Cover Story

“Hey, look what I found.” My husband handed me the magazine he’d been reading, open to a page near the back. As I scanned the columns, numbers and words blurred together before I found what he was talking about. There it was, atop a column of 92, 92, 91 in the buying guide of October’s […]

An estimated 129 million trees in California are dead. It sounds apocalyptic, but it’s true.  About one-fifth of those, or 27 million, died between November 2016 and December 2017. More than 60 million died the previous year.  Most of the die-off has occurred in the Sierra Nevada, but forests on the Central Coast have lost […]

The nighttime forest hum of crickets and frogs, sometimes punctuated by a distant wolf howl, fills the wood-paneled cabin room. Lined with locked boxes, tables with drawers, a pot-bellied stove, a bed, and frontiersman accoutrements, the only modern feature to the room is a keypad-locked door. This isn’t the California wilderness of the late 1800s, […]

A U-Haul van packed with pounds of freshly harvested marijuana eases its way down the narrow winding road on the back side of Cebada Canyon. As it rolls and bucks against uneven terrain, the driver brings the vehicle to a complete stop on the right shoulder to let a gunmetal Honda Accord pass by.  “That’s […]

After 25 years in the U.S. Navy, Peter Flores had heard all the meritocratic mantras in existence, and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” was by far his favorite. Hard work was the constant focus of his life as a command master chief, and as a new naval sciences teacher in the early 2000s, he […]

When a doctor told Tonya Schultz she would have to have her arm amputated to fight the cancer slowly creeping through her body, she was determined to find another solution. “[They] told me we don’t have any other treatments, we need to amputate,” she said. “That’s when I said, ‘No, I don’t want to do […]

She was so scared she couldn’t even bring herself to get out of the car. So Teri Bayus sat in the parking lot at Cuesta College until she summoned the courage to get out and walk over to registration to sign up for the Central Coast Writers Conference. After all, her husband had double-dog dared […]

More than 50 senior citizens sat in rows listening intently as candidates presented their platforms, speaking in six-minute chunks with a wood-grain patterned wall and bingo board serving as a backdrop. The Sept. 10 forum at the Casa Grande Mobile Estates clubhouse in Santa Maria was like many candidates forums of years past, ending with […]

Acres of asphalt cover what used be rows of cauliflower and strawberry fields along Santa Maria’s Betteravia Road. The Enos Ranch development shot up quickly just off Highway 101 last year, raising steel beams and vaulted white walls in a matter of months. But the towering cranes and churning cement mixers are mostly gone, and […]