The words that won Dave Mitchell the most distinguished prize in journalism don’t come easily now, and his balance is compromised. Just moving from the back of his comfy living room chair to the front is an ordeal. He doesn’t inch along; he moves in centimeters.

Slowly and deliberately, Dave lowers his wiry, 6-foot, 3-inch frame onto his familiar cushioned perch. He’s had several falls lately and can’t afford another. Finally arriving at his destination, he leans back, lights his trademark pipe and takes in the view of his 2.5-acre hillside patch of Point Reyes Station.

Parkinson’s disease has ravaged Dave’s balance and his memory, but it hasn’t stolen his joy. He takes pleasure from the parade of wildlife outside his picture window. There are raccoons, squirrels, foxes, skunks, deer, ravens, possums, wild turkeys, swallows and roof rats—lots of roof rats. The coyotes and bobcats lurking about the grassy hills make an occasional appearance.

Until recently, Dave would have chronicled each visitor and documented its adventures with his camera. They appear in countless posts on “Sparsely Sage and Timely,” the blog he wrote for 17 years after leaving the Point Reyes Light, the tiny weekly he put on the national map with a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for coverage of the Synanon cult.

Last month, Dave, who is 79 now, wrote his final post: “Closing the Curtain.”

“In the past two to three months, a bout of Parkinson’s disease has substantially crippled me,” he wrote. “My lack of balance when standing and walking pretty much confines me to one floor at home. I can’t drive, and just the walk down to where we park cars is so exhausting, I rarely leave home.”

With clinical detachment, Dave listed the symptoms of his disorder: unintended or uncontrollable movements. Shaking and stiffness. Difficulty with balance, coordination, walking and talking. Failing memory.

Despite the grim prognosis, Dave still smiles a lot. The comments on his last blog post—like the prizes and magazine tributes lining the walls of his cabin—remind him that he has lived a very full life.

“Dave is one of my heroes,” posted Carl Nolte, a celebrated San Francisco Chronicle columnist and friend. “He’s gotten a bad break, I see. But his legacy will always be part of Point Reyes.” 

In his blog, Dave continued serving as the quintessential purveyor of local news but also mused about national and international affairs. He provided detailed coverage of the annual Western Weekend, giving shout-outs to the young winners of the 4-H rabbit show. He touted the work of local artists such as landscape painter Thomas Wood of Nicasio. And he griped about Donald Trump, who, like the roof rats frolicking on Dave’s deck, made repeat appearances in the blog.

Dave found the twice-impeached president’s embrace of Vladimir Putin particularly perplexing. “Amazingly, Trump’s fawning admiration only grew when Putin this week sent troops into the Ukraine, and Russia fired missiles into its cities,” he wrote the day after the invasion commenced.

During the pandemic, Dave, who shuns television, diverted himself by watching wildlife instead of Netflix. No detail of animal behavior escaped his notice. 

He griped about the fox that peed on his copy of the Chronicle each morning. He took note of the friendly relations between deer and wild turkeys, who hung out peacefully in his field. And he observed a raccoon sitting on its haunches, its front paws clasped together in front of its chest. “She’s probably praying that the chaos in the human world doesn’t also devastate the animal world,” he wrote.

In another post, Dave shared a list of jokes that had been circulating around town: 

“Wi-fi went down for five minutes, so I had to talk to my family. They seem like nice people.”

“My doctor asked if anyone in my family suffers from mental illness. I said, ‘No, we all seem to enjoy it.’”

“I told my wife I wanted to be cremated. She made me an appointment for Tuesday.”

He shared snippets of off-beat news stories he had discovered online, including one about a woman who dropped her phone into an outhouse toilet and fell in head-first while trying to retrieve it.

There were poignant musings, too, including several about a homeless man Dave and his wife, Lynn, befriended in town. 

“Billy Hobbs was sleeping outdoors in Point Reyes Station when the rain and cold winds hit two winters ago, so Lynn and I offered to let him wait out the bad weather in the Mitchell cabin,” Dave wrote. “Once he did, Billy was able to resume showering and getting his clothes cleaned regularly. Add to that a haircut and a beard trim, and he had dramatically cleaned up his act.”

Billy had fallen into homelessness after the breakup of his 25-year marriage. Dave loaned him his second car to sleep in while he waited to receive government housing aid. They had to move it every 72 hours to make sure he didn’t get a parking ticket.

In October 2021, when Billy’s seven years of homelessness ended, Dave wrote a celebratory post. “Thanks to the California Section 8 Housing Program, Billy two weeks ago moved into a pleasant, one-bedroom apartment in San Rafael,” he wrote. “The second-floor apartment comes with a fireplace and a deck.”

Dave’s blog began as a column in the Light, and some of his posts harken back to stories he covered during his tenure as editor and publisher of the paper, which he and his first wife, Cathy, owned from 1975 until 1981. After two years of covering Central American guerilla wars for the San Francisco Examiner, Dave bought the Light a second time, running it from 1984 until 2005. 

In the blog, he regularly paid tribute to old friends and sources who had passed away, including Paul Morantz, an attorney who represented victims of the Synanon cult. Dave began the post in his spare, just-the-facts style: “On Oct. 10, 1978, attorney Paul Morantz reached into the mailbox of his Pacific Palisades home and was bitten by a 4.5-foot-long rattlesnake whose warning rattles had been cut off. The snake had been placed there by two men whose truck’s license plate was traced to Synanon headquarters. Morantz a week earlier had won a $300,000 judgment for a woman who said she’d been abducted by Synanon and abused.”

Although complications from the snake bite plagued him for the rest of his days, Mr. Morantz went on to represent victims of several other cults. “He represented various clients pro bono and was frequently described as heroic,” Dave wrote.

The self-deprecating title of Sparsely Sage and Timely was a play on the Simon and Garfunkel classic “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.” It was suggested by a reporter friend at the Sebastopol Times, where Dave worked before coming to the Light. He knew he was no sage, but he would impart what wisdom he had in a timely manner. For most of the life of the blog, he gave himself a weekly deadline that proved harder and harder to meet as his illness progressed.

“I’ve just started a course of a dopamine-producing medicine,” Dave wrote in his last post. “Parkinson’s is associated with lower dopamine production in the brain, so I’m hoping the new med will be as effective as it’s been described by optimists and medical personnel.” 

His fans and friends will be hoping for a comeback.“Thanks for keeping it going for so long,” David Clarkson, the Point Reyes jeweler, commented on Dave’s final blog. “Getting old ain’t for sissies.”