Gathered on both sides of Papermill Creek Sunday morning, 125 West Marin residents demonstrated their support for a pedestrian bridge at the site of the onetime irrigation dam for the Giacomini Ranch.

Demonstrators including surfboarders, kayakers, several dogs, and people on opposite shores assemble for an Art Rogers photograph Sunday morning. A line over Papermill/Lagunitas Creek marks where the demonstrators want the Park Service to build a pedestrian bridge.

Originally a saltwater marsh, the ranchland was bought by the Giacomini family in 1944. Encouraged by the federal government (which wanted to increase wartime milk production) and subsidized under the Land Reclamation Act, the Giacominis built dikes surrounding the ranch to keep water from inundating their pastures at high tide. For half a century, the ranch prospered, but in 1998, the State Water Resources Control Board, stopped issuing permits for its seasonal irrigation dam.

In 2000, the Golden Gate National Recreation Area bought 550 acres of the ranch for $5.75 million. This Recreation Area land is being administered by the Point Reyes National Seashore, which last year began excavating it for a new marsh.

Even before the 550-acre sale eight years ago, the Giacomini family had sold more than 400 acres to public agencies, with Marin County Open Space District acquiring a slice of acreage just downstream from the Green Bridge. The acreage is bordered by the creek on the south and Point Reyes Station’s C Street on the north.

A footpath along the western edge of the county land from C Street to the dam site became popular for short walks.

Meanwhile, the County Open Space District — with assistance from the state — developed White House Pool park on the opposite bank. The park includes a scenic path along Papermill Creek from Inverness Park to the old dam site.

Demonstrators on the south shore of Papermill Creek last Sunday said they want a bridge so that pedestrians and bicyclists, especially children, are not forced to travel along the shoulder of the 45 mph levee road when going between Inverness Park and Point Reyes Station.

Not surprisingly, many of those at Sunday’s pro-bridge demonstration were residents of Inverness Park.

As administers of the Recreation Area land, the Point Reyes National Seashore has said it will soon hold a public meeting to discuss the proposed bridge. At this point, loudest opponents to the proposal are ideologues who insist that once a new marsh is created, humans should not sully nature with a path and bridge.

The new wetland will be located between downtown Point Reyes Station and downtown Inverness Park. The pathway above runs between the proposed bridge site and C Street in Point Reyes Station (seen in the background).

Folks, the land is not virgin terrain on either side of Papermill Creek below the Green Bridge. Not only has much of it been grazed for more than 50 years, humans have been reshaping it since at least 1855 when Samuel P. Taylor “built a warehouse at creekside for the paper he manufactured eight miles upstream,” to quote the late historian Jack Mason’s Earthquake Bay.

“It was here the steamer Monterey deposited passengers Olema-bound.

“A ferry crossed the creek here, Charlie Hall charging 25 cents one way per passenger. His bar, the Ferry House, was nearby to the south…. The county bridged the creek in 1875, the year the train came and the steamer pulled out.”

When the Park Service bought the Giacomini Ranch eight years ago, it’s stated goal was to create wetlands and thereby slow sedimentation of Tomales Bay and improve its overall environment. There was no mention of creating a wilderness area between the county firehouse and the Inverness Park Store. Remember, the former ranch is now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and the purpose of recreation areas is not to exclude humans.

Demonstrators on Sunday morning walk along the scenic path from White House Pool to the site of the proposed bridge. The Point Reyes National Seashore a while back argued for the elimination of this route near the creek, I have been told by county staff. In the background is Inverness Park.

The National Seashore, which would have to pay for much of the bridge, is also opposing it. For a public park, it is amazing how misanthropic its policies are. A while back, the park tried to convince Marin County Open Space District to reroute the scenic White House Pool path so that it ran along the edge of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard (the levee road) instead of along the creek. That way, nature would not be disturbed by humans walking through it. Fortunately, the county did not go along with the idea.

Now the National Seashore administration has raised a new objection. Even though the bridge would connect two rutted dirt paths, the park says it would have to be wheelchair accessible, and the requisite ramps for the eight-foot-wide bridge would double its length, making it 450 to 600 feet long. That’s more than twice the length of the Green Bridge and more than three times the length of Platform Bridge.

This Brooklyn Bridge over Papermill Creek — up to twice the length of a football field — would cost millions of dollars, the park says, and it is therefore unaffordable. I’m not buying any of it.

Here Joyce Goldfield of Inverness Park, who uses a motorized scooter to get around, takes part in the pro-bridge demonstration along with Duane Irving.

“A little Madness in the Spring/ Is wholesome even for the King” Emily Dickinson

We’re only four days into Spring, and already the world looks brighter. Of course, the return of Daylight Savings Time has probably helped. In any case, here are five faces that have brightened my cabin in the past few days.

My houseguest Linda Petersen’s dog Sebastian among the daffodils.

Deaf and legally blind, Sebastian will turn 15 in May. Linda’s daughter Saskia 10 years ago found the Havanese-mix filthy, matted, and hunting through garbage in the streets of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Saskia managed to locate Sebastian’s owners, who not only were willingly to give him to her but even had a few veterinary records for him.

A wild turkey showed up a few mornings ago just outside my kitchen window. The tom was displaying for some hens under the pine tree.

Neighbor Didi Thompson in early afternoon called excitedly to say a bobcat was in the Giacomini family’s field, which is next to her property and mine.

Another neighbor, George Stamoulis, had previously seen the bobcat on our hill, and Cat Cowles of Inverness while driving to work at Hog Island Oyster Company had spotted it walking up Campolindo Road downhill from our homes. Finally, it was my turn to see it, if only from a distance.

Vamping for cannabis: Seeva Cherms (daughter of Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park) and her friend Michelle from Hollywood.

The two are working in the drive to qualify a ballot initiative that would legalize the use of marijuana and the cultivation of its non-euphoric cousin hemp. Please see Posting 104 for that story. While touring the state, they dropped by at sunset to say hi.

Government officials’ wanting to sound “green,” rather than science and common sense, seems to be behind the growing number of restrictions on West Marin’s woodstoves. (In fact, a number of environmentalists have complained that the new restrictions on woodstoves are actually un-environmental, for they encourage the use of fossil fuels for heating while restricting the use of a renewable resource.) Two months ago I wrote Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey about my concerns, and this week he “belatedly” responded to my comments and answered questions for this blog.

On Jan. 20, I had written: As a constituent, I’m asking that you and the Board of Supervisors speak out against the broad-bush limits on woodstoves proposed by the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. [The county has a seat on the district’s governing board.] As I’m sure you recall, in 2003 you shepherded an ordinance through the board that required us to replace our woodstoves with EPA-approved versions by 2008. At that time, I objected in The Point Reyes Light that what might be needed in the San Geronimo Valley was clearly not needed in windy areas.

As was reported here last May, a recognizable apparition of Jesus (or is it Moammar Khadafy?) appears from time to time on the glass door of my woodstove after there’s been a fire. Whoever he is, he’s clearly saddened by what the world of his woodstove is coming to.

There just isn’t a smoke problem in the windy areas or open countryside of West Marin. The San Geronimo Valley’s problem, which is what prompted the ordinance, is that the Valley acts as a bowl for smoke. As the Air Quality Management District noted at the time, “When there is no wind to dissipate pollutants, they become trapped under this inversion layer, building up to unhealthy levels.” The operative phrase is “when there is no wind to dissipate pollutants.”

Despite published objections from environmentalists such as Mark Dowie and Michael Stocker, from The Light, and from others, the ordinance passed without making allowances for parts of the county where it isn’t needed, such as in Point Reyes Station. So as a good citizen of Marin County, I spent more than $4,000 last year to replace my Franklin stove with an EPA-approved model.

Now along comes the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and proposes banning the use of woodstoves on the West Marin coast if there is air pollution in, for example, Oakland. Why should smoke building up somewhere that’s a mountain range and a large bay away keep people from using EPA-approved woodstoves in rural areas along the coast from Sonoma to San Mateo counties? Doesn’t the County of Marin, which has already made rural residents spend thousands of dollars on EPA-rated stoves, now have an obligation to defend the use of those stoves?

From a strictly financial standpoint, heating with propane or electricity is enormously more expensive than with wood. I fear the Air Management District board has the provincialism of those hooked up to natural gas. Because of storms each winter, there is always plenty of firewood for sale here, making fallen trees a resource rather than a disposal problem. On the other hand, there are heavy environmental costs from the refining and transporting of propane, the damming rivers and using fossil-fueled plants to create electricity.

So as a constituent, I am asking that the County of Marin, after forcing us to install expensive, EPA-approved woodstoves, will now secure an exemption from the Air Management District’s proposed ban on heating with wood on bad-air days.

It would not be difficult, to determine which parts of the Bay Area have inversion-layer problems and which don’t. If everyone wanted to, the problem areas could be overlaid on zoning maps the way the Coastal Zone is. The district previously said it had the equipment to monitor air anywhere it was requested to do so, so this is not an extravagant suggestion. Forcing hundreds of thousands of people to unnecessarily stop heating with wood in cold weather is extravagant.

To me, it seems only fair that county government take a stand after already making us spend more money than most of us can easily afford. Nor would it be healthy to force families who can’t afford expensive heating to shiver through cold days because 75 miles away some town has an inversion layer.

Supervisor Kinsey (left) responded: The issue of windy areas is one I researched we researched when we were considering the County ordinance five years ago. The BAAQMD and others provided us with clear information that pollution created in Marin ends up impacting the East Bay and the Central Valley. I believe that if all counties and cities act together we can substantially reduce air pollution in the region, as well as addressing the immediate concern of areas which have inversion layers.

DVM: Under a four-year-old county ordinance, which you sponsored, homeowners in West Marin and other unincorporated parts of the county, by July 1 of this year have to replace their old woodstoves and fireplaces with EPA-approved units. Do you feel that should be sufficient to meet the Bay Area Air Quality Management District’s goals?

Supervisor Kinsey: I believe that our ordinance has taken appropriate steps to meet the BAAQMD’s goals related to air quality impacts related to wood smoke. The county ordinance provided a five-year voluntary program, and the board provided a rebate program to financially help people who need to upgrade their wood stoves. Given that those who have only a wood-burning source for their heat are exempt from the BAAQMD ban during “Spare-the-Air” events, as long as they are using dry material for their fuel, I believe that our ordinance is consistent and adequate to meet BAAQMD goals.

DVM: The main alternative to wood for heating in West Marin is propane, and it is derived from other petroleum products during oil or natural-gas processing. With the cost of natural gas expected to rise by 20 percent this year and the cost of oil already high and rising, wouldn’t this seem to be a bad time to be forcing people to burn more propane?

Supervisor Kinsey: The proposed regulations do not force West Marin residents to switch to propane. Wood burning remains a viable option, although some homeowners will have to pay the price of converting to an EPA-certified stove. I agree that petroleum-based fuels will continue to become more expensive and have their own environmental consequences, even if their impacts occur remotely. Our board is strongly advocating the development of additional renewable energy capacity in our county, and I am very pleased with the operation and cost savings that I am realizing from my own photo-voltaic installation.

DVM: Do you think the Air Quality Management District recognizes differences in rural, suburban, and urban wood heating? Should it?

Supervisor Kinsey: The BAAQMD considers air quality to be a regional responsibility, and I doubt that they differentiate between remote, low-density communities and larger, more urban ones, because they recognize the interconnectedness of the atmosphere. Having said that, I also doubt that their enforcement activities will focus on the lower-density areas where problems and complaints will be fewer. I also think that by exempting wood-burning smoke when it is the sole source of heating for a residence is an acknowledgement that there are differences in the character of communities.

I believe that we all live in the same fragile bubble, and that we are equally responsible for the quality of our air, whether we live in West Marin or an urban area. At the time that the Marin County ordinance was enacted, many local residents agreed with me, and some cited their own health problems related to smoke. That said, I also believe that when regulations are implemented the cost must be taken into account, and I applaud the Air District for proposing a rebate program, similar to Marin County’s rebate program, which will help people make the transition.

DVM: Should the county ask the Air Management District to make exceptions for EPA-approved woodstoves? For homes in sparsely populated areas? For woodstoves not in the vicinity of bad-air-day problems?

Supervisor Kinsey: For the reason mentioned above, I do not think that the Air Management District needs to make additional exceptions for low-density communities.

DVM: In general, what should the County of Marin’s role be in all this? What position is the board taking?

Supervisor Kinsey: Marin County seeks to be a leader in reducing health risks and climate change consequences related to pollution of our air. We were in the lead on requiring improvements to wood-burning appliances, without taking an arbitrary position of banning all woodstoves. We also have tried to ease the financial impact of change for individuals. I expect that our board will endorse the proposed regulations, but we will not take an active role in enforcing those regulations.

Our objective has been, and will remain in a supportive role, to help homeowners convert their stoves and to meet the county code. In the upcoming county budget process, I will be requesting that my fellow supervisors support renewed funding for the county rebate program to help homeowners with the costs associated with conversion.

A couple of Supervisor Kinsey’s answers make me suspicious. He talks about “pollution from Marin” having an impact in the East Bay and Central Valley. That’s “Marin,” not “West Marin,” the territory that makes up most of his district and which is on the other side of the coast range from the East Bay. In fact, he acknowledges, “I doubt that the [Air Management District officials] differentiate between remote, low-density communities and larger, more-urban ones.”

I’m also suspicious when a politician says, “Don’t worry about this law I’m backing. In your case, it’ll never be enforced.” Either you have a bad law or a prediction you can’t count on. Supposedly, as long as you don’t have other ways to heat your house, you’ll be able to fire up EPA-approved woodstoves on “Spare the Air Days.” Of course, you won’t be able to do so if you have propane available, even if you can’t afford to use it.

I like Supervisor Kinsey, but his citing the “interconnectedness of the atmosphere” and our all living “in the same fragile bubble” as arguments for restricting this coast’s woodstoves strikes me as a wondrous rhetorical leap, not empirical science.

Although the official comment period on the Air District’s proposed woodstove restrictions expired back on Dec. 10 (well before most of the public was aware of them), readers can still email suggestions to district staff or directors at sparetheair@baaqmd.gov.

Half the frontier towns in Northern California contain buildings that, if you believe local lore, were once bordellos. I can’t count the number of times someone in Point Reyes Station has assured me that either the Grandi or the Western Saloon used to be a whorehouse.

I once asked the late Lefty Arndt, who had lived in Point Reyes Station since the 1920s, if there really ever was a brothel in town.

He told me there once had been one, but it was neither the Grandi nor the Western. Rather, it was a small building that once was on the main street and became a brothel after being moved to Mesa Road, where it is now a private residence. For the sake of the residents, I won’t identify it. Arndt, who had not been a patron, said it was his belief that only two women worked there, and noted that the town didn’t pay too much attention to it.

In contrast, it would be hard to imagine higher-profile prostitution than the Emperors Club VIP where New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer (right) was a patron.

As the FBI revealed Monday, the governor had been frequenting the call-girl operation before it was raided a few weeks ago. From listening to folks around Point Reyes Station, however, I get the impression that people here are less interested in Spitzer’s high-priced call girls than his hypocrisy.

From 1998 to 2006, Spitzer was New York’s attorney general, and “during that time he prosecuted at least two prostitution rings as head of the state’s organized-crime taskforce,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported. “In one such case in 2004, Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.”

Government hypocrisy toward prostitution, however, is traditional and may never have been more bizarre than at Mustang Ranch, once the best-known brothel in the United States.

An oasis of mobilehomes amid 440 acres of sand and sagebrush located 10 miles east of Reno (and in a different county), the ranch offered security, cleanliness, and mirrors on the ceiling. The women who worked there were required to use condoms and get weekly medical checkups.

Although Nevada law permits bordellos in most counties, it insists that their operators, bizarrely enough, be of good moral character. But what in other people would be considered an expression of good character, such as civic-mindedness, can in the case of a brothel owner be criticized as grasping for legitimacy. In the 1970s, Mustang Ranch owner Joe Conforte found himself in that situation.

While he could easily have been considered a scoundrel merely because of the way he made his money, Conforte instead came under attack primarily because he was considered too involved in civic affairs for a brothel owner. Leading the attack was the local press, and in 1977, Warren Lerude, Foster Church, and Norman Cardoza of The Reno Evening News and Nevada State Journal shared a Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing for denouncing Conforte’s influence in the Reno area.

Reading about all this in California, I was surprised by Conforte’s rise to national prominence, especially when he was written up, complete with an Annie Leibovitz photo (at right is a toned detail from it), in Rolling Stone magazine. Equally surprising was his subsequent fall.

In 1990, a federal court took control of Mustang Ranch after Conforte missed a $75,000 monthly tax bill. When word of the takeover reached the bordello, “prostitutes panicked and fled, customers were thrown out, and the doors were slammed,” The Chronicle reported at the time.

Given government’s usual repression of prostitution, one might have expected officials to be pleased that the brothel had closed. Not so. When a federal bankruptcy judge turned Mustang Ranch over to US Bankruptcy trustee Jeri Coppa, she considered it her top priority to immediately get the bordello back in business.

As her office saw it, the closure could not have come at a worse time. The Reno Air Races were to be held that Saturday, and normally this would be the busiest weekend of the year at Mustang Ranch. The whorehouse could not afford to lose so many potential customers if it was to pay off the IRS and its secured creditors.

“I’m trying to get the girls back, straighten out the business licenses, insurance, and work permits, blood tests, and get the place back open,” Ms. Coppa, the federal bankruptcy trustee, told Chronicle reporter Kevin Leary three days before the Air Races. “It’s a new experience for me. I’ve never run a whorehouse before. But about 20 girls have signed up so far, and the bar manager and floor maids are anxious to get back to work.”

In any case, the federal government with unusual alacrity managed to reopen Mustang Ranch just in time for the Air Races. Later the ranch was sold at auction, where it was purchased by an associate of Conforte.

Notwithstanding prostitution’s being legal throughout much of the state, even in Nevada it carries a stigma. Onetime Harper’s editor Sallie Tisdale in Talk Dirty to Me: An Intimate Philosophy of Sex (Doubleday, 1994) notes that prostitutes in Nevada cannot live and work in the same town, go into casinos or bars, or be in the company of men in public places. Still for women willing to put up with the stigma, working in a brothel at least pays fairly well and is relatively safe.

The same is not true for their sisters who walk big-city streets. My former employer, the old San Francisco Examiner, in 1995 reported not only that rape, robbery and beatings are a daily risk for the city’s streetwalkers but also that few of their attackers are ever prosecuted. Hitch-hookers, who ply their trade in strangers’ cars, face particular danger.

Fearing the AIDS epidemic, streetwalkers nowadays generally try to get their customers to use condoms, but hypocritical laws actually discourage this. If a woman is found to be carrying a supply of condoms, many courts in both the Great Britain and the United States allow that fact to be used as evidence against her should she be charged with prostitution.

There was a time back in the late 1970s when people lived upstairs in Point Reyes Station’s derelict Grandi Building although the county considered the place unsafe and eventually kicked everybody out. A couple of years before that happened, however, sheriff’s deputies began to notice that each evening, one of the Grandi’s female residents kept going across the street into the Western Saloon, picking up men, and then taking them back to her room. In the course of a night, she might do this two or three times.

Suspecting she was soliciting, officers began keeping an eye on her, only to discover she was not a prostitute, just very promiscuous.

Not exactly the Emperors Club VIP where Gov. Spitzer (who is scheduled to resign Monday) spent up to $80,000.

It is easy to underestimate the power of coincidence; nonetheless, I am surprised by a sudden rekindling of interest in The Point Reyes Light and West Marin Citizen as representing two poles of community journalism.

A German journalist, Stephan Russ-Mohl, showed up at my cabin yesterday to interview me about the changes at The Light since I sold it two years ago. In 1992 while teaching Journalism at the Free University of Berlin, Russ-Mohl authored Zeitungsumbruch: Wie sich Amerikas Press revolutioniert, which devoted a chapter to The Light. Unfortunately, I can’t read it.

All I can tell you is that is that the chapter begins with a (presumably translated) comment by American journalist Robert Giles: “Die amerikanische Provinzpresse steht heute nicht mehr in der Tradition eins couragierten Journalismus, eines Journalismus, der Anstoß nimmt.”

Apparently the passage complains about “die amerikanische Provinzpresse” losing the courage to become indignant.

However, Russ-Mohl goes on to say, “Ein Beispiel jedenfalls, da es mutigen Journalismus auch an den Grass roots noch gibt, liefert ein Winzling unter den amerikanischen Zeitungen, der ein Strackweit nordlich von San Francisco erscheint: The Point Reyes Light.” I surmise that 15 years ago the author could see some counter-examples, including The Light, but as they say in Germany, “eIch verstehe nur Bahnhof.” *

Another book that devotes a chapter to The Light is Pulitzer’s Gold, which has just been published by the University of Missouri Press and is selling remarkably well.

Engagingly written by Roy Harris (senior editor at CFO magazine), Pulitzer’s Gold looks in detail at what the 12 most-recent winners did to earn the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, which Joseph Pulitzer considered his top prize.

The book also details the work of several other of the 92 winners (through 2006) of the Public Service gold medal, including The Light. These others were chosen, Harris writes, “because they are not only terrific stories but also fine illustrations of how Pulitzer Prize-winning work has evolved over the years.”

The Light won its gold medal in 1979 for an exposé of violence and other wrongdoing by the Synanon cult.

Pulitzer’s Gold notes that Robert Plotkin now owns The Light and concludes its chapter on the newspaper: “Though new to Marin, he has grand ideas. ‘This is going to be the Paris of the twenties. This is going to be the Beats of San Francisco in the fifties.’ Talent will gravitate to The Light, he says, because it is still known, even back East, as the little California paper that won the Pulitzer Prize.

“Mitchell, though, will never forget how strange it felt to have been so small and to have won so big: “It’s like being out playing touch football and making a good catch, and somebody says, “You could play for the 49ers with a catch like that.'”

Meanwhile Point Reyes Station journalist Jonathan Rowe’s article, The Language of Strangers, in the January-February Columbia Journalism Review continues to generate discussion. The article describes the new incarnation of The Point Reyes Light and the advent of The West Marin Citizen.

In discussing The Light’s editorial approach under its new publisher, Rowe (at right) wrote, “First, there was the braggadocio and self-dramatization. Most people in his situation would lay low for a bit, speak with everyone and get a feel for the place. Instead, Plotkin came out talking. We read that he was going to be the ‘Che Guevara of literary revolutionary journalism.’ The Light would become ‘the New Yorker of the West’ …. [However] he soon showed a gift for the irritating gesture and off-key note.”

A flap erupted when Peter Byrne, a columnist for an alternative newspaper, The North Bay Bohemian, posted an angry comment on CJR’s website where Rowe’s magazine story was online.

Byrne, who called Rowe’s article “terribly one-sided and unfair,” referred CJR readers to a column he himself had written. In the Bohemian column, Byrne wrote, “It seems evident to me that Plotkin breathes journalism day and night, and has responded to the expressed desires of his provincial readers,” adding that “The Light under the direction of Mitchell, was staler than day-old toast.”

Explaining his interest in The Light, Byrne acknowledged that “last year, Plotkin and I talked about working together, but it did not pan out since I require a living wage.”

Several CJR readers, including Rowe himself, have by now posted responses. “Byrne acknowledges that Plotkin is ‘narcissistic,’ which is his word not mine,” Rowe wrote. “But he blames this trait on us dim-witted locals, who lack a capacity to appreciate good journalism. ‘Townies waving pitchforks and whale-oil lanterns,’ he calls us. Now that’s reporting. It’s an interesting psychological theory too.”

A CJR reader named Monica Lee replied to Byrne: “Petah, Petah, Petah, sit yourself down, read much, study hard, and maybe someday you will write a piece as brilliantly spot-on about small-town newspapers and what they mean to a community as Jonathan Rowe has done.”

Another reader, Steve Bjerklie of Point Reyes Station, responded that publisher Plotkin is “a wealthy dilettante with a journalism degree playing out a Walter Mitty fantasy at The Light, and the West Marin community suffered for it until the advent of the rival Citizen.”

Michael Mery of Point Reyes Station wrote that Byrne’s comment was “a typical journalistic cheapshot, little information coupled with limited experience.”

I subsequently saw Mery in Toby’s Feed Barn and remarked on his response to Byrne’s commentary.

“It was drive-by journalism,” Mery said with a laugh. Although Mery came up with the clever turn-of-phrase on his own, he’s not the first to use it in describing a smear written by an out-of-town journalist who shows up only briefly. In fact, there is a book with that title by an author named Rowse (not to be confused with Rowe).

The Point Reyes Light controversy shows no sign of letting up any time soon, which no doubt explains why Sausalito-based Marin Magazine has now arranged to publish a lengthy excerpt from Rowe’s article.

* German slang that translated literally means: “All I understand is train station,” which is comparable to saying, “It’s Greek to me.” How do I know this and not know German? A little vegelchen told me.

A herd of up to nine blacktail deer have taken to spending their days on this hill, here joining the horses of Point Reyes Arabians for a late-afternoon snack.

California’s Department of Fish and Game has estimated that well over half the roughly 560,000 deer in California are Columbian blacktails, the deer native to West Marin and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Mutual friends. Two blacktail does licking each other’s coats.

For years many people believed (and many websites still say) that blacktails are a subspecies of mule deer, a species found from the Northwest to the deserts of the Southwest and as far east as the Dakotas. DNA tests, however, have now found mule deer to be a hybrid of female whitetail deer and blacktail bucks. Or so says author Valerius Geist in Mule Deer Country.

Whitetails first appeared on the East Coast about 3.5 million years ago, as this blog previously noted. DNA evidence suggests they spread south and then west, arriving in California about 1.5 million years ago.

In moving up the coast, whitetails evolved into blacktails, which resemble them in appearance and temperament. Blacktails eventually extended their range eastward, meeting up with more whitetails coming from the east. Apparently the blacktail bucks were able to horn in on the harems of their parent species. The result: mule deer.

Mule deer as seen on the website of Wind Cave National Park in the Black Hills. The deer are so named because of their long ears.

And for an amazing look at a whitetail deer, check this YouTube clip of one running into the path of a motorcycle on a mountain highway, but avoiding a collision by jumping over the biker as he ducks.

What is there to say about the American turkey that hasn’t recently been said? In the last 20 years, wild turkeys have spread throughout West Marin. I grew up in Berkeley and six weeks ago attended a New Year’s Eve party there; to my surprise, residents of my old neighborhood were likewise talking about wild turkeys moving in on them.

Well, how about this curiosity? Why does the bird have the same name as the country? As it happens, Turkey was the talk of the world’s chattering classes this past week after Turks voted that henceforth women can wear headscarves in universities. But getting back to the coincidence of names:

Here’s an explanation from an educational website, Kidzone, for younger students; it’s consistent with the etymology given by The American Heritage Dictionary:

“When the Spanish first found the bird in the Americas more than 400 years ago they brought it back to Europe. The English mistakenly thought it was a bird they called a “turkey” so they gave it the same name. This other bird was actually from Africa, but came to England by way of Turkey (lots of shipping went through Turkey at the time). The name stuck even when they realized the birds weren’t the same.”

The African bird which the English confused with the American turkey was the guinea fowl, The American Heritage Dictionary notes. As it happens, for the past two months that bird has been the talk of Point Reyes Station’s chattering classes, such as we are, because a representative of the alien species has been walking the streets of town.

The first report of that streetwalking was published in this blog Dec. 16. Yesterday, The Point Reyes Light reported that after two months of hunting and pecking throughout Point Reyes Station, the bird has now been caught by Station House Café employee Armando Gonzalez.

A word of warning. If guinea fowl is the dinner special some night at the café, remember the caution of Inverness Park biologist Russell Ridge: “You better like dark meat.”

A fascinating article in Wednesday’s Marin Independent Journal reveals a “second massive sewage spill” at the same Mill Valley treatment plant discussed in the last posting here. The total amount of sewage spilled in one week is now put at 5.2 million gallons.

Because of a bureaucratic snafu, the Jan. 25 spill of 2.45 million gallons into Richardson Bay, an arm of San Francisco Bay, didn’t come to light until after last Thursday’s spill of 2.75 million gallons. As the article by reporter Mark Prado explained, the Sewerage Agency of Southern Marin (which owns the treatment plant) should have immediately notified the Regional Water Quality Control Board after the first spill but instead emailed notification to the regional board’s parent body, the State Water Resources Control Board.

A typo in the email resulted in the date of the spill being given as Jan. 15 instead of 25. Seeing the date, a state employee put the email aside, assuming it dealt with a two-week-old event, the newspaper reported. When the regional board finally learned of the earlier spill, The IJ added, they too were confused by the typo, until yesterday.

“Health officials posted signs at beaches and waterfronts along Richardson Bay warning people of the contamination last week after the second spill was disclosed,” The IJ noted and showed such a sign, which was photographed by Jeff Vendsel.

Why the sign looks almost as serious as the one below that health officials posted many months ago next to the Green Bridge! The Marin Environmental Health Department in early January told me this sign should have been taken down in October and would be right away. It’s still there.

So why was this sign along Papermill/Lagunitas Creek posted in the first place? Did millions of gallons of sewage also spill into the creek? Did any sewage spill into the creek?

Not according to North Marin Water District. North Marin monitors water quality in the creek because it draws the drinking water for Point Reyes Station, Olema, and Inverness Park from creekside wells.

As was noted here in Posting 94, North Marin’s tests of Papermill Creek’s water have found only normal amounts of bacteria, including e-coli bacteria, NMWD senior chemist Stacie Goodpaster told me. After a rain, of course, the amount of bacteria in the creek goes up temporarily, Stacie noted, because bacteria get washed into the creek.

However, she added, North Marin’s current testing cannot determine the source of the bacteria; they come from soil, decaying plants, or animal waste. She felt reasonably sure there has not been any sewage leak into the creek, for that would cause there to be at least 50 times as much e-coli in the water.

Marin Environmental Health later confirmed there was no indication of a sewage spill into Papermill Creek.

Supervising health inspector David Smail told me that under state standards for Recreation 1 (swimming) freshwater, the maximum number of enterococcus bacteria per milliliter is 61 in a single day’s sample (104 for saltwater). The last sampling at the Green Bridge, which followed unusually heavy rains in October, resulted in an enterococcus count of 63 (only two over the limit), but under established “protocol,” that requires a sign, David said.

And despite the “avoid contact with water” line in the county sign, Papermill Creek did not test unsafe for boating (Recreation 2). So the “avoid contact” part wasn’t accurate even at the time the sign first went up.

But who’s to care? Runoff from heavy rain carries apparently normal amounts of soil, plant debris, and wildlife waste from forested parkland into Papermill Creek; doesn’t that warrant posting warnings at least as dire as those for a 5.2-million-gallon sewage spill?

Needlessly alarming West Marin’s tourists and local residents doesn’t really matter, does it? It’s just bureaucracy fubar. Or crying wolf.

Author and political activist Jack Herer showed up at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station Monday evening to publicize the “California Cannabis Hemp & Health Initiative 2008” signature drive.

Herer signs a copy of one of his books, Grass, for Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness. Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park (at left) helped organize Monday’s meeting. Attendance was light, probably because in West Marin Herer was preaching to the choir.

Monday’s event began with a movie, Emperor of Hemp (narrated by actor Peter Coyote), about Herer’s 50-year campaign throughout the United States to legalize cannabis sativa, both the smokable and non-smokable varieties. In the film, Herer is seen evolving from a conservative military policeman in Korea after the war to an advocate for growing hemp for fiber, food, and fuel.

Herer loves to rant, although the effects of a stroke have slowed his speech in recent years, and is seen from New York to Oregon ranting against marijuana laws and haranguing enthusiastic crowds with, “Hemp will save the world.”

Appropriately, Herer says his interest in cannabis sativa occurred after a girlfriend convinced him to try smoking pot. Not only did the euphoria make him see the world differently, he became a different person. Herer went from a Goldwater Republican to an advocate for legalizing cannabis, both for enjoyment and medical purposes. Equally significant, he became an advocate for growing industrial-grade cannabis to replace wood in paper, for use as fuel and lubricants, for cooking oil etc.

As Herer pointed out in his repeatedly reissued 1985 book The Emperor Wears No Clothes, hemp was used for thousands of years to make paper, cloth, oil (from its seeds), and innumerable other products. In 1937, however, the US government outlawed personal use of pot and outlawed even the growing of industrial-quality hemp despite outcries from the medical community, among others.

The absurdity of banning a valuable crop became evident a decade later when, as Emperor of Hemp shows, a US Department of Agriculture film described hemp farming as a patriotic part of the war effort, even though it remained illegal.

The federal government continues to ban hemp farming (although industrial-grade hemp contains too little tetrahydrocannabinol to create the effects associated with pot), and hemp products sold in this country are all made with imported hemp. Emperor of Hemp quotes the government’s argument for banning a valuable crop as being that police would have trouble determining which cannabis was legal and which was illegal, so allowing industrial-grade hemp growing in the US “would send the wrong message to our children.” Huh?

Emperor of Hemp contains interviews with people from the medical community, academia, and the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, all saying that what Herer preaches is on target despite his bombast. Even NORML, who for years didn’t want to associate itself with Herer’s “Hemp-will-save-the-world” rhetoric, now recognizes the aging activist’s writings have made the public understand the false premises behind the government’s war against cannabis, the group’s executive director says in the film.

Herer has now authored the Hemp Initiative in an attempt to make California law reflect reality. As Herer said Monday, signatures are being collected for the state initiative, with 434,000 valid signatures needed by April 5 to qualify for the November ballot. In any initiative drive, a large number of signatures are invalidated, so organizers of this campaign hope to reach three million signatures in the next two months.

The initiative would legalize the growing and selling industrial hemp, would bar state law enforcement officers from helping federal agents enforce federal anti-marijuana laws in California, would legalize marijuana smoking for religious purposes, would legalize adult use of marijuana for euphoria as well as medicine, and would set standards for non-commercial cultivation of marijuana.

To publicize the initiative drive, three-day “Hip Hop for Hemp” festivals will be held in Northern and Southern California. Seeva Cherms (left), the daughter of Linda Sturdivant, is handling publicity, and Wednesday she told me 24 bands and several internationally known reggae and rock stars have already agreed to participate.

For the moment, Seeva added, the identities of the biggest names cannot be announced, pending arrangements with their recording companies. People who want to keep up with festival plans will soon be able to check a new Hip Hop for Hemp website.

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An operation aimed at eliminating a herd of axis deer near Marshall Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore was abruptly halted Monday morning after numerous news organizations learned of the killing and showed up to report on it.

The killing was being carried out by riflemen from a firm called White Buffalo, which the National Seashore hired last year. White Buffalo had planned on using helicopters to herd the axis herd into ravines where they could be gunned down en masse. However, the shooting stopped after 18 deer out of a herd of 80 were killed.

Axis deer on L Ranch in the Point Reyes National Seashore just before the killing began. (Photo by Trish Carney of San Rafael.)

“It looks like we might have successfully stopped the axis-deer slaughter that was scheduled for early this morning,” a pleased Trinka Marris of Inverness Park said later Monday. Trinka had organized protests this morning on Marshall Road and at the Bear Valley headquarters of the park.

Approximately 20 protesters took part, including representatives of WildCare and In Defense of Animals.

“The park had blocked the roads, and the White Buffalo helicopters were launched, but when our protest showed up at the roadblock [not far from Marshall Beach], with camera and reporter in tow, the word got back to park headquarters,” Trinka recounted.

Hired with grant money, a company called Full Court Press has been getting publicity for the axis and fallow deer’s plight in the Point Reyes National Seashore. Monday evening Trinka told fellow protesters, “Thanks to the remarkable firm that has been hired to help with this campaign, by 10 a.m. the park was crawling with new crews from ABC, NBC, CBS, KTVU, and The Independent Journal.

“By 11 a.m. the helicopters had been put away, the all-terrain vehicles that carry the carcasses were back at maintenance, and the mission had been aborted.”

Today’s protest began at daybreak, and Trinka thanked “the 20 or so dedicated people” who showed up. “It was not easy getting up at 4:30 on a stormy Monday morning, but we did, and I think we bought these beautiful creatures at least one more day of sweet life.”

Earlier today Trinka reminded me that the park has consistently refused to let the public see how the killing is done.

Despite what the park has claimed, “it’s not one bullet to the brain,” Trinka said. If the public could see how brutal the killing actually is, “no one would stand for it.” Indeed, deer hunters in West Marin have complained that many of the deer shot by White Buffalo suffer long, agonizing deaths from “gut wounds.”

White Buffalo is under contract to kill fallow and axis deer in the park through June, at which time the eradication program must be reviewed and a new, one-year contract signed, Trinka said.

Members of Congress and the California Legislature have asked the Bush Administration’s Department of the Interior to at least temporarily stop the killing until it can be thought through better. The National Seashore, however, has responded that under the government’s contract with White Buffalo, it can’t afford to stop.

On Monday, Dr. Elliot Katz, president of In Defense of Animals, countered by offering to pay the rest of this year’s contract with White Buffalo. The veterinarian made the offer directly to both White Buffalo during the protest on Marshall Road and to National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher during the protest at park headquarters.

The Neubacher administration has told the public that the main reason for killing off non-native deer in the park is so they won’t compete with the native blacktail deer for forage. Pressed by the press today, however, the park superintendent conceded that White Buffalo’s riflemen sometimes shoot a few native blacktails that are hanging out with the fallow and axis herds.

The park’s claim that there would be more native blacktail deer in the park if the axis and fallow were not eating so much forage is, of course, sheer propaganda. The buildup of brush and dry grass is annually such a problem that the National Seashore regularly conducts controlled burns to reduce the risk of wildfires.

Providing the biggest check on the blacktail population of federal parkland here, as can be seen along Highway 1 from Muir Beach to Marshall, are motorists. Fresh carcasses of deer struck in traffic are daily sights in West Marin. This is hardly surprising now that the National Seashore attracts more than 2.2 million visitors annually, and neighboring Golden Gate National Recreation Area lands, hundreds of thousands more.

Update as of Wednesday evening: Demonstrator Saskia Achilles, who has continued to track the axis-herd eradication, just reported, “All road access is blocked by park rangers in trucks when the hunting is going on, so I have only been able to get close on foot, and not at night, but I see their helicopters in the deer’s valley, and I see nets with a heavy load getting carried by the helicopter….

“Today they stopped again when a media helicopter flew over,” she added, “and resumed right after [it left].”

“It looks to us from the field that they are killing 20 to 30 every night [and] … and that their aim is to have wiped out the entire axis herd by the end of Thursday.”