(Ed note: After 22 years in a variety of federal prisons, John Dalton is at home in Laytonville picking up the pieces of his shattered life. His case was the worst example of egregious/outrageous government…
Posts published in “Essays”
Looking back, there was a chain of events that in some ways might have led up to the Anderson Valley Land Trust filing a lawsuit against my family. For a few years, the AVLT kept…
They don’t come to northern California for the bubbly, the marijuana or the luxury hotels and they don’t enjoy picnic lunches along the Russian River. There are more than 150,000 of them in the whole…
When I was little kid in the 1940s, in the early morning on New Year’s Day, my father would drive the empty streets to North Beach to pick up certain pastries for New Year’s Day…
Dawn belongs to the heifers. Six of them wait every morning near the bottom of the hill. In fair weather a pickup truck brings alfalfa and sometimes meadow grass. On rainy days, the man tugs…
In the latter years of the Reagan administration, when even sophisticated urbanites were terrified of the AIDS virus and shunned those afflicted (never mind rural blue-collar backwaters whose tolerance levels still run about 20 years…
There have been many board members who have quit the Anderson Valley Land Trust over the past few years. That might be normal for volunteer organizations in the Valley, I am only aware of the…
By the age of 20 I wanted to be a novelist of dark bitter books with criminal characters trudging their sins, diseases and poisoned dreams around California’s golden landscape. The writers I idolized, and which…
I was recently made aware of an argument that had taken place between a Mother and her teenage son, six weeks ago or so, at their family home. The heated exchange was regarding the young…