“Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey”

“As for Mike and me,” T.B. O’Neill writes of himself and his brother as 1960 approached, “we thought we landed in paradise. The town accepted us and we accepted Chico as our home.” Just thirteen, Tim and older brother Mike had endured abject poverty, family dysfunction, and more moves than a U-Hall rental.

The story of the 1950s is told in “Timmy: A Boy, An Era, A Family’s Desperate Journey” ($16 in paperback, independently published; also for Amazon Kindle). Intended for his own children, the book has wider resonance as O’Neill (tboneill.com) chronicles the loneliness of one who doesn’t fit in. Timmy is reckless, a failure academically, frequently ill.

“I’ll tell you our story as I remember it,” he says in the preface. “Rather than speaking in my own voice, I chose to look upon my childhood as a better angel might––calling up a third-person narrator to chronicle the foibles of our family as we stumbled through the 1950s.”

And stumble they did. “’Timmy’ does not end in victory.” 

The memoir begins in 1950 on the outskirts of Newark, California with parents Carl (“Curly”) and Naomi and life in a two-room house (no indoor plumbing) accommodating the four of them. Carl is an alcoholic and physically abusive, hitting Naomi when he can no longer handle her sharp tongue. 

As Carl’s drinking worsens, the family moves again and again and again, trying to escape themselves and find suitable work. Naomi leaves with the kids over and over, yet always returns to Carl (until a man calling himself “Ed” enters her life). The story is heartbreaking, not least in how Tim is affected.

“When he was younger,” the narrator says, “he yearned for kind words or a touch from his parents. But he came to notice that it was time itself that cured his longing. He gradually acquired the ability to detach, to expect much less from others, to ignore rejection from those who found him inconsequential. He would place his faith instead upon the man he would become, a man who needed no one.”

Will Chico change that trajectory? The sequel, “Dangle Him Purposely,” may have the answer.

“Yellowstone DNA: A Tale Of Wolves, Wildlife, And Humans”

What does it mean to say an ecosystem is balanced—and what happens when it’s not? There are scholarly answers to those questions, of course, but former Chico City Council member Scott Huber uses his latest novel to draw readers into a heartbreaking generations-long story of “Yellowstone DNA: A Tale Of Wolves, Wildlife, And Humans” ($14.99 in paperback from Long Creek Dutch Publishing).

The novel focuses on elk, wolves, and humans, which, Huber writes in the preface, “until the coming of white Europeans … existed in a state of equilibrium—two predators who hunted in small packs or clans and a prey animal that existed in numerous herds of dozens and hundreds. The predators killed only enough to sustain their small populations. The prey’s numbers were kept in balance by their pursuers.”

Based on two years of research and observation, Huber’s story mixes fictional characters with historical events. It culminates in the great debate “pitting ranchers and hunters against wildlife watchers and eco-tourists” over the question of reintroducing gray wolves into the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. (Speculative chapters at the end take readers to 2031 and beyond to show how anti-wolf government policies might be changed.)

Huber, a hunter himself, brings nuance to the novel’s debate about restoring the ecosystem. But the wolf must be part of that balance. “In Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley,” an author’s note says, “Scott was privileged to experience close encounters with wolves and their pups … enchanted by the beautiful songs of gray wolves near Wyoming’s Sunlight Basin.”

Chapters take readers into the minds of the humans and the other animals, using indigenous names throughout. From the nineteenth century through our own time, here are the tales of Chili the elk, Nuni and Omah the wolves, Pohogwe (Po) the Shoshoni (Tukudika) archeologist, and many more.

Without wolves, the burgeoning elk population devours aspens the beavers need, ruining their habitat; then the beavers are taken by coyotes and killed by cars when they try to make for better waterways.

But this is a novel of possibility; the gray wolves, “the Isa, creator gods of Shoshoni mythology, began singing their approval.” Huber invites readers to join in.

“Firescaping Your Home: A Manual For Readiness In Wildfire Country”

“Fire must be recognized as an integral part of our landscapes,” write biologists Andrienne Edwards and Rachel Schleiger in a stunningly beautiful and indispensible guide to staying safe. What that means, they write, is moving away from old fire suppression ideas and moving toward living with fire even as changing climate and more flammable invasive species (looking at you, Scotch broom!) make it trickier to live in the wildland-urban interface (WUI).

Edwards is a Chico State botanist; Schleiger, a plant ecologist whose Magalia house survived the Camp Fire, teaches at both Chico State and Butte College. Their book, “Firescaping Your Home: A Manual For Readiness In Wildfire Country” ($29.99 in paperback from Timber Press; also for Amazon Kindle) gives readers clear guidance about hardening one’s home, creating defensible space, and planting fire-safe gardens.

In full-color pages the authors offer a catalog of hundreds of native plant species that might slow a fire, in part by catching embers. They also discuss how fire behaves and how to think in terms of fire-suppression zones. 

Five feet around the house should be a “noncombustible zone” (no organic mulch or wood chips); next come the “green zone,” the “fuel reduction zone” and, finally, beyond 100 or 300 feet, the “habitat zone.” Details on how to maintain each zone guide even a WUI novice and come not only from the authors’ expertise but from lived experience (before Edwards replaced her old roof tiles a baby possum fell through a hole—an open door for embers).

“A powerful key to protecting your home in wildfire-prone areas,” the authors write, “is to learn how vegetation and structures affect wind patterns” and to consider using a “fire shelterbelt,” windbreaks of “fire-resistent (hydrated) trees and shrubs” that can “reduce wind, flying embers, and firebrands.”

Bottom line: “We must recognize that protecting homes and families is not about controlling wildfire but rather reducing the flammability of our homes, landscapes, and communities.” The use of prescribed burns, and even letting some wildfires burn where the threat is small, draw on the wisdom of Native peoples. “Fire is something we can coexist and evolve with, moving into the future.”

“Rock My Soul: A Poet’s Heart, A Brokedown Palace, And A Final Fare-Thee-Well”

Few books have captured the essence of Chico like Stephen Metzger’s new memoir, “Rock My Soul: A Poet’s Heart, A Brokedown Palace, And A Final Fare-Thee-Well” ($19.95 in paperback from Stansbury Publishing; also for Amazon Kindle), available at Made in Chico, The Bookstore, or from the author at SMetzger@csuchico.edu.

Metzger “retired from Chico State in May of 2010, after 30 years teaching in the English, American Studies, and Journalism departments.” (Subsequently he taught at Butte College until December 2018.)

At Chico State Metzger connected with librarian Jim Dwyer, hired in 1986. Dwyer had a scholarly side (“Where the Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction” was published in 2010, his retirement year and the start of his “downward spiral”), but also, as Rev. Junkyard Moondog, an activist alter ego bigger than life.

“You could spot him a mile away,” Metzger writes; “long, stringy gray hair, crooked baseball cap, smile as wide as a kayak. … he always managed to surprise—if not embarrass—everyone around him, while he somehow seemed impervious to embarrassment himself.” More than once Moondog recited a poem while he “nonchalantly began to undress.” As a former girlfriend noted, “Jim didn’t have any filters.”

Metzger intertwines his own story with that of Moondog, interviewing those who knew Dwyer. Pot and alcohol use didn’t do him any favors in retirement. He died June 28, 2015, collapsing at a mini-mart on his way home after attending the Grateful Dead’s Bay Area Fare Thee Well reunion tour.

KZFR lamented the passing of a “free spirited eccentric, outspoken, caring, giving, loveable oddball. … He was pure Chico.”

In 2016 Metzger bought Jim’s old house in Chico from brother Billy. It became a rental, complete with a peace sign on the roof, and later shelter for spillway and Camp Fire evacuees.

Friend Lisa Emmerich: “People say he was a dancer who couldn’t dance, a singer who couldn’t sing, and an actor who couldn’t act, but I think he really could act. His quinessential role was the one he played every day.”

Jim’s house is a memorial to Moondog, but so is this book. Pure Chico.