Posted by DavidMitchell under General News, Marin County, Point Reyes Station Comments Off on A variety of festivities make for another fun-filled Sunday in Point Reyes Station
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David Briggs (center) serves a sausage to Donna Larkin while behind him Jim Fox doles out pancakes to Nadine Booras.
Point Reyes Disaster Council’s 32nd annual pancake breakfast was held Sunday morning in the Point Reyes Station firehouse. The event is a fundraiser for the Disaster Council, which is made up of resident volunteers, and works as a civilian adjunct to the county fire department. Frying the pancakes, along with eggs and sausages, were members of the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department.
Supervisor Dennis Rodoni and Marin Fire Capt. Mark Burbank used the occasion to exchange ideas.
Most guests ate inside where firetrucks normally reside, but the spillover dined on the firehouse driveway.
Many merchants and several individuals contributed the prizes for a fundraising raffle. Other donations were sold through a silent auction.
Selling raffle tickets along with breakfasts were Disaster Council coordinator Lynn Axelrod Mitchell (left) and Inverness Disaster Council coordinator Jairemarie Pomo. Working at the table at other times were Eileen Connery, Marty Frankel, Deb Quinn, and Vicki Leeds.
Sunday afternoon a Dia de los Muertos procession was assembled at Gallery Route One and then proceeded up the main street.
Parading in the Aztec Dancer tradition, adults moved to the beat of a youth on a drum.
Debbie Daly on accordion and Tim Weed on banjo led a demonic-looking musical group as it proceeded up the street.
Whether one watched from the sidewalk or from overhead, the procession created a thoroughly enjoyable spectacle.
Dia de los Muertos festivities finished up in Toby’s Feed Barn where Ernesto Sanchez had erected an altar for commemorating friends and relatives no longer with us. Most of the celebrants’ face painting occurred in Sanchez’s art studio.
Nor were those the only public celebrations. Sunday in this rural town of 850 residents. Papermill Creek Children’s Corner coincidentally held its annual Harvest Fest in the Dance Palace community center, where the preschool meets daily.
Posted by DavidMitchell under Wildlife Comments Off on Celebrating the harvest; a raccoon sniffs a skunk’s rear end; and other images of fall
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Sorting through pumpkins. On Wednesday, Lynn and I headed over to Nicasio’s enormous pumpkin patch and bought a medium-sized squash for our harvest-season horn of plenty.
Each year we celebrate the harvest with an old-fashioned cornucopia in our front room.
This fall we’ve become used to seeing what I once would have considered an odd event, a skunk eating with a family of raccoons. Like dogs, raccoons confirm each other’s identity by sniffing rear ends, and they don’t hesitate to sniff a skunk’s backside. This skunk raises its tail as if it’s going to spray, but it never does. The raccoons and skunk sometimes shoulder each other as they compete for kibble on our deck. At first, I would occasionally hear faint growls during these matchups, but no more.
When I started photographing them Friday night, the camera’s flashes immediately caught the raccoons’ attention. The skunk, on the other hand, didn’t even look up.
Bobcats are crepuscular, meaning they are most active around dusk and dawn. In recent months, we’ve repeatedly seen them around Mitchell cabin. This one was sitting in a spot of sunlight outside our kitchen window this past week. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod Mitchell)
Male bobcats do not help raise their young, which are born blind. The kits stay with their mothers more than half a year. Adults are said to roam up to seven miles per night. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod Mitchell)
Two or more blacktail deer show up daily. Judging from the fur on this buck’s rump, he’s probably been chewing on an itchy spot.
For Lynn and me, this fall is off to a good start. May you too enjoy the autumn.
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Lynn Axelrod Mitchell holds a glass of tea at the No Name in Sausalito.
The latest Marin Poetry Center Anthology (Volume XXI, 2018) includes a poem by my wife, Lynn Axelrod Mitchell. Titled Our Year In Four, it draws upon the nature around our home. I like the poem enough to share it, and I hope you’ll enjoy it too:
I
Bird-call makes us break
our solitude and sleep
to slip within this risen day.
The water bowl’s resurgent lake
clear enough for sparrow-sip
this warming day.
Bird-track stars in snow crystals
deliver us this glistening day.
Prints recede as skimming seeds
hail this breath of day.
II
Emerge from where we go,
hopeless captives
who fail at hobbling dreams
that make us quake at what we keep
from what we may release
like birdsong calling in the day.
Gaping redwings, shoulders back,
slingshot notes around the meadow,
our neighborly divide their forum.
Swainsons’ swirling flutes
swizzle cross the treetops.
We cast our husks of tribute,
sunflower, millet, suet,
to charm the scrubland gods:
While time is light as breath is air,
send them here, these newborn days.
III
Indigo sky.
No shoes, no shirt.
No rules need apply.
Berries lie in beds we made,
testifying to our pride,
our lustful spring ambition.
Luscious unclaimed virgins
no one ate or tried
jumped,
or were they pushed,
from overcrowded vines,
juices caking in the dust.
Laboring emmets carry off the spoils
clamber up the stalks;
roving antennae fondle aphid rears:
honeydew! like cheap, sweet beer.
Crusading leagues of ladybugs
arrive to save the plants
from habituated ants
who fight to keep their hooch.
Skirmish on the ragged green,
lunges, bites, maneuvers.
Biology is destiny, we say,
irrelevant to the sun devouring the day.
IV
Bring the tools inside, lay them sharp,
always clean, at rest in the dark.
The turned earth settles cool above,
warming continents below.
Give us time to think goodbye
sit on cushioned chairs
puzzle birds their silent pluming flights
wonder how they are.
Which tilt was final; setting sun decisive?
We try to reason when they knew: ‘now’ not if.
Storing wood for the annual surrender
we stake the ground on tremors
unbuckling chasms, bargaining again
we’ll hear the faintest notes return
sometimes through a murmur, raucous, rising.
Earth heaves, shudders in its own oscillation.
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Shoreline along Cannery Row in Monterey with a memorial to author John Steinbeck, who gave the area a special allure with his romanticized novel Cannery Row and its sequel, Sweet Thursday.
As regular readers of this blog know, Lynn Axelrod and I were married April 26 at Civic Center. The following month, we drove 80 miles up the coast to Gualala, where we went canoeing on the Gualala River, for the first half of our honeymoon. This past week we drove (actually Lynn did the driving) 160 miles down the coast to Monterey for the second half of our honeymoon.
The second photo down shows the living room in our suite, the Borogrove, with its view of Monterey Bay.
We stayed at an inn with a storybook quality, The Jabberwock, which is located in a mansion built in 1911. I’m sure many of you remember The Jabberwocky. It’s a nonsense poem in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the sequel to Alice in Wonderland. The Jabberwocky begins:
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:/All mimsy were the borogoves,/ And the mome raths outgrabe.
Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!/Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun/The frumious Bandersnatch!
However, the young man armed with a vorpal sword is able to slay the beast, and his father is ecstatic:
And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?/ Come to my arms, my beamish boy!/ O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy.
Complementing our joy: we found red and white wine, sherry, and hors d’oeuvres set out each evening in the inn’s enclosed sun porch. We also found a bottle of champagne, a decanter of brandy, and a plate of chocolate-fudge-coated strawberries in our room when we arrived.
Part of the Monterey County shoreline is within Asilomar State Park, and Lynn and I enjoyed several strolls along the water.
Flocks of pelicans could be seen frequently as they glided above the shore break.
Since I wasn’t smoking in the inn, these walks also provided opportunities to enjoy my pipe.
An official sign in a public restroom in Asilomar State Park. I wonder how many dogs can read it.
A visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium was one of the highlights of our trip. Probably the aquarium’s most popular exhibit is a tank of sea otters swimming casually around, typically on their backs.
Another particularly popular exhibit is a tank of puffins that paddle about seemingly oblivious of the crowds watching them.
A sea turtle swam above us.
As we wandered from one exhibit to another, schools of fish would sometimes give us the eye.
We saw exotic jellyfish and ….
…some of their luminescent cousins.
Throughout our stay in Monterey, we enjoyed sunny days, even when a few light sprinkles fell. What rain we had fell at night. At left a jet flies under a dramatic rainbow, which we could see from the inn for almost 40 minutes Wednesday late in the afternoon. From our perspective, we’d found the pot of gold.
