks, port and starboard. I declined his offer to come up and put the little girl back together again. He gave up on the Monterey boat, beached her, and became the contract skipper of a 45 foot, steel-hulled Monk boat fishing for a percentage. One afternoon he called his old lady at home in Bodega Bay and said he was only 45 minutes out of port and would be home shortly. It was a cloudless day with mild seas so he was running with the hatch cover off. A rogue wave came up behind him. His deckhand saw it coming, dove into the gaff hatch and held on. The unexpected wave came up so suddenly there was not even time to shut the wheelhouse door. The boat pitched, rolled, and turned turtle and that was the end of Butch. The deckhand survived to tell the story. Another bad place to be when “Rogue Waves” arrive is Tomales Bay. Several have died in these shallow waters. Landlubbers don’t treat mother-ocean with the respect she deserves, and many, many have paid the stark price for their arrogance and stupidity. Flashback: Late one night my old skipper, Dan Mitchell and I were making our way back to Pillar Point in pea-soup fog. We were navigating by loran and bottom depth readings. As we came up on the south end of the harbor reef we encountered a small skiff. Three frantic fishermen were waving and asking if we could guide them into the harbor. We told them sure, get astern of us. By the time we went through ‘The Jaws’ at the harbor entrance we had five other ‘wishermen’ astern of us. We looked like a ghostly nocturnal boat parade. ‘What are these idiots doing out here?’ asked Dan. ‘Stupidity and lack of respect for the ocean,’ was my answer.
THE DAY I MET the KZYX News Department. Here’s what happened: A tv guy passing through Boonville had heard Hanson on the radio. The tv guy asked me if it was the same Paul Hanson who’d tried to pull off a lottery scam up in Oregon some years ago. I promptly e-mailed Hanson, a man I knew only from his radio voice, to ask him if he was the Oregon guy. Ten minutes after the e-mail had whooshed up and away into the ether, a guy comes running through the door ranting about how “the bull dykes” were trying to ruin his life, that everything I’d heard was a pack of lies, that he loved his daughter and was a Vietnam veteran, and how these unnamed villains pursuing him had somehow followed him to Philo from Oregon. Hanson said he was pretty sure he knew who was “trying to get” him, but they were people from a long time ago, and anyway it was all untrue. Hanson wanted to know if I was going to write about it. I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, although I was already mentally composing an item called, “How I met the KZYX News Department.” When Hanson had burst through the door, I’d asked him to sit down, to tell us what was bothering him. We get a lot of troubled people passing through and, while not fully qualified as mental health professionals, we do try to be consoling. “I prefer to stand,” Hanson had said. I thought I might have to clip him one, he was that unhinged. As Hanson yodeled about the conspirators bedeviling him, I saw The Major taking a firm grip on The Nut Repeller, a four-foot broomstick The Major has kept under his desk ever since a deranged Frenchman went off on him and Dave Severn. Then, as abruptly as he’d arrived, Hanson stormed out. Thereupon commenced from him a series of abusive e-mails that accused me of various high crimes and misdemeanors, including an accusation that I’d said his boss, Mr. Coate, had tried to “extort” money for KZYX from a dying woman. That time, I’d written privately to Mary Aigner, KZYX’s hatchet person, asking Mares if anyone from the station had lately appeared at a diminished listener’s deathbed to pry her last few coins out of her. Aigner replied at length, and it was Aigner’s response that we printed. I’d merely done what any news hound would do — I’d asked for comment then reported the response. Mares and Co. probably resented the inquiry but they got off a plausible denial which soon appeared in print and that was the end of it. Hanson somehow had all this as some kind of attack on the station, which it wasn’t. I have indeed attacked KZYX every which way since its inception, but it had been a while since we’ve paid much attention to them. There was some more post flip-out electronic back and forth between Hanson and me. On my end I adopted my calmest, most therapeutic prose, while from him came back a deluge of insults that were so unhinged I feared him coming back to the office with a gun, against which The Major’s pathetic length of broomstick would be useless. So, I wrote to Hanson to say I had no intention of writing about him, although after all his insults I certainly was under no obligation to do him any favors. And Hanson, in a totally schizo about face, apologized to me. That was the end of it, I thought. And then he resigned. Frankly, I felt sorry for the guy, and I still feel sorry for the guy. So, what was Hanson’s big secret? Ten years prior, he’d tried to scam the Oregon Lottery for $25,000. He eventually pled out to a misdemeanor. Ho hum, but it got into the papers up north because those papers aren’t as nice as I am. And Hanson, a public person and career radio news guy, seems to have lost his Oregon job over it. Which wouldn’t have been fair, but when has fair ever applied to media? Anyway, and as I often say, why hold it against the man, especially here in Amnesia County where you are whatever you say you are and history starts all over again every day? No one will remember tomorrow, and today is already half gone. Fresh starts are the cosmic reason Mendocino County exists. Hanson should have stayed. He belonged here.
AN IMPERTINENT READER DEMANDS: “Who are you to pronounce on art and architecture?” Well, some years ago I read all of “Essential History of American Art” and I go to different museums a lot, mostly though, like you probably, I know what I like, and I don’t like Chuck Close and I don’t like to pay $20 to get into SF MOMA to look at a bunch of rocks hauled down out of the Sierras by some scamming Englishman who arranged the rocks on the floor in a V and sold it to the saps at SF MOMA as art. Pretty thin credentials, I admit, but there they are. I even buy a painting now and then if I can find one in my price range that I really, really like and I can talk my wife and the artist into an E-Z payment plan. I am the proud owner of two Mary Robertsons and one Nikki Ausschnitt which, if I think you can be trusted not to steal them, I might let you see some time.
IN THE EARLY 1960’s, the Reverend Jim Jones read an article in Esquire magazine that said Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Mendocino County, America, were the two best places to be during the inevitable nuclear holocaust. Jones, who took the possibility of plutonium poisoning and Esquire more seriously than most people, soon set up a church in Belo Horizonte but just as soon returned to his home base in Indianapolis where, apparently, his Hoosier mother church had nearly collapsed without his charismatic presence. Jones returned from Brazil and, in 1965, moved his small congregation and a Brazilian monkey to Redwood Valley where both were soon on exhibit. The preacher man was so broke when he arrived in Mendo in 1965 that he had to take a job as a teacher in Boonville, which he got through a fellow transplanted Hoosier who was then Boonville’s superintendent of schools and, like Jones, a Christian. Of sorts. But very soon, roughly three years, via a series of welfare scams and the importation of mostly black parishioners from the San Francisco Bay Area whose properties Jones appropriated for himself and whose persons he used as funding units for his church, Jones was a very big shot in Mendocino County, America’s rural home of the political low bar. The rev was soon foreman of the Grand Jury and a go-to guy for outback politicos. By the early 1970s, having outgrown the rubes of Ukiah, Jones left Redwood Valley for San Francisco where the Democratic Party apparatus did a lot more to advance him than any single individual did and the rest, as they say, is history. It’s clear (to me anyway) that given the porousness of today’s local, state and federal institutions — total strangers, often reinventions of themselves, are routinely elected to office, often here in Mendocino County where, from your local public radio station to your local school board, implausible persons are making decisions that affect your life, and seldom for the better. Jones is as likely in Mendocino County today as he was then.
A OLD POT GROWER wrote back before “legalization”: “That thing you ran about that grower who said it costs him a thousand dollars to grow eight hundred dollars of bud. He’s either incompetent or he’s lying. I’ve grown since 1969, and still grow some for personal use but well within the County guidelines. I haven’t gotten formal permission because who in their right mind would go to the cops for something like this? In reality to grow good marijuana is simply a matter of good seeds in good soil. Nutrients and so on are available free, as is manure from anybody who owns a horse or who can walk out to the beach for some seaweed. Nothing you need to buy. People whine about how hard they work and then you see them, or used to see them until recently, buying cars and trucks for cash and paying their $6,000 power bills for a month in hundreds and fifties. Cash. I believe in medical marijuana but I get tired of all the whining. Whether pot is 6% or 22%, who cares? But this guy saying that it costs him a thousand bucks to produce one pound of pot is a moron and a liar. There is something in this plant that really makes a diff in our normal life. Call me hippie dippie or whatever. Putting high tech chemicals on this blessed substance is incorrect. It’s a weed. Give it good soil it does well. Who the hell wants a six pound plant? Most of the dope out there is bad dope. “Knocks you down”? What’s the point of that? Maybe he’s paying so many people that it runs up his costs, but the whole price structure of this stuff is ludicrous.”
WILLITS is the only in-County school district to maintain the gracefully attractive old columns and arches of its original high school, a pleasing facade from the days when it was assumed that schools were so central to American society that it was crucial to make their buildings look like something important went on inside them. Those days are long gone, of course, and in today’s Willits architectural beauty is mostly unavailable beyond the high school grounds, although it remains, if the light is right, in a few ghostly, decaying Victorians arrayed near what used to be the town’s center, remnants from a forgotten time when Americans still cared what their towns looked like. These days Willits is a seemingly endless, unplanned six miles of fast food dumps and cranker motels apparently inspired by the visual splendors of Ukiah’s equivalently hideous main drag. And does it even need saying to school boards that modular buildings are soul destroying excrescences composed of cancer causing toxics that even the least conscientious parent would be reluctant to assign the family dog to, never mind their little heirs and assignees?
I’M NOT the only fan bedeviled by this question: “How do seagulls know when a baseball game is almost over? In my experience at AT&T, the first gulls begin to appear about the 7th inning but the whole mob doesn’t arrive until most human-type people have either left the ballpark or are on their way out. Then, like something out of Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds,’ great flocks of hungry gulls swoop down on the garlic fries and hot dog buns to commence feasting. Marian Dawkins of the Department of Zoology at Oxford claims “that the 7th inning stretch is what cues the gulls to prepare for a feast. The commotion of 40,000 people simultaneously standing and singing is the tip off. Gulls are very good at recognizing predictors for when food is going to become available. They have learned that the 7th inning stretch means that people will soon be clearing out of the stadium, leaving behind a plethora of half eaten, (and luckily in our ballpark) gourmet food.” Professor Dawkins suggests that “the field itself becomes a buffet — the players cleats have spent the past few hours churning up the soil, exposing delectable insects. I’m sure we are all happy to leave that particular delicacy to the gulls. We will stick with the Cha-Cha bowls and Crazy Crab sandwiches.”
MYSELF, I think it’s more a simple matter of birds knowing that where the people are the food is, and where there’s lots of people there’s lots of food. When I go, I get to the ballpark early and stay late, long after Tony Bennett has sung about leaving his heart in San Francisco as he boards the cable car that climbs halfway to the stars, which Tony sings only if the Giants win, and which never sounds better than when you hear it at the ballpark because every other place from dentist’s waiting rooms to primitive piano bars it’s merely one more of modern life’s myriad annoyances. No sooner has Tony left his heart high on the hill commences the eerie sight of thousands of attacking gulls descending on the empty stadium, diving into the seats to carry off the negative food value remnants, veering around the mysterious young men collecting the giant plastic drink containers for, I guess, resale in some obscure market. Twenty minutes after the last pitch, the place is pretty much empty, just me, the gulls and the grounds crew fussing with the pitcher’s mound. I’d like to stay long enough to watch the clean-up process, but the one-time I hung around for a full hour after the game hoping to see how it was done, an age-appropriate usher, another old guy, walked up to me and said, “You gotta go now, sir, we’re closing up.” But I wanna see how they clean this place. “Nah. They don’t do that for another couple of hours, at least. Sorry.”
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] I’m on the Left.
I believe taxes should be slashed for working class people and should instead be borne by the wealthy.
I also believe the revenue should be spent in ways that relieve financial pressures on the working class.
Child care/after-school care, tuition-free college/job training, single-payer healthcare, etc. would relieve working-class people of huge financial burdens.
[1] There’s blatant corruption on both sides. You have to admit nothing in Gaza would have changed with Kamala. I doubt she would back the whole “let’s build a resort” thing, but still. When Bush and Haliburton stole money it was ignored. Biden was neck deep in the Ukraine before the war! Or Pelosi the biggest insider trader in government? Or Newsom sees his homeless plan working since he bought a new $9 million house. Oh the money disappeared out of the “homeless fund” before he purchased his new home.
[2] Public schools were a huge benefit for generations of American kids, from Brooklyn to Topeka! Some of these kids went on to do great things, big and small, making America better. Public education gave them the keys to unlock their potential.
Most parents did not, and do not, have the means to send kids to good private schools.
Many (most?) public schools are failing now (actually since the late 60s, and the decline really started to accelerate in the late 80s) because of numerous factors, both external (society, lack of parental oversight and discipline at home, using public schools to indoctrinate rather than educate, Smart Phones, expelling religion in general and Christ in particular) and "internal" (schools are too big, teachers unions, rewarding administration rather than teaching).
I don't have a quick good solution. However, private schools are probably not a good answer for people of modest means. Home schooling mixed with supervised interaction like sports and church?
[3] OUGHTA BE, an on-line comment:
The burden has been shifted to the working class. Right after WWII we had a more progressive tax structure where the burden was paid by the richest. The vast majority of wealth in this country is inherited, not earned through any type of labor. Tax it. Right now if you and your partner work two jobs and pay rent you pay 30% of your income in taxes. The wealthier you are, the more crazy tax loopholes you can find. Don’t want to be taxed in California? Leave your Malibu mansion now and then and stay at your apartment in Manhattan, or the “cabin” in Jackson Hole. I qualify for MediCal and paid more personal income tax than Donald Trump. It’s not a conservative or liberal thing. Gavin Newsome’s wealth is inherited from his dad who was a wealth manager for the Getty family. Their “job” is avoiding taxes and investing inherited wealth. Meanwhile using our firefighting resources, natural resources, federal airports for private jets, highways for expensive cars, etc…
The wealthy, non-productive class should pay more.
[4] Where in Arizona does one find a $10 burger? Not here in Prescott. Maybe the single at McDonalds, but a proper one at any sit down restaurant will set you back $20. The 2-egg breakfast is spot on at $16 and on up. What’s $5 for two little strips of bacon as an add on?
Other essentials: $10 for a 6-pack of any reasonable beer. Ammo? Hell, $1.50 a round for any magnum pistol and $0.50 for 5.56.
If you ain’t cooking at home and reloading yer shit, than you’re either pretty well off, or scraping to pay the rent.
(b) I spent $30 the other day for 3 eggs, 4 pieces of bacon, sausage patty, hashbrowns, coffee and half a waffle.
I pigged out and took some home.
With tip $35 out the door.
[5] Rejoice in the possibility that we all receive a paltry $5K “refund” for this fraud and grift. It will be taxable income as well. And nobody responsible will be held to account or punished. This kind of pandering appeals to brokies and mouth breathers who can’t make good financial decisions. They’ll blow it on neck flame tattoos, big screen TVs, drugs, and booze (probably). And where will that $5K per household come from? The Fed will create it out of thin air with an algorithm and a few keystrokes.
[6] Just look at the progress in my lifetime. My grandmother, small town, paid her bills in person and with cash. My mother kept a checkbook to facilitate her budgeting and bill paying. We have gone from a checkbook, to credit cards, to debit cards, to PayPal, to tap Credit cards, and now we are being told about stores accumulating prices as you go and eliminating cashiers. It is not the banks, folks, it is us, demanding easier ways of doing business.
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