While driving the Alderpoint road on my way to court one day recently, somewhere on the descent into Garberville, near the Paradise Ranch, I saw this hillside of sweetpea flowers. In real life the colors are more intense than the photo.



And as I went to Yreka last week (17th June, I think) I drove up the Klamath canyon on Rt 96 and saw some rafters. Makes me lonesome, as the poet said, cause I'm a rafter myself sometimes. Or rather, I was. I met my sweethart on this stretch of the Klamath way back deep in the 20th century. I was an inflatable captain, she a student at the UC Extention. Today I'd no doubt be arrested for taking advantage of my exalted position of power, but then all was joy, and we've been together about 30 years now. Here's a couple of rafts racing as they paddle that last long stretch to camp.



PS She was in the adult division of the extention classes.

A bit dramatic I guess, as a title. The fires are still miles from the ranch. From Pratt Mountain as I came home today (after winning a victory in Santa Rosa where the air was approaching Chinese pollution levels) I got this shot of the Paradise fire



And this one of a fire somewhere in the south, probably Mendocino County. This looks scarier but maybe that's because it is closer. Come to think of it, that's scarier.



Latest radio reports are about 100 fires in Mendo, 40+ in Humboldt, a few out, many small, but a few getting up there. Notice the plume from the Paradise fire is going South. The first shot Saturday it was going North. A wind has come up. It's blowing away from Alderpoint, that's good. Our air is clear now. But it's blowing, and that's bad.

So I'm on KMUD Saturday morning 9:30-11:30 am. I can see fires burning in the coast range as I drove over Pratt Mountain coming in to Redway. When I get to the station, Dana, the dj before me, tells me she's been getting calls for several hours telling her about wildfires all over the area. We have reports of up to 40 fires from lightning strikes overnight. There is absolutely no news from those who are paid to know about this stuff: the CDF doesn't answer its phone on the weekends it appears. Their website is full of outdated info about fires in other places. Perhaps I'm just a bit frustrated, but it does seem that the county emergency services should have some sort of plan for getting emergency information out to the radio stations who can broadcast the information to people who can use it. This business with no one answering the phone on the weekend just doesn't cut it. They should be contacting us, actually, and should be appreciative of the fact that we are willing to reach out to them.

When we had a spate of lightning wildfires in 1990 we lost thousands of acres, and had an officialdom that was unable to accept or make use of volunteers whose work might have saved some or much of that land. We had earthquakes c 1992 that showed our information system didn't work (it was centralized and the main transmission tower was damaged). Meetings were held to fix the system.

Now its 2008, 16-18 years after these failures of the emergency information systems, and KMUD is still not getting notifications or news about fires that anyone who goes outside can see are going on. Perhaps its time to get things together?

FOLLOW UP 5PM. The WIllits News online posted an article about 4:40 pm about the 100 fires in Mendocino county. The Times-Standard has nothing on Humboldt County.

FOLLOW UP SUNDAY 2PM: The T-S has an article posted today. Of course so does the Associated Press so I don't know how to apportion the credit. The air was thick with smoke here in the valley of the main Eel late evening, and the sunlight seems filtered today. Most of the out of county press is focused on out of county lightning fires, with the AP worried about wine country.

FOLLOW UP SUNDAY 9 PM. I drove from Alderpoint to Santa Rosa this afternoon. Coming over Pratt Moutain I could still see the smoke plume from the fire on the east side of the Lost Coast range. The further south I got the worse the smoke in the air was. In Ukiah where I stopped for dinner at the Safeway (sandwich) I could smell the woodsmoke as I left the Safeway, and the air was densely hazy. It reminded me of China, but as the sun was still too bright to stare directly into, Ukiah was not quite as bad as X'ian (you have to be there to believe it). It is worse here in Santa Rosa, a large fire west of 101 around the Russian river (I think) is really pumping out smoke.

I saw two convoys of fire engines heading north as I drove south. i hope some are going to Sohum.

If you are an afficiando of medical marijuana law, perhaps you know that the situation has gone from really strange to total chaos. There was a conservative backlash going on during the past few months with Mendocino County's new DA and Sheriff backing an attempt to destroy the county's barely reasonable medical limits with something called Measure B. It may have passed, we're awaiting final results of the vote count.

But that no longer matters because People v. Kelly overturned the statute that the limits were based on, as unconsitutional. At the moment the limits are whatever you can convince the jury is reasonable. That means that for practicaly purposes Measure B is meaningless, as were recent attempts to roll back Del Norte County's fairly decent limits.

Two things are obvious: 1 - Each county needs bright line prima facie prosecution limits, and those should probably be something along the line of 100 square feet of indoor canopy, 6 mature outdoor plants, and 3 pounds of bud. Up to that point, no prosecution; over it, lets see case by case. There is no movement to establish something this reasonable, or anything like it.

2- The jury instructions for medical marijuana cases are a mess. They were a mess before Kelly, and now they are a real mess. I was one of a group of lawyers who met in SF yesterday to see about coming up with some unified suggestions for changing the standard jury instructions in medical marijuana cases. Defense lawyers are individualists, their practices are mostly solo and they depend on a strong sense that they are right. Not the greatest formula for a successful meeting, and it turned out to be quite chaotic - reminded me of Earth First ! strategy meetings I attended 18 years ago. But we got something done, and will probably succeed in our mission.

On the way back I stopped at Patronas in Ukiah. Mixed review this time. Food was great (sausage pizza, bubbly) service was not. This was the second time I have come in to see a room of empty tables only to be told there are none available and I'd have to sit at the bar. Last time i didn't have time, this time I gave it a shot. Bar service is poor - I never got bread, for instance - but the irritating thing is that some of the tables for 2 stayed empty the entire time I was there. They are empty when I arrived and they were empty when I left. So, why wasn't I sitting at one? I've asked the restaurant that, too. Both times the person greeting me at the door was a man, maybe he's the owner and has his own system? Right now I'm dropped Patrona's rank from "must eat there if you can" to "a good choice along with the Thai restaurant and the Japanese restaurant."

PS for you trivia fans, one sentence in this posting echoes a famous line from The Mummy. Extra points for the first person to tell me which one it is.

from John Muir's Travels in Alaska (1914) but citing a dance he saw in 1879 on his first trip:

"The dances seemed to me wonderfully like those of the American Indians in general, a monotonous stamping accompanied by hand-clapping, head-jerking, and explosive grunts kept in time to grim drum beats. Drumming in 2008 is steady, and unvarying, but I wouldn't call it "grim". I'm not sure what he meant.



A dancer before drummers in Celebration parade. The dancing today is done in time to an unvarying straight ahead drum beat, movements made in time to the music, and often done with bent knees, the head jerking goes on, but I don't recall any hand-clapping except sometimes from the audience



The chief dancer and leader scattered great quantitiy of downy feathers on everybody like a snow storm as blessings on everybody,

while all chanted "Hee-ee-ah-ah, hee-ee-ah-ah" jumping up and down until all were bathed in perspiration.

The songs we heard began with a verse of what appeared to be non-language sylables, which would be repeated after each song verse, of which there seemed to be but 2 or 3, and then the sylabic chorus, the whole thing repeated over and over during the duration of the dance. With a bit of work i could probably work out what song Muir heard.

"After the dancing excellent imitations were given of the gait, gestures, and behavior of several animals under different circumstances - walking, hunting, capturing, and devouring their prey etc."



This seems to be pretty much a lost art. We saw some flying bird imitations, and the Raven character in the various groups almost always imitates ravens on the ground. But the wolf dancers mainly howled. They were not solo, but part of a larger dancing group so perhaps we just didn't see this part of the dancing.

While all were quietly seated, waiting to see what next was going to happen, the door of the big house was suddenly thrown open and in bounced a bear, so true to life in form and gestures we were all startled, though it was only a bear-skin nicely fitted on a man who was intimately acquainted with the animals and knew how to imitate them. The bear shuffled dow into the middle of the floor and made the motion of jumping into a stream and catching a wooden salmon that was ready for him, carrying it out onto the bank, throwing his head around to listen and see if any one was coming, then tearing it to pieces, jerking his head from side to side, looking and listening in fear of hunters' rifles. Besides the bear dance there were porpoise and deer dances with one of the party imitating the animals by stuffed specimens with an Indian inside, and the movements were so accurately imitated that they seemed the real thing.