Nature must love mysteries. Why else would it have so many? Some of them are huge, like how the earth evolved. Some are small, like how individual species adapt to a changing environment. Nature in…
Posts published by “Marshall Newman”
It was a dry Anderson Valley day in late January this year. The morning temperature was crisp, the sun warming, and the light and shadows bright and deep in the forest where I was piling…
History is long, but memory is short. Anderson Valley’s early settlers may have arrived in the 1850s, but the valley’s history began millennia earlier, with the coming of Native Americans. These First People left little to indicate their presence here, but they were here.
Anderson Valley is a unique place. The valley’s tightly circumscribed terrain, redwoods-and-meadows landscape and temperate (compared to most of the world) climate are similar to a scattering of spots up and down the Northern California…
Anderson Valley has five cemeteries, though only four are in general use. All are old, all are still active, all have rustic character befitting the valley – no manicured lawns here — and all abound with historic family names, many that still had a strong presence in the valley during the years of my youth there in the late 1950s and 1960s. A few of those families remain in the valley today, others have passed on or moved on. Still, the cemeteries are snapshots of the valley, past and present.
One-Twenty-Eight. The highway. That $%&(@! road. However one refers to California State Highway 128, it is Anderson Valley’s main street and its main portal to the outside world. Highway 128 is also — in some…
During my periodic visits to Anderson Valley in recent years, I often told recently arrived residents they had not yet experienced a true Anderson Valley winter, one with big storms that lasted days, came often…
Soon after I began writing these vignettes of my time in Anderson Valley from the late 1950s to the late 1980s I discovered the Anderson Valley 4-H Club no longer existed. I was surprised, but…