Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
The first white people to settle this place alongside the Albion River were treated with kindness by the Pomo who periodically camped on a portion of what came to be called the Macdonald Ranch. Those campsites dated back hundreds if not thousands of years.  Despite the mutual friendship of the settlers and the Pomo the local logging company and railroad drove the Pomo from this part of the Albion.  Twentieth century loggers destroyed all but a handful of native artifacts up and down the Albion. 

  Everyone makes mistakes.  One can only hope the mistakes be rectified sooner rather than later. 

  In mid-September this paper ran an article about the proposed coastal trail on the Georgia-Pacific mill site in Fort Bragg.  The gist of the article concerned Pomo archeological sites on the mill site and that the Northern Pomo may not have been properly consulted regarding the coastal trail’s planning.

  I noticed a couple of glaring inaccuracies within the story.  It claimed the Mendocino Indian Reservation operated from 1853 to 1860 when the true dates are 1856 through 1866.  The article also asserted the reservation’s boundaries extended from Noyo River to Westport.  In reality the northern boundary was Ten Mile River.  These might seem insignificant errors, but in 1853 there weren’t enough Anglo-European whites on the Mendocino Coast to make a single community let alone request or man a reservation.  The bottom line of those mistakes: my skeptical antennae rose to alert stage.

  The problem with the September article is its one-sidedness.  A more complicated story lies underneath the obvious.

  The September piece didn’t dig deep enough to tell readers about Arcadis BBL Inc., the company, with a billion dollars in gross revenues, employed to study sediments at the G-P mill site. Arcadis subcontracted archaeological work to Garcia and Associates, from the Bay Area.  The City of Fort Bragg now relies on a single archeologist who replaced Garcia and Associates in 2009. This brings us back to a rather confusing error in the September piece which states, “An archeological study by CalTrans found 22 archeological sites with northern Pomo’s human and cultural remains…”  The archaeologist in question did work for Cal Trans for eighteen years, but is now self-employed.  The confusion stems from the fact that Fort Bragg received a $750,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration funneled through Cal Trans to the city for the coastal trail project. 

  A further problem with the September article is a lengthy paragraph that appears to be cut directly from an archeological report about the Fort Bragg mill site.  The paragraph contains no attribution, no hint as to who wrote it, no contextual link.  The plot thickens here.  The Sherwood Valley Pomo claim that the City of Fort Bragg failed to follow correct and timely nation-to-nation protocol in communicating with them, thus violating Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act.  One might say hurrah for an American Indian tribe that can hoist the white people’s government on its own legal petard.  However, the National Historic Preservation Act also establishes rules to protect historic archeological sites from plundering.  These rules make it unethical, perhaps illegal, to release to the public specific reports about archeological sites. So who released the confidential archeological information that went into the September article?  It wasn’t the archeologists and it wasn’t the City of Fort Bragg. 

  Still, it’s hard to forget that the predecessor in interest to Georgia-Pacific and the Union Lumber Company was the mill of Alexander Macpherson, constructed in the 1850s on the Mendocino Indian Reservation without permission from the U.S. government or the Pomo.

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  Last week’s column provided background to the case of a homeless man accused of injuring his dog, Frankie.

  On August 19th the defendant woke at the Hare Creek beach, south of Fort Bragg.  He admitted spending much of the morning drinking.  In the early afternoon the defendant leashed Frankie, who he’s had since Frankie was a pup. The defendant had previously owned/cared for Frankie’s mother, Daisy.  The “leash” was made up of two used leashes fastened together along with several feet of rope. 

  The defendant tied the leash to the right handle bar of his bicycle.  This allowed Frankie more freedom, the defendant claimed, when trotting along behind the bicycle.  That Sunday, however, the defendant pushed the bike due to an injury to his left elbow.

  The defendant and Frankie walked north to the intersection of Highway One and the street leading to the Boatyard Shopping Center.  A woman in a car, waiting for the light in the left turn lane of southbound Highway One, claimed the defendant cursed Frankie then jerked violently on the leash. She hollered, “You shouldn’t have a dog if you can’t take care of it.”

  On the witness stand the defendant admitted to shouting back epithets that included an oft used hyphenated profanity and another only anatomically and semantically appropriate for Frankie’s mother.  The ADA omitted, but the Public Defender let the jury know, that the woman answered back, “Have fun with the police.”

  Indeed, a Fort Bragg police officer was summoned and the defendant arrested.  The woman told the officer the defendant had struck Frankie with the bicycle. The defendant denied this under oath, and no conclusive evidence was presented to prove that Frankie sustained an injury.  Clear photographic evidence did display the sad state of Frankie’s paws.  The defendant explained that he’d traveled with Frankie to Aberdeen, Washington last February to get a prescription from a veterinarian for antibiotics to treat Frankie’s paws.  Only in the month leading up to the August incident had the paws worn down again.

  The standard of guilt for Penal Code 597(a) is intentionally wounding an animal.  In summation, the public defender recounted his own recent experience of tossing a pet cat that had bit him.  That happened inside a private residence, but the homeless defendant lives much of his life in plain view.  The Public Defender reiterated the standard for guilt in this case, concluding that on August 19th the defendant did nothing intentionally to wound Frankie and that the ADA had presented no clear evidence of any injuries sustained on that day.  The ADA’s rebuttal summation rested on the deplorable condition of Frankie’s paws.

  The clock approached noon.  The judged recessed everyone until after lunch.  The jury retired to deliberate shortly after 1 p.m.  Two and a half hours later they returned with a verdict of not guilty.

    The defendant wiped tears from his eyes.  Exiting the courtroom several jurors shook hands with him.  Some said, “I hope you get your dog back.”

  In the lobby, one of two spectators who’d remained to the end approached the jury foreman.  She enumerated the injuries she’d observed on Daisy after she gained custody of Frankie’s mother.  The woman, founder of “Daisy Davis Pit Bull Rescue,” insisted the wounds to Frankie’s paws could not be caused simply by mange as the defense implied in court.  The foreman listened awhile then excused himself.

  A few days later the defendant and Frankie could be seen near McDonald’s. The defendant said that Frankie still crawls into his sleeping bag at night, curling up under his armpit.

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Does it seem like more and more of the homeless are accompanied by a dog or dogs?  The City of San Francisco has just initiated a program that pairs the homeless with abandoned puppies.  The City pays the homeless person to take care of problem puppies until they are ready for adoption, but the homeless must give up panhandling in exchange.  Skeptics might say it’s a system with built-in problems.  What becomes of the bond established between the homeless individual and the young dog?  Who is going to monitor the admonition against panhandling?  What could be a more sympathetic sight for a panhandler than a puppy alongside?

  Mendocino County appears to possess an abundance of dog and homeless pairings.  Some food banks help with food for pets of the homeless.  Reportedly, the Foursquare Church in Fort Bragg offers dog-sitting services while the canine’s homeless person eats at the Hospitality House, which does not allow pets at dinner.

  You don’t have to look overly close at a nearly toothless individual on a street corner to guess that many of the homeless are woefully behind when it comes to medical care.  How many among us have examined the physical condition of a homeless person’s furry companion?  This is the story of someone who stopped to take that look then did something about it.  It is also the story of a man and his dog.

  A bicycle stood erect yet rider-less, its left handlebar tagged as an evidentiary exhibit, the right handlebar nudged against the panel separating spectators from the proceedings in the Ten Mile Courthouse on Thursday, September 27th.  Less than a handful of citizens remained in the audience to witness the second day of a trial in which a homeless man was accused of violating California Penal Code 597(a), which doles out punishments for cruelty to animals.  The alleged victim in the case: a six-year-old dog named Frankie.  The alleged perpetrator: a Caucasian man about 6’ 2’’, weight 165-175 pounds; his age hard to accurately estimate, perhaps middle aged, perhaps somewhat younger.  He has spent quite a bit of time in a homeless state; clearly missing several teeth, his neck appeared perpetually dusty, though that might be due to years of living outdoors.

  Under Penal Code 597(a) Frankie’s alleged abuser could be subject to a state prison sentence and/or a fine up to $20,000.  More often than not the fine is substantially less and defendants pleading out might be released immediately with credit for time already served in the county jail. This homeless man was clearly having none of that.  In the lobby before the second day’s proceedings at least one voice of the public could be heard saying, “Why didn’t he just plead ‘no contest’ and not waste so much time and money?”

  The Thursday morning proceedings did not get underway for the jury until after 10 a.m. because the assistant district attorney and the public defender spent most of an hour arguing before the judge over the prosecution’s desire to alter the charge to Code 597(b), which broadens the definition of what actions constitute cruelty to animals.  Since the defendant had already given his direct testimony the judge disallowed the request.

  With the jury returned to the courtroom the ADA cross-examined the defendant, re-establishing the basic facts of a case that reached court only five and a half weeks after the incident itself.

  Next time in River Views: What appears to be a throwaway case provides more than one surprise.

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An envelope marked “Urgent Notice” arrived in the mail last Friday.  The return address said:  State of California.  Inside were four identical slips of paper with “Advance Notice” boldly printed across the top.  Advance Notice for the bill that will soon follow from the state Board of Equalization; a bill for $150 for every habitable structure on the Macdonald Ranch.  This is the amount due for the new California Fire Prevention Fee.  The four notices apparently mean that the State of California thinks there are four habitable structures on this property.  That’s what I was told when I called the 888-310-6447 number listed on the “Advance Notice.”  I asked how the state arrived at the conclusion that there are four habitable structures on this property and was informed that aerial photography was used to determine those numbers. I further asked if the aerial photos were from the age of Google Earth or the photos taken for USGS (United States Geological Service) maps, many of which go back several decades.  The website www.firepreventionfee.org seemingly does use a Google Earth style map, but there has only been one habitable structure on this property for the last twenty years.  The thoroughly collapsed cabin that once belonged to my Uncle Charlie (uninhabitable since the early 1970s) might be mistaken from the air as a second abode, but not four structures.

  As of now the state believes there are 763,000 habitable structures within the State Responsibility Area (SRA) in California.  When I attended grade school SRA was a color coded reading program.  Now it is the millions of acres in this state that lie outside of incorporated towns and cities and their fire department districts.

  Discerning readers, of course, are thinking: what about our volunteer fire departments?  The State of California has got your back and got you by the short hairs at the same time.  Don’t you love politicians!  If your habitable structure resides within the SRA, but is also within the boundaries of a volunteer fire department, the fee will be reduced from $150 to $115, per habitable structure.   

  The only colors of seeming importance to the state are red, for the fires that the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention (Cal Fire) is responsible for putting out, and green, for the greenbacks the state hopes to collect to offset the costs of fighting fires in non-incorporated areas.

  If the state’s count is off as badly overall as the four for one mistake here at the Macdonald ranch, our government is in for a fiscal surprise.  The inability to properly count habitable structures is only the tip of the nonflammable iceberg.  Remember that the key phrase to this fee is “habitable structure.”  Next, recall who owns the vast majority of lands within the SRA.  In Mendocino County the answer isn’t who but what, as in corporate timber.  Mendocino Redwood Co. alone owns well over 200,000 acres in this county, almost all of it within the SRA fire prevention zone.  How many habitable structures are on Mendocino Redwood’s 200,000 acres of timberland?  Only a handful.  Can you say 1% vs. 99%?

  On a national level the Republican Party has become the blind supporter of the super rich, but California’s fire prevention fee was passed by a legislature with a Democratic majority and signed into law by a Democratic governor.

  A side note: Governor Brown’s wife, Anne Gust, served for years as the general counsel and executive vice-president of Gap Inc. The Fisher family, which controls Gap Inc. also owns Mendocino Redwood Company.

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Fifteen years ago a South African music enthusiast established a web site that he called “The Great Rodriguez Hunt.”  Rodriquez was an obscure singer/songwriter from the Detroit area whose two albums disappeared into the dustbin of the American corporate music business.  Rodriquez vanished completely from the music scene and the only thing the South African had to go on were conflicting rumors as to the method of on-stage suicide Rodriquez had chosen to end things.  Unbeknownst to the artist, Rodriquez’s songs reached South Africa during the darkest years of apartheid, his music and lyrics becoming anthems for change.  Searching for Sugar Man is a documentary feature film that tells the story of those who tracked down the truth about this mysterious figure from the music industry of the late 1960s and early 1970s. I saw it at Summerfield Cinemas in Santa Rosa, where it continued to play as this was written.  In more than fifty years of movie-going I have never seen so many audience members sit through the credits more or less stunned then turn and talk to perfect strangers at length about what they had just seen. 

  Most of what fills up movie screens from Fort Bragg to Ukiah to the cultural mecca of “The City” itself is nothing more than crap, excremental pablum for the lowest common denominator of our brains.  Pretty much the same can be said for what comes over the radio airwaves.  How much air time do Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger get in comparison to Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga?  Ever hear Chopin or Mozart outside of public radio? We not only need to amend the corporate influence on our electoral system, good citizens, we need to stop the corporatization of our arts.  Everyone who reads this should demand of their local movie house more films of the quality of Searching for Sugar Man.  Shutting the TV off in the land of Mendo-Lib is not enough.  If you give your children or grandchildren pocket money to go see The Expendables 2 or the fourth retread of a comic book series on film you have just committed a small crime against humanity.

  Searching for Sugar Man succeeds because it follows one of the most basic storytelling techniques, the quest of a few people to discover the truth about a mythic figure, but it grounds that tale in the reminiscences of hammer and nails construction workers, bartenders, and the few remaining people who actually knew the musical artist, Rodriquez.  To spell out anything more specific about the story would create a major spoiler. Despite the truth that the voices of true artists are being crushed here in the States, Searching for Sugar Man ultimately proves triumphant and inspirational.

  The humble tale of the musician, Rodriquez, reminds me, to some degree, of the fate of Jim Ford, a lost legend in the world of roots rock where soul, country and folk come together.  His only album, Harlan County, derived from a musical land where the Mississippi Delta rolled right through the Appalachian Mountains.  Jim Ford’s songwriting influenced many, including Sly and the Family Stone as well as Nick Lowe.  Ford even claimed that he helped Bobbie Gentry write Ode to Billie Joe.  We may never know the truth about that because Ford disappeared as thoroughly as Rodriquez in the 1970s, mostly into a deep haze of drugs.  When he re-emerged in the twenty-first century it was a case of too little and too late.  Jim Ford died in his trailer park home in Fort Bragg in November of 2007.

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On Labor Day the Albion River moved at less than a trickle. Gravel covered much of the riverbed and the tiny flow of water could be dammed to a halt with a few kicks of a boot.  This is not a tributary of the river or somewhere on its north or south forks, just a mile east of tidewater on the main stem of the Albion. 

  Dry weather and a lack of water makes ranchers and farmers wary— wary of fire.  This is truer today than fifty years or so ago when I was a small child.  In those days when sheep grazed the hillsides north of the Albion River (our cattle grazed down river in those bygone times, on land leased from our large timber company neighbor), it was not uncommon on a foggy summer evening for my father to announce after dinner, “Good night for burning.” 

  Dad would select a relatively small patch of hillside, directly below another recently burned over area, a match would be lit, and my siblings and I were stationed around the upper reaches of the burn zone.  When the flames reached the limits of that night’s burn boundaries we beat the fire out with freshly cut redwood branches.

  In the 21st Century view of things that would be considered a crime.  In reality what those small controlled burns did was provide better grazing land, burn off unwanted weeds such as poison oak, and provide a fire break for the forest beyond. In the two decades following World War Two the nearest fire lookout on Mathison Peak often was occupied by the watchful eye of Emma Mathison (same family the “peak” was named for).  If smoke from a Macdonald burn caught her attention, she might call on the party line telephone— two longs.  Usually, the Macdonalds rang her before a burn commenced, as did Clyde and Martha Anderson on Albion Ridge.  The party line telephone came into being here at the Macdonald Ranch at the end of the 1940s, a year or two after PG&E put in electric poles that extended a mile from the Littleriver Airprt Road down to the ranch house of my youth.  During the Great Depression and World War Two a farmer’s line of telephone connections ran from the Anderson Ranch at the northeast end of Albion Ridge down to the Albion River, crossing at my great uncle John Finley Robertson’s place then up the steep slope to the Mathison ranch. Another line ran from John Finley Robertson’s (readers may remember him from the true tale of the horse that shot Ben Frost dead on Little Lake Road) to our ranch then up the hill to connect to the handful of homes along the Littleriver prairie.  The folks along that farmer’s line also provided mutual fire protection for one another until organized volunteer fire departments became permanent entities approximately a half century ago, in great part due to the behind the scenes work of Emery Escola, son of noted Mendocino County historian Nannie Flood Escola.

  Reports about the burglaries at the Mendocino Volunteer Fire Department prove troubling. A Mendocino Beacon story about the incidents indicated that the Mendocino Fire Protection District pays for beer to be kept on hand at the department headquarters. The implications of tax dollars paying for alcohol for firemen would besmirch a hardworking bunch of folks who volunteer their time to provide the public lifesaving services.  According to Mendocino Volunteer Fire Department Chief Ed O’Brien the beer in question is paid for out of the firemen’s own funds.

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My name is Malcolm and I’m an ice cream addict.  During summer and fall I’m often able to sate my needs with homemade product made from a recipe in the 1941 edition of America’s Cook Book given to my mother as a wedding present by her maternal grandmother.  Page 716 gives the short, sweet instructions for “Philadelphia Ice Cream”:  Heat a quart of light cream (I mix a pint of heavy cream with a pint of whole milk) until lukewarm then add a cup of sugar, a dash of salt, and two teaspoons vanilla, stirring until dissolved.  That’s fine if you want vanilla ice cream, but I often add blackberries or blueberries or some other fresh fruit (berries need to be ground through a Foley Mill or you’ll end up with a literally seedy ice cream).  The mixture should be chilled in the refrigerator or freezer for a short time while you ready crushed ice and rock salt for the ice cream mixer.  Until recent years I used a hand cranked device much like Great-Grandma’s.

  When you’ve been raised on the homemade good stuff, even an ice cream addict won’t settle for just any “fix.”  Once upon a time (1928) Joseph Edy and William Dreyer went into business in Oakland making Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream.  The product was “grand,” but the name derived from their company’s address on Grand Avenue.  Aficionadas (PC for addict) know Dreyer and Edy as the inventors of Rocky Road ice cream.  Oh, yum!  Mr. Edy’s wife’s sewing scissors were used to cut the marshmallows down to bite size (Miniature marshmallows are a post World War Two invention).   When I attended first, second, and third grade at Whittier Elementary in Berkeley a fledgling addict could sometimes con his mother into a side trip down Grand Avenue to the Dreyer’s factory.

  Alas, corporatization has diminished the product and taste of Dreyer’s.  After the company went public with stock shares in 1981 Dreyer’s switched the brand of vanilla used in the ice cream.  In 2002 Dreyer’s was acquired by the Nestle Corporation. Two years later they changed the churning process.  Even an addict has standards.  No more Dreyer’s. I’ve sworn off Breyer’s as well.  Breyer’s started as an independent company in Philadelphia in the 1860s.  For more than a century it was made with truly natural ingredients, even after being purchased by Kraft Foods.  However, Unilever got hold of the brand in 1993.  By 2006 Unilever scrapped the all-natural ingredients in favor of cost-cutting additives, which has distinctly changed its flavor and taste, not for the better.

  Haagen-Dazs was once delivered on horse drawn wagons in the south Bronx. It used no emulsifiers or stabilizers other than egg yolks.  High butter fat content was the “secret sauce” that kept customers coming back.  Sadly, Haagen-Dazs (made up name, with no meaning in any language) is now a subsidiary of Nestle.  Nestle is the world’s most profitable corporation.  Many sources have alleged a long list of poor practices by Nestle, including the use of child slave labor in the production of cocoa beans in the Ivory Coast.

  If you, too, have a little problem with ice cream, but want the truly good stuff may I suggest Alden’s ice cream. It’s produced in Eugene, Oregon from all organic ingredients and is the closest thing to homemade you’ll find in stores.  On the Mendocino coast it can be obtained at Purity and Harvest Market; inland at Ukiah Natural Foods and Mariposa Market in Willits.

  Gotta go: ICA (Ice Cream Anonymous) meeting in five minutes.

                                                                                                                  Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
This edition of the AVA hits the streets on August 29th; on the same day in 1892 traveling salesman Whitcomb Judson was issued a patent for his shoe clasp locker, a metal fastening device for boots and shoes.  Today we would say that the device zipped two sides of the shoe together.  Judson gained some notoriety for his invention while displaying it at the Chicago World’s Fair the next summer (read Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City for a definitive account of that murderous time in the Midwest).  Unfortunately, Whitcomb Judson’s clasps broke open at inopportune times and he failed to gain any financial success.  However, in the early 1920s the B.F. Goodrich Company modified Judson’s invention and applied it on their rubber galoshes, calling the device a “Zipper,” and the rest is business history. 

  August is starting to feel more autumnal than summery and despite a couple of bear forays through apple trees things are relatively hunky-dory here at the Macdonald ranch.  Of course, hunky-dory requires etymological reflection.  Did you know that there once existed a “Hunkidori” breath freshener?  Tis true, the product came into being shortly after the Civil War, but our hunky-dory does not derive from the product.  Business takes from the vox populi and applies it to products in hopes of profits.  Hunkidori took its name because the word hunky already meant okay, good-to-go. 

  The meaning of “hunk” goes back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, if not before.  It’s useful to recall that New York was originally the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam.  “Hunky” derives from “hunk” which comes from the Dutch word “honk,” which meant something akin to home.  In the New York street slang of children around 1800 honk or hunk meant “home” in the sense of home base in games such as hide-and-seek or tag.  Getting “home” safely meant you were alright or okay (earlier River Views explained the etymology of O.K.).  At some point slangsters added dory for no reason other than the singsong effect.

  Things are indeed hunky-dory here at the ranch, in part, due to the presence of many western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis).  These grey –black lizards, typically two and a half to three and a half inches long, usually appear to have light and dark patterns on their backs.  Locally you might be seeing a subspecies, the coast range lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis bocourtii).  Fence lizards are diurnal and sun lovers.  As soon as coast or river fog rolls in they disappear under warm woodpiles.  Here at the ranch they can be spotted on fences or gates, but often hang out on windowsills and garden boxes.  When temperatures climb to the high eighties or nineties our fence lizards seek half-shaded areas under tomato plants and other leafy vegetables.

  Fence lizards copulate for reproduction in the spring.  If you’ve ever noticed fence lizards doing what looks like push-ups, it is part of their courtship ritual.  Eggs are deposited in loose pits and hatch in summer.  While watering the garden last week I noticed a tiny newborn lizard not much bigger than a thin stub of pencil lead.  The fence lizards here at the ranch actually follow us around while we water or sit nearby observing the human condition during weeding or planting.

  Don’t mistake them for lazy sunbathers, fence lizards eat many annoying insects and invertebrates including scorpions.  Ticks bite fence lizards, but it turns out that is a good thing.  Fence lizard blood contains a protein that seemingly kills the microbe in ticks that passes Lyme disease to humans.

                                                                                                                  Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com

  In the 1920s the Albion Lumber Company hired one of the first college educated foresters.  On his initial day on the job he rode the train east several miles and strode up a steep hill to one of the company’s logging operations.  He surveyed the work being done for the better part of an hour then approached the local woods boss, a man of many years in the business, dating to the days of felling trees with an axe.  The young forester rattled off a list of changes he thought would improve production.  The woods boss didn’t say anything for a long while then spat a gob of tobacco juice in the dust. “Son, walk back down that hill, get on the train, and don’t let me see your face in my woods again.”  Slump shouldered, the forester shuffled away.  The woods boss hollered after him, “And don’t stop at the cookhouse.”

  Walker Tilley liked to tell that story on himself when he returned to the Albion in the 1950s as a senior forester for Masonite Corporation.  Most of Walker Tilley’s successors in the field of corporate forestry have not been so self-effacing.  AVA readers may have noted Mike Jani’s letter in response to public concerns about Mendocino Redwood Company applying the herbicide imazapyr to tan oaks.  Presumably Jani has moved on from chief forester at MRC (Mendocino Redwood Co.) to the position of president with its sister corporation HRC (Humboldt Redwood Co.).  Jim Holmes is the current president of MRC, but Jani obviously keeps his hand in affairs that reach public relations level, not that Jani is adept at relating to actual members of the public. 

  For full disclosure Mike Jani is one of two people I’ve ever “flipped-off” in public. Jani’s bird came about a decade ago after a meeting in Fort Bragg and the actual gesture took place outside on a darkened street with only one other MRC employee as witness. For the record the other was a Ukiah High School Athletic Director who deemed my Beatles-length hair to be unacceptable on one of his sports teams.  He threatened to cut it himself at one point.  I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but the hair remained uncut and I missed no playing time (probably because the gesture was made away from school grounds).

  Jani’s letter, printed in the August 1, 2012 AVA, implies that the greatest problem with the application of herbicides over a broad number of acres is the negative visual impact for MRC’s neighbors.

  Another letter, in the same AVA issue, from one of those neighbors (Elaine Kalantarian), clearly rejects Jani’s impersonal ploy.  Her letter concludes that the only lesson Jani learned from the experience was that future herbicides should be better hidden from the public.  Perhaps, but Jani’s callous motives can best be seen in his own words near the end of his letter to the editor: “Ideally, we will someday find a cost efficient alternative to the application of herbicides…”

  The ideal world for Jani and MRC is a cost efficient one.  MRC already has experimented with stripping the bark of tan oaks near the stumps and found that to be an effective method of killing off tan oak without herbicides, but they will not hire any of this county’s woefully underemployed woodsmen to do that sort of work on a large scale because it is not “cost efficient” in relation to squirting the herbicide imazapyr into the hacked trunks of tan oaks.

  Mr. Jani need not stop at the cookhouse either.

                                                                                                                   Link to Anderson Valley Advertiser:  www.theava.com
 
Last week in the Mendocino County Clerk-Recorder’s office a great grandfather was not permitted to pick up a birth certificate for his great grandchild because the rules only allow a parent or grandparent to do so.  This small incident speaks to the overregulation of ordinary things as well as the increased longevity of our citizenry, not to mention the socio-economic fact that children are not only being raised by grandparents, but sometimes great grandparents.

  It didn’t seem possible that it would ever happen, but Bill Westfall has died, at the tender age of one hundred four and a half.  Bill was raised at and later retired to his family’s farm along the Albion Road.  When you live to be a hundred plus, retirement becomes a fairly drawn out career of its own.  Bill kept busy repairing other people’s machinery (from cars to chainsaws to washing machines) well into his second century.  He was into his mid nineties when I drove past him sitting by the side of the road looking spent one evening.  I pulled over and asked him if he needed a ride home. “No,” he said. “Going to have some logging done, so I thought I’d better walk down to the southwest corner and check things out.”

  “Down to the southwest corner” meant he’d made nearly a mile long hike, down and back up the steepest terrain imaginable.  Bill caught his breath and strolled another quarter mile up the county road to his house.

  It sounds odd to say about a man who has lived more than a century, but our family referred to him as “Young Bill” because his father was also Bill Westfall.  Now there is only little Bill Westfall, well into his seventies, a man of many skills, who often can be found volunteering at the Hospice Thrift Shop located in the “Boatyard” shopping center in Fort Bragg.

  There are many colorful stories about the centenarian Bill Westfall, including one from the 1930s about driving an unfamiliar team of horses up the coast road from Albion to the Kent Ranch north of Littleriver; however, I like to remember him steadfastly refusing to grant a right- of-way through his land to Louisiana-Pacific (the corporate predecessor-in-interest to what are now the timberlands of Mendocino Redwood Company).  Bill had given the right-of-way permission to the lumber company in the past, but when they refused to acknowledge a section corner that Bill had meticulously re-surveyed all bets (and rights-of-way) were off.  Bill stuck by his guns despite manipulative pressure from L-P foresters and “consultants.”  More than two decades later most of those connivers are still employed in much the same positions by Mendocino Redwood Company.

  In the world of government bureaucracy running amok: the Department of Labor is considering new child labor regulations for ranches and farms.  The new rules would not apply to children performing duties on their parents’ ranches or farms, but would prevent fifteen-year-olds from vaccinating, branding or roping cattle from horseback on a grandparent’s or aunt or uncle’s property let alone non-relatives’ property.  The new regulations seem to ignore the reality of life on a farm or ranch.  Heaven forfend a “child” under sixteen ever be bucked off their horse while herding cattle then have to walk all the way home on their own.  My surviving sister drove herds of our Uncle Charlie’s cattle for miles, sometimes single handed, before she entered school. My one non-surviving sibling died prematurely at the hands of a fellow human being, a far more dangerous critter than a horse, oxen, or bull.