When Sarah Palin said in a Nov. 24 radio interview, “Obviously, we gotta stand by our North Korean allies,” it was impossible to say who was more surprised: the US government, Korean War vets, South Korea, or…. North Korea?”

If General MacArthur were still alive, he’d be rolling over in his grave, so to speak.

This week, however, another politician surprised the world even more. At a fundraiser in St. Petersburg for children with eye diseases and cancer, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin sang in English Fats Domino’s signature ditty Blueberry Hill.

If you haven’t watched Putin’s performance, I urge you to do so. It’s pure opera buffa. Although he pronounced it “Blueberry Heeel,” Putin managed to stay on key and delighted his audience, which included a host of Hollywood celebrities.

Meanwhile, my efforts to negotiate peace among this hill’s foxes and raccoons have run into a bit of a snag. Although there have been no outbreaks of hostility, each has taken to stealing the other’s food.

This initially caused me to leave bread for the foxes just inside my kitchen door, where the raccoons couldn’t see it, but the stratagem worked only briefly.

It didn’t take the raccoons long to figure out what was going on, and they began grabbing the bread before the foxes could get to it.

This left the foxes sadly contemplating the disappearance of their dinner.

Then I remembered what the late Jerry Friedman once demonstrated. Friedman, a Marin County planning commissioner, was also co-founder of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin.

Back when I edited The Point Reyes Light, Friedman showed up one day with a photo, which we published, of his hand-feeding a fox that lived near him. If the EAC co-founder could hand food to a fox, I figured, I could too, thereby making sure the food was distributed evenly.

So far, Friedman’s system is working, and I’m feeding three foxes a night, along with three or four raccoons. The foxes and raccoons remain a bit wary of each other, and they all consider me as much a danger as a benefactor.

As for Putin, the US remains wary of him, but whether he constitutes a danger to this country is unclear. Also unclear is whether Palin is dumb like a fox or just plain dumb.

Friday’s Path of Lights in Point Reyes Station gave a festive start to the yuletide. Hundreds of West Marin residents flocked downtown after dark for events in several locations.

The annual lighting of the town Christmas tree, which is between Wells Fargo Bank and the Palace Market, drew a crowd that sang Christmas carols and held up candles.

West Marin Senior Services organized the tree lighting. The group’s chairman, Chuck Gompertz of Nicasio, welcomed the crowd, who sang along with Harmony Grisman and other West Marin musicians.

Part of the crowd (from left): Jasmine, Maria, Carina, with eight-month-old Giovanni.

Across the street, Point Reyes Books celebrated the release of The West Marin Review, Volume 3, a fascinating compendium of art, stories, essays, and poetry. The contributors range from Nicasio School 8th grader Kevin Alvarado, whose painting warns of violence against cattle rustlers, to native Alaskan Jan Harper Haines, who writes about belief in the supernatural. In Hootlani!, Jan describes her Athabascan village’s fear of referring to dead people by name.

Point Reyes Books and the Tomales Bay Library Association co-published The Review. Here Steve Costa (center), who owns the bookstore with his wife Kate, ladles out hot, spiced cider while contributor Amanda Tomlin (left) signs a copy.

Having contributed Tall Tales of Intelligent Animals to The Review, I was asked to take part in the book signing. I did, but many of those on hand were more interested in my new electronic cigarette. E-cigarettes, which provide users with a minuscule hit of nicotine, have no tobacco and emit only water vapor. Because there’s no smoke, I was allowed to enjoy mine inside the bookstore.

One oddity of the e-cigarette is that the recharger for its battery, which powers the vaporization, does not plug into a wall socket but into the USB port of a computer.

Meanwhile down the street, the gallery at Toby’s Feed Barn opened a show of art by Celine Underwood, carvings by Ido Yoshimoto, and prints by his father Rick Yoshimoto, as well as photographer Art Rogers’ portraits of the artists.

Santa Claus showed up among Toby’s hay bales to hear children’s Christmas wishes.

Also on hand at Toby’s was West Marin Citizen publisher Joel Hack. The once disheveled journalist is looking dapper these days now that West Marin’s newspaper “war” seems to be coming to an end.

Joel has hired as a part-time reporter my friend Lynn Axelrod, who once worked for me at The Light. Earlier in the day when Lynn tried to use a coverup in order to take a nap, Eli, the dog of Citizen ad manager Linda Peterson, quickly tracked her down and took her into custody.

Lynn, by the way, took all the above photos except this one.

Point Reyes Station’s annual Path of Lights, which includes sidewalks decorated with luminaria and the lighting of the town Christmas tree (between Wells Fargo Bank and the Palace Market) will be held this Friday evening, Dec. 3.

The festivities will include contributors to the new issue of The West Marin Review (Volume 3) signing copies at Point Reyes Books from 5 to 7:30 p.m. More about that in a moment, but first a word from our sponsors.

A raccoon friend of mine for the past several seasons picks a slice of bread off my kitchen floor Monday.

Also on Monday, a blacktailed buck grazes just below my deck as a doe and a couple of fawns graze nearby.

Four roof rats show up on my deck Sunday to share in the birdseed I put out for my feathered friends.

One of the Point Reyes Arabians looks over my fence from beneath a persimmon tree Monday. In the upper left is a stockpond belonging to the Giacomini family.

Grey fox on my deck last week shows no reaction when I use a flash to photograph him through an open door.

Wild turkeys eating with a blacktail fawn. Perhaps “birds of a feather flock together,” but they also flock with other creatures, as seen Sunday out my kitchen window.

And now back to the news. As the West Marin Review website notes, “In [the new] volume are Jonathan Rowe’s provocative, urgent essay about the future of irreplaceable places and Elia Haworth’s sweeping history of the farmers who settled in the area.

“The beauty of West Marin is evoked in vivid, colored woodblock prints by Tom Killion, in line drawings, watercolor, and photographs, in precise rendition and in abstract design.

“Some of the poetry is site specific,” but The Review is not exclusive to West Marin. It seems that ‘place’, wherever it is, is always a source of creative inspiration. Many of the essays and poems refer back to earlier homes, earlier times and lives.

“Fiction pieces include The Miles Pilot by Cynthia Cady, funny and painful and wrenching at the same time, and The Cat Lover by Jody Farrell, where reality and fantasticality link arms.”

The list of contributors to The West Marin Review is generally impressive, and many of them will be on hand to sign copies at Point Reyes Books. Although not particularly impressive myself, I’ll be among those with pen in hand should anyone want my autograph.

This fall four foxes began showing up on my deck just after dark each evening, as has been previously reported. Although skittish, they take turns grabbing slices of bread from my hand. They eat peanuts off the deck even when the door is open and we are only three or four feet apart.

However, this is also what the local raccoons do, which has led to several encounters. On more than one occasion, a raccoon has given a fox the evil eye, causing the reynard to scamper off.

A year ago, I dealt with the same problem; only that time the adversaries were a possum and raccoon. It took a bit of planning, but their historic suspicions notwithstanding, I was able to work out a ceasefire.

To bring both sides to the negotiating table, I placed a couple of piles of peanuts on it. Over several nights, I brought the peanuts closer and closer together until possum and raccoon were finally eating nose to nose in peace.

A week ago I began trying the same strategy in fox-raccoon negotiations, starting with peanuts spread fairly far apart.

As the peanuts moved closer together over several nights, so did both animals. Mutual enmity may seem like part of their God-given nature, but as Bertolt Brecht so aptly observed, “Grub first, then ethics.”

A Day of the Dead altar in the Dance Palace with the first of many photos in remembrance of ancestors and friends who have passed away.

Story and photos by Lynn Axelrod

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heroically cheerful despite bizarrely bad luck, Doreen Miao and her dog Tully back at home Sunday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ad in The Point Reyes Light around 1980.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you followed news of the three-month-long Gulf Oil Spill earlier this year, you know how distressing it was to see the victims. Well, it was almost as sticky at my cabin for 12 months before Terry Gray of Inverness Park and I finally capped another gusher one week ago.

For the past year, visitors to my cabin had arrived badly in need of a cleanup, their hands having become sticky from grasping the railing at the top of my front steps. Even the raccoons that show up each night at my kitchen door sometimes appeared to have sticky paws.

A tub of tree sealer sits where sap was dripping onto the railing of my steps.

A year ago, tree trimmers had cut off a pine limb which overhung my roof, and that had caused sap to drip from the wound onto the deck, railing, and steps below. After trying unsuccessfully to cap the leak by myself, I asked Terry for help.

Having concluded a girdle of cloth wouldn’t work because the sap would merely flow over it, I had already tried creating a collar using the inner tube from a wheelbarrow tire. Unfortunately, the bark of Monterey pines is striped with cracks, and sap flowing down those cracks went right past my rubber collar.

A new approach was needed. Before Terry showed up, I bought a caulking knife and a tub of tree-wound sealing compound at Building Supply Center.

It was Terry’s job to climb up on my roof two stories off the ground and slather the black goop all over the stub of the cut-off limb.

But within hours of his doing this, the wound was again dripping sap on my deck and railing.

So I asked Terry to come back and try again, for I had another idea.

This time he used a pocket knife to cut a shallow groove in the dry outer bark in order to divert the flow of sap away from the deck and railing.

The idea sort of worked but not totally.

Some sap continued to land where visitors would step on it and get it on their hands.

So Terry came back for a third try.

By now we were beginning to feel like BP struggling against the forces of nature.

Terry decided to lengthen the groove and build up its outer edge with sealer, which hardens within a few hours. At first, this approach seemed to work, but by morning the railing was again sticky with sap.

On Terry’s fourth try, he raised the edge of the groove even more but decided what was really needed was a wooden shelf to catch whatever sap overflowed the groove.

When Terry came back for a fifth time, he cut a shelf with one side shaped to fit around part of the trunk.

The shelf, which was attached to the trunk with wood screws, looked like it might be the perfect answer. But it wasn’t. The dripping became worse than ever because of sap oozing from the screw holes.

After cursing his shelf idea, Terry on his six try removed it, smeared tree sealer over the screw holes, and further built up the edge of the diversion groove.

He also smeared sealer on another wound where a very small limb had been cut off the tree.

It too, we now realized, was responsible for an occasional drip.

Terry headed for home fearing that the abandoned shelf’s screw holes would plague us for some time to come and assuring me he’d be back in a day or so to work on the damage.

But there wasn’t any. “You stopped the dripping ,” I told Terry when I got him on the phone. “Congratulations!”

Terry was naturally pleased but remained a bit dubious given all we’d been through. However, a week has now gone by without a drop of sap falling on the deck, railing, or steps below.

Today Terry climbed back up on the roof to check the stub of the sawed-off limb and apply more tree sealer. The leak has indeed been capped, he reported when he climbed back down.

Our persistence had been rewarded, and Terry hadn’t fallen off the roof. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I chortled in my joy.

Roughly 200 West Marin residents showed up Sunday evening in Toby’s Feed Barn to honor Duane Irving, who died of a heart attack July 19 at the age of 75.

A succession of residents related their memories of Duane for the crowd, and several remarked on his fondness for ice cream.

Duane’s parents had owned Halleck Creek Ranch in Nicasio where he spent much of his youth. A “Last Roundup” pamphlet, which was given out at the event, noted Duane “attended the little red school house in Nicasio [and was] a member of the last graduating class.”

Former Marin County Supervisor Gary Giacomini (left) lauded Duane’s vision in dedicating land on his ranch to the Halleck Creek Riding Club for people with disabilities. (Photo by Linda Petersen, West Marin Citizen)

At San Rafael High, Duane was an excellent football and especially baseball player, and after graduation joined the Marine Corps.

Following four years in the Marines, Duane broke horses for Bud Farley, whose ranch was later flooded by Nicasio Reservoir, and was game manager and cattle boss for Doc Ottenger, whose land would become part of the Point Reyes National Seashore.

At the request of the late Olema Valley rancher Boyd Stewart, Duane helped establish the Morgan Horse Farm within the National Seashore and subsequently worked in the park’s Roads and Trails Department.

Emcee Cindy Goldfield introduces her mother Joyce, Duane’s companion for many years, who paid an emotional tribute to Duane.

Many West Marin residents knew Duane best for his involvement in Halleck Creek Riding Club. For more than 30 years, he, Joyce Goldfield, and many volunteers helped people with disabilities gain self-confidence and enjoy rugged terrain on horseback.

People who had served as volunteers to lead the riders and people who had been riders themselves both told of their appreciation of Duane.

Xerxes Whitney (left), who was born with cerebral palsy, said he lived on the same hill as Joyce when she started the Riding Club, and “I was one of her first recruits.” (Photo by Linda Petersen, West Marin Citizen)

Despite some difficulties with speech and the use of his legs, Xerxes has developed into a first-rate athlete and now teaches tennis, as well as writes poetry.

He and Duane had played basketball against each other and held nothing back, including “sharp elbows,” Xerxes said. “Duane didn’t care if you could talk or walk,” Xerxes added. He cared about the person.

Perhaps the most-poignant tribute to Duane was offered by a young  woman with Down’s Syndrome. With unexpected eloquence, she described how much she valued Duane’s encouragement and support. Then speaking directly to Joyce, she said that Duane still sees her and loves her. By this point, I like many others in the Feed Barn had tears in my eyes.