Point Reyes Station


100_26282West Marin Citizen ad manager Linda Petersen, who has been hospitalized ever since a horrific car wreck June 13, this past week made significant progress in her recovery.

On Friday, a doctor at the Kaiser Medical Center in Oakland removed the steel-and-carbon halo (right) that had immobilized her head and neck for seven weeks.

Linda suffered 10 broken ribs, two broken vertebrae, two broken ankles, a broken leg, a broken kneecap, a broken arm, and a punctured lung when she fell asleep at the wheel June 13 and hit a utility pole in Inverness.

For the past five weeks, Linda has been in the Rafael Convalescent Hospital in San Rafael. Not only were her head and neck in the medical halo, which was screwed into her skull, she had casts on both legs and her left arm. She could look only straight ahead and could use only her right hand.

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On Sunday, Linda flashed a victory sign as she celebrated losing her halo. She now wears a short-term collar, which is not particularly confining and is, in fact, welcome since her neck muscles had not been used for seven weeks.

The halo was heavy and had been dreadfully uncomfortable as well as confining. Linda was so happy at having it gone that she called me on her cell phone from the ambulance bringing her back from Oakland to tell me the good news. I immediately emailed her the link to a YouTube music video of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, which, as she later confirmed, reflected how she felt.

Without the medical halo, Linda can now raise herself up in bed and sit comfortably in a wheelchair for several hours at a time. Equally important to her, she can now wash her hair.

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Linda (photographed today) at last can move around in bed and expects to soon be able to get into a wheelchair on her own. As these pictures show, Linda made dramatic progress in just a week’s time.

Today Linda was transported back to Oakland where another doctor removed the cast from her right leg and replaced the cast on her left arm with a short brace.

She now looks forward to leaving the Rafael within two weeks and returning to West Marin. This is good. Linda and her family say that after her first two weeks in the convalescent hospital, which contracts with Kaiser, her stay has sometimes been unnecessarily unpleasant.

Indeed, Linda’s daughter Saskia van der Wal, a physician in Oakland, and her son David van der Wal, a social worker in San Francisco, have filed complaints about the convalescent hospital’s treatment of their mother.

I’ve received copies of their complaints, which are also addressed to the assistant director of nursing at the Rafael, Kaiser Permante’s continuing care coordinator in Marin County, a California Department of Public Health inspector, and a state ombudsman.

A key complaint is that the convalescent hospital a week ago threatened to evict Linda the next day unless it was immediately paid for a month’s stay in advance, Kaiser having said it would drop its hospitalization coverage until she was ready for more physical therapy.

“Today, July 29,” Saskia wrote the Rafael, “you have given us less than one day’s notice to pay a total of $7,140 for the period of July 24 to Aug. 24, 2009. She had Kaiser coverage until July 23 and has since applied for Medi-Cal.

“You have threatened that she will be removed from the facility tomorrow if we do not pay this amount today. We have not received anything in writing, documenting reasons for eviction or adequate discharge planning. This is illegal.

“I have spoken to the California State Ombudsman, and they have informed me of my mother’s rights. She must be given a 30-day eviction notice first of all, and secondly, you know she has Medi-Cal pending, which means if they do not back-pay your facility, only then will my mother be responsible for the amount owed.”

Linda’s son David in a separate complaint wrote that when first Saskia and later he called the Rafael’s director of admissions to question the convalescent hospital’s threatening to evict their mother, she hung up on each of them. In his complaint, David noted he then called the director of admission’s supervisor, Abe Jacob, assistant director of nursing, but “he simply cut me off and asked, ‘Where is the money?'”

Beyond that, David added, “while my mother has been at the Rafael, there have been numerous cases of neglect.” For example, he wrote, the surgeons who operated on Linda’s punctured lung closed the incision with staples.

The “staples were scheduled to be removed July 7,” David wrote, but medical staff at the Rafael neglected to do so until July 21. [By then, Linda told me at the time, some had become infected.] “My mother had complained of pain for several days under her right breast before any action was taken by medical staff,” he noted. “By the time the staples were removed, skin had grown over several staples.”

In addition, he noted, “my mother complained for several days of pain in her bladder. The only treatment my mom was offered was pain medication. My sister (an MD) suspected a urinary-tract infection, but it was not till almost a week passed that [Linda’s] catheter was removed and antibiotics were administered before the infection worsened.”

It’s no wonder Linda is so eager to go home. In the meantime, an inspector from the state Department of Public Health has been looking into these complaints against the Rafael Convalescent Hospital.

A pair of thieves in their late 20s or early 30s cleaned out the cash drawer of Point Reyes Gifts shortly before 3 p.m. today. The shop is relatively small, however, and owner Barbara McClellan told sheriff’s deputies the loss was not large.

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Shop owner Barbara McClellan told deputy Rick Johnson the couple used a ruse to distract her while the theft occurred.

Deputies said a woman, who was described as having shoulder-length brown hair and wearing a white t-shirt, asked Barbara about some clothing in the back of the shop. While Barbara attended to her, a man who was with the woman stayed in the front of the shop near the cash register, talking on a cell phone.

The man was wearing a baseball cap that may have said San Diego on it, Barbara told deputies. Eventually he ended his phone call and said his children were fighting and that he and the woman had to leave. Not long afterward, Barbara looked in the cash register and discovered all the folding money was gone.

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The theft brought numerous deputies to Point Reyes Station. They fanned out around town but without a description of the getaway car, officers were unable to find the couple.

Deputy Johnson tried dusting for fingerprints but unfortunately found only smudges.

Barbara is the daughter of the late Jack Mason, West Marin’s well-known historian. Her daughter Patty Collins is a former manager of the town’s bank and now works in East Marin.

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, who lives in Point Reyes Station, told Raichlen that “the barbecued oyster was born after a shark-and-stingray fishing tournament in 1972.”

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Anastacio Gonzalez, who in June retired as head of technical maintenance at West Marin School, on Tuesday spooned his “famous 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. Now it’s about to go statewide. Jars of Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce have just gone on sale in Marshall, Point Reyes Station, and Inverness Park. Within the next few weeks, the sauce will be sold at the meat counters of 31 supermarkets stretching from Los Angeles 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 — are immigrants or their children 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 Tuesday. So in January 1969 he emigrated to West Marin and went to work as a milker on Domingo Grossi’s ranch.

bottle_1He 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 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.

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“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.

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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.”

100_2613And 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.

Barbecuing oysters on Tuesday, Anastacio ladled melted butter on top of his sauce.

Now after 37 years of barbecuing oysters with his special sauce, Anastacio is ready to sell it. His stepson Matt Giacomini lives in Oregon where he has been working with a chemist at a bottling company to duplicate the recipe. Jars of Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce are already in the Palace Market, Toby’s Feed Barn, Tomales Bay Oyster Company, the Marshall Store, and Perry’s Inverness Park Store. Drakes Bay Oyster Company will stock it as soon as another shipment arrives from Oregon.

The biggest outlets, however, could prove to be 31 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. These Southern California supermarkets plan to 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, Anastacio’s creation has other uses as well. I found it delicious on hamburgers, and 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, virtually all the oyster barbecuing anywhere is occurring around Tomales Bay, Anastacio said. However, with any luck at all, people throughout California will soon be giving it a try.

One of the joys of living in Point Reyes Station is the variety of wildlife that comes with it. To demonstrate my point here’s an assortment of photos from the past week.

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After living on this hill for more than 30 years, I saw chipmunks on my property for the first time Sunday.

I knew there were chipmunks in the area, for I’d seen them in the Point Reyes National Seashore, and Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evens writes about them in his Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula.

The species of chipmunks around here are Sonoma chipmunks. They can be found from San Francisco Bay to Siskiyou County. On the Endangered Species List, the Sonoma chipmunk is rated a species of “least concern.”

Various authorities suggest the name chipmunk comes from an Odawa or an Ojibwe word meaning red squirrel and may have originally been spelled in English as chitmunk. Others attribute the name to the noise they make, a chipping sound for an alarm with a harsher version for courtship.

The Sonoma chipmunk is a “common resident of open forests, chaparral, brushy clearings, and streamside thickets from sea level to 6,000 feet [in elevation],” the California Department of Fish and Game reports.

“They forage among small branches of bushes and on ground for acorns, fungi, and seeds of manzanita, ceanothus, and gooseberry.” The rodents, in turn, “may be preyed upon by long-tailed weasles, bobcats, badgers, gray foxes, and various hawks and owls.”

Sonoma chipmunks, Fish and Game notes, “breed from February to July [with] one litter per year of three to seven young.”

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A key reason for the variety of wildlife on this hill are two stockponds where all manner of critters go for a drink. Sunday night, coyotes next to this pond entertained my neighbors and me with an extended chorus of yips and howls.

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The ponds also attract Great blue herons (such as this one spotted Monday afternoon), along with egrets and ducks.

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Monday morning I looked up from making breakfast to find this young buck staring in the kitchen window at me.

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Raccoons are nightly visitors on my deck.

Their favorite food appears to be moths on my windows lured there by the light indoors. As happened last Wednesday, a raccoon will occasionally go to the effort of climbing onto my roof to pick moths off a dormer window.

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Wild turkeys (seen here Monday) have become year-round residents on this hill.

The turkeys eat seeds, berries, acorns, and insects, along with small frogs and salamanders. Their hunting and pecking is often memorialized by pockmarked fields.

possum-closeup_1This young possum (seen Sunday) is a frequent visitor to my deck. He’s not fond of the raccoons, but he likes to drink from my birdbath.

Needing to get rid of some rancid peanuts a while back, I decided to leave them on my deck for whatever critter came along. Not realizing the possum was just outside my kitchen door, I opened it a crack and started to lay a handful down, only to have the possum suddenly emerge from the dark, stick its nose in my palm, and start nibbling on the nuts.

The possum made no attempt to bite me, but I quickly pulled my hand back lest I get nipped accidentally. It is rare for possums to carry rabies; their body temperature is too low, 94 to 97 degrees compared with 102.8 for raccoons and an average of 101 for domestic dogs. All the same, I highly recommend against hand feeding these cute little marsupials. You may have less luck than I did.

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Linda Petersen, advertising manager of The West Marin Citizen, working from her bed in The Rafael Assistance for Living, a convalescent hospital on North San Pedro Road in San Rafael.

I’ve been posting periodic updates on Linda Petersen’s condition following her horrific traffic accident in Inverness June 13. Linda suffered 10 broken ribs, a broken arm, a broken leg, a broken knee cap, two broken vertebrae, two broken ankles, and a punctured lung when she fell asleep at the wheel and hit a utility poll along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

Since then, Linda has spent time in Marin General Hospital, Kaiser Medical Center in Oakland, and now The Rafael. She wears casts on both legs and on her left arm. Her head and neck are immobilized by a medical “halo” made of steel.

The halo won’t come off for at least four or five more weeks, and until then she is basically stuck. She spends a few minutes in a wheelchair each day, “but it’s not very comfortable,” she acknowledged Monday. “It puts a strain on my neck. This thing was probably invented during the Second World War and hasn’t been been updated since. It weighs a ton.”

Weighed down by the head gear, which is screwed into her skull, and able to move only her right arm, Linda has chosen to fight the tedium of spending a couple of months on her back by getting back to work.

Using her cell phone, she’s already working with about a dozen advertisers, she said, “and as soon as I’m online, there’ll be a lot more.” (Three days later following numerous calls to an ISP her laptop was finally connected to the Internet.)

How do merchants react when she calls them from her hospital bed? “They’re kind of surprised,” she replied. “‘Oh, Linda, how are you doing?’ they ask. ‘We’ve been worried about you. You sound so good.” Does their concern translate into ad sales? “It might give me a bit of an advantage,” she admitted with a laugh.

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Linda has been receiving a steady stream of cards, emails, and phone calls from well wishers. People have brought her flowers, fruit, yogurt, ice cream, books, balm, and magazines. “I’m so touched by that,” she said. “The outpouring of encouragement has really helped me keep a good attitude.”

Linda’s much-beloved dog-about-town Sebastian died in the crash. Here the two of them paused while on a walk at White House Pool.

Speeding Linda’s recovery, her doctors say, is her being in good physical shape at 61 years old. Before her accident, Linda went to the West Marin Fitness gym almost daily. Until two months before the accident, she went horseback riding every week or two, and therein lies a story.

Linda lived in Puerto Rico for more than 20 years, and in March 2000, she was riding her own horse, a Paseo, when it was attacked by a much larger stallion. With the other horse trying to “throw itself” onto the back of Linda’s horse, she leapt off, only to have her horse fall and roll over her lower back.

Her injuries on that occasion consisted of a dozen broken bones, including a crushed pelvis, and numerous internal contusions. Despite major surgery and extensive hospitalization after the mishap, her hip was deteriorating by the time she moved to the Bay Area about five years ago, necessitating a hip replacement in 2006.

After recovering from that hospitalization, Linda resumed riding, accompanying friends on trails throughout Marin and Sonoma counties. Increasingly on her mind, however, was her recent hip surgery and the fact that our bones become more brittle and take longer to mend as we grow older. So two months before her automobile accident, “I decided I better not do anymore riding,” she noted, laughing at the irony.

And then the conversation turned to business. Shari-Faye Dell of The Citizen happened to also be visiting when I showed up at The Rafael, and Linda told her that ads for Osteria Stellina restaurant and Zuma gift store were ready for this week’s issue. “Check with Chris [Giacomini, the owner] at Toby’s,” she told Shari. “If he isn’t there, you can also talk with Oscar [Gamez, the feed barn’s manager].”

Later in the hallway I commented to Shari how remarkably Linda was handling a situation that would devastate many of us. “She’s one of those people whose glass is half full,” Shari responded with admiration.

First an update on the condition of Linda Petersen since so many people have asked about her. As was reported here, she fell asleep at the wheel in Inverness a week ago and drove into a utility pole.

Linda, who is 61 and lives in Inverness, suffered multiple broken bones and a punctured lung. Her 16-year-old Havanese dog Sebastian, well known in Point Reyes Station for his sweet disposition, died in the crash.

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Sebastian and a raccoon appear to be seated across the table from each other à la C.M. Coolidge’s series of paintings a century ago, Dogs Playing Poker. In fact, there was a window pane between these two.

I visited Linda today at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Oakland where she has been transferred from Marin General Hospital.

Although she faces more surgery, Linda was in remarkably good spirits. She is, of course, the advertising manager for The West Marin Citizen, and while we were talking, she received a call on her cell phone from Citizen publisher Joel Hack. Suddenly Linda was back on the job from her hospital bed. “Check with Toby’s,” she told Joel. “Susan Hayes’ ad won’t be ready till Wednesday….”

Linda’s head and neck are immobilized by a medical “halo,” and she can raise only one arm. Nonetheless, she cracked jokes with Joel and later remarked that by staying involved in her work, she’s reducing the boredom of being stuck in a hospital. Now there’s a brave response to an awful predicament.

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Now for an update on the wildlife around my cabin. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve seen as great a variety of critters on my deck at night as I normally see in a year. Here’s a gray fox that stopped by last week.

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A raccoon finds its wandering obstructed by a possum on my deck.

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When the possum didn’t leave, the raccoon took a run around it, giving the possum a wide berth. The possum hissed and bared its teeth but did nothing else. For several weeks, I’ve periodically seen this possum and raccoon warning off each other as they pass by on my deck. Sometimes, however, they ignore each other entirely.

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A blacktail doe on this hill gave birth to a couple fawns roughly two months ago. Today they followed their mother around my pasture while a year-old buck grazed nearby.

100_24081The fawns appear healthy and are now old enough to enjoy bounding across my fields. I see them as a good omen for this summer.

Sunday’s Western Weekend Parade packed the main street of Point Reyes Station, making it look like half the residents around Tomales Bay were either watching the parade or in it.

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A Coast Guard color guard led the parade, followed by Marin County and Inverness fire engines. Several parade entries, including an inflatable boat from the Coast Guard base in Bodega Bay, had maritime themes.

100_2325The good ship Mary Kay’s Revenge from Marshall. The Point Reyes Light on Thursday reported, “The boat is constructed largely of recycled sail cloth, plywood and pallets” and had been sitting “on Peggy Bannan’s porch in Reynold’s Cove” while awaiting the parade.

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Parade Marshal Maidee Moore of Inverness received a ride from Dennis Luftig of Point Reyes Station. Maidee has long been active in civic affairs and is perhaps best known for decades of leading a program, Tomales Bay Waterdogs, which teaches children living around Tomales Bay how to swim.

100_2264Western Weekend Queen Mindy Borello, 17, rode in a pickup-truck carriage during Sunday’s parade. Mindy won the queen contest by selling the most Western Weekend raffle tickets.

100_2265Western Weekend Princess Rocio Gomez  Together Rocio and Mindy sold more than $8,000 worth of raffle tickets.

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The float was called “The Hula Hoopin’ Haley Grandkids,” and this grandkid was a pro.

garden-club2Three quarters of a century  Inverness Garden Club’s entry each year includes numerous participants, a motorcycle with a sidecar, and a float festooned with flowers and greenery. This year the club is celebrating its 75th anniversary, hence the birthday cake. Among the club’s activities is maintaining flower beds in public places.

100_2281Several kids on mini-motorcycles took part in the parade. This young biker may be new to the parade circuit, but he has already learned its protocol. To get the attention of other kids along the parade route carry a bag of candies and toss out handfuls. Works every time.

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Papermill Creek Children’s Corner (a preschool in Point Reyes Station) and Marin Head Start paraded together.

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Planned Feralhood president Kathy Runnion of Nicasio, dressed as a cat and festooned with toy kittens, led her group’s parade entry. The group catches feral cats in Point Reyes Station and neuters or spays them.

Kathy finds homes for the kittens and as many of the adults as possible. A few adults cannot be domesticated and are returned to the street, but at least they are no longer reproducing. Not surprisingly, the number of feral kittens around town has dropped dramatically.

dancersWest Marin School students dance a Paso Durangeneze. The group includes Alejandro Chavarria, 3rd grade; Graciela Avalos, Sarahisabel Barajaz, Stepanie Gonzalez, William Gonzalez, Shelby Hunt, Normar Isais, Bianca Lima, and Phoebe Marshall, 4th graders; and Armando Gonzalez, 5th grade. Their teacher is Dolores Gonzalez.

nave-patrola1The Nave Patrola annually spoofs the Italian Army in World War I although it also borrows an “Il Duce” chant from World War II.

In the early 1970s, an official from the Italian Consulate in San Francisco complained to parade organizers, the West Marin Lions Club, that the patrol disparaged Italians, what with its seemingly confused marchers colliding with each other and going off in all directions.

Defenders of the patrol, however, replied that many of the members are of Italian descent. In addition, most folks here find Benito Mussolini, “the Duce of Fascism,” as he called himself, fair game for satire.

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Bikini-clad dancers on an entry from Very Nice Firewood of Point Reyes Station waved placards that said, “Joe’s Knows How to Keep It Hot,” along with “Keep Warm & Toasty” and “Got Wood?”

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A highlight of every Western Weekend Parade is the impressive Concord Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps, which participates in numerous parades each year. Based in Contra Costa County, the Blue Devils are a world-class drum corps, having won 12 Drum Corps International championships in the past 33 years.

The Western Weekend Livestock Show and Fair were held Saturday at the Dance Palace for the second year, having been held for more than half a century at the Red Barn (whose current owner has renamed it and repainted it green).

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William Nunes’ four-year-old dry Holstein took first place in junior showmanship while Alyssa McClure’s heifer took second.

100_2213_1Thoroughly enjoying the livestock show were the dogs of Lisa Patsel, who owns Tree House bed-and-breakfast inn.

Because the number of ranches in West Marin has been steadily shrinking, the number of entries is now tiny compared with what it was back in the 1960s and 1970s.

Half a dozen cows were shown this year compared to 100 in 1962, but youths in the ranching families that still remain take the competition as seriously as ever.

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4-H Club members recite the Pledge of Allegiance and the 4-H pledge at the beginning of Saturday’s livestock show.

100_2221Michelle McClure took first place in senior showmanship for Holstein cows, and Nathan Hemett took second.

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Kelly Hinde of Sonoma County 4-H judges rabbits during the 4-H fair.

100_2230Freddie Genazzi’s red slider named Ozzie took first place in the turtle competition. Although his sister wasn’t present, her turtle, whom the judge dubbed Harriet, took second.

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Judge Hinde inspects a pair of mice.

100_2253Judges Ellie Genazzi and Terry Gray compare notes during the Western Weekend Fair’s dog show.

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Amelia McDonald’s dog Hamlet clears a hurdle in an obstacle course during the dog show.

dumpster2While the obstacle course confused all the dogs that went on it, this Dumpster behind the Dance Palace confused virtually all the humans who went to use it.

Despite what was reported last week in the calendar sections of The West Marin Citizen and Point Reyes Light, the Western Weekend Parade will be held on Sunday this year, as always. Both papers were apparently led to believe the annual parade would be held a day early on Saturday, June 6; however, a check with the county firehouse in Point Reyes Station Monday confirmed it is making arrangements for a parade on Sunday.

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A procession of antique tractors in last year’s parade.

The Western Weekend Livestock Show will likewise be held Saturday as always. However, it is no longer held at the Red Barn but at the Dance Palace.

The event, which is scheduled from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., is a time for 4-H club members to exhibit crafts and animal projects they have been working on all year.

Sunday’s parade will march down Point Reyes Station’s three-block-long main street at noon. Because the route is short and the number of entries is sometimes small, it is not uncommon for several entries, after they finish the procession, to circle around via sidestreets in order to parade down the main street a second time.

The 34th annual Dance Palace Silent Auction will be held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday with live music by Moonlight Rodeo from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
Oysters and drinks will be sold on the lawn, starting at 11 a.m.

Launching the forerunner of Western Weekend on Aug. 6, 1949, was a women’s sorority called Companions of the Forest. Their turreted former hall still stands across Mesa Road from the Marin Agricultural Land Trust office. That first celebration included a dance, a queen contest, a carnival, and a cakewalk, which together raised $440.65 for repairing the hall.

Western Weekend didn’t become a celebration of West Marin’s agricultural heritage until the following year when the women’s husbands, who belonged to the newly formed West Marin Lions Club, got involved. They added a parade, a chicken barbecue, and a livestock show at the Red Barn (now also called the Old Engine Barn).

100_74741In subsequent years, the event increasingly focused on 4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America).

During the early 1950s, 4-H and FFA were the main youth groups on the coast, and in those days members had relatively few places to exhibit their animals and other projects.

Parade judges’ viewing stand last year.

By 1962, the West Marin Junior Livestock Show was attracting cows from throughout Marin County, and 100 head showed up that year. The Lions added a lean-to onto the Red Barn to house the overflow. (The “Junior” referred the competitors all being 4-H or FFA members.)

The women held fashion shows on Sunday afternoons, and the Lions brought in carnival rides. Eventually the Point Reyes Station chapter of Companions of the Forest merged with the Petaluma chapter, which continues to this day.

Throughout the 1970s, the parade grew every year. In 1980 and 1981, it drew about 150 entries. An ad hoc group calling itself the Tomales Bay Explorers Club annually entered elaborate floats: Nessie, the bay’s own underwater monster; King Tut’s Tomb, a large pyramid complete with the king’s court; and a hug replica of one Imelda Marcos’ open-toed shoes, out of which a tap-dance group periodically slid and then performed in the street.

100_74881The Wells Fargo stagecoach in last year’s parade.

By then, 10,000 or more people sometimes jammed the town’s sidewalks and store roofs to watch the parade.

Some merchants would later discover that drunken spectators, who had without permission used roofs for vantage points, had dropped empty beer cans down drainspouts.

With the first heavy rain each fall, several flat roofs would flood, and the stores below would have water dripping through their ceilings.

With so many people jamming Point Reyes Station for these monster parades, beer flowed in the gutter by the time the last floats disappeared each year, sometimes to be replaced by outlaw bikers doing wheelies down the main street.

The Lions too were finding it difficult to cope with the throng, so in 1982 and 1983, they eliminated the parade although the West Marin Junior Livestock Show was held as usual. When the parade was revived in 1984, it was much smaller with far fewer groups from outside West Marin.

Nowadays, a variety of groups ranging from the Lions Club to the 4-H Council to the Dance Palace to the Farm Bureau help put on Western Weekend. The gods too seem to help out. In 58 years, it’s never rained on our parade although high winds have occasionally blown floats apart.

dave-dinsmore-homeWindstorm destruction. The historic house where Dave Dinsmore lives on Nicasio Square has withstood more than a couple of blows over the years from speeding southbound vehicles. Coming at the end of a long straightaway into town, Nicasio Valley Road’s 90-degree turn in front of the house has sent nighttime speeders flying off the road and into the fence and porch. This week, however, the blow came from a gale that sent half a tree crashing down onto the porch’s roof. No doubt the resilient residence will recover from this blow too.

West Marin’s gales of Spring are back. In response to last week’s posting about Google’s inaccurate current-weather reports for Point Reyes Station, reader Linda Sturdivant phoned me around 3 p.m. Tuesday to talk about the weather.

Linda, who lives on Portola Avenue in neighboring Inverness Park, was concerned about the gathering windstorm, for she could hear limbs cracking in the bishop pine canopy over her home. Linda’s partner Terry Gray told me he too was concerned and then went outside to move his pickup truck. A large branch had broken and momentarily was caught in other branches, but it was hanging over the truck.

When the winds finally knocked the broken limb to the ground, Terry later told me, it turned out to be about 13 feet long and about 10 inches in diameter at the break. That’s enough to dent the roof of a truck’s cab or break a windshield or both.

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Less fortunate were at least one or two birds that apparently could not get out of the way in time when branches snapped, or flew into something while trying to escape the chaos. Leo Gilberti of Woodacre, who was doing some cleanup work for Linda Wednesday, found two dead little birds on the ground outside her home.

One had a broken neck, which can happen when a bird flies into a window pane, but the right side of the other bird’s chest was crushed although there were no puncture wounds.

Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evans has tentatively identified the birds as pine siskins based on this bird’s “cleft tail, streaked breast, and finch-like bill.” I had emailed Jules the photo above, which he viewed on his handheld BlackBerry, leading him to caution that the bird was “kind of hard to ID on my phone.”

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As it did elsewhere in West Marin, Tuesday’s gale brought down limbs all along Portola Avenue in Inverness Park, keeping part of the road closed throughout Wednesday.

Although gales blow through West Marin every spring, I’m not particularly fond of them. Wildlife and livestock obviously aren’t either.

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Life looked pretty tranquil for cows along the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road until this week’s windstorm.

100_1840Reflected in the windows of neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsmans’ potting shed, a cat that could never have perched on their gatepost in this week’s gale could sit there nonchalantly last week.

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In a gale, there is no such thing as “straight as the crow flies.” These feathered flying machines may not be as fast as fighter jets, but they’re even more maneuverable. Once the gusts built up, the crow approach to the birdbath on my deck resembled dogfight maneuvers more than a landing pattern.

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