Slideshow

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 […]

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 […]

The guitar player is dressed head to toe in black. Flanked by a drummer and a key-board player at a Eureka coffee-house on a Saturday night, he rips into a set of music he describes as “zombie surf rock.” He starts with a number called “Zombie Songs” and works his way through “Haunt This World” […]

Making a building is a loud undertaking. Drills whine and hammers strike up an odd beat, quickening at the end of each sequence to drive the nails flush. Compressors kick, their motors changing pitch. The low light of a gray day is just enough to illuminate the dust. Finishing time at the emerging store – […]

The Old Tomlinson Ranch, July 2006. The Wilsons had slept hard, exhausted by their two-day journey up from Ojai and the fiasco they’d had with the moving truck. The truck was too tall to pass under the bridge that crosses over the road at Lady Bird Johnson Grove, and they’d had to bring in a […]

It was Halloween, and almost everyone was having a fine, silly time inside the big old house in Eureka. Never mind whose house. All that matters, really, is that despite the general merriment, the party had its scary moments. Take, for instance, the sudden conversation that sprang up in the kitchen among a number of […]