It took until March for a smattering of steelhead to run up flat-bottomed Gibson Creek, a watercourse that flows past the house where I live, in a fastidiously well-manicured section of West Side Ukiah (water-intensive…
Posts tagged as “essays”
“Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension. Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.” — Blaise Pascal Marcia and I watched the movie…
Two things are remarkable about the last 35,000 years of human history: that things have remained so stable, and that so much has changed. If, as Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked, we have…
In 1976 The Band staged a farewell-to-the-road concert, “The Last Waltz,” at Winterland in San Francisco. Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel, Rick Danko and Garth Hudson played a dozen of their own great songs…
Hippie met its ugly death In Buena Vista Park; Buried with the smack and meth With candles in the dark; Vietnam the only trip That had the people in its grip. * * * Organized…
Cypress boughs dangle over the still, mocha-muddy waters of an Oklahoma swamp as a gaggle of drawling Southern country boys walks waist deep through the sleepy current. The men, shirtless and tanned, feel their way…
Richard Brautigan once observed that “It’s really something to have fame put its feathery crowbar under your rock and then upward to the light to release you, along with seven grubs and a sow bug.”…
When my father died five years ago, my siblings and I did not hold a memorial service in his honor. We were each of us so wounded by our father’s incessant criticism and disapproval of…
The squirrels are starting to look a little better every year — not really because of anything they're doing differently, but in light of the economic situation at least 99% of the rest of us…