The cold, rainy weather and holiday season may have you thinking about roasting chestnuts on an open fire.

While some folks may be using natural gas-fueled fireplaces, some still use wood-burning fireplaces. The U.S. Fire Administration says heating fires account for 36 percent of residential home fires in rural areas every year.

Emergency Management officials have some reminders to make your fireplace and fire safe:

• Have your fireplace cleaned by a professional. A chimney sweep will clean out the entire chimney. Many use a high-powered vacuum so that there is no soot or dust entering the home. Some sweeps also offer a series of inspections of the chimney, interior flue and checks of attic spaces for any damaged areas that will need repair.
• Choose firewood carefully. Seasoned firewood — wood that has been allowed to dry out for at least six months — is the best and safest option. Buying one or two cords of wood may take the average fireplace user through the season. Wood can also be purchased at supermarkets or picked up free in different areas.
• Avoid wood from trees that have just been cut down. It likely contains high levels of moisture that will result in more smoke than burn power, and could lead to creosote deposits forming on the inside of the chimney.
• Synthetic logs are also available, but use caution because they may burn unevenly and put out highter levels of carbon monoxide. Follow directions on the packages of these products carefully.
• Inspect your fireplace screen or guard to ensure it can safely protect against embers escaping the fireplace. In homes where there are young children, an added barrier may be needed in front of the fireplace to prevent little hands from touching the hot screen.
• Remember to open the chimney flue before starting any fire. This allows fresh air to feed the fire and will enable smoke to exit the home. Failure to open the flue can result in smothering, dirty smoke filling the home quite quickly. The flue should be closed after the fire is completely extinguished so that animals and outside debris don’t enter the home via the opening.
• Have a metal container for removing and storing hot ashes handy. Embers and ashes can stay hot for quite some time, so they should be placed outdoors, ideally far from the home so they don’t set anything ablaze.
• Educate household members about the rules of fireplace use. Do not burn anything but wood in the fire to avoid the emission of toxic fumes or dangerous embers. All it takes is one stray ember to start a huge fire. Also, improper fuel materials may lead to the buildup of flammable creosote on the chimney.
• Do not leave a fire unattended. If you have a fire going in the fireplace, be sure someone is keeping an eye on it. Be sure the fire is out before you go to bed.

The post Earlier than You Mild That Fire, Learn This appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The cold, rainy weather and holiday season may have you thinking about roasting chestnuts on an open fire.

While some folks may be using natural gas-fueled fireplaces, some still use wood-burning fireplaces. The U.S. Fire Administration says heating fires account for 36 percent of residential home fires in rural areas every year.

Emergency Management officials have some reminders to make your fireplace and fire safe:

• Have your fireplace cleaned by a professional. A chimney sweep will clean out the entire chimney. Many use a high-powered vacuum so that there is no soot or dust entering the home. Some sweeps also offer a series of inspections of the chimney, interior flue and checks of attic spaces for any damaged areas that will need repair.
• Choose firewood carefully. Seasoned firewood — wood that has been allowed to dry out for at least six months — is the best and safest option. Buying one or two cords of wood may take the average fireplace user through the season. Wood can also be purchased at supermarkets or picked up free in different areas.
• Avoid wood from trees that have just been cut down. It likely contains high levels of moisture that will result in more smoke than burn power, and could lead to creosote deposits forming on the inside of the chimney.
• Synthetic logs are also available, but use caution because they may burn unevenly and put out highter levels of carbon monoxide. Follow directions on the packages of these products carefully.
• Inspect your fireplace screen or guard to ensure it can safely protect against embers escaping the fireplace. In homes where there are young children, an added barrier may be needed in front of the fireplace to prevent little hands from touching the hot screen.
• Remember to open the chimney flue before starting any fire. This allows fresh air to feed the fire and will enable smoke to exit the home. Failure to open the flue can result in smothering, dirty smoke filling the home quite quickly. The flue should be closed after the fire is completely extinguished so that animals and outside debris don’t enter the home via the opening.
• Have a metal container for removing and storing hot ashes handy. Embers and ashes can stay hot for quite some time, so they should be placed outdoors, ideally far from the home so they don’t set anything ablaze.
• Educate household members about the rules of fireplace use. Do not burn anything but wood in the fire to avoid the emission of toxic fumes or dangerous embers. All it takes is one stray ember to start a huge fire. Also, improper fuel materials may lead to the buildup of flammable creosote on the chimney.
• Do not leave a fire unattended. If you have a fire going in the fireplace, be sure someone is keeping an eye on it. Be sure the fire is out before you go to bed.

The post Earlier than You Gentle That Fire, Learn This appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

This is the Hot Read. In this column, you’ll find everything and anything I found interesting from the NFL Week 13 Sunday action. There’s the stuff that everyone’s talking about, and the stuff that nobody’s talking about; the stuff that makes football incredible, and the stuff that makes football fun. I hope you enjoy it and learn something cool—and if you do, I hope you’re back next week, when we do it all again.

The Big Thing: The Healthy 49ers Are the NFL’s Best Team

A lot happened this past NFL Sunday. If there’s one thing you need to know, it’s this.

Here are the best 10 offenses in football by expected points added per drive.

Nobody on this list is a big surprise. The 49ers, Cowboys, Dolphins, Bills, and Eagles fill out a clear first tier; the Lions, Rams, Chiefs, Ravens, and Chargers are in the second.

Now here’s the same graphic adjusted to remove Weeks 7 and 8 for the 49ers, when the team was without Deebo Samuel and Trent Williams.

This way, it looks far less like there’s a first tier and a second tier. It looks like there’s a lone leader.

Of course, this isn’t fair to everyone else. The Cowboys have had to play games without Tyron Smith and Tyler Smith, and the Dolphins without Terron Armstead, Robert Hunt, and De’Von Achane. Everyone deals with injuries.

But when the 49ers haven’t been dealing with injuries on offense, they’ve looked better than anyone else this season. In fact, they’re undefeated. They’ve won every game that both Samuel and Williams have started and finished. In Week 6, when they stumbled against the Browns, Samuel went down after just eight snaps; during Weeks 7 (at Minnesota) and 8 (against Cincinnati), both Samuel and Williams were out.

Those three games are the 49ers’ only losses on the season.

In each loss, they scored 17 points; in the nine full games that Samuel and Williams have both played, the 49ers have scored at least 30 points in all but one (in which they scored 27).

Again, I don’t want to give this treatment to just the 49ers. Plenty of teams have looked like juggernauts during stretches of this season. The Cowboys have scored at least 30 in each of their past four: 40 in three of those. The Eagles, before they ran into the 49ers, had won their last five against opponents such as the Dolphins, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Bills. But the 49ers played both of those teams and beat those teams by a combined score of 84-29. Nobody has felt more dominant, against bigger opponents, than this healthy Niners squad.

The Niners just present too many problems for opponents to solve. Every single player that might touch the ball for the 49ers is downright terrifying: Christian McCaffrey, George Kittle, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo. Samuel leads all receivers in yards after catch per reception by over 1.5 yards per catch; Kittle is third among tight ends in YAC per reception, but he’s also third among tight ends in air yards per pass attempt—that’s not at all how that’s supposed to work. Aiyuk is top 20 among wideouts in both catch rate and air yards per target, which is—say it with me—not at all how that’s supposed to work.

When all of these guys are healthy, you just sit there as a defense and take it. There’s nothing else to do. Blow after blow, broken tackle after broken tackle, nifty motion into play-action fake into misdirection screen into actually, it’s a reverse. Also, you’ve just given up a third-down conversion to Jauan Jennings, and there goes Brock Purdy on a scramble. Are you with me? Do you need a minute? Can I get you a glass of water?

As fun as the 49ers offense has been when the plasma cannons have had a full charge, the season is far from over. San Francisco is still a game behind Philadelphia in the hunt for the no. 1 seed, and Detroit and Dallas remain in that mix. The 49ers have a rematch with the Seahawks next week and a huge Week 16 game against Baltimore coming ’round the mountain. They’re still likely to play the Eagles on the road, should they run into them again in the playoffs—and when they see the Eagles (or the Cowboys) again, they will see a motivated and embarrassed team with plenty of adjustments up its sleeves. The hay isn’t in the barn.

But this is the best 49ers offense we’ve seen in the Shanahan era, full stop. The prime Jimmy Garoppolo years had gaudy numbers, but defenses hadn’t caught up with the easy gimmicks yet. Defenses know the ins and outs of this system now, and it doesn’t matter. The 49ers don’t just have gimmicks; they have star talent at every position on offense, including a young quarterback who is improving every week on already impressive play. It’s tough to imagine anything stopping them except a terrible bounce on the merciless injury roulette wheel.

Is there any team you’d like to play less right now than the 49ers?

The Little Things

It’s the little things in football that matter the most—zany plays, small victories, and some laughs. Here’s where you can find them.

1. I DON’T KNOW what refereeing is

The state of NFL officiating deserves a much longer and more nuanced look than is possible in this column. Any take on refereeing given within 24 hours of a game (including this one) is unavoidably held prisoner by the moment and is not given with a sober mind. I will provide that sober take on some future day.

What in heaven’s name was going on at the end of Chiefs-Packers? The Patrick Mahomes unnecessary roughness call was made by an official far away from the play and thrown even though Mahomes was still in bounds at the time of the hit. It happened on the Chiefs sideline, and you don’t even see them call for a flag!

The next play was a called scoop ’n’ score overturned by review that also had a personal foul penalty that disqualified Isiah Pacheco, and I don’t even want to get into that. The play after that …

This league calls the silliest defensive pass interferences. Terrible underthrows in which the receiver makes no effort to catch the ball and only flounders through contact are rewarded with a spot foul. Uncatchable balls are routinely ignored. And this—a piggyback ride—went unflagged.

The subsequent plays included a clock stoppage when the receiver was moving backward on his way out of bounds (should have been a running clock) and a Hail Mary that had a defensive pass interference (though, to be fair, every Hail Mary does).

The Packers deserved this win. They’re 6-6, having knocked off the Lions and Chiefs in recent weeks. I think they’re going to the playoffs, and rightfully so.

But I don’t like watching games in which I have no idea how the officiating will go. As a regular gambler on football, I really don’t like it. The NFL is playing with real fire by letting the quality of officiating continue to deteriorate while also openly partnering with multiple U.S. sportsbooks.

Imagine an end-of-game sequence like this one in the AFC championship game with millions upon millions of dollars on the line. Spooky stuff.

Wait! Sorry, hang on. I just remembered. This was whistled dead for forward progress in Texans-Broncos?! Are you kidding me?!

OK. Done now.

2. ANDREW VAN GINKEL, up to the plate

I can’t imagine the average NFL fan is super dialed in on Van Ginkel right now, but he’s one of the most important players to watch over the next few weeks. Star Dolphins pass rusher Jaelan Phillips popped his Achilles against the Jets in heartbreaking fashion, and to fill those enormous shoes, Miami is relying heavily on Van Ginkel.

Van Ginkel has been almost exclusively a defensive lineman for most of his career, but under new defensive coordinator Vic Fangio this year, the Dolphins have experimented with playing him off the ball and in space. Against the Commanders, in the Dolphins’ first game without Phillips, Van Ginkel played no box snaps for only the fourth time this season, and he produced early, with a pick-six and what should have been recorded as a sack in the first half.

The Dolphins defense continues to be one of the best in the league now that it has the intricate Fangio system under its belt. If it can survive the Phillips injury, it’ll remain a force alongside that explosive offense come playoff time.

3. BEATING YOUR DIVISION RIVAL with the same play they almost beat you with

Late in the fourth quarter, the Tennessee Titans tied the game against the Indianapolis Colts with this Will Levis touchdown throw to DeAndre Hopkins.

The design on this throw is cool. The Titans are bluffing a typical pick route—the inside receiver runs to the flat, and the outside receiver runs the slant. The defensive backs accordingly switch responsibilities—but then Hopkins suddenly breaks back inside, and the outside corner is nowhere near close enough to affect the catch point. Excellent design.

The Titans would fail to take the lead when they missed the extra point, and this game would go to overtime. Down three and in need of a touchdown to win it, here’s the concept the Colts dialed up.

That look at all familiar?

4. THE CHARGES against those who willingly watched Jets-Falcons or Chargers-Patriots

Six months of community service and a $5,000 fine. I don’t care if you needed someone to have a great fantasy day to make the playoffs. You better have been born in New York, Atlanta, San Diego, or the greater New England area to have tuned in to these games.

If you or someone you know willingly watched these games, please reach out to me, and I will perform a citizen’s arrest.

The Zag: The College Football Playoff Committee Got It Right

I tend to be a little contrarian. It’s not so much a personal choice as it is an occupational hazard. Here’s where I’ll plant my flag.

OK, so this isn’t an NFL take. But the 2023-24 Selection Committee officially named the four teams for this year’s College Football Playoff, and everyone is furious, so here we go.

These are the four best teams in college football, according to the committee. That sentence was very carefully written, even though at first brush it looks banal. “Four best teams in college football,” is very different from “four most deserving teams in college football.”

The most deserving teams in college football are the teams that had the winningest seasons. Such teams include Washington and Michigan—undefeated power-conference champions who made this year’s playoff. But that designation would also include Florida State, the undefeated ACC champion who was left outside of the playoff.

Florida State was left out for a simple, obvious, and very painful reason: their starting quarterback, Jordan Travis, is out for the rest of the season with a devastating leg injury. Travis, who was squarely in the Heisman race, is one of the best quarterbacks in college football. He is far from the only NFL-caliber player on the Seminoles—WRs Keon Coleman and Johnny Wilson; edge rusher Jared Verse; running back Trey Benson. But Travis plays the most important position on the field, and without him—or even backup Tate Rodemaker, who missed the ACC title game with a concussion—Florida State is not nearly as good of a team.

Were it the committee’s job to put the four most deserving teams into the playoff, they would have put Florida State in. But that’s not their job—and if that were the objective of the College Football Playoff, there would not be a committee at all. Rather, there would be an algorithm. All undefeated conference champions would get into the playoff, ranked by strength of schedule. Behind them, all one-loss conference champions would get in, ranked by head-to-head record and then by strength of schedule. It would not even be a little bit hard to do this.

Why, then, has college football adopted a closed-door committee to generate a heuristic ranking? Well, for one, it’s preferable that the best teams get in over the most deserving, because the playoff games will likely be better. For another, it acknowledges that football always comes back to watching the games and making your own judgments—for as many stats as I love to use, it’s a hard sport for stats to encapsulate. But much, much more importantly, is this: it creates debate.

It is unbelievably fun to be angry about things. Perilously so, in fact. It’s tempting to just hop on Twitter—err, X, I suppose—and do it all the time. The regionality and tribalism of college football have always hinged on that reality: that everyone should have at least some argument for their team, and accordingly convince themselves that everyone is out to get them, digging their heels further and further into a rabid fandom the likes of which the NFL barely touches.

So the committee put Alabama, a one-loss conference champion, in above Florida State, a zero-loss conference champion, because Alabama is a better team right now than Florida State by their collective judgment. I’m inclined to agree. You can disagree if you like, and you can yell at me on Twitter as well. You can tell me the committee is intellectually dishonest, because a true interpretation of “four best teams” would have almost certainly included Georgia over Texas or Washington—and I can see that point crystal clear. It’s a frustrating system—and that’s the point.

I feel horrible for Florida State fans and players, all of whom deserved a bid for the national championship and lost it entirely on terrible injury luck. There’s nothing I can say to make that better.

But the committee got it right.

(Mostly Real) Awards

I’ll hand out some awards. Most of them will be real. Some of them won’t be.

That Young Man Can Play Award: Arizona Cardinals TE Trey McBride

Tight end is a famously challenging position for young players to learn. Rookie tight ends often end up taking a de facto redshirt year by default. Such was the case in 2022 for McBride, who essentially didn’t play until Zach Ertz got injured, ultimately ending the year with 265 yards on 29 catches.

In the last six weeks of this season, McBride has 41 catches for 440 yards and two scores. No tight end has more receptions; George Kittle has one more yard.

McBride has quickly become a favorite target of franchise quarterback Kyler Murray, and with wide receiver Marquise Brown approaching free agency, McBride is establishing himself as the primary target in this offense overall. In Sunday’s 24-10 win over the Steelers, McBride had eight catches for 89 yards and a touchdown, and led the Cardinals with nine targets. Stock dramatically up for the younger player.

Offensive Rookie of the Year (of the Week): Detroit Lions TE Sam LaPorta

Everything I just wrote up there about rookie tight ends not producing? Toss that out.

LaPorta has been a godsend for the Detroit Lions. They desperately needed a viable second target to play foil to Amon-Ra St. Brown, and they got more than they bargained for with their second-round pick tight end. After a nine-catch, 140-yard performance in a win over the Saints, LaPorta has 679 yards through 12 games—that total already puts him seventh on the post–Super Bowl leaderboard for rookie tight ends. At 56.6 yards per game, he’s on pace for 962 yards, which would make him only the second rookie in the Super Bowl era to clear 900 receiving yards—Kyle Pitts, who has the record at 1,026 yards, is very much within range.

The Very Much in the Playoff Race Award: The Los Angeles Rams

Don’t look now, but the Rams have a top-10 offense. Sixth in success rate, seventh in EPA per drive. And they’ve been dealing with injuries to key players like Cooper Kupp and Kyren Williams. The obvious things to highlight in this offensive surge are the superlative play of Matthew Stafford, who remains a fearless gunslinger despite his age and injury history, and the emergence of Puka Nacua, who had 139 yards from scrimmage and a score in the Rams’ 36-19 win over the Browns.

One unheralded, but critical key to note: the play of the offensive line. The Rams snagged two new starting guards this offseason: rookie Steve Avila in the second round of the draft, and Kevin Dotson late in training camp via trade with the Steelers. Both have been lights-out, while longtime backup Alaric Jackson (responsible for the best inexplicable screenshot of Sunday’s slate) is holding his own at left tackle.

The Rams have a proven formula on offense and a young defense that’s getting better by the week. They aren’t built like a true contender, but I’d wager they’re a tough out in January.

The Very Much Not Really in the Playoff Race Award: The Pittsburgh Steelers/Cleveland Browns

I simply cannot take 2023 Joe Flacco seriously. He didn’t even play that poorly—for a while there, the Browns were keeping pace with the Rams!—but the Browns are on their fourth starting quarterback, and it’s a player even the Jets passed on. I do not fear this team.

I also cannot take 2023 Mitchell Trubisky seriously, despite the fact that Kenny Pickett’s ankle injury means I must watch him play the New England Patriots on Thursday Night Football—truly, the most cursed matchup to ever grace that revered slot. The Steelers hope Pickett will be out only a few weeks, but I’m not sure Trubisky is good enough to keep the Steelers alive in this dense AFC playoff race during Pickett’s absence.

With the Steelers and Browns facing dire quarterbacking situations, there’s more room now for some AFC hopefuls. The Texans and Colts, surely. The Broncos as well. Dare I say … the Bills?

Next Ben Stats

What it sounds like: Next Gen Stats, but I get to make them up.

1: That’s how many punts the Colts actually blocked on Sunday

The national media is lying to you! It’s sensationalizing the numbers! It’d have you believe the Colts blocked two punts against the Titans this Sunday—consecutive punts, in fact. But it is a lie!

Here is their one punt block, courtesy of a wonderful rush by Nick Cross.

As you can see in this replay, Titans punter Ryan Stonehouse actually does make contact with the ball moments before driving it directly into the oncoming Cross. (Cool football nerd moment: This rush was designed based off of film study of the Titans’ punt protection this season. Not dumb luck—schemed up!)

The second “punt block,” however, was anything but!

This, my dear friends, is a forced fumble because Stonehouse never made contact with the ball. Cornerback Troy Brown knocks the ball away from Stonehouse on the drop, not the kick. This ball was never punted, but rather fumbled by the Titans and recovered by the Colts.

The media would have you believe we just saw the 30th game with multiple blocked punts for a single team. Ha!

3: That’s how many games NFL teams have lost this year while allowing their opponent to score 10 or fewer points. The Patriots have all three losses.

This is not a Next Ben Stat—rather, it’s a Next Jason Starrett Stat; he really stumbled across a banger.

You want to know the absolute worst bit? Those three losses … are the Patriots’ past three games: 10-6 to the Colts in London, 10-7 to the Tommy DeVito Giants last week, and this 6-0 travesty at home against the Chargers. The Patriots defense has given up 26 points over the past three games. They’re third by success rate and second by EPA per drive in that stretch. And for their effort, nothing: 0-3. A new coaching staff and a new quarterback (perhaps selected with the second pick, which the Patriots now own) almost inarguably await.

The post The Scorching Learn, Week 13: The San Francisco 49ers Are Again to Peak Type appeared first on DAILY SAN FRANCISCO BAY NEWS.

The dangers of Alaska aren’t limited to storms, starvation, and grizzly bears. Sometimes the most dangerous thing is the person you love.

Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Peggy Townsend’s The Beautiful and the Wild, which is out November 7th!

It’s summer in Alaska and the light surrounding the shipping-container-turned-storage shed where Liv Russo is being held prisoner is fuzzy and gray. Around her is thick forest and jagged mountains. In front of her, across a clearing, is a low-slung cabin with a single window that spills a wash of yellow light onto bare ground. Illuminated in that light is the father of her child, a man she once loved. A man who is now her jailor. Liv vows to do anything to escape.

Carrying her own secrets and a fierce need to protect her young son, Liv must navigate a new world where extreme weather, starvation, and dangerous wildlife are not the only threats she faces. With winter’s arrival imminent, she knows she must reckon with her past and the choices that brought her to the unforgiving Alaskan landscape if she is ever going to make it out alive.

A story of survival in the wilds of Alaska, The Beautiful and the Wild explores the question of whether we can ever truly know the person we love—or ourselves.

1.

The silence was so thick I felt like I was drowning.

It filled my ears and throat with a watery quiet that made it hard to breathe. I leaned my forehead against the cold steel door that imprisoned me, and willed myself to draw in small gulps of air until finally the feeling of suffocation began to lift. It was only then that I turned to look at my surroundings.

I was locked inside a rusted shipping container, its walls pockmarked with tiny holes that let in slivers of light. A mildewed mattress on a low frame sat in one corner, with a ragged upholstered chair and a steamer trunk next to it. There was a shelf with an old-fashioned lantern on it, a small woodstove that vented through the back wall of the space, and a cluster of fifty-five-gallon drums in the corner near where I stood. It looked as if someone had once lived here but had abandoned it the way people did in ghost towns, leaving everything behind as disaster and illness struck. I shivered and pulled my jacket tighter around me.

Gray light filtered through a high rectangular window and I pushed myself away from the door to look.

Outside, the sky was pewter with dark clouds that scudded in the wind. Dense stands of spruce pressed around the container. In the distance, a muscular line of serrated mountains poked the sky. Everything here in Alaska seemed oversized and unrestrained. Even the summer daylight had no boundaries. I didn’t have my phone or a watch but I guessed it was after midnight.

In front of me was a clearing that had been hacked out of the wilderness. A small greenhouse, a couple of graying outbuildings and a scattering of broken equipment edged the compound. A good-sized vegetable garden had been planted in the center of the opening, although the plants looked tired and anemic. On the far side of the garden was a sagging, low-roofed cabin with a set of weathered antlers nailed above the door.

Yellow light spilled through the front window of the hut, illuminating a male figure bent over a table as if performing some intricate work. He wore a plaid flannel shirt and his golden hair was long.

He was my husband, the father of my child. A man everyone said was dead, and yet here he was, very much alive.

He was also the one holding me prisoner.

I couldn’t help but wonder how everything had gone so wrong.

2. THEN

I met my husband, Mark, nine years ago when I was still struggling to find my way. I was living in Sacramento with three roommates and waitressing at a cheap diner where the mediocre food was matched only by the sullenness of its customers. I sometimes wondered if the meals were what made people grumpy or whether the sourness of the customers caused the cook to do only a halfhearted job because he knew he would never please anybody. Either way, I felt like I needed to blow off a little steam and decided to go to this country-and-western bar called the Holdup with another waitress from work. Mark was the first person I saw when I walked in.

I was wearing a short denim dress and a pair of cowboy boots I’d borrowed from my housemate Maggie, and he was sitting at the bar in faded Wranglers and a white T-shirt. He had shaggy golden hair and boyish blue eyes; when he smiled, a dimple appeared in his left cheek. I tried not to stare but I couldn’t help myself. I was like a moth with a beautiful yellow flame in front of it.

When Mark caught me looking, he came over with a bottle of Coors and sat at my table. My friend got up and went to the dance floor. My whole body vibrated with his nearness.

First, he asked me questions about myself and then told me he was a freelance filmmaker who’d studied at UCLA and just finished a documentary about a Marine amputee who’d run the length of Africa as a penance, basically, for being alive when the rest of his squad was dead. He told me about watching a sunset in Morocco, hiding from bandits in Uganda, and surfing at J-Bay in South Africa. He seemed confident and adventurous. One of those people who went off to climb mountains or motorcycle across Siberia just because the unknown was out there waiting to be experienced. He was so different from me and yet, from that moment on, he was the only thing I wanted.

I could say it was the beer I drank followed by three whiskeys on the rocks but I would be lying. We closed down the bar with talk and I went home with him, where we made frantic and then slow love on a mattress on his bedroom floor. I would have gone with him sober. I never left after that night.

When his Africa documentary won the grand jury prize at a prestigious New York film festival four months later, the combination of excitement and optimism caused him to propose marriage and we drove up to South Lake Tahoe, where we tied the knot in a wedding chapel off the main drag. The truth was, as we lay in our hotel bed that night-the new Mr. and Mrs. Russo, as the officiant had loudly announced-I felt like, even though I didn’t deserve it, I’d won some kind of prize too.

After that, we rubbed shoulders with celebrities at Sundance and spent a weekend at a fancy house in Tahoe with some hedge fund guy who introduced Mark to a couple of big-time producers. We went to elaborate parties in San Francisco and LA and spent all day in bed just because we could.

Life seemed shiny and bright then, especially after the two producers Mark had met hired him to replace the cinematographer on their most recent film, a guy who’d had an unfortunate accident involving a BMW, a power pole and a bottle of Don Julio tequila. Mark was flown to Utah in a private jet. Three weeks in, everything fell apart.

First, the producers told Mark that they had to make cuts to the budget and then that they wanted to take the film in a different direction: more commercial, more explosions, and with a love story. Mark told them they would ruin the film and made the mistake of sending an email to a fellow shooter telling him what a clown show the production had become and how the married director had been having sex with an eighteen-year-old girl on set. The story somehow made its way into the trades, including the detail that almost everyone on set called the two producers the Brothers Dim. Mark was fired and told he would never work in Hollywood again. He took a Greyhound bus back to Sacramento.

The next day, I found him passed out on the couch, an empty bottle of vodka on the carpet next to him. It was three in the afternoon. I helped him into bed and went to work, thinking he would sleep it off. He didn’t. For the next five days, he huddled under the blankets, refusing to speak, refusing to eat, refusing suggestions to get up and take a shower. His stillness felt scary and dangerous, like a hand grenade had been deposited in our bedroom.

On day six, just as I was getting ready to call Mark’s brother to ask if this had happened before and what I should do, Mark stumbled out of the bedroom. His hair was wild and his smell zoolike, and he went into the kitchen and fried himself three eggs.

“Don’t,” he said, and held up a hand when I started to ask how he was.

He spent the next two weeks on the phone. No one would take his calls.

After that, he got a job at one of those big-box hardware stores and started a portrait business on the side. Then, one day, he burst into our apartment and said a guy he knew from film school worked as a fire lookout in Washington State and needed someone to fill in for him while he went off to take care of his ailing father.

“Think of it, Liv. We’ll be on top of the world and no one will bother us. We’ll be part of nature, free from the money-grubbers, the phonies, the idiots. Just us.”

It scared me a little but he folded me into his arms and said: “Trust me, you’ll never feel more alive than when you don’t know what’s coming next.”

And he was right.

By the time fire season was over, I was weightless from the freedom of being unchained from rude customers, routines and responsibilities, and so we kept traveling. We crisscrossed the West, sleeping under the stars, drinking beer in dimly lit bars and getting temporary jobs when we were low on money. Once, we worked clearing out hoarder houses for a rehab outfit in Los Angeles. Another time, we spent three weeks in a commune outside of Portland, Oregon, where we canned vegetables, milked goats and fixed fences.

Then I got pregnant and Mark shifted from the restless wanderer to the superhero of fathers. He’d come into a little money after his mother died-his cardiac surgeon father had passed three years before-and he made a down payment on a house on the outskirts of Sacramento. It was beige stucco, 1,120 square feet, and had been built in 1939 when the Depression was still fresh on everyone’s minds. There was a tiny front porch, two small bedrooms, noisy plumbing and a galley kitchen that looked out onto a sprawling elm tree in the backyard. And yet it was ours.

He carried me over the threshold with my seven-months-pregnant belly. Later, we laughed about how he had grunted with effort when he hefted me up.

When Xander was born, Mark dove into fatherhood as if he had been destined to do just that. He changed diapers, read child-development books and paced the floor for hours when Xander had colic. When Xander began missing some of his milestones, Mark was the one who insisted we take our boy to Stanford.

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I remember sitting under a buzzing fluorescent light in the tiny exam room and listening as the doctor spoke about genes being deleted from a certain chromosome that would make our son’s health as fragile as an old man’s and leave him with developmental delays. He said, however, that surgery could repair part of what was wrong with our son’s heart and that if we did a lot of occupational and physical therapy, we could get him fairly close to “normal.”

He smiled when he said it, as if we should have thanked him for such wonderful news.

Instead, Mark’s eyes lasered in on the doctor. “Who the hell wants normal?” he said. “Normal is just a prescription for unhappiness. You should know. Look at you.” The doctor reared back on his wheeled stool. “My kid is perfect,” Mark said, “an old soul who was placed here for a reason, and he’s going to change the world.”

It turned out both he and the doctor were right.

Xander was an old soul, a beautiful boy who changed our lives. But he also needed surgery to enlarge his narrowed aorta and therapy to help him learn to walk. Our hearts filled while our bank account drained.

I started cleaning houses because of the flexibility the work offered and Mark took on different jobs: shelf stocking, house painting, hardware clerking. We tried to keep alive some vestiges of our former life with overnight camping trips to the mountains and watching old movies on the couch with a bottle of wine between us. Eventually, however, our lives dissolved into routine and I couldn’t help but think we were traveling the same stretch of road day after day, never getting anywhere except the state of exhaustion.

We worked and ate and fell into bed, sometimes without even a good night kiss. We still had sex but it tended to be more hurried and less intense than in the old days. A few times, I faked an orgasm but most of the time I didn’t have to. Mark was always careful to make sure we were both satisfied.

Still, I was never quite sure what Mark saw in me. I wasn’t thin or tall or beautiful like the women in LA, who all appeared to have stepped out of the pages of a magazine. I was shorter and more compact but my hair was thick and the color of roasted coffee beans and my cheekbones were high and sculpted. Mark always said my looks reminded him of a warrior princess.

“How could I look at another woman when I have you?” he would say.

Despite that, there was a part of me that suspected he wanted more than me and our little house, our low-paying jobs and our suburban lives, so when he got a job at a custom-motorcycle shop delivering bikes to customers all over the West and discovered a subject for a new documentary, I was thrilled.

But maybe our quiet life was what I should have wanted. Maybe that should have been enough.

3. NOW

I awoke on the bare mattress under a striped wool blanket I’d found in the steamer chest. My eyes were full of grit and my mouth dry as dust. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was, and when I did, panic fluttered inside me.

I sat up and told myself to calm down, that Mark couldn’t keep me locked up forever, although I could no longer be sure of that fact. Not since so many things I thought I knew about him had turned out to be wrong.

I pushed myself out of bed, my back muscles protesting against the lumpy mattress on which I’d slept. The plywood floor was rough under my bare feet. I went to the window, which was set high enough so that my chin just came to its bottom sill. I wiped away the desiccated corpses of a half dozen flies and tapped the barrier with my finger. Plexiglass. No way to escape there.

Outside, the sky had turned cornflower blue and a hard breeze sent cloud shadows racing across the garden. The dirt was dark with moisture. It must have rained during the few hours I’d slept.

I thought of my drive here: the pouring rain through Seattle, the graveled highway with its frost heaves and the dark forest pressing in on either side, the fast food Xander and I had eaten so I could surreptitiously charge my phone because my twelve-year-old Subaru was too ancient to have a charging port. Somewhere in the Yukon, however, the fast-food places disappeared and I had to be even more creative. Once, I tried to charge my phone at an outlet I found behind a gas station/mini-mart and was chased off by the attendant, who threatened to have me arrested for theft of electricity. Pretty soon, though, finding outlets didn’t matter. Cell service became so spotty it was basically nonexistent. It made me feel cut off from the world but free in a way too.

Excerpted from The Beautiful and the Wild by Peggy Townsend Copyright © 2023 by Peggy Townsend. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The cold, rainy weather and the holiday season can make you think about roasting chestnuts on an open fire.

While some people use natural gas fires, some still use wood fires. The US Fire Administration says that every year 36 percent of residential fires in rural areas are caused by heater fires.

Emergency management officials have a few reminders to keep your fireplace and fire safe:

• Let a professional clean your fireplace. A chimney sweep cleans the entire chimney. Many use a powerful vacuum cleaner to keep soot or dust out of the house. Some street sweepers also offer a range of chimney, interior chimney and attic inspections for damaged areas that need repair.
• Choose firewood carefully. Seasoned firewood – wood that has been dried for at least six months – is the best and safest option. Purchasing a piece of wood cord or two can get the average fireplace user through the season. Wood can also be bought in supermarkets or picked up free of charge in various areas.
• Avoid wood from trees that have just been felled. It is likely to contain high levels of moisture, which leads to more smoke than combustion and can lead to creosote build-up inside the chimney.
• Synthetic logs are also available, but be careful as they burn unevenly and can release higher levels of carbon monoxide. Follow the instructions on the packaging of these products carefully.
• Check your fireplace screen or guard to make sure it can safely protect you from embers leaking from the fireplace. Households with young children may need an extra barrier in front of the fireplace to keep small hands from touching the hot screen.
• Remember to open the chimney draft before starting a fire. This allows fresh air to feed the fire and smoke can leave the house. If the smoke vent is not opened, suffocating, dirty smoke can quickly fill the house. The smoke vent should be closed after the fire has been completely extinguished to prevent animals and foreign objects from entering the house through the opening.
• Have a metal container handy to remove and store hot ashes. Embers and ashes can stay hot for some time, so they should be placed outdoors, ideally far from the home so that they don’t set anything on fire.
• Inform the household members about the rules of using the fireplace. Do not burn anything but wood in the fire to avoid the emission of toxic fumes or dangerous embers. All you need is a scattered ember to start a huge fire. In addition, unsuitable fuels can lead to the accumulation of combustible creosote on the chimney.
• Do not leave a fire unattended. If you have a fire in the fireplace, make sure someone is keeping an eye on it. Make sure the fire is out before you go to bed.

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Story of Raphael Kadushin; Photographs by John Kernick

Only about 15 minutes west of York, at the beginning of my drive through Yorkshire, I realize that I have stepped deep English country.

The clues are hard to miss. There’s the billboard for the local chimney sweep. There is the lamb, the sheep, and finally the whole herd that wanders across the road. And then there are the signs for Gordale Scar Gorge and Stump Cross Caverns, brooding place names that seem to signal a spooky world ahead of us.

In fact, that’s exactly what I hope for. Yorkshire starred for the Brontë sisters and Bram Stoker, whose 19th century Gothic fiction Scratch the surface of every popular contemporary fantasy, from the Twilight saga to True Blood, and you’ll find the direct descendants of Emily Brontës Heathcliff, Stoker’s Dracula, and all the vampires, ghosts, and undead that materialized on Yorkshire’s moors.

So I came to England to drive from the Yorkshire Dales, through the North York Moors and on to the east coast to scare myself a little. I’m also here to understand why some of our deepest nightmares spread across this homely neighborhood of tea rooms and follies.

Highland cows stroll down a country road. (Photo by John Kernick)

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My first stop is Haworth, 80 km west of York. Here in the first half of the 19th century, the three Brontë sisters imagined a world of demonic villains, crazy women in the attic and dispossessed spirits in novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

The Brontë family’s rectory is at the top of the hilly town. As soon as I park my rental car and climb the stony ridge of Haworthschen Hauptstrasse, I immediately notice how the house appears to be swallowed up. Photos show the house framed by a few small graves. But in reality the cemetery floods the rectory, the tall, jagged tombstones lined up in wild, sloping rows that document the number of corpses in the city.

Typhus, cholera and tuberculosis plagued Haworth in the 19th century, and more than 40 percent of children died before they were six. Her short life is engraved all over the sprawling cemetery. A tombstone features the names of six babies, all of whom were lost to a stonemason father who modeled a sleeping child with its tiny doomed head resting on a tassel pillow at the base of the grave.

Obviously the Bront sisters were drawing from life when they wrote about death. Perhaps they also saw their own fate. Emily Brontë was buried under the desolate town church at the age of 30.

Ann Dinsdale, the collections manager at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, later explains to me that the local drinking water flowed from the bog spring through the cemetery grounds to the village wells and pumps. Historians associate this polluted water with Haworth’s high death toll. “The Brontës had their own private well,” notes Dinsdale, “but since the rectory is bordered on two sides by the churchyard, it is possible that their drinking water was also contaminated.”

The house now owned by the Brontë Society does not offer much relief. As I stroll through the gloomy rooms, I can’t help but feel a little claustrophobic, especially in the tiny dining room where the three sisters were writing and sharing space at a small central table. “They would walk around the dinner table every night and discuss their writing,” says Dinsdale.

Only when I go outside, into the sea of ​​wild grass, do I breathe freely again. It’s easy to imagine Emily’s ecstasy, embodied by the unrestrained passion of her characters Heathcliff and Catherine as it broke into these moors.

The town closes at dusk, so I flee 11 miles north to the Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel & Spa, an early 17th century coaching house in Bolton Abbey. Everything here is a British comedy by comparison: my guest room, which is anchored by a four-poster bed; my late afternoon tea with scones; and the dog lounge, an ode to the English love for dogs. Terrier portraits hang by the fireplace like furry pin-ups, and the flocked wallpaper is embossed with the silhouettes of Labradors and poodles. “The other night,” says chief concierge Eddie Styles, “we had ten dogs here.”

Still, it takes more than leaving Haworth to escape Yorkshire’s ghosts, which I realize the next morning when Styles starts talking again. “A bedroom here is always a bit cold and a lot of guests ask for steps even though there’s no space above,” he says. “Some say it is the ghost of a little girl who is lost in the moor and is looking for some warmth.”

She doesn’t have to look for company, as I learn when guide Alan Rowley picks me up on a marathon tour of the county. We zigzag through the moors and valleys and don’t seem to escape the ghosts. Almost every hut, every village and every sight has its own fairy tale or apparition.

Rowley, who sold his pub in York to get interested in local history, has heard all the legends over the years. “Yorkshire people are naturally storytellers,” he says as we drive 45 km east, past the quirky follies and the water garden of Fountains Abbey, where a phantom choir of monks is said to sing at night.

Forty miles to the east we pass Castle Howard. Here in 1940 the collapse of the house’s central dome was a terrifying warning; the family’s two sons would be killed in action during World War II and join the long line of Yorkshire’s lost youth. Finally arrived in the North York Moors National Park, we circle a squat block of stone on Danby High Moor that seems to have a head.

The market town of Helmsley, England borders the North York Moors. (Photo by John Kernick)

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“This is Fat Betty,” says Rowley, pointing to what looks like Yorkshire’s own combination of Easter Island boss and wife von Lot. “She is centuries old and is said to be a farmer’s wife who got lost in the misty moor and turned to stone. But Betty still has to eat, and if you stop and feed her, that counts as happiness. “

As I look at the pile of lollipops and candy bars on the floor (though park officials disapprove of the tradition) I can’t help but think that Betty could really use a sleeping pill after such a long watch. Her blank white face stares rigidly over the moor.

At least she scans a moody look. As we continue east, it is easy to see how the Yorkshire countryside has captured the vivid imaginations of its residents. The tumbling of low hills and bog meadows conjures up a feeling of agitated drama. Curved rows of old dry limestone walls stretch like spikes through the fields. Stranded villages, a duo of sandstone and slate, suddenly rise from the rocky ground and just as quickly merge again in the dappled light.

The scene brightened up at Helmsley. A typical moorland market town that shows the three laws of almost every Yorkshire village: people hang by a dog (Labs and Terriers preferred), tea rooms frame a paved square and the bakeries sell “millionaire’s shortbread” (caramel-covered cookie squares) . and covered with chocolate). But just a few kilometers outside the city, when we stop for dinner at the Star Inn, the mood darkens again.

“I was born in Whitby,” says Andrew Pern, part of a growing group of chefs who have made Yorkshire a serious culinary destination. “We went to the abbey as children and played hide and seek among the graves. We didn’t like to show that we were scared, but when someone didn’t come out … “

I had postponed my visit to Whitby – also known as Dracula’s house – to end my journey on a high pitched note of macabre melodrama. At dinner Pern’s black pudding and foie gras had distracted me from his warnings. But that evening as I lay in bed in Swinton Park, a stately property that was converted into a hotel by a baronial family, I can’t shake the image of the abbey cemetery.

On the edge of the rugged Yorkshire coast, the horseshoe town of Whitby rises in stony layers to the graveyard of St Mary’s Church and the vaulted 7th-century ruins of Whitby Abbey. In the soft midday light, the city looks like the finished cover of a horror novel. Bram Stoker chose this as his backdrop for Dracula when he stayed in a guest house across the street from the abbey in a guest house in August 1890.

In fact, the original edition of Dracula, published in 1897, follows local geography so closely that you could still map the area just by reading the novel. The vampire’s ship, the Demeter, runs aground in the sands of Tate Hill. In the cemetery of St. Mary’s Church, the parched Dracula digs into the doomed, sleepwalking heroine Lucy Westenra.

And the fictional protagonist Mina Murray, Lucy’s friend, climbed the real church stairs to the cemetery just in time to see a gruesome sight: “… My knees were trembling … something raised a head … a white face and red, shining eyes.”

The cemetery of St. Mary’s Church has crowned the coastal town of Whitby since the 12th century. (Photo by John Kernick)

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Panting, even with weak knees, I walk up the 199 wide stone steps to the church. Then I go back down to the lap of the city that makes a prosperous life from its Dracula family tree. I pass the Boo Tique boutique and shops that sell chocolate coffins and skull bracelets. Such souvenirs sell out during the town’s regular Gothic festivals, when a whole pack of Drac’s revelers dressed as vampires, zombies and ghouls haunt Whitby.

“It used to be underground, but now everyone comes,” says Elaine Horton, who stands in her Pandemonium Gothic shop, surrounded by satin corsets and vampire T-shirts as she runs her fingers through her blue hair. “I’m not sure why.”

I can only guess. When I climb the steps to the church one last time at dusk, I end up in a cemetery again, a suitable bookend for the first cemetery of my trip, in Haworth.

It occurs to me that the High Gothic stories, with all their vampires and ghosts, may now resonate so strongly because they allow us to fantasize at a time when so many of our stories, blog posts and tweets have become prosaic. Or maybe it’s because the best horror stories capture something profound: the bogeyman under the bed, our nameless fears, an elegiac sense of inevitable loss.

Whatever the reason, some constants remain. Whitby’s tiled roofs, glowing red in the setting sun, seem firmly rooted. So also the old Gothic street that carries all these stories down to the North Sea – only to be churned by the waves and washed back to the shore.

This feature, penned by Raphael Kadushin, first appeared in the November 2015 issue of National Geographic Traveler magazine.

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MOLE FROM ‘SAVE ANCHORAGE’ SLIDES INTEL TO CANDIDATE DUNBAR

“At the same time that Anchorage’s fringe right was organizing, the city’s Democratic Party was falling apart,” wrote The Appeal, an online San Francisco newspaper that suddenly became interested in the Anchorage mayor’s race. It is so concerned that the Democratic Party is falling apart that the Bay Area news organization stepped in to save candidate Forrest Dunbar.

This is how the narrative is crafted: Leftist candidates turn to leftist writers to help them vote and get them to harm their opponents. In this case, “Save Anchorage” seems to be the opponent of mayoral candidate Forrest Dunbar. He tries to tie the candidate Dave Bronson to the group in which someone passes information to Dunbar.

It is possible that his deep association with the Anchorage Press and Blue Alaskan is not helping Rep. Dunbar enough. Now he had to get San Francisco, the home of former Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, to lend a hand.

It wouldn’t be the first time Dunbar tried to harm the 8,000 members of the Save Anchorage group, made up of many ordinary mothers and some wild-eyed people mad at the city government. Dunbar recently mentioned Save Anchorage and Must Read Alaska as his enemies in a donation letter to all of Anchorage’s super voters.

A reporter from The Appeal in San Francisco interviewed Dunbar and said he was concerned about “Save Anchorage,” which was organized last year after a series of radical decisions to close the city’s shops, buy hotels for tramps, and a practice called “conversion therapy.” . “Save Anchorage was constantly present at meetings during the summer, fall, and winter months as members tried to save the city’s economy.

The appeal is funded in part by the wife of Mark Zuckerberg, who is the CEO of Facebook.

Dance protest ahead of the Anchorage Assembly meeting last fall.

The appeal reached readers in Anchorage through a public relations news service to get them to read the story in which they characterize Save Anchorage as the real radicals. The story, which appears as the main topic of the current issue of The Appeal, references the Anchorage Daily News, Anchorage Press, and Alaska Public Media as sources for recapitulating the political scene in Anchorage. It’s a textbook case of parachute journalism.

“On March 21, 2020, the city began using its sports arena and other large venues as emergency shelters. Over the summer, the city proposed using $ 22.5 million in CARES Act funds to buy four homes for the homeless. Public health advocates and progressives welcomed the decisions, but the decisions were a rally for a number of right-wing Anchorage residents, ”the news organization wrote. The group then threatened violence and a Facebook user named James Mileur “stormed the US Capitol on January 6th”.

The appeal then revealed the existence of a mole in Save Anchorage: “At least 8,000 people have joined the group, which has since been privatized. But one person has made sure that their message stays in public discourse. “

In addition to Zuckerberg funds, The Appeal is funded by several radical left-wing charitable organizations. With dozens of employees on staff, it’s essentially an unregistered field organizing team that seem to be targeting Save Anchorage as the Anchorage Mayors Race warms up.

The story was also stolen from mayoral candidates Dave Bronson and Mike Robbins. The author paints Bronson as homeless while painting Robbins as someone connected to a dating website called Romanian American Matrimonial Introduction Services, and also as a supporter of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Suzanne Downing is the editor of Must Read Alaska. She is a former business owner, longtime journalist, and policy advisor who worked for Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and Governor Sean Parnell of Alaska. Raised in Juneau, Alaska and based somewhere in Alaska, she was the editor of the Juneau Empire and now writes on current affairs and politics.

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