Mendocino County Today: Sunday 6/8/2025

Warm | Morning Glory | Anjes de Ryck | Gaines Memorial | Food Cutbacks | Paddlerama | Shell Game | Guntley Merchandise | Save Pillsbury | Rosy Garden | No Sanctuary | Pet Milkshake | AV Events | Huge Saturday | Free Show | Mullis Story | Petro Zailenko | Yesterday's Catch | Solve Angle | Marco Radio | Lost Coast | Nowhere Trail | Giants Win | June Lake | Quake Overdue | New Head | Old Man | Bare Knuckling | Lead Stories | No Gravitas | Draw Me | Children Fighting | You Idiot | SAM Project | A&W Carhop | Military Training | O'Brien Biography | First Sunday

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WARMER temperatures inland this weekend. A slight chance of thunderstorms over the Klamath Mountains and the Yolla Bolly on Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday afternoons. Windy afternoons return to NW California by the middle of next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 46F this Sunday morning on the coast. More of the same about covers the forecast. I saw a lot of salmon caught yesterday & heard of a few that got skunked. Another good marine forecast again today gives them another chance.

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ANJES DE REYK

May 18, 1950 – May 11, 2025

Nurse, mom, grandma, painter, photographer; loved animals, nature and Anderson Valley.

Originally from Belgium and loved her 21 years living here. Died peacefully in her Oakland memory care facility.

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CELEBRATION OF LIFE FOR GEORGE GAINES

Saturday, June 14, 11am, at the Philo Methodist Church

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REDUCED FOOD AID

Dear Editor:

Unfortunately, the recent federal budget cuts that have been impacting the Mendo Food Network and Fort Bragg Food Bank continue to affect our ability to maintain our programs.

Effective in June, we will no longer be holding two pop-ups a month in Willits. We will continue our first Thursday pop-up in Willits, but will no longer have a third Thursday pop-up.

We understand that this will be challenging for many of our community members, and we apologize. Please know that our programs and the families we serve are our priority, and any changes we make are out of necessity. Cutting our services is the last thing we want to do.

If you have any questions regarding our pop-up services or the impact of federal budget cuts on our programs, please reach out at (707) 809-5669 or [email protected].

Thank you for your understanding.

Mary Tinder, Development Director

Mendo Food Network

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MENDO’S BUDGET-BALANCING SHELL GAME

by Mark Scaramella

Another dubious assumption in the County’s projected budget for 2025-2026 is that the “carryover” from this fiscal year (2024-2025, ending June 30, 2025) will be around $6 million and that this carryover, which just happens to be about the same amount as the dubious estimate of the amount to be saved by keeping positions vacant for the year, will be drawn on to cover whatever savings don’t materialize from not keeping funded positions vacant.

Get it? First they assume there will be millions in carryover (unspent money) this year (a number which won’t be known until the books are closed sometime in the fall), and then they assume that it will be a whopping $6 million, and then they tell everybody that if they don’t meet their ridiculous vacancy target that they will use the mythical $6 million carryover to cover the mythical vacancy savings which nobody expects to save because they know that they will have to replace many of the vacant positions. Then they call all these rolling assumptions “one time funds,” and — presto! — they have a “balanced” budget.

The whole idea of a “balanced budget” when there are always unknowns and variables and assumptions involved is a fishy pretense to begin with on top of a very fluid process. But when the budget builders put in ridiculous and precarious assumptions just to make the budget appear to be “balanced,” it makes a mockery of the process and makes their empty claims that “we don’t have the money” for this or that hard to believe since they can cover millions of costs with assumptions that don’t stand up to scrutiny.

The budget is supposed to be a management tool, not just a once-a-year math exercise. It’s supposed to help managers see trends, optimize revenues, and examine expenses over the period of the budget. When the budget is seen as a perfunctory requirement built on financial number manipulation, it gives the Board and the CEO an excuse for not dealing with actual budget gaps because they know that underneath it all the “budget” is just a pile of false assumptions and self-serving estimates.

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TOWN HALL IN LAKEPORT UNITES VOICES TO SAVE LAKE PILLSBURY

by Monica Huetl

Passionate community members, elected officials, and tribal and environmental advocates gathered at the Soper Reese Theater on May 28 for a town hall meeting focused on the uncertain future of Lake Pillsbury and the potential removal of Scott Dam. Hosted by the Lake County Chamber of Commerce, the event highlighted competing concerns about water access, wildfire risk, economic impact, and ecological restoration as PG&E moves forward with surrendering its license for the Potter Valley Project.

The panel included Lake County Supervisors E.J. Crandall and Bruno Sabatier; Cloverdale Mayor Todd Lands; Lake Pillsbury Fire Chief Larry Thompson; Lake Pillsbury Alliance members Carol Cinquini and Frank Lynch; Round Valley Indian Tribes member Nikcole Whipple; and Deb Sally, representing the Sierra Club. Amanda Martin, executive director of the Lake County Chamber of Commerce, moderated the discussion. Congressman Mike Thompson addressed the audience via pre-recorded video remarks.

Background: PG&E's Plan to Surrender the Potter Valley Project

Constructed over a century ago, the Potter Valley Project (PVP) includes Scott Dam at Lake Pillsbury, Cape Horn Dam at Van Arsdale Reservoir, and a tunnel diverting water into the Russian River watershed. Originally built to generate hydroelectric power for Ukiah, the project is now considered economically unviable by PG&E, which announced in 2019 it would surrender its license. With no new operator stepping forward, the project is on a path toward decommissioning, overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Local Officials Demand Inclusion, Transparency

Supervisors Crandall and Sabatier, who have both advocated for Lake County’s interests throughout the surrender process, expressed frustration that Lake County was not included in negotiations that produced a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between stakeholders in Humboldt, Mendocino, and Sonoma counties.

“What is happening in Lake Pillsbury is horrifying from my perspective,” Sabatier said, criticizing the surrender plan as incomplete and lacking crucial details on fire mitigation, ecological restoration, and future water access. “We don't know any of those things until it's already been approved … which leaves us in a very volatile situation.”

Crandall emphasized the economic and safety stakes for Lake County, citing an estimated $850,000 in lost annual tax revenue and $40 million in potential property devaluation. He warned that dam removal could compromise water access for hundreds of well-dependent properties in a remote area with no public utility system. The lake, he added, is a vital source of water for firefighting.

“We don’t talk about the number of small fires that have been put out,” Crandall said. “Those are uncounted. They don’t make the list, but it happens all the time.”

Competing Visions: Ecological Justice, Water Security, and Fire Risk

Congressman Mike Thompson, who represents both Lake County and downstream communities such as Santa Rosa, acknowledged the tension between constituencies and called for balance. In his video remarks, he described PG&E’s plan as containing a “serious lack of detail” and affirmed that “the economic impact on Lake County is significant and must not be taken lightly.” PG&E disputes the county’s tax loss estimate, suggesting a figure closer to $100,000.

Carol Cinquini of the Lake Pillsbury Alliance called Lake Pillsbury “the heartbeat” of the Mendocino National Forest and stressed its role in local recreation, wildlife habitat, and regional water supply. She warned the true cost of decommissioning could exceed $2 billion if restoration, fire mitigation, and long-term monitoring are included. “We want a full evaluation of the feasibility of modernizing Scott Dam,” she said.

Frank Lynch echoed those concerns, advocating for a full feasibility study before irreversible decisions are made.

Nikcole Whipple, a Round Valley Indian Tribes member and environmental advocate, offered a different view. She expressed strong support for eventual dam removal but said interim water diversions should continue until Russian River communities become more self-reliant.

“I am a very strong advocate for the Eel, anti-dam and anti-diversion,” Whipple said. However, she acknowledged the region’s current dependence on the system. She emphasized the long-standing exclusion of tribal voices from water management decisions. “These are all the tribes and tribal people who have been left out of this conversation for over 100 years.”

Fire Readiness and Infrastructure Concerns

Cloverdale Mayor Todd Lands said dwindling water diversions over the past two decades—from 150,000 acre-feet to about 39,000—have strained local infrastructure and imperiled firefighting capabilities. “Now you can look at all the wineries and vineyards in the area to support a huge economy,” he said. Lands criticized the MOU negotiations as opaque and exclusive, conducted via ad hoc committees outside public oversight.

He referenced a 2018 study proposing the installation of a new fish ladder at Scott Dam as a cost-effective alternative to full dam removal, which he said was dismissed by environmental advocates. “If the dam did not come out, it was not an option,” he said.

Deb Sally of the Sierra Club’s Lake County chapter said her organization supports dam removal and would like to see investment in restoration and new recreational opportunities in the Lake Pillsbury basin. She also cited seismic safety concerns as a major factor.

Firefighters Sound the Alarm

Lake Pillsbury Fire Chief Larry Thompson, who has battled some of the largest wildfires in state history, warned that without the lake, firefighters would lose a critical water source and firebreak. He showed dramatic images of aircraft scooping water from the lake and called Lake Pillsbury “our first and last line of defense.”

“We owe it to every family, every visitor, and every firefighter to fight for a water system that protects us all,” Thompson said.

(MendoFever.com)

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DISTRICT ATTORNEY DAVID EYSTER

Mendo Never Has Been A ‘Sanctuary Jurisdiction.’

In response to recent local inquiries, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did previously release -- but then quickly withdrew -- a list of purported "sanctuary jurisdictions" which listed 48 of California's 58 counties, a listing that included Mendocino County as one of those sanctuary jurisdictions.

The now-withdrawn list was created based on a presidential executive order requiring DHS and Attorney General Bondi to identify jurisdictions that are perceived to be obstructing federal immigration enforcement.

So, yes, Mendocino County was on the flawed list as a jurisdiction believed by DHS and Attorney General Bondi to be a “sanctuary jurisdiction.”

The bigger question is why Mendocino County and only 47 other California counties were listed versus all 58 California counties is not clear at all.

The answer to that question is not clear because all 58 California counties are subject to the "California Values Act ," a law enacted by the California Legislature in 2017, effective January 2018. SB 54 limits California law enforcement agencies, including school police and security departments, from using money or personnel “to investigate, interrogate, detain, detect or arrest individuals” for immigration enforcement purposes.

To that end, SB 54 bars state and local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration holds that could be placed by the feds against those being held in local jails on local criminal charges and convictions, and further restricts local law enforcement's ability to respond to immigration notification and transfer requests (Govt Code §§7282, 7282.5).

While many in local law enforcement do not agree with the "means to the end" being used elsewhere in the country that are being reported on nightly on the evening news to "enforce" federal immigration laws, one thing is crystal clear. Mendocino County is not nor has it ever been a place providing sanctuary to criminals who also happen to be in the country illegally.

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UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Hey there, I'm MILKSHAKE! I'm a friendly, jaunty, energetic puppy looking for someone to call my very own. I may be young, but I already love toys and playing. In fact, I'm an expert chewer! I'm always up for a good game of fetch, so start collecting those stuffy toys and tennis balls, and be prepared for lots of fun and entertainment when you adopt me. Overall, I'm a cheerful, curious pup, and very excited to find my forever home. If you're looking for a sweet, fun-loving pup, please consider adopting me! I’m a Pittie mix, 24 pounds, and about 4 months old.

For information about all of our adoptable dogs and cats, and our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com

Join us the first Saturday of every month for the Meet The Dogs Adoption Event at the shelter.

For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453.

Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

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AV EVENTS (Today)

Free Entry to Hendy Woods State Park for local residents
Sun 06 / 08 / 2025 at 8:00 AM
Where: Hendy Woods State Park, Philo
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4513)

AV Grange Pancake and Egg Breakfast
Sun 06 / 08 / 2025 at 8:30 AM
Where: Anderson Valley Grange, 9800 CA-128, Philo
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4631)

The Anderson Valley Pomo, Past, Present and Future
Sun 06 / 08 / 2025 at 1:00 PM
Where: The Anderson Valley Museum, 12340 Highway 128, Boonville
More Information (https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events/4683)

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FRANK HARTZELL

Ride Along For Huge Saturday In Mendo: Heavy Metal, Wildflowers, Fresnel Lens And Navarro By The Sea are just some of the fun.

https://mendocinocoast.news/ride-along-for-huge-saturday-in-mendo-heavy-metal-wildflowers-fresnel-lens-and-navarro-by-the-sea-are-just-some-of-the-fun/

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JON TYSON: Sarah Songbird and I are performing a free show as What The Folk at The Boonville Distillery for Father's Day Brunch, June 15th, from 11AM to 2PM. Come join us for tasty food, a signature "What The Folk" cocktail, and good vibes! We hope to see you there.

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MARSHALL NEWMAN:

A bizarre local tale with major international scientific implications. The late Kary Mullis and development of the technique for amplifying segments of DNA - which lies at the heart of all DNA science, from ancestry tracking to vaccine development. His epiphany on how to do it began while driving Highway 128!

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/1993/mullis/lecture

PS. Marker 47.6 on Highway 128, where Kary Mullis stopped to write down his brainstorm, is located just south of Boonville near the junction with Highway 253. The "46.7" refers to the kilometers from Highway 128's beginning at the Navarro by the Sea bridge.

Mark Scaramella notes: I’m pretty sure the markers on Highway 128 are mile markers, not kilometer markers, which means that the Mullis epiphany spot is a few miles southeast of Yorkville near the Mountain House Road intersection, almost 47 miles from where Highway 128 begins with its intersection with Highway 1 on the Coast.

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THE RUSSIAN WHO FLED THE MOTHERLAND AND MADE MENDOCINO COUNTY’S REDWOODS HIS HOME

The wild story of a Russian who hid for years under the California redwoods

by Matt LaFever

The Hendy Hermit’s last known address was a “hollowed out tree stump.”

Petro Zailenko’s story is one of those wild local legends that feels too strange to be true — a Russian immigrant who, fearing deportation, disappeared into the redwoods of Anderson Valley and lived there for nearly two decades. He built two handmade shelters from bark and branches, foraged fruit from nearby orchards, and quietly roamed Hendy Woods State Park, where he became known as the “Hendy Hermit.” Today, you can still hike the trail he once walked, peek inside his weathered huts, and try to imagine the kind of life he lived — quiet, elusive, and completely off the grid.

And in a way, Petro’s story hits home for a lot of us who’ve ended up in Mendocino County. Maybe we didn’t all jump ship from a trawler or hide out in tree stumps, but plenty of us came from faraway places looking for something different — more space, more peace, maybe a little reinvention. Whether we planted roots in a redwood grove or just felt something shift when we first breathed in the Navarro fog, there’s a shared feeling here: that this place welcomes the wanderers. Like Petro, we found something here worth staying for.

The evidence of Petro Zailenko’s quiet legacy can be found all over this corner of the Northern California redwood forest. Signs throughout Hendy Woods State Park, nestled deep in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley along the Navarro River, bear his name and facts — or theories, at least — about him. They say he was a Russian immigrant born in 1914 who may have been wounded and captured by Nazis during World War II. They say that in the late 1950s or early 1960s, he jumped ship from a Russian fishing trawler in San Francisco and made his way north to Anderson Valley.

There, he briefly worked at a lumber mill — until, apparently, someone asked to see his immigration papers. That’s when Zailenko fled into the woods, afraid he’d be deported. For the next 18 years, he lived among the redwoods and came to be known locally as the Hermit of Hendy Woods. When he died, the coroner listed his occupation as “hermit” and his address as a “Hollowed out tree stump in Hendy Woods State Park.”

According to state park literature, “Nearly all of what we know about Petro Zailenko comes from the encounters of visitors and some locals.” These days, ranger Julie Winchester is the go-to Zailenko historian. She’s worked in Hendy Woods State Park for over a decade and fields the occasional question about the park’s most mysterious resident, in addition to her duties welcoming visitors and describing trails. One late May morning, she directed SFGATE to the Hermit Hut Trail, a short hike to the preserved remnants of Zailenko’s forest shelters.

Zailenko constructed his huts from redwood bark, sturdy limbs and mats made of needles, making watertight shelters built to withstand winter storms. According to park signs, Zailenko always kept two huts in case one burned or collapsed. Visitors described them as clean, tidy and impressively engineered.

About a mile down a winding park road and a third of a mile into Hermit Hut Trail, the first of the huts appears. The shelter is a crude lean-to — just strips of redwood bark and sticks propped against a fallen log smoothed by decades of wind and rain. The hollow beneath is just large enough for a man and a few belongings.

A short walk deeper into the grove reveals the second structure, more striking in form. Towering over 10 feet high, the round lodge resembles a rustic tipi, tall enough to stand inside, with a central hearth for fire. Though weathered, it still stands, more than four decades after Zailenko inhabited it.

Zailenko, park literature says, stood about 5 foot, 7 inches and weighed less than 100 pounds. He had a long beard and dark eyes and wore mismatched clothes collected from campers, which he refashioned to fit his thin frame. He foraged in nearby gardens, gathered fruit from a commercial orchard across the Navarro River and accepted food from park visitors.

“He had few if any teeth,” a poster inside the park says, so he preferred soft or overripe fruit. He stored beans and corn in jars and bottles, cooked over an open fire, and mashed food into a paste.

Some referred to Zailenko as “the Mad Russian,” while others called him “a bogeyman,” likely because of his tendency to appear suddenly and startle unsuspecting campers. However, he was never menacing, with park posters describing him as “elusive, harmless, and not considered a threat” — a presence consistent with his quiet, hermetic way of life. He was known to quietly wander into campsites, rubbing his fingers together in a silent request for matches or tobacco. Winchester told SFGATE that many campers remembered him joining their fires.

Zailenko lived alone in the park for nearly 20 years, finding refuge beneath the towering redwoods. Despite his solitary life, park records suggest he formed connections with two locals. In the late 1970s, Joan Gowan moved to forest land bordering the park to help stop poaching. As the park tells it, Zailenko saw her as a fellow hermit and slowly began to open up. He also grew close to Melvin Kutsch, a Hendy Woods ranger, who became something of a protector.

In August 1981, Zailenko collapsed in a picnic area. He was unable to eat due to intense stomach pain. Rangers took him to a hospital in Ukiah.

Phoenix Winters, an assistant archivist at the Historical Society of Mendocino County, told SFGATE that only one item could be found in the museum’s archives regarding the hermit: a mortuary record confirming he died on Aug. 31, 1981. The hermit was cremated.

Tucked away in the Hendy Woods Visitor Center, this modest collection was gathered from Petro Zailenko’s camp. A soot-darkened cooking pot, a glass jar and a tuna can are the tangible traces left behind from his 18 years of quiet, resourceful existence, serving as a dusty but powerful connection to the park’s most mysterious resident.

Park signs indicates Zailenko’s cause of death was stomach cancer. Some say his ashes were scattered in the forest where he spent his final years, although the park says that theory is just “one of many mysteries of the ‘Hendy Hermit’.”

Still, there’s a fondness for Zailenko among these towering trees. The interpretive signs near his shelters offer glimpses of how he has been honored since his death. One includes an image of a 1993 event flyer titled “Hendy Hermit Day,” where attendees could hike to the huts, hear stories of the hermit, and watch a hermit-themed skit. Another poster advertises a campfire program led by “Ranger Bob,” inviting campers to gather around the fire and listen to the legend of the Hendy Hermit.

Inside Hendy Woods’ visitor center, Winchester invited SFGATE to see a modest display dedicated to him. A portrait of Zailenko, printed on a slab of wood, hangs on the wall alongside framed photographs and everyday items gathered from his camps: a tuna can, a glass jar, a soot-darkened cooking pot. Winchester said most stories about Zailenko live on through local oral histories, passed down by “the old-timers here now.” These recollections offer glimpses into his life among the redwoods, even as the details of his past, as a war-torn Russian soldier imprisoned by the Nazis, remain blurred by time and memory.

The exhibit is quiet, a little dusty and easy to miss. But 44 years after Zailenko’s death, the huts he built still stand, his story continues to be shared from ranger to visitor, and the traces he left behind remain part of the park’s living memory.

(SFGate.com)

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, June 7, 2025

JULIO ACEVEDO-DELVILLAR, 28, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. DUI, suspended license for DUI, probation revocation.

JESSICA BAUER, 37, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

ANNA ESCAMILLA, 34, Ukiah. Unspecified offense.

MA MANDUJANO, 58, Ukiah. Unspecified offense.

RAUL MANDUJANO, 38, Ukiah. Attempted murder, assault with firearm, use of firearm.

SHANNON NOONE, 32, Fort Bragg. DUI.

STEPHEN SUTAK, 54, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, disobeying court order, failure to appear.

ANTONIO THOMAS, 45, Ukiah. Probation violation.

ANTHONY TOLBERT, 36, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, parole violation.

LUCERO VAZQUEZ-RODRIGUEZ, 41, Ukiah. Shoplifting, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

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MEMO OF THE AIR: La maldición del bebé rico.

Marco here. Here's the recording of last night's (9pm PDT, 2025-06-06) 8-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part: https://tinyurl.com/KNYO-MOTA-0647

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Humanity's Evolution, with Arcturian Ambassador Viviane Chauvet. (60 min.) I met a man last week who believes passionately in all of this. He's only level-three enlightened, he says, but his Spiritual Master, who's no longer on Earth but he can still communicate with him via jolts of emotional energy, is a full Arcturian, all the way up to level seven, where you achieve such purity that your body becomes transparent and you can read by the light from your three hearts. (They're in a straight line across your chest, a spectral one inside each lung, with the mundane heart in the middle.) Also the man has told his doctor to go fuck himself with his blinkered, perverted Western evidence-based medical science and he's treating his own prostate cancer with veterinary ivermectin and Chinese herbs. I'll keep you updated. Watch this space. And watch the skies. There are also Pleiadians (say plee-YAD-yunz). And Vegans, from Vega, who eat cheese and eggs just like everybody else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdIciu9fRTg

Nikola Tesla, who first produced X-rays in the lab but didn't get credit for it, X-rayed all sorts of things, including his own head, whereupon he felt "invigorated". Here's his foot being invigorated in a shoe. Those are the nails they used to hold shoes together in those days. Having gone through three pairs of modern cheap shoes in a year and a half, gluing them back together every time the heel pulls out or the toepiece hooks on something and peels loose, I think maybe the old-time shoe people had a good point. Nails. And when the sole wore out after ten years (!) you'd go to the shoe repair store and they'd nail new soles on for a dollar-fifty. And it smelled so good in there, even with the old man smoking a cigaret from the corner of his mouth. All the leather oil and polish, and the pots of simmering animal-based glue for patches and ballet shoes. And dust cooking on the red-hot tubes of the open-back bakelite AM radio playing a baseball game. https://www.vintag.es/2025/06/nikola-tesla-foot-x-ray.html

How we get artisanal tweezers. https://theawesomer.com/making-precision-tweezers-in-japan/772680/

And six-year annual rerun but more valid than ever: Republican Jesus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZ2L-R8NgrA

Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

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LOST ON THE TRAIL TO NOWHERE

by Paul Modic

When I walk in the park I often take little detours on side paths to build up the minutes, when they start getting steep I retreat back to the main hike, saving my uphill portion for the end. However, yesterday there was a weed-whacking crew off a ways and I wanted to stay far from the noise. A side trail got steep and this time I started going up and told myself I’d have to find an easier way to get back down.

Up it went, showing signs of being recently cleared as a possible bike trail, small trees cut, and when I got to the end it dead-ended into a mountainside of poison oak and felt like a trail to nowhere: probably impossible to ride a bike up and inconceivable that anyone would want to go hurtling down it recklessly.

I decided to loop over to the left and try to find one of the other established trails to go back down. I bush-whacking through the poison oak, found the original ranch fence still in great shape, and followed that for a while until the way was blocked by a large tree that had smashed down on it. I jumped across a little runoff fissure as the poison oak grew larger and more dense.

I walked back down through the woods until I was blocked by a dry creek canyon. I noticed another one on my other side as I went down, then reached a point where I could see them both converging below me, a maelstrom of erosion, fallen trees, and boulders. (You ever see one of those crazy configurations of converging creeks, runoff canyons, whatever you call them? There was no way I would ever try to get through that mess.)

I finally sat down to rest feeling semi-lost, thought about calling a friend, had a fantasy of a helicopter evacuation, but how would they get to me? I finally decided to head back over to find the trail I’d come up on and had to slide on my ass a few feet to get over one of those crevices, then continued to veer up through the woods to look for that fence again, and found the trail in a few more minutes.

I descended and it became too steep to go safely down (don’t want to fall with this new hip) and I thought about sliding on my ass again. Instead, two or three times I walked around the steep parts through waist-high poison oak and finally made it back down to the main road which runs through the woods section of the park and is only used for rare park maintenance vehicles.

There was no sign on the trail I’d just come down on, they should mark it “The Trail To Nowhere,” well, I sure know I’m not going up that way again.

I got back to my car, the whole hike had taken seventy-seven minutes and I was bushed. (That must have been a test trail they started building, then abandoned.)

Local Treasure

This is the ballad of the Community Park

the gem of the area which glows in the dark

I can't say enough about this beautiful place

sweating up this mountain or walking apace

Once was a cattle ranch and then got divided

young growers moved in and were very delighted

Steve Dazey and Bob McKee came up with the plan

they created a river park and then the fun began

Of course to the complainers it's never enough

for the cantankerous ones life can be rough

Everyone's welcome to come recreate

so many healthy opportunities await

Frisbee golf, ride horses, walk, run, and bike

fly your drone or kite or play whatever you like

Do a stoked sesh on the new skateboard ramp

or head over to the stage and practice your rant

Everyone's friendly out on the trails

as masks disappear, smiles prevail

And so once again we say thanks Bob and Steve

you had a vision in which we all can believe

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MATT CHAPMAN’S FIRST GIANTS WALK-OFF HR gives S.F. another one-run win

by Susan Slusser

San Francisco’s hesitant offense has an especially unhappy tendency to disappear during Logan Webb’s starts. Going into Saturday, Webb had by far the lowest run support among the Giants’ starters and that continued all the way through his time on the mound against the Braves.

Then came the ninth inning, when the Giants used their one tried-and-true technique to overcome a light attack, the last gasp. With two outs and another great Webb performance looking as if it were for naught, Matt Chapman c/locked a two-run homer to propel San Francisco to a 3-2 victory over Atlanta, the team’s MLB-high eighth walkoff of the season and the Giants’ second in as many games.

Since Chapman signed with the Giants before last season, the team is 48-15 when he drives in at least one run, but Saturday’s blast to right was Chapman’s first walkoff homer for San Francisco, and his first walkoff hit and RBI with the team.

“I wasn’t sure if it was going to go out or not,” he said. “You never quite know here, but once it did, I was pumped. Hopefully the first of a few.”

Since the Giants parted ways with slumping first baseman LaMonte Wade Jr. on Wednesday and added Dom Smith, Daniel Johnson and Andrew Knizner to the roster, the team is 4-0.

“It’s funny how things can change super quickly, but it feels good, getting four wins,” Chapman said. “Being able to come back and walk them off two days in a row is huge and we’re just looking to keep it going for sure with everybody contributing.”

Atlanta starter Bryce Elder was just as terrific as Webb on Saturday, striking out a career-high 12 and allowing just three hits in eight innings. It was his first career appearance against San Francisco and only one start removed from a 15-day trip to the minors. But Piece Johnson got the ninth and again was on the wrong side of a walkoff; he also had uncorked the decisive wild pitch in the 10th inning on Friday.

“His go-to is that curveball, it’s a really good pitch,” said Chapman said, who connected with a 1-1 curve. “I kind of just had a feeling that was what he was going to lean on in that situation. He threw it to (Heliot) Ramos a lot. He threw it to (Wilmer) Flores a lot. It was definitely in the back of my head.”

The Giants and Braves top the majors with 27 one-run games apiece, including the first two games against each other this year. Every one of San Francisco’s past 13 games has been decided by no more than two runs, the longest streak in franchise history, eclipsing a 12-game span from May 30-June 12, 1978.

“We’re used to these type of games,” manager Bob Melvin said. “As many as we’ve had like this, we’re battle-tested all the way to the end, and until the last out, we have a chance.”

San Francisco has played six one-run games in a row, the team’s most since eight straight April 11-18, 2014, and the Giants' 15 one-run wins are the most in the majors.

“I wouldn’t love to play them every single day, but it’s going to serve us well because we know how to play those games and what it takes to come out on top,” Chapman said. “When the pressure’s on, you got to make the play or take a good at-bat, everything’s heightened in those moments. It’s good for us to get that experience — but it seems like we’ve played, for three weeks straight, one-run games every single day. I think everybody would prefer to probably score some more runs.”

Trust Webb to be the guy on the mound when an opposing pitcher put together his best start of the year: He gets just 2.8 runs per 27 outs while being the pitcher of record. The run support for the rest of the regular starters is slightly more robust: Robbie Ray gets 4.4 runs of support per 27 outs while the pitcher of record; Landen Roupp 4.0; Justin Verlander 3.8; Jordan Hicks, 3.8; Hayden Birdsong 3.4, all per BaseballReference.com.

Webb struck out 10 in his six innings and walked zero; over his past four starts, he’s struck out 32 and walked one in 24 innings. That’s ace stuff, All-Star stuff, and he’s among the league leaders with 101 strikeouts overall.

“All the guys joke around, because I’ve always said that I’m not a strikeout guy, but this year, I think I’m just mixing things up and trying to do different things, and having a really good game plan just kind of elevated that,” Webb said. “There are a lot of games left and I feel like I am always due for a one-strikeout game or two-strikeout game.

“It’s not like I’m necessarily trying to go out there and strike everybody out, I just think I’m getting to the point where I’m able to maybe set people up better for it, and at that point, I try to get the strike out. I always think about what Greg Maddux said about if you get 0-2, you get one chance to try to strike them out and then you go back to just trying to get them out.”

Saturday’s outing was Webb’s fifth with 10 or more strikeouts and no walks. The only other Giants with as many or more since 1893 are Madison Bumgarner (12) and Tim Lincecum (five). Juan Marichal had four. Webb has three this season.

“That’s pretty great company,” catcher Patrick Bailey said. “Logan’s special.”

Webb struck out nine of the first 14 batters Saturday, including getting Ronald Acuña Jr. and Drake Baldwin swinging with two on in the third. In the fourth, he struck out the side, all looking, something that Braves manager Brian Snitker took exception to until he was tossed by home-plate umpire Gabe Morales.

Given the way Webb was working, Wilmer Flores’ leadoff homer in the fourth seemed like a major blow, but the Braves love a tight game as much as the Giants do, and Michael Harris II led off the fifth with his second career homer off Webb in just 13 at-bats.

Atlanta added a run in the sixth to take the lead, but Webb might have done his best work of the day that inning. Acuña, Baldwin and Austin Riley rapped singles to load the bases with no outs, and Webb got cleanup hitter Matt Olson to pop up before getting a grounder from Marcel Ozuna. Hit even slightly harder, Webb would have emerged unscathed, but Ozuna’s tapper was 74 mph and Chapman could only get the runner at second, with Ozuna beating the throw to first as a run scored. Webb finished his day by striking out Harris.

Briefly: Center fielder Jung Hoo Lee got the start off because of some slight back tightness but he could have played had there been a need, Melvin said. Lee pinch hit in the eighth and struck out. … Melvin said that Justin Verlander (pectoral strain) feels good after throwing to hitters on Friday but the team hasn’t decided when he’ll come off the IL. … The club announced that catcher Sam Huff, who’d been designated for assignment Tuesday, cleared waivers and was assigned outright to Triple-A Sacramento, a welcome development for a team that doesn’t have a lot of catching. “As far as the catching position goes, depth can be ominous,” Melvin said, “We were pulling for Sam to get a major-league job but he’s gotten to know our pitching staff and did well with all our starting pitchers.”

(sfchronicle.com)

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STUDY SAYS CALIFORNIA IS OVERDUE FOR A MAJOR EARTHQUAKE. DOES THAT MEAN ‘THE BIG ONE’ IS COMING?

by Jack Lee

Unlike other earthquake-prone places around the planet, California is overdue for a major quake, according to a recent study. But that doesn’t mean a catastrophic event like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is on the verge of striking.

“A fault’s ‘overdue’ is not a loan payment overdue,” said Lucy Jones, founder of the Dr. Lucy Jones Center for Science and Society and a research associate at the California Institute of Technology, who wasn’t part of the work.

The new study reported that a large share of California faults have been running “late,” based on the expected time span between damaging temblors.

The researchers compiled a geologic data set of nearly 900 large earthquakes on active faults in Japan, Greece, New Zealand and the western United States, including California.

Faults are cracks in the planet’s crust, where giant slabs of earth, known as tectonic plates, meet. The Hayward Fault is slowly creeping in the East Bay and moves around 5 millimeters per year, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. But sometimes plates get stuck and pressure builds. Earthquakes occur when plates suddenly slip, producing a jolt of energy that causes the ground to shake.

Scientists study ruptured rock layers deep beneath the surface to estimate when large earthquakes occurred in the past. In the new study, the authors collected data stretching back tens of thousands of years. For a region spanning the Great Basin to northern Mexico, this paleoearthquake record stretched back about 80,000 years. For California, the record extended back about 5,000 years.

The scientists used these records to calculate how much time typically passes between large surface-rupturing earthquakes around the planet. The average interval was around 100 years for some sites on the San Andreas Fault; it was 2,100 years on the less famous Compton thrust fault beneath the Los Angeles area.

About 45% of the faults analyzed for California are running behind schedule for a major earthquake, meaning that more time has passed since the last large quake on a fault than the historical average. In the other regions studied, this statistic ranged from 9% to 18%.

The researchers’ analysis only included large surface-rupturing earthquakes. It didn’t include the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, which was below the magnitude 7 threshold that the study authors used for quakes on the San Andreas Fault.

The authors associated seismic punctuality with slip rates, or how fast the two sides of a fault move past each other.

“Our analysis showed that the faster the faults are moving, the more likely it is that they will appear overdue,” said study author Vasiliki Mouslopoulou, a senior scientist at the National Observatory of Athens, in Greece.

In tectonically active California, the San Andreas Fault has a particularly high slip rate. The Pacific and North American plates slide past each other an average of more than inch per year in some spots.

“Faults in California are among the fastest-slipping faults in the world,” Mouslopoulou said, adding that other factors are also probably contributing due to the pattern of chronically late large earthquakes.

Previous studies had also shown that seismic activity has been unusually subdued in California, compared with paleorecords. A 2019 study reported that there’s been a 100-year hiatus in ground-rupturing earthquakes at a number of paleoseismic sites in California, including on the San Andreas and Hayward faults.

The authors of the 2019 study treated large earthquakes at these sites as independent events, akin to flipping pennies and counting how many turn up heads. They calculated a 0.3% probability that there’d be a 100-year hiatus in ground-rupturing quakes across all the California sites.

Scientists have suggested that there could be earthquake “supercycles,” with large quakes occurring in clusters, with less active periods in between.

“There are these longer-term, decadal, century-long ups and downs in the rate of earthquakes,” Jones said. Potentially, California is in a quiet time and large earthquakes are currently less likely.

Katherine Scharer, a U.S. Geological Survey research geologist who wasn’t part of the new research, commended the authors of the study, explaining that compiling the paleoseismic records was a “tremendous amount of work” and will enable more scientists to investigate earthquakes.

California’s relatively sparse big earthquake activity could be connected to the geometry of its faults. While the analyzed faults in California were more or less in line with each other, those in other regions resembled “a plate of spaghetti,” Scharer said.

“From the study, I think you would say that the main California faults are mechanically different somehow than the averages from these other places,” Glenn Biasi, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, who wasn’t part of the new work.

Biasi emphasized that it’s impossible to say if California’s faults are truly overdue for a big earthquake.

“The faults slip on their own schedule and for their own reasons,” Biasi said.

Scientists can’t accurately predict large earthquakes in advance but paleoearthquake data could help. The authors of the new study found that, excluding California’s recent lack of large earthquakes, faults around the entire planet have generally produced surface-rupturing quakes at intervals expected from paleoearthquake and historic records. Considering such data could improve earthquake forecasts, Mouslopoulou said.

(SF Chronicle)

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THE NEW HEAD of Homeland Security’s Terror Prevention Office, Thomas Fugate, is a 22-year-old former gardener and “Cross Functional Team Member” at a Supermarket in Austin.

Fugate has no background in counter-terrorism or much of anything, frankly, except being a self-described Trump sycophant since the age of 13. Feel safer, now? Maybe the “terror threat” from the border (or anywhere else) isn’t all it’s hyped up to be…

— Jeffrey St. Clair

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DON'T LET THE OLD MAN IN

by Toby Keith (2018)

Don't let the old man in
I want to live me some more
Can't leave it up to him
He's knocking on my door

And I knew all of my life
That someday it would end
Get up and go outside
Don't let the old man in

Many moons I have lived
My body's weathered and worn
Ask yourself how old you'd be
If you didn't know the day you were born

Try to love on your wife
And stay close to your friends
Toast each sundown with wine
Don't let the old man in

Many moons I have lived
My body's weathered and worn
Ask yourself how old you'd be
If you didn't know the day you were born

When he rides up on his horse
And you feel that cold bitter wind
Look out your window and smile
Don't let the old man in
Look out your window and smile
Don't let the old man in

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SULLIVAN V. KILRAIN

On July 8, 1889, under the sweltering Mississippi sun in the small town of Richburg, history was made — and ended — with America’s final bare-knuckle prizefight. The match pitted two giants of the era against one another: the undefeated Irish-American brawler John L. Sullivan and the formidable challenger Jake Kilrain. More than just a brutal test of endurance, the fight symbolized the last breath of an outlaw sport. Over 3,000 spectators gathered in secrecy, transported by special trains, all eager to witness a spectacle that had already been outlawed in many states. The bout was illegal, but that only added to the raw drama of the occasion.

The two fighters met under London Prize Ring rules, meaning no gloves, and the rounds continued until a man was knocked down. What followed was a nearly unbelievable feat of physical punishment and will — 75 rounds, lasting over two hours and sixteen minutes. Sullivan, badly dehydrated and on the edge of collapse at several points, found a second wind and wore down Kilrain until the challenger’s corner threw in the towel. Kilrain had fought valiantly, but Sullivan remained unbeaten, cementing his legacy as the last bare-knuckle champion. Watching from the sidelines was none other than Bat Masterson — legendary lawman, gambler, and gunfighter — who served as the official timekeeper, a reminder of how deeply this match was intertwined with the lore of the American frontier.

This fight marked not only the end of an era but the beginning of modern boxing. Soon after, gloves became standard under the Marquess of Queensberry rules, and bare-knuckle bouts faded into history, replaced by a sport seeking legitimacy. Yet the Sullivan-Kilrain fight lives on in legend — not just for its savagery and stamina, but for its place at the turning point of American sports and culture. It was a battle of grit and pride, where muscle met myth, and where the old world of rough-and-tumble brawling gave way to something more refined, but perhaps never quite as raw.

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LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

Trump Orders National Guard to L.A. to Quell Protests Against Immigration Raids

Trump Is Calling Up National Guard Troops Under a Rarely Used Law

What to Know About the Protests in Los Angeles

Immigration Enforcement Widens as Trump Targets Workplaces

The Quiet Unraveling of the Man Who Almost Killed Trump

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Watching this unfold is unbelievable, frightening and very sad. How can this be? The US was the world leader and was admired and looked up to by every other nation. Now, there is no decorum, no gravitas, it's lawless and cruel, governed by a mad man and a cabal of incompetents. It's like a whacky and dangerous version of a reality tv show - with real life critical implications for the entire world.

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CLASH OF THE BILIOUS BILLIONAIRES

by Maureen Dowd

Sometimes you’re better off letting the children fight.

That was President Trump’s callous wisdom on looking the other way as the Russians and Ukrainians continue to kill each other. But it might better be applied to Trump’s social media spat with Elon Musk. It’s hard to think of two puer aeterni who are more deserving of a verbal walloping.

Their venomous digital smackdown fulgurated on their dueling social media companies, flashing across the Washington sky.

In March, Trump showed off Teslas in the White House driveway and bought an over-$80,000 red Model S. Now, he says he’s going to sell it.

Thursday was the most titillating day here since the sci-fi classic “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” when a spaceship landed an alien to warn human leaders to stop squabbling like children, or the aliens would destroy the Earth.

On Friday, Trump tried to convey serenity. “I’m not thinking about Elon Musk,” Trump said aboard Air Force One. He added, “I wish him well.” But Trump then jumped on the phone to knock Elon, telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Musk has “lost his mind” and CNN’s Dana Bash that “the poor guy’s got a problem.” Trump had to know that would be seen as a reference to the intense drug use by Musk chronicled by The Times.

As Raheem Kassam, one of the owners of Butterworth’s, the new Trumpworld boîte on Capitol Hill, assured Politico, “MAGA will not sell out to ketamine.”

The Washington Post reported Friday: “Across the government, the Trump administration is scrambling to rehire many federal employees dismissed under DOGE’s staff-slashing initiatives after wiping out entire offices, in some cases imperiling key services such as weather forecasting and the drug approval process.”

On Truth Social Thursday, Trump threatened to take away government contracts that have handsomely enriched Elon even though, as Leon Panetta pointed out on CNN, “some of those contracts, particularly on SpaceX, are very important to our national security.”

Elon tried to tie Trump to Jeffrey Epstein, offering no evidence. He shared a post on Epstein that said Trump should be impeached. Trump reposted a message from Epstein’s last lawyer, saying the smear was “definitively” not true.

Musk did, however, expose Trump and Republican lawmakers as hypocrites, using his online bullhorn to shame them about their broken promises to reduce the debt. The big domestic bill is a dog’s breakfast of Republican proposals that could add more than $3 trillion to the debt to make the rich richer, while cutting health care coverage for the poor. Republicans are the ones who always claim they’re fiscally responsible, even while they keep exploding the debt.

Musk reposted Trump’s old tweets on X, such as this one from 2012: “No member of Congress should be eligible for re-election if our country’s budget is not balanced — deficits not allowed!”

Musk sneered: “Where is the man who wrote these words? Was he replaced by a body double!?”

As the weekend began, Trump seemed to be winning the fight, as Musk grew quieter and Fox commentators had pleaded with their parents to get back together.

Trump has exposed Musk’s naïve streak — something I saw back in 2017 when I reported that another tech lord had to explain to Elon that he couldn’t get away from A.I. by going to Mars; it would just follow him there.

Just because Elon hung in the Oval and Mar-a-Lago and debated moving into the Lincoln Bedroom, it didn’t mean he understood politics or power — or Trump.

Trump didn’t care about the potential conflict of interest in having the SpaceX chief pick the head of NASA. But he did care that Musk’s candidate had donated to top Democrats — and about the aborted plan for Musk to attend a briefing about military strategy against China at the Pentagon, and about Musk’s barbed public trashing of Trump’s “beautiful” tariffs and “beautiful” bill.

When I studied Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” in graduate school, I was struck by how much the 1818 novel by a teenage girl reminded me of the bros in Silicon Valley.

The brilliant scientists with their edgy experiments, too high on their own supply to consider the ramifications of A.I. What if your creation grows stronger than you and comes back to haunt you?

Musk posted that Trump was ungrateful because the nearly $300 million he spent on Republicans is what made Trump president. Musk created the monster!

But Trump created a monster, too. He gave Elon free rein and enormous power over a world he knew nothing about and people for whom he had no empathy. And in the end, of course, Elon’s demon mode came out and Trump’s monster turned on him.

“Elon was ‘wearing thin’,” Trump acidly posted, knowing how to hit a narcissist where it hurts. “I asked him to leave, I took away his EV Mandate that forced everyone to buy Electric Cars that nobody else wanted (that he knew for months I was going to do!), and he just went CRAZY!”

For all his macho swagger, Trump sure loves a catfight.

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TAIBBI AND KIRN

Matt Taibbi: …. But in the meantime, there is one story that is funny and also is kind of a follow-up of something that we spent a fair amount of time last summer talking about. So in the wake of the election loss last November when there was a historic gender gap up to 13 points, which is another four point drop from 2020 when it was nine points, Kamala Harris only got 42% of the male vote, which is an extremely low number, and the numbers were even worse demographically when you went looking at younger voters and particularly younger Latino and Black voters. And so the party in response to this, the Democratic Party, commissioned a study. They spent $20 million on something called the SAM Project, which is Speaking to American Men… Speaking to American Men or For American Men? Speaking with American Men.

Walter Kirn: And SAM would suggest it’s Speaking at American Men.

Matt Taibbi: Speaking at American Men, which is ultimately the punchline of this whole thing. Now, we can go back and talk about some of the things that got them in trouble with men over the summer and coming into this election cycle and in general, but even the fact that they commissioned this study was kind of widely mocked because it suggests that they thought that this was a messaging problem when actually the problem was much deeper and more fundamental. And so even commissioning it created some blowback. But after that blowback, Politico came out with a story this week, and what was the headline of that story? It was, “Democrats set out to study young men, here are their findings.” So they got a look-

Walter Kirn: And who did this study? Who do you go to with $20 million to study men? Does it say?

Matt Taibbi: So let’s see. It was $20 million that we budgeted for a study group that will be led by a co-founder named, I guess it’s Ilyse or Ilyse, I don’t know how to pronounce that, Ilyse Hogue. We’ll just call him Hogue. Then also John Della Volpe, a pollster who allegedly specializes in Gen Z voters. By the way, Hogue is the former president of NARAL. It might be a woman at least, maybe that’s how I should pronounce it. And then Colin Allred of all people who is the Black Texas congressman who yelled at me for having a tin foil hat in Congress and ran unsuccessfully narrowly for Senate against Ted Cruz last year. So they commissioned 30 different focus groups and they started to get some results back, and it’s just really fascinating that it took them this long to come around to certain realizations.

First of all, there were poll numbers, Walter, only 27% of men have a positive association with the Democratic Party. There is a SAM Project memo that talked about how many young men were discussing what they call the no win situation around the meaning of a man. The pollster Della Volpe said, “There’s a layer of economic anxiety that I don’t think I fully saw until now,” and they found out through the study that they were suffering their biggest losses among young men of color, which is probably the opposite of what they expected.

Also, there’s a fascinating quote in this story, an African-American professional described Democrats as embracing the, “Fluid masculinity of being empathetic and sensitive,” while, “Republicans are more like the traditional masculinity of a provider, strong in the machismo type.” So I don’t know, this to me is just funny, the fact that they even did this study is kind of extraordinary. Do you have any initial reactions to it before we lay into all the stuff that happened over the summer, the I’m a Man, Man commercial, the White Dudes for Harris thing? If they can’t see it, I don’t think they ever will no matter how much money they spend.

Walter Kirn: You know that saying, if you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it. If you have to do a $20 million study on men, you’ll never understand men. It’s anthropological, it’s like they’ve voyaged into the jungle to find the rumored ocelot or some strange creature which they’re going to bring back to their lab. They had access to all these people before, remember? Did they just forget to use them? No. They’ve had these pollsters, they’ve had these sociological and other demographic categories at their fingertips forever. I think they’re just trying to show they care. I think they’re just trying to show they’re interested or they understand there’s a problem and somebody got 20 million bucks, in other words, it may ultimately be about a payout to someone because it’s not going to solve their problem. The problem was they thought they did understand men and they came up with Tim Walz.

Matt Taibbi: Right, exactly, exactly, right.

Walter Kirn: Tim Walz who is some kind of walking bad AI version of a Midwestern man, and every gesture he made from loading his shotgun to fixing his truck-

Matt Taibbi: He nearly blew his balls off.

Walter Kirn: Well, he didn’t nearly blow his balls off, he nearly caused his shotgun to recoil into his scrotal area.

Matt Taibbi: Same thing.

Walter Kirn: Right, right. But with every attempt to understand men and to imitate how they behave using Robo Tim, the man’s man from the Midwest, they showed their cluelessness and they’ve done it again. They are not getting one thing: men don’t care about what being a man is.

Matt Taibbi: They need some money and a date. That’s what they need.

Walter Kirn: Right, right. Men caring about manliness is not being a man. Look at my hair. You think I care? I said seven insensitive things yesterday that no man would say to my wife or no person would say, and I did it unconsciously. Men are unconscious. Trying to understand them deliberately is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

Matt Taibbi: And-

Walter Kirn: But-

Matt Taibbi: Go ahead.

Walter Kirn: But besides nominating Tim Walz, and besides, we’re going to get to the White Dudes for Harris thing, just sorting out men as a interest group or an identity group itself is offensive. You know what I’m saying? Men just think of themselves as people and they happen to be male people. They may even think of themselves as universal people out of their male arrogance, but what they don’t go around is thinking of themselves as men, manly men, etc. You try to define it, you’re going to lose…

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THE WAY TO UNITY

To the Editor:

Thank you for noting the ideals for which men and women serve in our armed forces. As a Marine infantryman in Vietnam in 1966-67, I wondered what had brought us together in a conflict that was so difficult to understand, let alone wage successfully. We had to teach one another how to fight and how to survive.

Those who trained us hadn’t yet been to Vietnam, so they taught us what had always made the military function: people looking out for one another. We were learning to patrol, set up night ambushes, avoid buried mines, stay out of sight of snipers. I learned that every one of us knew something valuable that no one else knew. Only together did we know enough for most of us to survive.

In becoming a fighting force, we were expressing our country’s ideals by showing concern for one another. As a four-person team hailing from Chicago, Detroit, Philly and Amherst, Mass., we were learning that what makes a military unit work can also make a country work. At the end of 13 months, I felt I finally knew my country.

John Merson

New York

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VIETNAM MADE HIM A WRITER. HIS ANGER STILL BURNS ON THE PAGE.

A new biography of Tim O’Brien examines his formative time at war and the esteemed literary career that followed.

by Scott Anderson

‘Peace Is A Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien,’ by Alex Vernon

At a time when a serial draft dodger has made it his mission to reinvigorate American jingoism, it might be instructive to remember an American draftee who actually went to war. Not just any veteran or any war, but Sgt. Tim O’Brien of the Fifth Battalion, 46th Light Infantry Regiment, who was a 22-year-old private from small-town Minnesota when he landed in the murderous Chu Lai district of South Vietnam in February 1969.

His was a harrowing tour, detailed in Alex Vernon’s exhaustive new biography. As his unit’s radiotelephone operator, O’Brien was positioned near the front of the column whenever his company ventured from base on reconnaissance patrols or ambush missions against the Vietcong. It was a position that required extraordinary poise. He was in charge of calling in the coordinates for an artillery or airstrike while under fire, and radioing for helicopter “dust-offs,” or evacuations, for the unit’s dead and wounded.

During his 13 months in Chu Lai, there were too many dust-offs to count, and death rarely looked how it was depicted in movies: O’Brien saw his comrades cut in half on booby-trapped pathways, crushed beneath armored vehicles in flooded rice paddies, killed by the friendly fire of panic-stricken newbies. He also saw his comrades routinely abuse and burn down the homes of those they were ostensibly there to protect.

From his experiences, O’Brien, now 78, emerged as one of the foremost chroniclers of the Vietnam War. His second novel, the astonishing “Going After Cacciato,” won the National Book Award in 1979 and drew comparisons to “Catch-22” and “Slaughterhouse-Five.” He is best known for his semi-autobiographical collection of short stories, “The Things They Carried” (1990), which has become required reading for war reporters, politicos and literary writers alike.

O’Brien’s writings have derived much of their influence not from the stories themselves — as searing and raw as they often are — but from the pitiless emotional honesty that undergirds them. His work, which also includes novels about domestic strains and lifelong regrets, lays bare a tortured and angry soul, a conscience that won’t allow absolution for either himself or society. Although O’Brien was adamantly opposed to American involvement in Vietnam, he dutifully showed up when his draft number was called because he “lacked the courage” to do otherwise.

Once in Vietnam, he felt guilt for the barbarity taking place around him, for not reporting the officer who made a souvenir of the severed ear of a Vietnamese man he’d killed, for the ease with which he could put to one side the deaths of friends. His guilt is simultaneously that of the witness, survivor and perpetrator, and it never lets up. As his semi-fictive alter ego in “The Things They Carried” says in remembrance, “20 years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief.”

In composing his biography, the wonderfully titled “Peace Is a Shy Thing,” Vernon appears to have tracked down most every individual who crossed paths with O’Brien and had an interesting anecdote to tell. A seasoned critic and scholar who has published studies of Hemingway and war literature, Vernon also sleuthed through a veritable mountain of reference material; his list of archives and libraries consulted alone runs to well over two dozen.

In the process, though, Vernon sometimes makes the mistake of letting the research drive his narrative, and this is especially noticeable in the chapters devoted to O’Brien’s time in Vietnam, the formative period of his writing career. As with almost all frontline soldiers, the spells of horror and combat O’Brien endured were interspersed with long periods of boredom or uneventful slogs through the countryside, and by relying so heavily on the Fifth Battalion’s logs and official records, Vernon occasionally replicates that tedium.

The reward for his thoroughness has been to find a number of personalities who speak with both perspicacity and candor about his subject. None is more invaluable than O’Brien’s lifelong friend, Erik Hansen. After going through basic training together, the two young grunts served in different corners of Vietnam, but throughout their tours and for many years afterward, they maintained a wise — and at times agonized — correspondence. Their exchanges are some of the most powerful and revealing moments of the book.

Although he acknowledges that he too is friends with O’Brien, Vernon avoids the classic biographer’s curse of falling in love with his subject. In his telling, “O’Brien is affable, warm, loyal and funny,” but he “can be prickly to the point of being a prick.” Vernon also understands that his subject’s “good humor stands on a foundation of anxiety and rage,” a lasting fury “toward the magnanimous nation and the polite hometown that sent him to a repugnant war. Toward himself for letting them send him, the great moral failure of his life.”

His biographer does not try to redeem him. It’s hard to imagine that O’Brien, the most unsparingly honest and self-flagellating of writers, would accept anything less.

(NY Times)

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