This North Coast Place

The Road to This North Coast Place

2010-06-12T01:08:00.000-07:00

On Friday evening at Northtown Books, North Coast poet laureate Jerry Martien and virtuso bass player Shao Way Wu performed a few selections from their new CD, The Road to Heaven. Martien said that they'd been doing these performances--reading poems with string bass accompaniment-- for twenty years, and it seemed like a good and easy idea to record them. Shao Way quipped that this sounded more impressive than it was--in that time they'd only done six or eight gigs.

They performed about half the poems on the CD, including the poem that gave the CD its title, in which Martien wrote that if you're not on the road to Heaven, you're on the road to Hell. It's a road CD, since most of the poems involve travel by car.

I stood in the back awhile at Northtown and listened until my own back complained. Martien's poems are popular for good reason, Shao Way's playing is tasty. But this isn't a review. I'm writing about the event here mostly because it reminded me of just how this blog got started. It was originally going to be a book, mostly of interviews on the topic of how to be native to this North Coast place, a concept inspired by author Wes Jackson. I got a North Coast Cultural Trust grant to do it, but contrary to the figures still on its web page somewhere, I didn't get the full $5,000 grant, but half of that. So I really didn't have the funds sufficient to publish a book. I started this blog instead.

Since there was an earthquake at about that time, the interviews I used had to do mostly with that topic, and related geology and topography. And some history about the real Natives of this place. But the very first interview I attempted for this project was with Jerry Martien. I thought the poetry of place was a good place to start.

I interviewed him at his house, and we got on well--so well, it seemed, that we spent most of the time laughing. I don't think I learned much about poetry of place, and I didn't use the interview directly. But in the course of what turned out to be a rambling conversation, I did catch on to one important element of becoming native to this place, which emerged from his stories about coming here and settling in. Jerry arrived with the 60s wave of back to the land hippies and idealists, and it was a tumultous time. (The stories of shenangians at HSU in the late 60s and early 70s alone are enough to curl your hair.) But what got people involved in the community first and the most turned out to be schools, and the welfare of their children.

So that's what I learned: to become native to this place, it helps a lot to have children here, and raise them here.

Over the years I've learned that I'm never going to become native to this place, so even this blog is now a huge joke on me. I'm just not that interested in local politics, and since I don't fish or hunt or camp out or do anything outside except hike, and I don't garden, eat in restaurants, go out much more than the theatre I'm required to attend to write about it for my paltry few bucks, and I don't drive around much either (unlike Jerry M, who by the way doesn't even recognize me anymore, and has completely forgotten about our conversation.) And I don't have kids, here or anywhere. So I'm not much of a North Coast kind of person apparently. Maybe I'm not even much of an earthling.

I can't say the place has been all that welcoming anyway. Years ago, someone else who came the same year I did said, "so we're both newcomers. And we always will be." Except that she won't be, because she left. But for whatever reason, me and my work don't much interest people here, except as it can benefit them and their work. Maybe that's more of the time than the place, I don't know. But I've been anonymous here in ways I haven't been elsewhere.

So this blog has few entries, and probably shouldn't exist anymore except as an archive. But hey, it's free. I don't know if it's on the road to heaven. I doubt it. And even if it's on the road to hell, I'm trying to enjoy the journey as much as I can.

Biography of Sky

2010-05-01T01:20:00.000-07:00

These are actually from a few months ago, but they tell a story of this past month, too--rain and clouds, sun and wind...a lot of wind, it seems. And all kinds of light, including a little moonlight. Seems chilly, but today a hummingbird returned.

The Shoe Drops at HSU, Sort Of

2010-05-01T00:56:00.000-07:00

After wrenching and increasingly public debate over program elimination, the president of HSU announced the decisions, though they were hardly definitive.

The letter said that the decisions were exactly what Provost Bob Snyder recommended. Here they are verbatim:

• Suspend admissions to both Computer Science and Computer Information Systems until agreement can be reached on what, if any, computer programs to offer.
• Restructure the Nursing program, including reducing the number of students admitted to the program from 60 to 40. Require the program to develop a plan to address numerous organizational challenges.
• Suspend the MA in Theatre Arts with emphasis in Film Production, which currently has no students enrolled.
• Review the entire Theatre, Film and Dance department, with a specific focus on the undergraduate and graduate programs in theatre.

So in the end, the only program that was actually eliminated was, well, none. Except the MA in Film Production, which has no students, and therefore costs nothing. Savings were found in Nursing and elsewhere, but apparently outside funding as well as outside pressure saved the Nursing School. However the letter did note "numerous organizational challenges." Which is jargon for a program on life support that needs help but has no money or insurance.

The jargony bit about Computer Science seems to mitigate the general understanding that this program is gone, basically at the request of the program itself. But Theatre, Film & Dance is the only department that's now under "review." With this further note in the president's letter:

"The savings from these decisions, as well as the earlier decision to suspend the Industrial Technology program, amount to about $600,000 of the $1.3 million that had been sought through Program Elimination. Additional savings may be possible from the review of the Theatre, Film and Dance department."

The bloodletting has ended for awhile, partly because the school year is ending, but partly I suspect because the administration was surprised by the fallout from the process, and the harm the whole concept of "program elimination" was doing to its reputation, not to mention its ability to recruit students.

But it's not really over, and it looks like Theatre, Film & Dance is going to be a battleground. However, for a number of reasons, my ability to report on this also comes to end. As well as my inclination to do so.

But I will note this: the current production of the Redwood Curtain theatre in Eureka features six actors, four of them HSU graduates. Both directors--who are also the founders of the theatre--got HSU Theatre degrees. And the costume designer is a current HSU Theatre student.

Pain and Arrogance at HSU

2010-04-07T23:41:00.000-07:00

I've now heard accounts from several people who observed the HSU Academic Senate session that voted on program elimination, and compared their descriptions with the Times-Standard story today. Since they describe specific statements the same way as the T-S does, I consider them credible, even given all the emotion involved.

The outcome of the meeting however seems fuzzier than the T-S described. There was a substantial vote in favor of eliminating the nursing program entirely. (18-7, according to the T-S.) But it was a different story on the vote on the second package (actually package #4), which eliminates the sceneography MFA and the graduate film program, both within Theatre, Film & Dance. The vote was 13-12 in favor, with "one absention." What the T-S didn't say was that the abstention was the chair of Theatre, Film & Dance, who recused herself. There obviously is no mystery on which way she would have voted, and so the motion was really tied. At least one senator recognized this, and wondered if the vote should be revisited after reconsideration, but the Senate adjourned before deciding on that.

So the Academic Senate "decided" to eliminate these programs in Package 4, even though it had no cost savings attached. They had already met their dollar target of what they had to eliminate with the nursing program. But they eliminated these anyway, with a net savings of we don't know, maybe nothing, maybe less than nothing.

So what does it all mean? Maybe not a lot, as my previous post more than hinted. Because this was all advisory--the decision will be made by Provost Bob Snyder and President Richmond. It seems that the point was that the Senate get blood on its hands, it didn't matter what they consented to kill. Even if the Senate hadn't quite settled on its findings, that doesn't matter: Snyder, according to the T-S, said their part is over--now it's his turn.

And in an exchange that I heard described by others, the Senate Chair Saeed Mortazavi told Snyder that even though the Administration didn't believe the Senate could do it, and even though the Senate did it all under protest, they did come to a conclusion--to eliminate the nursing school. He asked that the Administration follow this decision. But Snyder refused to make any such commitment. The T-S reported his words as: “If I agree with your rationale and your reasons, I will go along with that. If I don't agree with your rationale and your reasons, I won't go along. That's just the way I am.”

I heard his final statement described differently, but always with that last touch: "That's just the way I am."

I don't know Bob Snyder, so I don't know how to judge his tone from his words. But others who heard him over the course of these meetings were shocked by what seemed like arrogance, or inappropriate flippancy, or both. There are livelihoods, lifetime commitments and futures at stake.

As for the nursing program, what the T-S story hints at is the fairly well known and openly discussed view that the program has been dysfunctional for years, and is currently in such a state of crisis that it would take resources beyond what's available even in flush times to repair it. For one thing, several searches for a new director have failed. Nobody wants to come here and deal with the mess that is has become. That's no reflection on the sincerity of the nursing students, who demonstrated during the Senate meeting in support of the program.

Provost Snyder (according to the Lumberjack account) told the Senate that one problem with eliminating nursing was the $200,000 state grant to the program. It's not clear to me whether he said this before or after the vote. Which obviously makes a big difference.

There may be need for nurses' training on the North Coast, but the HSU nursing program may not be the best alternative. It is not strictly speaking necessary to the university as university. If HSU had a medical school, maybe. But it doesn't.

On the other hand, it's hard for me to conceive of a real university without a theatre arts program, and this Senate non-vote gives some ammunition to Snyder, who has said publicly that he'd enjoy eliminating the Theatre, Film & Dance department entirely. And he's not the only one in the HSU administration who wants to do that. The hiring freeze has already weakened the department in key areas, but it still functions, and provides a service to students, the community and the university.

Meanwhile, at CR...

2010-04-07T23:20:00.000-07:00

As bad as things are at HSU, they may well be worse at College of the Redwoods. Last week there was the devastating story about its president Jeff Marsee in the North Coast Journal (so extreme I wondered at first if it wasn't a really bad April Fool's joke), which repeated charges such as "faculty leaders who say Marsee is a tyrant, paranoid staffers convinced that their phones are bugged and a pervasive climate of fear and festering animosity" and "Dr. Marsee has pretty much single-handedly created a work environment that is mean-spirited, corrosive, secretive and downright scary."

Then today the Times Standard covered a tumultous confrontation of "at least 150" faculty and students airing grievances to CR Trustees, who support Marsee. "The California State Employees Association delivered a vote of no confidence in President Jeff Marsee." There were quotes about “exhaustive evidence of mistreatment” on the part of a "toxic administration, and a "crisis in our employees' morale."

The story then finds Marsee who is currently on a Fullbright scholarship, in Russia. His defense includes that "Community and Junior Colleges removed CR from the accreditation warning status in January because the college had improved its communications and conflict resolution abilities."

You just can't make this stuff up.

As tragic as all this is for the CR community, it may have tragic consequences for HSU as well. For one thing, an obvious (if institutionally difficult) way to address each institution's financial problems is to see which programs are unnecessarily duplicated and which would benefit from some sort of merged program or at least close cooperation. Nursing, for example. But given the chaos at each institution, with two presidents having in common a no confidence votes from their faculty, it's pretty unlikely common sense will prevail.

Trauma at HSU

2010-04-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

Decisions are being made this spring that may determine the future of HSU, and will ripple out into the North Coast community--though that community doesn't seem to be involved in the decisions. More in the post below.

Is HSU Cutting Its Future?

2010-04-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

A satirist might look at what's currently going on at Humboldt State University and ask, is the university being murdered, or has it just been tricked into committing suicide?

The North Coast community as a whole seems unconcerned, and it is certainly uninvolved--even though anything serious that happens to HSU will have substantial and long-term effects on the economic and cultural life of the region.

Inside HSU the current round of "cost-cutting" is traumatic. The counselling center is doing big business, dealing not so much with the usual student or faculty problems, but with these traumas--the fired staff and senior staff leaving in droves, taking with them precious institutional memory; the students whose course choices are shrinking, the time necessary to fulfill degree requirements possibly getting longer and therefore more expensive, and/or facing the disappearance of their majors and the possible devaluing of their degree because of it, as well as the cutting of "electives" which often are the most valuable educational experiences of these student years; the prospects of faculty with roots in the community facing the possible choice of moving on or teaching something else, as well as the insecurity and the upsets associated with putting their names on the process of eliminating majors, programs and departments. And on and on.

The University has been bouncing this way and that for years, trying to respond to dictates of the CSU system (that could easily contradict each other from year to year) and the shrinking resources from the state. All the reasonable cuts have already been made, with the possible exception of higher level administrative posts and compensation. Now HSU careens into pretty fateful decisions, with implications for its identity (will it legitimately be able to continue calling itself a university?) and its viability in the academic marketplace--and therefore ultimately, its existence.

Today the Academic Senate deliberated the fates of programs named to be cut, through a murky process which purports to be objective, but which would be hard pressed to defend that claim. There's a certain futility in these painful deliberations, since the Senate makes no final decisions, and a certain cynicism in the administration giving the Senate this task. You want shared governance, faculty? Well, here it is. Either the Senate will start the bleeding, and the provost and president will complete it, thus leaving the co-opted faculty with blood on their hands, or the Senate will refuse, and the administration will sigh about the failure of shared governance, and use whatever hacksaw or scalpel they will.

Let's take the examples I know something about: all three of the graduate programs in the Theatre, Film & Dance department are on today's target list (and the department as a whole is on notice that it may be completely eliminated.) They are on the list because the committee that decided so says they aren't worth the approximately $160,000 they cost.

The problem is, the department can't figure out where that figure came from, and nobody will tell them. Their figures show no such savings. The savings of cutting the classes etc. involved in the program are more than offset by the loss of graduate students who do work necessary for productions--not only the department's, but anybody who uses the Van Duzer or Gist Theatre. Higher paid staff will have to be hired to do it--especially in view of state safety laws--and so eliminating these programs will cost more money than it saves--which doesn't even deal with the value of the programs to the department, the university and the community. There's hardly a theatre in the county that doesn't have an M.A. or MFA from HSU in its organization (usually at the top), or doesn't use HSU graduate students in its productions.

And then there's the Film program targeted for elimination--which will save exactly zero dollars, because there's nobody in the program now. However, there is a new graduate program being developed that has already raised foundation money and it happens to be the kind of program that is a natural for HSU to seize upon gratefully because it so clearly is a key to its future: it is program centered around science documentary filmmaking.

In that is the not very hidden lesson and ultimate danger: in slicing away at itself, HSU is killing its future. Some of what HSU has been doing the last few years makes sense in terms of its future: for instance, it is strengthening ties with alums and starting to realize that it can't count on state funding anymore for total financial support. It's going to have to act more like a private university, or the public-private hybrids like the University of Pittsburgh.

But most of all, it needs an identity, a vision of itself that serves as a guide for reorganizing its academic structure and offerings. Not a brand--that's just PR, that's easy, I could invent an attractive brand for HSU in my sleep--but a brand is unsustainable unless it matches a reality, even a reality-in-the-making, a real vision. Not another all inclusive and otherwise wobbly vision statement. A fully articulated and worked out vision. And the leadership to develop that vision and make it real.

Without that, it's stuck with this mess. The metaphors are multiple: slow-motion bloodbath of targets of opportunity, political assassinations, seeming surgical strikes that go wrong, with unintended consequences and collateral damage played out over years. I don't think anyone on the HSU campus would dispute that the university has already been wounded, and is in the process of inflicting more wounds on itself. The question is whether they are wounds that will heal, or is this the death of a thousand cuts?

And what kind of university will be left? Will it be able to even legitimately call itself a university? For one thing, I always though that if you don't offer graduate programs, you're a college, not a university.

Anyway, that's how it seems to me--though I am not a properly anointed expert. I hope some folks who are more directly involved are asking long-term questions, and that leaders of the local community inform themselves, and insist on being heard. Maybe all this is happening and I just haven't heard about it?

Update 4/4: First reports on what transpired at the Academic Senate meeting Saturday suggest that the process is indeed as self-destructive and unfair as the direst implications of this post suggest it might be. At this point I don't believe that anyone--in the administration or on the Senate--is operating either reasonably or in good faith. The game is rigged.

Happy Spring!

2010-03-21T02:59:00.000-07:00

Suddenly a week of sunny days and warmer temps. The rains now nighttime showers. Things grow here all year, but blooms like this in our front yard say that spring is here.

Wiyot Vigil

2010-02-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

In honor of those who died at the 1860 Indian Island massacre, and in celebration of the ongoing Wiyot cultural regeneration, the annual Vigil is just concluding in Eureka. I couldn't make it this year but I've lit a candle here, and I'm with them in spirit. Jerry Rohde has a new piece on the 1860 events in this week's Journal, and here's a link to some of my past writing on those events (published in the San Francisco Chronicle) and subsequent ones.

Climate Change Comes to the North Coast

2010-02-16T05:27:00.000-08:00

In some ways, the North Coast is well positioned to survive the Climate Crisis. We may eventually have problems with sea level rises, and we'll probably get hit with harder and more frequent storms coming off the ocean. But we've got the makings of fairly self-reliant and maybe even self-sufficient communities, and there's a lot of interest in locally based alternative energy. But now there's pretty sobering news: you've probably noticed it if you live here, and now it's been quantified: there's less fog. And because the redwoods depend on moisture, especially from the fog, it's bad news for them. And of course, for us. It's likely because of climate change, which means that it's likely to get worse. We may be turning into wine country up here, but losing our redwood forests seems a pretty steep cost.

Seven Ways of Looking at a Rainbow, Part I

2010-01-23T02:34:00.000-08:00

I took these in December actually, but never got around to posting them all here.

Seven Ways of Looking at a Rainbow, Part 2

2010-01-23T02:29:00.000-08:00

Eureka Post Office Damaged

2010-01-12T15:25:00.000-08:00

The old Eureka Post Office on H Street, one of the last remaining quality public buildings in the area, damaged in Saturday's earthquake. See post below.

Earthquake Damage

2010-01-12T15:10:00.000-08:00

A few more aftershocks over the past 24 hours, but nothing above 3.2. However, there seems to have been more damage than previously thought in Eureka from the Saturday 6.5 quake. Estimates have risen from $12 million to $28 million, affecting more than 200 structures.

One of the buildings sustaining significant damage is the Eureka Post Office, which is now closed and may not reopen, pending a structural inspection, according to the Times-Standard. This is sad news because that building is one of the last remaining public buildings of any worth or beauty in the county. Eureka and Arcata have some of the ugliest public buildings I've ever seen. But the old Post Office, which I'm guessing is a Depression era building, is handsome and well proportioned on the outside, and comparatively pleasant on the inside, with some vintage historical murals. Losing this structure would be a blow.

Earthquake Update

2010-01-11T02:18:00.000-08:00

After about 20 aftershocks in the first 18 hours or so--three of them between 4.0 and 4.2-- they ended for awhile at about noon Sunday--until a 4.1 around 10:30 pm. These reportedly have people pretty rattled where they're felt, but again, we're feeling nothing here in Arcata. Our resident HSU earthquake expert, Lori Dengler, told the Times-Standard that there is a 78% chance of a strong aftershock of magnitude 5 or greater within a week.

Dengler also said that the quake had a side-to-side motion, which doesn't result in tsunami.

The T-S story said the maximum shaking was felt in Eureka. There's damage in the millions, still being assessed, and one serious injury reported so far.

Earthquake Return

2010-01-09T23:53:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile, and the fact that we haven't had a substantial earthquake for some time has been on some people's mind here, including mine. This morning in fact. But I certainly wasn't thinking about it this afternoon when I asked Margaret if she wanted to take a walk on the beach Sunday, which is supposed to be sunny. How about right now? She asked. My concerns were that it was already after four and would start to get dark fairly soon, and whether my car was going to start. But we went.

We were on the beach after 5 when a woman out there with her dog came back in our direction to say that there had been a large earthquake--she was holding her cell phone--and that power was off in Arcata. We quickly headed back, as I kept my eyes on the ocean. (Later, I remembered that while we had earlier been watching a man throwing a stick with his dog, a single wave came pretty far up the beach. That's not entirely unusual, but in this case...)

For as it turned out, the earthquake was out in the ocean. Had it been stronger, and had the right sort of movement, we would have been in exactly the wrong place--a major quake would send a tsunami up that Mad River Beach before the shaking stopped. But though it was a respectably strong 6.5, this quake was 25 miles out, and didn't create a tsunami. Besides, we were still in the parking lot when the quake hit, and we didn't feel a thing.

That's the weirdness of this quake--we didn't feel anything, and nothing was even disturbed in our house in Arcata by the first quake or the aftershocks in the next first hour or so. Houses a few blocks away were without power, but ours was fine.

The most worrisome aspect was, as usual, the lack of good information, and reliable sources for it. Several local TV stations were off the air completely, and only one has anything approaching a news staff anyway. There was nothing on the Internet for the first hour except the Geological Survey statistics. I didn't check all the radio stations--several were knocked off for one reason or another--but stopped at one of the Michael's Media FM stations--all three were carrying the same broadcast--where an announcer, a couple of producers and engineers were funneling information, some of it--very little, really--from authorities, and a lot from people phoning in. This was the only semi-reliable source of information. They were quite good, but this situation is fairly scary anyway.

So I heard stories of power outages in Eureka and Trinidad, of strong shaking at the Bayshore Mall in Eureka (TVs falling, tiles falling from the ceiling, etc. at Sears), and of strong shaking and some road damage up the "mountain" in Kneeland. Concern over gas leaks in Eureka. Some anecdotes about injuries--a rack of guns falling on a man at a sporting goods store in Ferndale, I think--but no real reports of serious injuries or deaths. Some talk of building damage in Eureka, but nothing official.

Looking back on entries here (follow the label "earthquakes") and I've noted several strong quakes in that same vicinity, the Mendocino Triple Junction, where three tectonic plates run up against, under and over each other. That's where the potentially most destructive major quake is likely to occur. Even at 6.5., this one was felt pretty far north and south and east, although not everywhere. What that's about is one of the things that it will be interesting to hear the experts explain in the next few days.

As for what happens next, there's no rule. It's rare but not impossible that an even stronger quake will follow soon. It's more likely that the shaking from that vicinity is over for awhile. Meanwhile, other parts of the country face bitter cold and snow, wind and ice. Everybody's got something.

Progress?

2009-07-09T23:06:00.000-07:00

Because of the light that day, I took some photos in this corner of the HSU campus last fall (top photo.) Little did I realize that by this spring, this view would no longer exist. I passed by again in May, and ongoing huge construction has torn much of it away. The big trees were still there, although pretty forlorn, but the little stream you can't quite see behind the bushes seemed to be gone. Then I noticed the odd effect of dead grass just inside the construction fence, and green outside it at the far edge. That's the second photo. But even that changed. The last time I went by, the inside grass was green, too.

More Bragging Rights

2009-05-20T20:48:00.000-07:00

Amy Stewart, North Coaster and columnist for the North Coast Journal (as am I), is featured in today's New York Times, concerning her new book, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities (Algonquin), which inspired an exhibition at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Photo is from the NY Times, of Amy at home.

Bragging Rights

2009-05-13T23:10:00.000-07:00

This is Brooke Grant of Hoopa, voted Miss Indian World at the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow in New Mexico. She has lineage in three North Coast peoples (Hupa, Karuk and Yurok) as well as Chippewa. Congratulations to Brooke Grant and the Grant family!

2009-05-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

This is Brooke Grant's Traditional song at the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow, a song sung for girls at their coming-of-age ceremony.

Arcata Sunset Series 3

2009-04-12T03:53:00.000-07:00

Arcata Sunset (series 2)

2009-03-17T03:27:00.000-07:00

R.I.P. Deborah Clasquin

2009-03-12T04:53:00.000-07:00

Deborah Clasquin, pianist and teacher much beloved on the North Coast, passed away on Tuesday, it was announced today. In his email to colleagues, Dean Kenneth Ayoob called her "a force of nature," and Deborah certainly was that. She was a force for good on the North Coast and for the students and fellow HSU faculty she championed. I'll always remember sitting behind her on the Fulkerson Hall stage as she played "Rhapsody in Blue." My last encounter with her ended in a long hug. We will miss her.

Winter Sunsets

2009-02-04T22:18:00.000-08:00

Our so-far sunny winter also meant spectacular sunsets. More about this sunny winter in post below. BK photos.

Goodbye, Sun

2009-02-04T21:48:00.000-08:00

It's hard--very hard--to get upset about sunny days. Especially in a place where there aren't that many of them (though I did look that up before we moved here in 1996, and statistically there were about as many sunny days here per year as in Pittsburgh. It just doesn't seem like it.)

But sunny days in winter--a string of gorgeous sunny days the likes of which we don't even get in spring, summer or fall--was wonderful, but also scary. This is supposed to be our rainy season. Sometimes the rains start in December, but they're always here in January and February, and often into March.

Those rains are important. Our dry, warm January extended south to San Francisco, and particularly into the mountains. Just that one month of little rain or snow may have condemned the Bay Area to some degree of water rationing this coming summer. We're not looking forward to fire season up here either. Last summer, after reasonable winter rains, the fires were extensive and very damaging.

And even though January was so extreme that it was impossible to ignore, technically we're in at least our second year of drought. Southern California has been in drought for much longer.

Up here, it seems we could absorb a sunny January, but of course there's global heating, and if this is the start of a trend, this entire ecosystem could change, with consequences I doubt anyone can fully foresee.

Of course it was hard to concentrate on ideas of doom when the sun was shining, with blue skies and that carress of sweet air, just a little cooler than the feel of the sun that we normally get mostly in the fall. The Golden State.

There was another bonus resulting from clear days: clear nights. What a treat to see the winter stars, especially with the recent conjunction of the moon at its closest point in years with bright Venus and brighter than usual Jupiter. The other night, it was the crescent moon--straight as a smile-- with Venus bright beneath it. I had to drive down to Ferndale that night, and they always seemed to be right in front of me, in the blackness above the thin ribbons of fog. When I got home just after 11 they were gone, but it was a cold clear night, very black sky, very white stars, and as I gazed up at Orion's belt---a shooting star!

We did get a few showers, but then the sun came back immediately, and I saw the biggest rainbow I've seen here--a complete arch, from somewhere near Mad River Beach, and fading into the Arcata Community Forest.

Well, there's rain in the forecast for tomorrow. Maybe we're just getting the season late. That's what happened in 2007--a dry January, a very wet February. Today was the foggy gray with some sun behind it that in other Februarys would pass as a pretty nice day. But after day after day of bright sunshine, it was kind of depressing. Though, of course, I'm glad.

Newspaper Follies

2008-11-10T14:22:00.000-08:00

Thanks to one guy's deep pockets, Eureka was one of the last towns in America to have two daily newspapers. That's over now, as the Eureka Reporter has shut down. Ironically, it published its first interesting reporting in the past week or so, at least to me: a comparison of the draft report on the institutional health of Humboldt State University by high-priced consultants, and their final report which considerably softened direct criticism, especially of the university president.

So we're back to one daily, the Eureka Times-Standard, which this week managed to miss the biggest bonanza for newspapers in a generation. The newspaper business as a whole is ailing, and has been for much of the past decade. But the election of Barack Obama led to many newspapers selling all their copies and even adding to press runs for their Tuesday editions, because people wanted to keep newspapers to remember this historic event.

The Times-Standard probably wasn't one that many people kept, choosing to emphasize local stories. Other newspapers, realizing the demand wasn't entirely satisfied, gave the Obama election lavish coverage in their Sunday editions. The San Francisco Chronicle gave over its entire front page to the covers of other newspapers and magazines, all with Obama photos and headlines about his election.

Or at least I'm told they did--by the time I showed up at Wildberries, all their copies were sold out. There wasn't a Chronicle to be found anywhere else in the vicinity either. Meanwhile, the Times-Standard had an Obamaless front page--and at Wildberries stacks of unsold copies overflowed onto the floor.

The front page of Monday's T-S is notable only for the three headlines being timeworn cliches ('It's been a long time coming,' 'Like ants in a kitchen' and 'can't get blood from a turnip.') But fear not--the T-S will be printing the worst and most useless part of the Reporter: its editorials. Something smells funny about that.

MAXXed Out

2007-10-25T02:20:00.000-07:00

"Aren't you the biggest employer in the county? And you only got one [county] Supervisor?"
--Judge Richard S. Schmidt
U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Texas

This statement, as reported by the Eureka Reporter, may be the most honest moment in this whole sorry affair. It's the so-far successful attempt of the MAXXAM corporation to screw its employees the way it has totally screwed the far northern California forests by declaring bankruptcy for its Pacific Lumber division.

The attempt is being made in Texas because shortly before declaring this bankruptcy, MAXXAM set up Pacific Lumber as a hollow corporation headquartered in Texas, where the courts are vastly more favorable to Texas robber baron and MAXXAM's owner, Charles Hurwitz.

I couldn't explain the ins and outs of this mess even if I wanted to, but to give you a flavor of it, MAXXAM's latest ploy was to propose selling off vast tracts of forest for pricey housing development to pay its debtors, and when the Humboldt County board of Supervisors got wind of it, they quickly voted to deny any permits to do so. The attempt got only one Supervisor's vote, hence the Judge's all-too candid question.

Yes, back in the day, Pacific Lumber may well have owned all the Supervisors. But it's not that big an employer anymore, and public support has waned, especially since these proceedings began.

Shortly after I came here more than a decade ago, I wrote a script for a one hour documentary video about MAXXAM's campaign to cut down as much redwood forest as fast as possible to pay off the debt it incurred when it bought Pacific Lumber, among other companies--acquisitions that Wall Street smiled on, raising the stock price so the bigwigs all got very wealthy. The massive tree slaughter, including on steep hills and along waterways, led to devastation one winter when heavy rains led to flooding and landslides. One small town was literally destroyed.

Just about every charge made in that video (called Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact), and every prediction of the future--including how MAXXAM was going to leave employees high and dry (they're now even trying to get out of paying pensions)--was proven to be true. I hope my writing helped make the video effective (it turned out to be instrumental in at least one court case) but I can't claim superior insight about the content--I was so new here that working on it with veteran environmentalists (who had a lot of the footage when I started) was a quick and thorough education. (I did satisfy myself with my own research that what they claimed was correct.)

That all this sad business came true has not especially raised the general reputation of environmentalists (as antiwar activists found, being right doesn't do that) but it has turned a lot of public opinion against the previously defended corporation. Which may be one reason that the company owns only one Supervisor.

What occurs to me today, when this quote popped out from an episode in the ongoing story, has to do naturally enough with fire. We've monitored several horrific days of vast fires in southern California. We get forest fires up here, too, but other parts of the state and the country don't usually hear much about them because there usually aren't any multi-million dollar homes endangered by them. Of course if MAXXAM and its allies get their way, that will change.

Harry Potter Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

Young witches and wizards and interested muggles of all
ages gathered at Northtown Books in Arcata as the moment
approached--Friday at midnight, the latest and last of the
Harry Potter novels will go on sale--Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows. These photos suggest how Arcata
participated in a global phenomenon...

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:37:00.000-07:00

The line as midnight approaches goes to the end of the
block, and it will continue to be that long until well past
midnight..

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

The very first in line get chances to win prizes--keep your
eye on that young lady in pink...

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:33:00.000-07:00

They fill out their forms--the last step before the door opens!

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:32:00.000-07:00

Professor Snape makes sure your credit is good...

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:31:00.000-07:00

The Bewitching Hour has come---and the books are waiting!

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:30:00.000-07:00

You're greeted by Harry!...

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

...and of course, at last! The book!

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:24:00.000-07:00

Let the reading begin!

Harry in Arcata

2007-07-21T23:22:00.000-07:00

Northtown's McGonagall conducts the raffle, floating
above the bookstore counter...

Harry in Arcata

2007-07-21T23:17:00.000-07:00

Everyone checks their cards for the winner (including the cross-dressing
witch...)

Harry in Arcata

2007-07-21T23:15:00.000-07:00

Virtue Rewarded! She wins Harry's scarf!

Harry Comes to Arcata

2007-07-21T23:13:00.000-07:00

And a very good night for Harry!

Mike Thompson Steps Up

2007-03-04T16:19:00.000-08:00

Righting Wrongs

Flying on America's commercial airlines stopped being enjoyable some time ago. As airlines cut back service and airport security rituals became a major headache, you were lucky if it was merely annoying. Now flying is becoming so stressful and chaotic that what used to be routine travel is routinely hazardous to your health and safety.

It's bad enough that in a cross-country trip I just booked, which involves several stops, crossing three time zones and more than 12 hours, there is not a single meal offered on any flight. That, along with the dry air and poor ventilation, makes these flights a health hazard, and adds to the effects of jet lag. (You're supposed to drink a lot of water, but how can you do that when they don't let you take water on board, and they don't give it to you?) But the spectre of passengers incarcerated in a plane on a runway for eight hours, as happened several times last month, goes well beyond the pale.

JetBlue, the airline with the most notorious delays and incarcerations, responded with its passenger Bill of Rights, which the business boosters immediately lauded. But its provisions were so weak as to be insulting. Why, they promised to keep you locked up on the runway for no more than five hours! Their compensations were on the order of free fries with your next purchase of a big mac.

The only rights passengers can get will come from the federal government, and apply to all airlines, which taxpayers as well as frequent flyers subsidize. So it's significant that a passenger Bill of Rights has been proposed by our own Member of Congress, Mike Thompson. And it's a very reasonable proposal. For example, from Thompson's website:

These standards include allowing passengers to deplane after three hours on the tarmac, while providing pilots with flexibility if takeoff is imminent, and providing passengers with adequate food, safe drinking water, clean and sanitary facilities, air ventilation and a reasonable temperature while waiting on an aircraft. Airlines must also keep passengers fully informed about the timing and cause of flight delays and cancellations.

Also: Calls on the FAA to work with airlines to allow long-delayed flights to offload passengers who choose to disembark – without losing that flight’s position in the departure sequence.

These and other provisions are sensible, and should become part of the contract that airlines enter into when they sell tickets. In this way passengers can expect the same standards on every airline, and no airline is singled out for a particular burden the others don't have to bear. That's the whole logic of government regulation.

Mike Thompson is also getting support for his bill to set a timetable for the redeployment of U.S. troops in Iraq--some 45 bipartisan cosponsors so far. Thompson, a Vietnam vet, authored the bill with Rep. Patrick Murphy of PA, an Iraq vet. It is sponsored in the Senate by Senator Barack Obama, and in that regard will be a test of his leadership as he contends for the Democratic Party nomination for President. But here in Humboldt HR 787 is Mike's bill:

I’ve been against this war since the beginning and think our troops should have been redeployed long ago,” Thompson said. “Our troops have done everything we’ve asked of them and they shouldn’t be in the middle of Iraq’s civil war. The Iraqi government should step up and take responsibility for securing their country.”

Earth to North Coast

2007-02-27T20:58:00.000-08:00

This is as close to a snow scene as we've had in Arcata, but
it's after a hail storm this past week. BK photo.

2007-02-27T20:04:00.000-08:00

Cold and Quake: A Wake-Up Call?

In a relatively isolated, largely rural area, natural forces are seldom out of the news. Right now they're dominating. Like the rest of the country, we had an unusual January--in our case, it was sunnier, drier and warmer than usual. (Nationally it was the hottest January on record.) And like much of the rest of the country, our February has been much different: wetter (bringing rainfall to about double the average for the year to date) and colder (45 was the high in Arcata yesterday, and that's unusual).

The hail storm the other afternoon was also pretty unusual, in that it gave Arcata streets that winter wonderland appearance for a half hour or so. I was out in it, standing under the shelter of a tree for awhile on H Street towards Northtown, and saw one young woman dash out of her house to snap a photo, and a couple of kids trying desperately to make "snowballs" and throw them before the whole thing disappeared. I got home just in time to take a few photos myself. There was still a remnant of white on the ground when a hummingbird came by the feeder.

Snow and storms in the mountains have been a big problem. Some of the few roads that connect us with the outside world have been closed because of snow or slides. One storm knocked out power to a transmitter on Horse Mountain for the local ABC affiliate for days. Suddenlink, our new cable company, got the ABC feed in time for the Oscars Sunday, which explained the patches of black screens and silence where local ads would normally go.

In terms of the Big Picture, weather is naturally variable and there are trends that play themselves out for a series of years, but despite locally active Climate Crisis deniers, global heating is clearly changing weather patterns. As to near-term effects, the devil can be in the details. For instance, our total rainfall is about normal since July, but we've been experiencing different winter patterns for several years now, with the rain that used to fall over several months coming later and more intensively. That's bound to have an effect on life in the rivers, forests and fields, as has been seen elsewhere when, for example, the balance between predator and prey species has been upset, and migrating birds or birds hatching chicks at a certain time of year aren't finding the food they normally do, because the weather has altered insect cycles. And as the climate has grown warmer, some species expand into new areas, creating various kinds of havoc. All this can eventually affect us--food and water supply, behavior of wildlife, etc. I hope our scientists are monitoring this here. Anticipating the possibility of problems might help the area cope with effects, instead of being completely blindsided by them.

Earth sent another reminder Monday morning with a 5.4 magnitude earthquake about 35 miles off the coast and south of here, at 4:19 AM. I was still awake at the time, sitting right here at the computer, and Pema the cat had just come by to find out why. The ripple went right under us, and Pema lost her footing for a second. No damage was reported anyway, due to the distance of the quake from land--5.4 is in the "moderate" range, so it could have done some damage otherwise.

There was an all-day earthquake prepardedness drill at HSU a few weeks ago, which in itself was a step forward, although the only local newspaper that said a word about it--the HSU student newspaper, the Lumberjack--opined that it wasn't well organized, didn't involve enough people and was generally taken too casually. At one point a Coast Guard helicopter landed on the HSU soccer field. I happened to be in the vicinity when it did. I watched as the two people inside stood and looked towards where an ambulance and a knot of people were, but if there was supposed to be a practice run of stretchers or whatever, none happened while I was there. HSU President Richmond came by where I was standing, then went down closer to the field. I saw a lot of nodding but that's all. I walked away and a few seconds later, the helicopter was in the air again.

I'll say it again: for a place that has earthquakes and storms, there's no excuse for the apparently cavalier attitude towards prepardeness here. And when we get to really sustained and complicated crises like a pandemic, a well-constructed plan that everyone in the community understands could be the difference between life and death for hundreds and maybe thousands. But apparently this isn't interesting enough for media to hone in on it, or important enough for the public and public officials to give it priority.

2007-02-27T20:02:00.000-08:00

This also started out as hail but McKinleyville got a couple of inches of snow Monday. (Eureka Times-Standard photo.) There's been a foot or more of snow in the hills nearby.

North Coast Pix 2006

2007-01-02T11:20:00.000-08:00

Before we get deeper into 2007, here are some of my photos from the past year. This is Stephanie Kim, a North Coast ballerina after her premiere performance as the Sugar Plum Fairy in this year's Nutcracker, performed at HSU by North Coast Dance.

2007-01-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

The reception after the Nutcracker premiere was catered by Avalon restaurant. The chocolate fountain was a big hit.

2007-01-02T10:31:00.000-08:00

Redwood Curtain held a fundraiser Christmas party at the Bayside Grange. Here actor Theresa Ireland responds to Bob Wells as a naughty Santa.

2007-01-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

Seasons greeters at the Redwood Curtain bash: Lynn and Bob Wells.

2007-01-02T09:37:00.000-08:00

The Guantanamo Group of North Coast Quakers continues to meet and use various means to attain their goal of visiting the Guantanamo Bay prisons to offer comfort to prisoners and staff. They are Andrea Armin-Holland, Karin Salzmann, Dr. Fred Adler, Carol Cruickshank and Margaret Thomas Kelso. Not pictured: Dr. Richard Ricklefs.

2007-01-02T03:58:00.000-08:00

In December this robin began tapping at the kitchen window, apparently trying to get in. These words were part of our efforts to gently persuade it to desist. So far nothing has worked--the robin visits nearly every day, tap, tap, tapping on our kitchen window.

2007-01-02T03:53:00.000-08:00

Pema was a semi-feral cat rescued from starvation, and our companion for about a year and a half. It's only recently that she would have remained relaxed enough to have her picture taken.

2007-01-02T03:51:00.000-08:00

Our backyard apples this fall.

2007-01-02T03:46:00.000-08:00

One of our pair of resident hummers this year. In past years we've seen three around the feeder at times, but I've seen only two this year. However, they're still here as of New Year's Day.

2006-12-28T00:29:00.000-08:00

Why the apocalypse will not be broadcast

Humboldt cut off from the outside world said the headline in the Eureka Times Standard. On Tuesday, we had our annual Christmas week storm and power outage. I'm not entirely kidding--all the serious outages I recall in the past ten years have been between Christmas and New Years, including the immense storms that caused a lot of flooding and destruction as 1996 became 1997--and literally did cut us off from the rest of the world for awhile (Rt. 101 was closed in both directions, as were portions of other roads, and planes weren't flying into or out of the airport.) Last New Years Eve there was another storm that left us without power for days.This time it was the day after Christmas, and a night and morning of wind and rain left us without electricity for several hours.

But that wasn't what the headline was about. Late in the day we lost all Internet connections and all long distance phone service. There was "a problem" somewhere north of here, but perhaps the most disturbing thing the paper said was that no one knew what it was or exactly where.I'm not sure exactly when Internet service was restored because in the interim we lost our electricity again. Winds raged through here all night and well into the morning--up to 50 mph. The power went down at abot 2:30 am and wasn't restored until Wednesday nightfall, just as we had the fireplace stoked up and were getting the candles in place.

The most maddening thing about this again this year was the lack of information about what was going on. When I lived in Pittsburgh, I could be confident that no matter how silly local radio and TV got--and they were getting increasingly silly---they would all have complete information in any emergency. Some stations would go to an all news format, while others would extend their regularly scheduled newscasts. Because they had regularly scheduled newscasts--on radio stations, at the top of every hour usually, or five minutes before. And probably news headlines at half-past.

But here on the North Coast we have no reliable source of news and information from any radio or television station. My guess is that there are three basic problems. First, conglomerates bought up local stations and ditched local news. With little or no local presence they are unable as well as unwilling to fulfill their public duty, which I would argue they are required to do by law since they are using our public airwaves.

Second, this is a small media market that has trouble getting and keeping experienced newspeople. It's easy to make fun of the teenagers who staff the news shows, with their fake media voices trying to make fluff and half-baked stories sound important. But in emergencies, when the public needs accurate information, it's not funny. The lack of it has a real potential to compound tragedy, if not cause some.

The third reason is that local media don't take the responsibility to inform the public seriously. Where are the regularly scheduled radio newscasts ? And if they can't afford to do them every day, how about scheduling news in times like this, on the hour and half-hour, so listeners will know when to tune in?

What did I hear today? A couple of guys grudgingly offering a few tidbits of info as part of their Studio 60/Daily Show repartee, in the midst of the discussion that really interested them: have any good bands ever come out of Ferndale? And a few mumbled sentences in the local break of All Things Considered, when we were told that power might or might not be off in some places, and if it was, it would be restored as soon as possible.

Isn't anyone being trained to make phone calls and insist on answers? Is it too much to ask to be able to get that information without listening for it amongst hours of music you may not really want to hear?

As beautiful and virtuous as it is, this is a vulnerable place. We are rather easily cut off from the world. We expect a major earthquake that can come at any time, probably accompanied by tsunami. Yet we have no system of obtaining information when we will most need it. There seem as well to be no clear lines of authority for those emergencies, which is something that ought to interest the local print media more than it seems to.

This week wasn't bad (although it's not over.) But the ease with which we lost power and Internet and long distance all at once should be sobering. It's not a joke anymore, if it ever was.

2006-09-29T18:18:00.000-07:00

So far...but not for long..

If you follow my more active blogsite, Captain Future's Dreaming Up Daily, you've no doubt noticed that the Climate Crisis is one of my major themes. But adding to the surreality of this moment, so far it seems that at least in the most obvious ways, global warming has been pretty good to the North Coast. When most of the nation and much of the world was broiling, in drought or being inundated with torrential rains and struck with wind and lightning storms, we had a fantastic summer, at least on our coastal strip. We've had a warm early fall; although this has often been the warmest and sunniest time of the year since I've been here, it seems that this fall has been ever balmier and clearer.

But as much as I enjoyed it--and I was well aware how lucky we were, and how beautiful it was--it was with some unease. That feeling increased for the four days I spent in Seattle in early September. It was bright sunshine, clear skies and 80 plus degrees the entire time. People who live there said they hadn't had rain in weeks. I've never seen Seattle like that. Maybe it's seasonal, and in my many previous visits I hadn't been there in early September, but as well as being glorious, it felt eerie.

We have other signs here, too. As in this Times-Standard story about last Saturday, which set a record high for that date, and also a record low. It got up to 82 in Eureka on Saturday afternoon, and down to 42 that night. It's the first double record like that, the paper said, since the late 1800s, which is almost as far back as official white people's records go hereabouts. Not that this alone proves anything. But it does add to the general sense of weirdness, and of more to come.

For under the obvious are other trends. It seems to be getting drier. We can see the fallout from that--the smoky air from forest fires, the mountain lions wandering into neighborhoods in search of water. Because of the time spans and the personal nature of perception of the weather (do winters seem warmer to me because they are, or because for our first years in this house we had less insulation, worse windows and no central heating?) we can't be sure, but we do get a sense of it, and with only that, comes a certain unease, a vague disquiet and anxiety.

Because of the complexities of weather and climate as well as the complexities of our own perceptions, we have science to measure, compare and quantify, according not only to effect but to causes. And climate science is telling us clearly and in as unanimous a voice as science ever has, that we're into an era of serious climate change that could very well become catastrophic to millions of people at minimum, and to all of human civilizaton and most of the nature we know at the maximum, which is not far from likely.

I read this stuff a lot (along with the latest on how we might cope with the near-term effects and even perhaps prevent the ultimate catastrophes in the longer term) and it's become part of me. So it's interesting to me to read something like Bob Doran's account in the North Coast Journal of behind-the-scenes problems concerning this year's North Country Fair. I went to the Fair this year for the first time in several years, for a couple of specific purposes (like gift shopping), which included this one: it was a beautiful day in a world about to change.

Apparently a lot had changed behind the scenes at the Fair--according to Bob, not for the better. But to me it was like it always has been, at least on beautiful days. I enjoyed seeing the people, especially children, several of whom I saw in rapt attention to a puppeteer. I enjoyed the food at the African booth. The stalls, the glass and metal and pottery objects glinting in the sun, all the color, the fabric, the shapes. And for me it all had an air about it that I imagined as being somewhat like that in those movies (I thinking one was called "The Shooting Party") about the years or year just before World War I, when life changed abruptly and, over time, almost completely for many if not most people, when most people didn't realize it was going to change. And they certainly didn't know how life would change.

The Climate Crisis could bring that kind of change even in the lifetimes of the children or even the college students at the Fair, or--as I am beginning to suspect from the alarm with which scientists are greeting the latest data--at least the start of it in my own lifetime. Of course, I'm hoping that intentional changes will start soon, in an effort to save the future. Either way, such change may or may not be as abrupt as the effects of a Big earthquake, but once it has started, it will roll on, faster and faster. There will be no going back.

Of course, the North Country Fair has just enough of a feeling of timelessness--of the most ancient marketplaces and harvest festivals--that something of it will survive. But the people who go to it simply will not feel the same about their lives and the world as the people who attended this year's fair.

That was in my mind and in my feelings that day. By coincidence, I guess it was the same day as that double high-low temperature record.

Reading Bob's story prompted another thought about it that seems apropos to this blogsite's erstwhile theme. Becoming native to a place is partly a process of learning its history, and especially learning it through people you know, and through experience, as Bob knows it, or as Barry Blake knows North Coast theatre. But place has other dimensions, and other time scales. So maybe there is room for people like me as well, and ways for us to contribute our kinds of perceptions, and to in our ways to become native to this place.

2006-08-01T13:45:00.000-07:00

A Beautiful Summer, With Losses

Should I feel guilty? I feel grateful. While most of the nation, and even friends who live a few miles away, are suffering through a very hot summer, the weather in Arcata has been magnificent. We've had sunshine and cool air. The strawberry crop this year is terrific (though it looks like the heavy spring rains suppressed the tomatoes), the hummers are humming, and we've just spotted a butterfly.

But the summer hasn't been without loss of prominent members of the North Coast community. Both were unexpected. The most recent, the one that is affecting a lot of people at the moment, is the death of Tim McKay, who began the North Coast Environmental Center more than 30 years ago, and has been a stalwart of the environmental community ever since. He died of a heart attack at 59. But at least he was doing something he loved--birding--and in the company of someone he loved.

I met him only a few times. I was a guest on his radio program once. But his Center was so important to this place that it is inevitable that it plays a role, known and unknown, in our lives here. Sometimes in unpredictable ways. I first knew that the Seventh Generation Fund was here, for example, when I read a summary of one of his many interviews with Chris Peters, its director. Seventh Gen became my entry to learning more about the Native community here and elsewhere.

McKay was a giant of this place, and his influence was felt beyond it. A short summary of his achievements is in the Press Democrat; John Driscoll of the Times Standard provides more context and memory. The North Coast Journal collected reminicences for its cover story. Through the voices of people who knew him well, a portrait of the person begins to emerge. Sid Dominitz, long time editor of ECONews (who I did meet in the first year I was here) quotes McKay's philosophy of activism: "Persistence is victory," and the methodology of "endless pressure endlessly applied." McKay lived it, though his persistence was not angry and blaming but centered. It strikes me that it takes someone with the temperament of a birder to make that work.

Earlier this summer, Eric Rofes died of a heart attack at age 51. Christina Accomando, a colleague at HSU, wrote this about him in the North Coast Journal. Again, I met him only once or twice, in connection with the very valuable Education Summit he organized at HSU every year. I was surprised to learn how much of a national figure he was, and well-known in one of my old stomping grounds, the Boston area. So the Boston Globe article on him was quite a revelation to me.

I don't want to project my own ignorance on the rest of the North Coast. Yet I wonder if our provincialism didn't give less value to Rofes than he deserved. Certainly I thought the importance of that unique Education Summit was not appreciated as it should be, and I know that frustrated him. What will happen to it now?

Of course a lot of people are asking, what will happen to the North Coast Environmental Center? Whose voice will replace Tim McKay's at meetings, on the radio, in hearings and in Congress? These are very great losses for this community. Let's hope the example of these two men inspire others to come forward and continue their work.

2006-07-10T16:07:00.000-07:00

More Sara

A few more thoughts about Sara Felder's show at Dell'Arte (see post below), now that more time has passed and the show has closed, so I won't be spoiling it for anyone.

In general, it's kind of amazing that a show that features a self-announced Lesbian, talking about Israel and Palestine, as well as her blind mother, turns out to be so non-threatening. That's largely due to Felder's personality, her performance (juggling and shadow plays fascinate everyone on a non-verbal, non-ideological level), the play itself (which dances around the tough issues rather than confronting them, though it authentically portrays a personal engagement) and in part to the audience.

Lesbians and gay men participate in the North Coast community and are generally accepted as valued members of the community. This is especially true among politically active people, who often support Lesbian and gay causes, and among theatregoers. Felder attracts a specifically gay and Lesbian contingent among her audience, and she did something pretty skillful and interesting: she played to them for a moment, and simultaenously used them to build a joke. In character, she responds to what she thinks is an accusation by an old friend, now an orthodox rabbi in Israel, about "her kind." She goes into a rant defending her coming out as a Lesbian at 16, her pride in being Lesbian, etc., to shouted encouragement and cheers from the audience. Which all contributes to the joke when it turns out the friend wasn't referring to her homosexuality at all. By "her kind" he meant secular Jews.

There is also another particular bit of Felder's showmanship (or does that have to be showomanship?) I've been thinking about. A few times early in the show she picked up one of three large knives, the kind we've seen jugglers juggle (in my case, in the safety of a television audience.) But she doesn't do anything with them. Still, they are the equivalent of showing a gun--the stage rule is that by the end of the play, that gun must go off.

Later she hands the knives to someone in the front row. Later still, after we've presumably almost forgotten about them, she is teetering on a balance board rolling back and forth over a round object, beginning to juggle lemons. She drops them. Though her juggling has at times appeared supernatural, she has flubbed once or twce, so that's what this looks like. She covers as if she's screwed up. The lemons are on the floor, when she calls for something else to juggle--and the young man in the front row hands her the knives. Which she juggles while balancing, to wonderment and applause.

The moment has been carefully prepared by the hints and expectations earlier. And if dropping the lemons wasn't intentional, it should now forever be so. Because seeing those lemons on the stage upped the ante for what is already a dangerous bit of juggling. Very skillfully done.

2006-07-08T00:31:00.000-07:00

Sara Felder at Dell'Arte

I just saw Sara Felder's show, Out of Sight in the Carlo Theatre at Dell'Arte, the Friday night performance. It's as she says in the mini-interview below, a comedy with content. Although the show is still "in process", it's already got a symmetry and an impact. And she sure can juggle! There's wit and emotion, and an audience-friendly ninety minute running time. Everybody had a good time tonight.

She's obviously a veteran performer, present with a presence, and tonight's audience was totally present and on top of things as well. Not just with laughter and gasps at the juggling, which is balletically lovely at times as well as wondrously skilled, but with audible responses to her words, sometimes simply in recognizing the metaphors and symmetries of the piece.

I was fortunate enough to sit beside a couple of brothers (I assume) of grade school age, wearing red hockey shirts. One of them exclaimed each time he got a passing reference in the shadow play--he recognized the one eye over the other joke about modern art--"Picasso!" And when the chicken warned the sky was falling, "that's Chicken Little!" "There's a Greek myth about flying too close to the sun!" Smart kid, smart audience. Good time.

I had emailed Sara Felder some questions for my Stage Matters column in the North Coast Journal, but she's been on tour and didn't get back to me until after the paper had gone to press. Bob Doran posted this at his Humblog, but I thought I'd post it here as well.

What's your show about? What will we see?

Out of Sight is a vaudevillian's attempt to understand both her mother and the Israel/Palestine crisis. To do so, she revisits how her mother became blind -- by staring at a solar eclipse as a child -- and her own visit to Israel in the 80's. It's a comedy with content.

When did you write this show? Is this the first performance?

Out of Sight was commissioned by the National Performance Network and premiered in Spring 2006 at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia. It has since been performed at the WomenSpeak Festival in Harrisburg, PA. This is its third venue. It usually takes me about a year of touring before the show settles in, so I very much consider these performances in Blue Lake as part of my process of creating the show.

What's your background? Where are you from, etc?

I'm from a little shtetl in Brooklyn called Brighton Beach. I lived in San Francisco for 20 years before my partner got in the crazy notion to go to rabbi school. We moved, with our son, to Philadelphia three years ago and are counting the days (many) till we can return to the holy land of San Francisco. Or somewhere relatively close to San Francisco. Or at least in the same time zone.

Prior relationship to Dell'Arte or the North Coast?

Arcata was a favorite stop of the Pickle Family Circus when I was with them in the early '80s.
I also brought my solo play, "June Bride: the story of a traditional Jewish lesbian wedding" to the Mad River Festival in, gosh what year was that? (8 years ago or so??). Then I brought my next show here too: "Shtik: a queer play on Jewish vaudeville" about 4 years ago. It's wonderful here. I love Dell'Arte, the redwoods, the bagels.

Where did you learn to juggle? How much is that part of your show here?

I learned to juggle in college at U.C.L.A. in the late 70's. Juggling is my best voice in theater work. I love using objects and circus in metaphorical ways. In this show there is mucho mucho mucho juggling. In fact, the whole show is a balancing act between trying to understand "my mother's Israel" which was created to protect Jews from antisemitism and the tragic consequences of creating a country in a place inhabited by a native population. Yes, there's three ball (actually three lemon) juggling, contact juggling, glow-in-the-dark juggling, devil sticks, scarves and knives. And for the first time, I also do a bit of shadow puppets to tell the story of my mother's blindness - shadows to tell the story of shadows.

Out of Sight continues with shows at 2pm and 8pm Saturday July 8 and 8pm Sunday July 9 at Dell'Arte in Blue Lake.

2006-05-30T01:08:00.000-07:00

California poppies, in abundance.

2006-05-30T01:07:00.000-07:00

California poppies closeup

2006-05-30T00:37:00.000-07:00

California Poppy

My first spring on the North Coast, I fell in love with the California poppy. Somehow on my previous trips to California I hadn't noticed it, but come late May it was blooming in Arcata. I noticed it especially around the HSU campus, and on the median of L.K. Wood (now shorn to golf course grass and poppy-free).

It was the color, that bright orange that first attracted me, along with their wild abundance. I examined one cluster more closely and noticed that there was variety--some were partly white, some yellow, some a deeper orange that was almost red. A student wandering by informed me that this poppy is the California state flower (true) and that it's illegal to pick them (not true.)

I confess I picked a few anyway and took them home, because having them around made me happy. We didn't have any growing in our yard, but now we do. It cheers me up to see them, especially in those times when I'm not sure what I'm doing here, or if I'll ever feel at home. The poppies keep coming back, glowing and spreading themselves everywhere--today I saw a yard where they were growing up a trellis. Hooray for them.

These flowers are native, and were used medicinally by Native peoples. Powered and smoked, they're said to have a mild sedative effect. Just looking at them produces an effect in me--even this May, my ninth on the North Coast.

2006-03-30T14:35:00.000-08:00

"I'm a small town kind of guy." Intrepid reporter Dave at Fernbridge. Photo courtesy Dave Silverbrand.

2006-03-30T13:30:00.000-08:00

Dave Silverbrand’s Big Story

Can the North Coast laugh at itself? Or are we all up our own tree?

by William S. Kowinski

Six years ago, Dave Silverbrand was the news director, anchor and star reporter on the TV station with Humboldt County’s largest TV news staff. They generated 22 hours of local news a week---news at 6 a.m., news at 5 p.m., news at 6 and 6:30 and 11 pm, on KVIQ (Channel 6.) The Ackerley Group, owner of Channel 6, poured a million dollars into staff and equipment. Even when they lured away the anchor of rival KAEF (Channel 23,) Silverbrand remained the genial face of Channel 6 news, second in the ratings to KIEM (Channel 3.)

Then it was over. Ackerley sold out to the broadcasting behemoth, Clear Channel Communications (which reportedly was most interested in Ackerley’s billboard business). As a result of the sale, the Channel 6 local newscasts were closed down completely.

One of the few at Channel 6 to survive this sale was Dave Silverbrand, who continued to provide one local news story a day for Clear Channel’s station in Santa Rosa. Shortly thereafter, KVIQ was sold again, this time to Raul Broadcasting, and for a short time, Silverbrand was out of a job entirely.

Dave Silverbrand has the image and presence of an easy-going guy. But he doesn’t like inactivity. So in his underemployed period about four years ago, he sat down and wrote a play: a satirical look at a North Coast conflict, centered on the survival of a tree.

One of the characters is a veteran TV news reporter, worried and angry that his 35 years of reporting hasn’t amounted to much, who is trying to redeem his own self-image with one last great story.

After finishing the play, which he titled The Tree, “I didn’t try to do anything with it,” Silverbrand said recently. “I figured an opportunity would come up sometime.”

Pacific Arts Center Theatre created challenging theatre on the North Coast for a generation, first in Arcata in the 1970s and then in the early 90s in Manila. Along the way, it spawned the children’s theatre group, Vagabond Players. After leaving Manila, both groups moved for about a year to the Eagle House, then to a Eureka warehouse space. Then PACT stopped producing completely, and Vagabond reconstituted itself as a program of the Ink People. But true to their name, they were still vagabonds.

“We were homeless for about two years,” said Carole Wolfe, volunteer artistic director. “I wanted us to be in Arcata, but I was basically calling everybody who might have a space to rent.”

When it got to the point that she was looking just for storage space for Vagabond’s equipment, she contacted the landlord of the Old Creamery building in Arcata. “He asked me if we were still looking for space for the theatre. I said, ‘yes we are.’” Three months later Vagabond Players moved in---to the same space where Pacific Arts Center began, some thirty years earlier.

Vagabond’s first foray in its new space was an ambitious production last fall of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Mark Dupre.

Dave Silverbrand, who lost his job when Raul Broadcasting took over, had to apply for the position of General Manager of KVIQ, which he got. Except for an engineer, he is the station’s only employee. He does all the station’s local segments, such as his “Project Lean” series (healthful food), “Project Green” (Arcata Recycling) and “Dave is---“ (“a kind of comical thing where I try different peoples’ jobs”), a format he began in previous Channel 6 incarnations.

So last September he showed up at the Vagabond Players’ new space, now called the Star Garden Theatre Art Center, to do a story on "Wild Things.” He mentioned his play, which he’d continued to work on over the years. “They said, well, it would be our first adult production,” Silverbrand recalls, “ but let’s take a look at it, and they did, and pretty much on the spot said they wanted to do it.”

So The Tree grew in Arcata, and will open this Thursday, March 30 at the Star Garden Theatre for a three-weekend run, with all proceeds donated to Food for People, the Humboldt County food bank.

2006-03-30T13:01:00.000-08:00

Young Dave does radio. Photo courtesy Dave Silverbrand.

2006-03-30T12:50:00.000-08:00

"It gives me a chance to say a few things, without sounding like some grousing, grumbling old man. I can be a humorist and say the same thing. It’s great.”

2006-03-30T12:30:00.000-08:00

Just Do It

The tall reporter in the trenchcoat and floppy hat talks earnestly to the camera about his thwarted ideals. Images of his heroes, like Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, flash across the screen. His career, hasn’t amounted to much. We see him doing forlorn stand-ups and getting tossed out of a rock concert. He needs one big story to justify his career.

The man in the video is the man showing it to me on an ancient monitor perched on a riser at the Star Garden space: Dave Silverbrand. The clips, which Silverbrand edited together to create what amounts to a character in his play, are from his own career. There are six or seven of these taped segments which the audience will see, while the live cast accomplishes its scene changes.

This is one of the joys of this play for him, the live Silverbrand claims. “I get a chance to laugh at myself,” he says, “which I enjoy doing very much.”

Dave Silverbrand (the surname is an Americanization of a common Swedish name) was born in King City, south of Salinas, and grew up in various small towns down in Steinbeck country. In high school his English teacher suggested he attend a town council meeting and write something about it for the local radio station. He did, and found he liked it a great deal. Until then he hadn’t even imagined a career in broadcasting, but after earning a B.A. in journalism at San Jose State University, he wound up in Portland, Maine, where he worked as a television reporter and substitute anchor for the next twenty years.

Silverbrand returned to California in 1992. After a couple of years as a reporter for KIEM-TV, he went back to school and earned his Master’s in English at HSU, where he also taught and was heard on KHSU radio. By 1997 he was back in TV broadcasting, as news director at Channel 6.

He showed me another taped segment for his play when I visited his Channel 6 office, a cramped, narrow space in the Eureka building where Eureka Television Group runs its four stations and his as well. The premise of this clip is that the reporter, now bored and angry because the “big story” he’s covering is moving too slowly, is being interviewed by a grade school girl for her school newspaper. She asks him general questions like “What is your job?” and he gives increasingly resentful answers, complaining that he is called in to anchor when “the little punk calls in sick,” and he loses choice assignments to reporters who bat their eyelashes “and shake their booties.”

As he continues to rant even after the girl says she has to go, the segment is genuinely funny. But it is pretty biting if not bitter, so I asked Silverbrand if that’s how he feels about his own career.

“Sure, this is how I feel, that’s the point,” he said. “In 35 years, I’ve had cases where I had to come in and fill in for the little punk who calls in sick, and I’ve been upstaged by the anchor queens, because they’re the anchor queens. There’s a lot about TV that’s superficial, and I’ve watched people just slide into these plum assignments because that’s the way TV is. It ticks me off sometimes. The rest of the time I’m having such a good time it doesn’t matter. That’s why I’m enjoying myself with this play. Because it gives me a chance to say a few things, without sounding like some grousing, grumbling old man. I can be a humorist and say the same thing. It’s great.”

2006-03-30T12:20:00.000-08:00

‘Just find a way to work the system, you can have an awful lot of fun. "

2006-03-30T12:15:00.000-08:00

Because, as it turns out, Silverbrand and I are almost exactly the same age (born six weeks apart in the summer of 1946) and had our first journalism jobs at the same time a few hundred miles apart (I was a writer and editor for the Boston Phoenix while he was getting started in Maine), I happen to know something more about the peculiar point in media history when Silverbrand was beginning his television career.

There were few women on the air in television news until 1971 or so. Boston’s largest TV station, WBZ, had one female reporter, a middle aged woman respected for her reporting skills. But a few years later there was a huge influx of primarily young and attractive women hired to be on the air, at first as “soft” news reporters, then general assignment reporters, then talk show hosts and co-anchor spots on new early news shows, and by mid-decade, the anchor chair on the more established news programs.

Several proved to be very good at television news. The alarmingly beautiful Natalie Jacobson, who became the first woman to anchor the evening news in Boston, is still a popular (and now award-winning) newscaster at the same station, WCVB. Pat Mitchell, who I met when she was the WBZ film and theatre reviewer, is now the head of PBS.

But there were others… On a story, I had to attend a public hearing in Boston concerning telephone company regulation. I arrived an hour or so into it and saw a group of reporters standing in the press section, but I didn’t know any of them. However, there was a tall, extremely striking woman I’d seen on TV, and of course she’s the one I chose to approach, to catch up on what had gone on so far. She smiled her blinding smile at me and giggled. In her long, perfectly manicured fingers she held a reporter’s notebook, completely blank.

Of course, there were male anchors more famous for their handsome smiles than their penetrating intelligence (the urban legend about Boston’s biggest anchor star had him solemnly warning that a missing child should be approached carefully, because he was “acoustic”), and airhead anchors of both genders have since become a living cliché. But at precisely the moment Dave Silverbrand was beginning, this rapid influx of young women into local broadcasting was skewing the system to the detriment of other reporters, before some balance was achieved. Though it wasn’t easy for the young women either, it could be frustrating for young men.

But Silverbrand coped with all the change for 20 years in Maine, and could have stayed longer. “People I worked with years ago are still there,” he said. Or he could have tried to advance to more prestigious and better-paying media markets in bigger cities. “I didn’t have the fever for big city TV,” he said. “I’m kind of a small town guy.”

Since coming to the North Coast to be closer to his California family, Silverbrand has felt the effects of media conglomerates as well as all the other outrages. So besides satirizing his fate in a play, how does he deal with it? “If I had just acquiesced to the way things were, I would be incredibly angry and disillusioned,” he said. “But I learned early on that if something is really important to you, you go ahead and do it.”

Case in point: In 1982, a young Maine schoolgirl named Samantha Smith wrote to Yuri Andropov, then the Soviet Premier, telling him of her fears about nuclear war. He invited her to Moscow, and her trip became a media sensation.

“It was a big global story, one of those stories that I wanted to do so badly, I could ace that story—but somebody else, for those superficial reasons, got to go and do it,” Silverbrand recalled. “I felt so angry and left- behind about that. But I said, Dave, you can come up with your own way to do something like that. You don’t have to wait for somebody else to write your ticket, you can do it yourself.”

So Silverbrand organized high school student trips to Russia and went with them for four consecutive years. “That was even more fulfilling to me than covering Samantha Smith. And that’s the way I’ve been doing things ever since.”

Even when he was the one-person news staff for Channel 6 during the Clear Channel period, and he got a hankering to go to Cuba: “I knew nobody I worked for would send me, but I really wanted to go. I knew I would have to pay my own way, so I did.” He also took a camera. And since he was responsible for providing Clear Channel’s Santa Rosa station with one story a day from Humboldt, he fed them his series on Cuba. “What were they going to do? They had to put something in that slot. And I had just a wonderful time, talking to Cuban people.”

These days Silverbrand also teaches English and journalism classes at College of the Redwoods, and passes on this lesson. “I tell my students, ‘you can do things that are important to you, you can find a way. You don’t have to be told to do it, just go out and do it, and make a difference, and feel good about yourself. If you let others write all the rules for you, you’re not going to get anything done.’ In its own passive-aggressive way, what I did was revolutionary. So I tell them, ‘Just find a way to work the system, you can have an awful lot of fun.’ ”

In the end, that seems to be Silverbrand’s dominant feeling about his career. Veteran CBS journalist Mike Wallace had announced his retirement a few days before our conversation. Silverbrand watched an interview with him. “I thought, dammit, I’ve had as much fun at my job as he’s had at his. I didn’t make nearly as much money, and I didn’t work on a national TV network, but I’ve had a ball. And I’m not done.”

2006-03-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

Dave in Russia. photo courtesy Dave Silverbrand.

2006-03-30T11:50:00.000-08:00

"I think he’s very happy. He told me this is just how he imagined it to be.”

2006-03-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

An Equal Opportunity Spoof

Coming in from the March mist and cold, the space inside the Creamery building now known as the Star Garden Theatre feels immediately welcoming. The very high ceilings add to a sense of spaciousness and possibility, and there’s a warmth in the combination of modest fixtures and the theatre’s elegant wood floor. The homey reception area has a refreshment bar, topped with the large masks from Where the Wild Things Are, and a revolutionary new concept in local community theatre---two (count’em, two!) restrooms, one next to the other.

Though Carole Wolfe’s main concern is providing “a safe space” for children at Vagabond Players’ productions and kids classes, she is open to other opportunities these rooms provide. That’s one reason they gave the theatre a separate name. “We’d like to rent to other groups that want to perform for a weekend, or for classes,” she said. “We’re looking for a fresh start,” which also means an openness to new plays and productions for adults, as evidenced by The Tree.

Ten actors, some of them in their first production, gather here for rehearsals. At first, Dave Silverbrand wanted Mark Dupre to direct. “After six months of creating the heads for ‘Wild Things’ and putting together the production, Mark decided he didn’t want to do it,” Wolfe said. “But Dave was still set on having it in this space.”

Enter Denise Ryles, the veteran Humboldt County actor who directed her first show a few years ago. “Dave Silverbrand and I go way back,” she told me. “I was in an English class he taught at HSU, and later he would come into The Costume Box, the shop my mother and I have. He was doing his ‘Dave is…’ thing on Channel 6, and we’d dress him up for the different things he wanted to do.”

So Ryles agreed to direct (and her mother, Rosemary Smith, who still has the Costume Box at 2nd and T in Eureka, has designed the show’s costumes.) By all accounts, Silverbrand worked closely with the production, from involvement in casting to attending rehearsals and making revisions according to what he saw and experienced. “I believe in having the writer here,” Ryles said. “He can hear it and decide for himself if it sounds good or not. He can help the actors, and maybe the actors can add something, so he’s here to decide to keep it or not. I think he’s very happy. He told me this is just how he imagined it to be.”

2006-03-30T11:03:00.000-08:00

Dave eating healthy. from Senior News.

2006-03-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

“These personalities clashing with each other, these people bickering and picking at each other---it just seemed like so much fun to me.”

2006-03-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

The story in The Tree pits two families against each other: one father is an ex-hippie environmentalist who is now produce manager at the Co-op, the other an ex-logger now working in a lumber yard. They are battling over a single tree in the heart of town---should it be cut down to make bleachers for the high school football team, or left to live out its natural life? An aggressive police chief and a cautious mayor are between them.

This is not Silverbrand’s first play (a documentary drama called The Lobster War, based on his Maine reporting, was produced at the Eagle House in 1999), but it is his first comedy and work of the imagination. It seems his English Masters paid off, for it also includes star-crossed lovers in a Romeo and Juliet subplot, as well as a mysterious figure, a elderly woman who becomes a key player in the unfolding story.

Silverbrand and Ryles agree that the theme of the play is change, and how people cope with it, and try to locate a new identity in flux. The action---which includes protests, police plans for subduing protestors, city council meetings, etc.---seem to come from familiar local events, many of which Dave Silverbrand covered as a reporter.

They are situations rife with conflict, but that’s always fascinated Silverbrand, from the first town council meeting he witnessed as a teenager. “These personalities clashing with each other, these people bickering and picking at each other---it just seemed like so much fun to me.”

This attitude towards local conflicts, however, may be contrary to North Coast tradition. “Everybody here has an opinion about conservation and environment, and it’s a pretty deeply held philosophy. You don’t find too many ambivalent people around here. But there are some parts of the country where people laugh at themselves on a regular basis,” Silverbrand mused. “Where I lived in Maine, it’s part of the culture to laugh at yourself. Different parts of the country are the same way. We take ourselves very seriously up here---too seriously sometimes, I think.”

Silverbrand said he hasn’t seen the Dell ‘Arte play about a tree-sitter, Shadow of Giants, now on national tour, so he can’t make any comparisons. “I’m not saying this is one of the great plays of all time---it’s not,” he added. “But it is a local satire, an opportunity for all of us to laugh at ourselves. That’s pretty much the value of it.”

For all his fascination with disagreements, Silverbrand seemed proud to point out that he got along well with both police and tree-sitters during the protests in Freshwater a few years ago. Though Silverbrand refused several invitations to climb a tree, he and Jenny Carr—known as Remedy---were cell phone friends. He remembers answers his cell in a San Francisco hotel where he was on a Christmas shopping trip with his wife, and it was Remedy calling from her tree home, just saying hello.

Everybody likes Dave. But will they feel the same way after this play?

“I think he wrote a real heartfelt piece,” Denise Ryles said, and added with a grin, “he makes fun of everybody equally.”

A different version of this story appears in the North Coast Journal.

2006-03-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

Michael Bean airbrush work for poster photo for "The Tree." Chris Wisner photo.

2006-03-30T09:30:00.000-08:00

Performances of The Tree are Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m., March 30 to April 15. There is also a matinee on Saturday, April 15. Tickets are $10, $8 students/seniors. 2-for-1 tickets on Preview Night, March 30. The Star Garden Theatre Art Center is in the Old Creamery Building, at 1251 9th Street in Arcata. The theatre seats about 100 for this production. Call 442-1533 for reservations and information. This is a show for adults. Proceeds benefit Food for People.

Two Takes On Place

2006-02-16T01:35:00.000-08:00

What does "this place" really mean, in real life?

It can mean lots of things. A couple of them were suggested to me by two letters to the editor, on the very same page of the North Coast Journal a couple of weeks ago.

The Journal had published an interview with Cherie Arkley about her plan for a development on the Eureka waterfront that includes at least one "big box" store, Home Depot. At the moment, opposition is gearing up to the Arkley plan, and a lot of it is aimed at the effects of generic Big Box development.

But apart from the merits of that approach, I was intrigued by a letter from Duncan B. MacLaren, Fieldbrook, that zeroed in on the more specific question of whether this particular place--not the waterfront exactly, but the North Coast area---needs this particular Big Box: Home Depot. Underlying the question is the demonstrable fact that at least some Big Box stores drive out local businesses. Wal-Mart of course drives out just about every kind of retail business, that's been demonstrated over and over again. But MacLaren seems to be wondering if we need a Home Depot, given the other similiar businesses here, and given the likelihood of Home Depot driving out other hardware stores etc., is it worth it?

MacLaren doesn't think so. He doesn't think "a 3-way lamp socket" is really going to be any cheaper at Home Depot than at various Ace Hardware stores already here. And whether Home Depot, where "lumber has never been its strong suit" would offer the variety and expertise of local businesses it might hurt or destroy. His conclusion: "Give me the expertise and variety of an Almquist or a Mill Yard every time."

At this point a more recent immigrant to the area may shed some light. When I think of what's different about "this place," it certainly includes places like Almquist and especially another store he mentions: Pierson's.

I've just never seen a store quite like Pierson's anywhere. The combination of variety, of sales and value, and of friendly expertise, is phenomenal. Plus this business has apparently been deeply involved in local communities for a long time, and has provided good jobs for people---judging from their commercials, with low turnover.

I'll bet it's part of the community's image to outsiders as well. When I think of Portland, I automatically think of Powell's bookstores and the Coffee People (who make the best mochas on the planet, consistently.) I'll bet there are people who when they think of Eureka think of Pierson's. So the question becomes, do we want to mess that up, and become just like the rest of the country, all buying at Home Depots? Would we risk that, or is there really room in this area for a big box Home Depot?

This letter was about a change that, if made, could harm something that makes this place This Place. The second letter was about a change that may have already done so. It was from Jessica Puccinelli in Fortuna. It begins: "On Jan. 3, the Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 to have Jack Noble's gravel crusher installed in our residential neighborhood on the bank of the Van Duzen. Those who made the decision hadn't driven our one-lane road or seen our homes."

She goes on to say they would have seen what a nice, thriving neighborhood it was, with a particular character to its homes, people and businesses. But---"They would not have seen the Nobles. They started the mining and moved out." Possibly because of all the noise, dust, water pollution and traffic due to the gravel trucks. (The name of "Noble" is all too perfect, unfortunately. Not as a quality but as the nobles who own the land, but don't live there.)

But if the supervisors had come, she contines, "they might even have seen a mated pair of bald eagles, our national bird, that also nest here. They're a beautiful sight. With a noisy crusher and more truck traffic, we may never [see] those birds again. And neither will anyone else."

That says it all. I don't know for a fact if what she says is accurate, but what made her neighborhood "this place" for Jessica, also made it a particular place for everyone. And now (she fears, as we all should) it's become just another ruined landscape,which are all too common. They are so common that it's often hard to remember what actual places look like.

All the characteristics of her place--the quiet, the bed & breakfast, the homes and the businesses suited for just that place, and the presence of that particular pair of bald Eagles--all gone.

It all becomes just like every no-place else.

This North Coast Economy

2006-02-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

This week's North Coast Journal cover story is an interview with two banker/entreprenurial Humboldt residents talking about the county's economy. I have two quick reactions on subjects they brought up, primarily of local interest but also with wider application: the relationship of government and business, and the public relations dilemma of our local university, in a time it has begun the mainstay of the local economy and should be even more of a focus in the future. But it's currently struggling to stay alive.

The Business of Government

One of the themes that emerges from this interview is what one banker calls the "natural tension" between business and government. One says that Humboldt has become dependent on government funds from outside for infrastructure and services, but those funds are declining. He also suggests that the wave of local entreprenuership of twenty years ago hasn't been repeated in recent years.

But he fails to put the two together. I'd be interested to see a graph of the two phenomena: the years in which California and the federal government devoted more tax money to infrastructure--roads, parks, water systems, etc. as well as the infrastructure of support for public education at all levels, special programs for the arts and sciences, support for the state university, etc.---and for social services, including medical care, various support systems for senior citizens, for healthy children and families, for the differently abled. And the years in which there was a high level of entreprenuership locally. (I don't mean a literal graph---I hate graphs. But a comparison.)

I'll bet they match up pretty closely. What apparently business forgets (and may like the rest of us to forget) is how much they benefit from government support, both generally (as in the above examples) and in special favors, everything from abatements to roads built for their private use.

I'm not about to defend government bureaucracy (or the corporate version) that stifles creativity and tamps down energies. There is something of a natural tension between the processes of business and government, but that's often healthy. They operate as checks and balances. But it's time for everyone to recognize how much business benefits from government in creating general and specific conditions that allow businesses to begin and thrive.

It's going to be especially true in Humboldt's future. Two major components of the local economy that aren't mentioned are tourism and retirement or senior citizen related services, including medical and various care facilities. (Humboldt is precisely the kind of place that attracts retirees.) Both require government support, sometimes in direct subsidies (senior care) or indirectly in maintaining parks and public lands, and building new infrastructure.
Neither of these are high profit margin businesses, and though some can be fairly large, most will be small and very entrepreneurial. (I hope one of the eight ways I've spelled that turns out to be right.)

For both, smart government spending is essential, and it's time for business to recognize this--oppose these self-destructive tax cuts for the wealthy, on every level---and make life better for everyone, which makes this place more attractive to employers and good employees, as well as specifically creating better opportunities for business.

Redwood State University?

The bankers acknowledge that Humboldt State University is now the largest single economic force in the county, and is likely to be the most important factor in its economic future.But Humboldt is suffering the effects of state funding cutbacks, while it is also experiencing a decline in students, while much of the rest of the state university system has higher enrollments. The bankers discuss this in the context of our substantial "underground economy" (which means marihuana) and the apparent fact that this is the county's identity worldwide--that is, Humboldt =Humboldt's Finest.

Humboldt State especially perceives this as a problem, their biggest problem in fact. In some ways it seems to have become an obsession. One of the bankers, Patrick Cleary, suggests that HSU change its name to something like Redwood University, and advertise it as being in Arcata, not HC. The other, Thomas Bruner, thought this was a good idea, because HSU was never going to be able to market against this image directly: "Because what are you going to do, spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a marketing campaign? Humboldt: It's Not Just Dope.

The idea of a name change, of "re-branding" in today's vocab, isn't a bad one. There's recent precedent for a name change in the state university system---so the number-crunchers will have something to study to budget it. It could kick off a positive marketing campaign that might have the virtue of being true, for HSU does have an identity, even if it's been unable so far to express it well enough. And it does have to do with this place, with the environment and environmental concerns.

It's also possible to creatively take on the stereotype, with something between "It's not just dope" and the backdoor effort HSU halfheartedly pursued to market this place as "healthy."

But is it necessary? I'm not persuaded of that. It is a kind of truism that seems to be true by virtue of being repeated, and there's nothing more powerful in corporate America-- or corporate academia--- than the latest conventional wisdom. But there's no advantage in simply being so defensive--people can smell that a mile away (not just about dope but the homeless on the Plaza, etc. )

There's also no doubt in any case that HSU needs focused and more creative and energetic marketing, (as well as fewer public relations catastrophes) and a more flexible attitude--- and the clock is ticking.

Welcome to this site revisited

2006-01-25T02:05:00.000-08:00

Now that there may be some new eyes coming to this site, thanks to a North Coast Journal article, I thought I would re-state the basic idea for this blog.

I wanted to create a space on the Internet to explore what makes the North Coast the North Coast: what makes this a particular place.

My first inspiration was Wes Jackson’s book (published in 1996, the year I got here) called Becoming Native to This Place. This was a powerful idea for a newcomer. How do you come to know and be invested in a place? The idea of becoming native is to feel the same deep identification, and to have the same stake in a place as someone born here, with generations of ancestors buried in its ground. The passage of time obviously helps, but it's not enough.

The way Wes Jackson and others use the concept (like the poet Gary Snyder, it goes beyond roots in a community or an economy, but includes the particulars of the natural landscape. In their view, becoming native to a place is essential to keeping its character and its ecology alive.

That seemed especially appropriate here, not only because of the close relationship people on the North Coast have to their natural landscape, but because of the active presence of Indigenous peoples, the Natives of this place.

So on this blog and a companion one, called North Coast Texts, I started with a few themes. The first had to be the Native American presence and specifically the process of ongoing efforts of reconciliation, involving local tribes (especially the Wiyot) and the non-Native community, relations within the Native community, and how this might affect the relationship of everyone here to the place itself.

As for the place itself, I started from the ground up, by exploring aspects of local geology (here ) and also here.)

I also began describing my experiences and background as a newcomer here, and here (way down at the bottom of the month), and a little about the arts on the North Coast (mostly photos.)

There's more noodling on the basic concept, too.

I frankly had hoped to start dialogues on all these subjects, and more, through the comments. That hasn’t happened yet. Maybe it still can. I’d love to find a way in which people feel comfortable discussing their experiences as newcomers. Or exploring what they value most about living here, and how they feel they can best express it.

That, by the way, was why I created two North Coast blogs. North Coast Texts was for exposition and longer posts. This blog was supposed to be more for discussions: more “blog-like.” But whether or not that happens, the articles and interviews exist as an archive, a useful resource.

Lately this blog has become more blog-like in that my more recent posts are shorter and more personal---more about how I interact with this place, and it interacts with me. I think the idea is still an important one. It transcends our likes and dislikes about institutions, politics and economics, although all of those are relevant. Eventually though it has something to do with our feeling for the place, and maybe even the feeling of the place for us.

North Coast Links

2006-01-23T03:03:00.000-08:00

Since Eureka was a battleground over a proposed new Wal-Mart, there's likely still some interest in the issues raised then. I wrote a review published on the cover of the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, with a HUGE illustration, which you can find here in its on-line version, or in a longer version here.

Also, some of the material in an earlier post here became part of a cover story in the North Coast Journal about Humboldt Quakers and Guantanamo Bay Prison. It seems to have started ripples that are still moving outward several weeks after publication. Locally, it seems to have sparked interest in the Guantanamo effort (new participants in the Guantanamo group's meetings) and in the Quakers (new people at worship for several Sundays in a row.)

One letter to the editor in the Journal indicated that other local churches might find ways to support the Quakers' efforts. And some national Quaker organizations have taken note as well.

The cover story of this coming Thursday's issue of the Journal is on North Coast bloggers. I was asked to contribute part of it, on my blogging experiences. Should be interesting.

Our Sci-Fi Weather

2006-01-11T17:33:00.000-08:00

The Eureka Reporter reports the explanation by the National Weather Service for the sudden windstorm that devastated the Humboldt County electrical grid on December 31. Some people in less than remote places were without power for six days.

Several storms came through from the Pacific during Christmas week. By New Year's Eve morning the latest bout of heavy rains and constant winds had died down, only a weak storm was forecast for early in the new year, and most of the county was breathing a sigh of relief because it seemed the worst had passed and the grid got through it fine. But then at about 9:30 am winds that are estimated at up to 85 mph hit various parts of the area, and did the damage.
They were brief, and didn't affect all areas.

Now the Weather Service says that it was such a rare weather event that there is no record of it happening in Humboldt before. A similiar situation happened in Portland, OR in the 90s, which weather types have been studying ever since.It's called a bent-back occuluded front. In this case the storm had indeed passed--the front was in Montery to the south and Sacramento to the southeast. But "rapidly intensifying" low pressure in the ocean off our coast actually sucked the storm front back--the front "bent" back to the North Coast.

This explanation came in a story about why the NWS didn't issue a wind warning, not the most intelligent approach to the phenomenon, since it's not clear what the Emergency Alert would have done. Here's a classic graph on the outcome: But by the time they realized how strong the winds would be, it was too late, Dean [of the NWS] said. "The feeling at the time was that the winds had already started, so people already had the information that it was windy."

Yeah, good thinking. But what about this weird event? Nobody has seen it around here until the 1990s and now it's happened again. The conventional wisdom is that weather is full of freak events. It's that tricky old Mother Nature, tsk tsk, chuckle chuckle.

Well, the weather is seldom original, and some humility is certainly proper, but global heating scenarios predict such freak weather, and if the oceans are warmer in places they weren't before, we may be in for more "freak" storms. For which, incidentally we are not well prepared, as this event makes clear. The power crews performed admirably afterwards, but the flow of timely information was spotty and inconsistent, and generally a failure. Missing the point even a week afterward ices that particular cake.

There was a terrible TV movie on a few months ago about a series of storms that wiped out various picturesque capitals of the world and threatened to be "the end of the world!" as the title indicated. It ran for something like 4 hours over two nights, so I taped it and we watched the highlights. Good popcorn trash tv, but science fiction is rarely without relevance to the undercurrents of mood in the present. Sci fi weather isn't just coming. We just had some.

While we're interested here in what makes Humboldt "this place," it's always necessary to remember how deeply this place is connected to the rest of the world. Our weather is made elsewhere, in warm waters of the Pacific, for instance. They call it global warming because it is a global phenomenon in cause and general effect, but just as it is also caused by accumulation of specific acts in separate places, the effects are felt differently in different places. Yet as a global phenomenon, it's useless to look at either the cause or the effect only in local terms.

That's also the case with other kinds of air pollution---specific chemicals released in the air here may have their greatest effects elsewhere, and vice versa, just as the acid rain caused by polluting smokestacks in the eastern states is killing the life in midwestern lakes and forests.

We are part of this world, even the sci-fi part.

2005-12-30T01:05:00.000-08:00

Stormy Days

Another storm coming in tonight. We could get another 3 inches of rain over the next few days, and we already made the pbs news hour for rivers at their highest level in 7 years. With river and creek flooding, mudslides and downed trees blocking roads for various periods, the Humboldt County sherrif (also in charge of emergency management) has declared a stateof emergency for the county.

This reminds me of the last week of 1996 and first of 97, a rainy winter and a huge storm for New Years that resulted in flooding, mudslides and so on, washing out roads, virtually wiping out a community south of here, and when 101 was blocked on both sides and the airport was shut down, cutting the whole area off from the world.

That was our first winter here. The next was pretty wet as well, but none have been that bad until now.

The hummingbirds are hanging in, though. It's been a challenge keeping up with their intake of nectar from the feeder, although the wind blowing it around caused substantial losses, too.

I've been meaning to make note of a news story that's now a bit old, that the sci-fi channel is working on a new series called "Eureka," ostensibly set in our own Eureka city (although not shot anywhere near here, of course. Only movies set somewhere else are shot here. Like a forest planet in a galaxy far far away.)

Anyway, this series is about an isolated town that happens to harbor scientific geniuses doing super secret research for the government. Of course, this not only doesn't sound like Eureka, it doesn't sound like our government. What would they be getting these scientists to do? Prove global warming is a myth? Show by example that evolution is a phony theory? Figure out how to make sense of all the phone calls they're spying on?

This isn't the first time that our relatively isolated location has inspired fantasies of secret goings on. Thomas Pynchon (who may have lived in the area for awhile) used all kinds of Humboldt locations in his novel, Vineland. College of the Redwoods became College of the Surf, etc. and the forests hid entire secret military installations.

Of course, people hereabouts do say that in southern Humboldt there are entire towns that aren't on any maps. So who knows?

And of course, a bit north, Bigfoot. A famous personage here. There are even Bigfoot gasoline stations.

But back to the storms: so far we've had only a couple of very brief power outages, but they are more likely in this weather. We're high enough that flooding isn't likely to affect us, though it is remotely possible. There are lots of usually small creeks about. And it doesn't take much to block 101, especially south.

I recall that in 96 I was pleased to learn that the Arcata area is self-sufficient in diary products. I don't know if it's still true.

Aliens Among Us

2005-12-16T01:02:00.000-08:00

(from a few nights ago...)

Another day's news of humans killing and torturing each other, with the usual elaborate justifications. Another day of their big confused brains and bigger metal hands destroying their own planet heedlessly.

I'd rather write about birds.

While we expend great energy and interest in trying to discover whether there is alien life elsewhere, we not only ignore the alien life all around us that helped make us human, we are busily destroying it, and the basis for all life on the only planet where we know for sure there is any.

What little we did learn over thousands of years of contact, we are rapidly forgetting. We make up all kinds of rules that tell us what animals can and cannot do, and then we ignore evidence that violates those supposed rules. We don't have a clue why birds can do all they can do---fly and navigate over huge distances, bury food in hundreds of locations and remember where it is even when the landscape is covered with snow---with such little brains and little bodies.

The Guardian reviewed a book on why birds sing (the apparent conclusion is: because they can) which began with the following passage: "Starlings are great mimics, which is mainly why Meredith West and Andrew King spent a decade studying nine of them at the University of Indiana. They kept four birds in isolation, while the other five lived "in close proximity to their human caretakers, with extensive and friendly bird- human interaction". Not surprisingly, only these five learned to copy human sounds, which they reproduced "in odd ways". "'Basic research' one said. 'Basic research, it's true, I guess that's right.' One bird, which needed to have its claws treated for an infection, squirmed while held, screaming, 'I have a question!'."

I'm sure they have lots of questions.I grew up on a hill in western Pennsylvania, with stands of trees across the road, and in a hilly lot nearby, and woods not far away. We looked out on a town of roofs parsed with rounded trees. There were rabbits and squirrels around, and when I was quite young, lots of different kinds of butterflies in the wildflowers and "weeds" nearby. And there were birds.

There were robins, cardinals, goldfinches, sparrows and crows in the spring and summer, and occasionally bluejays and bluebirds. Pheasants and even hawks. Once I was looking out during a snowstorm and saw the top of a fir tree become a huge bird with black wings. It might have been an eagle.

Later I lived in an apartment building built into a hill in Pittsburgh. I was on the second floor, and in the front it was a long way down to the sloping street, lots of trees and birds on the wires. One bird, I believe a song sparrow, came back every year, with a distinctive song. I called him Beethoven because he sang the first four notes of the 5th and ended them with a tweet and a trill.

But the back porch was nearly even with a glade of trees where many different kinds of birds came. A visitor remarked she hadn't seen so many different kinds of birds anywhere else in the city (excluding the Aviary, I'm sure.)

When we moved to far northern California, among the many adjustments was the absense of songbirds. We lived in a apartment not far from the community forest. It was patrolled by hawks flying high above us. Crows and gulls were common, and some robins. I saw birds I couldn't identify, but I missed the songs.

Now we live in a house a bit farther away from the forest, and Margaret has gardens in front and back, and she has selected flowers and other plants that attract songbirds. There aren't as many as in PA but there are enough to be a comforting presence.There are many more species and kinds of birds hereabouts, with our mild coastal climate, open and wooded spaces, and our place on the migration routes. No cardinals or goldfinches, though.

Right now the birds that demands our attention are hummingbirds. This is one of the few places in America where hummingbirds are still coming to feeders in mid December. All summer they use ours to supplement the nectar from the flowers, but now with fewer of their favorites flowering, they are draining the feeder quickly. At a certain point, perhaps soon, the feeder will be untouched, and we'll know they're gone. The sun will bleach the red liquid to a transparent pink.

Migration is also partly why they consume so much now. Migrating species bulk up to perhaps twice their usual weight. There are so many species and subspecies, and so little is really know about their migrations, that its impossible to say where they go. Some fly routes from Alaska to Mexico. Some dip 500 miles or so south. Some don't leave at all.

The species most likely to be ours here are Anna's, Allen's and rufous, but there are apparently hybrids as well. I think we have two species coming to our feeder, though I can't be sure. The other day I watched one perching next to the feeder for an unusually long time. There wasn't much left in the feeder, and I refilled it. He (or she) came back, ate and flew away. Maybe that was the point.

It was either younger or a different, smaller species from the two that seem to be coming around in a pair, though they fly at each other furiously as they approach, and only one feeds at a time. Although I have seen two feeding simulaneously other years. I read somewhere recently that hummingbirds would probably be on the endangered species list except for backyard feeders. But the reprieve is probably temporary. Humans are destroying habitat too fast for feeders to keep up.

All reprieves are temporary, but some more temporary than others. Between the time I started writing this dumb little piece and the time that I began this sentence, the state of California by official government action ended the life of a man. He may or may not have murdered people. Since then he has contributed to his fellow man. Though such contributions are hard to quantify, it's more than possible he did more good than some of the people insisting that he had to be killed.

So they killed him. I'm not going into any ethical discussions about this. I'm opposed to capital punishment. Humans should be smarter and better than that. But apparently we aren't. If we destroy ourselves, it will be too bad. If we destroy the birds and the other life beyond some bugs and microbes, it will be well beyond too bad.

We seem determined to be the loneliest species conceivable, even if we succeed in surviving. But it would only mean that we would be only one of the last species to die out. Many large animals are well on their way to extinction--the great apes, the great cats. Some birds may make it, though. The evidence grows that they are descendants of the dinosaurs. They survived the last catastrophe, somehow they may survive the one we're making.

Mountain lions are occasionally seen in the community forest. A cougar was seen this summer on this side of the freeway, not a quarter mile away.

2005-10-06T01:13:00.000-07:00

Prisoners at Abu Ghraib waiting for release. AP 2005.

Being Peace: From Humboldt to Guantanamo Bay

2005-10-06T00:39:00.000-07:00

War in Iraq has revived feelings and memories of past wars, particularly Vietnam, as it has repeated particular elements and tragic patterns. These have resulted in types of activism with roots in prior wars, such as peace demonstrations and the G.I. Rights Hotline. But one facet of it has been starkly different---so much so that reaction has oscillated between shocked outrage and benumbed denial.

The first round of photographs from Abu Ghraib prison led to revelations that American soldiers and perhaps civilians took part in torturing prisoners, and that acts that are internationally defined (and banned) as torture as well as severe violations of human rights were to an as yet unknown extent matters of U.S. administration policy. Certainly, the President’s counsel, who is now the U.S. Attorney General, sanctioned torture as an instrument in the war on terror. The Geneva Conventions, previously sacrosanct to all armed forces in the world, at least officially, were violated with impunity.

In one way or another, people have voiced their disbelief, their despair and their anger that they should even need to oppose torture conducted by their own government.

So to actively oppose torture and violations of human rights and civil rights at Guantanamo Bay Prison as well as in Iraq perhaps requires a different set of skills and attitudes than other forms of protest. It may require a particular kind of commitment.

There is a very small group in Humboldt County who are trying to do something that’s never been done: to go to Guantanamo Bay prison for a week. They want to visit with the prisoners, and their captors.

They represent an important though often overlooked source of strength and activity for various peace-oriented efforts locally: the Humboldt Friends Meeting, part of the Society of Friends, popularly known as the Quakers.

There are six in this particular group. I know one of them quite well: my partner, Margaret Thomas Kelso. (Apart from my keen reportorial instincts, this is how I first learned about them.) The others are Andrea Armin-Hoiland, Karin Salzmann, Dr. Richard Ricklefs (the legendary physician in Hoopa), Dr. Fred Adler and his wife, Carol Cruickshank.

I’ve focused here on Fred and Carol, not only because Carol first proposed this idea, but because their story represents a kind of commitment that has meant they have made life decisions about career and relationships based in large measure on their convictions about peace and human rights. In this, they represent more than the other six, but many I’ve met or know something about in Humboldt, particularly those involved in the G.I. Rights Hotline.

But they also suggest a way of approaching this commitment that is informed by their involvement in Quaker meeting. What follows is largely taken from a story I did for the North Coast Journal. Most of it was about the G.I. Rights Hotline, and the story just got too long to include this section on the Guantanamo group. I’m adding this introduction, and just a little more about the meeting of this group I attended.

It was on a Sunday afternoon at Fred and Carol’s house in Arcata, in a large room with panoramic view. The room was largely empty except for a grand piano, and a smaller piano at one end. Fred Adler’s music will become important to the story.

What struck me about this meeting was the time and attention the group paid to their feelings about what they were doing, and what it was doing to their lives, as well as about strategies and tactics for going forward. They talked about how to deal with the deeply disturbing facts they had to confront, and how to maintain an attitude, as one put it, of “joyful action” when a lot of what was happening fed a sense of hopelessness.

This was not simply on a level of feelings, or a psychological level, although that would be different in itself from what I remembered about activist meetings, when an unquestioning militant attitude was as expected among peace advocates as among soldiers. The result of that was often a lot of shadow release and acting out, with nobody understanding why. But in this group, spiritual resources were also being called upon in a particular way.

Fred and Carol were concerned that my article not be so much about them. I’m sure they would prefer that I write mostly about conditions at Guantanamo, and the subject of torture. I’ve added a few links at the end of this piece, to articles and information that says more than I could in this space on those subjects. But learning a little more about how these two Humboldt citizens came to commit themselves to this cause I believe is also valuable.

Dr. Fred Adler was one of the first group of volunteers taking shifts on the G.I. Hotline in Arcata. As an emergency room physician at Redwood Hospital in Fortuna and other area hospitals who also practices at the K’ima:w Medical Center in Hoopa, Fred keeps an eye on the Hotline’s medical cases.

Fred is also involved in an effort begun by his wife, Carol, that is a specifically Quaker endeavor: an ongoing attempt to visit prisoners of the war on terror inside the Guantanamo Bay Prison in Cuba.

The group of six Humboldt Meeting members met this summer with Representative Mike Thompson, to ask him to accompany them to Guantanamo. “We were prepared to present quite a bit of information to him about Guantanamo Bay,” Carol said, after a recent meeting of the group at their home. “But he was very well informed on the issue. He said he didn’t want to accompany us, he had other priorities, but he would find out if it was possible for us to get there.”

In fact, Thompson wrote a letter to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on behalf of the Humboldt group. “I was surprised when I saw it,” Fred added. “I didn’t realize he was going to help us in that way.”

As Thompson’s letter states, “The Quakers have provided religious witness for peace since 1660. In major conflicts around the world, Quakers have been present to listen and provide spiritual relief for all sides engaged in conflict.” For such efforts, and their support for conscientious objectors, the Quakers received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1947.

Both Fred and Carol, who met as graduate students in the early 1970s at Columbia University in New York, can trace their activism and interest in Quakers to the Vietnam war. Fred sought draft and C.O. counseling for himself at the Peace Center in Palo Alto where he grew up. “I remember the Quaker woman who was the main administrator. She was a real bulwark. She was there every day, and held the place together.” Fred eventually did draft counseling there himself, and later in New York.

Carol had a similar experience as a student at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. “We had a weekly silent vigil on Wednesday afternoons at the draft board,” she recalls. “I was 18, most of us were young and maybe not totally reputable looking, but every week a Quaker elder came and stood with us, looking very prim and proper in her dress. She was there every week, and she was a real comfort, to have an adult there who stood with us. It just warmed my heart.”

But though both had attended Quaker meeting from time to time, they didn’t join until after they came to Arcata in 1986, at the urging of friends. The fellowship is important to them, as is Quaker worship (which a Quaker pamphlet describes as “silence and expectant waiting” in “mystical communion, individual meditation or prayer, with spoken ministry only as Friends may feel led to share their insights and messages.”) But the peace tradition is equally important.

“As pacifists, both Fred and I looked to the Quakers for that example,” Carol said. “For me, trying to keep going in the United States over the past 30 years, it was important to look at people who kept their ideals and kept working, and a lot of people like that were Quakers.”

But there was another historical factor that got them involved specifically in the Guantanamo effort. A Belgian author named Marc Vershooris got in touch with Fred about a book he was writing on World War II victims of the Holocaust in Ghent, in Belgium. Fred’s family in Vienna had all made it to England except for one aunt who stayed in Ghent, and was one of the Jews transported from there to Auschwitz, where she was murdered by the Nazis.

Fred was able to provide some letters and other artifacts, and the author in turn discovered more about his aunt than Fred knew. Both Fred and Carol attended the event and exhibition marking the book’s publication, and the parallels between injustice then and now became too powerful to ignore.

In a lengthy, meticulously documented report (which became controversial for a single word: “gulag”), Amnesty International described numerous violations of human rights and international law at Guantanamo, including allegations of torture by captives and FBI agents as observers. This was only one of many reports reaching these conclusions.

So when they returned, “I went to Quaker meeting in Arcata and told people I thought we should go to Guantanamo Bay prison,” Carol said. “We started meeting and worshipping together in January, and out of that group, six of us decided that this is what we should do. For me it’s felt very much like a shared leading with five other people. My feeling is that if the United States is going to be torturing people, we should go there. It’s being done in our name, and with our tax dollars. We should be there to try and comfort the prisoners who are being tortured. And we need to provide comfort to the US soldiers as well.”

In late September, the group received a reply from the Defense Department, turning down their request, describing the detentions at Guantanamo as “ongoing military operations,” for which access is “generally limited to those with an official purpose connected to the global war on terrorism.”

The group met a few days later. “The sense of the meeting was that this wasn’t unexpected,” Carol said, “and now we at least have something to respond to.” Plans include replying to the letter and expanding their contacts to include the offices of California’s U.S. Senators, Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer.

The group also discussed the ongoing hunger strike at Guantanamo over abuses and the indefinite captivity without charges or trials, which the New York Times reported was becoming serious enough that officials at Guantanamo were “worried about their capacity to control the situation.”

Like many of the others involved in the GI Rights Hotline and the Guantanamo group, Fred and Carol have time-consuming careers. But their activism is not an afterthought; it has been integral to the choices they’ve made, even of their professions.

Carol is a nurse and midwife employed at St. Joseph’s Hospital, where she is currently training Latino women to conduct prenatal and parenting classes in Spanish and to do home visits and support, as part of a program called “Paso a Paso” (Step by Step). She learned Spanish living in Peru as a child (where she knew a boy named Carlos Ferrand, who is now a filmmaker working out of Montreal on a documentary called “Americano.” He was filming a segment on Fred and Carol while I interviewed them.)

“The reason I went to nursing school was the fear that I wouldn’t be able to work in the states because of my politics,” Carol said. “Now I have enormous freedom to do political work and speak out because I’ve very employable. Being in health care gives you that freedom.”

Fred’s reasons for becoming a doctor were more complicated, but not entirely different. He studied classical piano through adolescence and the beginning of college, and music remains very important to him. He has continued to play---the large central room of their home where the Guantanomo group met is dominated by a grand piano—and he is now studying composition. “I would rather be doing music than any of these other things,” he said. “I try to bunch up my shifts, so last week I did medicine a lot, and this week I’ll answer the Hotline more and do more music.”

He switched to medicine from music for the usual practical reasons—the uncertainty of a musical career---but also to better serve his political interests. “I’m somebody who likes to have an effect,” he said. “As a classical musician, my life would be quite isolated from most people’s concerns. I wouldn’t have the impact I wanted.”

“There were years when I struggled with it,” he admitted. “It[medicine] wasn’t my first choice. But I think I’m a good doctor, and now I’m even happy as a doctor. It’s been very good to me, and it gives you a role that a lot can be done with, aside from the medical practice itself. As a doctor, you have status. People will listen to you. When we went to talk to Mike Thompson, it helped that we had two physicians in our group. It helps you get in the door. Even when they don’t like what they hear when you’re in the door.”

This is one of the best articles I’ve read on the cultural response to torture in this war and our lives now: “Torture Fatigue” by Silja J.A. Talvi.

The New York Times review of a new book by a former chaplain at Guantanamo about abuses.

Democracy Now! interview with this Muslim chaplain.

A comprehensive article with links, on Amnesty International report and related reports up to May 2005.

Amnesty International: Guantanamo & Beyond (2005)

statement introducing amnesty international annual report on human rights violations 2005.

2005-08-30T23:36:00.000-07:00

by Gino Severini

Harvest

2005-08-30T01:30:00.000-07:00

The strawberries in the new patch out front are waning, but the blackberries in the back are abundant, with a taste that seems influenced by nearby plants. The tomato crop was smaller this year, but there are still some ripening on the dying vines. Meanwhile, the pear tree is yielding good fruit for the first time, and an unusual taste of tartness with a sweet aftertaste. There are still lots of lettuces.

This is the immense privilege of picking parts of your meals, moments before you eat them. Strawberries and tomatoes warm from the sun—how much do I need to explain? Tomatoes in the US are bred to withstand higher impacts than most automobile bumpers because they normally travel so far by truck, and these days, by boat or plane.

What we (and by "we" I mean Margaret) don’t grow, others here and nearby do, just as organically. We’re kept in fresh garlic by friends in the mountains; soon we’ll pick apples there. There are two farmer’s markets a week within walking distance. Corn, peppers, all kinds of squashes and so on are the cheapest they’ll be, from now until the last farmer’s market just before Thanksgiving.

Known for redwoods and remoteness, Humboldt County has a lot of agriculture besides that cash crop you all know about (which flourishes mostly well south of Humboldt Bay.) Even here in Arcata and other spots along the cool coast, the growing season is continuous, and something is always budding, flowering or bearing its fruits. But this is the big harvest time, after which the hummingbirds will stop ignoring the feeder, and drain it several times in a couple of weeks before disappearing till spring.

I’m guessing that the longest distance any of the fruits or vegetables I normally eat must travel are the oranges, and they aren’t that far away. They were my first fresh food discovery when I arrived 9 years ago this fall. The Valencias are amazing, and pretty cheap right now. I have one every day to top off breakfast. It’s funny that California was once most famed in the mid-Atlantic states for its oranges, and although most of those fabled groves are gone, these fresh oranges are still a continual revelation. They live up to their old billing, so much better than the California oranges we got in Pennsylvania.

The pears are great, too. I discovered the Bosch variety, first from our neighbor’s backyard orchard several years ago. Oranges and pears never let you down.

A lot of people are on various low carb diets now, though I see that the fashion for them is waning. They’ve worked out for some people. But they don’t interest me. I tell people that it’s a great responsibility I’ve taken on, to keep the world in balance by consuming the carbs they are failing to honor. But it’s as close to roots as I can get here: pasta and biscotti.

I was raised among Italians, and every year at about this time the back porch would yield baskets of tomatoes and peppers from their prodigious gardens. These days I make pasta with a simple olive oil and spices sauce, grated Romano cheese and literally top it with tomatoes I have just picked and sliced.

These diets often also ban fruits, which I’m afraid makes them, according to my beliefs, sacrilegious. Life without oranges and pears and apple jelly is like life without hot water.
Possible, but why bother?

Anyway, I prefer the fashion of several years ago, when something called the Mediterranean diet was all the rage. That and the Slow Food Movement (centered of course in Italy) pretty much describe the food I recall from my grandmother’s table. Hey, we’re omnivores here. It’s healthy enough.

My forbearers in Italy and eastern Europe were peasants, and it is harvest time when I feel connected to their joys rather than their sorrows and limitations. When I was young I grew impatient with the endless talk of tomatoes and peppers and gardens and where the bread was fresher and the olive oil was on sale. I was bedazzled by the world of books and the story imagination, and the TV seduced me into seeing myself on a bigger stage in the big wide world.

Since then I’ve found that in a somewhat bigger world, people talk about Ipods and cell phones, gasoline prices and, of course, each other. I’d still rather pick a tomato or eat a pear than talk about them. In fact I’d rather talk to the tomato plants as I water them than listen to the TV snort and babble. I don’t kid myself that I am much “closer to the earth,” or even my “roots.” But I’m closer to something.

Cumulative Impact

2005-08-22T00:59:00.000-07:00

It’s been just about nine years since I drove that big Ryder truck off 101 and into Arcata. I’ve lived in a number of different places but except for where I grew up, I’ve never lived anywhere else for this long.

If every cell in your body is replaced in seven years, this place is a big part of me now. I can’t say I’ve ever felt quite at home here, and though it makes me sigh even as I type it, I know it’s partly my own doing, or not doing. But maybe not all.

Anyway, one of the first “jobs” I had here (it’s in parens because I never actually got paid for it, as the promise turned into a hope even before I was finished) was writing a couple of drafts of the script for a video called “Voices of Humboldt County: Cumulative Impact,” including the final draft. I was reminded of this by a news item this week.

This hour or so documentary, now the property of the Humboldt Watershed Council, was a response to the flooding and damage during a winter storm that began as 1996 ended and continued as 1997 began. It was our first winter here, but the worst storm we’ve seen. For a few days, even Arcata was literally cut off from the world---the airport and 101 both closed, and no trains running. That’s when I learned we’re self-sufficient in dairy products, which was some comfort.

The premise of the video was that all this damage was a predictable and traceable result of excessive timber harvests---especially cutting down so many trees on hillsides-- that Pacific Lumber engaged in, to pay down the debt incurred by its new parent company, Maxxam.

The evidence was convincing, and so, as it turned out was the video. I was told it was cited by a judge in one of the court cases in his decision that went against Maxxam.

Among the communities the video discussed were Elk River and Freshwater. Matters pertaining to their situation have been in court ever since, and citizens there have been working their case for eight years. Now, according to Econews, the regional water board has released their draft requirements on waste-discharge, which addresses impacts of logging in their areas. Next up is a battle over a technical report. Now I know why the activist who first got me involved in working on the video decided to go to law school.

One argument against limiting logging was that the logging jobs would disappear and PL would go broke. The video said they were logging recklessly and heedlessly at an unsustainable rate, and they’d go broke anyway. Well, despite some limitations environmentalists and others have managed to encourage, Maxaam kept logging for these nine years and guess what? PL is going broke anyway, apparently because they’ve run out of trees. I suppose if we want to turn the county into forest cemeteries and cement, we can contribute a bit more to Maxaam’s banks.

I was able to help with the video despite the fact that I was new and knew little about the local situation (though I had reported a long piece on Pennsylvania forests for the Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine. Yes, PA has forests---almost 60% of the state is forested, and PA leads the nation in hardwood timber, which is the most valuable in America.) In a way I was able to help because I knew little---I had to ask the questions a total stranger would need to have answered, which helped with my primary goal: clarity. Structure is part of that, and telling a coherent story is usually the best way to organize clearly and compellingly. So that’s what I tried to do in my first draft, which helped the others involved to add their expertise and even get new material and interviews. Based on all that I wrote the final draft.

So for all the time I’ve been here, everything we talked about in that video has been and still is a big part of the work here for sensible logging policy, protection of rivers and salmon, getting rid of harmful pesticides and herbicides. I’m proud of the work I did, even if I didn’t get paid, or included.

Quiet

2005-07-04T01:06:00.000-07:00

It's been quiet. Not just earthquake quiet, although it has been that, but summer quiet.

That's a specific condition of Arcata, or so it seems. A small town to begin with, Arcata loses about half of its population in one day. Graduation day at Humboldt State University.

In the past several years HSU has made some attempts at becoming a year-round university but it's not working. Budget cuts impinge on new programs, but the general lack of summer jobs for students in the vicinity, plus the accelerated need for students to earn money in the summer to pay for the increased cost of college, has pretty much doomed the summer program so far. It gets quieter every year in the summer, but this summer it's been really quiet.

Less traffic in a place that doesn't know what real traffic is, shorter lines or none at the grocers and drug store, and just plain quiet---I am certainly not complaining. It becomes easier to relate to the aspects of this place that attract people here, that lovely irony. Because those are all quiet: the small sounds in the quiet of the woods, the quieting of automobile fumes that allows the fragrances of the flowers and plants to mingle and even reach the flayed nostrils of the thoroughly polluted human organisms that have lived so many decades being beaten senseless by noxious vapors. The quiet that lets the colors talk, the breeze sing, the eloquent quiet that somehow goes very well with the smell of tomato plants, and the symphony for clouds, bay and treetops.

They make noise down on the plaza on Saturdays and for the spate of festivals there, so it's not like we're deprived of music and the hum and buzz of humanity, should we choose it. And of course there are the regular sonic invasions by mechanized divisions of power mowers almost as large as the lawns they cut, and their infantry sporting the latest weed-whackers, which apparently kill plant life with noise volume and fumes.

And of course there is this weekend when some feel compelled to celebrate the signing of an eloquent founding document by detonating explosives. Fittingly perhaps, since it was such technology that partly allowed the conquest of the Indigenous peoples who furnished many of the ideas celebrated in that document. Unlike the movie everyone is supposed to see this weekend, the aliens won that one.

But there's let's say more quiet in the summer, it's not an absolute. But it is a joy.

Aftermath

2005-06-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

A short article by Heidi Walters in the North Coast Journal reveals some disturbing information about earthquake response, indicating that many of the most endangered residents of low-lying coastal areas are not adequately informed and prepared.

Apparently, instead of quickly heeding the National Weather Service tsunami warning after the 7.2 quake, too many residents called 911 for verification, not only clogging the lines for emergency calls, but had there really been a tsunami, endangering their own lives.

The facts outlined elsewhere on this site should be better known: that anyone living in low-lying coastal areas or who happens to be on the beach when they feel strong shaking, should immediately head for higher ground. Then you can safely inquire as to what the danger might be.

An earthquake offshore in the subduction zone may cause tsunami, and if it does, the water will reach the North Coast rapidly. In a really strong quake, the first wave could hit before the shaking stops. And the first wave may not be the biggest.

more aftershocks

2005-06-17T14:51:00.000-07:00

Another earthquake and aftershock offshore, closer to Eureka than last time, apparently occured last night. We felt nothing here, however. I've occasionally felt tremors that could be earthquake activity but they were so slight and brief that there was no way to tell.

According to reports I was able to find, the big quake (now upgraded to 7.2 in some reports) as well as the one last night, a 6.6, were side-to-side quakes, the result of plates brushing past each other as they move, rather than one sliding under the other. The side-to-side quakes generally don't cause tsunamis. So this was not the kind of quake that geologists know is coming, which will involve plates colliding and pushing each other up and down. That kind is likely to be more destructive.

It's pretty interesting to watch the coverage, though. Very little hard information about the actual quakes, and lots of human interest about how people were scared or were not scared. Most stories emphasize an alarmist tone, and try to make drama even where there isn't any.
That's pretty troubling when something is potentially important. When a bad quake does hit, we are going to need timely information, and I see nothing to give me confidence we will get it.

Even the earthquake maps from official sources aren't keeping up, and are maddeningly short of the kind of information that would help a somewhat informed citizen to understand what's going on.

On the whole, if this is a kind of shakedown cruise for a real crisis, it is not providing a lot of confidence.

Earthquakes all up and down the west coast, from South America to Alaska, have been more numerous and larger this past week. Southern CA got a 5.3 yesterday. But again, whatever the geologists are saying to each other isn't getting reported very well. Very disappointing, and potentially dangerous.

after shocks

2005-06-15T20:11:00.000-07:00

There have been several small earthquakes offshore since the 7.0 about 24 hours ago. Several seem to have been aftershocks, but others are farther south. There was a 3.6 or so off Petrolia, south of here and pretty much at the triple junction, at about 7:30 pm. Didn't feel it here, and haven't felt any of the others since the 7.0.

So far nothing I've seen online or in print is very informative about the nature of these quakes. The Gorda plate was involved in the 7.0, is as technical as the info I've seen has gotten.

News reports, such as they are, emphasize the human response. According to the brief story in the Times-Standard, Trinidad north of here evacuated a few people in low-lying areas near shore, when the tsuanmi warning was issued. Trinidad just held a practice drill.

Earthquake Off North Coast continued

2005-06-14T23:18:00.000-07:00

It's about three hours after the quake now. Reports to the CA earthquake center indicate that it was felt up and down the entire state, as far south as San Diego. At least 30 reports from the Bay Area, and now there are hundreds logged from Eureka, Arcata, McKinleyville.

According to the SF Chronicle, downtown Crescent City was evacuated immediately, several thousand people moved according to plan, but they started going back when the tsunami wave didn't hit. That's an iffy thing actually, because the first wave is seldom the biggest.

No reports of damage yet. Tomorrow we'll probably find out more details about location and what plates were involved. I have to say that when I first felt the ripple I thought I heard it say, this isn't over.

It's Happened---Earthquake on the North Coast

2005-06-14T21:10:00.000-07:00

Here in Arcata at a little before 8 local time, I felt the rippling beneath my chair. The room rocked a bit, not enough to be alarming, but longer than I've experienced here before.

So I was bit surprised to see on the earthquake map what had happened: a pretty big one, a 7.0 offshore, looks to be in the subduction zone, about 80 to 90 miles off the coast, between here and Crescent City to the north.

The AP is reporting that a tsunami warning has been issued, and some evacuation is proceeding in Crescent City. A few of our friends in McKinleyville are heading for higher ground with other friends in the mountains. We're on the ridge near Humboldt State, and on the maps Lori Dengler and others prepared of tsunami hazards locally, we're in the white (no danger) zone, and that's for an even stronger quake.

Tsunami waves radiate out from the quake itself, and can travel at hundreds of miles an hour, so I suspect that our coast should be feeling something soon.

Otherwise it's quiet in the neighborhood. I don't think many people here even felt it, although there are at least 60 reports to the CA earthquake center from Eureka, and a couple from San Francisco---even one from L.A. This zone travels way up the coast to Vancouver as well. It's interesting that online there doesn't seem to be a source of really timely information. It's been more than an hour and all I've seen is the one brief AP story on the SF Chronicle site. And the real-time reports on the CA earthquake site.

UPDATE: As of 920, a new AP story says the tsunami warning has been called off.

Liberating the Local

2005-04-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

(as published as guest column in Eureka Times-Standard on April 13,2005, reproduced here as an opportunity for discussion via the comments... Also, some additional quotes that didn't make it into the published piece:
"The most valuable service designers and artists can provide a locality may therefore be to help it develop a shared cultural vision of the future, but not to design the future for it."

"Around the world, the vast majority of small and medium-sized companies operate within a radius of fifty kilometers of their headquarters location. Local conditions, local trading patterns, local skills and local culture are critical success factors for the majority of organizations." )

by Bill Kowinski

In a book to be published later this month, global business and design guru John Thackara isolates ten principles he believes will characterize cutting-edge opportunities for a better future, based in part on lessons of the last decade in technology, business and others aspects of the real world. Of particular interest to the North Coast is Principle #4: Locality.

The focus of "both business and social innovation," he writes, is shifting from locomotion to locality: "Authenticity, local context, and local production are increasingly desirable attributes in the things we buy and the services we use. Local sells."

At the same time, Thackara believes that how many localities market themselves doesn't work. "There's a big difference between selling soap and making sense of a place---but many place marketers don't get it." They imitate each other, and try to trade on nostalgic themes they all have more or less in common. "Identity has become a commodity. Diversity or distinctiveness have been edited out," and every city depends on the same kind of facilities and publicity.

What attracts visitors is real difference; what attracts investment is real information about real opportunities and quality of life. It requires the locality to be permanently engaged in knowing itself, as completely and in as much depth as possible. "The lesson is that design for locality is not about a return to simplicity; it involves dealing with more complexity, not less."

Thackara is interested in more than analyzing efforts and predicting trends. He wants design to help create a better future. But many trends and opportunities to build what's necessary for that future converge in the local. Sustainable local economies can be encouraged by designing and investing in sustainable energy and other sustainable industries, for example.

He also sees important roles for the arts, not so much in creating spectacles to encourage business but in helping to create community, and aiding in exploring the qualities of this place. Above all, art is personal, and the personal encounter is one of the major advantages of smaller places.

There is a lot of good news for the North Coast in Thackara's analysis. We have not destroyed the complexity of the natural world to nearly the same extent as most cities. Citizens have denied industries and businesses that might harm the natural and cultural environment. People here are participating in planning and decisions that affect their future. Now the North Coast is in position to focus on local innovations and sustainable industries, particularly those that will be needed in the global climate crisis, which is likely to dominate the economics and politics of the next 50 years or more.

Thackara's book ("In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World", from MIT Press ) suggests that small localities can compete with larger places by forming networks with each other. If people within localities and among them can work together, which technology makes easier to do, their combined assets and energies can compete with metro areas, while each of them can still offer superior social qualities. It is their context of "intimacy and encounter" that will "win out over the big centers." (Contrary to predictions, technology hasn't eradicated face-to-face encounters; it encourages them, and people want them.)

Technology does provide new methods for sharing resources and infrastructure, for facilitating local economies and creating new opportunities for individuals and small businesses in small and rural places.

None of this is automatic, and all of it requires intelligence, energy and truly appreciating and valuing the diversity of people, places and ecologies that creates the local context. But does offer possibilities that could direct the North Coast towards a better future by becoming more truly itself.

The Garden Song

2005-03-22T00:10:00.000-08:00

Spring rushes in on the wings of a rainstorm, the same as squalling winter's exit. The winter rains came late this year, beginning about a day after the Agriculture department declared Humboldt County an aggie disaster area because of drought.

The gardens that haven't washed away must be loving it. The North Coast is replete with gardens and gardeners. Whereas dinner conversations in western PA tended to be about snow tires (up until the late 80s, when they were about computers) and in Cambridge about Asian cuisine restaurants, on the North Coast the favorite topic is gardens and the vegetables and so on that grow in them.

Margaret is the gardener here; I'm the help. Her front yard stops traffic, but she's outdone herself with the new strawberry patch of spiraling layers, a sort of strawberry swirl. She's cultivated every inch of ground in the back, but I claim a certain credit for her potted tomato plants. My wish for my first basketball hoop and court meant the cement driveway didn't get extracted in favor of bare dirt, so the tomato plants are mostly in big barrels. There aren't too many thriving tomato gardens in Arcata as far as I know, but we've got one, and I'll bet it has something to do with the reflective and heat-retaining properties of my b-ball court.

Anyway, I pick the strawberries and the tomatoes. Tomatoes are part of my Italian youth; my grandparents had them, and two of our neighbors had a large patch (we were related somehow to them, and apparently all Italians in the county) so the smell of tomato plants always means summer to me. Come September, there would be baskets of tomato and green peppers left on the back porch.

Margaret goes to Quaker Meeting every Sunday, and you may be surprised to learn, as I was, that besides their mostly silent service, the Quakers sing. In honor of the first Sunday of spring they sang the Garden Song.

Inch by inch, row by row
All you need is a rake and a hoe
And a piece of fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row
Someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below
Til the rains come tumbling down.

There is also an anti-Garden song, which they also sang:

Slug by slug, weed by weed
My garden's got me really teed
All the insects love to feed upon my tomato plants
Sunburned face, scratched-up knees
My kitchen's choked with zucchinis
I'm shopping at the A and P next time I get a chance.

Either way, it's a North Coast song. Except for the A and P.

Welcome to This North Coast Place

2005-03-21T09:50:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the North Coast of California.

People who live here consider it a special place. But why? Why are people committed to living on the North Coast? What actions result from that commitment? What should be preserved, and what should change? What are the opportunities, and what are the responsibilities?

In his book, Becoming Native to This Place, Wes Jackson suggests that the key to making these judgments is to feel and act as if one's commitment is that of a native, with the knowledge and roots of family and culture in a particular place going back many generations. Poet and activist Gary Snyder has been making this point for decades.

This blog is meant to be a forum to discuss this idea and these questions. Every week I will add new content for discussion. For those unfamiliar with "web logs" or "blogs," the process is pretty simple. My posts are dated, so the most recent appears at the top of the page. At the bottom of each post there is a line that says "comments" ("0 comments" or "2 comments" etc., indicating how many comments there are.) Click on this to read other people's comments, and add your own.

For more on how to use "Comments," click here.

SITE CONTENTS (click to go there)
Weather or Not

Indian Island Vigil 2005

The North Coast and More About This Site

Native Peoples of the North Coast

Earthquake Country

Incredibly Ancient but Still Changing (geology)

Mapping the Territory

For more on subjects discussed here, please go to the companion site, North Coast Texts.

For bio and links to my work, please see my home page and portal.

2005-03-14T03:24:00.000-08:00

Arcatan Sunset photo: BK

Weather or Not

2005-03-14T03:13:00.000-08:00

Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Laureate in Literature, lived much of his life in his native Poland, but also much of it in Berkeley, California, where he taught Slavic languages. In 2001 he published an "ABC" book, a Polish form consisting of short entries organized alphabetically. Between entries for "Aosta" (a valley in the southern Alps) and "Aron" (a fictional character) is two paragraphs on "Arcata."

"Always a gray sky and ocean fog," he wrote. "I have been there a number of times and never saw the sun. Should one live there? Perhaps as punishment. Yet people do live in Arcata, because they have to."

Though published in 2001, the rest of this entry suggests his impressions of Arcata were formed a decade or more earlier, since he then discusses the timber industry as the reason people "have to" live in Arcata. But by the time we arrived in 1996, timber was no longer the dominant industry. Arcata's largest employer was (and is) Humboldt State University.

I have heard stories about what Arcata weather was like when the timber industry was dominant, especially about the smoke from the lumber operations, which darkened clothes hung on the line to dry. This had a familiar sound to me, because it is how people talked about Pittsburgh in the 1950s when the steel mills were dominant, and before pollution controls were instituted. It was said that downtown businessmen had to change their white shirts several times a day. (I was growing up thirty-some miles away, but I remember the flames shooting out of the mill stacks, and the smoke, on our rare drives to the city, mostly for baseball games.)

Did the smoke affect Arcata's weather? Probably to some extent. But as Milosz writes, because redwoods "require constant moisture, they grow in zones of perpetual fog." The North Coast is also known as the Redwood Nation, one of the last places on the planet with significant redwood growth.

However, almost all of the old growth redwood is gone (as we discovered to our sorrow shortly after we arrived), and much of the former redwood forest land is covered now with buildings and roads, pastures and cropland, rather than trees. Biologists realize that redwood forests contribute to creating their own weather, so the fewer trees in smaller forests could lead to some alteration of weather, perhaps even so great a change that the surviving redwoods will no longer have the conditions they need to thrive.

Factor in as well the ongoing shifts in climate caused by global heating, and the picture of North Coast weather is even less certain.

Nevertheless, weather and climate are major distinguishing characteristics about the North Coast. On the coast itself, temperatures stay in the same 20 degree band, shifting from 60s/low 50s in summer to 50s/low 40s in winter. There are significantly different microclimates even slightly inland (Blue Lake gets hot in the summer) and higher (up the mountain from Arcata gets snow some winters.) The lack of high heat in the summer was a major attraction for me, even more than the warm winter. We did research the sunshine: turns out that on average Arcata has about as many sunny days as Pittsburgh.

When we arrived here in 1996, the seasonal pattern was familiar to residents. I arrived in Arcata in the sunny blue blaze of fall. I remember being amazed at the softness in the air. The nights were clear, and the stars out here actually twinkle. The moon was so bright that, coming through the skylight, I could see myself in the bathroom mirror by its light. And there were some fantastic sunsets (though as elsewhere pollution may have contributed.)

Then came the rains. It turned out to be the rainiest winter of the seven I've experienced here, but of course we didn't know that at the time. We'd spent some time in Portland and Seattle, but this was not the same.

We had to adjust our clothing. Unlike Seattle, nobody here seemed to carry an umbrella. We didn't have a car that first winter, so after awhile we found relatively inexpensive full length waterproof ponchos. Margaret's was red, mine was black. She said I looked like Darth Vader, and with nothing showing but her face in the window under the hood, I thought she looked like a red Gumby.

That was the year of the New Year's flooding. For several days, the North Coast was entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Highway 101 was closed in both directions, and so was the airport. According to the newspaper, we were self-sufficient in milk, so I guess we could have held out for awhile.

That winter extended well into March, if memory serves. Once in spring we were at a house in the hills above Arcata, looking out a picture window as a storm started. There was lightning. Our host was startled. He told us to pay attention, because it might be a long time before we saw lightning again here. He was right.

That summer we learned the daily pattern: fog, sun, fog. And the nature of the fog was new as well. It wasn't this wispy stuff hugging the ground or floating like smoke up the hills (though there was that kind, too.) It was gray sky and maybe a wall of gray around you. That's when we learned the correct term: marine layer.

We got used to checking the wind direction, for rain from the north, fair weather from the south. We were both amazed at how things grow here. There is always something blooming. Eventually we collected some Gore-Tex duds, and got cars. There were other aspects to the North Coast dress code that aren't strictly weather related, but I did adapt partly due to the weather. I liked my t-shirts thicker, with long sleeves, and my sweatshirts and sweaters thinner. I got wool shirts, although I didn't actually wear them much. One way you feel at home in a place is when you dress for its weather more or less without thinking.

This winter I found myself being made a little nervous by all the great sunshine. It was too warm, and where was the rain? ( South to San Francisco, apparently, and around Los Angeles, draining into Death Valley.) The rest of the country was having a bad time, and I was counseled to enjoy our good fortune. But maybe I'd developed a weather eye for what's normal for the North Coast.

What weather experiences define the North Coast for you?

2005-03-04T02:04:00.000-08:00

Photos: BK. Fire Arts Center, Arcata