Confidential Incompetence & Cruelty;
Laytonville Lightning Fires;
Priest Penpals Prisoner;
Prune Packer to Pros;
No Water, No Fish;
New Willits Medicopter;
Catch of the Day
Posts published in July 2014
Last week, a group of Mendo grape growers led by a Redwood Valley grape grower and PhD psychotherapist named Dr. Rudolph Light, announced that they would appeal the recent state appellate court's overturn of Mendo Judge Ann Moorman’s hometown ruling that the Water Board couldn't require local grape growers to devise their own plans to minimize fish strandings. Mass fingerling death has occurred when the grape people all turn on their pumps at once.
As promised in my previous article, here are descriptions of a few more local folks as I remember them during my time in Anderson Valley from the late 1950s to the late 1980s. Jack Clow…
Mendocino County has always been a food-producing region. For thousands of years, Native Peoples organized their travels and daily activities to take advantage of the availability of seasonal foods.
We approach the twentieth anniversary of the wilderness trek of the two greatest radical journalists of our time: the late Alexander Cockburn and Bruce Anderson, editor and publisher of America’s Last Newspaper—Anderson Valley Advertiser. In…
Last night I attended the Mendocino Music Festival’s third orchestral concert of this year’s festival, my wife a cellist in the most excellent orchestra. The second half of the program was Symphony No. 2 in E minor by Sergei Rachmaninoff, a massive work that lasted more than an hour. The third movement of the four-movement symphony was especially moving to me—the glorious music swamping my psyche and catalyzing several epiphanies about the novel I’m currently writing.
A gentle rain keeps me company in the wee hours as I pen these words. We desperately needed it. Throughout May and June, storms danced by with thunder and lightning all around, teasing us like…
“But my father’s dying.” I didn’t want to say the word “dying” because I still had hope for a miracle and was superstitious about such pronouncements, but needs must at a visa interview at the…
The Albion River is dry. That should be enough of an alarm for some people. Obviously, there is water at its mouth, but the river itself is not flowing. At the confluence of the south…