Wed 10 Nov 2010

Trailer stash, a musical fundraiser to prepare Marshall for disasters

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, History, Marin County
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A storm in January 1982 dumped 12 inches of rain on West Marin in 36 hours, flooding roads all along the coast. Towns such as Bolinas and Point Reyes Station were cut off from the outside world. Slides were widespread, and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard north of Inverness Park was blocked by mud.

As it happened, there were no sheriff’s deputies or Highway Patrol officers in the Inverness area when the slides occurred, and the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department became in effect the only law west of the Pecos. It requisitioned food from the Inverness Store and distributed it to townspeople. An emergency kitchen was set up in St. Columba’s Episcopal Church.

In October 1989, slippage along the San Andreas Fault, which runs down the middle of Tomales Bay, the Olema Valley, Bolinas Lagoon, and across the Golden Gate, caused the Loma Prieta Earthquake. The temblor, which measured 6.6 on the Richter Scale, killed 63 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and left thousands homeless.

West Marin got off relatively lightly although Highway 1 south of Stinson Beach was so badly damaged it had to be closed for 18 months.

This area was not so fortunate six years later when a wildfire in October 1995 razed more than 45 homes on Inverness Ridge and charred 11 percent of the Point Reyes National Seashore. It took an army of firefighters from around the state to douse the blaze, which at one point was consuming an acre of brush per second.

With disasters such as these fresh in people’s minds, the Marshall Disaster Council expects there will be more and has acquired an emergency trailer for the east shore of Tomales Bay. Here’s the story from one of the organizers.

Tiny, the Marshall Disaster Council mascot, with trained volunteers Rich Clarke and Paul Kaufman in the new trailer, which is designed to hold urgently needed emergency supplies. The trailer will be on display outside Buck Hall at Marconi Center for Sunday’s Trailer Stash, a Musical Fundraiser.

By Paul Kaufman of Marshall

There will be a disaster; we just don’t know when. Residents along Tomales Bay’s East Shore (and hundreds of stranded tourists) could very likely be cut off from timely emergency and medical response.

The Marshall community is mobilizing to provide a cache of local emergency supplies. Thanks to a grant from the Marin County Office of Emergency Services, Marshall now has a brand new 7-foot-by-16-foot mobile disaster trailer.

But it needs to be outfitted with a cache of emergency supplies. While the Red Cross has helped with cots and blankets, Marshall still needs vital rescue and medical items including back boards, halogen work lights, a bolt cutter, a safety harness, fire axes, extinguishers, flares, and stand up tents.

In short, Marshall Disaster Council volunteers are trained and committed to help during a disaster. They just need the tools for survival; hence Trailer Stash, a Musical Fundraiser, which will be held at Marconi Center’s Buck Hall from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 14.

The performers will include: Ingrid Noyes with the Marshall Community Chorus and Kazoo Band, ragtime pianist George Fenn, traditional Irish music by Ted Anderson, harmonica stylist Dave Harris, the golden voice of Rick Pepper, acoustic guitar virtuoso Tim Weed (left), jazz pianist Corey Goodman, romantic ballads by the Kristi-Paul Duo, and Grammy Award-winning folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

Disaster Council volunteers are asking for a donation of $10 per person at the door or $25 per family. It will be a potluck, so please bring a salad, garlic bread, or soft drinks, and we’ll supply fresh Tomales Bay Oyster Company oysters raw, barbecued, or smoked.

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Sun 7 Nov 2010

Day of the Dead celebration in Point Reyes Station

Posted by DavidMitchell under Point Reyes Station
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A Day of the Dead altar in the Dance Palace with the first of many photos in remembrance of ancestors and friends who have passed away.

Story and photos by Lynn Axelrod

West Marin residents Friday celebrated the Day of the Dead with a show of Latino photography at Gallery Route One and with an altar and food at the Dance Palace.

Alex Porrata of Inverness has her hands full getting daughter Lu and son Ez to pose during the Dance Palace celebration.

By Mexican custom, on El Dia de los Muertos, the thin curtain between the living and the dead is joyously parted. The spirits of Mexican ancestors are expected to return to their living families. This reunion of the departed with their relatives and friends is celebrated with flowers, candlelight vigils, and lovingly prepared foods and sweets.

Day of the Dead is celebrated in different ways throughout Mexico.

In some regions, the first night, Nov. 1, is set aside to honor deceased children and infants, or angelitos, while commemorations for deceased adults are held the night of Nov. 2.

Several photos at Gallery Route One show Maria P. Niggle cheerfully cooking. Here she joins the parade from the gallery to the Dance Palace.

In homes, an ofrenda, or altar, is set up and decorated with candles, papier-mache flowers, sugar skulls, and photographs of the deceased. Their favorite foods are prepared to welcome and sustain them on their journey.

In cemeteries, gravesites are cleaned and freshened as flowers are brought to decorate the graves and tombstones. More food is brought and incense and candles are burned to help the dead find their way.

In West Marin, the ongoing Latino Photography Project show at Gallery Route One, Raices y Sabores: Roots & Flavors, celebrates the bounty of family, friendship, and El Dia de los Muertos.

Maria Herrera and Sara Reynoso, 7 months, at the Gallery Route One show.

Brilliantly colorful photomontages at the gallery show coastal residents preparing traditional recipes that families have passed down for generations. Other photos show gatherings of friends and neighbors, both Latino and non-Latino.

Brief biographies highlight the ancestral ties to Mexico and the United States of people in the photos, as well as the photographers.

A parade heads out from the gallery to festivities at the Dance Palace.

After a reception at the gallery last Friday, an El Dia de los Muertos parade wound its way through downtown Point Reyes Station to the Dance Palace, where the hall was decorated with a colorful altar.

The room was festooned with skeletons, flowers, and special foods. The annual custom of reuniting families and friends, living and dead, was symbolically celebrated once again.

Unlike Halloween, the Day of the Dead is intended not to be scary but to celebrate reunion. This display is at the entrance to the Dance Palace’s hall.

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Tue 2 Nov 2010

Point Reyes pedestrian home from hospital after being struck by deer

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, Point Reyes Station
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Heroically cheerful despite bizarrely bad luck, Doreen Miao and her dog Tully back at home Sunday.

The victim of a freak traffic accident, Doreen Miao, 57, of Point Reyes Station, returned home last Thursday after six days in Marin General Hospital.

As readers of my Oct. 28 report in The West Marin Citizen know, Doreen and her dog Tully had been walking beside Highway 1 just west of the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road Oct. 25 when a passing car hit a buck as it bolted across the highway. The deer was thrown into Doreen, who was knocked down and suffered a compound fracture to  one leg, a broken clavicle, and rib damage. (In a production glitch, The Citizen printed the Oct. 28 report a second time on Nov. 4.)

Doreen on Sunday told me that all she remembers of the accident is walking along the highway and then being in an ambulance. Photographer Marty Knapp, who lives on nearby Tank Road, told the Highway Patrol, as well as me, he saw the oncoming car, saw the buck bolting toward the highway, heard an impact, but did not see it.

Marty said he was not immediately aware that Doreen was lying on the ground, but two neighbors who could see her rushed over to help.

The photographer added he feels certain the car hit the deer rather than hit Doreen. The sound of the impact was what one would expect if a car traveling 25 mph were to hit a 200-pound buck, he explained, far louder than if it were to graze a pedestrian. Despite the blow, however, the blacktailed deer managed to recross the highway and disappear.

The driver of the car stopped and told officers he had hit a buck, but he was not aware of Doreen’s being involved. His car received only minor damage, the Highway Patrol noted.

Doreen, a native of Shanghai who has lived most of her life in the United States, walks her dog Tully to the post office and back almost every day. After the crash, Tully, a miniature Australian shepherd, returned to the post office where townspeople recognized him.

Vickie Leeds, owner of Cabaline tack shop, took Tully and Doreen’s cat Maui to the Point Reyes Animal Hospital. From there, the pets were transferred to a kennel in Novato. Thanks to a neighbor who picked them up from the kennel, Tully and Maui joyfully returned home Sunday.

For the moment, Doreen is using a walker to get around her house, but she’s as happy to be home as Tully and Maui are.

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Tue 26 Oct 2010

Have a happy (or scary) Halloween

Posted by DavidMitchell under History, West Marin nature, Wildlife
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Halloween, which will be celebrated Sunday, has its origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain. The name comes from an Old Irish word meaning summer’s end.

The ancient Celts of the Iron Age and Roman era believed the border between this world and the Otherworld was thin on Samhain, allowing both good and evil spirits to pass through. This, in turn, inspired the Celts to disguise themselves with masks and costumes to avoid the evil spirits.

With the Catholic celebration of All Hallows Even, the night before All Hallows (Saints) Day, falling at the same time of year, the two events came to be blended into Halloween. Trick-or-treating originated in the Middle Ages as a practice of poor people going door to door and receiving food in exchange for praying for the dead.

A great horned owl I photographed from my deck at twilight last week.

The symbols of Halloween eventually came to include, along with costumes and masks, jack-o-lanterns (which in the British Isles were originally carved from large turnips), black cats, bats, and owls.

Nor are owls, bats, and black cats the only spooky apparitions around my cabin this Halloween. A deck wraps around two sides of the cabin with steps leading down to the ground at both ends, and at 6:20 a.m. today I was awakened by the sound of footsteps scurrying past my bedroom window.

When I looked outside, I was amazed to see three foxes holding footraces back and forth around my home. Two of them were neck and neck with the other in a distant third place.

A winsome fox steps inside my kitchen.

As previously noted, three gray foxes have taken to dropping by each evening, hoping I will put out bread or peanuts for them.

For three or four years, I have periodically put out the same snacks for my raccoon neighbors, but now the raccoons must compete with the foxes.

They get along with each other fairly well, and I have seen a fox and raccoons eating peanuts nose to nose without conflict. Last night, however, my friend Lynn Axelrod saw one sly fox snatch a slice of bread from between the paws of a raccoon that was about to partake of it.

When the fox tried to do it a second time, however, Lynn cut loose with a Halloween-style “Boo!” and the fox ran off. From the raccoon’s perspective, Lynn had probably just fended off an evil reynard from the Otherworld.

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Wed 20 Oct 2010

Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce, a part of West Marin’s Latino heritage, further refined

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, History, Point Reyes Station
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More than a year ago, I posted a story about Anastacio Gonzalez of Point Reyes Station starting to bottle his famous sauce for barbecuing oysters. The sauce has now been refined by replacing high-fructose corn syrup with sugar, so this a good time to update the original posting, much of which is repeated here.

The sauce was already so popular that Anastacio would occasionally receive orders from as far away as Florida. Whole Foods stores, however, prompted him to refine it when they told him they were interested in carrying the sauce but not as long as it contained high-fructose corn syrup.

Anastacio this week told me he is “very pleased” with the new version. “It’s not exactly the same, but it’s very close.” On Wednesday I sampled the new version, and the main difference I noticed was a hint of celery and onions now in the sauce.

Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce is bottled in Portland, where his stepson Matt Giacomini lives. The first shipment of sauce without high fructose corn syrup sauce has just arrived and will be delivered to West Marin merchants next week.

Cookbook author Steven Raichlen a while back set out to determine who invented West Marin’s practice of barbecuing oysters. In BBQ USA: 425 Fiery Recipes From All Across America (Workman Publishing Company, 2003), Raichlen writes, “As I talked to folks in these parts, one name kept coming up: Anastacio Gonzalez.”

Anastacio told Raichlen that the barbecued oyster was born after a shark-and-stingray fishing tournament in 1972.

Anastacio Gonzalez, who in June 2009 retired as head of technical maintenance at West Marin School, spoons his “Famous BBQ Oyster sauce” into shucked oysters grilling on his barbecue.

I myself moved to Point Reyes Station in 1975, and I’ve watched Anastacio’s invention spread around the Tomales Bay area. Jars of Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce are on sale at the Palace Market, Toby’s Feed Barn, Perry’s Inverness Park Deli, Drakes Bay Oyster Company, Tomales Bay Oyster Company, Hog Island Oyster Company, the Marshall Store, and Golden Point Produce in the Tomales Bay Foods building.

And within the next few weeks, the improved sauce will also be sold at the meat counters of 35 supermarkets stretching from Oxnard (Ventura County) to San Diego. Here’s the story.

The 2000 census found that more than a tenth of West Marin’s population is Latino. Many, but not all, belong to immigrant families from three neighboring small cities not far from Guadalajara: Jalostotitlán, San Miguel el Alto, and Valle de Guadalupe.

Anastacio’s family is from Valle de Guadalupe, and before he arrived in West Marin, his brother Pedro had come up from Mexico and taken a job on Charles Garzoli’s ranch near Tomales. Anastacio visited Pedro in 1968 and “liked the area,” he told me. So in January 1969 he emigrated to West Marin and went to work as a milker on Domingo Grossi’s ranch.

He later moved to Joe Mendoza Sr.’s ranch on Point Reyes. “By then I was legal [had been officially granted US residency], so I bought a car and drove to Mexico for three months.” Meanwhile, Pedro had moved to Anaheim, Orange County, where he was working for a company that made electrical wire.

At Pedro’s urging, Anastacio reluctantly went to work for the company and stayed two years. “I started as a coiler and worked my way up to extruder operator. The day they gave me a raise [of only 10 cents per hour] I quit.”

In 1972, he came back to West Marin and began working for Point Reyes Station rancher Elmer Martinelli, who also owned the West Marin Sanitary Landfill. “I worked at the ranch parttime and at the dump parttime pushing garbage [with a bulldozer].”

Always amicable, as well as hardworking, Anastacio was invited to join the Tomales Bay Sportsmen’s Association, which held a two-day “Shark and Ray Derby” every year. “At the end of the second day, Sunday, we always went back to Nicks Cove,” he recalled. Then-owner Al Gibson provided association members with a deck where they could party and barbecue their catch.

In 1972, Anastacio was grilling shark and stingray fillets when Leroy Martinelli, Elmer’s son, showed up with 50 oysters and told him, “See what you can do with these.” With Al’s permission, Anastacio went into the restaurant’s kitchen to see what ingredients he could find. “I put together the sauce my mother used to use for shrimp,” he told me.

“I customized it a little bit, and it turns into this [his now-famous sauce].” Part of the customizing would surprise many people. “In my town, the guy who used to make the best carnitas [shredded pork] used Coca Cola,” Anastacio noted, so he did too.

(The new recipe contains neither the Coca Cola nor the ketchup that Anastacio first used.)

The Nicks Cove owner was as impressed as association members. “We can sell this,” Al told Anastacio and offered him a job barbecuing oysters. Anastacio was already working six days a week, but he finally agreed to do it. “We got oysters for six cents each and used to sell them barbecued three for a dollar.” Nowadays, the price is often $2 apiece.

“I was there for about three years. Then Tony’s Seafood offered me a better deal, a percent [of sales]. Nicks Cove used to pay me $20 per day. When I went to work for Tony’s, I doubled the money or better.” From Tony’s, Anastacio took his barbecuing technique to the Marshall Tavern, which was owned by Al Reis, then of Inverness. “I was barbecuing 4,500 oysters on a weekend. Sunset magazine interviewed me in 1980. That’s when everything went crazy.

Ad in The Point Reyes Light around 1980.

“After Sunset, I’d get people from Sacramento asking, ‘Are you the one?'” Jose de la Luz, better known as Luis, regularly assisted him. “We were working 12 hours a day to catch up,” Anastacio recalled.

Anastacio worked at the Marshall Tavern about four years until the IRS closed it. After that, he barbecued oysters at Barnaby’s by the Bay in Inverness for half a year or so and then moved to Mi Casa, which was located where the Station House Café is today.

Each time Anastacio moved to a new restaurant, the one he’d left would continue to barbecue oysters, trying to duplicate his recipe. “Whenever I left,” he told me with a laugh, “I left my footprint. All the same,” he added, “the customers were following me wherever I went.”

And throughout all this time, Anastacio repeatedly volunteered his barbecuing for a variety of worthy causes: West Marin Lions Club (of which he is a former president), Nicasio Volunteer Fire Department, Sacred Heart Church, Western Weekend, and St. Mary’s in Nicasio (where one day’s barbecuing brought in $4,500 for the church’s building fund). During the Flood of ’82, Anastacio barbecued 6,500 oysters for the National Guard, who were staying at Marconi Conference Center.

While barbecuing oysters, Anastacio ladles melted butter on top of his sauce.

Although Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce is now sold throughout the Tomales Bay area, his biggest outlets could prove to be 35 Northgate Gonzalez supermarkets, which are owned by Anastacio’s cousins, who also own a bank. “One of the owners [Antonio] is married to my brother’s daughter,” he explained. The Southern California supermarkets sell the sauce at the meat counter rather than just stock it on the shelves. “Antonio is in charge of the meat departments of all the stores,” Anastacio noted.

Even with the sauce, there is an art to barbecuing oysters. Anastacio ladles melted butter on top of his sauce while the oysters are on the grill. And he stresses that the oysters need to be shucked before barbecuing. Cooks sometimes try to skip the shucking by placing unopened oysters on the barbecue and letting the water inside the shells steam and pop them open. It may be less work, he said, but “you ruin your oyster.” It becomes overcooked and rubbery.

And while it’s called oyster sauce, it has other uses as well. I found it delicious on hamburgers, and Anastacio told me, “I’ve been using it on chicken, ribs, salmon, on almost anything you put on the grill.” In fact, as a bartender at Nicks Cove discovered when he ran out of V-8 juice, it’s also a great Bloody Mary mix. Just add lemon juice and Tobasco sauce.

For the moment, most oyster barbecuing is occurring around Tomales Bay, Anastacio noted, but with any luck, people throughout California will soon be giving it a try. The main thing he needs now, Anastacio said, is a distributor.

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Mon 11 Oct 2010

This fall’s wildlife census for my hill

Posted by DavidMitchell under West Marin nature, Wildlife
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The most recent wildlife adventures around my cabin began three weeks ago when I started down my driveway to pick up the morning Chronicle. There in the dirt at the edge of my parking area were several large paw prints, too large for the critters I usually see around here. Roughly 25 feet away, other tracks showed where a deer had kicked up dirt as it ran off.

A check of my tracking guide confirmed a mountain lion had probably been on my property the night before. That was an exciting but not altogether surprising discovery, for I’ve heard reports of mountain lion sightings along Tomasini Canyon Road, the next road to the north.

A gray fox eating bread on my deck.

With so much wildlife on this hill, my cabin has become a sort of blind for observing it.

In the past week, up to three foxes at a time have shown up on my deck. I sometimes feed them a few pieces of bread or a few peanuts, but judging from their scat, with which they mark my property (including the roof of my car), their main diet these days is blackberries.

On several occasions, I’ve watched encounters on my deck between raccoons and a fox. Neither seemed overly alarmed by the other, and at times the fox approached a raccoon within a few feet.

This is not to say that no other wildlife alarms raccoons. One kit sprang onto a post of the deck railing tonight and was about to climb to the top when suddenly it froze and flattened itself against the lattice.

For half a minute it hung there with only its head peeking over the top. Eventually the kit climbed on top of the railing, paced back and forth, but went nowhere. About this time, a couple of deer walked by just beyond the railing. Only when they were gone did the kit feel free to resume its meandering.

The foxes, however, seem not to be alarmed by any creature around my cabin. Sunday night when I scattered some tortilla chips on the deck and left the door open, this fox was curious enough about my kitchen to look inside before chowing down on the chips.

The foxes are usually skittish enough to run off a few feet when I open the kitchen door, but they quickly return.

And twice when my friend Lynn Axelrod stuck a piece of bread out the door, a fox took it from her hand.

Three, four, and even five raccoons have shown up simultaneously on my deck in the last week. They too enjoy snacking on bread, but except for one older male, they enjoy peanuts even more.

I occasionally put out a few handfuls of honey-roasted peanuts for their dessert, and I’ve had raccoon kits so enthusiastic that on occasion they grabbed my hand with their paws before I was done. Very odd to shake hands with a raccoon. Thank God they grabbed with their paws and not their teeth.

Because raccoons use their paws in eating, they wash them in my birdbath afterward, as well as take long drinks, no doubt thirsty from the salty peanuts.

Also taking advantage of my birdbath is this pine siskin.

A pine siskin swoops down to join five other siskins eating birdseed on the railing of my deck.

Pine siskins are an irruptive species, meaning that their populations can increase rapidly and irregularly. A type of finch, they are particularly plentiful this year because their main source of food, seeds, is also plentiful.

Also enjoying birdseed on my deck are roof rats, which on some evenings show up even before the birds leave.

There are noticeable variations in coloring among roof rats, with the one on the right demonstrating why they’re sometimes called black rats. I’ve written quite a bit about roof rats previously, and I won’t repeat it all here.

Canada geese fly over my cabin almost every evening. I always know by their honking when they’re coming. Some evenings several flocks in a row will head west overhead. Naturally a migratory bird, the geese used to only winter here, but in recent years West Marin has developed a large year-round population.

Also announcing themselves around my cabin these nights (in fact, I hear their yips and howls right now) are a number of coyotes. Like the gray foxes, coyotes are members of the dog family, canidae. However, unlike gray foxes, they can’t climb trees, which is a blessing for us all.

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Tue 5 Oct 2010

Culvert project at White House Pool aims to reduce flooding along the levee road

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, Point Reyes Station
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Point Reyes Station’s levee road (AKA Sir Francis Drake Boulevard) should flood less often during heavy storms in the future thanks to a county Department of Public Works project now underway.

Road supervisor Pete Maendle (left) of Inverness Park this week told me a box culvert under the levee road had become completely clogged with silt. This has sometimes led to a drainage ditch from Silver Hills causing flooding near the White House Pool parking lot.

Part of the project involves cleaning out sedimentation basins that are supposed to trap the silt, which consists of decomposed granite, before it reaches the culvert.

The channel downstream from the culvert empties into Papermill Creek, and county creek naturalist Liz Lewis said workers so far have found two juvenile steelhead, six to eight sticklebacks, and two prickly sculpin in the project area.

The state Department of Fish and Game has told the county to complete the project by Oct. 15 in time for winter rains and fish runs. County superintendent of road maintenance Craig Parmley said today he hopes the $25,000 project will require only five or six days of work.

Although the work isn’t expected to last very long, Lewis and Parmley both noted it has taken seven years to get the many state and federal permits the project required. The biggest delay was in getting permission from the Army Corps of Engineers, Lewis said.

Fortunately, the permits will allow the county to carry out ditch maintenance in the future without going through the permit process again, Parmley noted.

While the project is underway, a series of cofferdams keeps ditch water out of the worksite. Water in the dams is being pumped into Olema Marsh.

Once this project at White House Pool (in background) is completed, the county hopes to carry out similar work in Inverness, Inverness Park, and Bolinas, superintendent Parmley said.

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Tue 28 Sep 2010

Greetings from your governor

Posted by DavidMitchell under Dave Mitchell, Personal
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Back in the days of the Vietnam War, we young men would warily watch our mailboxes for letters from the President. Too many friends had already received letters that began, “Greeting: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States.”

Today I received an official letter almost as chilling. In celebration of my upcoming 67th birthday, wrote California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, I must renew my driver’s license “on or before [its] expiration date…. [of] 11/23/2010.”

“Your last two renewals have been by mail,” the governor wrote on behalf of the Department of Motor Vehicles. “The law requires you to now renew at a DMV office. If your physical description or address on this notice is incorrect, please make the necessary changes.”

Clearly incorrect was the address the governor used to reach me, that of The Point Reyes Light. I’ll have to change it.

As for my height, alas I’ve shrunk a bit from my 6-foot, 4-inch days. I now have to stand really straight just to hit 6-3, and as for 185 pounds, I’ve lost more than 15 of them in the last five years. (To paraphrase General MacArthur, old newsmen never die. Their layouts just get tighter.)

Nor did it seem entirely fair that the DMV required me to renew my car’s registration just weeks before before determining whether I am eligible to drive it. What if I fail my vision test? Or forget when the speed limit is 70 mph?

All my life I have found driver’s license tests unnerving ,perhaps because I flunked the first one I took back in high school. The man giving me the test directed me to drive through a construction zone, and when we came to an intersection, I stopped at the crosswalk rather than at a stopsign sticking haphazardly out of a pile of dirt. Wrong decision.

Luckily, when I taught college for two years in Iowa and then reported for Council Bluff’s daily newspaper, The Nonpareil, the State of Iowa simply issued me a driver’s license based on my having one from California. I guess the Iowa Division of Motor Vehicles figured that anyone who could survive the freeways of Los Angeles could handle the farm roads of the Hawkeye State.

However, when I returned to California and began reporting for Sonora’s daily newspaper, The Union Democrat, this state required me to take a behind-the-wheel driving test to get a new license.

I showed up for the test nervous as a cat. With a woman from the DMV directing me where to go, we drove all over Sonora. If we turned a corner, I used arm signals as well as blinkers. In fact, I used arm signals when I merely slowed down.

This time there were no problems, and we returned to the DMV office where I was told to sign more papers and have my photo taken. Next to a stripe painted on the floor of the photo area, a sign said it was important that my feet were exactly on it.

Still nervous, I bent over and carefully positioned my toes exactly on the stripe. However, just as I was straightening up, I heard a perplexed DMV photographer say, “I’m sorry, sir, but you’ll have to turn around and face the camera.” For the next several years, my driver’s license photo showed me with bright red ears.

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Wed 22 Sep 2010

Bolinas boy makes good with documentary on fashion models

Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, Marin County
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Bolinas photographer Ilka Hartmann this Thursday is taking a bus to Hollywood where her son Ole Schell will celebrate his 36th birthday Friday. But that’s not the main reason she’s going.

Ole, who grew up in Bolinas and now lives in New York City, will be on hand for the West Coast premier of his documentary film Picture Me, which he directed along with former girlfriend Sara Ziff.

Ilka Hartmann reads a review of her son’s film in the German periodical Geselleschaft.

Friday’s premier is a very big deal. The documentary has been shown at film festivals in New York, Dubai, Germany, Italy, Spain and Estonia. In New York it won the documentary award at the Jen Arts Film Festival; in Milan, it won the audience award and the best fashion film award.

The film is being shown in theaters (or soon will be) in France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, and it is about to be aired on television in England.

Sara (left) as a runway model is seen in the film wearing the gauzy gowns, tiny bikinis, and dramatically cut dresses of the world’s top fashion designers.

Fashion modeling can be a glamorous, highly paid career for a lucky few, but even for them it can have a dark side, the film reveals.

Along with company-store-type debt to modeling agencies and sexual abuse by photographers, there is widespread cocaine use to fight fatigue. Even models who are grown women are pressured by the fashion industry to have figures as skinny and androgynous as an adolescent girl’s. Bulimia is all too common.

Sara got into fashion modeling at 14 when a photographer stopped her as she was walking home from school in New York. That led to assignments all over the world. She appeared in magazine ads, on billboards, and on designer runways. Not long ago, Ilka told me this week, she herself had seen a picture of Sara on a billboard South of Market. She was wearing a black leather jacket in an ad for The Gap.

Ole attended the film school at New York University and met Sara while in New York. After they became a couple, she agreed to let him follow her around with a video camera, shooting her world of glamour, high pay, and grinding exhaustion.

The film is highly nuanced. We watch an almost blasé Sara receiving $80,000 and $111,000 checks for her assignments, as well as a choked-up Sara admitting she has found herself in situations so compromising she can’t tell her parents about them.

Because Sara’s parents are also in the film, Ole’s access to her private world is striking. Nor is Sara alone in revealing for the documentary some of the abuse she has experienced as a model.

Ole and Sara as pictured in the Geselleschaft article. The headline translates from German as, “Food for the photographers.”

A model name Sena Cech tells Ole, “I’ve been modeling two years, working really hard.” Nonetheless, she adds, “I am in huge debt on my credit cards because I’ve been paying for my own food, clothes, and travel.

“I’m still in debt to all of my agencies. They fly you over [to Europe], so that goes on your debt. When you first get here, they hire you a driver [and] get you an apartment, so that goes on your debt. They have to make copies of your [model’s] book, so that goes on your debt. They send out the copies, so that goes on your debt. They have to pick their noses, so that goes on your debt.”

Nor is the agencies’ exploitation of its models merely financial.

“I think it is really common that the photographer would try to sexually take advantage of the model,” Sena (left) says and describes what happened to her.

“I had one [casting] experience with a very well-known photographer, who’s well known for being sexual.

“He’s very famous and a big deal. My agent’s going, ‘Go meet this guy, and whatever you do, make a great impression on him.’

“They started taking pictures. Then, ‘Oh, baby, can you do something a little sexy? Can you take off your clothes?’ I took off my clothes. I had no problem with that. I have no problem with being naked.

“Then the photographer starts getting naked. I’m going, This is getting weird. Why is the photographer getting naked? Nobody’s going to take pictures of him.

“But then his assistant starts taking pictures of him naked and then goes, ‘Sena, can you grab the photographer’s cock and twist it real hard? He likes it when you squeeze it real hard and twist it.'”

As she tells the story, Sena looks more and more disgusted and finally blurts out, “This is so gross! I did it, but later I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel good telling my boyfriend about it. I didn’t feel things went the way they should have.” All the same, she adds with a grimace, “I did get the job.”

And that’s the conundrum Ole’s film so deftly shows. The models know they’re being exploited in several ways, are being required to work inhuman hours, and can become so fatigued they have trouble staying awake while on the runway. But the chance to earn large amounts of money is also alluring, and in the case of Sara, the money eventually allows her to attend Columbia University and make a downpayment on a home.

When it comes to who is doing most of the exploiting, the models blame their agencies, lecherous photographers, and clothing designers who think their dresses will be more appealing to other women if the models resemble anorexic waifs.

In the 1980s and 90s, the models were usually grown women, the movie notes, but now girls as young as 14, 15, and 16 are often seen on runways far from home. These girls are easily replaceable and are typically the most vulnerable to abuse.

Picture Me is a brilliant documentary. It has many things to say, and it lets the models themselves say them. The dialogue is mostly conversational in tone. There is no screaming, no ranting. Some of what we see is sad, but some of it is humorous. It’s the nuances that give this film its power.

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Tue 14 Sep 2010

Scotland’s ill-fated colony in Panama, and why I read ‘The Economist’

Posted by DavidMitchell under Inverness
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Besides Inverness in West Marin (which, of course, takes its name from Inverness, Scotland), there are communities named Inverness in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Montana, Florida, and Illinois, all of them named by immigrants from Scotland or their descendants.

In addition, there was once a settlement in Georgia named Inverness, but during the early 1700s, it was renamed Darien in memory of an ill-fated Scottish colonial scheme in Panama. And therein lies a story.

Some years ago I began reading the London-based Economist magazine each week for my main source of international news. Politically, The Economist is libertarian, but it is not an advocate of unbridled capitalism.

In any case, I read it for its back-of-the-magazine reviews of books and the arts, along with its commentary on cultural trends, more than for its political coverage.

In the Aug. 28 issue, I happened upon a review of Caledonia, the principal drama at this past summer’s Edinburgh (Scotland) Festival, and it made me realize how little I knew about Scottish history. The review was so intriguing I set out to see what else I ought to know.

Scotland was an independent kingdom from 843 when it was unified to 1707 when it became part of the Kingdom of Great Britain, and during the 1600s, it had far more imperialistic ambitions in the Americas than I’d imagined.

Scotland tried unsuccessfully to establish colonies in Nova Scotia, East New Jersey, and South Carolina, but the worst disaster occurred in Central America.

In the late 1690s, the Scots attempted to establish the colony of New Caledonia on the Isthmus of Panama. Here’s what happened. A series of crop failures had caused Scotland to look for an overseas source of income.

Enter financier William Paterson with a scheme for establishing a colony at Darien in Panama. It would be a way to facilitate trade with the Far East and with European colonies on the west coast of the Americas.

Despite no one really knowing how all this could be done, the Company of Scotland was chartered in 1695 to raise money to finance the scheme.

The site of Darien is shown just to the left of the word “Darien” in the “Gulf of Darien” on the right side of this map from 1699.

The company’s first expedition to Panama in 1698, however, ended in disaster. About 1,200 colonists sailed for Panama, but because of disease and starvation, only about 300 survived. Of the five ships that had made the crossing, only one was able to return to Scotland the following year.

Unfortunately, a second expedition had unwittingly set sail before the remnants of the first arrived home. The second group tried to rebuild what the first group had abandoned, as well as complete a fort for defense against the Spanish.

And the Spanish did indeed attack. The Scots were briefly able to hold them off but were ultimately forced to surrender. By then, most of the colonists who had joined the expedition had died of dysentery or other diseases. Only a few hundred (out of about 1,300) made it back to Scotland.

The economic effect of these failures devastated Scotland. Citizens from all levels of Scottish society had invested in the Darien scheme, and estimates of their combined losses range from a fifth to nearly a half of all the wealth of Scotland at that time. Many Scots were left indebted and impoverished.

Desperate to recover, in large part by sharing in England’s international trade, the Scots agreed to the 1707 Acts of Union, which created Great Britain as a political union of England and Scotland.

Clearly Darien was a “Scottish tragedy,” The Economist notes in its review of the drama Caledonia at the Edinburgh Festival. Unfortunately, the magazine adds, the drama was performed as “burlesque….

“Caledonia, which promises to tell the stories of the nameless and the blameless, quickly eases its way into parody. This is history as vaudeville.

“The cast keeps breaking into song, Riches from riches, Piled upon riches, To the end of the world, though there are too few voices to make anything other than the thinnest lyrical impression.”

“King William minces about in a wig in an entirely unsuitable way for this most stern and Protestant of monarchs; the members of Parliament have their noses in a trough and waggle their rumps.”

King William (right) was referred to both as King William III of England and King William II of Scotland.

“The Bernie Madoff of the drama is William Paterson, a visionary of world trade in a gold frock-coat. Darting about, he seems everywhere at once, though that may be less to do with charisma and more with his airy-fairy character. The nameless and the blameless make a quick shuffle off the stage.”

Items such as this are what make The Economist such a good read, as far as I’m concerned. In a short review of a semi-obscure drama, the magazine prompted this US citizen to learn about a bizarre chapter in Scottish history that led to creation of the country of Great Britain.

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