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 […]
News
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Roasted
On the stand last week, Pamela Olsen, co-owner with her husband of a small coffee roasting company called Bayside Roasters, cried when she recounted the feelings she had gone through in November and December of 2005. On the Sunday before Thanksgiving of that year, she got a call from one of her customers telling her […]
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Reggae River Rising
The battle over the future of the multi-million dollar Reggae on the River music festival down Southern Humboldt way rages on. After devolving into a nasty war of words in the blogosphere, with commenters taking pot shots under the cloak of anonymity, flames rose high last week with a pair of announcements that came almost […]
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Home for Good
In her one-story Trinidad home overlooking the Pacific, 61-year-old Pat Morales leaves her bedroom door open at night. That way she can hear when her elderly mother wakes up and starts her odd, late-night routines down the hall – rearranging the closet, shuffling tax forms from the 1970s, packing suitcases. When her mother’s acting like […]
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Got contract?
If negotiations between Humboldt Creamery and the union that represents most of its employees were not acidic enough, a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board threatens to sour the process further. Last Friday, a day after the Fernbridge dairy cooperative’s union employees voted 94-1 to authorize a strike, Redding-based Teamsters Local 137 fired […]
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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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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 […]