A young journalist asked me this question: How has the Valley changed since you arrived? Well, having a greenhouse full of marijuana used to be frowned upon… When I landed at Santa Ynez Elementary in the fall of 1966, I was a 13-year-old eighth-grader. The girls, including my future wife, ignored me completely. The boys […]

Let’s begin at the beginning. As the name implies, that might be Point Conception, where the roiling winds and cold which drive the morning fog up the Santa Ynez River are born in a maelstrom of froth and foam at the churning Pacific. Or the day when I first rode over San Marcos Pass, and […]

Benjamin Harry Etling Sr. passed away peacefully Monday, September 28, 2020, at Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara. Survivors include his sons Benjamin (Dianne),  Robert, William (Debra), and Bert (Laurel) Etling; granddaughters Lisa and Leah (Patrick) Etling McElearney; grandson Will (Abigail) Etling; and great-grandchildren Laurel Etling Socolow and Mercer and Rowan Etling. His beloved wife Marion […]

Green is gone, the flowers are fried, hay bales fill the fields, time to bring in the sheaves. There’s a tomb raider aspect to entering the vast shadowy spaces of a big barn, mysterious shafts of mote-speckled sunshine lighting warm, smooth wood, dusty antiques forgotten in the spider-webbed recesses. Crop circles aren’t from outer space, […]

Thank you Geoffrey Chaucer. We’re running ahead of merrie olde England’s flower sched, but looking good nevertheless. My favorite is the Buck Rogers space ship shaped shooting star.

A New England village forgotten by time. 

The Andivan rolled to the Sierras, about five hours away.

I’ve talked about the Bacara Beach walk before here; today we see what lies beyond the pier. It takes a low tide to get there without wet feet. The coast opens out into a snug little bay, with the right slide called Naples breaking temptingly in the distance. 

One of the great benefits of living in the SYV is the nearby seashore, where you can park for free and hike for miles without seeing a soul. When the tide is right, under hot, ice blue skies, amid mussels dripping salt spume and blinking in the sunshine, flanked by an ancient beach – now […]

The news that the lens from the lighthouse at Point Conception is moving to the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum reminded me of this article I wrote a while back. The Chumash Indians revere it as the door into eternity, the jumping-off place to the afterlife. For mariners it is a place of fear, a tempestuous, treacherous, fearsome, […]