Weathervane Almost 6 p.m., dark. Two of the resident boats at Woodley Island Marina have strung Christmas lights from their masts, Vs of cheer hanging upside down in the blue-black night. Other boats lie dark, or with one white spotlight ablaze to aid a last repair. Except on Dock B, where a broad yellow glow […]
Heidi Walters
Heidi Walters worked as a staff writer at the North Coast Journal from 2005 to 2015.
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Suspended Bridge
You might think anyone living deep in the Klamath River boonies would be content with a certain degree of disconnect, proud of or at least resigned to the hardship imposed by deep wooded canyons, summer-bake and winter-freeze, rock-riddled roads, simple living and familial rootedness. For the most part, this may be true. You’d have to […]
Posted inNews
K-i-s-s-i-n-g
Yep, after years of acrimony fueled, it is said, by pernicious personality differences, two of the biggest homegrown environmental organizations in this Humboldt/North Coast surroundscape have officially locked lips and sealed their alliance: the Environmental Protection Information Center and the Northcoast Environmental Center , wed at last. They’ve been sorta growing close over the past […]
Posted inNews
Mr. Van Eck’s Forest
Fred Marinus van Eck loved trees. The New York City investment banker owned thousands of acres of them all over the world. And it wasn’t only their cool, fragrant, fern-swept, critter-harboring selves that enchanted him, but their potential — he loved working trees, timber. And one patch he was particularly fond of was the nearly […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
High honor in Hoopa
On a recent fall afternoon at the Kim Yerton Memorial Library, in Hoopa Valley, library branch manager Kristin Freeman described over the phone the scene inside the warm, wood structure which is shaped to resemble a xhonta, a traditional house of the Hupa people. A carved wood eagle perched in the round window, through which […]
Posted inNews
Pulp Friction
It was early January 2005, and things were a little shaky to say the least out at the pulp mill on the Samoa Peninsula. Stockton Pacific Enterprises, Inc., then-owner of the mill, was sinking fast into the surf under nearly $30 million debt to investor PPM America, which had loaned SPE the money to buy […]
Posted inNews
Cut those — achoo! — redwoods down!
Now, all you have to do, Charles, is walk on in there — yep, right into those big boys — and sneeze.
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Trick our Trucker
His friends, until recently, called him ZZ Top. He had a dark bushy beard down to his chest. He had a belly, too. Mark David loves his drink. And tobacco, and chocolate. And he and Loretta Bradford, his life-love and full-time co-pilot, would be out there on the open road, trucking lumber and pipe and […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Bottled and Blessed
Yes, yes, from Oakland to Baltimore they’re booting the bottle from city government offices and fancy restaurants. The bottle of water, that is, which activists have taken on as yet another villain in the fight to save the planet from choking on plastic or drowning in deep-puddling carbon footprints. Bottled water, critics say, creates mountains […]
Posted inNews
Hoka Hey!
Photo: Associated Press As Hayduke would say. Or maybe he’d just cast a hairy eyeball at all the goodwill on display in Jeff Barnard’s AP piece about the levee-busting up on upper Klamath Lake to make life better for some suckers: “This particular site has been viewed by so many as so important [to the […]
Posted inNews
Everyone Is Connected
Of all the luck John Haley has pushed away his breakfast plate, forked clean of its quiche, hash browns and biscuits. Billie Jo sits next to him, antsy. She keeps looking across the noisy, warm dining room inside Christ Church Episcopal at a doorway that leads to another hall from which an even louder hubbub […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Tales from the Madaket
Relaunching the Madaket , 1989 The Motor Vessel Madaket harbors a veritable boatload of stories in its weathered Doug fir planks. From 1910, when she was built, to 1972, when the Samoa Bridge went up, the Madaket (originally named the Nellie C ) ferried scores of mill workers and their families and other folks back […]