Running sheep on the hillsides framing Anderson Valley provides the herder with a way of seeing Anderson Valley very different than from your car as you check up on the neighbors on your way to…
Posts published in “Essays”
Ed Sniece resides upriver, near a branch in a fork of the stream; one you wouldn’t ordinarily notice unless you already knew it was there. It’s a far piece afoot. Consequently, I don’t see or…
Many years ago, I was very involved in the 4-H program. A highlight of the year was 4-H camp. This was held at beautiful Mendocino Woodlands east of the town of Mendocino. I had attended…
I first heard that word “scamming” when I wandered out to the hills of Northern California as a hitchhiking teenager. I learned it meant to do or get something by sometimes sneaky and probably illegal…
I don’t have a college degree or a Ph.D., but I’m savvy enough to know that a lot of what passes for “political correctness”—as they call it in the academic world and elsewhere—is bull shit.…
Early last century Frank Sandelin owned numerous businesses in Ukiah and a number of properties, including a 307-acre ranch two miles north of Ukiah. The ranch grew grapes, Bartlett pears, alfalfa, hay and vegetables. Much…
The Beatles serenaded Lovely Rita in 1960s Liverpool, but Y2K San Francisco was choking with cars, tickets were costly, and outbursts of rage against Parking Control Officers were increasingly frequent. When a spate of attacks…
Whenever I drive through Ukiah and see youngish homeless men trudging along the side of the road with their backpacks, my first thought is always the same: Somewhere these men have mothers. That Pavlovian response…
Pandemic Halloween has been gifted a soundtrack: Republican rocker Ted Nugent’s ghoulish and deafening version of the Star-Spangled Banner. There is nothing—not Carl Maria von Weber’s Wolf Glen, not Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata in D…