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Posts tagged as “essays”

Deadbeat Daddy

Seventeen years ago I swore on my wife’s grave that I would keep our family together and watch our two baby boys graduate high school as good men. It sure hasn't been a walk in…

Marines and Timber Cowboys

When I returned home to our beautiful Anderson Valley from my tour of duty with the Army Paratroopers just before Christmas of 1962, it was an extraordinarily brilliant day — crisp, but cloudless with the…

Roy Laird’s Shop Burns Down

Pam Miller was in the house and Roy Laird was out working on the other side of his 20-acre Holmes Ranch property on his four-wheeler last Tuesday night a little before 7pm when they both…

Anderson Valley in the 1950s

When I was about eight years old and living at Brown's Mill Camp, I kept begging my parents for a bicycle for my Christmas present. They told me they couldn't afford such an expensive present.…

The Decay of Letters: Leg-Humping with Tom Wolfe

Someone made the odd, maybe malicious, certainly rash decision to put Tom Wolfe on the right hand side of Harper’s 150th anniversary cover, facing Mark Twain, a leonine, earthy, dignified old devil, sitting in alert…

Manhunt: Anderson Pursues His Demon

A near-murder mystery, passionate in a leisurely sort of way, is being played out month by month, week by week here on California's North Coast. It began with a bang, almost a deadly one, in…

On Mendo’s Timberlands, Nobody Knows How Many Board Feet

Little ol’ Mendocino County sure hit the big-time in the national press last week, didn't it? First, there was the front-page news feature on the Mendocino Redwood Company in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal (2/23/00). This…

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