Since Saturday, Everything Hurts:
Riffing on the truth, inspired by "The Best Police Blotter in America"
Someone complains about a “raging party” at 2 a.m. in a vacation rental. Someone reports “foul words” painted on a firehouse bay door. Some left a motorcycle by the side of the road. (In a ditch. In the fog.) There’s a black calf standing alone at a stop sign on an isolated road, a dog whining in a station wagon, a woman who hears “beeping and voices.” It’s always somebody: somebody reporting trouble, somebody having trouble, somebody reading about trouble.
Welcome to the “Sheriff’s Calls” column in the Point Reyes Light, the paper of record in West Marin County, California. West Marin is a place of fabled beauty, home to oyster farms and dairies, foggy meadows, sandy beaches, rocky headlands, redwood forests and lagoons. Bakers, novelists, beer makers, cheesemakers, and cowboys live here. So do migrant farm workers, soccer moms, Girl Scouts, hippies, and attorneys. West Marin is also home to the Point Reyes Light, the small independent weekly that’s been publishing since 1948. In 1979, the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for public service for its aggressive reportage on a violent, controversial $30 million cult called the Church of Synanon. I was studying journalism at San Francisco State University when the Light won the prize; the story of the tiny weekly paper taking on a bullying, dangerous organization made headlines across the country. Who doesn’t love a story like that? Decades later, Synanon collapsed and disbanded—its properties in the town of Marshall sold or seized by the government. And the Light, still small and scrappy, continues to shine. My favorite part of the paper is the Sheriff’s Calls, even though I don’t live in Marin County anymore. What’s the appeal? A sprinkling of facts, the aura of mystery, rendered with a touch of restraint. If you’re a writer, or love words, the Sheriff’s Calls column is fertile ground. It’s like listening in on a party line: You can eavesdrop without having to chime in. Here’s an offering from last week’s Light:
CHILENO VALLEY: At 11:58 p.m. a woman said five people were at her son’s house on the property and two were on the roof. She said there was a woman in a fancy dress and a man with a beard and a table with a tablecloth.
I want to know what’s going on at that house, don’t you? Was it a party? A wake? Why were people on the roof? And tell me more about that fancy dress…
I read the Sheriff’s Calls with a little nostalgia and a lot of curiosity. Maybe it’s the way items are rendered—lightly, gently, with a judicious nod towards privacy and dignity. Nobody is being singled out for ridicule, but the facts are given with tantalizing specificity. They’re compressed, like poetry, hinting at what lies beneath. Trouble captured in haiku: flashes of pain, beauty, malice, and humor.
In a 2015 article for Slate magazine, “The Best Police Blotter in America,” Leon Neyfakh explained why the Light’s crime dispatches were so compelling and fun to read. “The Sheriff’s Calls are arguably at their best when they are narrative-driven, though the narratives are of a very specific sort; never fully contextualized and usually unresolved,” Neyfakh wrote.
Exactly. These brief snapshots of human behavior have a luminous, universal beauty to them. Who among us hasn’t behaved badly, had a public spat with a relative or spouse, flipped somebody off, or canvassed the neighborhood looking for a runaway pet? On one hand, the Light’s Sheriff’s Calls could be a compendium of crimes culled from any rural environment, Vermont or Wyoming, anyplace that feels “out there”—away from anonymous city life. And yet there’s a haunting slippery quality that’s specific to the Light’s Sheriff’s Calls. The column has a poetic voice, an omniscient point of view: hands-off and a little wry.
The columns are written by Point Reyes Light editor-in-chief Tessa Elliott, who gets the information emailed to her from the Sheriff’s Department. In the Slate piece, she told Neyfakh that she goes to lengths to remove identifying details about the people involved in order to preserve their dignity and privacy. That sensitivity and restraint gives the Sheriff’s Calls a painterly touch. It also gives readers permission to read along without feeling too voyeuristic or nosey.
While Elliott doesn’t want the column to be seen as exploiting people who are having a hard time, she believes it has a purpose, serving as a “connective force” reflecting our common struggles and conflicts. It’s all there, writ large: bottle rockets that have been going off “for days,” full moon freak-outs, road rage, missing pets, weird packages, stolen lawn ornaments. Of course, this isn’t some fictional Mayberry R.F.D. The Sheriff’s Calls from West Marin are more than petty crimes and teenage pranks. Mental illness, drunken driving, domestic violence, and death show up on the blotter. Garrison Keillor would have a hard time spinning straw into gold if a child dies. But the territory it covers—bad behavior—is rich.
A few years ago, I went on a writer’s retreat with the women in my writing group (there are five of us). The idea was to get away from our families and schedules, and just spend a few days writing. As a warm-up exercise, I brought along the Sheriff’s Calls from the Point Reyes Light, thinking some of the real life reports might inspire us. One of the women in the group, Mimi Dixon, wrote this short fictional piece after reading an assemblage of crime reports from the Light. Here it is:
At The Lighthouse: Reports from the Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls
At 10:07 a man saw a light on inside his garage. It was an ordinary garage, with a manual door, a bit rusty, and the windows were caked with dirt. At 10:17 someone reported the theft of women’s undergarments and shoes; deputies noted that the same woman had reported the same kind of theft within the last year. The bra was lacy and red, she said. It didn’t match the thong. Why would they do that? Last year I was into black, she told the deputy, who wrote it down, glancing up at her now and then. The red dress, someone said, they saw a woman walking barefoot down the highway in a red dress, no bra, no panties, the wind blowing ever so gently. It was 11:20.
The night thrummed, traffic, waves, sand. At twelve a.m., exactly midnight, someone said there was a white man in jeans and a bandanna, who parked his Ford metallic pickup on Lucas Road. Someone felt he was looking into windows, knocking into trees. Someone heard gunshots. Someone heard gunshots near the saloon. Someone heard a large bang downstairs. Where? Downstairs. Oh.
At two a.m. a woman said she wished the deputy would take her tenant into psychiatric care: the Ashanti carvings, the somnambulation, the bucketsful of sand he’d spread over the bedroom floor. Crabs. Someone should clean it up, she said.
At 6 a.m., deputies gave someone a lift. A woman called to say that owners of an abandoned car she had reported for towing were now harassing her, using obscene language, knocking into doors. Another woman had sent her an email with violent threats after the former had rejected her advances, using obscene language. Strange noises, in the background, the deputy said. He couldn’t make it out, but strange.
She called five minutes later and said she was witnessing the theft of a garden arch from the golf course, the thieves were loading it into a metallic Ford truck parked the wrong way on the highway. Since Saturday everything hurts, especially this migraine.
Someone heard a big bang downstairs. A dead deer was reported in the middle of the road wearing red lace panties. Someone took someone to the hospital. Someone was having difficulty breathing. Someone found a child’s bicycle and bicycle helmet at the end of Maple Road. A baby appeared to be fainting.
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If you enjoyed Mimi Dixon’s fictional riff based on the Point Reyes Light’s Sheriff’s Calls please check out her award-winning nonfiction essay, “Breath” that ran in Ploughshares 2016. Here’s the link: Breath
Lastly, I am announcing a writing contest!!!! Here’s what I propose: Write 500 to 1,000 words of fiction, based on a crime report or police call you’ve come across online (or in print). The crime log item can come from any source, as long as it’s true. You can write your riff or story as a straight narrative and use names and specifics or keep it as vague and free-floating as you want. You can browse through the Sheriff’s Calls of the Point Reyes Light for inspiration, if that helps. Here is the link: Point Reyes Light
The deadline to get your submission to me is Sept. 1. The winner gets a free copy of my memoir, So Late, So Soon, about living in a religious commune in the 70s. If you are game and want to participate, please contact me via substack and I will send you an e-mail address where you can send your submission. I’d like to publish the winner on my substack.
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Randomness, one of life’s joys!
How old can the article be? Would the packing, I found a small report of when my dad set a tree on fire. It wouldn't be too fictional, but it will be funny!