We are so proud to have The Floodgate Store almost ready to open again! Good coffee, breakfast sandwiches, paninis, and more! Stop by when you see that open sign out one day soon! We are excited to be bringing life back to the Floodgate! If you have a fun story about this place, we would love to read it in the comments!
Butch & Buffy Paula, Philo
NORM CLOW:
My mother graciously shared her birthday today with Willie Mays. This is her faculty picture from her first year teaching at Anderson Valley Union High School, 1940-41. When she transferred from San Mateo Junior College to Cal, she already had a research paper on the Indians of the San Mateo Peninsula in the main library (as well as in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. and Stanford), compiled when she was the ripe old age of 19 at SMJC. I always wondered what the reaction would have been if she’d walked into the Bancroft Library on campus and filled out a form requesting to check it out. “Author: Elinor Heath”. “Requested by: Elinor Heath.” I didn’t even think of that when I was a student there 35 years later. She pooh-poohed the whole thing as nothing to brag about. I don’t know about that. Tenured university professors could spend fifty years hoping to pull that off, and she did it as a college freshman. Anyway, she’s still smarter than me.
A DISCARDED BOOK from the Larkspur Library had this message from a time unlike ours written in longhand in the back inside cover: “Steal not this book for fear of shame, For in it stands the owner’s name, For the Lord will say on that Great Day, ‘Where is the book you stole away?,’ And if you say you do not know, He’ll cast you down below, You’ll go up the ladder and down the rope, And there you’ll hang until you choke.” It is signed by Colette Anderson (No known relation, unfortunately.)
STEWART BOWEN sends along a Green Death memory written by the late Charles McCabe of the SF Chronicle. It seems the infamous malt has been upgraded by the San Francisco Brewers Guild into a “craft” version of the drink.
Never was a Rainier Ale guy myself, but I had a friend way back who drank it all day long, kicking off his day with a couple of warm bottles from the case he kept under his bed. It became a kind of running joke. We’d go over to Bob’s grungy-dark apartment on Fell Street near Masonic and there he’d be, a bottle of Green Death in his hand as he sat in an ancient easy chair he’d dragged in off the street. He’d either be talking to some other leisure-class hippies or reading. Bob was a great reader, a good talker, but these weren’t avocations that pay much, especially if you had to do them sitting down with a case of Green Death handy. Bob’s wife, who wasn’t long for the relationship, went off to work every day until she wised up and went solo. Every morning she’d leave hubbykins with his beer and his easy chair and she was out the door, and when she came home Bob would still be in his chair with a green bottle in his hand. He only got up from the chair to go to the bathroom, which wasn’t often. We’d joke about his capacity, which may have been simple inertia. It was hard to tell, but I never saw him any place other than in his chair downing his Green Death. One day we were sitting around talking and Bob, right in front of our eyes, began to break out in red, measles-like eruptions. Bing, bang, bong! Every inch of his pickled flesh was soon covered with red spots. “Bob! Whatever’s happening here is serious. You’ve got to go to the emergency room.” He was reluctant, probably hoping he could somehow be transported in his chair with enough Green Death to get him to Mission Emergency and back. We finally trundled him out the door and off we went, arriving, as I recall, just after dark. Then and now, of course, Mission Emergency is like a combat field hospital in full triage mode. Gun shot wounds and stabbings take priority, and on down through all other visible injuries. Bob’s medieval pox didn’t appear life threatening so we sat and waited an hour or so until a doctor was available. When Bob emerged from his consultation with the harried healer he smiled and said, “Guess what? It’s scurvy. I’ve got scurvy, the first case in the Bay Area since Sir Francis Drake. All I gotta do is eat and it’ll go away.”
JUST LAST WEEK, on a rare outing to downtown Frisco, on a block from the downtown Hilton, on one corner a shoeless black man, about 60, appeared to be convulsing but, on closer examination, was merely drunk or drugged or both and was rocking out prone in full twitch mode to heavy metal. Across the street a shopping cart guy sprayed cleaning solvent in the doorway of a closed cafe, then carefully unloaded his bedroll and made camp. On a third corner a toothless man held a scrawled but legible sign that said, “I tune fish.” I fished up a buck for him as he explained, “I tune fish, get it? Tuna fish!” I was thinking about these spectacles last Saturday afternoon when a coyote trotted across a Presidio road not far from the Immigrant overlook, which isn’t a mile from the Golden Gate Bridge. It was the third coyote I’ve seen this year in the city, and I wondered if maybe he wasn’t a harbinger of an apocalyptic reclamation project that might return California to the day Father Serra, on foot the whole way from Mexico, and his phalanx of conquistadors, stopped to rehydrate at nearby Mountain Lake, which has lately been dredged and returned to its natural state. That day I’d made a big circle, starting out at Land’s End, on through the Presidio, down to Crissy Field, up and over the little hill to Aquatic Park, through Fisherman’s Wharf, then south to North Beach, Union Square, west through the Tenderloin and on out to Clement for a late afternoon beer at the 540 club, a kaleidoscope of a day in a city that may not know how but always manages to look like it does.
NOT THAT MANY YEARS AGO, deep in the hills east of Boonville, I encountered a beautiful two-foot steelhead trapped and thrashing at my approach in a pool about a hundred yards from the headwaters of Jimmy Creek, which is darn near the top of the Ukiah Road (Highway 253) on the Boonville side of the hill. That hardy fish had made it all the way to its ancestral ridgetop home from the Pacific Ocean at Navarro, then through a gauntlet of industrial wine draws on the entire watershed much of the way, not to mention the array of natural obstacles that steelhead had survived to get home. That intrepid piscine traveler demonstrated to me that the in-County fisheries could be restored with a little more help from their friends, and a serious crackdown on their enemies.
THE LATE JEFF COSTELLO: “The profile you present for Mendo liberals is pretty much universal to describe the breed. I send this from Marin, a highly rated place on the scale of smug, although real human beings can be found anywhere, even here. A quick memory, my first encounter with political correctness: In 1977 we were in Nashville TN, of all places, and had hired a young couple to babysit. The woman told me very earnestly that she did not discriminate against children, and therefore called them ‘small persons’.”
GENE GALLETTI:
An old valley resident, my brother-in-law Avon Ray passed away this morning with his family by his side. Very peaceful.
Ed note: Mr. Ray was the owner/proprietor of the locally iconic “Ray’s Resort” in Philo after whom “Ray’s Road” is named.
VERN PETERMAN: Apple Dryer at the Day Ranch, with notes from the AV Historical Society.
THINGS DO SEEM inclined to the sinister when the fog rolls in, but just up the road at Elk, even in the full glory of King Sol, I’ve always had to suppress an impulse to scream, “I don’t care if Charlie Acker does live here! There’s something fishy about this place!” Ferndale, a larger version of Elk up in Humboldt County, does that to me, too. Creeps me out. I’m not sure what it is about these places that’s so unnerving. Maybe it’s the tidiness of everything, the precious architectural exhibitionism, the suffocating smugness one senses in the residents. Of course anywhere that the Northcoast’s groove-ocracy comes to dominate, as it has in Point Arena, Arcata, Elk, much of the English-speaking population of Anderson Valley, the West Side of Ukiah, a silently screaming civic pathology takes hold, and intense little wars are always breaking out, wars about nothing at all beyond personalities. That’s why at election time the different sides take out newspaper ads with all the names supporting their candidate, just like back in the 7th grade when Donnie ran against Debbie for class president. Natch, the groovies dominate public employment — the whole show — from schools, to public bureaucracies to municipalities, to the courts, where blandly liberal opinions prevail as unvarying as the suburban incubators that hatched them. When a local couple moved to Eastern Oregon, the wife commented, “It’s nice to live in a place where everyone doesn’t think alike.” West of the Cascades, however, is pretty much West Ukiah. Squared.
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