While visiting Sacramento a few weeks ago, Patient X, a Humboldt County resident who asked that her name not be published, went to a medical marijuana dispensary to fill her prescription, which she uses for migraine headaches. In her two years as a card-carrying medical cannabis user, the college-aged woman purchased the drug in dispensaries […]
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Posted inNews
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 […]
Posted inEat + Drink
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 […]
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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 […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Dream cafe
I don’t really consider myself a coffee connoisseur, but I’d have to say it was the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had. My old friend Arno Holschuh made it for me at a new place in town. If you’ve been reading the Journal for a while you’ll remember Arno. He and I were the […]
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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 […]
Posted inEat + Drink
Spaghetti col Tonno
As you drive towards Trinidad harbor you can’t miss the sign for Katy’s Smokehouse, and on my first visit to Humboldt County nine years ago, I didn’t. Nowadays a pleasant two-mile walk along shady Stagecoach Road brings me from our house to town, and I have become a regular customer at Katy’s. Initially I would […]
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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 […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Logger Heaven
There it was, corralled behind a thin rope inside a grassy expanse at Redwood Acres: the retired figure-conscious logger’s dreambike. No, nothing noisy or fume-spewing, chrome-boasting or rubber-laying – those kinds of bikes are for sissies. This was a deceptively delicate, spindly blond wood affair, stationary, with the playful look of an old Flexible Flyer© […]
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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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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 […]