Monday, 6:30 a.m.: Swimming instructor Jan Carroll sits on a table at one end of the 25-yard, six-lane Eureka High School pool going over paperwork. She’s been here half an hour already, shepherding swimmers in her Eureka Adult School class as they do their laps. Light filters through the swampy bank of windows on one […]
Heidi Walters
Heidi Walters worked as a staff writer at the North Coast Journal from 2005 to 2015.
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Pool Stories
Everybody’s got a swimming story — where they learned, the crazy way they could’ve been buried alive under a pile of wet kids, how it makes them feel to swim: "I grew up in San Francisco. I learned to swim at Fleishacker Pool. It was the biggest outdoor pool, and it was salt water. It […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Gold war
Tis the season for dredge miners to dust off their campers and mosey into the mountains for river gold. Tis also budget season, and the Karuk Tribe and California Trout have asked Gov. Schwarzenegger to endorse a provision that the state legislature added to the 2008 Budget Bill that would place a moratorium on suction […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Have RV, still gonna travel
Well, you bought the damned thing — you might as well use it. That’s the advice one rich fella says to another rich fella who, perhaps, is wondering whether he and the wife oughta take their Fleetwood Bounder with the boss triple slide-outs for a spin this summer. It’s also the attitude RV parks around […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Salmon can swim on buses
A judge ruled yesterday that TriMet (Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon) violated state and federal free speech laws when it rejected an ad (above), calling it “political,” submitted by the Karuk Tribe and Friends of the River Foundation. In February the ACLU sued the bus company over the rejection. Judge Henry Breithaupt said TriMet’s […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Task Force
Armed with pie charts, statistics and a pictorial display of the sort of slovenliness the Humboldt County Code Enforcement Unit frequently deals with regularly, interim County Counsel Wendy Chaitin and Deputy County Counsel Richard Hendry began an overview of the controversial unit last Friday at the first meeting of the Code Enforcement Task Force. (For […]
Posted inSpecial Sections
A Cautionary Tale
A friend once asked me, mockingly, “Do you consider nature benign?” I instantly pictured what he pictured: me floating barefoot through wildflowers, head in the clouds and a benevolent smile on my face, hugging rabbits and kissing beetles, oblivious that a few paces behind me in the flowers bobbed the fuzzy tipped ears of a […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Nitro shakes
Auto Racing Daily found Fortuna native Hillary Will, fastest drag-racing woman ever, pining for vrooom and the sweet scent of dragster gas after she’d spent a rare weekend off over Memorial Day watching other people drive at NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 in North Carolina. “Being there made me miss the smell of nitro and the sound of an 8,000-horsepower race car,” she told […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Loaded for bear
We like to kill bears in Humboldt County. The Daily Triplicate tells us that Humboldt ranks fifth among California counties for bear kills (117 were 86’d by hunters last year), while noting that its own county — Del Norte — has felt a diminishing appetite for bear over the years (just 29 killed last year, down […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Dirty birds
Dear old Clam Beach has made the list that no self-respecting body of sand and surf would want to be on: The Top Ten Beach Bummers. Heal the Bay, a nonprofit environmental group, puts this list together each year as part of an annual water quality report card issued for more than 500 California beaches […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
No Confidence
As the academic year draws to a close this week and droves of parents flood to town to collect their scholars, some of these visitors, leafing through a copy of Humboldt State University’s newspaper, theLumberjack, or, perhaps, this newspaper, might be troubled by a certain full-page ad. The ad, which first appeared in last week’s […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Jason Singleton Strikes Again
Driving through Eureka on 101, you may have noticed that a long-time fixture, the Arctic Circle, is all boarded up. On Tuesday, the Times-Standard had the report: The restaurant was sued in February over violations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The case settled, and the owners, unable to afford the fixes required to become […]