The other weekend I went back to my hometown to kick it with all of my old stoner buddies from high school and they were all about smoking salvia, a pretty gnarly pyschoative herb that is somwhat surprisingly legal to purchase here in California. I was familiar with salvia from reading Daniel Pinchbeck’s Breaking Open the Head, but I figured the shit they had bought at the local head shop was probably a stepped on, watered down version of the real shit that would do nothing more than give them a headache and a cough. But man, was I wrong. One after the other, I watched my buddies take a quick spin outside of the universe, and seemingly outside of themselves. They laid back like zombies and pawed at the air, all the while reacting to unseen foes and landscapes. At first I thought they were just fucking around, but when I saw the fear in their eyes and the utter amazement of their countenances when they inevitably returned to earth I knew that shit was no joke. I stuck to Bud Light, thank you very much. Apparently though, Willows isn’t the only place that seems to be fucking with salvia. In fact, there is a whole series of YouTube videos featuring people trying to do every day tasks such as driving and gardening, immediately after taking a big rip of salvia. Check it out, but seriously, I don’t recommend fucking with salvia unless you want to question your entire existence. When it comes to psychedelic drugs, I can tell you from firsthand experience that some doors once opened can never be closed. But hey, if you’re feeling adventurous, give it a rip and maybe you’ll see the end of the world. Fuck it.

Exactly 10 years since my own graduation from the hallowed halls of Willows High School, my alma mater is undergoing something of a Final Destination-esque string of tragic deaths within it’s current senior class. To put things in perspective, my graduating class was all of 99 people (the 100th got expelled the day of graduation) and the town hasn’t exactly exploded with growth since then. It’s a small town in the truest sense of the word. Nothing crazy really ever happens there. The only newsworthy death in Willows I can remember, until now, was my cousin Reed, who drowned in the Sacramento River after tying an ice chest to his ankle. They brought him back to life though. It was even on Rescue 911 ( albeit in a slightly edited capacity). But what’s been happening to the Class of 2008 is definitely something different for the residents of Willows, or, I’d imagine, any small town.

First there was the shocking death of Brian Parks, quarterback of the varsity football team, son of the head coach, and about as wholesome, All-American kid as they come these days. From the LA Times story:

Brian Parks collapsed Aug. 21, on a scruffy field, in the shadow of a badly bent goalpost. It was halfway through a Monday afternoon preseason football practice for the Willows High School varsity. Parks was a 16-year-old junior, a candidate to be the team’s starting quarterback. It was 92 degrees, a good 10 degrees cooler than at much of the previous week’s practices.

The person closest to Brian when he went down, about an arm’s length away, was the head coach. He was in his 29th year of coaching in the Northern Section of the California Interscholastic Federation, and the last 26 of those had been as a head coach. He also taught physical education, health and sports medicine at this school 75 miles north of Sacramento, and was the person best equipped to handle the crisis. Brian had fallen face down, helmet slightly embedded in the dirt. His arms were splayed to his sides, hands resting awkwardly. One of his teammates yelled at him to “Quit screwing around.”

When the head coach turned him over, he saw lifeless eyes. The head coach ordered a 911 call, then started CPR. Brian’s practice jersey was quickly cut off, then the shoulder pads. While an assistant searched for a pulse, the head coach continued mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the procedure that he had taught and been taught.
It took less than three minutes for the paramedics to get there. In Willows, almost nothing is more than five minutes away. The sign at the city limits helps explain that: Population 6,250, Elevation 135. When the paramedics arrived, they found groups of teenage boys, standing in small clusters, their faces blank with a sort of collective inability to comprehend. Nearby, an assistant coach was down on all fours, sobbing. Once the head coach relinquished medical efforts to the paramedics, he thought of his wife, who had just driven up from their home, three blocks away. The head coach’s name is Curtis Parks, and he knew that he and Cindy had just lost their only son, a son whose middle name was Curtis.

Parks had died from an unknown heart defect: Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy. Fast forward to this year, and another prominent, stand-out Class of 2008 student, Kayla Arnold was stricken by an even more mysterious unknown ailment, dying after her family removed her from life support:

Kayla Arnold, 18, was taken off life support and died late Wednesday morning, according to family spokesman Curtis Parks, whose son Brian was a close friend and classmate of Kayla’s, but died in 2006.

“Kayla was a wonderful young lady and loved by a lot of kids,” Parks said Wednesday. “I know the community will rally behind her family the same way they did last time.” Parks said that an official cause of death had not been determined as of Wednesday and said an autopsy would be scheduled “very soon.”

“The doctors have been able to rule out a few possibilities. We know it did not have anything to do with drugs and meningitis was also ruled out,” Parks said. “But, we still don’t know what actually happened or why.”

The fact that the Arnold family spokesperson was Parks, the father of Brian Parks, should give you some idea of the close-knit community in which these two mysterious tragedies struck. In fact, Brian Parks and Kayla Arnold were buried only a few feet from each other in the Willows Cemetary. That two, tragic, untimely deaths had happened to the same class of kids was pretty rare in the annals of Willows High School history. People wondered how it was possible that two such unorthodox deaths could happen in such proximity to one another. Statistically speaking, it was all pretty bizarre. Then came the news today of Willows High School senior Stephen Furtado, pictured above, murdered alongside his prom date in the forlorn mountain outpost of Chester, CA:

A senior at Willows High School and his prom date were found dead Sunday afternoon by the girl’s mother in Chester. The Plumas County Sheriff’s Office said Steven Daniel Furtado, 18, and Chester resident Jennifer Carmen Carrigan, also 18, are the victims of homicide.

As it this all weren’t bizarre enough, after being informed of his sister’s death, Jennifer Carrigan’s brother Billy, drove from his home in Berkeley to be with his family. Only he didn’t make it:

After hearing about the death of his sister, Billy Victor Carrigan, 20, left Berkeley to be with his family in Chester. The California Highway Patrol reported that Carrigan was driving east on Highway 36 near Mineral when he lost control of his 2001 Toyota Tacoma pickup on a 30 mph curve. The truck skidded off the road, reportedly became airborne, and slammed into several pine trees. Carrigan was wearing a seat belt but suffered major injuries. He was flown by helicopter to Enloe Medical Center, where he was reported in critical condition today.

Now I don’t necessarily believe in curses, but I don’t necessarily not believe in them either. Maybe it’s just bad luck. Maybe its just one-in-a-million times 3. But some crazy shit is definitely happening in Willows, CA. Let’s all hope it stops.

UPDATE: Jennifer Carrigan’s brother Billy has died from the injuries he sustained in the crash:

Billy Carrigan died Tuesday at Enloe Medical Center in Chico, said Christina Chavira, a hospital spokeswoman. He had been in critical condition at the hospital since Sunday, when he got into the accident along Highway 36 outside his hometown of Chester, about 150 miles north of Sacramento.

This is the first time in awhile I’ve been ashamed of being a Democrat.  A lopdick state assemblyman by the name of Jim Beall is proposing in a new bill to increase the tax on a can or bottle of beer from the current $.02 to $.30, making a six pack $1.80 more expensive:

The people who use alcohol should pay for part of the cost to society, just like we’ve accepted that concept with tobacco,” Beall said.

Beall has already successfully convinced the Franchise Tax Board to raise the taxes on so-called “Alco-pops,” the sweet tasting malt beers that teenaged dudes in Willows use to get high school girls drunk enough to let them touch some whiskers by $2 a sixpack, an increase that will take effect later this year.

WARNING: the following sentimental diatribe may be tl;dr

Being born and raised in Willows, CA, a forlorn outpost of a town known mostly to the outside world as a place to score Taco Bell or Starbucks on Interstate-5 between Sacramento and Portland, I had the good fortune to enjoy the sort of quaint small-town upbringing that many of my more urban rooted friends and associates know only from books and movies. Though the list of things that rule about life in Willows is too long to denote here, I can say that one of the more unique, and perhaps quixotic, aspects of Willows is the Sacramento Valley Mirror, a twice-weekly newspaper that acts as a foil to the local McPaper, the Willows Journal, and more importantly, as an implement of epic shit stirring. Owner / Editor Tim Crews is possibly the most despised in the entirety of Glenn County and for good reason: he’s successfully taken on almost every aspect of the local government, the cops, the County Supervisors, the School District and has somehow always come out relatively unscathed. As a kid in Willows though, I cared less about the uncovering of corruption and graft within local politics than I did the weekly rundown of Police Calls, which ensured that no domestic dispute or Drug bust would go unrecorded. Many lulz were had reading about a buddy’s older brother getting popped for Meth or the high school gym teacher roughing up his old lady. The Valley Mirror is the type of paper that every small town needs, but hardly any have. It has thus earned a surprising amount of accolades from the journalism world at large. Last year, I almost shit myself when I picked up my morning copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and saw the above picture of Crews strolling through Downtown Willows (at an intersection from which one of the five sets of stoplights in the entire town was recently removed, if that tells you anything about Willows). The accompanying story was quite laudatory, painting Crews as the protagonist in the David vs. Goliath fight of investigative journalism versus the corporate news world in the internet age:

The kind of scrappy journalism Crews does may become harder to find if current media trends continue. With classified advertising usurped by the Internet, newspapers across the country are facing mounting losses and, in many cases, cuts in staff and resources. First Amendment scholars fear that investigative journalism may die as newsprint fades away. Crews won’t have any of it. He is a country editor whose little paper is influencing public opinion on a shoestring budget. A maverick, old-school muckraker, Crews is notorious in this rural farming community of 6,220 people and the governmental center of Glenn County.

However, much to the chagrin of those who’d like to see the paper go the way of the dodo, the Sacramento Valley Mirror is now online, providing me with the weekly dose of the small town drama I’ve been missing. A quick run down of this week’s news shows the the Valley Mirror is still doing its thing. The leading editorial “Yes, we owe Glenn County taxes, and Glenn County owes us a fair shake” takes a recent disclosing of the paper’s outstanding property tax bill and turns it into a rather stirring run down of the various intimidation tactics used against the paper since it’s formation:

The paper is founded. In the first three years we have some 30 break-ins, cases of vandalism, or car burglaries. Most reports not even logged.
fter a several such, Sheriff Roger Roberts, beleaguered and looking tired, visited. Hands down on the counter, slumped shouldered, he said, “I just don’t know whom I can trust. But do this, clean the bottom of those computers real well so we can get some prints.” And so we did, with carbon tet. Clean as a phonied up narcotics case. A week or later we had another burglary. Our landlord had heard a scanner in the office – we didn’t have a base then — but wasn’t quick enough to catch anyone. We called it in. Lots of deleted files and searched files. The machine showed when they were entered. Then deputy, and now Glenn County Sheriff’s Lieutenant, Phil Revolinsky was there working when the Glenn County District Attorney investigators arrived.
“I’ll just go get my fingerprint kit it out of my car,” Deputy Revolinsky told Chief Investigator Mike Murray.
“No you won’t,” Lt. Revolinsky recalls the chief investigator saying. And so, no prints were taken.
Sand in the valve cover, water in the gas, .22 hole in a door, the list dragged on until a call to Congressman Vic Fazio’s office prompted the feds to make an appearance. And it all stopped. Three years and 30 or so events. If one lives with this kind of nonsense long enough, it becomes somewhat irritating. There was never one investigation by Glenn County. Those were different times, we are glad to say. [Memo to Willows Police Department: Any progress on the arson fire here 16 months ago?]

Elsewhere however, the mood is lighter with headlines such as the epic “Dog Bites Patrol Car.” And though the Willows Police Logs are seemingly yet to be online, there is at least the rundown of Glenn County’s Most Wanted, which from time to time includes any number of childhood friends and dudes I used to smoke weed with in high school. Ah, Willows! One day I shall make my return!