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The Revolution Will Be Improvised 
October 18, 2024 0 20  
Fool’s Gold: The Myth of Tiburcio Vasquez 
Suzanne Guldimann, October 18, 2024 0  
“And still of a winter’s night, they say,  when the wind is in the trees, When the moon is a ghostly galleon  tossed upon cloudy seas,    When the road is a ribbon of moonlight  over the purple moor,    A...
Billions in Flight: Migratory Birds 
Suzanne Guldimann, September 20, 2024 0  
Autumn doesn’t officially begin until the equinox on September 22, but all across North America birds are already on the wing—billions of them. Migration times and destinations vary based on the species and variables like weather and food sources—some...
One-Room Schoolhouse 
Suzanne Guldimann, September 6, 2024 0  
Back to school. A hundred years ago in Topanga, it would have been on foot—and often barefoot—to the little, red, one-room schoolhouse by the creek in the bend of the dirt road.  Public education in California was still relatively...
Desert Voices 
Suzanne Guldimann, August 23, 2024 0  
“‘Just now our blood dances to other music.’ They fell a-twittering among themselves once more, and this time their intoxicating babble was of violet seas, tawny sands, and lizard-haunted walls.” The swallows in Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows...
23 Oct 2024
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Chapparal Yucca 

Suzanne Guldimann, July 12, 2024 0 8 min read  
We saw the white fire of the yucca, Lighting the mountains— And still along the trail Spring’s flowers lingered for summer. —Madeleine Ruthven, “Yerba Buena,” Londelius Came to the Mountains, 1934 In late spring and early summer, thousands of...
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A Day at the Beach 

Suzanne Guldimann, June 28, 2024 0 13 min read  
“A little sea-bathing would set me up forever,” pronounces Mrs Bennet in Jane Austen’s 1813  novel Pride and Prejudice, expressing the desire to spend the summer at the newly fashionable seaside town of Brighton. The author wasn’t opposed to...
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The Hotel Arcadia 

Suzanne Guldimann, May 3, 2024 1 12 min read  
It loomed above the beach like Count Dracula’s beach residence: stark, turreted, treeless, and not exactly inviting, but Dracula wasn’t written yet when the imposing Hotel Arcadia opened its doors in Santa Monica on January 24, 1887. Celebrated for...