A MEMORIAL SERVICE for Freda Fox of Boonville who died last May at the age of 101 will be held October 5 at the Evergreen Cemetery in Boonville from 11am to noon. A get-together of family and friends will follow from 1-4pm at the Senior Center in Boonville.
PLEASE NOTE: Sunday, October 6th from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m the AV Elder Home is giving a tour of their new cottage, the pretty little new yellow structure next to the senior center. Board members will be on hand to answer questions. We hope community members will come to see what they have made happen.
SUNDAY, October 13th, 4 to 5:30 pm, is the AV Village’s October gathering: "What’s for Dinner? Nutritional Health as We Age" at Lauren's Restaurant will feature two local speakers on food and nutrition related topics. Refreshments provided.
BIG CROWD SUNDAY at the Boonville Fairgrounds for a Mexican rodeo, Michoacan vs. Guanajuato. Who won? Everyone!
MIKE MANNIX, Anderson Valley's popular man at the Anderson Valley Transfer Station, takes exception to our recent reference to "ever increasing dump fees." Mannix told us Monday that in fact the cost to dump a 30-gallon can at the Boonville dump has gone down 50 cents to $7.00 per can, compared to last year. He said that Jerry Ward and crew of Solid Waste of Willits, had recently come up with a more efficient routing system that saved on truck mileage so he reduced the cost of can dumping accordingly. Mannix acknowledged that the County would do well to consider some kind of subsidy to Mendo's many poor residents to keep big items from being left on the side of the road. Mannix added that of all the jobs he's held in Mendo over the last few years, working for Jerry Ward's Solid Waste of Willits operation is the best of the bunch.
IT WAS HEARTENING to read the enthusiastic reviews for the freshly revived Caspar Inn, once Coast night life's beating heart under the great publican, Peter Lit. The new owners are off to a great start, and here's hoping they prosper in a tough business.
MENTIONED to a friend that I thought the multiple agencies issuing red fire alerts was confusing. He replied: "Weather is hard to predict precisely. I don't have any sympathy for them but PG&E is in a tough spot. I remember after the Santa Rosa fire, people complained that PG&E didn't power down the lines beforehand. But hindsight makes it an easy call. People are very dependent on their juice these days, and will howl if PG&E flips the switch on them, especially if it goes on for days. (I was struck by the fact that PG&E wants two days to inspect the lines, after the weather event is over. That makes for a long outage.) If PG&E was a true public utility, the lines would be buried."
USED TO BE on extremely hot days like we had last week, the newspapers would run photos of eggs frying on sidewalks with a guy in a cook's hat holding a spatula and grinning into the camera. That's my memory anyway. But when I went on the internet to google the alleged phenomena, I learned that it’s possible, but not probable, that you can fry an egg on a sidewalk during a hot day. Source: Library of Congress! According to our national librarian, eggs need to reach a temperature of 158°F to cook through. Sidewalks can usually get up to 145*F. The hotter the day, the more likely your egg will fry. Using a good heat conductor (i.e. a frying pan) is also important. A concrete sidewalk isn’t the best conductor of heat. Neither is blacktop pavement, but blacktop will get warmer than the sidewalk. Even hotter still is the hood of a car, which is more akin to a frying pan. It was 107 in the shade outside our office door, but I couldn't find an egg to crack on the hood of the Silver Bullet, and anyway wouldn’t have wanted to provoke my loyal transportation for the past 295,000 miles.
AS KATY TAHJA NOTES: “This has been the fastest transition from summer to autumn I ever experienced...one day it's warm and balmy...two days later a chilling wind.”
NOTICED THIS FACEBOOK LAMENT from a Boonville person: "After the recent paving along Highway 128, our driveway now has a significant drop with no transition. I looked up the California guidelines for paving and on page 200-32 of the link below states:
‘Driveways connecting to State highways shall be paved a minimum of 20 feet from the edge of shoulder or to the edge of State right of way, whichever is less to minimize or eliminate gravel from being scattered on the highway and to provide a paved surface for vehicles and bicycles to accelerate and merge. Where larger design vehicles are using the driveway (e.g., dump trucks, flatbed trucks, moving vans, etc.), extend paving so the drive wheels will be on a paved surface when accelerating onto the roadway. For paving at crossings with Class I bikeways (Bike Paths), see Index 1003.1(6)
205.5 Financial Responsibility
Reconstructing or relocating any access openings, private road connections, or driveways required by revisions to the State highway facility should be done at State expense by the State or its agents.’
Does anyone else have this issue? We plan to submit a request to have it fixed."
PRETTY SURE that Big Orange will get to it, but until they do the inconvenience is indeed inconvenient. Odd that CalTrans doesn't get it all done at the same time.
DR. BURNS FROM MENDOCINO ANIMAL HOSPITAL will be at the Anderson Valley Farm Supply seeing patients on Thursday, October 24th and again on Thursday, November 14, 2019. She's there between 2:00 and 4:00 pm. People can always check the events section of our Facebook page for more information - it's always posted when we're going to be there. (Michelle Fetzer, Mendocino Animal Hospital)
LIBRARY LINES. Summer has sped by and it is time to reopen the A.V. Library. We will be open on Tuesday October 8th from 1-4 p.m. Saturday hours are 12:30-2:30. So round up all the books you checked out, and bring them back. We have purchased a number of new books by our favorite authors and few new authors to get familiar with. Look forward to seeing everyone. (Liz Dusenberry)
THE ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE. The AV Village’s long calendar of local events for moms and pops and other age-challenged valley-ites (and others, of course) can be seen at: https://andersonvalley.helpfulvillage.com/events
Or by contacting coordinator Anica Williams at: andersonvalleyvillage@gmail.com, 707-684-9829
DAN FIELD of Covelo called the other day to say that he remembers the Hendy Woods Hermit when he spent his summers as a ranchhand at the Tumbling McD Ranch on Indian Creek, Philo. Mr. Field said he and his co-workers had heard rumors about the Hendy Woods Hermit over the early years but they never believed it. “It sounded crazy,” Field recalls. Occasionally his coworkers would come back from a trail ride and say they thought they saw somebody out there in the woods near Hendy or around Edmeades’ old vineyard, but still nobody believed the sighting were the Hermit. “One day one of my coworkers came back and he was white as a sheet; he said he'd seen the guy. We still didn't believe it. The description was unbelievable.” The Hermit didn’t want to be seen and was very reclusive. He was kinda like a local Sasquatch.
“I was going through there one day and the trail had changed due to vegetation and weather and overgrowth and I went a different path. I saw some smoke coming out of a tall tree stump. I thought it was some kids playing with matches or something. When I came back later that day there was still this wisp of smoke coming out of the tree stump. Turned out it was his hut! I didn’t know what to think. Something was wrong. I rode up a little closer and the hair stood up on the back of my neck. There he was! It's true! He was dressed all in burlap. His clothes were burlap patches sewn together. His feet were wrapped in burlap too. I stopped short because I was so shocked. As I sat there on my horse, he came up and started speaking in a language I couldn't understand. He was holding my bridal and bit and looking at it like he was amazed at the fine leather work. I thought he asked where I was from and I told him I was from Tumbling McD Ranch. I asked where he was from. He went back and forth not understanding each other a few times. Finally he announced loudly, ‘I come from America!’ There he was. I came back and told everybody I'd seen him. My uncle was one of the ranch foremen. Later, we started bringing him food and basic supplies. He made a point of asking for cigarettes. But we couldn't understand him much at all. We would see him maybe twice a month after that. One time I was taking a string of kids on a horseback ride out in the area and they got to see it him and it was quite a thrill for them. Generally speaking, we tried to avoid him. We wanted to leave him alone and not invade his privacy. This went on for several years into the early 80s.”
“This photograph was taken in 1981. On the back of the photo somebody wrote:
‘Petro — Russian emigrant
15 years lived in Hendy Woods State Park.
He died a month after this was taken.
Fall '81’
“I believe he did die about a month later. He didn't seem very well-nourished. Over the years, he started being a little bolder and wearing regular pants and shoes. One time we came to see him and he was very excited to see us. So we got down off our horses and tried to talk for awhile. Apparently, over the winter a nearby fir tree fell down near his hut in a big storm and a big branch from that tree hit his hut. He’d been in there during a terrible big storm with lightning and thunder nearby. After we moved away, we heard that a Hendy Woods ranger was looking after him sort of, bringing him food and stuff. That Ranger was also the guy who brought him to the Ukiah Hospital after he got real sick where he eventually died. The entire experience made quite an impression on me. I'll never forget him or his hut. Technically his hut was not in the Park, but right near the Park border on Masonite land. So the State Parks people couldn't really claim he was their problem. They didn't know what to do. One time we heard he somehow started a fire in the area but they put it out. I'm not sure how that ended up. They might have brought him in for questioning and then decided to drop it and leave him be.”
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