Our new garden up on Fire Mountain, in Oceanside, looked like hell I grew up in Southern California suburbia and hated gardening. It was called yard work, which pretty much explains why any kid would …
July 17, 2023
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Stories by Scott Sadil
Thought about Idaho, settled for Oceanside
The elusive fish of San Pedro Martir
A model trout habitat in Baja Two years ago, when I first began my search for Salmo nelsoni, the Baja rainbow trout, I contacted Don Albright, a longtime Baja aficionado who regularly leads friends and …
April 30, 2023
Mike Doyle, Rusty Preisendorfer, Skip Frye, Chris O'Rourke
Wave Gangsters Socially, Van Artsdalen became a marked man. His reputation as a brawler traveled beyond the predominantly white population of La Jolla to tougher neighborhoods. Butch had already proved himself among the few black …
November 14, 2021
The bass at Lake Cuyamaca, the ducks at Niland, where to fish in San Diego Bay
Largemouth lust The casters trade rods back and forth. Watching them, I can feel more sympathy for the obsession with equipment. I’m obsessed too; it’s impossible to be a serious fly fisherman and not be. …
April 25, 2021
Raise your own eggs, a prince of a cat, intimate life with a duck
The chicken or the ego? Are chickens the proper enterprise for the modern family? Let’s get real about this right now. Chickens teach us about husbandry, domesticity, and death. The sole caveat to raising your …
December 19, 2020
Best Reader stories from 1987
Explosion! The sighting of San Diego was a welcome event for the crew of the GSS Bennington on a sunny July 19,1905. The patrol gunboat had just completed a rough, seventeen-day journey from Hawaii, and …
December 14, 2019
A rooster in La Jolla was just not going to do
It was one of the weekends when my wife announces, out of the blue, that she is miserable, and except for our son, our marriage, essentially, is a disaster. I was building a chicken coop. …
September 20, 1990
The next door neighbor on Fire Mountain in Oceanside brought me Spider in a box
You are merely tolerated. They do not need you. You love them anyway.
May 3, 1990
We bought our house on Fire Mountain in Oceanside during the real-estate frenzy
I carried a drink outside and squatted down on the lawn in the lee of the big bottlebrush, an ancient beast gone from shrub to tree with a trunk as broad as my waist, and I thought some about the frightening new notion of home ownership.
February 15, 1990
Reader writers: the story I wanted to write... but didn't
Sandy and a girlfriend had gone into a liquor store, robbed the clerk, They locked the clerk in a walk-in cooler. Sandy started feeling bad about the guy. She went back and let him out.
October 5, 1989
Our new garden up on Fire Mountain, in Oceanside, looked like hell
In the Southland tract where I was raised, developers planted geraniums in front of every house for purpose of immediate, colorful effect; and geraniums were the first things you pulled out to make room for more “sophisticated” plantings.
June 11, 1987
A model trout habitat in Baja
We also didn’t want to find ourselves short of water, but twice we came perilously close. I remember giving my fiancee my canteen and telling her to hold that last swallow as long as she could in her mouth.
February 26, 1987
All of the La Jolla hotshots were there —Tim Lynch. Rusty Priesendorfer. Reed and Joel Wayne, Skip Frye — except one
Do you know what it is to be an old surfer? To hustle waves from kids who weren't even born when you first learned how to catch a wave? To pull out all stops beneath …
December 4, 1986
Miramar Gun Club buddies teach me to shoot
Immediately I had a strong sense of my father's love for that gun; when he handed it over to me, I knew it wasn’t without some regrets. “It’s yours, under one condition. Don’t you ever sell it.”
July 24, 1986
Surf fishing Black's Beach for halibut
Is surf fishing the domain of the little man? Let’s nip this one in the bud. Surf fishing breeds intimacy with fish, the sea, and freedom. The spirt of the game is its refined simplicity.
December 5, 1985
Fly fishing San Diego's coastal canyons
You come full circle, making of fly-fishing what nothing else in your life can ever quite offer. Beyond the intangibles of sport, which are no small part of human psychology, fly-fishing affords one the pleasure of learning.
May 9, 1985