A&E

For the last 20 or so years I have visited the Lower Klamath River as regularly as the salmon themselves. Each fall, during the month of September, I would take the boat and the camper up to a crowded campground. Bathrooms were typically less than clean and invariably there would be the raucous party right next door. I would launch the boat in the dark along with 50 or more other boats and make my way up stream while waiting in lineups to fish along the way. The scar of both tribal commercial and subsistence netting was visible the entire way. Several years back my wife declined to accompany me citing these and other detractions.

All ocean fishermen are the descendants of ancient sailors. That is how fishermen got around, by sail boat. Evolution has produced a fisherman that now uses power to get to and from the fishing grounds, but he is still a sailor at heart. So it comes as no surprise that four letter words dot the vocabulary of most fishermen much as they do today’s sailors. But I don’t think there is a more heinous four letter word in the fisherman’s vocabulary than the word “wind.” And yet to a sailor, that word is their boat life’s blood, a dichotomy for sure.

A disaster benefit of a different kind will take place at

Conjectures, Etceteras

The staccato kee…kee…kee alerted me to the young eagles

Climate change and other factors threaten our land, food and water security on a global scale. Nationally our health is deteriorating—there are 18.8 million people currently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, 7 million more people undiagnosed and 79 million people with pre-diabetes. Just the cost to treat the diagnosed was $245 billion in the United States in 2012, according to the CDC. Imagine the staggering figure if those 79 million people with pre-diabetes are added to the diagnosed figure. I could go on and on with sobering facts and statistics we all face.

When I was tapped last year to head up the Teen Poetry Slam at the Sonoma County Book Festival, I said yes – but I needed a crash course in slam. Asking around, one name kept popping up. “You need to talk to Brianna Sage.”