I never forget watching a crew starting a prescribed burn in the woods near my neighbor’s home back in late spring 2008, in an era when wildfires were just starting to get crazy and often unstoppable. I remember Will Harling handed me a drip torch and told me where to safely light the undergrowth, so […]
Malcolm Terence
Malcolm Terence is an editor, along with Susan Keese and Don Monkerud, of Free Land, Free Love, Tales of a Wilderness Commune. He is a frequent contributor to California Teacher and EcoNews. Before he moved to the Black Bear commune in 1968, he was a newspaper writer in Los Angeles. For other insights into the late 1960s, he recommends Sleeping Where I Fall by Peter Coyote, Fugitive Days by Bill Ayers and the documentary film about Black Bear titled Commune, directed by Jonathan Berman.
Posted inNews (NCJ)
‘Given These Songs’
Brian Tripp, the storied Karuk poet, artist and ceremonial singer, is in hospice, receiving care provided for people who doctors think are in last months of life with an incurable disease. In many cases, hospice care is cause for abject sadness from the patient and their family. For Brian, it was reason to invite some […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Fighting Fire with Fire
Eric Darragh and Will Harling raced from Orleans in the small fire engine as soon as the word came early on Sept. 8 of a wildfire that had exploded above Happy Camp and was destroying everything in its down-slope path. They soon met Scot Steinbring, the Orleans-based fire management officer for the Karuk Tribe. It […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Spreading the Gospel of Good Fire
It’s been clear for decades that re-thinking fire management in the West is as much art as craft and science, so it’s fitting that the annual prescribed burning training program called TREX, just ending in and around Orleans, invited in a gang of real artists this year to help spread the message. Since its inception […]
Posted inArts + Scene
The Real Thing: Poets in Orleans (Video)
As we listened to the three poets spin their webs last weekend in Orleans, it was easy to fall into a trance. I glanced around at the 50 people who filled the room at the Mid Klamath Watershed Council, arranged in its community events incarnation. The poets had all of us hypnotized. The three of […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Totally Biased Review of an Elementary School Play
Full disclosure: Since I was a kid, I’ve hated school plays. With their choruses of singing first-grade elves, their trays of stale refreshments and drama coaches who may have previously worked as prison guards, there was little to love. All this to say that the musical adaptation of Disney’s Moana just presented by the tiny […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Changing the Landscape
Last week, as wildfires sparked to the south and east of Humboldt County that would soon come to devastate large parts of the state and capture national attention, organizers around the small Klamath River town of Orleans had just finished their fifth annual training to advance prescribed burning — both the skills and the public […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Reflections on Black Bear
I never would have written a book like this 50 years ago when we first started the Black Bear commune. We knew we had to keep secrets then. People mostly had only first names and even if we knew their last name it might have been invented. Maybe they were avoiding the military draft. Maybe […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Excerpt: ‘The Recipe for Chimichangas, or How I saved the Commune’
I promised more about the commune. First thing to understand: As a crowd of people intent on building a utopian community in the wilderness, we didn’t bring much baggage. I mean physical baggage, like tools and working trucks. There was no shortage of what we call psychic baggage and some fraction of it was useful. […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Shared Secrets
It makes sense for restaurant cooks to be jealous of their best recipes. I remember years ago teaching myself to make croissants. Nena Creasy, a great cook who lived nearby above the Klamath River, even gave me a big marble slab to roll out the layers of dough with butter and then more butter. I […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Let it Burn
The challenge for the fifth Klamath Fire Ecology Symposium in Orleans was to leverage changes in national and state fire policy to allow for more prescribed fire and managed wildfires at opportune times in an era that sees wildfires grow harder to control every season. It is a big claim that a little conference in […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Spoiled for Bread
Maybe because I bake bread so much, friends give me cookbooks about it. I just pulled one of them off the shelf that has nearly 200 recipes. I just use one way but it’s really good and I’ve used it for years. There is something indelibly special about your own bread just out of the […]