Traveling by train to Philadelphia, going North, you will pass by Chester, Pennsylvania, a city that has been in decline for more than half a century. Founded in 1682, the same year as Philadelphia, Chester…
Posts published in “Essays”
How did I get into this? That’s the inevitable question of concert day, one that has been gnawing at the performer’s nerves through the preceding night, perhaps for days before. You’ve practiced for weeks on…
Salmon are one of nature’s miracles, a resource of protein and nitrogen that feeds entire ecosystems, both marine and terrestrial. Far inland, within river basins of the Pacific Northwest, their biomass nourishes the soil, while…
A draft feasibility study prepared for the county’s Harbor District has identified several challenges to railroad development and deemed it to be a “high cost and high risk” venture. Authored by the Washington-based BST Associates…
In recent weeks, my thoughts have turned to neighbors. During our years in Anderson Valley, from the late 1950s to the late 1980s, the Newman family was — with perhaps one exception — blessed with…
Like most people, Billy came to prison scared and with good reason. See, this wasn't some “Camp Snoopy” joint where wanna-be tough guys dried out from their last meth run. Not a place where you just laid around for 8 months, swapped lies and told bullshit war stories until you paroled.
Sixty years ago this week the “forgotten war” came to an inconclusive end. The Korean war was perfectly mistimed for me. On 25 June 1950, the day I graduated from the University of California, Los…
We’ve slid down a long, slippery slope since the days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and mainstream reporters like Dan Rather turning President Nixon’s own words around to sarcastically imply that the leader of the free world was running from grand jury and congressional investigations.
We have a large old plum tree growing on the north side of our house, and in this first year of our residency the tree has gifted us with several hundred sweet red plums, which are ambrosia to deer, appealing to squirrels, and irresistible to a trio of baby foxes who visit the tree daily.