We’re fortunate to live here in a place called Big Valley in the northeast corner of California on the Lassen/Modoc County line that has so far managed to avoid overpopulation and overdevelopment and the resultant hyper lifestyle that gives sad valid relevance to the contemporary epithet Californicated.
Posts tagged as “essays”
My brother sent me a fascinating article published recently in New Scientist that warns of the impending loss of a gigantic part of our recent cultural heritage. To quote from the article: “Magnetic tape begins to degrade chemically in anything from a few years to a few decades, depending on its precise composition.”
Whistling down the Amtrak line in the region of Fernley, Nevada, about five in the afternoon, in the observation car under a lid of smoke from Sierra Nevada fires, scanning the murky sagebrush hills for…
I went to Berkeley’s first task force on homelessness the other night. It answered a few questions for me, but it also raised a lot more. Chief among them, I guess, is what is the…
The summer road trip seems to offer the chance to catch up on all those recordings accumulated over the previous year. Depending on your perspective, the endless government pork ladled out onto the highways of…
A few days ago, Marion Crombie, our musical neighbor and fellow fruit forager, reported that two of the most promising and easily accessible stands of blackberries hereabouts have begun to fulfill their promise, so the next morning Marcia and I set forth with our knapsack full of glass jars (with lids) to harvest the luscious berries pursuant to making blackberry jam.
August 28th marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, but it’s also the anniversary of Midway Atoll formally becoming a United States possession. The proclamation was made by Captain William Reynolds of the…
This is one of hopefully many letters from Myanmar discussing what I am seeing and experiencing as an aid worker or English teacher in the midst of a complex ethnic struggle.
My favorite sister was the middle child of five. For want of a boy on their third try, my folks issued her the male spelling of a name they’d already selected: Kerry Lynn. Born at sunrise…