Boom or Bluff?
Natural gas prospectors are swarming the Eel River Valley, making some folks hot.
Cover Story
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…
Trouble in Sunny Fortuna
Trouble, oh we got trouble, right here in the Friendly City! With a capital "T" and that rhymes with "P" and that stands for pool, that stands for pool. We’ve surely got trouble! Right here in the Friendly City. Gotta figger out a way to keep the young ones moral after school! Trouble, trouble, trouble,…
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…
Fuzzy logic
The Humboldt Watershed Council organized it, and two labor organizations have since signed on as co-sponsors – the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment and the Humboldt-Del Norte Central Labor Council. We’re talking about the workshop happening this Friday night at the Fortuna Riverlodge, 6-8 p.m.: "Bankruptcy 101: Understanding the Palco Chapter 11 Case."…
Nuts and bolts
The problem with a daily newspaper format is the reporters feel compelled to report news daily, and readers get the impression that they need a daily news feed. In a rural area, where for 50 years people from Cloverdale to Trinidad have talked about the anticipated start of the Willits Bypass, how important is it…
Trinity Alps Rambles
When some of us think of the Alps, we envision long waits in our cars as fire crews remove logs that have trundled hundreds of feet down to the 299 from blackened hillsides that lead up to the vertiginous slopes of the remote Wilderness Area. What the uninitiated don’t know is that the Alps are…
Painting in Paris
It was raining the day we first met Axel Marchand. Micki and I had taken shelter under a long canopy with a tin roof, in an area just off the Champs Elysees, after getting rained out of the place we’d originally planned to paint that day. We started new paintings under the shelter, with the…
Polenta: Variations on a Theme
Polenta is one of those ageless culinary lords, like bread. It has sprung from the hunger of mankind, and without apparent effort has always carried with it a feeling of strength and dignity and well-being. M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf Polenta is an ancient Mediterranean dish. The Greeks, Romans and others who lived…
