It's a funny mood around Peggy Templer's house in the northern California woods, a mixture of dread, relief and fear. Shock waves are still in the air. Lions'll do that to you, this lion in…
Posts published in “Essays”
The Fourth of July has always been a mixed bag for me. As a boy, I loved the barbecue and fireworks party in our neighbors’ backyard. My friends and I ran around in the dark with sparklers, ate potato salad and burgers and corn and watermelon, and a man smoking a cigarette and drinking a martini set off spectacular fireworks smuggled into California from Montana.
Fort Bragg is only ten miles from Mendocino as the crow flies. But a lot further by feel. Caspar bridge is like a Mason-Dixon line between two realms. Just flip-flop the compass. You might think…
The other day I was working the crossword puzzle and the clue was boxer Griffith and I thought of Emile and my heart froze for a moment because I was at Madison Square Gardens when…
Stories of spat-on veterans began proliferating in the US media in 1990 as the country ramped up for the first Persian Gulf War. Anti-war activists had spat on troops returning from Vietnam, or so the…
As I was walking home from town today, it occurred to me that nothing can prepare us for what is going to happen very soon in California, because nothing like what is about to happen has ever happened before. Forty million people did not live in California the last time, if there ever was a last time, so little water flowed in our rivers. Millions of cows were not being raised here, and millions of acres of water-hungry crops, including alfalfa to feed those millions of cows, were not being grown here during previous mega-droughts. Yes, there have been a few longish droughts in the last century and a half, but nothing like the current drought.
“The whole landscape appears to have been formed by some mighty convulsion of the earth that has thrown up numerous spurs or broken ranges of mountains to the height of from 7,000 feet to 9,000…
And now the news from Fort Bragg, where the women are patient, the men spend a lot of time at home, and the children are around here somewhere… It's officially summer and the marijuana is already as high as a Doberman's thigh. It's expected to be a bumper crop this year if you talk to Rollie Deschutes down at the Weed Feed 'n' Seed as some do, though I wouldn't recommend it, given the condition of his oral hygiene… Rollie's let himself "go to pot," so to speak, since that big disappointment with the VFW poetry contest in the early spring. Turned out the whole thing was a fever dream brought on by a surfeit of immature peyote buttons served to him in the guise of Brussel sprouts by his practical joking cousin Ephraim. Rollie's 5,000-word ode to jellybeans, written entirely in squid ink on discarded plywood sheets, will be on display at the back of the store until August.
Legal marijuana. I never thought I’d see it happen, not in my lifetime. Legalized medical marijuana is one thing, but now the states of Colorado and Washington have legal marijuana. I never thought. My life-time…