After months of preparation, Tuesday was, politically speaking, D-Day. For awhile it seemed that almost anything could happen.

Republican-controlled legislatures in several states had made it more difficult for minorities and the aged to vote. Voting was chaotic in Florida, where the period for early voting had been greatly shortened. On Sunday, so many people waited, often unsuccessfully, at the Miami-Dade elections office to cast absentee ballots that some of them had their cars towed from a parking lot across the street. Yet Republican Governor Rick Scott refused to extend the hours for early voting.

“Democrats are traditionally more likely to vote early, which is why many in the party have ascribed political motives to Scott’s restriction of the process. According to a report in The Miami Herald on Saturday, Democrats were leading Republicans ‘by about 187,000 early in-person ballots cast’ as of that morning,” the Huffington Post had noted a day earlier.

Meanwhile, blacks in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida were receiving robocalls that falsely informed them they could vote by phone.

D-Day in West Marin. Photography is not allowed in California’s polling places if it would intimidate anyone from voting. Fortunately when I showed up during a lull at the Point Reyes Station polls, both women marking their ballots told election workers they had no objection to being photographed.

Listening all Tuesday evening to reports from the front must have been far harder on our commander in chief than it was on those of us whose main responsibility was to photograph a bit of the event. The Rupert Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal was predicting that our fight was lost. Reports from battles for bunkers in the Senate sounded encouraging, not so good for advances in the House.

Barack Hussein Obama was leading in the Electoral College, but Willard Mitt Romney was temporarily ahead in the popular vote. Anything seemed possible. Television kept telling us the outcome in key states was still too close to call. Periodically I had to tune it all out just to clear my head.

One hundred twenty-four years of happiness. Malia, 14, Michelle, 48, Sasha, 11, and Barack Obama, 51, celebrate his reelection as the 44th President of the United States. New York Times photo.

Suddenly television showed Obama supporters in Chicago cheering. The fight was over, and the country for the moment was again safe. It hadn’t been Romney himself that had me worried as much as the rightwing fanatics with whom he is now allied. Can you imagine Paul Ryan a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Apparently Congressman Ryan had trouble imagining that too, for he kept on campaigning for his current seat in the House of Representatives while separately running for the Vice Presidency. He realized the likelihood of his being elected to serve as Vice President of the United States for four years was less certain than the likelihood of his being reelected to represent southeast Wisconsin in the House for two more years.

Obama carried California by more than a million votes and Marin County with 73.93 percent of the vote.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein, 79, (right), who has already represented California in the US Senate for 20 years, won easy reelection for another six.

Measure A, which had been supported in West Marin by Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), as well as many individual ranchers and conservationists, won countywide with 73.6 percent of the vote. The quarter-cent sales tax to support parks and open space needed a two-thirds majority.

Measure C, an eight-year extension of a $184.70 parcel tax to maintain and improve Shoreline School District, won with 76.8 percent of the vote. It also needed a two-thirds majority for passage.

Measure E, which would have authorized a $49 parcel tax in Bolinas for maintaining Mesa Park, lost despite getting 65.44 percent of the vote. It needed 66.66 percent for passage but fell short by 1.22 percent.

Measure F, which merely allows the Stinson Beach Fire Protection District to keep all the tax revenue it collects, won with 64.6 percent. It needed only a simple majority for passage.

Stinson Beach Water District elected three directors: Barbara Boucke, 239 votes (29.33 percent), Sandra Cross, 233 votes (28.59 percent), and Marius E. Nelsen, 195 votes (23.93 percent). The losers were: Terry Bryant, 78 votes (9.57 percent) and G. Scott Tye, 63 votes (7.73 percent).

House of Representatives: Democrat Jared Huffman appears well ahead of Republican Daniel Roberts, winning 76.59 percent to 23.41 percent in Marin County. That’s a 43,247-vote margin. The 2nd Congressional District runs from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, however, so results are not yet in from all northern counties.

State Assembly: Democrat Marc Levine beat Democrat Michael Allen by 2,131 votes in Marin County and trailed him by 468 votes in Sonoma County, giving Levine a 1,663-vote margin of victory.

There have been some odd returns around the country this election season. In August, residents of Jacksons’ Gap, Alabama, decisively reelected Mayor Janice Canham even though she had died in July. This week, Texans reelected State Senator Mario Gallegos, a Democrat, although he died last month. Likewise Iowans reelected State Senator Pat Ward, a Republican, even though she too had died in October.

These unlikely results will now, of course, necessitate special elections, but at least they stand as a testament to the popularity of the deceased incumbents. Thank God Obama not only won reelection but is alive and well in the White House.

When I moved to Point Reyes Station in 1975, the town’s postmaster was a short, thin, friendly man named George Gallagher. His identical twin Bob ran North Bend Ranch just east of town along the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road.

Sadly, that historic ranch is now for sale. Scott Stevens of Leading Edge Properties two weeks ago told The San Francisco Chronicle the 300-acre ranch is listed for $5.5 million.

The ranch got the name North Bend because Papermill Creek makes a northward-pointing arc as it crosses the property. In 1913, the twins, who both died in 2002 at the age of 89, were born on the ranch, which their grandfather bought from the Shafter family in the 1870s.

The old Gallagher house is unoccupied but is now being cleaned. Photos by Leading Edge Properties, (707) 695-4448.

Bob and George grew up in a white, two-story Victorian house, watching the North Pacific Railroad’s narrow-gauge trains rumble through their front yard, sometimes hopping aboard for a trip into San Francisco.

“There’s something about a train ,you can live right by it every day, and still when one comes by, you can’t help looking up,” Bob Gallagher recalled in a Point Reyes Light interview 11 years ago.

“You could always keep time by the trains runnin’ by there,” his brother George added. “Like clockwork five or six daily trains passed by on schedule from dawn to dusk.”

While the young twins rode a horse and buggy into town to attend Black District School, their older siblings rode the train to high school. “They used to get the train up to Tomales High and get there by noon,” George said. “Then they’d have to catch another train back at 3 p.m. That cut into their learning some, but they turned out just fine.”

The cattle-feeding barn with the ranch’s old barn at right.

The tracks ran right between the Gallaghers’ front door and their barn. “The dairy was on one side, and the house was on the other,” Bob said. “We had to cross the those tracks. [The train] always whistled before it got there, but comin’ one way, it came right out of the woods.”

The Gallagher children weren’t the only ranch residents who had to be careful. Sometimes turkeys and cows got dangerously close to the tracks while foraging in the right-of-way.

George Gallager (left) and Bob Gallagher in 1997.

Bob told of a time when a young ranch dog followed him and George as they ran across the tracks to beat a speeding train. The twins made it across safely, but the dog disappeared under engine. However, after the train had passed, the dog, which had crouched under the cars, got up and was able to walk away although it no longer had a tail.

The trains made it possible for the Gallaghers to take quick trips into San Francisco. Both Bob and George fondly remembered playing cards on one trip with Jackie Coogan, the child actor whose well-known roles included starring with Charlie Chaplin in The Kid. As it happened, Coogan had a grandfather in West Marin whom he frequently visited.

It was easy to catch the train as it ran through their ranch, Bob and George noted. “You’d just wave down the conductor, and he’d stop and give you a toot-toot,” George said.

The brothers would then board the train and ride it to Sausalito, where they would transfer to a Northwestern Pacific ferry. They’d reach Fisherman’s Wharf in about 90 minutes, less time than it takes most commuters today.

The main ranch house, where Kevin and Katie Gallagher live, was built in the 1960s and has three bedrooms.

There is much more that could be said about the ranch.

To the south, it borders on federally owned land within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. In the 1980s, the GGNRA’s boundaries were extended to include North Bend Ranch. This means the Park Service has Congressional permission to buy the property; however, the Park Service hasn’t had the funds to do so. The Park Service has also discussed extending the Cross Marin through the ranch, and on Oct. 14, 2001, bicyclists took a trial run. But nothing has come of that idea either.

 Another government agency, North Marin Water District, has a well on the property. It’s one of several wells along Papermill Creek for the water system that serves Point Reyes Station, Olema, and Inverness Park.

The Gallagher family hadn’t wanted to sell the property but needs the money to help pay for retirement and medical bills, real estate agent Stevens told The Chronicle. The owners of the ranch are George Gallagher’s sons Kevin and Paul, along with Bob Gallagher’s son and daughter Dan and Maureen.

Almost 2,000 people filled Love Field in Point Reyes Station Saturday for the seventh annual Far West Fest. The $35-per-ticket event was a fundraiser for KWMR community radio, youth centers in Point Reyes Station (The Lounge) and the San Geronimo Valley (The Loft), as well as the Bolinas Community Center and Home Base (the parent organization of Love Field).

Jack Kramer, president of Home Base which sponsored the festival, said the 2,000 figure includes children, volunteers, musicians, and vendors along with ticket holders. Although total revenue from the event is still being calculated, Kramer said the fest “was the most successful ever.”

Les Nubians from France wowed the crowd with up-tempo rhythms that prompted dozens of listeners to get up and dance on the grass. The Grammy-nominated group was led by an “Afropean” sister duo who grew up in Chad and France.

Other headliners included Orgone, a Los Angeles funk and soul band, and Vinyl, a Marin band with a large following. Numerous other bands also performed throughout the afternoon.

Festival goers took advantage of the warm, sunny weather to get a tan while picnicking on the grass and listening to the music. Dotting Love Field were canopies sheltering vendors who sold ethnic and tie-dyed clothing, jewelry, crafts, beer, wine, hot dogs and hamburgers, oysters, various exotic fare, and much more. StuArt of Bolinas used a Mayan calendar to tell fortunes. Small children squealed in fun on playground equipment of a very small variety.

Plucking banjos (from left) were Lowell Levinger better known as Banana, Steve Wharton, Konrad Alt, Ernie Noyes, Ingrid Noyes, and Jim Chayka. Backing them up on drums and keyboard were Jacquie Phelan and Brian Lamoreaux.

A group of banjo players, who called themselves the Warren Hellman Tribute Band, gave a brief performance. The band was created to honor Warren Hellman, a philanthropist who died last December at the age of 77. An investment banker who had been a partner in Lehman Brothers, he was also a founder of the Hellman & Friedman private-equity firm.

Although he was a billionaire, Hellman did not believe in accumulating cash for its own sake. He was a contributor to many causes, including education, healthcare, programs for the poor, and journalism. Dismayed at watching economics force staff reductions at San Francisco newspapers, he donated $6 million to the Bay Citizen, a nonprofit, professional newsroom founded in 2010.

A  banjo player as well as a financier, Hellman toured with a group called the Wronglers. He may have been best known in the San Francisco Bay Area for having founded the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in 2001. The free, three-day music festival in Golden Gate Park has now grown to where more than 750,000 people attended it last year. Hellman has left money to subsidize the festival another 15 years.

Performing on a second stage, the band Spark and Whisper drew an enthusiastic audience, including the dancers at right.

His last Far West Fest for at least awhile. Jerry Lunsford (right) hangs out at his traditional spot near the sound system for one of the festival’s stages. Since 1999, Lunsford has been a volunteer at KWMR, where he has hosted the Hippie from Olema music show. Lunsford, however, is about to leave West Marin for Crested Butte, Colorado, where he will become station manager for another community radio station, KBUT.

Shortly after 4 p.m., sirens suddenly broke through the music as firetruck after firetruck wailed past Love Field, some on the adjoining levee road, some on Bear Valley Road to the south.

As it happened, a 1.3-acre wildfire had broken out at the edge of Limantour Beach in the Point Reyes National Seashore. County firefighters and Park Service firefighters raced to the scene along with crews from Inverness and Stinson Beach. A tanker plane from Cal Fire made two water drops.

Because the firetrucks could not cross the pedestrian bridge to the beach, long hose-lines had to be laid to the blaze. The fire appeared to have started in a brushy area near the base of a willow tree, which is a few yards off the path to the beach, Park Service Fire Capt. John Haag later said. Most of what burned, along with brush, were reeds and Andean grass.

What started the fire was still unknown, he said Sunday, although it was almost certainly caused by humans. It took firefighters only an hour to douse the blaze, meaning that containing the fire ended well before the Far West Fest ended at 7 p.m. However, a fire crew hung around Limantour Beach until late at night in case there were flare-ups. Firefighters were back at the scene Sunday, and Capt. Haag said firefighters would check the area daily for the next five days.

Compared to other wildfires that have been flaring up around the state and country, the Limantour blaze was fairly small. All the same, whether you spent Saturday afternoon at the Far West Fest or at Limantour Beach, you probably came home with a lot to talk about.

The 63rd annual Western Weekend, which celebrates West Marin’s agricultural heritage, drew one of its largest crowds in a decade last weekend. On Saturday, the West Marin 4-H Fair, the Western Weekend queen’s coronation, and a barn dance were all held at Toby’s Feed Barn.

Sunday’s events began with a noontime parade down the three-block-long main street of Point Reyes Station. Despite the short route, the parade lasted more than an hour because street performances frequently stopped the procession. In addition, a few entries upon reaching the end of the route took a side street back to the starting point and made a second pass through town, thereby lengthening the parade.

Following the parade, the Marin County Farm Bureau held a chicken barbecue in Toby’s parking lot while a band played, people danced, and 4-H members sold pastries.

4-H Fair  Olivia Blantz of Point Reyes-Olema 4-H (left) and Emily Charlton of San Rafael 4-H cradle their poultry prior to the judging in Toby’s Feed Barn. Olivia’s hen won Best in Show.

Emily’s sister Erin Rose Charlton won the Showmanship award in the Junior category for her hen.

Goats  Olivia Tyrnauer’s goat Cinnamon (right) won first place in  Senior Showmanship. Olivia is a member of Mill Valley 4-H.

A Pigmy goat named Sylvester, which is owned by Megan Sintef of Nicasio 4-H, won a first place award in Junior Showmanship.

Altogether five goats were entered for judging in the 4-H Fair.

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Rabbits  Amelia Paulsey, 6, from San Rafael 4-H with her bunny Butterfly is questioned by her mother Kari Paulsey, who happened to be one of the judges.

For the first time in memory, no large animals such as cows and horses were entered in the 4-H Fair. As Allison Keaney, Marin County 4-H program representative, explained: “The fair in general has been running the risk of just not happening. With the alterations of the school schedules over the years, the first weekend in June [became] hard for folks.

“Our fair only had 36 members enter, representing only 25 families. That is actually up from last year. We only had two large-animal entries in 2010 and 2011 and therefore scratched the competition.

“Also, the demographic of our county enrollment has changed. The average age of our members has dropped a lot. We have lots of little members, which is exciting for the future, but members can’t do a large-animal project until they are nine years old.”

Western Weekend Queen Brenda Rico of Point Reyes Station riding in Sunday’s parade.

Parade Grand Marshal Michael Mery of Point Reyes Station.

Marin County Sheriff Bob Doyle (right) rides on a buckboard in Sunday’s parade.

Last hurrah  Lynn Woolsey (D-Petaluma) takes a last ride in a Western Weekend parade as a congresswoman before she retires from the US House of Representatives.

Incumbent Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey of Forest Knolls (center) does some last-minute campaigning during the Western Weekend parade in advance of this week’s election.

Congressional candidate Norman Solomon (D-Inverness Park) and his wife Cheryl Higgins led a large contingent of supporters in the Western Weekend parade.

The Aztec Dancers of Santa Rosa, traditional Western Weekend parade favorites, stopped periodically during the procession to dance to the beat of a drum. The dancers took third place in Adult Street Shows. They also won the parade’s Grand Prize.

KWMR community radio, 90.5 FM in Point Reyes Station and 89.9 FM in Bolinas, was represented by numerous marchers and an elaborate float. The entry won 2nd place among Adult Drill Teams.

Youngsters took advantage of the main street’s curb in order to have front-row seating for the parade, as well as to grab candies thrown from floats.

Adult spectators took whatever seating they could find, which for Gary Martin (left) and Bill Barrett was a spot on the front of the judges’ stand.

The Nave Patrola annually spoofs the World War I Italian Army, with the patrol’s soldiers marching chaotically and sometimes pausing to anachronistically shout, “Il Duce!, the group won the Best Adult Drill Team award, as well as the overall Best Drill Team award.

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 replied that many of the members are of Italian descent.

The seventh and eighth grade rock band from West Marin School were highlights of the parade. Here the eighth grade performs some rock’n roll classics. The West Marin Kids Who Rock band won first place in Kids’ Music plus the overall Best Music award.

Papermill Creek Children’s Corner preschool in Point Reyes Station took 1st place among Kids’ Drill Teams.

The Wedding Party with Carol Rossi and pugs won first in Adult Animals. Possibly influencing the judges’ decision was their being given the top layer of the wedding cake.

Blazing Saddle Jason McLean of Point Reyes Station (left) sits astride one of two metal deer he built, with his deer shooting fire out its rear end. McLean’s entry took 1st place among Adult Vehicles.

West Marin Community Services, which sponsors among other things the Food Pantry, the Thrift Store in Point Reyes Station, and the Tomales Bay Waterdogs swimming classes for youths, took 1st place among Kids’ Floats.

A 1920s buggy driven by Ethan McNamara took 1st among Kids’ Horses and won the Best Horse award.

West Marin Pharmacy joined the parade for the first time this year and won 1st place in Adult Music.

Halleck Creek Ranch in Nicasio, which operates a riding club for disabled children, took 1st in Kids’ Animals and the Best Animal award.

West Marin’s own tap dancers, the Fab-U-Taps, provided a street performance called Women of the World for Peace. The group took 1st place among Adult Street Shows, as well as the overall Best Street Show award.

Following Sunday’s parade, the West Marin Lions Club held a chicken barbecue in the parking lot of Toby’s Feed Barn. Members of Point Reyes-Olema 4-H sold pastries, and the Doc Kraft Dance Band inspired people to get up and dance.

The posting that follows is not a history of the North Pacific Coast Railroad or its successors, the North Shore Railroad and the Northwestern Pacific. Rather it consists of a few glimpses of the wondrous line as it evolved over 58 years and then for the most part faded away.

More than half the towns in West Marin grew up along the tracks of the North Pacific Coast narrow-gauge railroad. In 1875, the line opened between the Sausalito ferry terminal and Tomales by way of Point Reyes Station. Soon it was extended to Cazadero’s logging camps.

The narrow gauge makes a morning stop in Lagunitas around 1915. By then, the tracks east of Manor (now part of Fairfax) had been converted to standard gauge with an electrified third rail powering the locomotives.

In order for trains to travel between the San Geronimo Valley and Manor, the narrow gauge required two tunnels to get through Whites Hill: “a small one at the bottom behind White Hill School and the longer one at the top, which passed directly under the current [Sir Francis Drake Boulevard] pass,” historian Dewey Livingston of Inverness told me.

These were replaced in 1904 by the Bothin Tunnel on the south side of Woodacre. The Bothin Tunnel was sized to accommodate standard-gauge railroad cars, which in 1920 took over the stretch from Point Reyes Station east to Manor.

After the standard gauge shut down in 1933, the Bothin Tunnel remained open, primarily for fire engines from the county fire department in Woodacre en route to fires in East Marin. After many years, however, the Bothin Tunnel was closed by a fire and cave-in, Livingston added.

A northbound train crosses the Point Reyes Station trestle.

A particularly wretched part of the line was this trestle over Papermill Creek immediately east of Point Reyes Station. A sharp curve in the tracks just west of the creek was followed by a reverse curve on the trestle itself.

On June 21, 1903, one of the worst wrecks in the railroad’s history occurred at the trestle.

A special train had been chartered to carry friends of Warren Dutton, a founder of Tomales, to the town for his funeral. Returning southbound, the train, which had been traveling fairly fast all the way from Tomales, crossed the trestle a little too fast.

The engine and its coach fell off the trestle and landed upside down, killing two passengers. Four other passengers and the conductor were badly injured. Just three days later, another train ran off the tracks in nearby Tocaloma, crushing the engineer beneath the cab.

Three years later, the Point Reyes Station trestle experienced more misfortune when it was severely twisted (left) by the 1906 earthquake.

The trestle, however, was quickly repaired.

Similar damage occurred in Tomales and along the railroad bed beside Tomales Bay.

As the late railroad historian Bray Dickinson of Tomales noted in his 1967 book Narrow Gauge to the Redwoods, “Anticipating a big summer business, the narrow gauge company intended to start a new schedule on the day of the earthquake.

“The San Francisco morning newspapers never delivered because of the catastrophe — carried the North Shore timetable which provided a record four passenger trains daily to Cazadero and two additional locals for Point Reyes Station.”

In Tomales, the quake caused a hillside to collapse, tangling the tracks.

In the railroad’s early days, Tomales was the most prosperous West Marin stop, and nearby hamlets were also bustling places. Here a giant round of cheese awaits being picked up in 1894 at the train platform in Fallon.

In the 1890s, Engine 13 wrecked at Clark Summit just north of Fallon. The site is now part of Clark Summit Farm, an organic beef, pig, and chicken operation owned by Liz Cunninghame and her husband Dan Bagley.

Nowadays, most motorists on Highway 1 south of Tomales are familiar with these steel piers, which once held up a trestle spanning Keys Creek.

Far fewer people, however, have any idea how the trestle looked when it carried trains. In fact, remnants of the old railroad provide only a hint of the grand system it was.

For motorists heading north on Highway 1 from Point Reyes Station, the first turnout where they can stop and view Tomales Bay overlooks what was once a commercial area known as Bivalve. This long-gone oyster building was Bivalve’s dominant structure.

North of Bivalve, the old railroad bed along the shore is barely discernible these days.

In railroad days, however, this approach to Bivalve was a scenic part of the trip.

South of Bivalve, the railroad bed skirted a small lagoon as it crossed to Railroad Point on Martinelli property.

I know the spot well, for the late Sheriff’s Capt. Art Disterheft and I were once kayaking in the lagoon when we discovered we were virtually trapped by a strong incoming tide through the entrance channel (foreground at right).

We finally escaped by paddling frantically only to then hear someone on the turnout above us laughing loudly at our predicament.

The photo at right of a southbound train leaving Bivalve en route to Railroad Point was shot in June 1906. “This was two months after the great earthquake, which badly damaged this section of line along Tomales Bay,” Dickinson noted.

“Repairs had been rapidly made and regular trains were running over the entire line within three weeks. Uneven track ahead of Engine 3 marks quake damage.”

Although the tracks heading east from Point Reyes Station were converted to standard gauge in 1920, the tracks north of town remained narrow gauge. In 1930, the narrow-gauge section shut down, and in 1933, the standard-gauge section did too.

Much of the material for this posting comes from Dickinson’s book Narrow Gauge to the Redwoods. Anyone who lives in West Marin and is interested in its history should have a copy. The book was edited by historian Ted Wurm, who died in 2004, while most of its photos are from the late Roy Graves’ collection.

Water sheets down Seeger Dam as Nicasio Reservoir overflows.

A week after Nicasio Reservoir overflowed March 13, county supervisors declared an agricultural emergency because of drought conditions afflicting Marin ranches. The supervisors’ resolution declaring the emergency is the first step toward getting federal aid for ranchers.

Marin County Agricultural Commissioner Stacey Carlsen told the supervisors rainfall at many dairy and livestock ranches has been 31 percent of normal. The low rainfall combined with unseasonably warm weather, strong winds, and frosty mornings has dried out grass and inhibited new growth, the agricultural  commissioner explained.

The forage losses in pastures and rangelands are roughly 50 percent, he estimated. This has forced ranchers to reduce herd sizes and to buy supplemental feed far earlier in the year than usual, Carlsen said. The cost of feed is continuing to rise, the agricultural commissioner noted, and this is having a severe impact on Marin ranches. This county’s ranches, he said, are already operating with narrow margins.

Nicasio Reservoir water rushes down the spillway below Seeger Dam and flows into nearby Papermill Creek.

Notwithstanding the drought affecting ranches, the big water districts in West Marin report they’re doing just fine, thank you very much. Already this month, West Marin has received almost 15 inches of rain. As of a week ago, Marin Municipal Water District’s seven reservoirs stood at 94 percent of capacity compared with 91 percent at this date in an average year.

Even before this weekend’s rainstorms, Libby Pischel, spokeswoman for Marin Municipal, told me, “We are not expecting any rationing [this year].” The MMWD system serves homes and businesses in the San Geronimo Valley and in most of East Marin south of Novato.

Novato-based North Marin Water District operates a satellite system serving Point Reyes Station, Inverness Park, and Olema. It gets its water for the system from wells beside Papermill Creek upstream from the Coast Guard housing site in Point Reyes Station. Most of the water feeding the wells originates in two MMWD reservoirs: Nicasio Reservoir seasonally and Lake Lagunitas year round. A small amount originates in San Geronimo Creek.

North Marin General Manager Chris DeGabriele on Friday told me, “We are not expecting any water restrictions next summer in West Marin.”

Despite there being plenty of water to satisfy homes and businesses in three small towns, as well as fish in the creeks, there is not nearly enough to irrigate hundreds of square miles of ranchland — even if there were pipelines for doing so. Hence the agricultural emergency.

Point Reyes Station’s “birth can be pinpointed: Jan. 7, 1875, the day the first train came through on its way to Tomales,” the late historian Jack Mason of Inverness wrote in Earthquake Bay, A History of Tomales Bay, California (North Shore Books, 1976).

The train’s “first sightseers viewed Olema Station (its name for seven years) with unbelieving dismay. ‘The depot is in a wilderness!’ one of them wrote. And so it was: 11 acres of Mary Black Burdell’s cow pasture: no hotel, no sandwich stand or saloon.

“To reach Olema two miles distant, where many were headed, was well nigh impossible, with Papermill Creek to cross and no bridge or stageline,” Mason wrote. Back then Olema, whose downtown was much larger than it is today, was the commercial hub for the foot of Tomales Bay. It boasted two restaurants, two hotels, six bars, a racetrack, a school, a Catholic Church, and a Druids Hall.

In less than a year, a bridge providing access to Olema was built across Papermill Creek, but by that time, Mason observed, “passengers had a hotel nearer at hand …. ‘with the only saloon serving a vast and thirsty land.'” The hotel and saloon, which Dr. Galen Burdell built, were right across the street from the train depot.

Dr. Galen Burdell’s saloon.

Mary Black Burdell was married to dentist Galen Burdell and was the daughter of rancher James Black of Nicasio. Black Mountain, which provides the backdrop for Point Reyes Station, is named after him. In 1961, the site of Black’s ranch house was inundated by the completion of Nicasio Reservoir, but whenever the reservoir runs dry during droughts, the house’s foundation can still be seen on the western shore.

When the train depot opened in Mary Black Burdell’s pasture, Black had been leasing land nearby to former Sheriff James T. Stocker, who operated a dairy ranch on it. Today, “Stocker’s ranch site is marked by the cypress trees right across Highway 1 from Campolindo Road and [by] a couple of fruit trees,” Dewey Livingston, the reigning historian of Inverness, told me. “They all overlooked Tomasini Creek.” This this no doubt explains why Tomasini Canyon, where the old sump was located, for years was known as Stocker’s Gulch.

In the area around the depot, Mrs. Burdell gave her husband 950 acres of land she had inherited. The property would become the site of Point Reyes Station, and until the dentist’s death in 1906, “the town was his plaything,” wrote Mason. “By 1880, Burdell’s Station, as some called it, had all the appurtenances of civilization: a blacksmith shop, livery stable and butcher shop.”

A small school was erected in 1879, but in 1905 it was replaced by Black School (above), which was named after Mary Burdell’s father. The wooden, two-story structure was located where the firehouse is today.

The first store in town was built in 1883 at Second and A Streets by A.P. Whitney and Company of Petaluma but was sold four years later to Salvatore Grandi. The “Swiss farmer,” as Mason described Grandi, turned the business into a general store called Grandi’s Mercantile Company.

(It should be noted there is no street named Main Street in Point Reyes Station. The correct name for the main street is A Street or, if you prefer, Highway 1.)

The first post office opened on May 23, 1882, and the town changed names from Olema Station to Point Reyes the same day. The town’s name changed again, to Point Reyes Station, on Aug. 10, 1891, so its mail wouldn’t accidentally be sent to the post office at F Ranch on Point Reyes.

As Dr. Burdell developed Point Reyes Station, he wrote a covenant into the deeds for all the lots he sold, prohibiting anyone else from operating a saloon in town. Grandi, however, broke Dr. Burdell’s monopoly by opening a second saloon in 1902. The dentist sued, but in 1907 the state supreme court ruled in Grandi’s favor; Dr. Burdell, however, had died the previous year.

Grandi himself already had competition of his own to contend with. In 1898, one of his clerks, Peter Scilacci, opened a general store further north on A Street. Scilacci’s emporium was bigger than Grandi’s and included a livery stable and a grain warehouse.

The Bank of Tomales in 1910 bought land on the main street for a branch; over time, the bank would relocate and go through several ownerships and name changes en route to becoming a branch of Wells Fargo. Just before World War I, the Foresters of America built a hall, which still stands on Mesa Road just north of the Old Creamery building. In 1914, a small Catholic Church opened on B Street.

The masonry-built Grandi Company building had collapsed in the 1906 earthquake, and Grandi replaced it with a wooden building that is “now the upper story of the Western [Saloon],” Livingston told me. Two years later, Grandi retired and sold his nephew Reno Grandi and Reno’s partner Joe Codoni property across Second Street from the wood building. There they built the large, brick Grandi Building, which is now unfortunately empty and in disrepair.

The main street of Point Reyes Station in 1920 with the brick Grandi Building at left and the depot at right.

In its heyday, the Grandi Company sold everything from pianos to cattle feed, and in time it developed a policy of never raising the price on goods once they were in stock. Some items, such as stove-heated irons for ironing clothes, remained in stock for decades.

The upstairs of the Grandi Building was a hotel, along with a dance hall. The hotel was mostly used by railroad men, but lieutenant-colonel Dwight Eisenhower stayed there in 1940, just 12 years before he was President Eisenhower. For awhile the town’s telephone switchboard was in the hotel’s lobby. “The hotel closed around 1950,” Mason wrote.

The narrow-gauge railroad, which had been built to carry lumber from Cazadero in Sonoma County to the ferry docks in Sausalito and to return with supplies from San Francisco, was never profitable. It was reorganized several times and eventually became part of the Northwestern Pacific. But the advent of competition from trucks for hauling cargo and from cars for carrying people was too much for the railroad.

In 1920, the NWP converted the track east of Point Reyes Station to standard gauge. (It took the narrow gauge 477 cars to haul what the standard gauge could haul with 198.) But the new arrangement turned out to be inconvenient. Cargo passing through Point Reyes Station had to be unloaded from narrow-gauge cars and onto standard-gauge cars or vice versa.

In 1930, the narrow-gauge line to the north closed down, and in 1933, the standard-gauge line to the east followed suit. For a time, old rail cars were stored in Point Reyes Station, but many were eventually burned. The old engine house became a community center, and the depot is now the town post office.

I am indebted to historian Jack Mason’s Earthquake Bay for much of the foregoing information.

Well over 100 people showed up Sunday in the Dance Palace for a memorial to honor Cecil Robert Asman, who died on Christmas Eve at the age of 87.

Cecil was a particularly popular Realtor; that’s Realtor with a capital R. Only real estate agents who belong to the Board of Realtors can call themselves Realtors. It’s sort of like lions. If you send someone a message that there are a bunch of lions in your yard, those are big cats. If you say there are a bunch of Lions (with a capital L), they’re members of the Lions Club.

In late December 1978, Cecil became a director of the Marin County Board of Realtors. On that occasion, I asked Cecil about the then-much-discussed “struggle” between environmentalists and the real estate industry. “I consider myself a good environmentalist, but not in the political sense,” he responded. He said the real struggle was between environmental groups and subdivision developers.

Real estate, he said, “is really a service, bringing buyers and sellers together. Most environmentalists live in a house that was created by someone.” He noted with pride that he had sold homes to a number of West Marin’s prominent environmentalists.

My interview with Cecil in 1978, which was for a profile in The Point Reyes Light, took place at the real estate office he then had next to the Green Bridge.

Cecil, who moved to West Marin in 1962, had by the time of our interview done an amazing amount of civic work here. He had been a director of the Marin Coast Chamber of Commerce and the Inverness Yacht Club. He also helped the Inverness Foundation acquire the old Brock Schreiber boathouse, donating his commission toward the purchase.

He was an original member of the Inverness Music Festival and for years was a director. In 1976, he helped organize Point Reyes Station’s bicentennial celebration.

He had been on the bishop’s committee of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church and once headed the committee as warden of the church.

Because of all his work in the Episcopalian Church, it had never occurred to me that his ancestry was in part Jewish. So I was fascinated to read in The West Marin Citizen an account of his family life written by his daughter Carrie Asman.

Cecil’s father Ike was born in Vilna, Russia (now the capital of Lithuania), Carrie wrote. While Ike was still a boy, his family emigrated to the United States in the face of pogroms (deadly anti-Semitic riots) that were sweeping Russia and Eastern Europe. In the US, the family first lived in Georgia and then moved to New Orleans. After finding more anti-Semitism in the South, Ike Asman changed his name to Joe Green to disguise his ethnicity, Carrie noted.

The family ultimately moved to the East Bay, where I also grew up. Cecil attended local schools and enlisted in the Navy when World War II broke out, Carrie added.

After the war, Cecil held a variety of jobs before getting into real estate. He had been a business consultant, and I asked him about the other work he’d done.

Cecil said he had sold everything from hearing aids to automobiles, adding with a laugh:  “The most interesting thing I ever dealt with was selling and packaging B.S., cow manure.”

He told me that in the 1950s he purchased a weekend home in Inverness and moved here permanently in 1962. In 1964, he became a salesman for Studdard Real Estate and got his broker’s license in 1967.

Cecil said that when he bought his first house in Inverness, the price was $2,250. At the time of our interview 20 years later, it was worth more than 10 times that, he added, amazed at the effects of inflation.

In a comment prescient of the nationwide housing bubble that just burst, Cecil noted that a generally depressed housing industry had in 1975 set off a “meteoric” climb in real estate prices in West Marin.

At the time of our interview in 1978, however, the rapid inflation in house and land prices had started to slow, “and, I’m glad it has,” Cecil said. “It would have been catastrophic if the inflation had continued much longer.”

As for me, I was a beneficiary of Cecil’s close reading of the real estate market. With his guidance, I was able to buy more than two acres in the hills above Point Reyes Station at a very low price, and I continue to bless him for having made it possible for me to own a home here for the past 35 years.

Two close friends from Los Angeles, Janine Warner, who reported for The Point Reyes Light when I owned the newspaper, and her husband Dave LaFontaine, have been staying here for the Christmas holidays.

On Christmas Day itself, however, some even more exotic guests showed up.

Around noon Janine went out on the deck to enjoy the sunny Christmas Day and soon spotted a coyote in my field. Here it heads into some eponymous coyote brush.

Immediately I hurried inside and grabbed my camera. Before long, the coyote reemerged next to my parking area. It could hear us chattering on the deck and began staring at me while I took its picture.

The creature then looked down my driveway to make sure all was clear. Coyotes can be fierce, but they’re not foolhardy.

When it finally decided to leave, it started off at a brisk walk. Whether walking or running, coyotes are amazingly graceful.

Coyotes have a walking speed that sometimes tops 20 mph while their running speed can easily top 30 mph. This coyote, however, was just meandering. It took him almost half a minute to travel 0.2 miles to the bottom end of the driveway, where he then sat down to survey the area. Before long, he had disappeared without a trace.

Less than five minutes later, as if on cue, two bucks showed up outside our kitchen window. Both were good looking animals, but the buck in the foreground had an especially regal bearing.

Accompanying the bucks were two does. Like the bucks, the does were not particularly nervous, even when I went out the back door to get a clear photo of them.

Of course, these were not the only wild animals to visit Mitchell cabin on Christmas Day. Our familiar raccoon families showed up in the evening. We fed them slices of bread, but, to save money, we’re now supplementing that with dog kibble instead of honey-roasted peanuts.

Also showing up were our usual pair of gray foxes. One is comfortable enough around us to take slices of bread from our hands. The other, however, is sufficiently skittish that most of the time we have to throw slices to him.

Having a peaceful relationship with the animals around us is key to our having a decent existence, as most religions agree. “Life is dear to the mute creature as it is to a man. Just as one wants happiness and fears pain, just as one wants to live and not to die, so do other creatures,” wrote the XIV Dalai Lama in 1967.

“There is not an animal on the earth, nor a flying creature on two wings, but they are people like unto you,” proclaims the Qur’an. “Animals, as part of God’s creation, have rights which must be respected,” Dr. Donald Coggan, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, observed. “It behooves us always to be sensitive to their needs and to the reality of their pain.”

Many people will enjoy some turkey come Christmas. I’m enjoying 13 already. There are always wild turkeys around West Marin, but at this time of the year, there are more than usual around Mitchell cabin.

A flock of 13 wild turkeys this week parades across my field toward a stockpond.

While most people feel they know a fair amount about turkeys, domestic and wild, there have been many misconceptions over the years regarding the bird, which originated in North America and was first domesticated by the Aztecs.

One misconception is that wild turkeys have no white meat. They do, just proportionately less than domestic turkeys. While many Americans prefer white meat, people in other parts of the world are more likely to prefer dark. Or so I read.

Because much of the white meat comes from a turkey’s breast, the main domestic turkey we eat, the Broad Breasted White breed, has been bred to have a large chest. One result of this breeding, however, is that domestic turkeys, unlike wild turkeys, cannot fly. In addition, because of their large size and weight, they cannot mate, and hens must be artificially inseminated.

Likewise, domestic turkeys are white because they’ve been bred to be white. White feathers don’t leave unsightly pigment spots on turkeys after they’ve been plucked.

The wild turkey is an elegant bird. Benjamin Franklin felt it should have been chosen as the national symbol instead of the the eagle, which he considered “a bird of bad moral character.” Franklin didn’t having like a carrion eater as this country’s symbol.

Spanish conquistadors in Mexico in 1524 were the first Europeans to taste turkey meat. They found it delicious and brought some turkeys back to Europe. By 1524, turkeys had reached England, where they were quickly domesticated. Shakespeare refers to a “turkey cock” in Twelfth Night written in 1601.

Turkeys got their unlikely name because the “turkey merchants,” who did business in the Ottoman Empire (of which Turkey was the seat), were were the same merchants who brought turkeys to England from North America. This led to a widely held misimpression that the turkeys were coming from Turkey. Similar mixups occurred in other cultures. The Hebrew word for turkey literally means “chicken of India” while the Turkish word for turkey is “Hindi,” which refers to Northern India.

As for the country’s name, Turkey (which in Istanbul is Türkiye) is a combination of “Türk,” which is believed to have meant human beings in an archaic version of the Turkish language, while the “iye” apparently meant land of. In short, “Turkey” originally meant land of human beings, as a friend from Turkey confirms.

Elsewhere this turkey and fawn would be at risk of ending up on someone’s dinner table come Christmas. In this time and place, however, they can safely graze together, the fawn eating grass and the turkey eating insects and seeds. Merry Christmas, and I send you my wish that also on your Bach 40, sheep may safely graze.