Press "Enter" to skip to content

Posts published in “Essays”

Plugged Out

Not by accident. In fact, intentionally. I am not plugged in; I am plugged out. Every day, I see my opposites, who confirm my choice. They come into and out of my field of vision…

COVID Rebound

With President Biden experiencing a return of COVID symptoms, there has been a flurry of news reports on “COVID rebound”.  Let’s look at what this is and why it happens.   First, it might be…

The Gent From Ghent

In the first of the four volumes of Thomas Nugent’s Grand Tour of 1749, that hefty guidebook required of aristocratic British travelers to the continent, the city of Ghent (now in Belgium, which didn’t exist…

Logging Slash

Seventy-five years ago, when bulldozers began to be used to log the redwoods, a common practice began of blading logging slash from a landing as far as a dozer could push, usually that meant into…

The Olive Hackett-Shaughnessy Saga

No one seems to keep a tally of the exact number of storytellers in San Francisco, but there seem to be more of them, at more venues and with bigger and more diverse audiences than…

Merchant Marine Memories

Reading Ralph Bostrom’s interesting letter about sailing with the merchant marine service to Curacao, I was reminded of my own experiences with the Seamen's International Union on board a freighter bound for Saigon in 1968.…

The Two Forests of Van Damme 

There are trees found only on the coast of Mendocino County. And if that weren’t cool enough, there’s a whole forest of them that can only be reached by a wooden walkway tucked into a…

-