Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office:
Olsen-Smith
On March 27, 2021, at about 7:47 p.m., Humboldt County Sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to a business on the 1100 block of Murray Road in McKinleyville for the report of two people unconscious inside a vehicle parked outside the business.
While attempting to contact the individuals, deputies observed narcotics in plain view on the male driver’s lap. Deputies were able to wake the two, who exhibited signs of being under the influence of a narcotic substance. Deputies seized the narcotics, which were later confirmed to be over 1 gram of cocaine, over 1 gram of methamphetamine, and multiple Xanax pills.
Both subjects were detained and searched. During a search of the driver, identified as 27-year-old Luke Allen Patrick Olsen-Smith, deputies located metal knuckles.
Olsen-Smith was arrested and booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of possession of metal knuckles (PC 21810), disorderly conduct under the influence (PC 647(F)) and possession of a controlled substance (HS 11377(A)).
Faircloth
The passenger of the vehicle, identified as 23-year-old Angelina Lily Faircloth, was booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on charges of disorderly conduct under the influence (PC 647(F)).
Anyone with information about this case or related criminal activity is encouraged to call the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office at (707) 445-7251 or the Sheriff’s Office Crime Tip line at (707) 268-2539.
Marlin’s Cove, a housing complex with low-income units, in Foster City on Dec. 2, 2020. Federal bonds allocated toward the construction of affordable housing across California expired in 2017 after less than half of the funds had been used. Photo by Anne Wernikoff, Calmatters.
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Before California’s housing shortage contributed to a surge in homelessness and tipped median home prices close to $700,000, an obscure state financing agency led by top elected officials had the opportunity over the last decade to help private developers build a trove of affordable housing.
The California Debt Limit Allocation Committee, an arm of the State Treasurer’s Office that issues bonds for private projects with a public benefit, was tasked with getting $3.5 billion in tax-exempt housing bonds out the door. Such financing is often used by the government as an incentive for builders and developers to help increase the state’s inventory of houses and apartments.
Instead, the committee punted the money to an entirely different agency responsible for environmentally friendly projects, which spent only a fraction of the bonds. Today, the agency’s explanation for what went wrong did little to satisfy state auditors.
“The absence of a comprehensive and coordinated plan allowed the debt limit committee to mismanage and ultimately to lose $2.7 billion in bond resources with little scrutiny, a loss that the committee failed to publicly disclose and struggled to explain,” the California State Auditor wrote in a blistering report late last year that sparked headlines.
The auditor alleges that such bureaucratic errata began in 2012 and squandered a huge building opportunity, one that likely would have helped Gov. Gavin Newsom move closer to his target of adding 3.5 million homes. The office also concluded something that housing advocates reached a long time ago: The state lacks strong enough laws and oversight to ensure that cities and counties are doing their part to build affordable housing.
Committee members
The state treasurer at the time was Bill Lockyer, a fixture in California politics for decades who ran his last campaign, in 2010, under the slogan “Straight Talk, No Bull#*+!.” He left office in 2015. Fiona Ma is the current treasurer.
In response to questions from CalMatters, Ma’s office said the errors happened on Lockyer’s watch, and that no money was actually lost or misspent. Lockyer did not respond to requests for comment. Other members of the committee at the time included Gov. Jerry Brown and Controller John Chiang, who served as treasurer between Lockyer and Ma.
Brown declined to comment through a spokesperson.
Chiang, reached by phone, said he didn’t remember details of the bonds at issue. Though he was on the committee from 2012-2014 as controller, he didn’t lead it until his appointment as treasurer in 2015. He noted that during his time as treasurer, he used the bond proceeds on housing, something he said was a priority while he led the committee.
“When it’s 2015 and after, that’s me,” Chiang said. “If you want to know what happened before then, you need to talk to Bill Lockyer.”
Sean Spear, executive director of the committee at the time, also did not return messages seeking comment.
“The treasurer’s offices inherited the bond allocation issue from a previous administration,” Ma’s spokesperson Gloria Li wrote in an email. “To clarify some of the misinformation that is in the public, there was not actual dollars that were lost or misallocated.”
Over the objection of staff
In 2012, and again in 2013 and 2014, the debt limit committee was running out of time to spend bond dollars meant to support affordable housing.
It handed those bonds off to the California Pollution Control Financing Authority, which finances green projects. Doing so over the objection of its own staff allowed the debt limit committee to push the deadline for spending those bonds, totalling $3.5 billion, three years into the future. Among the members of the Debt Limit Allocation Committee were state Controller Betty Yee and then-executive director Laura Whittall-Scherfee.
When the deadline passed, pollution control had spent just $800 million. And the bonds expired.
“If the committee had allocated bond resources based on demand and past use of bonds and assigned more of the remaining bonds for affordable housing purposes, it might have avoided substantial waste,” auditors stated.
If the committee had allocated bond resources based on demand and past use of bonds and assigned more of the remaining bonds for affordable housing purposes, it might have avoided substantial waste. — State Auditor’s Office
Yee said in her time on the committee, there have been safeguards put in place to make sure the same problem doesn’t happen again and “ensure all bond allocation is used going forward.”
“As such,” she said in an email, “we have not had the same issue, particularly as bonds have become more competitive over the last few years.”
Whittall-Scherfee has retired and could not be reached by CalMatters.
Better way to monitor
The committee continues to allocate bonds, and the treasurer’s office insists they have a better way to monitor bond spending.
“Since the audit, (the Debt Limit Allocation Committee) has implemented accounting and audit practices to track bond allocation and allocation that has been carried forward to the next year,” wrote Li, of the treasurer’s office. That tracking and allocation amounts to a “report of action taken” from staff that tracks the bonds spent and those carried over from the previous year.
But there was already a tracking system in place for carryforward bonds: The IRS.
Every year, the bond issuers must file IRS form 8328, which spells out which unspent bonds they are carrying over into the next year.
Ma, the state treasurer, said in an email to CalMatters that her office will now crosscheck their own tracking with the IRS forms.
Affordable housing barriers
The auditor’s office alleged that a lack of transparency and “staff’s inability to account for the loss of resources” means California needs to overhaul how it spends and measures the use of affordable housing dollars.
“We acknowledge the barriers to affordable housing development,” the auditor’s office said in its reply, but the agency “does not actively solicit applications from those areas that are not applying for tax credits.”
In fact, the audit found when the debt limit committee did make affordable housing bond allocations, they were used to build housing.
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This article is part of the California Divide, a collaboration among newsrooms examining income inequality and economic survival in California.
CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
The President of Positivity is here for the sunshine! As Humboldt cautiously emerges from its winter hibernation period, our mogul of Mondays is taking advantage of the returning warmth by heading out to Baywood Golf and Country Club to work on her long game. And who better to enjoy this fine weather with than Redwood News meteorologist Dan Romano, who just so happens to be a seasoned linksman himself.
Catch Dan on this week’s edition of Mondays With Michaele and find his weather reports on Redwood News, available of television sets countywide.
Lance Hastings, president of the California Manufacturers & Technology Association, in Sacramento on March 26, 2021. CMTA has received 16 fraudulent EDD claims using their former address, each with different Social Security numbers, since September. Photo: Annie Wernikoff, Calmatters.
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If not for a persistent mail carrier, Lance Hastings might not have discovered all of the fake unemployment claims.
Last September, the head of the California Manufacturers & Technology Association got the first jobless claim from a worker he’d never employed. Mistakes happen, he thought, and reported the letter sent to the group’s boarded-up former Sacramento office as suspected fraud.
“They even used our old CEO’s name and address,” said Hastings, the association’s current CEO. “When we got that one, our spidey sense really got activated.”
But in recent months, as the mail carrier delivered more than a dozen other bogus letters with unfamiliar names and Social Security numbers, Hastings’ skepticism has given way to frustration — especially now that taxpayers like his organization will likely have to help pick up the tab for California’s $21 billion and counting in unemployment debt.
Now, he worries that higher unemployment taxes could make it harder for businesses in California’s already expensive manufacturing sector to recover from the shock of the year-long pandemic. “I think it’s unprincipled,” Hastings said. “These are just nails in the coffin that concern me greatly.”
Hellish waits on jammed customer service lines and brazen fraud have dominated the headlines about California’s unemployment system in the age of COVID-19. On Friday, officials at the state’s Employment Development Department unveiled new online tools to track unemployment data after the backlog of unpaid claims again mushroomed to more than 1 million in recent weeks, including more suspected fraudulent applications.
Amid the chaos, anotherbig problem has largely been overlooked: The state is out of unemployment money, and nobody is doing much about it. California has a history of going deep into the red to pay for jobless benefits during recessions, but the stakes are especially high this time as businesses hit hard by unprecedented pandemic shutdowns look to restart hiring. California’s unemployment rate fell in February to a pandemic-low 8.5% as employers added 141,000 jobs, but the rate is still twice as high as in February 2020.
The state’s unemployment trust fund financed by employer taxes ran out last spring, which economists attribute to an outdated tax system that has gone largely untouched for the last four decades. So far, California has borrowed $21.2 billion from the federal government to keep benefits flowing to the jobless. Employment Development Department officials expect the deficit to balloon to $48 billion by the end of the year.
In response to a question from CalMatters about how the state plans to address that debt, department officials said Friday that the next forecast for the unemployment fund is due around late May. “Information will be further forthcoming as developments occur,” spokesperson Loree Levy said.
In the meantime, employers have been required to keep paying a 15% emergency surcharge on unemployment taxes due to the fund’s insolvency. Even before the coronavirus shut down much of the economy, California’s unemployment fund was the most unstable of any U.S. state, well behind financially repressed Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
California’s unemployment rate fell in February to a pandemic-low 8.5% as employers added 141,000 jobs, but the rate is still twice as high as in February 2020.
The state’s descent during the pandemic to poster-child status for unemployment dysfunction could make this year a prime opportunity for reform. One option favored by economists at Stanford is to cut unemployment taxes for employers in lower-wage sectors while raising taxes on higher-paying businesses to reduce the state’s debt.
But so far, lawmakers from both parties are proposing much more limited reforms: new oversight boards, a direct deposit payment option, better language access and stronger checks on inmates filing for benefits. Some measures call for the Employment Development Department to develop a new recession plan or to keep paying expanded benefits as the pandemic drags on, but they don’t address the underlying debt or tax system at the agency ultimately controlled by the governor.
The cumulative effect, political analysts say, is that unemployment is poised to lose out to competing priorities such as vaccines, adding to a long history of neglecting safety-net programs in a year further complicated by messy recall politics.
“If the governor and the legislative leadership wanted to make this a top priority, the timing could be perfect,” said Dan Schnur, a Republican campaign veteran and a professor at the University of Southern California and UC Berkeley. “This could end up being the single worst financial scandal in the history of California government. But the irony is it’s so big and so sprawling, it’s difficult for voters to understand.”
Who really pays for unemployment?
Unemployment is what Stanford economist Mark Duggan calls an “invisible tax.” While Social Security is run by the federal government and deducted directly from workers’ paychecks, each state oversees its own unemployment system funded by employer taxes.
Despite California’s reputation for a progressive tax system, the state’s unemployment taxes hit businesses with lower-paid workers harder. That’s because businesses are taxed on only the first $7,000 a worker makes — the lowest amount allowed by federal law, and a figure that hasn’t been updated in 39 years, said Duggan, who studies unemployment at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
“It’s the worst… And it’s not some stupid little narrow program. As we just saw in the pandemic, this was the most important part of the social safety net.” — Mark Duggan, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research
Each business then pays a payroll tax rate ranging from 1.5% to 6.2%, depending on how many of its workers have filed for unemployment benefits in past years. That often penalizes hotels, restaurants and other high-turnover industries slammed by the pandemic. Unemployment taxes max out at $434 per employee, per year, or up to about $4,340 for a 10-person company paying the highest rate, before any emergency fees.
Since the state partially insures wages up to a much higher limit, $46,800 a year, the result is that businesses pay very similar unemployment taxes for a worker who makes $8,000 a year and another who earns $40,000. But the higher-paid worker gets $400 a week in state jobless benefits if laid off, compared to $80 for the lower-paid worker.
While the costs of those benefits add up for the state, it’s often not enough for out-of-work Californians to pay for housing, foodand other necessities. That’s made extra federally funded unemployment payments during the pandemic — $600 a week last spring, $300 under more recent stimulus measures — a lifeline for many.
“It’s the worst. The most regressive. Appalling. I don’t know what adjective to use,” Duggan said of the state’s current unemployment financing system. “And it’s not some stupid little narrow program. As we just saw in the pandemic, this was the most important part of the social safety net.”
What happens when that safety net breaks down is all too clear for Lauren Taylor-Mayweather. The 41-year-old mother of four lost her job as a home health aide in the Inland Empire in January, and she’s still out $490 after reporting a string of fraudulent charges on her state-issued Bank of America unemployment debit card in February.
All payments stopped for more than a month after her unemployment account was frozen, she said. Her husband was able to cover rent for the family, but they fell a month behind on their car payment, their auto insurance lapsed and groceries were sparse as she waited hours to plead her case to customer service workers.
“I was pretty much down to my last dollar,” Taylor-Mayweather said, and yet, “I’m being made the criminal.”
One silver lining of the past few months is that she’s been able to attend online classes for a bachelor’s degree in health care administration, giving her hope of moving up in her next job. But it’s fast-growing jobs including home health aides and other service industry positions that Duggan says would benefit most if California took on more ambitious unemployment reform.
He favors raising the $7,000-per-worker base on which employers are taxed to align with the $46,800 insurance limit. This would likely raise taxes on high-paying employers, but lower them for employers who hire more lower-wage workers. States including Utah, North Dakota and Washington have changed the rules and required employers to pay taxes on $36,000 in wages or more, and they’ve so far avoided unemployment debt during the pandemic.
“That would, overnight, lower the cost of hiring part-time and low-wage workers, and it would act as a powerful stimulus,” Duggan said. “Yeah, it would raise a little bit the cost of hiring engineers and accountants. But it would rationalize it, because right now the accountants and the engineers are getting free insurance.”
Debt deja vu
This wouldn’t be the first time California policymakers have passed on overhauling unemployment during a crisis. After the Great Recession ended in 2009, it took until 2018 for the state to pay back billions borrowed from the federal government through business taxes and interest payments from the state general fund.
Duggan argues that such a drawn-out approach again risks creating a “a drag” on economic recovery after the COVID recession. Other policy researchers contend that the explosion of unemployment fraud in many states during the pandemic should also be a wake-up call to rethink who runs benefit programs, since most other countries administer similar programs at a national level.
“Are we long past due for moving this to a federal system?” asks Jody Heymann, a UCLA professor of health policy. “I don’t actually think it’s realistic that all 50 states will be good at preventing fraud. And if they are, why would you set up that much redundancy?”
Still, such prospects seem far removed from proposals favored by business groups including the Tax Foundation, which are pushing states to steer clear of tax hikes and “avoid penalizing hiring.”
“This could end up being the single worst financial scandal in the history of California government. But the irony is it’s so big and so sprawling, it’s difficult for voters to understand.” — Dan Schnur, Republican campaign veteran
Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he won’t raise taxes this year, but the alternatives are limited. EDDofficials have stressed that upwards of 90% of fraud appears to have targeted federal emergency programs, so it’s unclear how much the state would get to keep of any money clawed back from fraudsters.
There’s also the possibility that the federal government could forgive some loans, though bailing out California and other insolvent states might not go over well in places that have kept their programs in order. California could also follow more conservative states and tighten eligibility or cut unemployment benefits for workers to save money.
The most likely scenario politically may be doing very little, given the hyper-polarized climate surrounding the recall. After assembling and disbanding an unemployment “strike team” last year, Newsom and his surrogates have largely avoided the issue since installing new leadership at the Employment Development Department, often referring questions to labor and employment officials as he navigates the pandemic and other turmoil.
“Newsom has probably been hurt politically much more by one silly birthday dinner than by a multibillion-dollar employment benefit scandal,” Schnur said. “That’s probably because he’s kept himself at such a distance from it. The problem is that may have created a disincentive for him to engage more forcefully on a solution.”
For Taylor-Mayweather, it all seems like a matter of will, or lack thereof. She blames both the state and Bank of America for failing to make sure unemployment money was safe in the first place, overlooking details such as secure chips in debit cards for recipients.
“You knew we were vulnerable,” Taylor-Mayweather said. “We weren’t worth the extra step.”
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CALmatters.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan media venture explaining California policies and politics.
When it comes to fashion, is there a Humboldt look? To explore this question of regional trends, on this week’s episode of Humboldt Holding Up — LoCO’s pandemic-era podcast — we speak with Jason Brandi, owner and clothing designer at Humboldt Republic, whose fashions you’ve undoubtedly seen Humboldt-wide, whether you’re in town, on a hike, or on the hill. Topics discussed this edition include:
This week’s break-in at Brandi’s Fourth Street Eureka shop
Transitioning from throwing events a decade ago at the Red Fox Tavern, Nocturnum and other local venues to full-time making clothes for a devoted following
The thought process that goes into designing clothes for a specific geographic region
Adapting his business approach to meet the demands of the last year’s COVID world
Learning from critiques of past designs
Navigating reaction to his popular parody designs
Click the audio player above to hear Brandi’s chat with LoCO’s Stephanie McGeary and Andrew Goff or play the episode in your podcast app. Also check out past Humboldt Holding Up guests below.
…and
more sacred by the minute. That’s because they’re getting
scarcer, and are projected to disappear altogether in the next 24
years, according to a new, generally well-reviewed, book (e.g. here;
or for a critical review, check this).
Thanks to our addiction to certain human-made chemicals, we’re on a
suicide mission to extinction. Not the slow
“global-warming-ocean-acidification” extinction, or the quick
“all-out-thermonuclear-war” extinction. Instead we’ve got sperm
counts sliding inexorably down at the rate of about one percent per
year. As a species, we’re on our way out.
(If
you’ve seen Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 flick The Children of Men,
you know how this plays out: no babies having been born for 20 years
due to worldwide infertility, society is in the process of
collapsing. It’s a great movie, whatever the premise.)
The
sperm count crisis (“crisis” = state of chaos and uncertainty)
has been known for decades, at least since the 1970s, and certainly
by 1992 when a Danish meta-analysis, the “Carlson Study” (after
the principal author) brought it to the attention of researchers
worldwide. It took another 25 years to make headlines, with the
publication of a major meta-study in 2017 by Shanna Swan, a
reproductive epidemiologist at Mount Sinai in New York. She followed
up her scientific paper with a recently released book (co-written
with science journalist Stacey Coloni) Count Down. Here are
some of Swan’s findings, “harvested from hundreds of studies”:
In Western countries, sperm counts dropped by 59% between 1970 and
2011, from 99 to 47 million per milliliter. At this rate, they’ll
be down to zero in 2045.
Testosterone levels in men have been dropping by 1% per year since
1982; a quarter of men experiencing erectile dysfunction are now
under 40.
Due, at least partly, to deformed sperm, a woman’s risk of
miscarriage increased by 1% per year between 1990 and 2011.
The average DOR (a measure of the number and health of a fertile
woman’s eggs) has been falling, while cases of endometriosis have
been rising over the past few decades.
While
researchers are divided on the causes of these dystopian statistics,
Swan’s main culprits are endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs),
toxins that interfere with the hormone-producing network of glands
collectively known as our endocrine system. These glands regulate the
balance of such hormones as estrogen (mainly in women) and
testosterone (mainly in men), the hormones responsible for deciding,
among other things, the sex of a fetus, the onset of puberty…and
pretty much everything that differentiates genders. When chemicals
interfere with their natural functioning, problems like the ones
found by Swan’s research ensure. In addition, testosterone-blocking
chemicals can lead to poor fertility or infertility in men, plus
feminizing effects such as smaller than average penises and
testicles.
According
to Swan, one class of EDCs is responsible for most of the problems:
Phthalates cause both abnormalities and death in sperm. First
manufactured in the 1920s, phthalates, aka “plasticizers,” are
used to make plastics stronger, more flexible, durable and
transparent. They’re everywhere, in plastics, electronics,
cosmetics, pesticides, shampoos, hair spray, nail polish, shower
curtains…(Other potential sperm-damaging carcinogens mentioned by
Swan include bisphenol A or BPA, the resin that lines soda and beer
cans; PFAS found in food packaging; and PCBs, which are now banned.)
Unfortunately
for her credibility, Swan overstates her case, inviting a lot of
“correlation isn’t causation” complaints, suspicions of
cherry-picking data, and objections that “the dose makes the
poison.” So while the precipitous drop in sperm count is real (at
least, I haven’t read anyone arguing with those data), her focus on
particular chemicals weakens her argument. For instance,
endocrinologist Richard Sharpe of Edinburgh University (who
originated the notion of EDCs in the 1990s) opined to science
journalist Philip Ball that he “suspects that diet, lifestyle,
medications and environmental chemicals all play roles, possibly in
that order.”
However,
taking Swan at face value, she offers a bunch of suggestions, from
“don’t smoke” (duh), avoid obesity, don’t heat food in
plastic containers, only eat meat free of additional hormones and
antibiotics, eat organic, and rip up your wall-to-wall carpets. (She
seems to be addressing the wealthier among us.) More tips on avoiding
toxic kitchen chemicals here.
And FWIW, here’s a
study I found linking increased male fertility with a
nutrient-dense diet.
Meanwhile,
the irony is hard to avoid. Since humans are busily creating “the
sixth extinction event,” the guilty ones are those that stand most
to lose from our actions.
The winter returned this past week. It’s a measure of the size of the city that some parts reported snow, while others, including our neighborhood on the Asian side, did not. Still, it was miserable. After weeks of sunshine and warmth, and the long walks we were able to take with Leo, the return of the cold weather was rather hard to take, especially since like everybody we already spend too much time indoors.
The return of winter got me thinking about other winters. I thought about my first winter in Prague. It was called “the Russian winter” by the Czechs that year, with Siberian winds blasting the whole of central and eastern Europe. It was so cold that he penguins at the Prague Zoo were brought inside to keep them warm, which I thought rather strange. They were penguins, after all.
“Well, they are not real penguins, they’re Czech penguins,” a student remarked. Ah, Czech humor.
On a more serious note, the city also set up Army tents in Letna Park for the homeless, as temperatures dropped well into the minus. It was not a good time for anybody to be outside.
The winter was long, the snow lasting until late April or early May. Having come from California, where on the coast we mostly saw just rain most winters, it was a particularly long winter for me. I was living in Roztoky, a village just outside Prague. Every morning I’d get up, dress in the few warm clothes I had and, since the buses only ran once every hour, walk the lonely road into the city to catch the metro at Device to the center for my first lesson of the day. It was about a thirty-minute walk, still dark out, the road to the city silent except for the occasional car, the woods on each side of the road heavy and damp with packed snow. I’d walk in the cold, silent dawn feeling very far away from California.
Once in town, I’d rush to the metro station, down the steps to where it was heated, and hurry down the escalator to catch the first metro to Strasnice, a district on the other side of town, for my morning class. The class was at a Swedish cosmetics firm. I’d stand outside the company shivering until my students, Jitka and Marketa arrived. After we went inside, they’d go and get me a hot cup of coffee before the start of the lesson. After the lesson, I’d take the tram to the city center, and walk over to Bohemia Bagel for a good American breakfast of eggs, bacon, hashbrowns and toast. I’d eat breakfast, drink bottomless cups of coffee, then sit and read or write for a couple of hours, stopping now and again to see if it was snowing outside or not. I’d wait for it to clear before heading out.
Walking carefully over the cobblestones, which were slippery and treacherous. I’d teach in the afternoons and sometimes the early evenings as well, where depended on which day of the week. There were lessons at Maersk, the Holland-based shipping company, which had offices in Prague and in Melnik, a town about an hour north of Prague. I taught at both offices, and took a bus to Melnik on Wednesdays.
After work, I’d catch the bus at Dejvice back out to the village. There was a small neighborhood pub called Aj Movka that I usually went in the evening. They served good local beer for 15 crowns (less than a dollar) and the manager cooked a decent goulash served with rohliky, the Czech rolls. Towards the end of each month, when I was low on money, I’d buy canned goulash from the potraviny and rohliky for 1 crown apiece, and spend the evening in my room reading books, the worlds of Kundera, Remarque, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, et al, helping warm the room and make the winter seem faraway.
I always found the writing went well in the winter, when you were more isolated and there was little else to do. In the spring, the great Prague springs that always came, you wanted to be outside, at the beer gardens at Riegrove sady and Letna, sitting at picnic tables under the pleasant trees and sipping pints of cold beer. I remember surviving that long Russian winter, and feeling quite proud of the fact that I’d managed to make it through on my own in a faraway land, and knowing that I could in one way or another, scrape by in the city after that.
The best part of that year was, when the spring finally came, I’d found a room share in Nusle, a neighborhood in the city. I was back in Prague, just in time for spring. All along the Vltava River, the trees were in blossom, the people had returned. Later, in the summer the beer gardens were full every night as everyone gathered to watch the World Cup on big screens. It was a hot, languid summer and the long Russian winter became a thing of the past. I stayed four more years, and fortunately the winters after that first one were very mild.
###
The first full winter I spent in Istanbul was also not too bad. That was around the time of the global financial crisis, so maybe the fact that I was working, with a steady income and roof over my head, made all other things relative. There were a few snow days, but the climate was more Mediterranean, not unlike Northern Cal. I was used to that kind of winter. Or so I thought. The main thing was that while Turkey is near the Med, and gets some of its mild winters, it is also near the Black Sea, to the north. So it also gets its share of Russian winds from time to time, as I found out later, especially the winter of 2011-12.
But that first winter was not so bad. I was living in Cicekci, a neighborhood on a hilltop overlooking the Bosphorus on the Asian side of the city. There was not much to do in Cicekci, since it is mostly residential, but it’s equadistant between Kadikoy and Uskudar. Some weekends I went to Kadikoy and others I ventured down the hill to Uskudar, depending on the traffic and my mood.
Talk about a tale of two neighborhoods. Kadikoy was colorful, cosmopolitan, with lots of young people, many of them foreign, lots of bars and cool cafes; in contrast, Uskudar was traditional, conservative, with most women wearing headscarves, and there were coffee shops in the shadows of the great mosques.
On cold, rainy Saturday mornings, if I’d chosen Kadikoy, I’d head along busy waterfront over to the Arem Café, nestled on a backstreet near the fish market. They served a modest omelette, and generous cups of hot Turkish tea. Best of all, nobody went there in the mornings, so I had the back section, which was a kind of enclosed terrace, all to myself. I’d bring along a book and notepad, read and write for a while, until the garcon brought the omelette and refreshed the tea. There were always cats who came in from the street and lounged in one of the empty seats, or else sauntered up to the fireplace for a nap. Next to the fireplace stacks of freshly cut wood were arranged neatly, ready for use. For some reason, the sight of the firewood was always reassuring, even more so than the softly crackling fire itself.
Later I’d stick the book I was reading and the notepad into my bag, pay the bill, then go up to Barlar Sokak, or Bar Street, which was only a few minutes’ away. Usually I went to Hera, a bar located in what used to be a large Greek-style summer house. Most of those old places have long-since been sold and broken up into shops, bars and apartments, as Kadikoy was absorbed into the ever-growing city. All the new yalis along the Bosphorus are very expensive and much more extravagant. At Hera, the interior is spacious, also with a fireplace in winter, with the same reassuring stack of firewood. You wonder which room of the house it was when the house itself existed. Maybe it was a bedroom, or perhaps a sitting room, or study. The terrace has comfortable booths and a view of the street. I’d order a few drafts of Tuborg, read and look out at the rain and the people passing in the wet streets.
On other Saturdays, I chose to go to Uskudar. There was only one place that served alcohol, a seedy bar hidden on a narrow street off the main thoroughfare. It was kept of the way from respectable folk, I suppose. I’d found it by accident while wandering the back streets one day. The bar was full of old locals, men who liked to read newspapers and watch the horse racing on a TV that was placed on a wall opposite the bar.
I was the only yabanci who ever went there, and the other patrons ignored me, while the garcon, young local guys, brought small glasses of beer and placed them on the table with scarcely a word, other than “Boyrun,” (here you are). The beer was cheap, and the atmosphere was quiet, so it also was a good place to write because you felt far away, and the odd familiarity of the bar was comforting. You could be left alone, and yet stimulated at the same time.
Later on, in other winters, I found new places to go, and other places to write. After I married and settle down, it was not so easy to just get away like that, disappear for whole mornings and afternoons, and coming home smelling of beer. If one is happily married, and wishes to remain so, one learns that time must be spent together. One time, shortly after we met, I took my wife Ozge to the old seedy place in Uskudar, just to sort of share the places I’d been. We didn’t stay long. “You used to hang out here?” she asked, and as she looked around warily I couldn’t help notice how forlorn, borderline disreputable, the placed was. I’d never really noticed before. But it was hard to explain that in my early Istanbul days, the old bar had been a strange, curious but comforting place to while away a solitary Saturday afternoon, and that it had even given me some good stories. But then again, it is important to change your venue from time to time, and after that I never went to the old bar anymore, figuring it had probably given me what was to be given. The same went for the Arem Café. One day, my wife and I were walking past, and I noticed the café had been demolished. Eventually a bar was built in its place, and I figured, well, that’s it for the Arem too. Then a few months later, my wife and I recognized the owner of the Arem at another location a few blocks away. He saw me too and smiled brightly. “Hos geldiniz!” he said, remembering me. But we just nodded, congratulated him on his new place and walked on.
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The return of the winter this past week got me thinking about the other winters, those first ones in Prague and Istanbul, how the winters seemed colder then because I was adapting to a new city, a new culture, a new way of living, and finding my way. This winter, which marked the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus entering our lives, has been quite different. We have a one-year-old son, Leo, and with the restrictions and precautions, there are no weekend sojourns through backstreets, no long days in the bars and cafes. Of course, as my wife would say, “If only you had worse things to worry about!” in her usual wise way.
We took Leo to the park on Thursday. It was the first time the sun had been out for several days. We let Leo use the swing and the slide in the park, while the older kids brushed him aside easily, showing him how it’s really done. Afterward, we let him walk on his own, with Ozge monitoring carefully, down the street to the farmers’ market. The farmers are all decent, modest, hard-working fellows. They know us and when they saw Leo walking on his own, all bundled up, they greeted him kindly and encouragingly. One of the farmers, an older man with a weathered face and white moustache, gave us a cucumber for free, to give to Leo to help him grow. We thanked him, and he put the rest of our produce into the bags. I carried all the shopping we’d done and pushed the stroller down the street, the Bosphorus in the distance, while my wife watched as Leo, his eyes full of pride and wonder, waddled down the street, gazing out at the winter world. He saw me further ahead and pointed, smiling and feeling pretty impressed with himself, while Ozge stood ready behind him should he suddenly fall. We were a family heading home, the sun still shining but more cold weather on the way. The good news is that it’s supposed to warm up a bit at the weekend. We can perhaps go to Kuzguncuk and let Leo walk around in the park. There are always new places to go, and things to write about, no matter the season, no matter the city, no matter the weather.
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James Tressler, a former Lost Coast resident, is a writer and teacher.
