Hot spots at the rear of Manka’s restaurant continued to flare up for hours after the fire had been contained.

Winds that gusted to hurricane force toppled a tree onto Manka’s Inverness Lodge and Restaurant early Wednesday, breaking a gas line and starting a fire that gutted the 81-year-old wooden building.

Trapped. A guest who escaped unharmed with his possessions nonetheless found his car stuck for hours in Manka’s parking lot, hemmed in by Inverness and Marin County firetrucks.

The tree fell onto Guest Room 7 and went through it into Room 4 where it hit a hotwater heater and broke the gas line. All of those in the building escaped unharmed, including overnight guest Jake Gyllenhaal, who starred in the movie Brokeback Mountain, and his actress sister Maggie.

Daniel DeLong, chef and co-owner with his partner, Margaret Grade, later told The Independent Journal, “Jake was helping me pull things out of the fire.”

Inverness and county firefighters were called out at 2:43 a.m., and by the time the first firetrucks arrived, “it was going pretty good,” one Inverness fireman told me, so there was little that could be done except keep the fire from spreading. Firefighters did manage to save the original building on the property, a 106-year-old cottage.

Referring to the inn itself, the fireman remarked, “When it’s all wood, it isn’t easy to get inside and get [the fire] out.” This is a particular problem with historic buildings, he said, adding with a grimace, “It sucks.”

Heavy rain and Arctic wind (which gusted to 100 mph atop Mount Tamalpais, county firefighters were told) not only sent the tree crashing onto Manka’s, it did less-severe damage throughout West Marin. Falling trees blacked out much of West Marin most of the night.

A tree that fell on a utility pole along the levee road in Point Reyes Station forced closure of the road for much of Wednesday.

Sections of Highway 1 between Point Reyes Station and Olema were flooded during the night.

Manka’s under its former owners, the Prokupeks, was known for decades as a Czech restaurant. Current owner Margaret Grade bought Manka’s in 1992, refurbished the building, and developed a cuisine around wild game, locally grown organic meat and produce, seafood and elegant desserts.

In recent years, Food and Wine magazine repeatedly rated Manka’s as among the top 50 hotel restaurants in America while The San Francisco Chronicle called it one of the top 100 restaurants in the nine-county Bay Area.

When Prince Charles and Camilla, the duchess of Cornwall, visited West Marin a year ago, they stayed in Manka’s. Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey later told The Independent Journal the prince told him they “had a good night’s sleep” and found Manka’s fare “really outstanding.”

Manka’s owner Margaret Grade (center) herself was one of the chefs, and several of those who worked with her were in tears Wednesday morning. However, when Margaret spotted me taking photos, she might just as easily have been the congenial hostess welcoming guests at the door.

“Good to see you, Dave,” she called to me. “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“It’s good to see you too,” I responded, “but not under these circumstances.”

Only the front wall of Manka’s restaurant remained mostly standing. Sky can be seen through the windows of a guest room whose roof was consumed.

Despite the circumstances, however, Margaret remained the upbeat person I’d always known her to be, and before the fire was out, she had begun talking about rebuilding. Responding in kind, I asked her if she already had a contractor in mind.

Alluding to restaurant designer Pat Kuletto, who is restoring Nick’s Cove restaurant in Marshall after numerous permit hassles, Margaret joked, “I hope Kuletto has paved the way for us at the county.”

Then recalling how much work Manka’s needed when she bought the restaurant and inn in 1992, Margaret said to me with a laugh, “Look at what a disaster the place was. This takes us to a different level.”

A blacktail buck in the glow of late afternoon sun as the days grow short.

It was one of those moments when reality becomes surreal — as if the natural world suddenly went running off in all directions. Which is sort of what happened.

As I was about to leave my cabin to get my mail at the post office, something told me this would be a good day to carry my camera in my pocket. So I did. Nothing happened downtown worth photographing, but when I was driving back up my long, curved driveway, I was suddenly glad to have my camera with me.

Near the top of my driveway, I startled a herd of blacktail deer grazing just downhill from my cabin, and they did what deer typically do in these circumstances. The herd ran in front of my car. I was proceeding slowly, however, so they safely made it into a field on the other side of the driveway where they stopped.

Wild turkeys hunt and peck their way across my field.

As it happened, a flock of 12 wild turkeys were already in that field, and when they saw my car approaching, the turkeys just as perversely scurried across my driveway in the opposite direction.

Both were so intent on where they were heading that the flock and herd dashed past each other without seeming to notice there was a discrepancy as to where safety could be found.

A dozen wild turkeys forage downhill from my cabin.

Once they’d passed each other on the driveway, bird and deer both slowed to a walk, and I was able to photograph the turkeys as they marched across the field below my cabin.

Wild turkeys are not native to California. In 1988, California’s Department of Fish and Game planted three toms and 11 hens for hunting at Loma Alta Ranch (on the ridge between Woodacre and Lucas Valley Road).

From there the turkeys spread to nearby Flander’s Ranch and the Spirit Rock property — and eventually to Nicasio, Olema, and even as far north as Tomales, where they have been known to intimidate small children and scratch the paint of cars on which they perch.

In February 2005, a low-flying turkey gliding across Highway 1 in downtown Tomales hit a power line, causing three lines to slap together and fall to the ground. The town was blacked out for four hours, but the turkey — albeit initially stunned and walking around in circles — suffered only a few singed feathers and eventually wandered off.

After the commotion has died down, a fawn peers
around her mother’s neck at the departing turkeys.

I found this garter snake one morning warming itself in the sun on my driveway. Common garter snakes come in innumerable variations and are found in fields, forests and wetlands nationwide. Like this snake, adults average about four feet long. In West Marin, their diet typically consists of tadpoles, slugs, and earthworms. But unlike other snakes, they don’t eat insects. When first born, the snakes are prey for bullfrogs. Hawks and foxes eat adults.

Pacific tree frog hiding out in leaves from my persimmon tree.

Pacific tree frogs’ chirping is so dependable that Hollywood typically uses it whenever the sound of frogs is needed in a movie, even if it’s set in Africa.

The website NaturePark.com reports that the tree frog’s “color varies from almost a bronze brown to a light lime green. Individuals can change color in green and brown tones in a few minutes. This color change is related to the temperature and amount of moisture in the air, not the background color as in most other amphibians and reptiles. This color change gives it the protection of camouflage as it hops and crawls about on low leaves, branches and on the ground in open forests and forest edges looking for flying and crawling insects to eat.”

I photographed three lizards on the wall of my cabin and then was unable to find any naturalist either in town or at the Point Reyes National Seashore who could identify the green lizard at lower left.

I also checked the website wildherps.com operated by herpetologist John Sullivan of Pacific Grove. When I didn’t see the green lizard on his site, I emailed Sullivan photos of the three and asked for help. His answer: “I believe all three of your lizards are actually Western Fence Lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis). They have a fair amount of color variation, and the green one is within the range of colors I’ve seen.”

Charlotte’s Web (below) — Every fall I can count on some garden orb weaver each evening stretching a web from my eaves to the railing of my deck near the front-door light.

“The building of a web is an engineering feat,” as Wikipedia aptly notes. The orb weaver “floats a line on the wind to another surface. The spider secures the line and then drops another line from the center, making a ‘Y’.

“The rest of the scaffolding follows with many radii of non-sticky silk being constructed before a final spiral of sticky capture silk.”

“Orb weavers are three-clawed spiders, and “the third claw is used to walk on the non-sticky part of the web.

“Characteristically, the prey insect that blunders into the sticky lines is stunned by a quick bite and then wrapped in silk. If the prey is a venomous insect, such as a wasp, wrapping may precede biting.”

Possums are found throughout West Marin wherever ponds, creeks, marshes, and even drainage ditches provide riparian habitat.

I photographed this possum when it stopped on my deck to wash its paws.

West Marin’s possums originated in the Deep South where “common opossums” are commonly called possums, thanks to a linguistic phenomenon known as aphesis.

“The common opossum,” writes Point Reyes Station biologist Jules Evans in The Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula, is “the only marsupial native to North America [but] is not native to Point Reyes or the Pacific Coast. After the first known introduction into California at San Jose about 1900 (for meat, delicious with sweet potatoes), opossums spread rapidly southward: by 1931 they were common on the coastal slope from San Francisco Bay south to the Mexican border. Point Reyes avoided the onslaught until about 1968.” They are nocturnal omnivores, eating plants, earthworms, slugs, insects, and roadkill.

A perfectly preserved fossil of a feathered creature that lived 150 million years ago has provided further evidence to show that modern birds are living dinosaurs. The fossil is a complete skeleton of an Archaeopteryx and shows it had features common to birds and a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called therapods. — The Independent (London)

There are dinosaurs living on the two acres around my cabin. This is not metaphor but fact, as scientists from around the world have confirmed. Naturally, I hate to see any prehistoric reptile going hungry, so I buy dinosaur food at Toby’s Feed Barn in 50-pound sacks. The dinosaurs at my cabin get fed twice daily, thus requiring a new sack every fortnight.

Putting out seeds for the dinosaurs and then watching them show up, chow down, and start fighting provide me with a prehistoric world of entertainment. I’d much rather watch this twice-a-day drama than anything on television.

Canada geese fly over my cabin each evening en route from Tomales Bay to the larger of two ponds at the Cheese Factory in Hicks Valley, where many of West Marin’s Canada geese spend nights. Hundreds of Canada geese winter annually on the bay, on Nicasio Reservoir, and at Bolinas Lagoon. Along with these snowbirders, a year-round population of Canada geese is developing in West Marin. The fulltimers are descendants of geese that people over the years have dropped off at the Cheese Factory’s smaller pond, which is beside the picnic area. This began with an unidentified “Johnny Apple-Goose” releasing (with permission) four geese with clipped wings at the pond in the 1970s. Seeing those four, other people were then inspired to start dropping off their own surplus Canada geese (not always with the Cheese Factory’s permission).

The dinosaurs around my two acres are mostly songbirds, jays, blackbirds, herons, crows, vultures, and hawks while Canada geese honk overhead. This may sound odd, but as the website of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History explains: “In the view of most paleontologists today, birds are living dinosaurs. In other words, the traits that we accept as defining birds — key skeletal features as well as behaviors including nesting and brooding — actually first arose in some dinosaurs.”

Professor Mike Archer, director of the Australian Museum in Sydney, told ABC in 2002, “Fossils uncovered in the Liaoning Province of China have provided a whole sequence of missing links in the dinosaur-to-bird story…. The birds we see flying around our backyards are actually living dinosaurs, descendants of prehistoric beasts we all once presumed became extinct 65 million years ago.” In fact, not every scientist had shared that presumption. The

With its bird brain, a red-winged blackbird has the mind of a dinosaur. Ninety percent of red-winged blackbird males have more than one mate, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology reports, “with one male having up to 15 different females making nests in his territory…. [He] fiercely defends his territory during the breeding season [and] may spend more than a quarter of all the daylight hours in territory defense.” He doesn’t get much cooperation, however, from his female consorts. The ornithologists at Cornell report, “From one quarter to up to half of the young in ‘his’ nests do not belong to the territorial male. Instead they have been sired by neighboring males.”

Chinese fossils of nesting dinosaurs with rudimentary feathers have made many laymen finally realize birds are indeed dinosaurs — not creatures that evolved from dinosaurs but true dinosaurs. However, for more than a century there were always some scientists convinced of this.

Responding to renewed interest in the concept following the Chinese discoveries, Yale University two years ago proudly pointed out that “in 1880, Charles Darwin credited O.C. Marsh — Yale’s first professor of Paleontology — with further research on ‘toothed birds’ (dinosaurs) that provided ‘the best support’ for his theory of evolution.”

And while it’s amusing to talk in terms of “dinosaurs” eating birdseed on my deck, realizing that that they are, in fact, reptilian is illuminating. When a crow lands on a railing, it might as well be a Tyrannosaurus Rex as far as the other dinosaurs are concerned; they scatter in panic.

A scrub jay swooping onto my deck strikes the same fear among smaller dinosaurs that the arrival of a malevolent Monolophosaurus (1,500 pounds and carnivorous) would have struck among their prehistoric predecessors. Among like-sized dinosaurs, only the doves — those feisty birds of peace — can hold their own against common jays

Mealtime generally is fight time for the dinosaurs at my cabin. Fifty or more birds of several species get their beaks in each other’s face as they jostle for position along the 2-by-4 railings where I leave seeds. This reptilian territoriality is especially noticeable among blackbirds, as well as scrub jays (below). Their constant sparring to determine survival of the fittest can, however, work to their disadvantage, for it often causes them to overlook untouched piles of seed nearby.

On the other hand, the sparring of the bigger birds suits the towhees and Oregon juncos just fine. These mellower dinosaurs take their place at the feast as soon as the blackbirds and then the jays drive each other away.

Several dinosaurs are almost as fond of my birdbath as my birdseed, for they drink from the basin as well as bathe in it. Unfortunately, while dinosaurs instinctively avoid dirtying their own nests, they have no similar aversion to fouling their own drinking water. Birdbaths can transmit disease from one dinosaur to another, so I refill mine daily, pouring the old water into flowerpots on my deck. Unlike dinosaurs, flowers benefit from poop in their diet.

The fact that my feathered friends are prehistoric reptiles doesn’t, of course, make them all savage beasts. For example, I call this photo taken on my deck:

Golden-Crowned Sparrow Disguised as a Stained Glass Window

Walt Disney’s 1951 documentary Nature’s Half Acre was unusually successful for having such a simple premise: that there is an amazing spectrum of nature to be found on even a relatively small piece of open property. In fact, the movie’s cast was both huge and small — hundreds of little insects, various birds, spiders and lizards, flowers and other plants galore.

Likewise, the theme of this exhibit is the abundance of plants and animals I’ve managed to photograph from the two acres around my cabin overlooking Point Reyes Station.

Fortunately, the small town (population 820) remains a bit of the Old West despite being only 40 miles north of San Francisco. How much longer the town’s historic charm will last has, however, been uncertain ever since the opening of the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1965. Often now on weekends, the town is overrun with tourists (almost two million per year) en route to the nearby park. The tread of that many visitors on the flora and fauna of this area is crushing in more ways than can be easily imagined. Here, therefore, are some glimpses at what still survives.

A photography collection in progress:

1. Male Western fence lizards do pushups to intimidate rivals, exposing their blue bellies in the process. When under attack, the tip of their tail twitches to draw the predator’s attention away from the body of the lizard. While the lizard can survive the loss of the tip, the loss takes a toll on the lizard which stores food there. The Western fence lizard is pestered by ticks, but when ticks that carry the Lyme Disease spirochete bite a “blue belly,” the spirochete dies.

— Photos by Dave Mitchell

2. A raccoon showed up at my kitchen door at Halloween and stood up with a paw on the glass to catch my attention. The young raccoon was obviously used to begging from humans, and given the occasion, I rewarded it with a Halloween cracker.

3. Sunset looking southwest from the deck of my cabin. In the middleground, the setting sun casts a glint off a shiny leaf. In the background is Inverness Ridge, much of which is in the Point Reyes National Seashore.

4. I have blacktail deer on my property throughout the year. I photographed this doe through my dining room window. At some times of the year, as many as 14 blacktails can be found around my cabin at one time.

5. Red foxes are far less common than gray foxes in West Marin; however, they are common in the Sierra, Cascade Mountains, and Central Valley, and there have been red foxes on Point Reyes for many decades. Some may be the descendants of foxes that escaped fox hunts in Nicasio during the 1970s.

6. I found this Pacific Ring-necked snake in a rotten log while splitting firewood. The snake eats very small critters — tadpoles, insects, and especially salamanders — and it has just enough venom to immobilize them. However, the snake is not dangerous to humans.

The new owner of The Point Reyes Light has fabricated so much in court papers and public statements that I feel compelled to respond. Related topics included here: Robert Israel Plotkin and Lys Plotkin found to be frequently filing lawsuits. Robert Plotkin and mother defendants in US bankruptcy court in connection with a $77 million Ponzi scheme. Plotkin’s attorney Robert H. Powsner, 77, blames his own “forgetfulness” as he attempts to explain away a “web of lies” in his court filings.

Here are the facts regarding the litigation filed by The Point Reyes Light’s new owner Robert Israel Plotkin and his wife Lys against me, the former owner, against Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, and against other people. Some of what is here was discovered by people not connected to the case. With a variety of people using the web to follow developments, government records containing surprising revelations of “mopery with intent to creep” * have come to light.

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1. The most-significant misconception about problems at The Point Reyes Light is that they center on disputes between new publisher Robert Plotkin and me. They don’t. In the first 12 months after he became publisher, 13 staff and contributors were fired, quit, or in various ways shown the door.

Some staff such as Gayanne Enquist of Inverness, Sandy Duveen of Woodacre, Jim Kravets of Fairfax, and Peter Jamison, formerly of Woodacre, did not have jobs lined up when they left. I, at least, am retired.

2. Prior to Robert Plotkin’s and my falling out last February, I had been working diligently to help the paper during its transition to new ownership — as a consultant to the newsroom, a columnist, and a photographer. I have a five-year employment contact with The Light, which cannot be unilaterally terminated, but it pays only $175 per week to be available as a consultant. Nonetheless, I volunteered additional help as needed. Following the New Year’s Eve storm, I spent three days slogging through mud and wading through water to photograph the damage. However, as numerous people who have dealt with the new owner have discovered, he is frequently insulting and abrasive, and when he insulted me, we got into a shouting match in front of The Light.

Plotkin initially told bystanders and a sheriff’s deputy he was a victim of “attempted murder” — that I had tried to strangle him. However, hairdresser Barbara Keady, a witness who spoke with him immediately afterward, and sheriff’s deputy Ted Keehn noted there were no marks on him. “Plotkin had no visible injuries,” deputy Keehn wrote in his incident report. Plotkin then added to his story that I had tried to run him down with my car after he and I started yelling at each other.

But when deputy Keehn interviewed witnesses, that story didn’t hold up either. Realtor Robert Cardwell told the sheriff’s deputy that he saw Plotkin and me arguing in front of Greenbridge Gas & Auto. When Plotkin got out of my car, I made an abrupt U-turn on Mesa Road and stopped in front of The Light with a wheel on the sidewalk, which is flush with the pavement (i.e. there is no curb). “Mitchell got out of the red Acura and ran toward Plotkin,” deputy Keehn quotes the Realtor as saying. The deputy quoted hairdresser Barbara Keady as saying “she saw Mitchell park his vehicle in front of The Point Reyes Light on the sidewalk. Mitchell got out of his vehicle and had a heated verbal argument with Plotkin.” Sandy Duveen, who then sold advertising for The Light, told the deputy that after the Acura stopped abruptly in front of The Light, “she saw Mitchell walk towards Plotkin,” the officer reported.

So there was no attempt to strangle Plotkin or hit him with my car. As for my parking with one wheel on the sidewalk, anyone familiar Point Reyes Station’s old Creamery Building, where The Light is located, has often seen cars with at least one wheel on the sidewalk. Indeed, because there is no curb, vehicles parked halfway on the sidewalk are not uncommon.

3. Represented by Point Reyes Station attorney Robert Powsner, Plotkin then asked for a restraining order and later an injunction that prohibits me from being around him, his family, and his newspaper. Like other staff and contributors who have left, I had by then concluded Plotkin was immature and abrasive, as well as sometimes dishonest, so I had no problem agreeing to stay away from him.

When asking Marin Superior Court to issue a retraining order against me (because we had shouted at each other), Plotkin claimed he needed special protection because of my supposedly immense size. With his irrepressible flair for the dramatic, Plotkin told the court I am 6-foot, 6-inches tall and weigh 225 pounds. Now Plotkin, of course, was writing from the perspective of a short and pudgy (The Marin Independent Journal called him “pear-shaped”) 36 year old. Nonetheless, this 63-year-old retired editor is definitely not larger than pro football’s Terrell Owens, the big wide receiver. In reality, I am 45 pounds lighter and three inches shorter than what Plotlin cavalierly wrote in his sworn statement.

In the last five years, the former lawyer has filed lawsuits against six tenants, one against The Bodega Bay Navigator website and its owner Joel Hack, and two against me. He is also a defendant in US bankruptcy court. Although for a while he was a deputy district attorney in Monterey County, Plotkin is no longer licensed to practice law in California.

Joining her husband Robert, Lys Plotkin in August filed her own litigation against me, accusing yours truly of causing her “reckless and intentional infliction of fear and anguish and emotional distress.” What was the basis for this bizarre accusation? I’d had that shouting match with her husband six months earlier. Although she was not present for the squabble, Lys Plotkin in her court filing alleges that by shouting back and forth with her husband, I “realized” I would “cause [her] to suffer extreme mental and emotional fear, apprehension, anguish, and distress for the safety of her husband, of herself, of her unborn child, and of her son.” Wow! And despite Ms. Plotkin’s not being around at the time, she alleges I was “certain” I was doing this to her when her husband and I started yelling at each other. Like her husband, it would seem, Ms. Plotkin is willing to offer up absurd fabrications when it suits her purpose. Nor is she any stranger to litigation. Besides signing on as a second plaintiff in her husband’s lawsuit against me, Lys Plotkin has been a second plaintiff in three unlawful detainer lawsuits filed in San Diego County during the past five years to evict tenants.

4. Long before Plotkin and I had our squabble, he had a falling out with The Light’s long-time cartoonist, Kathryn LeMieux of Tomales, who quit contributing. The Bodega Bay Navigator in Sonoma County had just converted from a weekly newspaper to a website, and owner Joel Hack invited LeMieux to post her cartoons on The Navigator site. After I agreed to Plotkin’s injunction, which forbids my even sending him email, Hack invited me to also start posting on his website, which I did. In an Aug. 14 lawsuit filed by Plotkin against Hack and me, he claims I “induced” LeMieux “to become the cartoonist for The Navigator.” (My supposedly recruiting LeMieux, Plotkin suggested, amounted to my unfairly helping a competitor.) But like other things Plotkin has said in his lawsuits, in The Light and to other reporters, this was a total fabrication. LeMieux had agreed to draw for the website before I was involved with it.

5. Attorney Robert Powsner on Plotkin’s behalf then got Judge Jack Sutro to issue a bizarre injunction against my posting on the Bodega Bay website. Plotkin and Powsner had told Judge Sutro that by letting me post writing and photos on The Navigator’s site, Hack was “damaging or destroying” The Light. The judge agreed, and in chambers he told lawyers for both sides that protecting Plotkin’s $500,000 investment in The Light outweighed constitutional prohibitions against censoring free expression.

In making his ruling, Judge Sutro came up with a seemingly illogical interpretation of the sales agreement signed by Plotkin and me when he bought The Light’s stock in November 2005. When I sold the stock to Plotkin, I agreed not to write for another Marin County newspaper. In deciding I was violating that agreement by posting on The Navigator website, Judge Sutro failed to acknowledge there is a difference between a website and a newspaper. Ironically, a Sixth Appellate District court ruling as recently as May in a case involving Apple Computers noted, “The term ‘newspaper’ presents little difficulty; it has always meant, and continues to mean, a regularly appearing publication printed on large format, inexpensive paper.”

In addition to making no distinction between a website and a newspaper, Judge Sutro even more bizarrely failed to distinguish between a business being based in Marin County and a business being based in Sonoma County, where The Bodega Bay Navigator has always been located. The judge apparently accepted Plotkin’s boggling claim that the place of publication depends on what is written about in newspapers and websites, as well as in which communities they can be read.

Perhaps contributing to Judge Sutro’s confusion, Powsner and Plotkin untruthfully told Judge Sutro last August that The Navigator website “has no publishing or production facilities or premises in Sonoma County other than defendant Hack’s computer.” Exposing this fabrication, The Marin Independent Journal subsequently published a photograph of Hack working in The Navigator’s cluttered “shack,” a building located behind Hack’s Bodega Bay home.

Because Plotkin — in securing an injunction against The Bodega Bay Navigator and me — claimed that competition from The Navigator’s site is “damaging or destroying” The Light, Navigator owner Joel Hack and I as co-defendants are now assembling evidence such as this to demonstrate it is Plotkin himself who is “damaging or destroying” The Light. The injunction is now being appealed, and more litigation is expected. Under Plotkin’s ownership, many readers have complained about Light reporting that is inaccurate, sensationalistic, or inappropriate for a community newspaper. Subscriptions have been dropping, as Plotkin admitted in his Nov. 9 issue. This sign was spotted on the Stinson Beach Village Association bulletin board opposite the front door to the town post office. As co-defendants having to ward off Plotkin, Hack and I would welcome submissions of any legally significant evidence showing that whatever wounds The Light has suffered have been self-inflicted rather than caused by competition from The Navigator website: http://www.bodegabaynavigator.info/interiorpages/WMarinNews/WMarinNews.htm.

6. I am getting excellent legal representation from attorney Ladd Bedford and Arman Javid of the San Francisco law firm McQuaid, Bedford, and VanZandt, and we will appeal Judge Sutro’s injunction, now that he has finally signed it. In addition, retired attorney Judy Teichman of Inverness Park is working as a volunteer on my behalf.

7. In the meantime, some fascinating West Marin stories are being left uncovered. How in the world, for example, did “defendant Robert Israel Plotkin” end up in federal bankruptcy court this fall in connection with a $77 million Ponzi scheme? The case was investigated by the FBI and prosecuted by the US Attorney’s Office.

The ringleaders, Moshe Leichner and Zvi Leichner, are now serving time in prison, a US bankruptcy trustee is trying — so far without success — to get at money the Leichners squirreled away in one Swiss and two Israeli bank accounts, and the Justice Department has warned the ringleaders they may be deported.

A US bankruptcy trustee has reported that last year he “filed over 150 adversary proceedings…. These proceedings seek recovery of funds in excess of $20 million in pre-petition transfers made by [Moshe and Zvi Leichner] to insiders and other parties.”

A federal hearing was held in October, with attorney Powsner representing “defendant Robert Israel Plotkin,” according to court papers. Plotkin’s mother Zaporah Bank of Los Angeles, another defendant, is representing herself.

As explained by CPA Grant Newton, an expert witness hired by the bankruptcy court, the Leichners from 1998 to 2003 “operated a Ponzi scheme: namely, a phony investment arrangement whereby earlier investors are paid fictitious profits from the funds of later investors.”

The Leichners’ Ponzi scheme operated under the name Midland Euro, and the US Justice Department notes, “The Leichners told their investors that Midland Euro would invest their funds in foreign currencies which Midland Euro would then trade on the international currency market for profit. Although the terms of the investments tended to vary slightly among victims, generally, the Leichners claimed Midland Euro would generate guaranteed monthly profits of between 2% and 4%.”

So the question we are left with is: how much did Robert Plotkin know and when did he know it? It may merely be that in contriving to make an unbelievably high “guaranteed” profit in the high-risk, foreign-currency-exchange market, Plotkin got involved with shady characters. However, he can hardly claim to be financially naïve since he is enough of an investor to own or have recently owned — besides The Light —an $840,000 seaside home in Bolinas, another house in Taos, New Mexico, real estate in New York City, and rental homes in San Diego County. I have no idea how much of this he presently owns or whether he will even stick around West Marin too much longer. Although he has by now owned a home in Bolinas for two years, the BMW he drives to work still carries New Mexico license plates.

As for the real estate in San Diego, Robert Plotkin (often with his wife Lys) went into that county’s superior court six times in five years, seeking to have tenants evicted. If you add to those six lawsuits the two Plotkin filed against me this year and the one he filed against Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, you get a sense of just how litigious this former lawyer is.

8. Another curious story not receiving coverage is the role of Point Reyes Station lawyer Robert H. Powsner, who is representing Plotkin against Bodega Bay Navigator owner Joel Hack, the federal bankruptcy trustee, and me.

As it happens, Powsner’s law firm is one of three I had been using, depending on the nature of the issues. My current attorney, Ladd Bedford, who has been a friend since our days together at Stanford, gave my former wife Cathy and me free day-to-day advice during The Light’s Synanon investigation. The Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe law firm — likewise at no charge — successfully fought off six lawsuits totaling $1.032 billion, which lawyers for the Synanon cult filed against the two of us. One case went all the way to the California Supreme Court, where Heller Ehrman won a major legal precedent that greatly increased California reporters’ right to keep confidential sources confidential in civil cases.

In addition, I had hired attorney Powsner to represent me in a variety of matters, including one out-of-court dispute involving my firing of an intern when he failed to cover a major storm, as assigned. After firing him, I had to stop the intern from running off with the office keys. What I didn’t know until a witness’ sworn statement this year was that the intern had been ripped on cocaine at the time.

Attorney Powsner’s photo
and his description
of his practice can be found at:
lawyers.nolo.com/attorney.cfm?attorneyID=422&LocationID=19&specialtyID

When I hired Bedford and not Powsner to draft the sales agreement for The Light, Powsner went ballistic — perhaps because he owed The Light about $4,000 at the time and would have liked to work off the debt. In any case, when I approached him for help in dealing with Plotkin, Pownser announced he was switching clients and intended to represent Plotkin against me.

Under the California State Bar’s Code of Ethics, Powsner should have refused to fight a former client in court since he has confidential information about that client. The reason for the rule became immediately obvious; Powsner (before finding out that cocaine was the likely cause of the intern’s behavior) repeatedly tried to dig up more information about that dispute to use against me on Plotkin’s behalf.

My attorneys have asked a court commissioner to disqualify attorney Powsner because he had previously represented me. In particular, he had attempted to use information from the intern dispute, against me on behalf of a new client. Powsner, who is 77, responded with a surprising rationalization for his investigating on behalf of Plotkin an out-of-court dispute that he negotiated as my lawyer: it was simply a matter of his “forgetfulness.” That would be an amazing admission for any lawyer to make — and especially one who is still practicing in his seventy-eighth year and would like to continue.

Powsner told the court commissioner that until he read my present lawyers’ motion to disqualify him, “I hadn’t remembered anything about the… [intern] matter (which was in 1998) nor that it existed nor any information about it.”

Powsner apparently also forgot that in the months before the motion to disqualify him was filed, he had talked over the matter with my lawyer and one of my lawyer’s partners, Arman Javid, as well as The Light’s former business manager Don Schinske, The Light’s former typesetter Cat Cowles, The Light’s present front-office manager Missy Patterson, and (as he himself would later acknowledge) his own secretary Susan Cofano and his new client Robert Plotkin.

As my attorneys then pointed out to court commissioner Roy Chernus, “Robert Powsner is caught in a web of lies…. Mr. Powsner’s new declaration not only contradicts his own assertions and the declarations of three witnesses, but it contradicts his own assertions several times within the same document. All the previous untruths prevent Mr. Powsner from keeping his story straight.”

Attorney Powsner has now hired his own attorney, Peter Flaxman of Mill Valley, to help untangle him from his “web of lies.” In the meantime, a complaint has been sent to the State Bar regarding forgetful Bob’s unethical conduct.

So you managed to find your way down here. Come on in. Welcome to my digs.

Keeping a log on the web (i.e. a blog) is a bit like keeping a log on a ship. It includes both a journal of one’s trip through life and reports on significant events along the way.

How a web log came to be called a blog, by the way, reflects the whimsy that has long characterized those who gambol on the World Wide Web of the Internet. A blogger named Jorn Barger coined the term in a Dec. 17, 1997, entry on his site, jokingly turning “web log” into “we blog.” And who is Jorn Barger? Wikipedia reports he is editor of “Robot Wisdom,” has taught at Northwestern, once lived at The Farm (Stephen Gaskin’s commune in Tennessee), has written articles criticized as anti-Semitic, and as far back as 1994 offered us bloggers the cautionary observation: “The more interesting your life becomes, the less you post… and vice versa.”

If Barger is right, however, blogging is unique among all the forms of storytelling. When most of us encounter something interesting, we can’t wait to tell others about it.

And that’s what this blog will mostly consist of: stories, comments, and photography that reflect my life and interests as a resident of Point Reyes Station. The purpose of this site is not to be an alternative to The Point Reyes Light, which I formerly owned, although it will periodically comment on the newspaper since I am contending with a series of lawsuits its new owner has filed against me. The new owner Robert Israel Plotkin has repeatedly made public statements about me that are demonstrably false or misleading, and this blog will, among other things, allow me to set the record straight.

But basically I’m more interested in events such as occurred Tuesday morning, Nov. 21, in Chileno Valley. As it happened, I was called upon to be a liaison between six orphaned fawns and two ranchers.

In a facility at her home, Susan Sasso of Olema had raised and rehabilitated the five small bucks and one doe on behalf of WildCare, the San Rafael nonprofit. She does it yearly, and it can be grueling work, feedings every four hours seven days a week when the fawns are newborn — sometimes every two hours when they’re sick. But by last week, the fawns at last were old enough to be released back into nature, and Susan asked me to contact two friends in Chileno Valley. The friends generously agreed to allow the deer to be released on their ranch. They themselves don’t hunt, and their ranch is large enough that the deer can wander over hill and dale without leaving the property. (The ranchers, by the way, have asked me to withhold their names lest I draw hunters to their land.)

The trick was getting the fawns from Olema to Chileno Valley. Early that Tuesday, Susan and another WildCare volunteer, Cindy Dicke also of Olema, gave the fawns injections to sedate them. Mike Vincilione of Point Reyes Station arrived in a pickup truck with camper shell, and the sleeping deer were loaded onto mats and towels in the truckbed. The drive to Chileno Valley took about 40 minutes, with Cindy riding among the deer.

The release itself went amazingly smoothly. Mike drove across a ranch bridge to a pasture bordered by a creek, and there each fawn was lifted gently out of the truck and laid on the grass.

Cindy then gave them all wake-up shots, and the fawns quickly revived. Some were wobbly enough when they first tried to stand that they had to be steadied lest they fall and injure themselves, but this lasted only for a minute or two.

Within roughly 10 minutes, five of the fawns were grazing while one of the bucks kept trying to mount another. It’s not about sex; it’s about domination, Susan explained. (“Just like they say about prison,” remarked computer guru Keith Matthews of Point Reyes Station when I recounted the incident.)

The fawns have now been on the ranch a week and appear to feel at home — to the point where the domineering buck tried to mount one of the ranchers. “When that happens,” Susan told her, “just slap him.” The other fawns are more leery of humans, and after a few more slaps, the lecherous buck probably will be too.

Most of the fawns brought to Susan are too weak to survive, and she loses far more than she saves. Within a year, cars and hunters may kill many of the deer she raises. Nor does West Marin have any shortage of blacktail deer. So why does Susan spend so much time and effort saving the few she can? Susan puts in the long hours simply because she is a humane person. Most of us feel sorry for sick and injured wildlife when we encounter it although we typically don’t see a way to help. Susan has found a way. And lest anyone imagine Susan has some New Age sense of humanity toward sufferers that aren’t human, I should note the “Humane” Society was founded in 1954 and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 130 years earlier