It's an unhappy day all around, at the end of it headed south on my bike out of Arcata through Bayside and just about ready to pass the post office when someone startles me by…
Posts published by “Crawdad Nelson”
Sacramento doesn't have a noon whistle. Instead, they blow a siren for a full minute on the last Friday of the month. It's not the same thing at all. Probably very early in the industrial…
The grizzled old philosopher/working man/lifelong confirmed stoner I used to get weed from when I lived in Arcata is being evicted from his sandy little shacked-up trailer in Manila which squats on a tide-soaked marsh…
I died in April, 1979, a Saturday morning that I seem, now, to remember as being sunny and animated, as most sunny spring days on the Mendocino coast are, with that naive optimism unique to…
The boys were flying on acid on the veneer line, that much I knew. I never worked on veneer but I saw it done. A matter of flipping big flat sheets of Doug fir off…
I was minding my own business when I heard the thump of heavy footwear on the porch. I stepped outside in time to intercept two neatly dressed young women, carrying shiny briefcases and purses. Their…
We rolled out of Lemmon Valley, just north of Reno, late on an icy night in December. My brother had insisted that a little midwinter elk hunting was just what I needed, and I couldn't…
June of 1977 there was uncertainty about the future of the mill in Fort Bragg. At that time it had been in operation for over 100 years, but only the year before, Louisiana-Pacific, which had…
I’ll admit I was down-and-out. I was borderline Fun Bunch. But these things are subjective. One man’s pith is another’s drivel. I was in the Humboldt Squeeze: watching my job dry up quicker than the…