The Battle of Point Reyes
Kicking old-school ranchers off their land to make Silicon Valley vegans happy
Injecting elk with birth control by helicopter
How do you tell the good cows from the bad cows?
Point Reyes is a 70,000-acre protrusion that sticks out of California into the Pacific Ocean, about an hour north of San Francisco. The Point Reyes National Seashore comprises 65,000 acres of that piece of land, as a unit of the National Park Service that currently makes no sense to anyone. To my eye, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, and I’ve been visiting it since I was a child. It calls to me.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Point Reyes was a kind of Miwok Santa Monica for thousands of years, a pleasant and densely populated oceanfront neighborhood. Then came the Franciscans, who brought the first few cows. In the 1830s, Mexican land grants turned the Point into ranchland. In the 1850s, litigation over those grants delivered most of the Point into the hands of a San Francisco law firm — Shafter, Shafter, Park, and Heydenfeldt. Shafter and Shafter then created a dairy …
Tansy
Miraculous flower essence works directly on self-awareness; 4 drops under the tongue will cure your procrastinating, turn you into a model of healthy vigor and drive.
The Carolingian emperor Charlemagne new its qualities. So did Hildegard von ingen, Madame Restell, and the herbalist Steve Horne.
Ask President Henry Dunster of Harvard, whose corpse it helped to preserve.
Two summers ago, my neighbor in Las Vegas — an eloquent and refined man with one of the sharpest minds (and tongues) of anyone I know, a Wildean wit — admitted to me that he was depressed, and that his doldrums took the form of playing video games. If Oscar Wilde himself had materialized and told me he was a big fan of Grand Theft Auto, I could not have been more surprised. My neighbor is impressively well read, a person who recaps Thackeray novels for me as he finishes them, and with whom I discussed Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady over Zoom during the most stultifying months of the pandemic. He has serious literary aspirations, often waking at the crack of dawn to write before opening the small business he owns with his husband. And somehow, with all this talent, intelligence, and promise, he was sitting around wasting time… playing video games. Reader, forgive me: I am …
The Cards We’re Dealt
There are beer nights, and there are whiskey nights
Three of a kind can beat four aces
Don’t be too quick to fold
My father’s one-bedroom apartment smells of spilled beer soured into the carpet and SpaghettiOs etched onto the sides of the microwave. My little legs swing back and forth on the edge of the rickety dining room chair that I somehow managed to drag over to the coffee table, where he sits across from me, his caramel eyes peeking out from behind five blue-backed Bicycle playing cards he holds before him like a fan.
I push another penny into the pot. He whistles.
“Not what I’da done,” he says.
“I don’t want to play anymore,” I say, imagining the royal flush he must have. I scatter my cards face up on the glass table and cross my arms, pouting in the way that only six-year-olds can.
“Son,” he says, his voice gentle but firm. “Pick ’em up.”
I do.
“You can’t be too quick to fold, boy,” he says, putting his cards down slowly, one at a time. “You never know what the other …
