Recent news about the sand bar at the mouth of the Navarro River blocking the stream so thoroughly that Highway 128 remained flooded by the backed up waters sent me searching through the 1879 archives…
Posts published in “Essays”
“Hey Weinstein”, says Zuckerman, his wannabe director Monte Nido neighbor one sparkling summer Sunday, “I’ve got a commercial to shoot out in the desert. It’s for a Mexican brandy client, La Rosa Fina. I need…
America didn’t get what it expected, but perhaps it got what it deserved, good and hard. Daddy’s in the house and he busted straight into the nursery and now the little ones are squalling in…
Faced with a crummy time in the McCarthyite and Cold War 1950s here’s what some of us did. The American mood was apocalyptic. LA was ringed with nuclear tipped Nike missiles. We more or less…
I was asked a few years ago to inspect a vineyard just outside of Geyserville. I used to get these requests often, and this was not a large vineyard, so no problem. When I arrived…
Marcia and I woke the morning after the election to the sounds of Waste Management trucks picking up the recycling cans, and my first words to Marcia were, “Apparently total collapse of the system has…
Michael Laybourn is an artist and businessman living in Hopland. He grew up in Hanford, Washington where his dad was involved in Atomic Energy. He graduated from Arizona State University with BFA in Painting &…
Had lunch with a few other yate owners and Liliana, Madame of the Port. She is a real character, plus very attractive and engaging. She arrived here in Playa del Cocos with her parents when she was 5-years old and learned English by just talking to the tourists and yate owners.
Another Memorial Day has come and gone in Ithaca’s ramshackle nineteenth-century civic graveyard that sprawls over some twenty hillside acres between the flats of downtown and the campus of Cornell University on the bluffs above. Once a grand landscape park that housed the dead beneath neo-classical crypts and mighty obelisks, the cemetery is now a neglected oasis for mischief-makers and dog-walkers: many monuments have toppled over; the facades of the city fathers’ imposing vaults are ruined.