The night before the Russian River Run, Sally Miklose called me from her motel room in Ukiah because her 16-year-old son Jesse wanted to find…
Posts published in “Essays”
Giant ragweeds bloom in the fields of our river valley after an unusually wet spring, with vast expanses of the bottoms and low ground temporarily…
So, you are out on the John Muir Trail (JMT) and nature calls. Your first thought: Why doesn't Nature have a 1-800 number. Of course,…
At night the band would play paso dobles in the square. When it was time for the tuba solo, the audience became quiet and in…
As a kid during the 50s my favorite movies were sci-fi and monster flicks, mostly black and white budget affairs like Creature from the Black…
On an unusually warm July evening for San Francisco, I sit in front of an antique Underwood typewriter in the room where Dashiell Hammett wrote…
Javier didn’t recognize their faces, but he had seen the chairs before; white, plastic, cheap. Stackable. Their center of gravity was off kilter. They strained,…
A few months ago Harper’s Magazine published an article by Rebecca Solnit titled “Abolish High School.” After a brief introduction, she tells about the circumstances that propelled her from junior high school straight to college.
Something marvelous strange happened with our pumpkins this year. That is to say we are hopeful the strange turns out to be marvelous. Here’s what has happened so far. Four years ago, I bought two pumpkin starts at the farmers market in Mendocino and planted those starts in a raised bed rife with redwood roots, three miles inland from the coast. Those plants were supposed to grow small sweet pumpkins, half the size of bowling balls. I got one little pumpkin. Delicious. I saved the seeds.
I recently heard a radio interviewee make a statement so ridiculous, so patently absurd, so willfully obtuse, that I felt I must, from atop my…
Dr. Preston owned a two story building that still stands today at the corner of Little Lake and Lansing Street in Mendocino, across from the…