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KWMR and Love Field in Point Reyes presented a “Far West Fest” Saturday, Aug. 18, as a fundraiser for the community radio station (90.5 FM in Point Reyes Station and 89.3 in Bolinas). Throughout the fair, which ran from 11:30 a..m. to 7 p.m. at the privately owned baseball field, acoustic music and amplified music alternated on two stages. Here the crowd dances to the band Sambad.

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Approximately 750 paying adults plus dozens of children and volunteers enjoyed sunny weather, with many families picnicking in Love Field’s outfield.

Vendors’ booths offered jams and jellies, artwork, a variety of prepared foods, newspaper subscriptions, face painting, t-shirts, children’s books, and information on numerous organizations.

Carlos Porrata of Inverness and his granddaughter play in the shade of the face-painting booth. The retired state park ranger’s colorful braclet shows he has paid admission while the stamp on his hand shows he’s old enough to buy beer.

The Far West Fest included a “Kids’ Zone” filled with outdoor toys, such as this.

The audience dances to the band Camper Van Beethoven during the fundraiser for KWMR. The station, incidentally, can be heard streaming at KWMR.org online.

West Marin Citizen editor Jim Kravets (left) and reporter Jeremy Sharp sold subscriptions to the new weekly newspaper. Other staff also took turns manning the booth.

A laid-back celebration. Despite bright sun in Point Reyes Station, a light breeze off Tomales Bay kept festival goers comfortable. Here an acoustic band tunes up in the background.

The band System 9 entertained several hundred Inverness Fair goers Saturday, Aug. 11, in First Valley. The fair ran from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Gene Ptak of Inverness and Nav Singh, an owner of the Inverness Store, shucked and barbecued oysters throughout the fair as a benefit for Papermill Creek Children’s Corner preschool.

Fairgoers admire the work of several painters, who used an Inverness Way fence for their gallery.

Throughout the fair held at the firehouse green, Terry Aleshire of Inverness gave motorcycle-sidecar rides to kids, plus an occasional parent, as a benefit for the Inverness Garden Club.

Scoby Zook of Inverness during the fair manned a fundraising table for the Dance Palace. Many other nonprofits also had fundraising or informational tables along Inverness Way.

IN OTHER, OLDER NEWS: Many years ago, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (1916-97) wrote that he kept a file of items to use whenever he had space, so I began keeping a similar file, which I labeled: “Quotes Worth Saving.“

One item from Caen’s file that ended up in mine has to do with Winston Churchill’s famous saying, “The British Navy has survived 300 years of rum, buggery, and the lash.” To this Caen added, “That sounds like another quiet Saturday night South of Market.”

Churchill, of course, had a legendary way with words. Take his comment in a 1939 radio broadcast two months after Stalin and Hitler signed their non-aggression pact: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.”

Has anything changed in the Kremlin? Part of the confusion, of course, results from the fact that folks in Moscow speak Russian.

In October 2000, The Chronicle reported that “Boris Yeltsin scolded Mike Wallace during a 60 Minutes interview: ‘An experienced journalist like yourself should express himself in a more civilized fashion.'” Wallace’s question, “Is Yeltsin thin-skinned about the press?” had been mistranslated as asking whether the former Russian leader was a “thick-skinned hippopotamus.”

One item from my Quotes Worth Saving file concerns James Gordon Bennett Jr., who took over the now-defunct New York Herald Tribune from his late father. “Father had no enemies,” the son commented, “but his friends intensely disliked him.”

Here are a few more newspaper stories from Quotes Worth Saving:

DECATUR, GEORGIA  A man accused of holding up a Domino’s Pizza outlet because he believed he was the target of the company’s “Avoid the Noid” ad campaign has been found not guilty by reason of insanity. [Kenneth] Noid, who was described as “acutely psychotic,” held two employees in the restaurant in Chamblee hostage for nearly six hours in January before he surrendered. Police said Noid thought the pizza maker’s TV commercials (which showed a giggling, red-hatted gremlin called “the Noid,” who tried to chill pizzas before they could be delivered) “were aimed at him.”  Associated Press, 1989

PHILADELPHIA  Two Amish men have been accused of buying cocaine from a motorcycle gang called the Pagans and then distributing it to young members of the conservative religious sect. “Bikes and buggies, it’s a rather strange combination,” Pennsylvania State Police Maj. Robert Werts said of yesterday’s indictment.  Marin Independent Journal, 1998

IRAN  A 16-month-old baby in Iran was found safe and slumbering in the den of a mother bear after being missing for three days. The baby was the child of nomadic parents in western Lorestan province who found their child missing after returning to their tent from the fields. A search party later discovered the toddler in the bear’s den about six miles from the encampment. The team said the child had been breast-fed by the bear; doctors reported the baby was in good health.  Earth Environment Service, 2001

SACRAMENTO  A 26-year-old man was arrested early yesterday for hitting his wife with a frozen squirrel, police said. Police spokeswoman Betsy Braziel said Kao Khae Saephan had been arguing with his wife about 2:30 a.m. when he walked into the kitchen and took several frozen squirrels from the freezer. The woman told police that when she walked into the room, her husband swung the squirrels at her and struck her in the head. Saephan was booked in Sacramento County Jail on suspicion of spousal abuse.  Associated Press, 1991

HARRISON, ARKANSAS  Sun editor Jon Vader testified yesterday that he used a photo of an elderly Arkansas woman to accompany a fabricated article about an aged pregnant woman because he assumed the woman in the photograph was dead. Nellie Mitchell, 96, of Mountain Home is alive and suing The Sun, a tabloid newspaper published in Boca Raton, Florida, for $1 million.  Associated Press, 1991

FRANCE   A three-pound meteorite tore through the roof of a parked car in the French Alpine town of Chambery, setting the vehicle on fire. Police said the small, molten-basalt rock fell from the sky at around 3 a.m. on April 11. The car’s owner, awakened by the crash and fire, refused to believe it was a meteor and insisted on filing an arson complaint with police.  San Francisco Chronicle, 1997

AND FINALLY  “For many in the West, diseases are a bit like birds: everyone gets them, but poor countries have more exotic species.”  The Economist, Aug. 11-17, 2007

Last week’s posting discussed Senator Dianne Feinstein’s challenging Point Reyes National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher’s plans to close Drakes Bay Oyster Company.

County supervisors had asked Feinstein to intervene after hearing from members of the public, including UC Berkeley biologist Corey Goodman, who revealed the park administration had misrepresented research to justify closing the company.

On July 21, Feinstein toured the oyster farm with owner Kevin Lunny and Supt. Neubacher, as well as convened a meeting in Olema of top Park Service officials, National Seashore officials, Lunny, Supervisor Steve Kinsey and others. The upshot of the meeting was that Lunny can now get the permits he needs to improve the oyster operation.

Four days earlier, Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey had written Supt. Neubacher, saying his plan to imminently start exterminating the axis and fallow deer herds in the park was unjustified. She disputed his administration’s claim that park research showed the growth of the herds has reached crisis stage. Nonetheless, extermination has now begun.

White, as well as brown, fallow deer browse with spotted axis deer in the Olema Valley. Notice how the spiral antlers of the axis buck seen here contrast with the palmated antlers of the fallow buck in the next picture. (Photos by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Perhaps the park has displayed its most outrageous chutzpah when it claims the fallow and axis deer eat too much brush, thereby depriving the blacktail deer of food and the threatened red-legged frog of riparian habitat. In fact, there is such a buildup of brush in the National Seashore that it has become a fire hazard. Why do you suppose the park each year holds all those controlled burns?

As for threats to the red-legged frog, the main two dangers are from bullfrogs and the National Seashore administration.

The park’s policy of converting historic stockponds from freshwater ponds to saltwater lagoons amounts to eliminating primary habitats for the red-legged frog. Indeed, when the park was initially discussing plans to convert the Giacomini Ranch to a saltwater marsh, the Neubacher administration acknowledged it would be wiping out red-legged frog habitat but said not to worry; there’s plenty more elsewhere in the park. At the time, the administration boasted that one of the largest populations of red-legged frogs in California is in the National Seashore.

A much greater threat to red-legged frogs than non-native deer are non-native bullfrogs, which eat adults and tadpoles. Scientists have noted that much of the park’s red-legged frog population has been displaced by bullfrogs, which are found in ponds throughout the park. Hundreds of bullfrogs can be found in some Olema Valley ponds.

A brown fallow buck displays his moose-like antlers.

So why isn’t the park setting its sights on bullfrogs rather than pretending that the threat to red-legged frogs is fallow and axis deer? Because what the Neubacher administration really wants to protect is itself. What the park passes off as science is in actuality a political calculation: “Catch hell now and get it over with.”

Neubacher became superintendent after a citizens advisory commission appointed by the Secretary of the Interior held hearings in which the public and scientists from across the county determined the optimum size of the herds. Their conclusion? Approximately 350 deer apiece. What followed, however, were periodic public outcries over methods used in culling the herds.

It periodically seemed the park just couldn’t do it right:

In the 1980s and early 1990s, rangers claimed 90 percent of the deer they killed were going to St. Anthony’s Dining Room to feed the poor. In 1992, however, when The Point Reyes Light invoked the Freedom of Information Act to check the park’s culling records for the previous eight months, it turned out that only 29 percent of the deer shot had been ending up at the soup kitchen. Deer slain where rangers would have had to lug them a ways to reach a vehicle were left where they dropped.

The National Seashore earlier this year said it will donate the slain fallow and axis deer to the Redwood Empire Food Bank in Santa Rosa and the St. Vincent de Paul Society in San Rafael. It now says the Hopper Mountain National Wildlife Refuge in the Central Valley will get some of the meat to feed condors. The park would like the public to think that all the meat will go to these organizations. Past experience suggests otherwise.

During culling in 1992, some rangers merely herded the deer into low brush, shot willy-nilly at them, made no attempt to finish off wounded animals, and left them all to rot. Unfortunately, deer with a gut wound can take several painful days to die. When then-Supt. John Sansing found out what was going on, he acknowledged the rangers were in the wrong and demanded the culling be done in a humane fashion. The culling then continued through 1994, after which Supt. Neubacher stopped it, and the herds began growing.

A white fallow doe, whose ancestors lived in the Near East, and a spotted axis doe, whose ancestors came from India and what is now Sri Lanka. Rancher Doc Ottinger in the late 1940s acquired the original members of their herds from the San Francisco Zoo, which had a surplus, and brought them to Point Reyes for hunting.

So what is really going on? Despite Congress’ intent when it voted to create the Point Reyes National Seashore, the Neubacher administration is in the process of creating a Disneyland-like facade of wilderness. In the process, much of the cultural history of West Marin is being obliterated.

The narrow-gauge-railroad town of Hamlet has been razed, the pioneer town of Jewell has been wiped out, historic barns have been torn down in the Olema Valley, attempts are underway to end 150 years of oyster growing in Drakes Estero, and the 65-year-resident herds of fallow and axis deer are threatened with extermination. All this reminds one of Taliban zealots in 2001 blasting apart two 6th-century Buddha statues carved into a cliff. The Taliban considered the the 125- and 174-foot-high sculptures non-Islamic and, therefore, out of place in Afghanistan.

From the end of the last ice age 11,000 years ago until the National Seashore was created, elk and, since the Gold Rush, cows kept Point Reyes in grassland. However, the park has eliminated grazing on hundreds of acres, which have now become brushed over with coastal chaparral. As this happens, rare plants that can only live in grassland are endangered. Grassland rodents disappear, thus reducing a key food source for eagles, hawks, and owls that had hunted the fields.

The environmental damage to the grassland ecosystems of former pastures seems to matter less to the park administration than making the landscape look wild. However, this artificial wilderness bears no resemblance to what Point Reyes had been like since the Pleistocene Epoch.

The Neubacher administration would appear to imagine that the tule elk, which the park reintroduced to Point Reyes in 1978 after a 110-year absence, will eventually become numerous enough to replace cows on the point. But it’s all Fantasyland. If elk numbers ever got that high again, the park would need to reintroduce 15,000 Miwoks, as used to live in the area, to cull the herd through eating a lot of venison. In contrast, the herds of cows the elk would displace can be, and are being, efficiently culled by the ranchers who own them.

It’s time that more members of Congress than just Woolsey and Feinstein pay attention to the park administration’s repeatedly thwarting the will of both Congress and most of the public. So far, the Neubacher administration is shrugging off Congresswoman Woolsey’s letter opposing its plan to eliminate the fallow and axis herds. The time to act is now. Professional riflemen have already begun shooting deer. Readers need to email Woolsey via http://woolsey.house.gov/contactemailform.asp and request she organize more support in Congress for these exotic creatures.

Threatened with extinction in the Point Reyes National Seashore, black and white versions of fallow deer browse in the park’s underbrush. Generations of the deer, whose ancestors came from in the Near East, had lived on Point Reyes before the National Seashore opened in 1965. The National Seashore now wants to eliminate them as non-native newcomers. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

The administration of Point Reyes National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher is beginning to feel the heat from members of Congress.

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey and US Senator Dianne Feinstein have now joined West Marin residents, the agricultural community, and animal-rights groups in questioning the park administration’s justifications for two drastic plans: closing Drakes Bay Oysters and eliminating the park’s 60-year-resident herds of fallow and axis deer.

At the request of county supervisors, a concerned Senator Feinstein on July 21 convened a meeting to discuss the National Seashore administration’s plans to close Drake’s Bay Oysters. The company is owned by Kevin Lunny, who also raises grass-fed beef within the park, and he was on hand along with top National Park Service officials, state officials, Supervisor Steve Kinsey, and others.

Kevin Lunny shows baby oysters that will be raised in Drakes Estero. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Senator Feinstein, who also toured Drakes Bay Oysters, at times had her hackles up. She knew Professor Corey Goodman had revealed to the Board of Supervisors that the park administration had misrepresented data in justifying its plan to close the oyster farm. Dr. Goodman, a professor of microbiology at UC Berkeley whose expertise in analyzing data is widely recognized, previously reviewed research as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

The upshot of Feinstein’s meeting in the Olema Inn is that Lunny can now get the permits he needs to upgrade the oyster farm he bought from the Johnson family. Still to be decided, however, is the fate of the mariculture operation after 2012 when its current lease expires.

Also familiar with Dr. Goodman’s revelations regarding the park’s misrepresenting research data is Congresswoman Woolsey’s office, as spokesman Chris Shields confirmed for me last week. The congresswoman on May 30 discussed axis and fallow deer with a coalition that included the Marin Humane Society, In Defense of Animals, Marin Wildcare, and local residents. She subsequently wrote Neubacher on July 17, disputing his claim that there is an immediate need to eliminate fallow and axis deer in the park.

“There is no urgency to move forward,” Congresswoman Woolsey wrote. “Park research fails to show any ecosystems collapsing or any native animal populations currently declining because of the exotic deer’s presence in the park.”

Not all “white deer,” as they are often called, are white. Fallow deer can be white, brown, spotted, and black. The spotted deer seen here, however, are axis deer while the black critter is angus beef on the hoof. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Unfortunately, as Dr. Goodman complained to Marin County supervisors, the press too often has uncritically spread the National Seashore’s inaccurate claims about the oyster company. The same could be said of inaccurate claims about the deer herds.

One claim is that the fallow and axis herds are growing out of control. Two years ago, the park administration told the public the fallow herd was doubling every 6.5 years. A week ago, The Independent Journal quoted the park as now claiming the herd is doubling in four years. The claim, of course, is malarkey, as anyone who regularly drives through the Olema Valley knows.

Accepting for the moment the Neubacher administration’s estimate, there are now 900 fallow deer in the National Seashore, give or take 50 or so. If the herd were really doubling every four years, there would have been only 125 fallow deer in the park when Neubacher became superintendent 12 years ago and stopped the culling. In fact, his predecessor, Supt. John Sansing, had been following a policy of maintaining the fallow and axis herds at roughly 350 deer apiece through culling.

Nor did the axis herd ever recover from that culling. The park says it now numbers only 250 deer. Yet the Neubacher administration also claims the axis herd doubles every 3.5 years. If that were true, there would have been only 16 axis deer left in the park when Neubacher stopped the culling.

The fallow herd is growing, and its size should ultimately be limited, but the rate of growth is hardly out of hand. As Congresswoman Woolsey notes, there is time to find alternatives to eliminating the herds.

Gentle and curious, fallow deer are easily domesticated. (Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com)

Consider the National Seashore’s claim that the fallow deer are now out-competing native blacktail deer for grass and brush. As most residents will confirm, there are more blacktail deer in West Marin now than at any other time in recent memory.

Why? One reason is that homes have been built up to the edges of the park, creating the sort of non-urban, residential development where blacktails thrive. Studies in the Bay Area have found suburban blacktail deer often live more than twice as long as those in the wild, with does doing fine in territories as small as three or four square blocks.

The park also claims the growth of the fallow herd is forcing it to expand eastward. Wait a minute! The park itself is expanding eastward. The Truttman Ranch, the Beebe Ranch, and the Lupton Ranch, all on the eastern slope of the Olema Valley, have been taken out of agriculture since being acquired by the park. All the residents of Jewell on the eastern edge of the Neubacher administration’s jurisdiction (which includes pieces of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area) have been evicted.

By steadily reducing human activity at the eastern edge of the fallow deer’s long-time range, the park through the years has been unintentionally encouraging the fallow deer to occasionally wander eastward.

So what is really behind the National Seashore administration’s eagerness to eliminate the park’s fallow and axis deer? Protecting blacktail deer, red-legged frogs, or the administration itself? That will be the topic of next week’s posting.

Two ravens have begun defending my pasture, often sitting atop pine trees and croaking out loud “cr-r-ruck” warnings. Whenever I wander down my driveway, they circle low overhead, creating quite a din. The easiest way to distinguish ravens from crows, by the way, is by their tails. Raven tails are tapered like the bottom of a man’s tie while the ends of crow tails are squared off. In this photo, a downward flap of the wings leaves a ghost image above them.

A blacktail fawn nibbles on a blackberry vine outside my kitchen window.

Whether one finds entertainment in music, wildlife, or the cosmos, Marin County can be a pretty good place to live. The wildlife alone is more entertaining than television, and enjoying it merely requires keeping your eyes and ears open. In West Marin where light pollution is minimal, the cosmos is on display every night that isn’t foggy. And as for Marin’s music scene, the venues may be small, but the performers are typically top notch.

Moonrise at the Station House Café. The arms of light extending to the right and left are part of a small cloud in front of the moon. In the foreground, a woman in the shadows reads a map by the light of the café sign as a car drives by.

Meanwhile inside the Station House, Si Perkoff on piano, Daniel Fabricant on standup bass, and Dale Polissar on clarinet perform a dazzling set of melodic jazz.

Last Friday a friend and I attended an impressive performance of Hawaiian slack-key-guitar music at the Dance Palace, and on Saturday another friend and I went to the venerable No Name Bar in Sausalito to listen to jazz. The No Name is virtually the last establishment around here surviving from the Beat Era, and the music we called “modern jazz” in the 1950s and 60s can still be heard in the bar every Friday and Saturday night.

Shortly after we found a table, three couples showed up and took a pair of tables next to us. One nut-brown-complected woman in the group was speaking French, and before long she stood up and began dancing all by herself. Now it’s not unusual for a couple or two to dance in the narrow straits between the No Name’s bandstand and bar, but in my years of going to the place, I had never before seen a dancer quite like this one.

The woman must have been a French stripper, for she started doing bumps and grinds in front of the band, giggling all the while. Her dance routine included flirting with men at the bar and periodically raising her a leg over her head as if she were flashing. (In fact, she was wearing long pants.) At other times, she passionately kissed her rakishly coifed husband, and in general kept both men and women in the bar wondering what she would do next.

When the band at her request played a bossa nova number, she and a tall blonde from her group started to dance only to have a somewhat tipsy guy, who’d been on a stool at the bar, cut in and start dancing with her. The blonde then convinced a more-than-hefty black woman from another table to dance with her. Rhythmically swaying to the beat, the third woman’s grace was as impressive as her size. The French woman meanwhile danced holding the tipsy man’s hands on her butt or alternately holding her own arms around his neck; her husband just laughed.

When the three couples finally left the bar, the waitress quipped: “Show’s over.” My friend and I chuckled, but the tipsy guy on his stool at the bar looked forlorn.

The rest of the world may going to hell in a handbasket, I thought to myself, but here in Marin County, folks are still finding ways to have fun.

More entertainment: With a droplet of water still on its chin, a roof rat prepares to climb down a lattice after taking a drink from the birdbath on my deck. In the late 1340s, roof rats’ fleas spread bubonic plague throughout Europe, but the main danger from the timid, little roof rats now in West Marin is to dishwashers. Please see Posting No. 13 for that story.

Nick’s Cove restaurant and cottages, which Croatian immigrants Nick and Frances Kojich originally opened on the east shore of Tomales Bay in 1931, reopened last week after being closed seven years for remodeling.

This past Sunday, owners Pat Kuleto and Mark Franz held a benefit party for the Tomales Volunteer Fire Department and invited the West Marin community to be the resort’s guests. For me, it was a pleasant reminder of how many oysters I can eat when I’m not paying for them.

The restaurant, bar, and cottages had gone unused for seven years because of an exhausting permit process. The five-year process ran up the cost of refurbishing Nick’s Cove from an initial estimate of $3.5 million to an eventual total of $14 million, investors Pam Klarkowski neé West and her husband Rick Klarkowski told me during the party.

When I had a moment to chat with Pat Kuleto, I commented that given all his permit hassles, I suspected there must have been four or five time times when he wished he’d never bought Nick’s Cove from Ruth Gibson (at a cost of $2 million back in 2000). “More like 400 or 500 times,” Pat responded. The restaurateur said that during his career (of more than 35 years) he has designed 190 restaurants. (Among them is San Francisco’s “beloved” Fog City Diner, which opened in 1985, the Nick’s Cove website notes.)

Pat Kuleto with his girlfriend Sarah Livermore, a singer who performed at Sunday’s party.

With 34 government agencies and citizen groups each wanting its own concerns addressed in the permit process, remodeling Nick’s Cove was “three times harder” than even the most difficult of his other restaurants, Pat said. In a sarcastic commentary, the Nick’s Cove menu this week facetiously included red-legged frogs on its list of appetizers. The frogs, which are a “threatened” species because non-native bullfrogs here eat them, supposedly were served with plenty of red tape and cost $2 million apiece.

It’s worth noting that the same county, regional, and state bureaucracies, as well as citizen groups, have managed to intimidate potential buyers from trying to restore the historic Marshall Tavern south of Nick’s Cove. Very few people can afford the red tape Pat encountered.

I asked Pam how many investors Nick’s Cove has. She didn’t know but said there were definitely more than 20. “Even a winery wanted to invest,” she said. “We’re not expecting to make our money back the first year,” her husband added.

Little Rock cottage on pilings over Tomales Bay rents for $975 a night on weekends in August.

Nor is the restaurant alone expected to repay investors. If all goes as planned, more than a third of Nick’s Cove’s income will come from overnight guests staying on both sides of Highway 1. The lodgings include four waterfront cottages, and July and August are high season. On weekends during July, the two-suite cottages rent for $680 per night while the two smaller cottages go for $595. In August, the weekend rates will be $850 per night for the smaller cottages and $975 for the two-suite cottages. On the other hand, the mid-week rate in July for the smaller cottages is a mere $440 per night.

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The bar at Nick’s Cove

Prices in the restaurant at Nick’s Cove range from $7 for a mixed-lettuce salad, to $12 for a gourmet hamburger, to $16 for fish and chips, to $24 for a grilled pork chop with peach chutney, to $32 for a 16-ounce, rib-eye steak.

Nick’s Cove executive chef Mark Franz (on right with his partner Pat Kuleto), has been on the “culinary scene” for 26 years, notes the resort’s website.

In 1997, Mark opened San Francisco’s Farallon restaurant, which was designed by Pat. Mark’s “coastal cuisine” at Farallon has received acclaim in Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, and similar magazines.

Several hundred guests showed up for Sunday’s party at Nick’s Cove, a lively event with a band and dancing in an outdoor dining area. Singing with the band was Pat’s girlfriend Sara Livermore. Chef Alex Klarkowski (below at right) and his older brother Ben barbecued oysters beside the bay all afternoon. Tomales firefighters, who parked two firetrucks outside the front door, sold raffle tickets while Marshall activist Donna Sheehan worked the crowd, trying to get people to complain to Caltrans about the lack of mowing this year along Highway 1.

Standing at the end of Nick’s Cove’s long dock and looking back at the restaurant and cottages, I remembered happy times when I used to keep a boat in Inverness and would periodically sail to Nick’s Cove for a meal, sometimes sailing home after dark. Thanks to Pat, Mark, and innumerable investors, a new generation of sailors can enjoy the same wonderful outing.

A blacktail doe and her two fawns in my field.

Fawns at play bound across my field.

Now that Independence Day is over, let’s take a moment to reflect on what it was really all about. Footraces in Inverness? Parades in Woodacre and Bolinas? A tug of war between Bolinas and Stinson Beach? Illegal fireworks on Stinson Beach? I myself spent much of the holiday enjoying nature.

The odd thing about the Fourth of July is what it doesn’t represent. For example, did the 13 colonies begin their fight for independence from the British crown on July 4, 1776? No, the “shot heard ’round the world,” at the opening battle of the Revolutionary War, had already been fired on April 19, 1775, in Concord, Massachusetts. Paul Revere had made his famous ride the previous night. On April 23, 1775, King George III had declared the colonies to be in open rebellion. The colonists had seized Fort Ticonderoga from the British on May 11, 1775, and on June 16, 1775, had fought the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In short, the American Revolution had been underway for a year when on June 7, 1776, representatives of the 13 colonies, meeting in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress, began debating whether to declare independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain. On July 2, all the colonies except New York (which abstained) voted to approve a draft of the Declaration of Independence.

On July 4, 1776, members of the Continental Congress (with New York as usual abstaining) voted to approve a final draft of the Declaration of Independence, but only John Hancock, president of the Congress, signed it before it was sent to a printer.

The document we know as the Declaration of Independence was signed by all members of the Continental Congress, including New York, on Aug. 2, 1776, and backdated to July 4. Perhaps one reason we don’t celebrate Independence Day on Aug. 2 is that those who signed the document on Aug. 2 did so in secret to avoid British reprisals. I personally would have thought that keeping the public in the dark negated the purpose of a “Declaration of Independence.”

In any case, all this was so convoluted that future President John Adams mistakenly wrote his wife after the first vote: “The second day of July, 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival.”

Likewise in the dark and fighting for survival: this dauntless vine of ivy has worked its way through a narrow gap in the wall into my basement, where it is now growing up through a cabinet in my workshop. Because there are no windows in the workshop, the vine gets light only when the basement door is briefly open, as it is here, or when the sun is in a position where there may occasionally be a crack of dim light around the door. The photo demonstrates the valiant persistence of ivy, but it also reveals why many homeowners don’t want it growing on the outside walls.

In contrast to the controversy raging in town and in the press this week over the sorry state of The Point Reyes Light under its new publisher, life has remained fairly bucolic at my cabin.

In preparation for the fire season, tractor operator Gary Titus from Tomales on Saturday mowed my pasture and that of my neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsman.

Homes uphill from fields of dry grass are particularly vulnerable to wildfires, county firefighters remind West Marin residents each summer.

Titus, who mows our pastures annually, told me that ours, like other fields he’s mowed this year, were faster to cut than usual even though the grass was higher. It apparently has to do with which types of grass grow best as the timing and amount of rainfall vary.

The mowing provides quite a show, for crows continually fly in circles around the tractor looking for insects, snakes, and other small creatures killed, or at least stirred up, by the mowing. It is not uncommon for West Marin’s ubiquitous gopher snakes to get chopped up by mowers, but Titus was happy to report that this year he hasn’t killed a single snake.

Most of the wildlife around my cabin have, of course, not been affected by the mowing.

Possums at night still climb lattice to drink from the birdbath on my railing.

And the raccoon that my stepdaughter Anika photographed last month peering in my dining-room window is back at it. Standing on my firewood box outside, the raccoon (which appears earlier on this blog) initially seemed to be merely checking on what those of us inside were doing.

This week when I spotted her again, however, the raccoon had more on her mind. On my window ledge is a ceramic candlestick with the lifelike shape of a small bird. The raccoon obviously wanted to grab it, but there was a pane of glass in the way.

In contrast to the rural tranquility around my cabin, protesters in Point Reyes Station milled around in front of The Point Reyes Light Monday morning. Some were upset by the paper’s sensationalism, which which under publisher Robert Plotkin has been heavy on gratuitous gore. Others complained that the newspaper no longer provides West Marin with the coverage it needs. “It’s lost connection to the community,” protest organizer Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness told the press.

The demonstration, which got advance coverage in Saturday’s San Francisco Chronicle and by the Associated Press, was covered live on Monday by Sonoma County public radio and the Santa Rosa Press Democrat.

In a lengthy article by Paul Payne, The Press Democrat quoted Plotkin as calling the demonstration a “march to mediocrity, a protest against excellence. I bought the newspaper to make something extraordinary.”

Payne also interviewed Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, who plans to launch a competing weekly newspaper in West Marin on July 5.

Hack told The Press Democrat and The Chronicle that his newspaper would cover school board and other public meetings (as The Light did before Plotkin bought it in November 2005). He also promised to also cover the special accomplishments of everyday residents, such as “aunt Mabel’s prize-winning raspberry jam.”

The new paper has been temporarily dubbed The West Marin Pilot until readers chose a final name, and Hack last week told The Chronicle that scores of people have begun subscribing before the paper even exists or has a definite name. He has also reported significant success in lining up advertisers.

Editing the new newspaper will be former Light editor Jim Kravets. In Saturday’s Chronicle, Kravets is quoted as saying, “It’s a journalist’s dream to work in a community where people don’t just pick up the paper out of rote, but run to it.”

Kravets has called for a community meeting at 7 p.m. Monday, June 18, in the Dance Palace, to tell editors and staff of the West Marin community newspaper what they want and don’t want in their newspaper. He described the meeting as a chance for West Marin residents to ensure the “paper is not merely relevant but essential for the enlightened practice of West Marin citizenship.”

Notwithstanding the protest and a new competitor, The Light itself got some good news this week.

Missy Patterson, who runs the paper’s front office, has changed her mind and will not work for the new newspaper, Hack reported. He said Patterson did not explain her reasons in detail, mentioning only that she was uncomfortable with her earlier decision to jump ship.

And on Wednesday, The Independent Journal reported that former Light bookkeeper LaShanda Goldstein has pled guilty to embezzling $62,000 from the weekly.

Goldstein, 29, of Santa Rosa remains in Marin County Jail in lieu of $62,000 bail, The Independent Journal added.

On Monday, she pled guilty to “one count of embezzlement with an enhancement for stealing more than $50,000,” the paper reported. She could face a maximum sentence of four years in state prison, but Deputy District Attorney Rosemary Slote said Goldstein may be sentenced to probation because she has no prior record.

A 2,000-square-foot art studio at 80 Blackberry Way in Inverness Park burned to the ground Friday afternoon. The owner, Sherburne Slack, whose home is next to the studio, told me while the fire was still burning that he had “no clue” as to what started it.

Slack noted he gone to the studio half an hour before the fire broke out and had seen nothing amiss.

There are no fire hydrants on Blackberry Way although there is one not far away at the foot of Balboa Avenue where tanker trunks refilled. Slack (above) has a 3,000-gallon tank at his house, from which both he and firefighters also drew water.

The studio was being used for sculpting and had previously been used for blowing glass, but none of the glass furnaces had been turned on in a year and a half, Slack said. The artist explained he had developed a bad back and could no longer handle the heavy lifting glass blowing requires.

Slack said he lost $50,000 to $60,000 (wholesale price) of art in the blaze. Slack’s art (left) has been exhibited worldwide. Some of it is currently in an exhibition in New York, he noted.

The artist said he had been working at a computer in his house and waiting for someone with a brush chipper when he heard noises and went outside expecting to see the chipper.

Instead he found smoke billowing from his multi-level studio less than a block from Balboa Avenue.

Slack (at right) said he immediately called the 911 emergency number but was kept on hold for six minutes.

Meanwhile neighbors called the Point Reyes Station firehouse directly, and one person drove into town to alert firefighters.

Firefighters were called out at 2:18 p.m. County firefighters from Point Reyes Station, Woodacre, and Tomales responded, as did the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department.

When firefighters arrived on the scene, a prime concern was preventing the blaze from spreading to a house next door owned by Bolinas School teacher Don Jolley.

Although the Jolley house (above) did not catch fire, heat from the blaze blew out windows facing the studio.

As of this posting, the county Fire Department was preparing to look for clues as to what started the fire.

Slack told me the studio was uninsured, adding that he does not have enough income to rebuild it. However, he said, the loss was just “stuff” and that it was more important that no one was hurt.

This vase from Sherburne Glass Studio is titled “Beauty” and contains “amethyst and gold ripple.”

The glass torso above, which also comes from the studio, is titled “Resurection.” Both pictures of Slack’s art were taken from sherb.com where more of his work can be seen.

With the traditional lasso twirling and the Coast Guard color guard’s precision marching, Sunday’s Western Weekend parade drew roughly 2,000 spectators, who lined the sidewalks of Point Reyes Station’s three-block long main street.

Of course, back in 1980 and 81, the parade drew crowds of 10,000 people, largely because participating groups came from all over the San Francisco Bay Area. But that large a multitude in a town which then had about 600 residents was overwhelming. Rowdy motorcyclists roared up and down the main street when the parade ended. Beer flowed in the gutters.

The chaos prompted the West Marin Lion’s Club, which then sponsored virtually all of Western Weekend, to call off the parade for two years while retaining the weekend’s Junior Livestock Show. (“Junior” in the sense that all the contestants exhibiting animals were youths from 4-H and FFA clubs.)

When parades resumed in 1984, they were smaller, home-grown affairs. Which from a spectator’s point of view, not to mention public order, is far more comfortable. Of course, there’s still plenty of spit and polish, for Point Reyes is a parttime home for the US Coast Guard Communications Station crew and for Marin County firefighters (seen at rear).

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One of the odder entries (last seen heading toward the Old Western Saloon) was dubbed “Light ’em if you got ’em.” The bizarre contraption featured a spinning rack of antlers on the front and belched fire from it’s chimney. At times, the “devil” at left would turn up the gas, and fire would shoot higher into the air. Nervous spectactors were relieved when “the devil” — despite his legendary propensity for mischief — did not turn up the gas while passing under any overhead lines.

Cowgirls for Peace were followed by protesters with a banner: “Stop Bushwhacking the Planet.”

A group from the Dance Palace Community Center danced its way down the parade route.

The Western Weekend barbecue, which followed the noontime parade, was sponsored by the Farm Bureau this year and was held at Toby’s Feed Barn instead of at the Red Barn where it traditionally was held. Also moved from the Red Barn this year was the livestock show, and attendance was sparse Saturday. A spot check around town found most people didn’t know it was being held in rancher Rich Giacomini’s corral next to the Dance Palace.