One of the luxuries of being retired is that I can do all the late-night reading I want, and I’m continually being amazed by what I read.

Remember the shortwave radiomen in those old movies about World War II: “Come in, Rangoon! Come in, Rangoon!”? When I was a kid, the family’s floor-standing radio had shortwave bands, and I recall the fun I had picking up broadcasts from far and wide. But like everything else from that era, shortwave radio faded out — or so I had thought.

The London-based Economist reported June 21 that while shortwave radio has pretty much gone off the air in Europe and North America, it’s still widespread in Asia and especially Africa. The BBC World Service, for example, has a worldwide radio audience of 182 million, of which 105 million still listen on shortwave, The Economist reported. In Nigeria, shortwave use is actually growing.

‘Pride in Craftsmanship‘ photographed in San Rafael.

While visiting Rome some years ago, I ended up staying across the street from what appeared to be a one-building country — and it wasn’t the Vatican. A sign on the front said, “Knights of Malta,” and I could see parked cars with Knights of Malta license plates in the building’s courtyard.

All that came to mind after the inner council of this order of monks, also known as Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order, elected Friar Matthew Festing, 58, of Great Britain its new grand master to replace Friar Andrew Bertie, who died in February.

The “sovereign” Knights of Malta, who do international aid work, have 12,500 members worldwide but no territory of their own, Napoleon having seized the Island of Malta from them in 1798. The order actually began in 1080 AD, took part in the Crusades, and after the Christian defeat ruled first over first Rhodes and then over Malta.

Not only do the Knights of Malta have their own license plates, I read last week that they issue their own passports, have their own flag (right), stamps, and currency, actually are widely recognized as sovereign, and have diplomatic relations with 99 countries.

For two centuries after the loss of Malta to Napoleon, the nation had no country — merely headquarters in downtown Rome — until 1999 when the government of Malta agreed to let the knights repossess historic Fort St. Angelo for 99 years. As a result, the Knights of Malta/ Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order, is probably the only sovereign nation in the world that rents its homeland.

The National Audubon Society, which once romanticized the West’s wild horses, now calls them “feral equids” and wants thousands of them killed, as does the US Bureau of Land Management, The New York Times reported Sunday.

The Times noted there are 33,000 wild horses roaming BLM lands from Montana to California, and another 30,000 have been rounded up and are in holding facilities until somebody wants them. From the perspective of a mustang used to the wilds, this is probably like incarceration at Guantanamo Bay. From the perspective of BLM, continuing to spend $26 million a year to take care of all the horses it rounds up (below) is far too expensive.

The Science Conservation Center in Montana, meanwhile, has written a rebuttal to the Audubon Society, saying that contraception would be better than killing to control the number of wild horses. But BLM itself, The Times reported, stands accused of having little interest in contraception.

Does any of this sound familiar?

For BLM substitute National Park Service; they’re both agencies of the Interior Department. For Audubon Society, substitute Marin Group of the Sierra Club; they’re both for the birds. For the Science Conservation Center, substitute the Humane Society of the US; they both oppose the Bush Administration’s applying to wildlife its “Just Say No” antipathy toward contraception. And for wild horses, substitute white deer; nativists dislike both animals for supposedly being non-native, even though they’ve been in North America for centuries.

A fallow deer (commonly called a white deer) and her fawn. Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com

Just how long has each species been in North America? George Washington released this country’s first white deer on his farm at Mount Vernon. Unfortunately, the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service appears to dismiss our first president as some distant, benighted fellow. As for the horse, it “began evolving on the North American continent 55 million years ago, before crossing the Bering land bridge and spreading through Asia and Europe,” the June 28 Economist reported.

Spaniards reintroduced horses into North America during the 1500s, and they spread across the West. “In the 1700s there were so many mustangs in Texas that maps marked some areas merely as ‘Vast Herds of Wild Horses,’” The Economist added. However, from 1920 to 1935, “hundreds of thousands of mustangs were sent to slaughter to provide cheap meat.”

BLM says there’s not enough forage for 33,000 wild horses on their 29 million-acre range and wants to kill 6,000 of them. Claiming there wasn’t enough forage for 1,000 exotic deer in their 75,000-acre range, the Park Service last year shot roughly 800 of them. Last week, the Park Service said it will soon shoot the rest.

I’m surprised by how frequently West Marin residents say one reason they hope Obama wins is that it would allow the Democrats to clean house in the Department of the Interior. Blood-lust, defiance, and vengeance have come to epitomize the department’s land-use management. These are not traits most of the public will tolerate forever.

Entries are numbered in the order they were posted but by necessity are published in reverse order. The most recent postings (the highest numbers) begin below the Table of Contents while No. 1 is at the bottom of the final page.

To go directly to a story without scrolling, click on the highlighted phrase following the numbers.

Weekly postings are published by Thursday.

1. Introduction to this site SparselySageAndTimely.com plus an account of orphaned fawns being released in Chileno Valley.

2. Robert I. Plokin’s and Lys Plotkin’s litigation

3. Nature’s Two Acres: A Point Reyes Station Photo Exhibit

4. Nature’s Two Acres Part II: Living dinosaurs actually found around my cabin

5. My background: Biographical information on newspaperman Dave Mitchell

6. Nature’s Two Acres Part III: Insectivores and Not

7. Nature’s Two Acres Part IV: Christmas turkeys & where the buck stopped *

8. Storm-caused fire razes Manka’s Lodge and Restaurant in Inverness

9. Big Pot Busts at My Cabin

10. Bankruptcy court trustee lets Robert Plotkin hold onto some of his Ponzi-scheme ‘profits’

11. Nature’s Two Acres Part V: By Means of Water

12. Nature’s Two Acres Part VI: How Flashing Affects Wildlife

13. Nature’s Two Acres Part VII: Rats v. dishwashers

14. Marin supervisors refuse to tilt at McEvoy windmill

15. The Bush Administration at Point Reyes: Part I

16. The Bush Administration at Point Reyes Part II: Whatever happened to the Citizens Advisory Commission to the GGNRA & Point Reyes National Seashore?

17. Saying Yes to Change: A former Point Reyes Station innkeeper finds true joy by moving in with a working-class family in a poor neighborhood of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

18. The Gossip Columnist

19. Nature’s Two Acres Part VIII: ‘Mice & rats, and such small deer’

20. Nature’s Two Acres Part IX: Point Reyes Station’s blackbirds

21. Nature’s Two Acres Part X: ‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’

22. Former Point Reyes Light columnist John Grissim, the late pornographer Artie Mitchell, Brazilian President Lula and the advent of orgasmic diplomacy

23. Nature’s Two Acres Part XI: The perky possum

24. Nature’s Two Acres Part XII: April showers ‘cruel’ with ‘no regrets’

25. Nature’s Two Acres Part XIII: ‘Who’s the Head Bull-Goose Loony Around Here?’

26. Sheriff Bob Doyle ’stays the course’ despite blunder and gets county government sued.

27. Nature’s Two Acres Part XIV: ‘The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.’

28. Nature’s Two Acres Part XV: ‘Among animals…one finds natural caricatures.’

29. Mermaids, cows, Horizon Cable, and Russia’s Internet war on Estonia

30. New newspaper to be published in West Marin

31. Nature’s Two Acres Part XVI: A gopher snake & other neighbors

32. Many fail to find Western Weekend livestock show; a new newpaper debuts in West Marin; The Point Reyes Light reports a former bookkeeper is in jail on embezzlement charges.

33. Sunday’s Western Weekend parade and barbecue

34. Western Weekend retrospective; anonymous satire of Point Reyes Light distributed at parade; Light’s use of unpaid interns may run afoul of labor laws.

35. Inverness Park fire Friday razes art studio

36. Monday’s demonstration against The Point Reyes Light

37. Preventing fires at home while The Point Reyes Light feels the heat

38. The death of a salesman: Andrew Schultz

39. Ship’s flare or meteor

40. What we didn’t celebrate on the Fourth of July

41. 76-year-old Nick’s Cove reopens

42. Garbage in, garbage out

48. Music, wildlife, and the cosmos

49. Congress sees through Point Reyes National Seashore claims

50. Watching the Point Reyes National Seashore obliterate cultural history

51. Quotes Worth Saving & the Inverness Fair

52. The KWMR/Love Field ‘Far West Fest’

53. ‘Possums,’ a sequel to the musical ‘Cats’

54. Truth becomes an endangered species at the Point Reyes National Seashore.

55. Language, politics & wildlife

56. Despite public-be-damned management, it’s still a beautiful park.

57. Nature’s Two Acres XVII: As seen by an old, almost-blind dog

58. Bolinas firehouse and clinic opening party Sunday

59. Paving Point Reyes Station’s main street at night

60. Vandals dump sewage at West Marin School

61. Point Reyes Station’s Hazel Martinelli celebrates 101st birthday with party at son’s deer camp

62. Hawks on the move

63. Tuesday’s Marin County Farm Bureau luncheon for politicos

64. White House Pool: a public park where management listens to the public

65. Nature’s Two Acres Part XVIII: Seasonal sightings

66. Ranching matriarch Hazel Martinelli dies at 101

67. One last warm weekend before the season of darkness

68. West Marin’s ‘Mac Guru’ leaving town — a friend with a knack for surviving

69. Coastal Post’s December issue to be its last, assistant editor says; publisher contradicts her

70. California photo book’s release celebrated with gala on Inverness Ridge

71. Ship hits Bay Bridge; spilled oil drifts out Golden Gate and mires birds on West Marin coast

72. Farm Bureau president quits; defends independence of wife who disagrees with his political position

73. Point Reyes Station pharmacist decries health-insurance practices

74. Nature’s Two Acres Part IXX: ‘Things that go bump in the night’

75. Being a Gypsy isn’t enough; KPFA fires host criticized for not being a ‘person of color’

76. Giving thanks for an abundant harvest

77. West Marin Community Thanksgiving Dinner celebrated in Point Reyes Station’s Dance Palace

78. Nature’s Two Acres Part XX: Where coyotes howl and raccoons roam free

79. Lessons to be learned from the oil spill

80. Point Reyes Station’s ‘Path of Lights’

81. Stefanie Pisarczyk (AKA Stefanie Keys): a woman of two worlds

82. Our Lady of the Chutzpah — the many faces of State Senator Carole Migden

83. Striptease in Point Reyes Station… well, sorta

84. Winter Moon Fireside Tales — an undiscovered gem draws only four ticketholders opening night (but more for second show)

85. Nature’s Two Acres XXI: Coyote influx benefits some birds around Point Reyes Station

86. Urban legends

87. Blackouts bedevil Point Reyes Station area

88. Non-native species stops traffic in Point Reyes Station

89. Nature’s Two Acres XXII: They’re hundreds of times more deadly than cynanide… and headed this way

90. Assemblyman Jared Huffman’s ominous mailer

91. Yuletide greetings from Santa Claws

92. Guess who came to Christmas dinner

93. ‘Eco-fascism‘ in the Point Reyes National Seashore

94. Marin County gets a bum rap from itself

95. Hurricane-force wind & heavy rain take heavy toll on West Marin

96. Blackouts, newspapers in the news, and poetic frustration on the prairie

97. Old Christmas trees, wild turkeys, and the famous cat-and-rat scheme

98. Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposal to close Tomales Bay State Park to save money could prove expensive

99. Nature’s Two Acres XXIII: Bambi, Thumper, and Garfield

100. Lawsuits against and by Robert Plotkin settled out of court

101. Nature’s Two Acres XXIV: Buffleheads, Greater Scaups, and the 16.6 million wild ducks shot annually

102. Storm damage bad but could have been tragic

103. Heavy news media presence briefly halts axis-deer slaughter in the Point Reyes National Seashore

104. Statewide campaign to legalize hemp and marijuana comes to Point Reyes Station

105. A final thought about the Caltrans worker who just did his job — and saved the day

106. Signs of bureaucratic contamination

107. Here’s hoping ‘the goose hangs high‘ this Thursday for Valentine’s Day

108. Nature’s Two Acres XXV: Talking turkey

109. Nature’s Two Acres XXVI: Which came first, blacktail or mule deer? Hint — their venison is oedipal

110. Sewage spills into ocean at Dillon Beach

111. ‘Drive-by journalism’

112. Dillon Beach sewage spill update

113. A tale of Kosovo, West Marin, and a bored battalion of Norwegian soldiers

114. National Seashore’s slaughter of deer traumatizes many residents here; ‘we demand a stop’

115. A country without the decency to ban torture

116. Prostitution in New York, Reno, and Point Reyes Station

117. Supervisor Steve Kinsey defends further restrictions on woodstoves in West Marin

118. Five Faces of Spring

119. Seeing history through newsmen’s eyes…. or the pen is mightier than the pigs

120. Point Reyes Station and Inverness Park demonstrators call for a pedestrian bridge over Papermill Creek

121. Newspaperman from Chileno Valley describes his life in the United Arab Emirates

122. Nature’s Two Acres XXVII: Animals about town:

123. ‘Still Life with Raccoon‘

124. The Beat Generation lives on at the No Name Bar

125. Nature’s Two Acres XXVIII: The first fawns of spring

126. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXIX: Cold-blooded carnality… Or, why be warm blooded?

127. Lt. Governor John Garamendi joins battle to save fallow & axis deer in Point Reyes National Seashore

128. Humane Society of the US says National Seashore claims about deer contraception are misleading

129. Western Weekend’s 4-H Livestock Show fun — but smaller than ever

130. Early projections hold: Obama, Woolsey & Kinsey win… Leno easily bests Migden & Nation

131. Sunday’s Western Weekend Parade in photos

132. Kite day at Nicasio School

133. Artist Bruce Lauritzen of Point Reyes Station draws a crowd for opening of exhibit

134. Scenes from my past week

135. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXX: Baldfaced hornets

136. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXI: The pink roses of Point Reyes Station

137. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXII: The first raccoon kits of summer

138. Alice in ‘Wilderness’

* President Truman’s oft-used saying “the buck stops here” originally “comes from the phrase ‘passing the buck,’ which is a poker-playing expression.The buck was a marker to show who next had the deal; the buck could be passed by someone, who did not want the responsibility of dealing, to the man on his left. (The marker was occasionally a silver dollar, which, by the way, is how the dollar became known as a buck.)”

“People seeking food will see an opportunity to hunt, gather, or cultivate. People who are well fed, but seek spiritual sustenance in nature, will see a refuge. Wildlife biologists will see a laboratory, archeologists a dig, real estate developers a suburb, park managers a place of employment.” — Mark Dowie of Inverness.

(From The Fiction of Wilderness published in the West Marin Review. The essay was adapted from an upcoming book Vital Diversities: Balancing Protection of Nature and Culture. Dowie teaches science and environmental reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.)

A small group of Point Reyes National Seashore visitors buying oysters from Drakes Bay Oyster Company and quietly picnicking beside the water a couple of weeks ago.

The tranquility at the oyster company contrasted with the folks screaming in excitement at another national park 200 miles away. In Yosemite, two rock climbers set a speed record for going up the face of El Capitan.

The climbers, one from Lafayette and one from Japan, shaved 2 minutes and 12 seconds off the 2 hour, 45 minute, and 35 second record held by two German brothers.

Back at Drakes Bay, oyster-company owner Kevin Lunny is fighting an attempt by National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher to close the oyster farm when its lease runs out in 2012.

Supt. Neubacher’s administration says the 125-year-old oyster farm is incompatible with a wilderness area. Of course, the oyster farm isn’t actually in a wilderness area. So far, the government has labeled Drakes Estero, the inlet where Lunny’s oyster company is located, merely “potential wilderness.”

Drake’s Bay Oyster Company’s parking lot in the foreground and the Coast Guard’s white buildings in the background.

But it’s a stretch to call Drakes Estero even “potential wilderness.” By act of Congress, the land around it is reserved for agricultural. From the oyster farm, visitors can view not only this “pastoral zone” and traffic on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard but also a US Coast Guard Communications Station.

One chunk of parkland that is in a designated wilderness area is El Capitan.

The 3,000-foot-high granite monolith is part of what the Park Service boasts is “one of the world’s greatest climbing areas.” Not surprisingly, members of the press and public were on hand for a week to hoot and holler as climbers Hans Florine and Yuri Hirayama repeatedly scrambled up El Capitan. Hirayama has said that if he climbs the rock again, he’ll bring a movie crew from Japan.

Encouraging an international hullabaloo in the Yosemite wilderness area is apparently appropriate when the national park is looking for good publicity. In their own way, national parks do a fair amount of huckstering. The National Seashore, for example, holds sandcastle contests at Drakes Beach every Labor Day to lure crowds to Point Reyes.

All this commotion suggests that seeking solitude in nature to restore your soul can sometimes be more romantic than realistic — whether you’re wandering on Point Reyes or in Yosemite (right). Even without climbers and their fans, Yosemite’s wilderness is crawling with an estimated 500 black bears. If you don’t want your meditations disturbed, it’s better to follow the Savior’s advice (Matthew 6:6), and “when thou prayest, enter into thy closet.”

So what activities are appropriate in a “wilderness” area? That apparently depends on the park superintendent of the moment and whom he likes or doesn’t. Ever since Lunny helped organize the Point Reyes Seashore Ranchers Association so that ranchers could put up a united front in negotiations with the park, Supt. Neubacher’s Administration has made it clear they don’t like the oyster grower/beef rancher.

From a strictly environmental standpoint, Neubacher’s justification for trying to close Lunny’s oyster farm reveals the irrational way the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service is being administered these days. If this region of the Park Service is so fastidious it wants to close down a 125-year-old oyster farm to protect “potential wilderness” at Point Reyes, what the heck is the region doing promoting environmentally damaging rock-climbing competition in Yosemite’s “wilderness area?”

“As the number of climbers visiting the park has increased through the years, the impacts of climbing have become much more obvious,” the National Park Service acknowledges. “Some of those impacts include: soil compaction, erosion, and vegetation loss in parking areas, at the base of climbs, and on approach and descent trails, destruction of cliffside vegetation and lichen, disturbance of cliff-dwelling animals, litter, water pollution from improper human waste disposal, and the visual blight of chalk marks, pin scars, bolts, rappel slings, and fixed ropes.”

And what about the 2 million visitors a year the National Seashore attracts to Point Reyes. By any chance do they affect the wilderness around here more than a low-key, family-owned oyster company? Or the National Seashore’s filling in a wetland at Drakes Beach to provide parking for for this multitude… how did that preserve nature?

Given all this, just what does the Park Service mean when it talks about protecting the “wilderness?”

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’” — Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

To every creature there is a season. At the beginning of May, the blacktail doe that hangs around on this hill brought out both of this year’s fawns for the first time. Sunday night, it was Mrs. Raccoon’s turn to bring out her four kits.

My kitchen door has become a regular stop on Mrs. Raccoon’s evening rounds.

From the first time she showed up a couple of years ago, her begging has mainly consisted of standing on her hind legs with her front feet on the glass of my kitchen door.

Some nights I throw her scraps, and over the years I’ve learned what she likes and doesn’t.

She won’t eat dog food or fruit. She definitely likes fish and (unseasoned) meat scraps. But her favorite fare is bread — not that healthy, whole-grain stuff but cheapo bread with the consistency of cake.

Three kits hide behind the woodbox on my deck Sunday. I later got out a tape measure and found the gap they’d been in is only four inches wide.

Mrs. Raccoon and two kits beside my woodbox Tuesday night. The youngsters are about the size of six-month-old housecats.

Late in the evening, a male raccoon (left) sometimes shows up begging, but he’s more skittish and is easily intimidated by Mrs. Raccoon if she’s around. Which is probably why he usually waits until she’s gone.

For three weeks last month, I watched helplessly as he contended with a tick attached to the bridge of his nose. Finally, he managed to scrape it off — but lost a couple of patches of fur in the process.

“Raccoons do not live together as mated pairs,” the Calusa Nature Center and Planetarium in Florida notes on its website. “The males mate with as many females as possible. During the breeding season… females find a den. The male raccoon locates a female and, if she is willing, moves into her den for a short period of mating. Afterwards, the male resumes his wandering lifestyle.”

Two kits prowl my deck Tuesday. Young raccoons are also called “cubs” or “pups,” and some people refer to “kits” as “kittens.”

“Raccoons may breed any time during the late fall into early spring,” reports a posting by the San Diego Natural History Museum. “The gestation period lasts about two months, and the young are born between December and April. A litter may have two to seven young, with an average of four. The eyes open at about three weeks. Although the pups begin to forage and hunt with the mother within two months, she will care for them for almost a year.”

This is a story about Point Reyes Station’s ubiquitous pink roses and how I once happened to rescue a few wild ones.

One of the many bicyclists passing through town pedals past climbing roses in front of West Marin School.

When I came to town in 1975, Toby’s Feed Barn was located in the old Livery Stable building at Third and B Streets in Point Reyes Station. The Tomales Bay Foods building next door was a haybarn. In those days, Toby’s Feed Barn was just that — an outlet for hay transported by Toby’s Trucking. Some of it was grown on family land in Nevada.

In 1976, Toby’s Feed Barn moved into the old Diamond National lumber building on the main street where it now sells everything from bales of hay to gourmet foods to fine art. Toby’s Trucking, which already had facilities in Petaluma, moved the last of its operation out of Point Reyes Station. The livery stable building, where trucks had been serviced and hay stored, was sold a couple of years later along with the haybarn.

Toby’s Feed Barn and Trucking had begun in 1942, so there was an accumulation of old truck parts and other detritus of a trucking-and-hay business to be cleared away before the buildings changed hands. Back then, John’s Truck Stop was located on Fourth Street where the Pine Cone Diner is today, and watching the cleanup from across the way was owner John Ball.

Wild roses transplanted 30 years ago to my cabin. Unlike many roses, these are pretty much ignored by deer.

The Truck Stop owner had once been a driver for now-deceased Toby Giacomini, and he asked if he could have some of the wild roses growing where the cleanup was underway. “Help yourself!” Toby immediately responded. John took a few and encouraged the late Lt. Art Disterheft of Olema, then commander of the Sheriff’s Substation, to dig up a few more for himself.

Art, as it happened, had just come down with the flu and was in no shape to dig up roses, so he passed the offer along to me. There were three degrees of separation between Toby’s “Help yourself!” and me, but I accepted nonetheless. After all, I reasoned, the area would soon be cleared, which it was.

Digging up the roses was an amazing experience. It took a pick, as well as a shovel, to free them, for they were not growing in topsoil, as you and I think of it.

These roses were rooted mostly in clay, baling wire, and old engine oil. While moving them, I had to worry as much about getting greasy as getting pricked.

The roses’ hardiness was, however, encouraging. The wind across my pasture on the hill sometimes blows so relentlessly that it had withered all the flowers I’d tried to grow around the cabin. I figured these roses could withstand anything, and they have. In fact, without their annual pruning, my hot tub would soon be overgrown by a prickly, pink jungle.

The rose now growing in front of my deck, Rosa Californica, is one of less than a dozen native to this state.

In downtown Point Reyes Station, an example of a five-petaled antique rose can be seen at the corner of Highway 1 and Mesa Road (above) in front of Jane Quattlander’s home.

Several varieties of domestic pink roses have gone feral around town, for birds can spread rose seeds. These unidentified roses are growing at Bivalve overlooking the foot of Tomales Bay. Bivalve, now little more than a dirt turnout off Highway 1, was once a whistlestop on the narrow-gauge-rail line between Point Reyes Station and Cazadero.

Climbing roses along Highway 1 frame a view of Black Mountain.

Several West Marin towns are associated with particular flowers. An abundance of nasturtiums helps give Stinson Beach its colorful character. Primroses have become symbols of Inverness, thanks largely to the Inverness Garden Club’s annual Primrose Tea. With pink roses dotting so many Point Reyes Station vistas, we’re obviously the town with the rosiest outlooks.

An immense thicket of climbing roses along Highway 1 marks the southern edge of Point Reyes Station. This wall of thorns and pink blossoms borders the entrance to the Genazzi Ranch.

My neighbor George Stamoulis this past week pointed out another bit of nature nesting on our hill. Several of George’s pine trees have limbs overhanging Campolindo Road, and at the end of one limb, a colony of baldfaced hornets have built a nest the size of a Cranshaw melon.

Baldfaced hornets, which are found throughout North America, are really a type of wasp and distinct from European and Asian hornets. They are in the same scientific order as yellowjackets, Vespidae, and somewhat resemble them.

The hornets haven’t attacked any of us on Campolindo Road, but George is worried that a delivery truck will knock the nest down. So far, however, even the garbage trucks have managed to miss it. Good thing because the “worker” wasps, infertile females, are extremely protective of their nests and will repeatedly sting anyone who disturbs it. (The males, “drones,” have no stingers.)

Baldfaced-hornet nests, which have been known to reach three feet tall, are made of a paper-like material the worker wasps produce by chewing old wood. Starch in their saliva binds the wood fibers to create the paper.

“Every year young queens that were born and fertilized the previous year start a new colony and raise their young,” Wikipedia notes. “This continues through summer and into fall. As winter approaches, the wasps die, except for young fertilized queens which hibernate underground or in hollow trees. The nest is generally abandoned by winter, and will most likely not be reused.”

Homage to Rembrandt. Former Inverness resident John Robbins, who built the Horizon Cable system in West Marin, at my dining-room table Wednesday just before sunset.

Not much news here from this past week — just a few stories and mostly unrelated photos. The first story occurred — appropriately enough — after dark on Friday the 13th.

Kathy Runnion, who heads the cat-rescue group Planned Feralhood, was riding with me to the No Name Bar to in Sausalito for an evening of jazz when I drove past the Ross Police Station along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard about 9:15 p.m. The traffic light at Lagunitas Road up ahead was green, but as we approached the intersection, Kathy suddenly exclaimed, “Do you see that? Look out!” There was a thump, and Kathy cried out, “Oh, my God! That car hit her!”

I glanced over at the far curb just in time to see a pre-teen girl collapsing on the pavement. I immediately stopped, as did the oncoming driver that hit her. The girl was apparently leaving an event at the Marin Art and Garden Center, and parents who had been at the center, along with a policeman, immediately converged on the scene.

The girl was obviously in shock and may have been briefly knocked out, for she kept screaming, “What happened?”

“You were hit by a car,” the officer repeatedly explained. Within minutes, paramedics and an ambulance arrived. I later called the Ross Police Department to relate what Kathy and I had witnessed. Kathy had seen two girls in the road, jaywalking in the dark. One “retreated” to the curb when she saw the oncoming car. The other girl, however, tried to run across the street. If she’d been a second or two faster, the oncoming driver probably wouldn’t have struck her, but I probably would have. Our cars were virtually side by side when the accident occurred.

The policeman I talked with said the girls’ view of oncoming traffic had been momentarily obscured by a third car, which was turning left. Fortunately, he noted, the oncoming driver was able to swerve just enough to avoid hitting the girl head-on, so her injuries were not too severe. Nonetheless, the incident left me shaken. I pass all this along for the obvious moral: don’t jaywalk on a busy boulevard after dark, and if you’re a driver, keep your eyes peeled for those that do.

The blacktail doe and two fawns that live on this hill spend part of every day in my pasture. The fawns are now about 10 weeks old. I shot this family photo Thursday.

My next story isn’t grim despite its violent conclusion. As it happens, when I sold The Point Reyes Light 32 months ago, I had been storing two of the newspaper’s old computers in my basement. They were obsolete and ready for recycling, but I didn’t want to throw them out until the hard drives were erased. In these days of identity theft and cyber-crime, leaving personal and business records on the hard drives would seem to be asking for trouble.

On Monday, using the computers’ “erase” function, I tried to write over the hard drives with zeroes — the usual way to clear a hard drive. But the old software soon froze. What to do? I called Sheila and Michael Castelli, who a few years ago moved from Point Reyes Station to Taos. She builds websites, and he’s a computer techie.

Mike gave me advice for resuming the erasing, but Sheila soon emailed me that Mike had come up with a simpler, low-tech solution: take out the hard drives and smash ‘em. The only problem with that was I’d never tried to disassemble a computer and wouldn’t know a hard drive if I saw one. So I wrote back for more advice.

On Tuesday, however, it occurred to me to call Marin Mac Shop in San Rafael, where a techie told me he’d remove both hard drives for a total of $49.50. I crammed the two computers, two monitors (one of them huge), a plate burner, and other gear into my Acura and — with its rear end sagging — drove over the hill.

Marin Mac Shop needed less than five minutes to remove both hard drives, and I was back out the door and on my way to ReNew Computers. The electronics-recycling center is hard to find. It’s located at 1241 Andersen Drive, Suite J, a small space in one of the non-descript industrial buildings south of downtown; however, the staff was friendly, and the dropoff was free.

Back at home, I followed Mike’s suggestion and destroyed the hard drives with an ax. I pass all this along as one solution to the vexing problem of what to do with old computers.

This last story is a pretty good indication of how I live these days. My long-term houseguest Linda Petersen has a 15-year-old dog, a Havanese named Sebastian. As I’ve noted before, he’s virtually deaf and legally blind, but he’s very sweet.

In recent months, unfortunately, Sebastian has taken to begging at the table, and given his advanced age, neither of us has had the heart to turn him down.

My dining-room table sits next to a window, and just outside the window is a woodbox. Linda and I were eating dinner Thursday night when her little dog as usual came over and stood with his front paws on my leg, wanting to be fed. At that moment, Mrs. Raccoon climbed onto the woodbox and began vulching over my shoulder, hoping I’d throw her some pieces of bread.

“Only in this cabin,” I said to Linda, would we have a pet dog and a wild raccoon begging at the dinner table simultaneously.” Linda then took over feeding table scraps to Sebastian while I got up and threw some bread out the kitchen door to Mrs. Raccoon. I pass all this along as a warning as to what can happen once you start feeding dogs and raccoons from the dinner table. They give you no peace.

An enthusiastic crowd showed up at the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art Saturday afternoon for the opening of an exhibit by Bruce Lauritzen of Point Reyes Station.

Lauritzen’s idiosyncratic exhibition of paintings, which is titled the Vessel Series, consists of abstracted representations of boat hulls.

The artist discusses his painting Still Waters III with two guests at his opening.

The painting in the foreground is titled Boathouse. The three smaller paintings to its left are titled Towards Dark Water, RowBoat, and RowBoat II.

Lauritzen graduated from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland and earned a master-of-fine-arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute. He later taught at the College of Marin and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He was also a member of the Marin Arts Council’s founding board of directors. Lauritzen’s work is in more than 100 private, institutional, and museum collections.

Lauritizen (left) with fellow Point Reyes Station artist Chuck Eckart during Saturday’s opening at the Marin Contemporary Art Museum on the old Hamilton Air Base.

The show can be seen from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays through July 13 at 500 Palm Drive.

Some history regarding the museum’s impressive home: It typifies the air base’s Spanish-Revival-style buildings, which were mostly constructed in 1934. Originally called Hamilton Airfield, the base is named for a World War I hero, 1st Lt. Lloyd Andrew Hamilton. In August 1918, Hamilton received the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism after leading a low-level bombing attack on a German airdrome 30 miles behind enemy lines in Belgium. He died in action only 13 days later in France. The air base was decommissioned in 1974.

Like a kite/ Cut from the string,/ Lightly the soul of my youth/ Has taken flight. — Ishikawa Takuboku (1885-1912)

Students from tiny Nicasio School on Wednesday afternoon flew kites on LaFranchi Hill across Nicasio Valley Road from the school. By tradition, the event is held during the last week of each school year, and the full studentbody takes part.

Western Weekend Queen Lianne Nunes greets the parade crowd Sunday. Her driver is Debbie Rocca.

Sunday’s parade in Point Reyes Station drew almost 1,000 spectators, who enjoyed sunny skies and a little less wind than we’d been having all week.

In many ways, Western Weekend is a small-town celebration of its ranching heritage. Of course, not all small towns are the same.

Cowgirls for Peace in recent years have become a fixture of this small-town parade.

Another politically progressive group of women, Main Street Moms, in the past have demonstrated against President Bush’s war policies. This year the Moms demonstrated for clean energy.

The Marin Agricultural Land Trust float. MALT, a nonprofit, was founded in 1980 as an alliance between ranchers and environmentalists to protect family farms and preserve open space. It works like this. Ranchers voluntarily sell commercial- and residential-development rights to MALT — typically in exchange for half the market value of their property. Under this arrangement, the ranchers give MALT an agricultural-conservation easement across their land while retaining ownership of their ranches. So far, MALT has acquired easements on more than 60 ranches for a total of more that 40,000 acres.

The Nave Patrola spoofs the World War II Italian army — at times chanting “Il Duce,” the title taken by Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. Patrol members manage to continually get their marching orders confused, collide with each other, and fall down. Back in the early 1970s, a representative of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco after seeing all this complained to parade organizers (to no avail) that the spoof denigrated Italy.

Tomales Bay State Park’s parade entry was a kayak on wheels pulled behind a truck.

The nonprofit Coastal Health Alliance operates clinics in Point Reyes Station, Bolinas, and Stinson Beach.

For youngsters, grabbing wrapped candies, which riders on parade floats throw, is often as important as seeing the parade.

Marin Sun Farms entered an especially ambitious float in the parade. The grass-fed, organic beef ranch on Point Reyes has a butcher shop in Point Reyes Station, and a butcher on Sunday cut up a quarter of beef while standing on the bed of a truck rolling in the procession.

The Aztec Dancers keep in rhythm with the beat of drummers (left rear).

Wells Fargo’s having bought the Bank of Petaluma in Point Reyes Station three months ago, the Wells Fargo Stagecoach showed up for this year’s parade.

Marin County Farm Bureau held a chicken barbecue next to Toby’s Feed Barn after the parade. Toby’s was also the site of the parade’s judging stand, a Cow Flop Drop fundraiser for Halleck Creek Riding Club, a chili cookoff, and various other Western Weekend festivities.