Attorney John Belsher, of San Luis Obispo, was looking a little tense-jawed Monday night as resident after resident stood up inside the Cutten ElemenSchool auditorium to give him and his Forster-Gill fellows what-for over the mixed-use development – with up to 1,442 homes – they’ve proposed for north of Ridgewood Drive and south of the […]
Heidi Walters
Heidi Walters worked as a staff writer at the North Coast Journal from 2005 to 2015.
Posted inNews
Boom or Bluff?
Some time ago — about 10 million years, around about the time humanlike apes were transitioning to apelike humans and dogs were starting to look like dogs — the Eel River Delta was taking shape. Great quantities of land continuously washed into the ocean, forming layers of sand, rotting plants and other deposits atop another […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Sunshine, Symbols and Remembrance
The sun came out Monday and everybody seemed drunk on it. Down in town, in Arcata, a man in one backyard had pulled off his shirt to bare his muscled pale arms to the warmth. A woman in her garden was in a tank top. Everyone dangled jackets and sweaters under their arms as they […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
About a Worm
A mid last week’s news that the fed-eral government has mandated in-stallation of fish ladders as a condition of the government’s relicensing of PacifiCorp’s Klamath dams, some of the region’s top fisheries scientists gathered in Fortuna to talk about a worm. They met for two days to swap information about a tiny, translucent, squid-shaped class […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Moon on You
Well, shall we start with the moon? It hovered, just past full, at the far end of the long corridors between rows of Old Town buildings, lighting up alleys and casting blue tones onto the already lamp-lit streets. You’d walk alongside one old brick edifice – perhaps darting inside to check out an art exhibit, […]
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White Pavement
Fhyre Phoenix awoke in the middle of the night, brain ablaze. He had an idea for saving the world! Again. But this time, he thought, the solution was one that ordinary citizens could enact with ease. There was just one minor, niggling obstacle. So let’s hark back to where it all began: in the letters […]
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Back to the Land 2007
The Old Tomlinson Ranch, July 2006. The Wilsons had slept hard, exhausted by their two-day journey up from Ojai and the fiasco they’d had with the moving truck. The truck was too tall to pass under the bridge that crosses over the road at Lady Bird Johnson Grove, and they’d had to bring in a […]
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Panic Attack
It was Halloween, and almost everyone was having a fine, silly time inside the big old house in Eureka. Never mind whose house. All that matters, really, is that despite the general merriment, the party had its scary moments. Take, for instance, the sudden conversation that sprang up in the kitchen among a number of […]