Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2018 i Journal of Alta California

“When in Doubt, Go Higher” — Mountain Gazette motto Our masthead lists people whose work and life inspired us. Among them we honor Mike Moore, the founding editor of the Mountain Gazette. Mike was a true creature of words. He was an avid reader with wide-ranging interests, but especially fiction, as well as non-fiction reporting and essays. As an editor, he discovered new writers and was often the first to recognize original talents long before they became much better known. His conversation was laced with self-deprecating irony. He tended to tell you he liked a story by talking about when it would run. He’d let you know he didn’t like it via sideways remarks, a general lack of enthusiasm, a proposal to make a few small changes. Or “Let’s go…

Most farmers are up before the crack of dawn. But the sun is already shining in the woodsy Bay Area enclave of Woodside when Matt Barnard gets up — a pretty good gig for a farmer. Of course, Barnard’s 50,000 square feet of leafy vegetables and herbs is no ordinary farm. Barnard isn’t exactly working the land either, at least not in the traditional sense. His farm occupies a warehouse in South San Francisco about the size of a Walmart. Inside the enormous building, leafy green vegetables grow on towers 12 to 15 feet tall. Perhaps even stranger than the sight of thousands of plants growing on vertical racks is the complete absence of natural sunlight. Forget photosynthesis as you learned it in elementary school. You can also forget about…

When you’re alive you get to recognize hematite, azurite, smoked quartz lovely, eh? in sticky black silk And watch simplicity become complex in management “Only bow when bowed to” Go look at the sunset Inspiration for a bunch of numbers heralding the close of the Xian calendar and new age metaphysical smoothies Suddenly, I looked up, and everyone had white hair People go in and out of your life, and your life is a room filled with flowers and a kitchen cooking supper and you have wrested the inscrutable from the obvious or the other way around We are called the exquisite bloom of February We are called wild and grow freely Very very annoying are people who arrive an hour and a half late for lunch…

On Feb. 20, 2005, author Hunter S. Thompson died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head at his home in Woody Creek, Colo. His son Juan and daughter-in-law Jennifer were in the next room. His wife Anita, who was at the Aspen Club, was on the phone with him as he cocked the gun. Very soon afterward, San Francisco’s own Warren Hinckle started work on a memorial volume, soliciting tributes from a vast array of Hunter’s friends and collaborators. Hinckle had first worked with Thompson in 1970. As co-founder and editor of the magazine Scanlan’s Monthly, he matched illustrator Ralph Steadman with Thompson to produce “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” (1970), the first work of Gonzo journalism. Naturally, Warren felt he should also write a memorial essay…

Fred Lyon lives for the night. For seven decades, Lyon has been shooting photographs of San Francisco after dark — landmarks that look very different in the shadows; nooks and crannies that aren’t so obscure in daylight; people out for the evening who become enigmatic when captured by Lyon’s lens. His noir photography shows the city in a very different light. “This town is so easy to make the case for noir,” Lyon says. “The nighttime is a parallel to the fog. It covers up the works of man visually.… It gives them a romanticized look.” Lyon was born in San Francisco 93 years ago and has been there ever since. He became a photographer, he admits, to get girls, after noticing the success of a school classmate who had…

John Muir would have loved “The California Field Atlas,” a compellingly poetic exploration of the living environment of his beloved adopted state. Muir famously observed that, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” The “Field Atlas” is organized around the deep interconnections of life, geography and climate, echoing Muir’s intuition. As author Obi Kaufmann writes in his introduction, “I want to coax this single piece of the universe into opening up its secrets.” Like Muir, both Kaufmann and his “Field Atlas” defy categorization. Muir was a naturalist, writer, geologist, botanist, inventor, engineer and environmentalist. Kaufman is a painter, poet, topographer, natural historian, activist and one-time tattoo artist who happens to have a love of science and a knack…

The Blackwing pencils arrive in a slender box, with the scent of California cedar when the lid is removed. When you hold one of these 8-inch writing tools, take care to sharpen the Japanese graphite to a fine point. Then make the first notation on a blank page, remembering the company motto: “Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed.” It’s never easy to replace a legend. Especially if the instrument has inspired such writers as John Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov, Broadway composer Stephen Sondheim, actress Faye Dunaway, and Chuck Jones, the father of Bugs Bunny and other Looney Tunes. But that’s what California Cedar Products Co. in Stockton is doing with its new line of Blackwing pencils. “We’re targeting people who haven’t picked up a pencil in years,” says brand manager…

When Ruth Bancroft was 64 years old, she got down on her hands and knees and etched tiny holes throughout a chunk of her family’s land in Walnut Creek. Into each went a small cactus, succulent or other arid-climate plant. She’d spent 20-some years acquiring such curiosities, stashing them in four-inch pots in a maze of glass and shade houses built by her husband. Despite their glacially slow growth rates (they’re not called century plants for nothing), Ruth gave each specimen the room it needed to reach maturity — a guess, in many instances, as these were rare finds in Northern California in 1972. When she finished, tiny plants dotted three acres of mounded planting islands. This new garden pushed every limit. Walnut Creek was too cold and wet in…

All but forgotten today, Kate Crane Gartz (1865-1949) was an epitome of a famous American type: the wealthy progressive firebrand. Heiress to a Chicago plumbing-supply fortune, she railed against injustice in eloquent, impassioned letters to Jazz Age government officials and newspapers — written from her mansion in Altadena. Gartz often was described as a “millionaire socialist” or a “parlor Bolshevik,” and a 1923 collection of her letters was titled “Parlor Provocateur, Or, From Salon to Soap-box.” Gartz’s preferred title was “Letters of Protest.” TO LOS ANGELES JUDGE FRANK WILLIS, APRIL 22, 1920 Your Honor: I entered the sanctuary, and gazed upward to the stained glass dome, upon which were inscribed four words: Peace, Justice, Truth, Law — and I felt hopeful. … I listened to the prosecutors; the law in…

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom remains the frontrunner in the field for the 2018 gubernatorial election, and it’s looking more and more like he and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa will be facing each other in a Democratic runoff in November. That likelihood increased after billionaire Tom Steyer opted out and former Republican Congressman Doug Ose jumped in, further dividing the already small GOP voter pool. — Dan Walters GAVIN NEWSOM Odds: 3-2 (Previously 3-2) ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA Odds: 3-1 (Previously 4-1) JOHN CHIANG Odds: 5-1 (Previously 5-2) DELAINE EASTIN Odds: 11-1 (Previously 9-1) DOUG OSE Odds: 900-1 (New entry) JOHN COX Odds: 1,000-1 (Previously 1,000-1) TRAVIS ALLEN Odds: 1,000-1 (Previously 1,000-1) TOM STEYER Scratched…

The Bayou Swamis had people dancing to zydeco at Fort Bragg’s 24th Annual Abalone Cook-Off last October, but even the band’s squealing accordion couldn’t lift the Mendocino County gathering’s grim mood. Abalone is California’s rarest seafood delicacy and holds an almost mystical allure for many Californians. Stalking, preparing and feasting on abalone has long drawn people together on the California coast in a primal ritual that’s not easily given up. Decades back, adventurous cognoscenti could slosh into the surf from the Tijuana Sloughs to the Oregon border and pluck species of this giant snail from submerged rocks. Scuba divers found the pickin’ even easier. A commercial industry thrived. Longer ago, even before the first Spanish mast appeared off the California coast, Native Americans picked abalone from tide pools for food.…

It’s unseasonably warm for a mid-October evening. The air is still, except for the occasional gust of wind. The only sound in Rio de Los Angeles State Park, aside from the faint din of nearby traffic, comes from a handful of men playing a pickup game on the basketball court. Beyond the park lies a set of abandoned railroad tracks and, beyond that, the concrete-lined Los Angeles River meanders toward a highway interchange near Dodger Stadium. A homeless man moves in and out of the shadows as he rummages through a series of trash cans scattered along the edge of a grass lawn. A gray-haired coyote with splotches of orange-brown fur trails patiently just a few paces behind. “There’s no way he’d be following him,” says National Park Service researcher…

When two massive objects, such as black holes, orbit one another, they send out massive ripples in spacetime, called gravitational waves. The crests and troughs of these waves stretch and distort space and time. Researchers use 2 1/2-mile-long detectors to capture these waves. Lasers measure the tiny changes in the length of the huge arms of the detectors. LIGO has detected waves roughly equal to the distance between the two detectors, about 1,850 miles apart. The waves stretch each detector by about 1/10,000th the width of a proton. 1 Light is shot from one source to a beam splitter, where it is sent down two identical but perpendicular arms. 2 At the end of each 2 1/2-mile arm, a mirror reflects the light back to the source. 3 A gravitational…

In the 1960s, the San Francisco Giants were poised to become the best team in baseball. Not only did their roster sport such fan favorites as Willie McCovey and Willie Mays, but the team had positioned itself to take advantage of the new wave of talent coming into the game — the Latino ballplayer. The Dodgers’ Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in 1947, opening the door to other players of color. “The Latin player then took the game to another level,” says Hall of Fame player and baseball executive Joe Torre. And nobody had more, or better, Latino players in the early 1960s than the Giants. Pitcher Juan Marichal, for example, recorded a one-hitter in his very first major league start and won 20 or more games six…

David L. Ulin is the author or editor of 10 books, including “Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles.” A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches at the University of Southern California. Terry McDonell was Editor of Esquire and Sports Illustrated and co-founder of LitHub. His memoir is “The Accidental Life: An Editor’s Notes on Writing and Writers.” Laurie J. Flynn is a writer and book editor who has covered Silicon Valley for The New York Times and was an editor at the San Jose Mercury News. Penni Gladstone documents the social and political issues that define our times. She is an award-winning photojournalist, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice.…

Warren Hinckle wrote like an angry angel when he felt like it, which was often, but that was not what made him the hero of freewheeling journalists. Writers and editors emulated his spirit, studying his many gifts and tricks, from hyperbolic irony to self-plagiarism — both of which I am employing here. Warren was a wonder of eccentricity, and his recent posthumous books, “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?” and the anthology of his writing, “Ransoming Pagan Babies,” show off the reach of his genius. As an editor, Warren was a master of mix, filling his issues with journalism, humor and twisted history — a high-low range that called to mind Claude Levi-Strauss’ “The Raw and The Cooked” — the idea being that the reach between opposites is both amusing and…

IMAGINE THE CITY OF THE FUTURE: Los Angeles, say, or San Francisco — an urban landscape in which the streets have been reclaimed as public space. Visualize autonomous vehicles serving residents and making deliveries on demand. Envision a complex ecosystem of public and private transit: buses, light rail, subways, ride-sharing. Think about the use of bike paths, about sidewalks as pedestrian corridors. Consider mobility hubs — built-out transit stations that offer expanded services, such as bike-sharing, electric vehicle charging stations and ride-share access, all integrated via technology. This vision seems close at hand and yet, at the same time, miles away. As cities have been revitalized in the past 20 years, urban transportation has come to a critical juncture — a crossroads, if you will. Our cities are gridlocked, with…

It was 1967 in San Francisco, and 21-year-old Jann Wenner was seeing his generation flood the world with two roaring currents: alternative culture and radical politics. Jefferson Airplane was filling the Fillmore West. Timothy Leary was urging 30,000 at the Human Be-In to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Bus tours of the Haight brought hundreds of out-of-towners to gawk at the long-haired freaks. It was the Summer of Love. On the political side, thousands were marching with the Mobilization. Black Panther Bobby Seale was recruiting at San Francisco State. Mario Savio was going to jail for a Free Speech rally at Berkeley. It was The Movement. Wenner was an eyewitness. A Berkeley dropout, he got a job from Warren Hinckle at Sunday Ramparts. Wenner injected his passion for the…

Classic rock doesn’t get much more classic than the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Multi-hit, multiplatinum, it was an essential part of any respectable dorm-room music collection in the late 1970s or early ‘80s. And its iconic songs play on forever on today’s oldies radio stations and Spotify playlists. But “Hotel California” is more than a mere classic rock album. It also sits at a critical turning point in the history of popular music. When it was released in late 1976, it represented the pinnacle of what was known variously as country rock or California rock, a tuneful, smooth, slightly twangy, definitely mellow sound that dominated the mid-’70s, exemplified by the likes of Poco, Buffalo Springfield, Jackson Browne and Linda Ronstadt (who had once employed the Eagles as a backing band). In…