Today a casual traveler driving east from the Comptche Store would never imagine the busy logging scene along the valley floor that went one 140 years ago. The headwaters of the Albion River in our…
Posts published in “Essays”
Mushrooming population, developers’ zeal, pressure for more housing, agricultural subsidies, pesticides, and other forms of pollution only partially explain the persistence of environmentally destructive water practices. The entire body of water law itself has been—and…
I’m not sure when I first listened to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which premiered 100 years ago this week, from start to finish. Snippets had played throughout the soundtrack of my life as a…
I was born with control. I take two awful hot baths a day. I keep movin’ all the time on the diamond — and I eat nothin’ but fried food. Why does my arm last…
Cactus Smuggling and Other Adventures… I stood alongside two Mexican tourists looking through a chainlink fence at an enormous hole in the ground. Somewhere near the New Mexico/Arizona line it was maybe half a mile…
Water is a frequent image in Bach’s music. Placid rivers sing the praises of enlightened monarchs. Other streams rush by, murmuring their eternal truths of earthly life’s fleeting nature. Elsewhere, storms rise up, from strafing…
Denny’s restaurant, longtime cornerstone of Highway 101 and Ukiah’s busiest road into town, closed a couple years ago. Nothing was done to prevent it being destroyed by various vagrants, criminals and druggies who infest the…