Most homeless parents interviewed for this story requested anonymity to protect their children’s confidentiality. It was just before noon on a cool Monday morning when Maureen Chase spotted a boy about 10 years old walking alone through the parking lot of a low-cost motel in Eureka. She caught up with him just as he entered […]
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Sometimes Jerry wins
On the corner of 8th and B streets, Jerry Droz cranes his neck back, squints the midday sun out of his eyes and studies a blue, shingled house that’s seen better days. The high-complexioned, blue-eyed 56-year-old aims the lollipop stick he’s been chewing toward the second floor of the four-unit rental. "You can see there’s […]
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Choosing the end
A mid the clangor of bus trays and the murmur of lunchtime conversations at the Humboldt Senior Resource Center, Eunice Noack and Gloria McGillvray were talking about how they wanted to die. "I certainly don’t want to lie in bed in a coma or in huge pain that can’t be treated for months," said Noack, […]
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Broadband to the Backwoods
The cream-colored box marked "RuralConnect™Trailblazer™" is just a display model mounted on a telescoping pole in the large, dark garage in what was once the Arcata headquarters of Yakima, now home to Carlson Wireless Technologies Inc. It’s one element in an exhibit the company is assembling for an upcoming telecom trade show. The square, gunmetal […]
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No Work? No Workers!
Vince Campbell, he just got sick of it. He’d worked for Eel River Sawmills for 20 years as the environment and safety director. A good job. But for years, it seemed, the wood products industry had been crashing around him. A mill closed here, another mill closed there. When it was Eel River’s time to […]
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Scotia Past
Throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s, HSU art professor Ellen Land-Weber made numerous visits to Scotia to document life in one of the last company towns in America through photographs and interviews. Only fragments of her work have been published; only a fragment of it is published here. In it, people of Scotia […]
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Which vets vend free?
Usually Henry Robertson is busy jar-ring organic olives, but lately he’s been sidetracked by a can of worms. In recent weeks Robertson, a Vietnam veteran and owner of Henry’s Olives in Cutten, has been wrangling with various local government agencies over their non-compliance with state law. The snafu surfaced last month when Robertson, 58, stopped […]
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Wounded Healers
For almost three years doctors had been assuring Bonnie Etz that the large lump she felt in her breast was probably just dense fiber, nothing to worry about. So when Etz found out in 2004 that she had a rare and advanced case of breast cancer she felt betrayed and distraught. But her husband was […]
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The goose conundrum
Hear that gabbling in the sky, that high rambunctious cry as if an entire city of laughing children is flying over? Or see that shifting V-tipped string of black stretched south to north? And another and another? Early in the morning, we stop what we’re doing to watch banner after noisy banner of Aleutian geese […]
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Water, Dirt and Time
Northcoast Journal Mailbox March 15, 2007 Editor: I represent the non-governmental defendants in the Mad River Bluff litigation featured in your last cover story and I would like to set the record straight ("Water, dirt and time," March 8). I feel sorry for all of the homeowners affected by the erosion of the Mad River […]
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Growing pains in Cutten
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 […]
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Stormy Weather at HSU
The rain was coming down in relentless sheets Monday, hard and steady upon the dozens of Humboldt State students who gathered midday on the quad, cardboard signs sagging, shoulders raised up to jaws for warmth, to rally about, um … Why were they rallying, exactly? For an observer, it was hard to understand the exact […]