Mendocino County Today: Tuesday 11/25/2025

Chilly | Water Cap | Geysers Tremors | Hopland Complaints | Outstanding Teacher | Bragg Council | County AI | Local Events | Boonquiz | Foodbank Reminders | Unity Club | Friendship Park | Silicosis Cases | River Restoration | Homeless Indian | Yesterday's Catch | Capitol Cheer | ZuckerBunker | 49ers Win | Breaktime | Pro Choice | Eight Hours | Smoke Break | National Healthcare | Restaurant Biz | King Me | MAGA Defections | Contrarian | Home Fires | My Boy | Thankful | Acceptable Opinion | Lead Stories | Ukraine Negotiations | And So | Economic Rage | Friends | I Wished | Branch Library | Cagework City | Dead Lanterns | My Drugs | Opium Den

---

COLD overnight temperatures and patchy frost is possible today and Wednesday. Generally dry weather and warm temperatures through mid week. There is a chance of light rain and sprinkles for Del Norte and Northern Humboldt counties on Thanksgiving Day, followed by dry and cooler weather conditions through the weekend. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A cool 38F under clear skies (fog is nearby) this Tuesday morning on the coast. Apart from some scattered low clouds at times we are looking clear & dry until further notice. As we say around here "MAKE ROOF" !

---

---

THE NORTHCOAST was shaken early Monday as a series of earthquakes struck in quick succession, raising concern in the seismically active region.

At least seven tremors have been reported, ranging in magnitude from 1.1 to 4.1, with the epicenter near The Geysers.

The larger 4.1 magnitude earthquake hit first, detected at 7.08am PT (10.08am ET), and the rest were likely aftershocks, according to the US Geological Survey (USGS).

Residents as far south as San Francisco reported shaking in the region, following the larger quake.

The Geysers in the state is a large geothermal field in the Mayacamas Mountains, spanning Sonoma, Lake and Mendocino counties, which harnesses underground steam to generate electricity.

Although it is called The Geysers, the area does not have actual geysers but rather steam vents called fumaroles, a name given by early settlers who misunderstood the natural phenomenon.

The Geysers geothermal field in northern California lies atop a network of faults, including the Bartlett Springs Fault Zone and the Healdsburg–Mayacama Fault system.

Smaller faults beneath the geothermal site have made the area prone to frequent earthquakes, and experts say some tremors may be triggered by the region's geothermal energy operations, raising concerns about the potential for stronger shaking.

---

ED NOTE

MARC REISNER died in 2000 at the age of 51 after writing the most prescient book we have on the state's water systems and, just before he passed, Reisner had almost finished the best book you'll read on the ever-present hazard of earthquakes.

‘Cadillac Desert,’ published in 1986, described how precarious California's water delivery systems are even with abundant rainfall. (cf the Potter Valley Diversion for precariousness.)

‘A Dangerous Place,’ tells us what's likely to happen to NorCal, esp the Bay Area, in an earthquake of 7.2 or greater during which the inevitable Big One is likely to damage and/or destroy the vast network of dams and levees that store and hold back the state's water. When the Big One hits, and the tectonic plates grind in their different directions, all that water will rush towards the new vacuums created. “If the contrived flow of water should somehow just stop, California’s economy, which was worth about a trillion dollars as the new millennium dawned, would implode like a neutron star,” Reisner writes.

---

ONE BROWN ACT VIOLATION AFTER ANOTHER

Curtailment of public comment is followed by noticing failure

by Elise Cox

The board of directors of the Hopland Public Utility District met on Nov. 13, three weeks after receiving two formal complaints from ratepayers alleging the board violated the Brown Act during its October meeting. At that meeting, the board voted to raise water service rates by 40% and wastewater rates by 25%, effective Nov. 1. Both the October and and November meetings were held at Brutocao Cellars.

The HPUD board’s first action — closing the meeting to hold a closed session — appeared to trigger yet another Brown Act issue: failure to comply with public-notice requirements for an agenda item.

The agenda posted at the Hopland Post Office listed a closed-session item: Anticipated Exposure to Litigation, Government Code § 54956.9(d)(2). It did not identify the title or specific nature of the potential litigation, nor did the board later state on the record that such disclosure would jeopardize service of process on unserved parties or HPUD’s ability to conclude existing settlement negotiations—such statements are required when an agency withholds information.

After the closed session, public comment began.

A reporter asked, “Is there going to be a report back from closed session?”

A board member replied, “Information received and direction given to staff.”

The reporter followed up: “Are you taking any action on the Cure and Correct letter? Are you going to re-notice the meeting as requested, as required by the act?”

“We are going to send that up for discussion with legal,” Board President Joan Norry responded.

“What was the last half hour?” asked Vernon Budinger, author of the Cure and Correct letter.

“Closed session,” Norry said.

“I thought that was litigation,” Budinger replied.

“No, it was legal counsel,” Norry said.

Jared Walker, deputy director of the Ukiah Valley Water Authority—which provides management services to HPUD—interjected: “It was a conference with legal counsel in closed session for anticipated exposure to litigation, so there was an item discussed there in closed session. But the report out was literally just information received and direction given to staff.”

Neither Norry nor Walker asserted that further disclosure would jeopardize service of process or settlement negotiations, as required by the state law.

Attorney Jonathan Weissglass, who recently won a Brown Act judgment against the City of Berkeley on appeal, said that if the closed session was held in response to Budinger’s letter, the Act requires that the letter be made available for public inspection 72 hours before the meeting.

A similar issue unfolded in Fort Bragg in August, when the city attorney advised the mayor not to hold a closed session after an agenda referenced anticipated litigation with an undisclosed party. Three residents objected, and the item was withdrawn.

During a presentation to the Arcata City Council two years ago, attorney Nubia Goldstein noted that Brown Act violations are effectively judged in two courts: state court and the court of public opinion. Goldstein said agencies can be required to pay attorney’s fees if they are found in violation.

“From a criminal standpoint, there’s a provision that can charge an elected member with a misdemeanor,” Goldstein said. She noted that a misdemeanor requires intent: “The district attorney would have to prove you violated the Brown Act intentionally,” she said.

The HPUD board of directors received their first “Cure and Correct” letter from ratepayer Matthew LaFever on October 12.

“California’s Proposition 218 and Ralph M. Brown Act exist to make sure local governments like HPUD act transparently and fairly when raising rates or making major financial decisions. These laws aren’t just guidelines — they’re the foundation of how local government is supposed to work: publicly, accountably, and with respect for the people who pay the bills,” LaFever wrote. “At the October 9 meeting, those standards weren’t met.”

Vernon Budinger sent a separate “Cure and Correct” letter on November 6. Budinger’s letter contained allegations of procedural misconduct. He also asserted that that the board had offered a faulty financial justification for raising water rates by 40% and wastewater rates by 25%.

The alleged procedural misconduct included unreasonable limitation on public comment and the late release of financial statements. In terms of the financial basis of the rate increases, Budinger cited the absence of a cost-of-service analysis, reliance on speculative costs, and a disputed estimate for the Caltrans ADA project.

The law gives legislative bodies 30 days to respond to cure and correct notices and inform the person who wrote the letter of its decision. If the legislative body does not remedy the violation, a challenger must commence an action within 15 days of receipt of the legislative body’s written decision, or if there is no written decision, within 15 days of the expiration of the 30-day window.

The tone of the Nov. 13 HPUD meeting grew less contentious when the board shifted to a discussion of proposed Caltrans work on Highway 101 to meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements. Both board members and ratepayers expressed concern that the project could divert traffic away from downtown Hopland for as long as three years. They also shared frustration over the lack of clarity about the project’s scope, financing and timeline, and agreed on the need to bring all involved agencies together.

The next meeting of the HPUD will be on December 11, 2025. If at that point the HPUD board has not indicated that it will re-do the meeting on the rate increase, ratepayers will have just days to decide whether to go forward with a lawsuit.

Mendocino County David Eyster did not respond on Monday to a request for comment on when repeated violations of the Brown Act rise to the level of misdemeanor charges.

(mendolocal.news)

---

MS. SWEHLA AND MRS. ROWLAND spent the last two days at a professional development workshop in Crescent City, CA with all the other agriculture teachers from the North Coast CATA Region. They attended great workshops. They exchanged ideas with other agriculture teachers. Ms. Swehla was also honored to have been named the Mendo-Lake Section Outstanding Agriculture Teacher and the North Coast Region Outstanding Plant Science Pathway Teacher.

---

DAVID GURNEY:

Re: Fort Bragg City Council
---> "I see an agenda item for announcing new city employees, new police chief perhaps?"

No, no new Chief. They did a gala introduction of all the "new" city employees (from over the past year or so). It was more of a ceremonial, showboat, morale-booster kinda thing. No new Police Chief, no new Finance Director, nor Community/Housing Development Director vacancies filled. Fort Bragg has been letting some of these "interim" officials go on in that capacity for literally years.

I'm done with local politics. I have too many other writing projects, and dealing with a cult-like city government is not high on the list. Plus I have a really crazy neighbor just up the road, who got up after me tonight and went on about how she was really upset that people had been going on the MCN lists, saying that ICE was in the area. And that she doesn't have a problem with the Flock cameras. And that all the city meetings are open to the public, and everything with the city is hunky-dory. Then she mentioned me by name! And this ain't the first time she's come after me. It's too creepy.

Anyhow, good luck getting rid of the Flocks. If you're serious, you need to write up a proposal of why they need to be removed, and request that it be put on the Agenda for the next City Council meeting (the removal of Flock cameras). Then they have to deal with it, by law.

Yikes...

---

MENDOCINO COUNTY’S INFO TECH DIVISION has drafted a proposed new policy grandly called “Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The core of the policy says that “AI tools and systems may be used only for functions that directly support County operations, services, or analytical needs, and must align with County values and legal requirements.”

As such AI may be used “only for functions that directly support County operations, services, or analytical needs,” such as:

• “Drafting non-final content, such as memos, reports, or meeting summaries, subject to staff review.
• Pattern detection for operational improvements, subject to human validation.
• Public-facing virtual assistants that comply with all appropriate disclosures and privacy controls.
• Summarizing, analyzing, or visualizing public datasets.”

Using AI for the following is prohibited:

• “Generating communications that represent official County policy, legal interpretation, or formal direction without review and verification.
• Any application that may lead to discrimination, bias, or inequitable service delivery.
• Uploading, transmitting, or processing sensitive data, including Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), financial information, or legally protected records, without explicit authorization from the County IT Division.”

Sounds ok. But as usual the difficulty will be determining which is which. In particular, for example, will drafts of “non-final” items on the Supervisors agenda which have been generated by AI contain a notice that says it’s AI generated? Will the final version say that the original draft was an AI product? Who will be responsible for fingering the policy violators?

Not to be too cynical about it, but so much of what Mendo generates now might as well have been produced by a robot that identifying and proving that certain materials violate the policy will be nearly impossible. The policy itself seems like it was generated by AI. In fact, the draft policy is so vague and generic, how do we know wasn’t generated by AI? Then there’s the question of whether AI can be used to spot violations of the AI policy…? When the robots want to get rid of someone can they simply accuse someone of illegally using AI? The AI policy could be the germ of a plot for machines to take over Mendocino County! (But would anybody be able to tell the difference?)

(Mark Scaramella)

---

LOCAL EVENTS (this week)

---

LAST CALL FOR THE BOONVILLE HOLIDAY QUIZ

We shall begin at 7pm, Tuesday Nov 25th, at The Boonville Distillery and Restaurant (formerly the BrewPub). Hope to see you there.

Cheers, Steve Sparks, Quizmaster.

---

REMINDER FROM ANDERSON VALLEY FOODBANK

We will continue to distribute food on the first and third Wednesdays during December:
December 3rd and 17th are the next two dates.

December 4th is the fundraiser at the Boonville Hotel.

Many thanks to volunteers and all others who have been helping with donations.

Special shout-out to AVHS ag students and Beth for Thanksgiving boxes!

Happy Holidays to all

Thanks,

Greg Brunson for AVFB board <[email protected]>

---

UNITY CLUB NEWS: Holiday Bazaar preparations

Enjoy a refreshing break from Holiday Dinners. Spend your preparation time baking, some for the family and some for the Bazaar. If you make three dozen cookies, set aside half for the Holiday Bazaar. When I bake cinnamon rolls, it takes all day and three sticks of butter. I'll be freezing some of them for my family and donating the rest to Unity Club. If you have forgotten what treats you agreed to make, text or call Elizabeth W.

Join us for the December 4th Unity Club meeting at 1:30 in the Fairgrounds Dining Room. Bring your creations to be packaged, labeled and priced. We'll slap a bow or some ribbon on them and take them to the Baked Goods Booth. If you already have your blister packaging, make labels for the goodies. Include possible allergens; like peanuts, tree nuts, dairy, or wheat. If it's Gluten-Free say so. Thank you.

We need to account for our financial and physical donations to the Community. I keep a diary at school that lists my in-class hours and donations of pencils, rulers and erasers, etc. If you gave items to the Wildflower Show's Silent Auction, gave books to the Library, worked the Bridge Gate or Flower Hall at the Fair, or brought food or supplies to one of the schools. Jot down the hours and "in kind" donations. Give your notes to Janet L. by email, text or in person.

Rather than repeat previous emails, I'll just make a "Things to Remember" bullet points list.

• Baked goods, preserves, candy for packaging at the Dec. 4th meeting
• Canned goods or dry goods 2# bags for the Food Bank
• Toys for Toy Drive - unwrapped
• Granny's Attic items
• New Gifts for the Silent Auction
• Small toys for Elementary School students' rewards
• Your Volunteer hours and in kind donations

I wouldn't miss this meeting for the World or my sixth period class. It's so much fun getting everything ready for the Annual Holiday Bazaar. Happy Baking!

If you aren't a baker, just make a donation. Last year my power went out on the 8th of December. Whew! Made it just in time.

See you there

Miriam L Martinez

---

JAKE BAREFOOT:

The last post I made about Friendship Park ended up getting shared around Fort Bragg and stirring up some controversy so I want to step back and explain, as clearly as I can, what the actual issue is with Friendship Park, the sprinklers, and events like the circus, and why this led us to propose a separate organization focused on the park itself.

Right now, the field at Friendship Park has three big issues:

1. There’s a new non-potable water source that is planned to come online in the next few years that will supply plenty of water to the park for irrigation. That’s great news, but things are not ready for the park to irrigate right now because there are some maintenance issues that need to be addressed.
2. The current irrigation system is not functioning correctly. Lines are broken, and the control box was literally buried under a mound of dirt for years which made it impossible for anyone to conduct any kind of proper check in check out procedure. This needs to be established so the fixes are protected.
3. The field surface itself needs to be completely redone if we want it to be a safely playable and tournament-ready facility.

From a common-sense standpoint, the order of operations is simple:

• First, repair and modernize the irrigation system,
• Second, make sure clear check in / check out procedures are in place so it doesn’t get wrecked again, and figure out a way to make sure that they actually happen and are enforced in a timely manner.
• Third, resurface, level and re-grass the field.

If we did things in a different order and resurfaced first and then dug up the field to fix sprinklers, we’ll destroy the new grass we just paid for. That’s a waste of money and effort. It would also be a waste if we do the plumbing and grass and don’t come up with a system to protect it so it won’t get damaged.

Where things have gotten complicated is that we’ve asked for basic protections so that, once the irrigation is fixed, it doesn’t get destroyed again by large events that need to drive stakes and bring vehicles onto the field.

None of this should be designed to be exclusionary. I’m talking about simple, standard stuff any responsible facility would use: a real check-in/check-out procedure for renters, deposits, clear documentation of the field’s condition before and after events, and clear responsibility for repairs if damage occurs.

I also want to be very clear about this: The main tenant of the park for the last decade or so is the circus. I do not think this situation had been fair to the circus, and I don’t want them blamed, that’s not what this is about at all we are just trying to look forward and I think they’ve been set up to fail. They’re being booked into a facility with a failing irrigation system that’s not clearly marked that doesn’t seem to have a solid check-in/check-out process. When damage happens, everyone points fingers and the circus gets painted as the villain, even though it doesn’t seem like they were ever given a proper system to work within.

If I was in their shoes I would be very frustrated with that situation and I think all parties involved could benefit from a better system.

There should be more events at Friendship Park, not fewer. I am absolutely in favor of that. But without a clear process, we will keep having the same problem with any tenant who uses the park, which dosn’t make sense.

In my mind, a good system would:

• Protect the field and the irrigation that we’re wanting to invest serious resources into
• Give every renter clear expectations and a fair process so they can not be setup to fail
• Make sure tenants have a good experience on a well maintained facility that they want to come back to again.

This is exactly the kind of situation that made it seem like we needed a second, non-biased organization whose sole focus is the park itself—maintenance, scheduling, and check-in/check-out for events.

That is a very different skill set than running an after-school program and there’s been enthusiasm for doing it from many people who are tied to the original organization that built the park so many people in the community thought it made sense.

CCM’s core mission is childcare and programming for kids. That’s important work, but it’s not the same as:

• Managing a sports facility,
• Protecting and maintaining a major capital investment in irrigation and turf.
• Handling event logistics and field inspections
• Organizing tournament use, local leagues, and outside renters.

That’s a lot of side work for them to deal with and have to keep track of and it could be more efficient for a dedicated park organization that could focus on those things full-time, without having to juggle them against the operational pressures of an after-school program. It could treat every user—Little League, circus, community events—with the same clear, consistent rules and expectations and make a really easy process for the community to utilize the park instead of constantly trying to protect one revenue stream at the expense of the field.

What we’ve been told is that CCM is worried that if they tighten up check-in/check-out or require deposits and real accountability, the circus or other prospective tenants might choose a different location like Heider field that dosn’t have any irrigation systems to worry about and then they might lose that income which is very important to the funding of their programs.

I understand the fear of losing funding, but that fear is exactly what seems to be blocking even the most basic, common-sense protections for the field from being enforced and one way or another we need to figure out a better way.

From my perspective, keeping things as they’ve been is probably not in the best long-term interest of Friendship Park. But ultimately, this isn’t just my decision or CCM’s decision. It’s something the community should weigh in on.

So here’s the real question:

• Do we want to keep the current structure, where an after-school program that depends on one or two key events controls the field that has historically been afraid to set firm conditions on renters? And possibly loose a cherished piece of our towns history.
• Or do we want a second, park-focused organization with a clear, neutral mandate to protect and manage the field for all users—baseball, circus, and any other community events—so we can fix it properly and keep it fixed?

Let’s come up with a clear, community-supported plan that lets us restore Friendship Park and keep it healthy for decades to come. The community can decide what makes the most sense and as long as it ends up with the park being improved from its current state and allows us to be in a place where we can move forward with renovations then that’s going to be a good thing.

There has been an incredible amount of energy that has gone into building and maintaining this place over the years from our community and many incredible memories have been made, I hope the path we take going forward preserves this piece of our history.

What do you think makes the most sense?

---

SILICOSIS CASES IN COUNTERTOP WORKERS CONTINUE TO RISE, as Silicosis Becomes a Reportable Disease in California

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) has issued a statewide advisory as silicosis cases continue to increase among workers who cut or finish engineered stone used in “quartz countertops.” Silicosis became a reportable disease in California in June 2025, requiring healthcare providers to report suspected or confirmed cases within seven days.

Since 2019, CDPH has identified 432 cases, including 25 worker deaths and 48 lung transplants linked to engineered stone fabrication. While no cases have been identified in Mendocino County at this time, individuals who have worked in countertop fabrication—especially with engineered stone—may be at risk.

Silicosis is preventable. Workers can reduce exposure by using water during cutting, using proper dust- control equipment, and wearing appropriate respirators. Employers are required under Cal/OSHA regulations to control silica dust and keep workers safe. For more information, see the website at www.dir.ca.gov/title8/5204.html.

Healthcare providers are encouraged to ask patients about past or current countertop fabrication work and to consider silicosis in both asymptomatic and symptomatic at-risk workers. Make the diagnosis using imaging (chest X-ray, chest CT) and pulmonary function tests (spirometry, diffusing capacity) and refer early to pulmonary and occupational medicine physicians for diagnosis and coordination of care.

Recommendations for Workplace Safety for At-Risk Workers

Inhaling any silica dust is dangerous. Workers can help protect themselves by:

• Using large amounts of water when cutting or grinding countertops
• Using specialized vacuums designed to safely remove dust
• Wearing the appropriate respirator at all times during dust-generating tasks

For more information and safety resources, visit the CDPH Occupational Health Branch website at www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CCDPHP/DEODC/OHB/Pages/silicosis.aspx or the CDC NIOSH website at www.cdc.gov/niosh/silica/about. Questions may be emailed to [email protected].

---

IN MENDOCINO, RIVER RESTORATION PAYS OFF FOR SALMON

Coho love the newly ‘messy’ streams.

by Tanvi Dutta Gupta

Conservationists restoring salmon along California’s North Coast have a mantra: A good coho salmon stream looks like a teenager’s bedroom — if teenagers discarded logs and branches instead of dirty clothes. Surveying a stretch of the Navarro River one morning last spring, Anna Halligan, a conservation biologist with Trout Unlimited, was delighted. “This is exactly what we want,” she said, examining the debris-filled water. The twigs, dirt and branches around a fallen redwood had slowed the river to a crawl and carved out a deep, sun-dappled pool underneath the trunk.

In September 2020, Trout Unlimited’s partners spent days selecting a redwood and then carefully maneuvering it into the river to make it more coho-friendly. That tree has now vanished — crushed under this much larger redwood, likely carried downriver by this winter’s rains. The collision has created even more of a “mess” than Halligan could have planned.

Halligan climbed down for a closer look. Within minutes, a young, silvery coho flashed into view in the new pool.

Coho salmon, which migrate between freshwater creeks and the open ocean, have nourished people, plants and animals along the Pacific Coast since time immemorial. Fred Simmons, an environmental technician for the Cahto Tribe of Laytonville Rancheria, recalled growing up along coho runs “jammed up so thick that you could go out there any time of evening and just get whatever you needed for your family.”

But logging, development and climate change have devastated the coastal streams, and Simmons — now in his 60s — has seen coho pushed to the brink. The population in and around Mendocino County, toward the southern end of the species’ range, was declared threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1996 and endangered in 2005.

That young coho in the Navarro River was part of a resurgence: For two years now, conservationists have watched the species return to the coast in notably large numbers. For the first time, “recovery seems possible,” said Peter Van De Burgt, a restoration manager with The Nature Conservancy. “We’re on the right track.”

The first attempts to restore Mendocino’s streams for coho and other salmon began in the 1960s. Decades of logging in the area’s old-growth forests left woody debris in stream channels, creating miles-long barriers. Well-intentioned state conservationists decided to remove it.

“They had this Western concept, like sweeping the floor,” said Anira G’Acha, environmental director for the Cahto Tribe of Laytonville Rancheria. They left behind hundreds of miles of tidy streams — simplified channels like bowling-alley lanes filled with fast-flowing water.

And fish kept dying. “It’s hard to be a salmon,” said Van De Burgt. Everything wants to eat you — birds, otters, even other fish. Without fallen logs to slow their flow, streams lack the overhanging banks, woody debris and deep pools that young salmon need to hide from predators.

“Recovery seems possible. We’re on the right track.”

On the Ten Mile River in Mendocino County, California, The Nature Conservancy oversees monitoring for juvenile coho salmon. Biologists Lydia Brown and Evan Broberg implant tags in young fish to track their growth.On the Ten Mile River in

Gradually, researchers realized that salmon needed the shelter provided by logjams. By the time coho salmon populations were protected by the Endangered Species Act, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife “basically did an ‘Oops’ and said, ‘Well, let’s put them back in again,’” said John Andersen, a California forester and policy director of the Mendocino and Humboldt Redwood Companies.

Historically, fire helped fell the trees salmon needed. “Stream habitat evolved around fire for thousands of years,” said Ron Reed, a Karuk tribal member who is a cultural biologist and dipnet fisherman. But as the logging industry grew, so did wildfire suppression. Conservationists had to cut down some trees to create new logjams.

In the late 1990s, Mendocino Redwood and other logging companies began partnering with Trout Unlimited to restore coho back to the land they owned; soon, The Nature Conservancy and other groups, supported by state and federal grants, began restoring streams elsewhere in the region. Halligan noted that an “ecological system” of collaborators has sustained this work, directing millions of dollars to local contractors and rural economies.

But creating logjams is harder than clearing them. Projects initially went through the same state environmental permitting processes required for conventional logging projects, despite their substantially different goals. Some took more than a decade to see through.

Other challenges were more practical. “We learned very quickly,” said forester Chris Blencowe, who consults on Nature Conservancy and Trout Unlimited projects. Blencowe initially relied on second-growth redwoods but noticed that when they toppled into a streambed, they would “often just break like an overweight watermelon.” He’s since switched to Douglas fir for many of his projects.

Blencowe has also learned to wedge logs between standing trees so that the wood doesn’t wash away in the winter rains, as it did in the early years. The Nature Conservancy has come to rely on a machine that uses vibrations to sink logs into the sediment, since the sound of a power hammer could stun or kill nearby fish.

Even after 20 years, not everything goes according to plan. Van De Burgt said this unpredictability is a feature, not a bug: “We want to implement projects that create chaos in the river.” The more chaos, the more places young coho will have to live and survive — and the more coho will make their way downstream to the ocean.

The projects can benefit other salmon and steelhead species, too, as well as the streamside forests. Felling nearby second-growth trees for logjams “encourages understory plant relatives to grow,” Marisa McGrew, a Karuk and Yurok woman and assistant natural resources director for the Wiyot Tribe, said over email. “Stream restoration and forest restoration go hand in hand.”

In the winter of 2023-2024, 15,000 coho salmon returned to spawn along the Mendocino coast, the highest number recorded by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife in 16 years of monitoring the population. Last winter, according to preliminary estimates, that number nearly doubled. “I think we got the perfect alignment,” said Sarah Gallagher, who leads the agency’s monitoring program. Good ocean conditions, a reprieve from several years of drought, and hundreds of miles of restored streams have combined to foster a flush of coho.

Still, this recovering population represents a fraction of historic runs. Once, hundreds of thousands of coho returned to California streams each year. But chinook and steelhead continue to dwindle. In mid-April, the interstate Pacific Fishery Management Council extended its ban on ocean salmon fishing for a third year. And hundreds more miles of North Coast streams still need wood. “Sometimes, when you look at it on a map, it looks like we’ve barely done anything at all,” said Halligan of Trout Unlimited.

“Stream restoration and forest restoration go hand in hand.”

Even as this year’s population is tallied, its habitat’s future is uncertain. Earlier this year, the Trump administration proposed deep cuts to the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose Pacific Coastal Salmon Recovery Fund has supported much of the restoration work along with Gallagher’s coho monitoring.

Meanwhile, Northern California conservationists are exploring alternatives, such as the $10 billion for climate resilience projects in Proposition Four, which California voters approved last November. With recovery underway, they’re determined to continue bringing coho back. The coho “are realizing this is their homeland where they were born,” Simmons said. “It seems like they’re trying to heal.”

(This story was produced with support from Bay Nature, a nonprofit news organization that connects the people of the San Francisco Bay Area more deeply with the natural world. High Country News)

---

---

CATCH OF THE DAY, Monday, November 24, 2025

JOHN ALVAREZ JR., 40, Willits. Probation revocation.

TIMOTHY BANUELOS, 33, Ukiah. Resisting.

JOSHUA LOPRESTI, 18, Ukiah. Under influence, paraphernalia, metal knuckles.

AARON MASSEY, 37, Ukiah. Controlled substance for sale, under influence, paraphernalia.

TYLER PARRY, 36, Ukiah. Domestic battery, false imprisonment, damage to communications device.

BREONNA SHERWOOD, 21, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery.

JOHN THOMPSON, 61, Fort Bragg. Assault with deadly weapon with great bodily injury, battery, vandalism, battery on peace officer.

THOMAS THORSON, 40, Nice/Ukiah. Probation revocation.

---

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM CRAIG

Warmest spiritual greetings,

Sitting quietly on a public computer at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in Washington, D.C. listening to “Tibetan Healing Relaxation Music” on YouTube. There is nothing particularly noteworthy happening on Capitol Hill right now. The weather is warm today, and everybody is outside gearing up for the holiday season. Talk is of Black Friday sales, the local sports teams, and holiday planning. Local residents have timed out on the subject of the Republicans in general, the Trump administration, SNAP benefits, the National Guard, the earth’s climate, and everything else except for 1.stocking the refrigerator with beer, 2.putting the steaks on the barbie, and 3.getting the game on the large high definition screen with the sound up. This is precisely how it is in America’s national capitol. I have no idea what is going to happen in the next five minutes, where I am going to go, what I am going to do, and I have no reason whatsoever to be concerned about any of it. That’s just the way it is. Happy Holidays.

Craig Louis Stehr, [email protected]

---

DAVID GURNEY:

Suckerberg’s Coast Bunker…

That poor, lonely billionaire with no real friends.

While you've been gossiping and giving away your privacy on Fakebook, Meta-Freak Mark Zuckerberg has been building a Doomsday private paradise on Kauai. He now owns over 2,300 acres of the island, with multiple unimaginably opulent mansions, and complete with his ultimate hideout and resting place, a 5,000+ sq.ft. underground bunker.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itVu37NNA-U&t=249s

---

49ERS WIN TURNOVER-CRAZED GAME, beat Panthers 20-9 despite three Brock Purdy picks

by Noah Furtado

Monday night was supposed to be a revenge game for Christian McCaffrey against his old team. San Francisco 49ers quarterback Brock Purdy interrupted the script.

McCaffrey carried and caught the ball as well in Niners threads as when the Panthers traded him away three years ago, but Purdy threatened to hijack the spotlight by throwing interceptions in three consecutive series before halftime. No other NFL quarterback has thrown as many picks in the first half of a game this season.

Purdy eventually got out of the way of letting McCaffrey have his moment in a messy 20-9 win that moved the 49ers up to an 8-4 record. McCaffrey surpassed the century mark in scrimmage yards again and reclaimed the league lead in the category as his Offensive Player of the Year campaign continued. The running back has fallen short of 100 scrimmage yards only once this season.

The spry age-29 star was fed the ball on the 49ers’ first five plays from scrimmage. Run, checkdown, checkdown, run, checkdown, it never seems to get old. McCaffrey gained 40 yards before some fans had even sat down, with nine touches in a clinical 15-play, 72-yard opening touchdown drive that Jauan Jennings capped with a catch-and-run score in the red zone.

Nearly nine minutes had passed with the Panthers’ offense yet to log a snap. But that changed dramatically when Purdy started to look farther downfield. The Niners QB threw his first interception into double coverage, targeting Jennings on a dig route. Pro Bowl cornerback Jaycee Horn trailed a step or two behind while a Panthers safety loitered in the passing lane. Purdy threw away from the safety, but into the hands of Horn and behind Jennings, who did not have much say in the play’s outcome.

Ahead of Purdy’s second interception, he faced a multiple-choice question. Purdy stepped up in the pocket to evade pressure; two possible answers presented themselves. He could have scrambled for a first down and more with a lot of green grass in front of him. Tight end George Kittle was open on an intermediate route across the middle. It might have seemed like there was no wrong answer, but Purdy found one. A floater behind wide receiver Ricky Pearsall, tightly covered by cornerback Mike Jackson on a post route to the end zone, landed in the hands of Jackson.

Purdy tossed his third interception of the game, and second to Horn, against zone coverage. Horn read the QB’s eyes as he stared down Pearsall on an in-breaker. Unbeknownst to Purdy, Horn ranged past the hashes from his third of the field to make the play.

And yet, at that point the 49ers still led 7-0.

The Panthers converted only three points off Purdy’s three interceptions with former No. 1 overall pick Bryce Young at quarterback, against a 49ers defense down to their third-string middle linebacker with backups at either end of its front four. Young somehow posted a worse passer rating (25.0) than Purdy (48.4) in the first half and ultimately threw two interceptions of his own, both secured by 49ers safety Ji’Ayir Brown in a career performance.

By the second half, a more conservative Purdy appeared to have learned his lesson for this particular game. He completed only 1 of 8 pass attempts that spanned more than 10 yards downfield.

---

49ERS GAME GRADES: McCaffrey, defense provide cover for Purdy in victory

Christian McCaffrey more than made up for a rough game by Brock Purdy as the San Francisco 49ers improved to 8-4 with a tough-to-watch 20-9 defeat of the Carolina Panthers on Monday night.

OFFENSE: C
If this had been a hockey game, Purdy might have gone to the bench after throwing his third interception in the first 22 minutes. He nearly had two others in the half, much to the displeasure of a clearly displeased Levi’s Stadium crowd, but finished 23 of 32 for 193 yards and an opening-drive 12-yard TD throw to Jauan Jennings. McCaffrey was dominant with 142 yards (89 rushing, 53 receiving) while getting 31 touches, including 11 on his team’s 18 first-quarter plays. The 49ers outgained Carolina 340-230 in total yards and had 23 first downs to the Panthers' 12.

DEFENSE: A-
Purdy’s problems put added pressure on San Francisco’s defense, but it was up to the test as Ji’Ayir ended the initial post-INT drive with the first of his two picks and the unit forced a punt after the second. The third turnover resulted in a Panthers field goal, but that was applause-worthy since that drive started at the 49ers’ 33. Carolina QB Bryce Young — coming in off a franchise-record 448 passing yards a week ago — was held to 169 through the air while RB Rico Dowdle (833 yards before Monday) gained just 38 on six carries.

SPECIAL TEAMS: B
Matt Gay, filling in for Eddy Piñeiro who had replaced Jake Moody, made both of his field goals (47 and 29 yards) in his 49ers debut and added a pair of extra points. Skyy Moore, at the heart of the 49ers ranking fourth in the NFL in kick return average (28.3), ripped off a 43-yarder that set the stage for Gay’s first field goal. Thomas Morstead was not called on to punt.

COACHING: B
No one could have blamed Kyle Shanahan had he told Purdy to take a seat after pick No. 3, but instead of pulling him he just pulled him back. After 23 first-half passes, Shanahan called for only nine after halftime (all of which Purdy completed). Shanahan did roll the dice once, opting to go for it on a 4th-and-1 at the Carolina 47 early in the second quarter. The 49ers converted, only to have Purdy’s second INT scuttle the possession. Robert Saleh strengthened his resume again as his injury-depleted defense never gave Carolina much of a chance.

OVERALL: B
This was the start of a three-game stretch in which the 49ers need to get fat and happy. The fat will have to wait, but they have to be happy with an 8-4 record heading into games against the Browns and Titans (who have three wins combined) with their Week 14 bye in between. Per numerous online prognosticators, a loss would have dropped the Niners’ playoff chances to just above 60%. The win shoved that figure above 90%. That’s a reason to be happy.

(sfchronicle.com)

---

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

With all the above going on, America needs a break. Enjoy a turkey, if you can afford to buy one, and count your blessings — for we are still a blessed people in a blessed land, and we should all show a little gratitude for the privilege of just being here on a planet so superbly suited to our needs.

---

FREE TO CHOOSE

Editor,

I voted for President Donald Trump, as did many of my family members, friends and other Americans.

I have seen posts on social media and read comments in the newspaper accusing us of being cult members, brainwashed, Nazis, racist, not being Christians and other vile comments that I cannot repeat.

We are all Americans entitled to vote for our choice. We will not all agree, but there are civil ways to voice our opinions. This hatred is not Christian-like.

As the Bible says, “He who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Diane Frank

San Francisco

---

“IT'S A SHAME that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work. ”

― William Faulkner

---

---

AN ON-LINE COMMENT: What is insurance? Pooling money to cover risk. The bigger the pool the lower the cost. Universal care is pooling the entire country. Why not learn from others. Take the best plan in the world, Netherlands was mentioned and use it here. Use the law word for word. The media is against universal care and misrepresent it because of their advertising. Watch CNN and half the ads are healthcare and insurance illegal in most countries. Whenever they talk about cost they assume current cost with no savings. Why not use Europe's cost per capita?

---

“YOU HAVE A TREMENDOUS AMOUNT of personal freedom in the kitchen. But there’s a trade-off. You give up other freedoms when you go into a kitchen because you’re becoming part of a very old, rigid, traditional society—it’s a secret society, a cult of pain. Absolute rules govern some aspects of your working life: obedience, focus, the way you maintain your work area, the pecking order, the consistency of the end product, arrival time.

If people in any work situation understand that it truly is a meritocracy, that doing a good job is all that matters…

One of the wonderful things, traditionally, about the restaurant business is that it attracts people from wildly diverse backgrounds and forces them—by working together in hot, confined spaces for long hours—to get along, to cooperate, to come to understand one another. The pressure is so intense that any cultural baggage they bring along has to be jettisoned.

I think the mix of informality and order can be useful in team building. When people feel comfortable being themselves, they can focus on their work, whatever the pressures. It’s very comfortable. It’s one of the things I hear most from people who are no longer in the business. They miss that camaraderie, the casualness, the sense of accomplishment at the end of a hard shift, sitting at the bar enjoying a free drink and reviewing the evening’s events. It’s golden. I’ve heard that a thousand times.”

— Anthony Bourdain

---

---

FROM ZOHRAN MAMDANI TO MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE, TRUMP’S PRESIDENCY IS LOSING THE PLOT

by Jack Ohman

Every day, it seems, we are presented with more evidence that President Donald Trump’s imperial presidency is unraveling.

For the first 10 months of Trump’s second White House term, Republicans in Congress were content to roll over and play dead as the administration set about cutting and pasting the Project 2025 blueprint in place of the United States Constitution.

But then a funny thing happened. Americans, including those in the MAGA fold, started to let it be known that they didn’t actually like tariffs, higher medical bills or glaringly obvious government corruption.

Suddenly MAGA’s most vocal cheerleader, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, began appearing on non-MAGA media outlets to complain about rising health care costs and demand that Trump push for the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Even more surprising was that she sounded, well, coherent. She even apologized for her previous contribution to the tone of our putrid national discourse.

Trump may have initially written off Greene’s defection as inconsequential, but an election wipeout for Republicans was evidence that even broken clocks were right twice a day.

In fact, Greene’s abrupt exit from the reservation rattled Trump enormously. How can you tell? The nicknamer-in-chief dubbed her “Marjorie Traitor Greene.”

After that Truth Social smackdown, the MAGA death threats started rolling in, and Greene, in a Beltway bombshell, announced Friday that she was resigning her seat in Congress on Jan. 5. Make no mistake, Greene is politically goofy, but she’s not dumb. She smells the stench of failure on Trump and his amateur hour administration, and she is jumping ship to humiliate him.

Greene also bested Trump (and House Speaker Mike Johnson) on the Epstein files. Once Trump folded on the House vote, he looked like something he detests more than anything: a loser.

Speaking of losers, Trump’s attempts to bolster soon-to-be-former New York Mayor Eric Adams and former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the mayoral race in the Big Apple were another epic fail. On Friday, that election had consequences in the White House.

After spending weeks calling Zohran Mamdani, the charismatic, 34-year-old Democratic Socialist, a “communist,” threatening to deport him (Mamdani was born in Uganda), and tweeting that the mayor-elect looked “TERRIBLE, his voice is grating, (and) he’s not very smart,” Trump did an about-face, inviting him to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

On paper, one would think that an Oval Office visit might be a potential trap for Mamdani. Instead, it was Mamdani who played Trump like a fiddle.

“I feel very confident that he can do a very good job,” Trump said of the man that New York gubernatorial candidate Rep. Elise Stefanik has called a “jihadist.”

In fact, Friday’s love fest left everyone a tad disoriented. The two guys from Queens hit it off, or, more importantly, gave the appearance of hitting it off, which is what good politicians do. Mamdani went in selling the idea of building new, affordable housing in New York, and professional apartment developer Trump lapped it up.

While Trump can be brutal on social media, he sometimes loses his ability to punch people in the face in person, and he treated Mamdani like a long-lost son.

“We agree on a lot more than I would have thought,” Trump told bewildered reporters, adding, “I’ll be rooting for him.”

Greene’s resignation video and Mamdani’s White House photo-op were a double dose of whiplash for a Republican Party that can no longer pretend that Trump’s time in the spotlight won’t soon be over. Want more icing on this cake? On Monday, a federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s politically motivated indictments of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Is Trump really crumbling? Yes, like the East Wing. Can he reverse the slide? Not in the courtroom of public opinion, where he’s flirting with record lows for unpopularity. Barring Supreme Court shenanigans, it’s becoming clear that Republicans are almost certain to lose control of the House in the midterms.

The Big Beautiful Bill is now looking like an albatross. The shutdown and lack of an outline of a “concept of a plan” on Obamacare is going to cost millions of Americans their health care or make it prohibitively expensive.

Trump may have hoped that if he covered every surface in the Oval Office with gold leaf, voters wouldn’t notice that he had been largely unsuccessful in lowering the cost of living. But the garish Oval Office gold leaf turns out to be purchased from Home Depot, and it’s tarnishing Trump’s political clout.

Can Lame Duck Donald still turn the tide? Perhaps only if he invokes the Insurrection Act, which is now not likely to be endorsed by a GOP congressional caucus that smells fear, and, more importantly, the specter of defeat in 2026.

Trump’s second term may have only just begun, but its end is also near.

(Jack Ohman is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist and columnist who also writes at https://substack.com/@jackohman.)

---

---

KEEP THE HOME FIRES BURNING

They were summoned from the hillside
They were called in from the glen
And the Country found them ready
At the stirring call for men
Let no tears add to their hardship
As the Soldiers pass along
And although your heart is breaking
Make it sing this cheery song

Keep the Home Fires burning
While your hearts are yearning
Though your lads are far away
They dream of home
There's a silver lining
Through the dark cloud shining
Turn the dark cloud inside out
Till the boys come Home

Over seas there came a pleading
"Help a Nation in distress!"
And we gave our glorious laddies
Honor made us do no less
For no gallant Son of Freedom
To a tyrant's yoke should bend
And a noble heart must answer
To the sacred call of "Friend!"

— World War One song, lyrics by Lena Gilbert Ford (1914)

---

I DIDN'T RAISE MY BOY TO BE A SOLDIER

Respectfully Dedicated to Every Mother—Everywhere

Ten million soldiers to the war have gone,
Who may never return again.
Ten million mothers’ hearts must break,
For the ones who died in vain.
Head bowed down in sorrow
In her lonely years,
I heard a mother murmur thro’ her tears:

"I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier,
I brought him up to be my pride and joy,
Who dares to put a musket on his shoulder,
To shoot some other mother’s darling boy?
Let nations arbitrate their future troubles,
It’s time to lay the sword and gun away,
There’d be no war today,
If mothers all would say,
I didn’t raise my boy to be a soldier."

What victory can cheer a mother’s heart,
When she looks at her blighted home?
What victory can bring her back
All she cared to call her own?
Let each mother answer
In the year to be,
"Remember that my boy belongs to me!"

— lyrics by Alfred Bryan (1914)

---

---

"THE SMART WAY to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate."

— Noam Chomsky

---

LEAD STORIES, TUESDAY'S NYT

Judge Dismisses Cases Against Comey and James, Finding Trump Prosecutor Was Unlawfully Appointed

Xi Presses Trump on Taiwan as They Agree to Meet in China in April

Trump Is Considering Push to Extend Obamacare Subsidies

Study Finds Mental Health Benefit to One-Week Social Media Break

‘Queen of Versailles’ to Close as New Broadway Musicals Struggle

A.I. Can Do More of Your Shopping This Holiday Season

---

AS U.S. PRESSES FOR PEACE, ZELENSKY SAYS UKRAINE FACES A ‘CRITICAL MOMENT’

Where Things Stand

Ukraine peace talks: President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Monday that his country was at a “critical moment” after talks with American officials over a U.S.-backed proposal aimed at ending the war with Russia. President Trump said in a social media post that “something good just may be happening” in the talks, but gave no details. Mr. Trump has set a deadline of Thursday for Ukraine to agree to the plan, an early draft of which many Ukrainians deemed overly favorable to Moscow.

Trump criticism: Mr. Trump said on Sunday that Ukraine’s government had been insufficiently thankful for American aid and other support since Russia’s 2022 invasion. Mr. Zelensky later said his country was “grateful for everything that America and President Trump are doing for security.”

(nytimes.com)

---

---

OUT WITH WOKE. IN WITH RAGE.

by James Carville

We are not even two weeks from the government shutdown, and the public conversation on the matter has fled the building. This shows, no matter what you believe, there’s a simple truth. The shutdown will have zero lasting consequence for next year’s midterms. The only thing that will persevere is economic pain. And that’s exactly why Democrats won on Nov. 4.

Zohran Mamdani, Abigail Spanberger, Mikie Sherrill — even down-ballot Georgia Democrats — all won with soaring margins because the people are pissed. And the people always point their anger at the party in charge. Rent is out of control. Young people can’t afford homes or pay student debt. We’re living through the greatest economic inequality since the Roaring Twenties.

President Trump has done nothing to curb the cost of what it requires to take even a breath in America today, the centerpiece promise of his 2024 campaign. The people are revolting, and they have been for some time.

This offers Democrats the greatest gift you can have in American politics: a second chance. I am now an 81-year-old man and I know that in the minds of many, I carry the torch from a so-called centrist political era. Yet it is abundantly clear even to me that the Democratic Party must now run on the most populist economic platform since the Great Depression.

It is time for Democrats to embrace a sweeping, aggressive, unvarnished, unapologetic and altogether unmistakable platform of pure economic rage. This is our only way out of the abyss.

Just as we did in 2018 and even in 2022, it’s all but certain that Democrats will turn out urban and suburban voters in the midterms, specifically the kind of people who vote regularly. At this point, it’s a damn near guarantee for our party, and we must continue to surge these voters. What we must also do is build a platform that helps us permanently uproot the Republican advantage in more rural regions. This can be done only with good old-fashioned economic populism, both in message and measure.

Just as it was for the Mamdani campaign, raging against the rigged, screwed-up, morally bankrupt system that gave us the cost of living crisis must be the centerpiece of every Democratic campaign in America. Unless you’re the top 1 percent, this touches everybody. Even lifelong Republicans know this economy isn’t working.

We have to present ourselves as adamantly, even angrily, opposing the system that is preventing younger rural voters from buying homes, jacking up utility bills and keeping grocery prices at astronomical levels. It is vital that Democrats, with some big ol’ cojones, rail against the unjust economic system that has created these conditions. Otherwise, we will continue to be viewed as part of it.

For this to work, we can’t get sidetracked on our message. The Republican Party’s greatest weapon has always been its uncanny ability to turn us against one another. It cannot be said enough: The era of performative woke politics from 2020 to 2024 has left a lasting stain on our brand, particularly with rural voters and male voters. The term Latinx was despised even by many Latino people. Calling folks “BIPOC” should have never been a thing. “Defund the police” was a terrible idea. Polling shows that nearly 70 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is “out of touch” and that it is more interested in social issues than economic ones.

We can no longer be a party with a whiff of moral absolutism. We can correct this only by looking toward the future, always, in every situation possible, and pivoting to a form of economic rage as our response.

With all this rage, we must also have a bold, simple policy plan — one that every American can understand. In the richest country in the history of our planet, we should not fear raising the minimum wage to $20 an hour, which had a 74 percent approval rating in 2023. We should not fear an America with free public college tuition, which 63 percent of U.S. adults favored in a 2021 poll. When 62 percent of Americans say their electricity or gas bills have increased in the past year and 80 percent feel powerless to control their utility costs, we should not fear the idea of expanding rural broadband as a public utility. Or when 70 percent of Americans say raising children is too expensive, we should not fear making universal child care a public good. And darn it, we should not fear that running on a platform of seismic economic scale will cost us a general election. We’ve already lost enough of them by being afraid to try. The era of half-baked political policy is over.

If you’re a student of history, the French Revolution is in the American wind. While the stock market soars, Mr. Trump and decades of corrupt and morally bankrupt Republican economic agendas have splintered the very heart of the American economy. The few are getting vastly richer while a crushing tide drowns the many. Yet even as Mr. Trump’s approval sinks to a low point of his second term, Republicans continue to place their faith in an economy built on pillars of sand, while the people scrape by day after day. This can change. It’s time we as a party do, too.

Le peuple se lève.

---

---

"WHEN I SAW MY WIFE AGAIN standing by the tracks as the train came in by the piled logs at the station, I wished I had died before I had ever loved anyone but her."

— Hemingway

---

BRANCH LIBRARY

I wish I could find that skinny, long-beaked boy
who perched in the branches of the old branch library.

He spent the Sabbath flying between the wobbly stacks
and the flimsy wooden tables on the second floor,

pecking at nuts, nesting in broken spines, scratching
notes under his own corner patch of sky.

I'd give anything to find that birdy boy again
bursting out into the dusky blue afternoon

with his satchel of scrawls and scribbles,
radiating heat, singing with joy.

— Edward Hirsch (1986)

---

“SO HE BOUGHT TICKETS to the Greyhound and they climbed, painfully, inch by inch and with the knowledge that, once they reached the top, there would be one breath-taking moment when the car would tip precariously into space, over an incline six stories steep and then plunge, like a plunging plane. She buried her head against him, fearing to look at the park spread below. He forced himself to look: thousands of little people and hundreds of bright little stands, and over it all the coal-smoke pall of the river factories and railroad yards. He saw in that moment the whole dim-lit city on the last night of summer; the troubled streets that led to the abandoned beaches, the for-rent signs above overnight hotels and furnished basement rooms, moving trolleys and rising bridges: the cagework city, beneath a coalsmoke sky.”

― Nelson Algren

---

---

MY DRUGS WARS

by Jonah Raskin

In the 19th century, the big international drug dealers were the English and the French imperialists who managed, with arms, to hook the Chinese on opium and force them to legalize it. I can understand why the Chinese were hooked. Opium is addicting. I tried it and liked it; opium took away all my pains. I used it briefly in the 1980s when I was growing weed. I traded marijuana for opium which I scored from an electrician. The only part I didn’t like about opium was coming down. When that happened I felt every ache and pain.

Frederick Engels wrote about the opium ”quarrel” as he called it in a report for the New York Daily Tribune in which he condemned “the old plundering buccaneering spirit exhibited by the Brits.” Unlike Engels—the scion of a German bourgeois family— I have never owned a factory nor have I ever had a working class girl friend like Mary Burns, but like Engels I have been and still am a Marxist fascinated by the “plundering buccaneering spirit.” And while we’re on the subject of drugs, let's not forget that Marx observed that “religion is the opiate of the people.” Religion is also addicting and can take away all earthly pains with the promise of heaven and eternal life .

For decades, I was a capitalist in the world of cannabis, and a criminal, too, in the Marxist definition of the word. I was also a reporter. I led three lives. In Theories of Surplus Value, Engels’ buddy Karl Marx writes that criminals undermine “the monotony of bourgeois life.” He or she, Marx argued. is also a major producer of both use and exchange value in capitalist society. Marijuana money paid for my groceries, gas, shoes and socks. I also bartered weed for a car and a teepee which provided me with a home for a couple of years.

“A criminal,” Marx explains in Theories of Surplus Value “produces crimes, criminal law, the police, criminal justice, penal codes, arts, bell-letters, novels.” As a criminal in the cannabis world in California when I was in my 30s and 40s I wasn’t alone. There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of us in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, cultivating, harvesting, transporting, selling and consuming weed. We came from Thailand and Poland, Chicago and Los Angeles and joined the “Green Rush,” the reincarnation of the Gold Rush. I left the commercial industry at about the same time that California voters approved Proposition 215 which legalized medical marijuana in the Golden State.

Becoming a marijuana grower and trafficker certainly enlivened my own life, and, while I don’t take sole credit for producing crime, criminal law, cops and penal codes I played a small part in the big picture. Also, as a marijuana journalist and as writer of fiction and nonfiction, as well as the creator of a feature film about marijuana I helped to produce the literature and the culture that reflected the industry and its workers.

I had read about capitalism in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere before I entered the cannabis world, and took economics 101 in college, but I had no direct experience as a capitalist until I grew and sold weed. From first hand experience, I learned about the laws of supply and demand, the fluctuations of the market, the role of the police in regulating the industry and in helping to set prices. Raids by law enforcement put a dent in the supply and jacked up prices. I also witnessed the vital role that marijuana dollars played in fueling the California economy when it needed fueling. Growers and dealers struck me as modern day buccaneers

Ever since the early days of capitalism, crime and criminals helped with the “primitive accumulation of wealth.” Indeed, marijuana farmers and traffickers extended the story of primitive accumulation into the 20th century. Marx explained that “The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.”

True, capitalism had long existed in California and elsewhere before the cannabis industry came along, but cannabis boosted local economies, especially in Sonoma, Mendocino, Humboldt and Lake counties when the lumber and fishing industries failed, men and women were out of work, tax dollars dried up and when commerce in small towns and cities suffered. Marijuana revived towns like Garberville, Willits, Eureka, Arcata, Sebastopol and truck stops in-between. Vineyards, grapes and wine would follow in the wake of weed.

My father was the first commercial marijuana grower I knew. A bootlegger and a rum runner in the 1920s who delivered Prohibition booze to speakeasies, he belonged to the Communist Party in the 1930s and had a long lucrative career as a lawyer on Long Island during the real estate boom of the 1950s. While he called himself a Marxist he was more of an economist determinist than a follower of Marx and Engels. His favorite book was Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which is due for a reevaluation today as the nation celebrates its 250th birthday. The second commercial marijuana grower I knew came from a prosperous Marin County family and ran his operation like a corporation with employees, wages and bonuses and with armed guards to protect against thieves. If only hippies had been growing it I would probably not have been interested in the subject. My dad was growing marijuana, he told me, because his monthly social security check and his savings didn't cover basic expenses.

I didn't know about his crop until he was dying of cancer. A month or so before his death, which happened a day before his 67th birthday, he called me to his bedside, told me about his secret garden and made me promise not to share information with my mother or anyone else in or out of the family. When he died before his crop had gone the distance and reached maturity, I harvested it, cured it and transported it to an apartment in Santa Rosa in a working class Mexican neighborhood where I was living and writing. Every morning for several months I rolled half-a-dozen or so joints, smoked them, got stoned and worked on a book with my by-line which was published in 1980 under the title My Search For Traven. I would write other books aided and abetted by marijuana which helped me focus on the words in front of me.

The smell of marijuana leaked out of my Santa Rosa apartment, so much so that a neighbor knocked on my door and asked me to sell him weed. That was my first deal. He handed me cash and I forked over a baggie. On one occasion, I transported weed on a flight to New York in a suitcase, which popped open as I was walking across the immense foyer and headed for the taxi cab to take me to Manhattan. A dozen of so baggies with marijuana scattered, and for a moment or two I panicked. I need not have done that. Arriving and departing passengers scooped them up, handed them to me and helped to save me.

In a rented vehicle, I drove pounds to Los Angeles where I sold them at $4,000 a pound to my friend Mark Rosenberg who I knew from our days in SDS together and who was then the president of Warner Brothers pictures and a “baby mogul.” Mark gifted ounces as end-of-the-year bonuses to men and women who’d worked on movies he produced such as The Fabulous Baker Boys and Bright Lights, Big City.

In 1980, I sold the idea of a marijuana movie titled Homegrown which wasn’t produced until 1996, soon after California approved medical marijuana. I also wrote articles and stories about weed for San Francisco Examiner and High Times magazine under the alias Joe Delicato. High Times also published my book, Marijuanaland: Dispatches from an American War which was also published in France under the same title.

“Everyone in France knows the word marijuana,” my translator told me. Around the world, it’s known as marijuana, though it’s also known as ganja, grass, cannabis, dagga and more.

Yes, I was growing it at the same time I was writing about it; growing it provided me with honest insider information. From 1981 until the end of the decade I doubled as an instructor in the English Department at Sonoma State University, paid about $6,000 a semester – not enough for my partner and I to live on.

After growing for a couple of years in Sonoma County and after tense helicopter surveillance, I grew in Mendocino east of Willits on a mountain top where 75 or so families also grew marijuana. I made friends with Ray and Nancy, two Irish Catholics from New England who made marijuana their god, their church and their country and who made enough money to buy the properties adjoining theirs.

Every fall they hosted a potluck party with lots of weed and piles of cocaine from Peru. Without the coke, the guests would have fallen asleep early in the evening and slept soundly.

In Mendocino, grew on a parcel of land next to Ray and Nancy’s that was owned by a San Francisco lawyer and his librarian wife who I knew from anti-war days in New York. They sent their three daughters to an expensive private school in San Francisco and needed money to pay for their tuition.

I was a sharecropper. In return for using the land and with access to the water on the property, the landowners received one quarter of the crop. We never argued, though arguing came easy with one partner who carried a gun and snorted a lot of coke and who said to me one evening in the midst of a debate about the best cultivation methods, “Don’t make me have to use this on you.” He meant his gun.

During my last season in Sonoma, my partner, Angel— a twenty-something-year-old Floridian and who had grown up in the Miami drug culture— heard the thud thud thud of sheriff’s helicopter seconds before I did. She was sunbathing naked on the redwood deck at the back of the house. Her initial impulse was to cover up. Then she reached for a bath towel, and, while the helicopter hovered directly overhead, tossed it aside and revealed all, hoping to distract the pilot’s eyes from the pot patch.

We didn't take chances; we harvested the weed, drove to Bolinas where we manicured it and then transported it to a dealer in San Francisco who was happy to have it. ( The police were raiding pot patches in Bolinas when we arrived so we lay very low.) Season after season, the money rolled in and rolled out quickly. I became addicted to it, and to the outlaw lifestyle.

After a while I came to regard addiction as a metaphor that explained all of human history and behavior. As a species homo sapiens were addicted to money, power, sex, drugs, beauty, bad habits and good habits, too.

On Main Street in Willits, where I shopped for essentials, I saw marijuana dollars change hands, and as growers bought cars and trucks, groceries and gifts at Christmas for the kids. Hypocrisy ruled. Local business folks took pot money with both hands and insisted there was no marijuana money in Mendocino. “Go to Oregon if you want that story,” a head of the Willits chamber of commerce told me.

I met and interviewed several Mendocino County sheriffs including Tom Jondahl and Tom Allman who I liked and who tried to legalize weed on his own. Jondhal told me that law enforcement officers in New York would call him and explain that they’d just raided an apartment with marijuana labeled “Grown in Mendocino.”

Couldn’t he do something about it? they asked. No, not really he explained; there was far too much of it and he had too few resources to make a dent in the crop. Besides there was pressure not to raid for the growers and from law abiding citizens who liked the cash economy.

I grew during Reagan’s presidency and during the war on drugs, which was really a war on people, when civil rights were violated, and also when greed often ruled on pot farms. My friend Ray Raphael, a Humboldt County school teacher, tells the story of how hippies became capitalists in Cash Crop: An American Dream. Indeed, weed was and still is as American as apple pie and mom; a countercultural sacrament that was embraced by agriculture and became an industry.

Michelle Alexander tells the harrowing story of how weed laws and the enforcement of weed laws led to the persecution of young men of color in her landmark book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. In Northern California white men and women were also arrested and incarcerated. In big cities people of color were the big target of law enforcement as they are also the main targets of ICE today. It ain’t fair and it's crying shame.

My experiences in the weed world provided me with a real education in economics and politics. I got out of the biz when I was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to teach American literature in Belgium where I didn't know a single dealer.

When I came home I was hired to teach fulltime and with a pension at Sonoma State University. For a decade I had worried that I’d be arrested and lose my part-time teaching job. Fortunately, I was able to lead three lives as a marijuana grower, a college teacher and as a pot reporter.

After I gave up growing commercially, I continued to grow a modest crop for my own personal use. I even grew it in my backyard at Ocean Beach in San Francisco, but the cold, the fog and the wind didn’t favor marijuana cultivation. I use a salve today that combines THC and CBD and helps with arthritis.

I’m happy it’s legal, happy there aren’t the kinds of mass arrests there once were, still distressed that the White House and war drug warriors lied to the American public about the danger of a flower that humans have relied on for their health and for spiritual harmony for thousands of years.

Did Marx and Engels smoke weed? Probably not. But they might have. After all, Marx said “Nothing human is alien to me.” Weed has rarely been alien to humans, from ancient China and ancient Egypt to Chile and California today.

---