So, early on the morning of the arraignment, I drove the same route I’d taken for decades-across the Golden Gate Bridge, north on 101 through Sonoma, into the green-forested gorge of the Russian River. Joaquin was to be arraigned at the Mendocino County Superior Court in Ukiah, squarely between the Greenfield commune and Camp Winnarainbow. Once the driver was booked into jail, they discovered that his name was Lee Anthony Joaquin and that he was the primary suspect in the killing of Nicholas Whipple. Then a local news outlet reported that a California Highway Patrol officer in a different part of Mendocino County had pulled over a car and arrested the driver for possession of a firearm and transporting cannabis. I tried the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, but the public information officer was on sudden, indefinite leave, and the records department denied my request for documents. Recent homicides on the Indigenous reservation there prompted the tribal council to declare a state of emergency on April 16, 2023. The Round Valley lies in a remote area of Northern California. Azbill wrote back that she was not authorized to speak on the matter. I found email addresses for Randall Britton, president of the tribal council, and Alberta Azbill, executive secretary. She transferred me to a voicemail box that did not take messages. I said I was a writer calling about the Whipple and Montelongo murders. I called many times before a woman picked up. The phone rang without answer or even a voicemail recording. The Tribal Council of the Round Valley Indian Tribes responded to these two murders by declaring a state of emergency-a way of requesting help from outside law enforcement-so I tried calling the reservation office. I wondered the same about Ruby Sky Montelongo, age 16 and likewise a Round Valley tribal member, found on April 15 and killed, authorities suspect, by a girl whose name was not being released because she was herself only 15 years old. I wondered, in other words, whether there might be something important for me to learn-some way to make sense of our shared present tense-in the story of how Nicholas Whipple, 20-year-old poet, father, and enrolled member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, wound up dead by the side of a road on the cold morning of March 29, beaten so savagely that only during a later autopsy did anyone figure out that he’d also been shot at close range with an assault rifle. The second related truth, shadowing the first, is the mass murder of Indigenous people in Mendocino during the gold rush-and, in the Round Valley itself, historical evil so night-dark that it operates like the event horizon of a black hole, from which no light escapes. This article appears in Issue 25 of Alta Journal. Decades later, when my wife and I wanted our own two kids to drink from that Aquarian source, we dropped them at Camp Winnarainbow, near Greenfield, to learn tie-dye and juggling from Wavy Gravy, 1960s political clown. Summers, Mom and Dad drove us to Greenfield in the VW, let my sister and me skinny-dip with hippie kids and walk moonlit forest to cabins where kerosene lanterns lit the windows and live bluegrass harmonized with the night crickets. The first of these, Mendocino’s role as paradise in my private California cosmos, dates to the early 1970s, when families from my childhood block in Berkeley pooled money to buy 5,600 acres near the Mendocino town of Ukiah in order to start a commune that they called Greenfield Ranch. News of the murders of Nicholas Whipple and Ruby Sky Montelongo, earlier this year in the remote Round Valley of Mendocino County, caught my attention because of two irreconcilable truths.
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