THE ANDERSON VALLEY is shocked at the sad news that Jason Abbott has died of complications following surgery in San Francisco. A graduate of Anderson Valley High School, Jason, a logger, was injured in a fall from logging equipment. He is the son of Gary Abbott of the Anderson Valley and the grandson of Gloria Abbott, also of the Anderson Valley. There will be no formal service, but the popular young man’s many friends and family will gather for a potluck celebration of his life 3pm, Saturday (June 30th) at the lawn area of the Mendocino County Fairgrounds in Boonville.
STARTLED to see Anna Taylor’s home being demolished at Navarro last week. Prominent in the affairs of the Anderson Valley for many years, Ms. Taylor has been confined to a Santa Rosa care home for some time. Brad Wylie of Navarro is the owner of the property where the Taylor home, visible from Highway 128, and erected some time before World War Two, was situated.
IN OTHER NEWS from the Deepend, there’s been an unhappy management change at Camp Navarro. The previous manager, quite popular with locals, was rudely fired by the Camp’s overseers, casting a palpable pall on the surrounding community.
THAT SMALL FIRE at Rancho Navarro a few days ago was started when a generator in a shipping container for an indoor grow exploded. Fire broke out and burned some nearby trees and about a half-acre of brush. Fortunately, the blaze occurred at 4am when it was cool and there was no wind. This all happened at a newer grow site, and sometime after the fire, vehicle tires were slashed and masked men were observed doing celebratory jigs. Deependers suspect rival growers who had their water supply depleted by the new development did the tire slashing.
HOT! A summer weather pattern kicked in last Friday with a three-day temperature rise until the fog rolled back in Sunday evening. It got up to 92 in Boonville Friday, 97 on Saturday, and 90 on Sunday before returning to the low 80s for the rest of the week. Like the other large-scale events at the Boonville Fairgrounds, this one is also so well managed, the post-concert clean-up so thorough, one would never know that five thousand or so people had been in our tiny town over the weekend.
THE RASTAFARIANS arrived in force Friday, departed in droves Sunday. Monday morning, looking a bit worse for three days of One Love, a few stragglers stumbled around Boonville clutching their paper cups of coffee.
ONE OF THE EVENT’S managers told us Monday that several of the bands had had a terrible time at SFO where arbitrary INS agents allowed some famous musical personalities into the country without hassles while others were turned away. In one case a Brazilian band was admitted but its lead singer was not. A Jamaican was allowed in but his records were confiscated.
RENEE WYANT is like a lotta unsung, self-effacing people around here who collectively make the Anderson Valley more of a community than most places, and an exceptionally nice place to live. For years, Renee has donated the goddess only knows how many hours in managing the snack bar at high school ball games, and there are a heckuva lot of ball games. And these volunteer hours occur after her very long and complicated work day which include the weekly electronic organization and dispatch of Boonville’s beloved weekly newspaper. Since her youngest son graduated from high school in 2013, Renee is overdue for snack bar retirement, but she’s probably impossible to replace, and on and on she goes.
IF YOU WANT to stay at the renovated Harbor House in Elk, a room is only $700 per night. Less expensive berths go for $300 a night. One on one tutorials with Charlie Acker, optional.
IN THE AGE of instant communications, the more prosaic, non-inflammatory news travels slowly. Here in the Anderson Valley, who’s boffing whom is known in full English-to-Spanish translation minutes after the couple un-couples. But the fact that appliances are no longer accepted at the Boonville Transfer Station — water heaters, stoves, fridges, washers and dryers — remains unknown to many. You can offload this stuff at the Ukiah station, deep South State Street.
THE ANDERSON VALLEY Senior Center took a tour of Lucille Estes’ remarkable gardens at Airport Estates last week and, no surprise, came away, as everyone who sees them does, chanting superlatives, as in “Wow!”
YOU'RE GETTING to be a Valley old timer if….
- You remember when all local phone numbers were Twinbrook 5-31XX – with no area code.
- Your local phone line was a party line.
- You visited Hendy Grove before Hendy Woods State Park was established.
- You checked out books from the library in Indian Creek State Park.
(Marshall Newman)
THE ANDERSON VALLEY School Board met Tuesday evening (25th of June), and will meet again on Friday (the 28th). I planned to attend to get my two bits in but came to my senses before setting forth. I wanted to complain in person about the district’s reliance on the Santa Rosa-Eureka-based lawyer’s combine which has supplanted our school board’s authority. Case in point: Our school board, on the advice of one of these distant un-elected attorneys, recently agreed to a $60,000 deal the public is not privy to. Why? Because the lawyer said so, public money notwithstanding. Call me old school but I still think $60,000 is a lot of money. I also think the public has every right to know the details of the claim against the district that led to 60 grand sailing out the door. But the lawyer says it’s a secret. I also wanted to ask the school board to ignore the lawyer and tell us all the Why Fors of the 60 thou deal. But the new public agency strategy is to simply ignore impertinences from the pesky sectors of the public and stay with the errant private but also publicly-funded legal advice dispensed from Santa Rosa and, in this case, Eureka.
SPEAKING of the local schools, our Superintendent, Mrs. Hutchins, has survived the Mean Girl’s Spring Offensive and is now our former Superintendent, but she is also now Superintendent of all Mendocino County’s schools, having bested a Ukiah edu-drone in the recent election, and bested him by a healthy margin, too. In a lot of ways, the County Superintendent’s job is a lot easier than overseeing a single school district with its entrenched, unsupervisable staff, often irresponsible parents, reluctant, under-achieving students, unpredictable, pressure-prone school boards. I challenge you to stop the next 20 people at the Boonville Post Office, and if one of them knows anything at all about the County Office of Whatever the Hell it is, you’ve encountered a rare informed citizen.
MSP tells us that the sandbar is firmly in place at the mouth of the Navarro River. “Last year, for the first time in the 24 years MSP has been on the coast, the sandbar was breached the entire summer - it closed in the Fall. But there was still a good discharge estimated at the gauge (the amount of water headed toward the sandbar) - 24.7 cubic feet of water per second. Put into understandable terms, that's 183 gallons per second, 10,967 gallons per hour and 658,008 gallons per hour,” not enough to blast the river free at the Pacific.
BOONVILLE FARMERS' MARKET CLOSES. For the past two months Petit Teton Farm tried to keep a market going in Boonville, but too few customers showed up to justify the effort. We thank Johnny Schmitt and the rest of the Boonville Hotel management for allowing us to run the market in their parking lot. We also thank Natural Products of Boonville and Yorkville Ranch Olive Oil for regularly vending with us. Perhaps someone will try to revive the market at some future date. And a big thank you to those handful of faithful locals who regularly attended the market. We invite you to come out to the farm to shop. Petit Teton Farm is open every day from 9-5 except Friday, 9-3 and Sunday, noon-5. If you have questions or requests please call 707.684.4146 or email us at farmer@petitteton.com. We will let you know what is available each week and can pick and pack for you prior to your visit. This week we have: meats - pork, beef, squab. Veggies - Walla Walla onions, red of Tropea onions, Napa cabbage, shelling peas, cherry tomatoes, Espelette peppers. Eggs. Canned goods - from soups to jams, krauts to pickles, relishes to chutneys. We welcome visitors.
BLACKBIRD FARM, the rogue charter school-funded all-weather youth camp in the hills west of Philo, has racked up another Notice of Violation for building an unpermitted road. Meanwhile, at the foot of Ray's Road, Blackbird's entry point, we've got OneTaste, a sexual "educational" business committed to instruction in "spiritual" masturbation. The onanists paid $4.9 million for the Philo property where, for $5,000 a weekend, men and women, previously unknown to each other, are taught "orgasmic meditation." The orgasmics arrive in Philo in droves, many of them traveling in charter buses from the Bay Area and paying lots and lots to, well, and not to put too fine a point on it, whack-off, er, orgasmically meditate, which seems to me some pretty darn tricky multi-tasking, but I guess that’s why some people need lessons. The Orgasmics are lately in the news because some of their customers think they’ve been scammed. Boy, some people are just too darn skeptical for their own good! Pretty sure OneTaste’s customers are drawn from the Rajneesh demographic.
DETECTIVE LUIS ESPINOZA has been promoted to Sergeant, and I just ran out and bought a new Celestron telescope to help keep focus on the Boonville basketball coach’s astronomical career with the Sheriff's Office, because when I came here in 2009 he was a ride-along with our newly arrived Resident Deputy Craig Walker, a designation that has subsequently been done away with (due to the stingy Board of Supervisors who have reserved all pay raises for their own sweet selves). His skyrocketing career could take him away from us, down to Sonoma County, for instance, where a patrol officer was recently listed as making more money ($300k+ in one year, thanks to overtime) than District Attorney Jill Ravitch! But Sgt. Espinoza tells us he’s not in it for the money — who said he’s all about community, and goodness what an asset he is to ours! No, he confesses, under duress, he doesn’t want to give up being a homicide detective, and putting killers away — but, hey, he says, it’s time to move on. True enough, and at risk of repeating myself, the man is motivated, talented, versatile and precise; and I wouldn’t be overly surprised if he didn’t run for sheriff next election. I, for one among many, would vote for him! (Bruce McEwen)
UKIAH TO BOONVILLE Tuesday afternoon by MTA. The driver, approximately 80 years old, said to me at the gate, "You're a Senior presumably." I said he presumed correctly, and wanted to add that I was pleased to find someone older than me still on the job, but that might be stretching presumption a little too far. Old people, of which I am one, tend to be tetchy about age. The ride to Boonville was $1.50. I got on at the Ukiah Library. It was hot on the street, hotter yet in the sadistically designed bus shelter where a large woman with a squirming child shared my wait for the bus. It seems hot in Ukiah even in mid-winter, and the place is unbearable in the summer months. Maybe it's the desolation of the place — bad buildings, no trees, miles of pavement — all of it twice as noxious in the heat. There were ten passengers, Me, a sedate gringa, a black man dressed for the heat like a Bedouin, 8 middle-age Mexicans. We picked up the 11th passenger at WalMart. She was a difficult upload. A worn-looking woman of 50 or so, and half-to-three quarters cracked, she carried several over-large bundles indicating she was homeless. She immediately kicked off a prolonged haggle with the driver about the fare to Point Arena, I think. I considered paying it myself just to get on the road as the driver, undoubtedly accustomed to dealing with difficult persons on his daily run from Gualala to and from our lovely county seat, finally said, "You're either on or off." That's right. That’s exactly the way we looked at it in ’67. You're either on the bus or off the bus, but this late in the trip I no longer recognize the bus. I liked the old boy's clarity. Bus drivers may be our last totally clear citizens. As the cracked woman extracted change from several different bags she'd plunked down in the aisle, the Mexicans exchanged loco looks. The loco lady finally paid up and we were off. Almost. "Wait!" she shouted. "I've got to tie my bag down." The driver stopped the bus, got out, opened the back door while his star passenger secured one of her bags. The bus rattled up and over the hill, its air conditioning gasped, the cracked woman appeared to sleep, and the ride was uneventful all the way to Boonville.
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