Posts published in June 2023

At a high school graduation one year, I was talking with a teacher about the kids who don’t want to move away. While so many of their classmates can’t wait to leave, some kids are…

To the average browser looking at a shelf of used books on Western Americana at Grassroots Books in Reno it wasn’t much. A weathered old publication called California Journal of Mines and Geology, Volume 49,…

In California, when the issue is water, the ironies seem to string out in seamless succession. Bill Warne, the man who built the California Water Project, was in government service nearly all his life, and…

I recently spent three days in the town of Sonoma, visiting friends and revisiting familiar places like Oak Hill Farm that I wrote about in Field Days, my book about farms, farmers and field workers.…

In the early 1980s, a faithful correspondent, Wanda Tinasky, who purported to be a literary bag lady who lived under bridges on the Mendocino Coast, turned out to be an erudite former San Francisco beatnik…