In your life you must go to Yellowstone. If you can't or haven't, come on, come along. I was a tour bus driver and a park ranger there for several seasons. I've been taking folks…
Posts published in “Essays”
Several years ago we rented a farm house to a couple new to the area. Ironically the man’s father-in-law had just purchased our property in Hopland, making it possible for us to purchase the small…
Ahh, those Anderson Valley mornings. At the Mosswood before things heated up it was calm and happy, the smiling lovely staff providing truly wonderful coffee, and there were open seats out front. I plunked my…
When I think of the Democratic Party these days, the image instantly comes to mind of little Linda Blair playing the demon-possessed child in the classic horror movie, The Exorcist (1973), most particularly the scene in which…
Monday morning I debated making a trip over the hill to the Ukiah valley where our watermelons and sweetcorn might be needing water. At the Mosswood Market in Boonville my girlfriend, Jetta (who is carrying…
Would you darken your complexion and walk in the shoes of a black man in America today? Probably not, especially with police shootings of unarmed black men, and not if you remember John Howard Griffin’s…
The sixty year old trees in Bainbridge park are gone. In the battle, nay war, against homeless people sitting on the grass, every element of grace or accommodation in the park has been removed. The…
The entire French Resistance against the Nazis can be encapsulated in this film sequence: a man—a loner, standing and leaning on his bicycle, smokes a cigarette alongside of the railroad tracks. He carries a newspaper…
I’ve never been down an American coal mine, among the least safest in the world, though have plunged thousands of feet into the dark bowels of British pits in Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland, the world’s safest until they were closed by politicians and bean counters.