The guardian angel
Tailing the woman who puts Eureka City Schools on the front lines of homeless services
Cover Story
The guardian angel
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…
Beachcombing
It seemed like a good place to look for the dead. The tide was ebbing, leaving behind orange crab casings, their goathead patterns staring blankly up at the gray-milk sky; huge clam shells jutting from the sand like small white tombstones; and sand dollar skeletons slowly fading from purple to bleach-bone white. A bitter north…
Peanut gallery
‘Bloodbath On Buhner St.’ ‘Seaport Satirist Shocker’ ‘Bombastic Blogger Is City’s Legal Beagle’ Yes, everyone has most likely already heard the news, seeing as how it prompted a local media blitz the likes have which have not been seen for about a year (nearly to the day, in fact). The enigmatic blogger previously known as…
Recovering from the Freeze
At the plant sale in Trinidad a couple weeks ago, everyone was talking about what they’d lost during the freeze. Many of us were still having a hard time believing that it had happened at all. "It was just one freeze after another," someone would say, shaking her head. "Night after night. It never let…
Freedom to Wonder
This is a story about place and the relationship of two artists to their place. One grew up moving around the United States and eventually around the world. His father worked for the United Nations and so the artist, as a boy, lived in Burma, Bangladesh, India, Uganda and Turkey. He grew up under the…
Home Cooking
The actors, the characters and the plot are all long forgotten, but there’s one scene of a movie that has stuck with me. A man – a chef, or at least a good cook – is world-weary and physically exhausted, but hungry. He goes to the refrigerator and pulls out a steak. He takes out…
420?
If you’re in the know you can imagine why four-twenty is such a big deal here in Humboldt – and it has nothing to do with blackbirds baked in a pie. For the uninitiated, 420 (or 4:20, or 4/20) is code for getting baked, as in the consumption of marijuana. Exactly why is lost somewhere…
