Hundreds of West Marin residents plus a number of visitors enjoyed free turkey dinners (with vegetarian “turkey” available) Thursday in Point Reyes Station’s Dance Palace.

The 23rd annual West Marin Community Thanksgiving Dinner, as always, drew community members of all ages and from all walks of life. For many, it was a chance to socialize with friends and neighbors, as well as make new acquaintances.

The community dinner for more than a decade was held in Point Reyes Station’s Red Barn (now painted green) and in recent years was held in the gymnasium of West Marin School. One effect of the event’s moving to the Dance Palace Community Center this year was that guests could once again bring wine to enjoy with their dinner.

A happy crew of volunteers served the dinner. Here singer/musician Harmony Grisman ladles gravy while writer Elizabeth Whitney gets a helping of stuffing from ornithologist David Wimpfheimer.

Organizing the annual dinner is West Marin Community Resource Center, working with the Inverness Garden Club, Marin County Fire Department in Point Reyes Station, Sacred Heart Catholic Church, The Dance Palace, West Marin 4-H, West Marin School, and West Marin Senior Services.

Marin Organic members provided most of the vegetables for the feast, along with dozens of quarts of Straus Family Creamery yogurt for guests to take home with them.

Here’s who helped feed the multitude: Bank of Petaluma, turkeys; Bovine Bakery, bread; Brickmaiden Bread, bread; Clover Stornetta, dairy products; Coast Roast, coffee; Forks & Fingers (Novato), pitchers; rancher Bob Giacomini, Point Reyes Bleu cheese; Lombardi’s (Petaluma), bread; National Park Service, turkeys; Palace Market, potatoes; Rhea McIsaac, produce; Sacred Heart Parish, pies; Gail Coppinger, produce; Peter Martinelli, produce; Station House Café, salad dressing & produce; Waste Management, debris box; West Marin Lions Club, turkeys; Rotary Club, turkeys; Marin Produce (San Rafael), produce; Toby’s Feed Barn, produce; and Star Route Farms, produce.

Here to join me in wishing you a Happy Thanksgiving are a flock of wild turkeys, which I spotted this afternoon behind my pine tree as they strutted near the fence of neighbors Dan and Mary Huntsman.

Wild turkeys, of course, are not native to West Marin. Working with the California Department of Fish & Game, a hunting club in 1988 introduced the wild turkeys on Loma Alta Ridge, which overlooks the San Geronimo Valley. The original flock of 11 hens and three toms all came from a population that Fish & Game had established in the Napa Valley during the 1950s.

By now wild turkeys are common throughout West Marin, particularly around Spirit Rock and Flanders Ranch in Woodacre (where they’re protected), around Tomales (where they’ve shorted out overhead lines and intimidated children), and around Nicasio, Point Reyes Station, and Olema.

The only folks doing much turkey hunting around here anymore, however, are Point Reyes National Seashore rangers. As might be expected, the park has attempted to eliminate these “exotic” symbols of America’s first Thanksgiving celebrations.

America’s Thanksgiving, as it happens, originated with two celebrations. The initial one was held by Virgina colonists in 1619 to thank God for an abundant harvest. Two years later, Massachusetts colonists held a Thanksgiving celebration after their first harvest. This second celebration was the one where the governor of Plymouth Colony invited the Wampanoag people to join them for three days of feasting, and the Indians brought venison to the potluck.

Every year at this time, I like many other people in the Western World display a cornucopia at home. I knew from my days as a Latin student that cornu means horn and copia means plenty, but until last year, I’d never looked into the mythology behind the display. It turns out to be fascinating and has to do with the birth of the god Zeus.

The ancient Greeks and Romans considered Zeus the youngest son of the Titans Cronus and Rhea. Cronus, who then ruled the world, supposedly had been told that he would lose his throne to one of his children, so he gulped down each one when it was born. To avoid having another baby eaten, Rhea secretly gave birth to Zeus in Crete. She then wrapped a rock as if it were a baby and gave it to Cronus, who swallowed it whole.

Growing up on Crete, Zeus was protected by a goat named Amalthea, who also provided him with milk. One day while the young god was playing with Amalthea, he accidentally broke off one of her horns. Horrified by the pain and distress he’d caused his surrogate mother, Zeus promised Amalthea that forever after, the horn would always be full of whatever good things she desired. Thus was born the cornucopia that many of us display each fall as a symbol of an abundant year.

And may you too get whatever good things you desire during these end-of-the-year holidays.

A reminder: This year the annual West Marin Community Thanksgiving Dinner will be held in Point Reyes Station’s Dance Palace. Turkey dinners will be served at no charge (although donations are always welcome) from 2 to 3 p.m. And for the first time, those planning to attend have not been asked to make reservations. However, people willing to volunteer time serving the dinner have been asked to call West Marin Community Resource Center at 663-8361.

“I have been one acquainted with the night.” Robert Frost, 1928

Crescent moon at sunset Wednesday, along with an Oregon junco on my railing. Every culture I’ve encountered enjoys colorful sunsets but feels some apprehension when night falls, fearing danger may lurk unseen in the dark. Here are some more creatures I’ve recently managed to photograph with a flash around my cabin after nightfall.

A young but aggressive (toward other raccoons) male in my pine tree. The “waschbar (wash bear),” as a raccoon is called in German, is indeed in the same order (dog-like carnivorans) as bears, and it does like to wash its paws, although not necessarily its food. When a raccoon finds acorns in the forest, it makes no attempt to wash them, causing some zoologists to believe raccoons actually wash their paws to increase tactile sensitivity.

Judging from the amount of grit raccoons leave in my birdbath, however, I suspect that some of the washing is simply a matter of cleaning debris from their paws. Here my camera’s flash gives the raccoon both green and white eye shine. (Please see Posting 12 for an explanation.)

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“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night…. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness” Psalms 91

A roof rat gets a drink from my birdbath at night.

The rat, a native of southern Asia, is the same species (Rattus rattus) whose fleas spread bubonic plague throughout Europe in the 1340s, killing off half the population.

In West Marin, however, roof rats don’t transmit such pestilence, but they are a threat to dishwashers. (Please see Posting 13 for an explantion.)

“From ghoulies and ghosties/ And long-leggedy beasties/ And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!” Traditional Scottish prayer

At 2:30 a.m. one night last week, I was working on this blog at my computer upstairs when I was startled by something that bumped loudly into the window next to my desk and then flapped up and down the glass before coming to rest on my window sill. A few feet from me, a stunned bird sat around long enough for me to shoot this photo, which I then showed ornithologist Rich Stallcup of Point Reyes Station.

To me the bird looked like a starling, and I assumed my desk lamp had confused it. But what was it doing flying around in the dark at 2:30 a.m.? “It is a European starling,” Stallcup confirmed. “Often when birds are migrating at night or when they are disturbed from a night roost, they are dazzled by, and attracted to, artificial light sources like lighthouses and your desk lamp.”

Nonetheless, bumping into my window can’t have been any fun for the starling, and it may have decided, in the words of Lord Byron, “We’ll go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.”

Point Reyes Station resident Keith Mathews was an Air Force officer stationed in Tokyo back in 1962 when an official from the Philippine embassy invited him to visit Manila.

Keith, who had been a logistics officer ever since injuries from a fighter-jet crash made it unsafe for him to pilot a plane, was scheduled to travel to the Philippines anyhow, so he readily accepted the invitation. Not only did he get to travel first class on a commercial airline instead of taking a military flight, the Philippine government put him up in a fancy hotel and provided him with a Jeep, a driver, and two bodyguards.

But even two bodyguards proved to be not enough. While crossing the hills of Luzon to meet a ferry that would take him to another island, Keith’s Jeep was stopped by 15 highwaymen on horseback brandishing single-shot rifles.

Keith told this story Saturday during a goodbye party that several of us threw for the “Mac Guru” of West Marin. The computer technician, who first moved to West Marin 25 years ago, will move to Valdosta, Georgia, next week.

The bandits took the Jeep and the guards’ rifles. One bodyguard’s rifle, however, was a locally valuable Winchester repeater, and a bandit, apparently out of sympathy, gave the owner a single-shot rifle in partial exchange.

Leaving one of their group with the horses, the other 14 piled into the Jeep and headed for town. Unfortunately, no one knew how to drive very well, and the Jeep ran off the road and into a gorge. Keith and his group discovered the wreck as they walked back to the nearest town. “There were bodies lying everywhere,” he recalled.

Keith said his group did not stop to help the injured bandits, they had the guns, but continued walking and when they got to town reported what had happened. The Philippine army was then dispatched to the scene.

The Philippine government later called the highwaymen “Communist terrorists,” Keith told us, but it wasn’t true. They were just field workers with primitive guns stealing a car, he said, and “probably never heard of Karl Marx.”

Listening to Keith’s story Saturday was a fascinated group of Macintosh-computer users. Because a disproportionate number of West Marin residents use Macs, most of Keith’s friends have hired him at one time or another to work on their computers. As a result, the 35 folks who showed up for the party had not only their friendship with Keith in common but also their preference in computer manufacturers.

Keith’s story of surviving a carjacking in the Philippines reminded me of how much he has survived in his 73 years, and not merely the holdup in Luzon or a fighter-jet crash in Nevada.

“During the Second World War, we had to support ourselves because everything was rationed. Farm families in the area traded butter, produce, meat, and poultry with each other,” Keith said. “Looking back on it we did real good during the war.

“I went in the Air Force in February 1954 because I heard that the draft board was coming for me.” Had he been drafted, Keith would have ended up in the Army, but “I’d been on a farm, and I didn’t want to be slogging through mud.

“In 1954 when I joined, the Korean war was ongoing, but it had slowed down. We still don’t have a truce there, by the way. When I enlisted, they kept giving me a bunch of tests, and I finally got accepted into pilot training. Three months after I joined, I soloed my first airplane, a Piper two-seater.” During pilot training, Keith said, “I flew 40 different airplanes. I checked out [as an approved pilot] in every airplane I flew.”

In 1955, Keith married, and with his wife Patsy soon had a son and daughter. In the summer of 1958, the family was living in Bangor, Maine, where Keith was stationed when he was sent to Nellis Air Force Base on the outskirts of Las Vegas for a three-week training course. Keith was then 23.

Part of Keith’s training was in an F-100C, “the first production plane that would do supersonic in level flight.” The single-engine fighter jet (seen at right) carried four 50-caliber machine guns. On July 13, “I was up in the air for an hour,” he recalled. “It was a gunnery run, and when you run out of bullets, you come back for more.” Doing just that, Keith was landing on a runway at Nellis when everything went to hell.

“I touched down and rode probably 100 yards when [the right landing gear] broke off. I was still doing 200 mph, and I started cartwheeling to the right, wing tip to wing tip. It was a very exciting ride.”

The plane cartwheeled onto a grassy median strip between runways, said Keith, “and it’s a good thing. If I was doing that on the concrete, there’d be nothing but sparks. That was my biggest fear when it started. I thought, ‘Oh, shit! I’m burned up!'”

As the jet cartwheeled down the median, “my head’s banging on the canopy on both sides,” Keith remembered. “I’m wearing a helmet that weighs six to eight pounds.

“I had no control over anything. When the airplane finally stopped, the firetrucks were right there. I blew the canopy off and started to run. I got about 50 feet and collapsed.”

Keith recalled, “I felt a lot of pain. Half my body was paralyzed.” His neck was broken, and there was bleeding into his spinal column. Keith spent the next five months in a hospital at Parks Air Force Base where the patient in the next room was World War II hero Jimmy Doolittle of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo fame.

Doolittle, who had “something wrong with his knee,” proved to be a friendly neighbor, Keith said. Doctors initially warned Keith he might have only five years to live. Keith’s injuries had caused him to have a stroke, and “they figured I’d have later strokes.” Both predictions proved wrong although Keith was left with mild tremors.

Keith (seen here at center with a few of the guests at his party) stayed in the Air Force after he was well enough to return to duty but was taken off the flying staff. “They said it would be dangerous for my life,” he noted.

Instead he was made a logistics officer and sent to Greenland for a year. This was followed by a short stint at Castle Air Force Base in Merced and then Tokyo, where he was living when he took the trip to the Philippines.

As the logistics staff officer for the 5th Air Command (the regional air command for the Far East), Keith was sent to Vietnam four times as the war there intensified. At other times, he was dispatched to Korea, Okinawa, Guam, Taiwan, and Thailand, as well as the Philippines. A logistics officer makes sure military supplies are where they should be, and the record keeping required ultimately made Keith computer savvy.
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After leaving the Air Force in 1968, Keith worked as a bartender in Monterey and somehow managed to convince the National Institute of Mental Health to contract with him to teach drug-abuse treatment at Hayward State, a subject he then had to quickly master.

That position led to his writing a drug-abuse-treatment plan for Stanislaus County and then four years as executive director of Walden House treatment program in San Francisco. For the next 11 years, he consulted with all of California’s alcohol- and drug-abuse programs through a State Mental Health Department project.

Keith arrived in West Marin soon after the storm and flood of 1982, left in 1998 for two years, and has been back here ever since fixing people’s Macintosh problems. How did he come to advertise as the Mac Guru? “Somebody called me that about 1998,” Keith replied. “I thought, ‘I’ll stick it in the paper and see if it draws any flies.’ It worked.”

But now, Keith said, it’s time to retire…. I’ll still do the same thing, but I won’t work as hard.” The computer guru told me his customer base totals 401 Mac users, noting that a few out-of-state customers, such as former West Marin resident John Grissim in Sequim, Washington, consult with him by phone and email. Keith added that he now plans to do more long-distance consulting.

Why is he leaving? Keith, who has children in Georgia, said a series of health problems last winter made him think, “I ought to find someplace cheaper to live with family around if something happens. I can’t afford to get sick in West Marin.”

But as a sign at his goodbye party said, “We’ll miss you, Keith.”

October’s final weekend provided a reminder of why many of us have chosen to live in West Marin. With sunny skies Saturday and Sunday, temperatures were comfortable even along the Pacific and Tomales Bay. On Monday, the weather turned chilly, and fog still blanketed the coast on Tuesday and Wednesday. With Standard Time scheduled to begin Sunday and the shortest day of the year only six weeks off, the season of darkness will soon be upon us.

Barbecuing oysters beside Tomales Bay in Inverness, Molly Milner, who operates an oyster bar on the deck at Barnaby’s restaurant, held an end-of-the-season party Saturday, with oysters at half price. I alone ate a dozen. A folk-rock band entertained diners, some of whom were surprised when the bandleader urged them to join a heretofore-unheard-of cause: saving aberrant red variations of (normally black) Frisian horses in Europe.

It seemed to be a weekend for eating throughout West Marin. County and volunteer firefighters held a pancake breakfast in the Point Reyes Station firehouse Sunday morning to raise money for the West Marin Disaster Preparedness Council. In the foreground (from left): Donna Larkin of Inverness Park, Phillip McKee (back to camera), Tony Ragona of Point Reyes Station, and Heather Sundberg of Point Reyes Station.

Mike Meszaros, former chief of the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department, cooks eggs in the Point Reyes Station firehouse for Matt Gallagher of Point Reyes Station during the annual event.

Outside the pancake breakfast, firefighters tear apart a car to demonstrate how the Jaws of Life are used to free a victim trapped in a wreck. “Jaws of Life” (a trademark of Hale Products Inc.) is not just one single tool but a set of several types of piston-rod hydraulic tools, including cutters, spreaders and rams. In the background, a rescue basket hangs from a fire engine’s hoist.

While West Marin residents watched rescue demonstrations and ate pancakes at the Point Reyes Station firehouse, dozens of motorcyclists, enjoying the last Sunday of October, roared down Highway 1 a block away.

Point Reyes Station resident Hazel Martinelli, matriarch of the Martinelli ranching family, died Saturday, Oct. 27, at 101 years old. She was the mother of Leroy, Patricia, and Stanley Martinelli of Point Reyes Station and the widow of Elmer W. Martinelli.

She leaves eight grandchildren and five great grandchildren.

On her birthday, Sept. 30, less than a month ago, her son Leroy (with her at right) had thrown a party for her at his deer camp in Tomasini Canyon.

Patricia Martinelli on Monday noted her mother, whose maiden name was Guldager, was born and raised in Tomales where her father was a cattle dealer. She married Elmer Martinelli of Point Reyes Station on Aug. 1, 1925.

A Vigil Service for Mrs. Martinelli will be held at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 1, at Sacred Heart Church in Olema. The Funeral Mass will be held at 10 a.m. Friday at the church followed by entombment in Olema Cemetery. Visitation will be from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday at Parent-Sorensen Mortuary in Petaluma.

The family has asked that any memorials be made to Tomales Regional History Center, Autism Society of America, or Dominican University.

This photo exhibition in progress focuses on the variety of nature that can be seen from the two acres in Point Reyes Station where I live.

In his book The Natural History of the Point Reyes Peninsula, biologist Jules Evens of Point Reyes Station writes: “The Coast Miwok and the Pomo, who inhabited these shores for at least 5,000 years, were tideland collectors, acorn gatherers, and game hunters who survived and measured time by the seasonal abundance of food. For those early people each season, counted by phases of the moon, brought its own sustenance. One moon was for gathering herbs; one marked the return of the ducks; another marked their departure. On the bright full moon of midwinter, hunting could be difficult.”

Here is a look at what can be seen at this time of year.

A Buckeye butterfly lands on a chrysanthemum outside my cabin Sunday.

This week’s gibbous moon was waxing, and October’s full moon will be Friday night. A gibbous moon is one that’s not full, but more than half its facing hemisphere is illuminated. Since childhood I have been fascinated by being able to see the moon’s topography along its terminator, the boundary between the illuminated and unilluminated hemispheres. At upper left, the dark, mile-deep crater shaped like a five-pointed star is 69-mile-wide Crater Gassendi. The light area immediately below the crater is the Mare Humorum, Moist Sea, formed by lava 3.9 billion years ago. This photo, like most on my blog, was shot with a $270 Kodak EasyShare camera, which came with a 10-power zoom. Newer models cost less and have a 12-power zoom.

A young blacktail buck next to my cabin just before recent rains turned grass green.

A Lesser goldfinch eating buds on my rosemary bush. Lesser goldfinches eat seeds, flower buds, and berries. Point Reyes Station ornithologist Rich Stallcup, who identified the finch in the photo, this week told me, “Lesser goldfinches… are way less common than American goldfinches in West Marin during summer. There is an upward pulse in their numbers in the fall. Then both species withdraw a bit inland for the winter.”

A Western fence lizard suns herself outside my cabin. Western fence lizards eat insects and spiders, and they, in turn, are eaten by birds and snakes, which typically catch them while they’re sunning themselves.

A tip of the hat this week to Rod Ruiz, supervising ranger for Marin County parks. When alerted 10 days ago to a paradox at White House Pool (no scenery visible from some scenic overlooks along Papermill Creek), he promptly fixed the problem.

White House Pool Park is named after a wide spot in Papermill/Lagunitas Creek. Bounded by that creek to the east and Point Reyes Station’s levee road to the west, the park stretches from the Olema Creek tributary to a parking lot near the intersection of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Bear Valley Road. At each end is a rustic bridge.

Meandering the length of the park is a storybook-like path through lush foliage, making it popular with West Marin residents from seniors out for a stroll to bicyclists to dog walkers. As can be seen at upper left, here and there along the way, county Parks and Open Space has cut narrow lanes that branch off the main path and tunnel through foliage to the edge of the levee. At the end of each lane, permanent benches overlooking Papermill Creek provide places for walkers to rest and enjoy the scenery.

Unfortunately, in the past couple of years, foliage in front of half the benches got so high that views of the creek and the landscape beyond it were lost. Here Linda Petersen of Point Reyes Station two weeks ago tries to again spot four river otters she’d seen fishing just downstream the previous day. But from this lane and the bench at the end of it, the creek was mostly hidden. Linda was able to move to another vantage point, but her options were relatively few.

This week, Linda’s aging dog Sebastian had a much better view from the same bench. His vision needs all the help it can get, so the change was probably dramatic for him too. What had changed? Ten days ago, ranger Ruiz was told that although the benches had been been anchored where they would provide scenic views, there were no longer any views from several benches. The county was, in effect, maintaining lanes through foliage that came to dead-ends in more foliage. Ruiz said he would make sure the lanes were properly taken care of and did. It should be stressed that the county did not remove vegetation from the creek bank (i.e. riparian vegetation) but merely trimmed foliage on top of the levee. Those who enjoy looking out at the views from White House Pool can credit supervising ranger Ruiz with looking out for them.

Two red-tailed hawks above my cabin, part of a family group of four. Biologist Jules Evans of Point Reyes Station notes this time of year is also the height of the coast’s hawk migration, which can best be seen at Hawk Hill on the Marin Headlands. For those who haven’t been there before, here are directions. While southbound on Highway 101, take the last Sausalito exit before the Golden Gate Bridge, turn left a short distance, and then turn right onto Conzelman Road. Go a ways and then watch for the sign for Hawk Hill.

Although this is the height of the hawk migration, which includes red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks along with falcons and turkey vultures, the migration can be seen throughout the fall at Hawk Hill. The hill is so named because migrating hawks, falcons, and vultures reconnoiter above it before crossing the Golden Gate, which is why so many hawks can be seen circling there. Biologist Evans notes that not all members of these species are migratory. Some are year-round residents of West Marin.

More than 80 guests showed up Sunday at Leroy Martinelli’s deer camp in Tomasini Canyon to celebrate his mother Hazel Martinelli’s 101st birthday. Mrs. Martinelli, who lives with her daughter Patricia in Point Reyes Station, is seen here with her son Leroy at right and Joan Haley of Point Reyes Station at left.

Leroy Martinelli, himself 78, with daughters Gail Hale and Margie Langdon during the party he hosted at his deer camp. Such hunting “camps” are common on ranches around Point Reyes Station and typically consist of a small clubhouse with a kitchen and social area. Guests arriving for Sunday’s party found part of the entrance road patrolled by black Angus steers.