Malcolm Macdonald
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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  September 4, 2013

9/11/2013

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                                                                                                                 Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
The State Parks project to remove the remnants of the old Ten Mile Haul Road is a boondoggle. For those who may have forgotten, the common definition of boondoggle is: to do work of little or no practical value merely for the appearance of looking busy.

     On the other hand, the claim that a trail must be maintained on the site of the old haul road is a specious one as well, not founded on historical fact or use. The simple truth about the 2.5 miles of road remnant is that it lies in an area where hardly anyone hikes, rain or shine, winter, spring, summer or fall. About three weeks ago I walked with three other intrepid coast “old-timers” from the Highway One bridge at Ten Mile River down to the haul road. The trail that avoids slogging over sand dunes to the haul road is almost overgrown and severely under-used. The weather was postcard perfect on an August weekend. Beyond the parking lot we did not meet another soul until we strolled within a couple hundred feet of Ward Avenue. I have hiked this same stretch since childhood, encountering fellow travelers grows rarer as the years pass. The exceptions have invariably been people walking along the shoreline.

     From the mouth of Ten Mile River to Ward Avenue, from the shoreline to where the expansive, sandy dunes are bordered by non-native stands of eucalyptus is now pretty much state property. Most tourists and most coast residents don’t even know how to get there. If they do know that Ward Avenue leads westward to an easily accessed beach, 99% of those beach users do not venture more than a few hundred feet north along the shore let alone go out on to the dunes to the east. Even the trail to one of the hidden jewels of local sightseeing, the lake surrounded by these dunes, is so little used that one has to have prior knowledge about where to strike out east from the shore in order to find it. The four of us who went out tromping the dunes on August 17th did find the lake, but it isn’t easy unless you’ve been there before.

     The hidden lake in the dunes was once the property of John Ross II. A century or so ago, he may have dammed what was once a smaller pond to make it bigger. Those few who do trek across the expanding dunes can spot the fences where the Rosses ran cattle and hundreds of sheep. Most of that fencing has been buried by sand, which leads back to the haul road removal. Segments of the haul road just south of Ten Mile River are still intact, only slightly scarred by time and weather, but intermittent sections are buried under several feet of sand. Where is State Parks going to draw the removal line: will it only remove that which is visible now then skip over the buried portions to the next exposed section? If State Parks plans to pull up the buried sections, much environmental disturbance will ensue from the equipment needed to do so.

     As is plainly clear, the sea, sand, and a mere thirty years of time have already disposed of much of the haul road. If State Parks were totally true to its expressed mission it would have long ago gone through the dunes sifting out every tiny particle of the southern part of the haul road because that is where hundreds of feet of the old logging road has been dispersed.

     Leave it alone, walk on the beach, and let time do its thing.

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 28, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                  Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
August 28th marks the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, but it’s also the anniversary of Midway Atoll formally becoming a United States possession. The proclamation was made by Captain William Reynolds of the USS Lackawanna in 1867.

     The acquisition of the islands that make up the Midway Atoll differs from the stereotypical colonial conquest. Midway was uninhabited when first spotted by the Hawaiian barque Gambia in 1859. The word barque comes to us from a combination of etymological roots; one source being an early Irish word for boat, the other deriving from Latin to French and related to “barge.” In the 1859 context a barque meant a sailing vessel of three or more masts.

     Midway’s islands were uninhabited because much of its land is nothing more than sand. As its name implies Midway sits half way across the Pacific between Asia and North America, just 140 miles east of the International Date Line. Midway lies near the northwestern end of the lengthy Hawaiian archipelago. Most of its coral reefs protrude no more than a few feet above sea level, contributing to many shipwrecks.

     As many readers know the Battle of Midway proved a pivotal point in World War II. What most readers probably are unaware of is that Midway was already a naval air station in the 1930s. Pan American Airways’ so-called Clipper airships started trans-continental passenger service across the Pacific in 1936 with the lagoon at Midway one of the stopover points for the flying boats. An even littler known aspect of Midway’s history began almost as soon as the Pan Am Clipper’s first flight. The possibility of accidental or intentional transport of plants bearing disease and insect pests led the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association to set up an inspection post on Midway. Entomologist Fred Hadden was assigned to Midway, not only to inspect aircraft passing through Midway, but also to fumigate each and every plane landing there.

     As tensions between the U.S. and Japan mounted the United States government contracted with a private firm out of Detroit to build a military air base on Midway. Hundreds of civilian contractors from nail ponders to crane operators to surveyors were employed for that purpose at wages far outstripping what the laborers could make back at home. Most of these civilian workers signed contracts that bound them to the job in Midway for several months. One of them was my great uncle, Leonard Ward. Leonard had been a rodeo cowboy for nearly twenty years prior to accepting the Midway contract. He had been the All-Around Rodeo champion of 1934, ranking nearly as high for several years before and a couple of years after. Nearing forty years of age, he’d suffered a severe leg break at a Salinas rodeo two years before taking the job on Midway.

     Leonard’s contract on Midway concluded in early November, 1941. At that point, he chose to take a more lucrative deal to work a similar construction job on Wake Atoll. Less than a month later, Wake was attacked by Japanese planes only hours after Pearl Harbor. 1,500 civilians and 400 or so Navy and Marines surrendered Wake to the Japanese on December 23, 1941.

     At the end of the first week of June, 1942, one of Uncle Leonard’s fellow POWs, Leroy Myers, then barely an adult, was ordered by the Japanese to shimmy up the tallest crane on Wake to oil its highest parts. From his shaky perch, several dozen feet above the ground, Leroy could see far out to sea, spotting smoke rising from the remnants of the Japanese fleet as it retreated from its defeat at Midway.     

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  August 21, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                   Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
Australians call them muttonshells, but we say abalone; the term deriving from the Spanish abulón. However you say it, the flesh of the abalone is such a commodity that its reputed black market value in the Bay Area and Sacramento runs into hundreds of dollars each. California’s Department of Fish and Game has its hands full attempting to enforce the law when it comes to poachers who often arrive at secluded diving spots well before dawn. Fish and Game is so outmanned that a volunteer group, AB Watch, has formed in recent years, to provide added eyes up and down the Mendocino Coast. Seasonal limits have been reduced, but the poaching goes on and on.

     Punishment does not often completely deter criminals, but if the fines for abalone poaching reach levels that diminish the profitability of the poachers then the abalone population might have some chance of returning to something near the levels of this columnist’s childhood when diving for abs was almost unheard of because, at low tides, the mollusks could easily be picked off shoreline rocks.

     In an effort to stiffen and standardize the fines for abalone violations in Ten Mile Court the members of Mendocino Abalone Watch and the Mendocino County District Attorney’s office agreed on sentencing recommendations for the 2013 season. Essentially those standardized fines amounted to this: a one abalone violation equals $813.50 in fines and assessments plus 12 months probation plus forfeiture of fishing gear and items seized upon arrest (meaning the abs), the surrender of fishing license and ab report cards, and eight hours of community service. The fines progress monetarily to a base fine of $1,000 per abalone when the violation rises to more than six abalone over the limit. At that level a violator also forfeits any abs taken, their fishing gear, license and ab report cards, and is placed on 24 months of probation. In addition the violator would receive 20-30 days in jail or perform 250 hours of community service.

    What could possibly screw up the system? Enter Judge Clayton Brennan. At a typical June Ten Mile Court session, Brennan, without consulting the Assistant District Attorney for recommendations, reduced case after case of ab violations to infractions: a $680.50 fine with none of the other penalty provisions. In late July, with Brennan on vacation, visiting Judge Andria Richey followed the recommendations of the ADA to the letter.

     Something strange is going on with Judge Brennan. At some point in June he cut off the usual practice of calling the cases of private attorneys first. The bailiff could be heard whispering this information to several lawyers as well as an admonition that Judge Brennan would not enter the court until all the attorneys were seated like schoolchildren before him.

  By the time Brennan returned from vacation in August the private attorneys were once again allowed to clear their cases first. However, Brennan’s adjudication of abalone violations was all over the place. He neglected to mention any community service provisions. He told the assembled multitude of ab violators that he must be entirely consistent in judging them, then went right ahead handing down infraction sentences for obvious misdemeanor violations. The topper came when the ADA recommended a fine, in accordance with the guidelines, of more than $7,000 for a poacher caught with seven abs over the limit. Without rhyme, reason or cause Brennan reduced the fine to less than half that and again neglected to mention the 250 hours of community service that should have gone along with the monetary punishment. At that point one long time court observer was heard muttering, “What a farce!”

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  August 14, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                 Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
The Mendocino Community Network (MCN) provides internet access to many in Mendocino County. The MCN Discussion List was designed to be “an open, unmoderated list intended for the discussion of items relevant to the residents of Mendocino County as determined by the list membership.” Sometime in late 2012, I signed onto the list, thinking it might be a place to better keep up with upcoming meetings and/or topics peculiar to the Mendocino Coast and Mendocino County.

     Occasionally, an entry relevant to our locality creeps in, but much of the MCN Discussion List is dominated by a handful or two of the same people who far too often devolve into some of the vilest ranting and name-calling this side of an unkempt gas station toilet stall wall. After a couple of weeks of sorting through the dozens of posts a day that flood into my inbox through the MCN Discussion List I got in the habit of deleting almost every one. If something in the post’s title appeared to be of legitimate interest I opened it, but those have grown fewer and farther between as the months have gone by.

     Though he doesn’t sink to the depths of the caustic, cursing, name-callers, our Fifth District Supervisor, Dan Hamburg, is a relatively frequent contributor to the MCN Discussion List. From late last year to this spring, it seemed that Supervisor Hamburg’s posts seldom held much relevancy for my life along the Albion River or, for that matter, any part of the Fifth Supervisorial District. In late May Hamburg provided a posting about burial laws, which one might conceivably say is germane to a rural setting. Beginning with his May 30th posts I decided to save all of Hamburg’s contributions to the MCN Discussion List. For the last two months I have also saved every offering of another frequent MCN Discussion List poster for something of a comparison.

     The titles of Hamburg’s May 30, 2013 posts: “Noam Chomsky, The Kind of Anarchism I Believe In” and “Modified Wheat is Discovered in Oregon.” In the two months and ten days that I have kept track Hamburg has posted more than eighty-five times to the MCN Discussion List. Last Saturday’s Hamburg posts: “Ed Asner skewers the rich;” “New Mexico is the driest of the dry;” Bad Prison Policy for Women.”    

     In fairness to Hamburg and in comparison, the other MCN poster had twice as many Discussion List entries, more than 175 in a 70 day period. That’s two and a half posts per day, typical for the ten to twelve individuals who dominate the MCN Discussion List, making it largely a waste of time.

     Our Supervisor has the same freedom of expression as the rest of us. I would just like to think that an elected representative would spend his time concentrating more on issues pertinent and pressing to the Fifth District than posting articles about far off places. In the past two months Hamburg’s MCN Discussion List offerings have included the aforementioned piece about home burials as well as a few posts in defense of his cutting off the public comment of a particular individual at a July Board of Supervisor’s meeting, but the vast majority of his contributions are merely recitations of articles found in national publications or internet sites. It might be a little more appropriate if our supervisor posted the articles of local or regional journalists as a public service, but I have yet to see Hamburg post an article from the Willits News, Ukiah Daily Journal, Mendocino Beacon, Fort Bragg Advocate-News, let alone any piece from the AVA.

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  August 7, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                  Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com

  This week marks the anniversary of the start of Operation Prairie, a series of battles fought between U.S. Marines and the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in the northern provinces of what was then South Vietnam during 1966. One of the Marines who fought in those battles was twenty-three year-old Sergeant Ralph Coleman, who helped evacuate five injured members of his squad while under intense enemy fire. Coleman was awarded the Bronze Star for his heroism. Like many Leathernecks, he responded to the medal of valor by saying, “I was just doing my job, what I had been trained to do in the Marines.”

     Also, like many a Vietnam Vet, Coleman didn’t gain recognition for his deeds until twenty-two years after they were performed. The Bronze Star was awarded to Coleman in 1988 at San Quentin State Prison. Coleman was incarcerated there for shooting and killing his wife, son and niece ten years before.

     At his murder trial Coleman was found legally responsible for his actions, but diagnosed as mentally ill. He received a life sentence for his crimes. In 1989 he was transferred to the then new maximum security facility at Pelican Bay, near Crescent City, where the mental health staff for three thousand, five hundred prisoners consisted of one person. Within two years of Pelican Bay’s opening, hundreds of lawsuits were filed claiming violations of the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition of cruel or unusual punishment. Many of the lawsuits complained about conditions in the prison’s Security Housing Unit (SHU) where some of the inmates were so psychotic their psychiatric needs should have been monitored hourly. Other complaints stemmed from the treatment of dozens of others in the Violence Control Unit (VCU) where clothing sometimes consisted of paper gowns, inmates were denied cups to drink from, and were occasionally cuffed or hogtied so they had to slurp their food from a plate.

     Coleman filed suit on his own behalf then contacted Donald Specter at the non-profit Prison Law Office. Through Specter’s work and the ruling of United States Magistrate Judge John Moulds, Coleman’s case became a class action suit. By the 21st Century Coleman’s case was rolled together with that of Marciano Plata, a prisoner injured at Soledad State Prison. The Plata Case eventually wended its way to the U.S. Supreme Court where a 5-4 decision stated that California’s State Prisons were indeed in violation of the Eighth Amendment due to dramatic overcrowding (In 1980 the state prisons housed 24,000 inmates. By 2006 that total reached 173,000.).  

   The end result: the overcrowded state prisons had to redistribute prisoners. That is why Assembly Bill 109 was passed in April, 2011. AB 109 allows certain felons to be housed in county jails rather than state prisons in a program it terms “Realignment.”

     A study just released by Stanford Law School found that “counties that had existing alternatives to incarceration, treatment programs, and data collection and evaluation processes firmly in place seemed more confident that they could successfully implement Realignment.”     

     Given that the Realignment program stemmed from an inmate with mental health issues it is interesting that California’s legislative solution seems to be based on the purely mathematical equation of reducing overcrowding. In Mendocino County, if a person is in a mental health crisis situation, there is often nowhere for that citizen to go except to the county jail because Mendocino County has no early intervention crisis care.  Once in the county jail, it is seemingly the standard practice of Mendocino County to deprive that same person in crisis of all psychiatric medications for two full weeks.

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  July 31, 2013

9/2/2013

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On July 31, 1703 Daniel Dafoe (nee Foe) was placed in the punishment stocks in front of London’s Temple Bar for satirically defending Dissenters in his writing. In the early twentieth century Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes proudly wore the moniker “The Great Dissenter.” We’ve slid down a long, slippery slope since the days of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and mainstream reporters like Dan Rather turning President Nixon’s own words around to sarcastically imply that the leader of the free world was running from grand jury and congressional investigations.    

     Mainstream news reporters do little more than regurgitate the spin of the day in 2013. In the age of post 9/11 Patriot Act enactments (It is difficult to think of anything related to the Patriot Act as truly legal let alone ethical), whistleblowers or vocal dissenters are just as likely to find themselves incarcerated as an Islamic jihadist with a bomb in his shoe.

     When one of our ex-presidents says that “America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time,” then something is dead in the well. The only real question left is why are so many able to hold their noses and pretend there’s no stench. This is not the country that so many of our forefathers stole from the Indians. I am sorry Woody Guthrie, but this land is no longer your land or my land. From California to the New York Island this land is overwhelmingly owned by the one-tenth of 1% of the wealthiest of Americans. From the quarter million acres of redwood forest owned by a single family that owes its fortune to overseas child labor down to the Gulf Stream waters where in Post-Katrina New Orleans rents have risen, poor people’s houses have not been re-built, and every unionized teacher was laid off, this land was not made for you and me.

     Power corrupts. Nixon’s Watergate crimes look schoolboyish compared to George W. and Obama’s immoral wars, drone strikes, and NSA spying. If you don’t think something’s rotten in the water of this imperialist, bully of a country you better check out the documentary Gasland or find out why the federal justice department spent years prosecuting and imprisoning a college student who disrupted an auction intended to give wilderness lands to oil and gas companies, but the same justice department has done next to nothing to even attempt to prosecute the giant banks who have ripped off our national treasury to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. More to the point, if you think this country isn’t sick, then get sick and see what happens to your bankroll.

     I am sick and tired of people standing up and saluting the stars and stripes with a pledge that includes the phrase “under God.” For the first sixty years of its existence “The Pledge of Allegiance” did not include anything about God, though it was penned by a minister. That minister, Francis Bellamy, was a Christian socialist. That’s right, Christian socialism, a form of religious socialism based on the teachings of one of the biggest dissenters of all time: fellow by the name of Jesus of Nazareth. In general, Christian socialists like the author of “The Pledge of Allegiance” believe in political, social, and economic equality for all; that capitalism is idolatrous and rooted in greed, nothing less than a mortal sin.

     If you, dear reader, don’t believe that the author of “The Pledge of Allegiance,” was a Christian socialist, well, in the immortal words of the Old Perfesser, Casey Stengel, “You could look it up.”

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  July 24, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                     Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
July 24th marks the anniversary of Anthony Johnson acquiring two hundred fifty acres of land in Northampton County, Virginia during the summer of 1651. Anthony Johnson was a free black man, brought to the colony aboard the James in 1621. He had been captured in his native Angola. When he was initially sold to a white tobacco planter named Bennet, Johnson was known only as Antonio. Antonio was indentured to Bennet, the common practice of the time, meaning that he could work his way out of servitude after a period of hard labor (often seven years). Until the mid-1850s, in the American colonies, though indentured servants were often treated as roughly as slaves, the indentured servant could earn his or her freedom and there was no clear practice of lifetime slavery.

     Expansion of tobacco plantations like Bennet’s farther and farther inland within Virginia proved to be an intolerable depletion of land and resources for the native Powhatans. On Good Friday, 1622, after an adviser to the Powhatan chief was murdered by an English settler, the Powhatans overran several farms and small communities. At the Bennet plantation, Antonio was one of only five survivors among fifty-seven residents.

     In 1623, Mary, identified on the ship manifest simply as “a Negro,” arrived in Virginia aboard the Margaret. She was indentured to the same plantation as Antonio, the only woman there. Within a few years Antonio had taken the name Anthony Johnson, Mary had taken him as her husband, and by the mid-1630s both worked off their indenture to become free blacks. The usual practice of the time granted freed indentured servants a year’s provision of corn, double apparel, necessary tools, and a small cash stipend.

     Anthony and Mary Johnson remained married for forty years, rearing four children to adulthood, quite a feat for the 17th century, let alone a black couple in Virginia. Anthony Johnson’s July, 1651, acquisition of two hundred fifty acres of land on Virginia’s eastern shore, near the Pungoteague River in Northampton County, would make him significant enough within the history of early Virginia, but the story does not stop there. Along the Pungoteague the Johnsons ran cattle and horses, raised hogs, and cultivated a tobacco crop. The Johnsons retained close ties to other free blacks in the area as well as trading with neighboring white plantation owners. At least one of his sons took a white woman as his wife. Anthony Johnson employed his own servants, including a back man named John Casor. In 1653 Casor demanded his freedom from Anthony Johnson, believing he had completed his indentured servitude. Johnson claimed there was no proof of the indenture. Casor left the Johnson farm and went to work for a white colonist named Robert Parker. Anthony Johnson brought suit in the Northampton County court. In 1655, the court’s decision read in part: “The saide Mr. Robert Parker most unjustly keepeth the said Negro from Anthony Johnson his master. It is therefore the Judgement of the Court that the said John Casor Negro forthwith returne unto the service of the said master Anthony Johnson.”  

     The court established no end point for Casor’s servitude to Johnson, effectively making him the first person in the American colonies to be legally designated a slave for life and Anthony Johnson became the first court anointed slaveholder.

     The slave system soon morphed into one of white power. By the 1870s Anthony Johnson had amassed nearly a thousand acres of land. At his death, Virginia courts ruled that being black Johnson was not a citizen; therefore, his lands could not be inherited by his children.

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  July 17, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                 Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
Just when the San Francisco Giants looked as dead in the baseball water as their one-time ace Tim Lincecum, little Timmy turned the tables by throwing a no-hitter last Saturday night. Though the 9-0 score proved lopsided, Lincecum’s quest for baseball immortality kept me tense as could be on the edge of the couch. Afraid of jinxing Timmy, I clutched my empty dinner plate through the last three and a half innings in much the same way I did for Matt Cain’s perfect game thirteen good luck months ago. When “she-who-must-be-obeyed” asked after five innings, “Do they have a hit?” I ignored the query, signaling her that there was something worth watching here.

     Unless you count splitting kindling as a sport, baseball was the first game I played. The Giants moved to San Francisco when I was four years old. My earliest religious experiences involved praying for Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda to hit it out of Seals Stadium.

    For a couple of decades I knew every player on the Giants roster as well as 99% of the rest of both leagues.  A few years ago this column ran a list of the fifty greatest San Francisco Giants. It would be too difficult to limit the entire franchise of New York and San Francisco Giants to just fifty. Any real fan knows that Giants greatness started twenty years before even John McGraw and Christy Mathewson, when Tim Keefe and Smiling Mickey Welch were the Lincecum and Cain of their era.

     My father taught me about Buck Ewing, the Buster Posey of the 1880s and 1890s, but also pointed out some of the more obscure, colorful or tragic figures of the baseball world. In 1895 the Giants brought up a promising left-handed pitcher named Ed Doheny. He never quite panned out with them, losing nearly seventy games while winning barely half as many. He was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1901, where he turned things around, posting 16-4 and 16-8 won-loss records the following two campaigns. About halfway through the 1903 season, at the age of thirty, Doheny suffered some sort of psychological breakdown. By October, after inexplicable violent outbursts against teammates and his personal physician, Ed Doheny was permanently committed to the Danvers Asylum for the Criminally Insane where he died thirteen years later.

  Though never a Giant, one of Doheny’s contemporaries is worthy of note in the world of obscure baseball incidents. It would take too long here to explain the exact details of how Ed Delahanty played Cap Anson’s 1892 deep fly ball to centerfield into an “inside-the-doghouse” home run, but intrigued ball fans can do a little digging and find what Paul Harvey might have called “the rest of the story.”  The precise cause of Delahanty’s death, at age thirty-five, when he was found floating in the waters near Niagara Falls remains a mystery to this day.  

     Of course, the most memorialized obscure baseball player of all time wore a Giants uniform. Moonlight “Doc” Graham played right field for two innings without coming to bat on June 29, 1905. Graham was not forgotten by W.P. Kinsella in his novel, Shoeless Joe, or in the film version entitled, Field of Dreams.

     A few weeks back this column discussed the 1-0 sixteen inning pitching duel between Juan Marichal and Warren Spahn that occurred fifty years ago this month. Perhaps some astute reader can name the extremely obscure Giant who watched that game from the bench. Hint: he performed in only eleven big league games though he spent the entire 1963 season with the major league Giants.

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley advertiser  July 10, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                     Link to Anderson Valley advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
Hiking is in my blood, from the Highlands of Scotland to the Burren of western Ireland. One of my great uncles, Alec Robertson oft times strode from Rockport to the Albion River and back for a long weekend’s jaunt. My parents hiked into the Trinity Alps as part of their honeymoon in the fall of 1941.

     And so again this June I set out into the wilderness with my old backpacking buddy Steven Steelrod. He moves a little slower after a torn Achilles three years ago; nevertheless, the first week’s sojourn into the Trinities with Steve’s brother, Jason, along for good company proved easy enough. Along the way we spotted a bald eagle at Horseshoe Lake and met a met a man from Ashland who spends his summers as a paid guide for small groups in the mountains. Somehow the topic of the Burning Man Festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert came up. Steve was intrigued, as a friend of his college student daughter had just given her a ticket. The guide pontificated about the mind-expanding enlightenment he’d found at Burning Man. Steve pumped him with questions and eventually the guide told us how his life had been opened to new possibilities through the ingestion of the drug ecstasy. Jason and I excused ourselves politely, but with a double-barreled roll of the eyes, moving onward and upward to Ward Lake where the fish were biting and the highs natural. Steve was an hour behind us getting back to base camp a mile east of Mumford Meadows, newly informed at what went on at Burning Man, but skeptical concerning its cultural or psychological efficacy.

     A day later, beside the shrunken shoreline of Landers Lake we met a Tennessee college student performing Forest Service scouting loops of a week or more at a time. We were the first humans she’d seen in four days, though she had spotted a bear and thought she glimpsed a mountain lion. As usual Steve talked on and on to her while Jason and I pondered which would be safer for a college student: a few days and nights at Burning Man or weeks on end alone tromping the trails of the Trinity Alps.

     The following week Steve and I set out from the Mule Bridge trailhead up the North Fork of the Salmon River. The first six miles of this trail were a virtually flat walk in the woods, even with 40-45 pound packs on our backs. The next seven included six crossings of the Salmon River with boots, socks, and trousers tied around necks and barefoot balancing of the packs in icy, rushing water; wouldn’t be a Steelrod summer without some adventure. Of course, the last mile was a steep climb to Abbott Lake, where two very spent campers pitched tents in the gloaming.

  Three nights later, we were back downstream, having re-forded the Salmon another half dozen times and having survived a close encounter with a rather large male mountain lion. Only then, by firelight, during a discussion of how television journalism has sunk to new lows with the all day coverage of the Jodi Arias murder trial on CNN’s Headline News channel did Steve reveal that he’d once taught Arias in high school and caught her plagiarizing an internet site for a term paper. She vehemently denied the accusations of cheating though a friend downloaded a replica paper to prove Arias’ guilt. Soon thereafter, her mother removed her from school. Perhaps a trip to Burning Man or a few weeks alone in the wilderness would have been a better alternative education.

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River Views -- Published in the Anderson Valley Advertiser  July 3, 2013

9/2/2013

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                                                                                                                   Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com

A couple of weeks ago I walked into the Coast Hardware Store in Fort Bragg for my annual purchase of a sleeve or two of .22 shorts. Usually, when the clerk asks what they are for I reply “target shooting,” but the truth is they are for shooting blue jays, woodpeckers, and occasionally pigeons who invade our cherry trees. Anybody who is aghast at that has no concept about what really happens on a ranch or farm. The truly appalling thing is that Coast Hardware doesn’t have any .22 shorts or .22 longs or almost any bullets whatsoever on its ample number of shelves devoted to ammunition. A long time Coast Hardware employee put it this way, “After Obama got re-elected and the Sandy Hook shooting, they bought out all the ammo and darn near all the guns.”

     This is the Mendocino Coast, people, not the Bible freakin’ Belt. Apparently, I have greatly underestimated the number of gun nuts in the vicinity, not to mention the racist gun nuts. The same kind of folks weaned on the Andy Griffith Show have clearly forgotten that Deputy Barney Fife carried only one bullet, often in his shirt pocket, and that Sheriff Andy almost never packed a gun.

     I learned how to shoot a gun and handle one with relative safety about the time I started to school. The Cuban Missile Crisis didn’t send my parents running to the store to overload on ammo. None of my aunts or uncles, who’d all been taught to shoot at equally early ages, didn’t stock up on new .30-.30s or rifle shells when, heaven forfend, a Catholic got elected President of these United States.

     It’s not just Coast Hardware. I called Walmart in Ukiah. They are out of most gun ammunition; same thing at Pacific Outfitters in or county seat. This is Mendocino County, not Texas! Speaking of Barney Fife, he had a word for people like those who make a run on the ammo store. That word is, “NUTS!”

     I may know some of these nuts. I may have grown up around them. These people are some of the most capable handlers of large machinery, loggers, or farmers around. These are people I would trust to grade almost any road, fell a difficult tree, or buy their produce without a second thought as to whether it was purely organically raised or not. However, when it comes to politics and true social progress many of these same well-grounded individuals are led around by the nose by Fox News, the propaganda of large corporations, and the misguided policies of entities like the NRA or churches whose tenets have yet to fully shed beliefs that weren’t ethically sound in the Middle Ages let alone now.

     For those of you who don’t understand why ranchers or farmers shoot fruit thieving birds or chicken coop marauding animals, well, in the immortal words of Mr. T, “I pity the fool.”

     For those who may possibly be addicted to guns and ammo, perhaps Jeff Foxworthy should offer the following test questions:  Do I shoot more target rounds per week than there are days in the year? If you answered yes, you just might be a gun nut. Do I have more bullets in my house than the population of the nearest town? If the answer is yes, you might be a gun nut. Does firing a gun release dopamine in my brain? If you don’t know the answer because you don’t know dopamine from methamphetamine, you might just very well be a freakin’ gun nut.

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