We’ll start with who deserves coal in their stockings come Christmas morning. At the top of my personal list is the Marin Independent Journal, which cheated me out of $32.65 last Oct. 22. Here’s the story in brief.

Lynn and I hand out about three loaves of bread to foxes and raccoons every evening. If we buy cheap white bread for 99 cents a loaf at Safeway, this comes to about $21 per week. If we bought the same amount of bread in West Marin, where bread typically costs about $5 a loaf, the total cost would be about $105 per week (or almost $5,500 per year), far more than we can afford. Which is why we buy it at Safeway.

On Oct. 22, I was leaving the San Anselmo Safeway with a cart full of bread when an Independent Journal vendor just outside the door stopped me, saying I could get half a year of the paper free of charge if I merely paid for the Sunday editions.

That came to $32.65, so I paid the vendor in cash and got a receipt. He said my IJs would start being delivered to my house in about a week. But none ever arrived, so on Nov. 6, I emailed the IJ’s circulation department to complain and asked that it look into the problem.

When I received no answer to my email, I wrote the IJ again on Nov. 11, saying I was cancelling my subscription and wanted my money back. If the paper didn’t send the money immediately, I warned, I would take the IJ to small claims court. A few days after that email, a woman in circulation called to say I should have been receiving my subscription. Would I like to start it now?

I replied that the whole experience had soured me on the IJ and that I merely wanted my money refunded. She said she’d have a check sent to me. Another three weeks have now passed without my refund, and I’ve started my small claims lawsuit. I’m certainly glad I saved my receipt to show the judge.

My advice? Don’t buy a subscription from an IJ vendor. It may well be a ruse to get your money without providing you with anything but frustration in return.

Who’s been nice

Point Reyes Station celebrated the start of the Christmas season Friday night with luminaria lining the main street and the lighting of the town Christmas tree, which is located between Wells Fargo Bank and the Palace Market at the far end of the street.

Toby’s Feed Barn held Christmas in the Barn, which included a visit from Santa Claus, with whom many young people wanted to be photographed sitting on his lap. Jewelry, crafts, and ethnic clothing for sale made the scene particularly festive.

In the gallery at Toby’s Rich Clarke of Marshall exhibited his photography while his son Kevin of Oakland showed off his paintings, furniture, and wooden sculpture. They each said they’ve been influenced by the other.

Meanwhile at the other end of town, the Dance Palace hosted a crafts fair that filled the church space (seen here) and the auditorium. Along with arts and crafts, jams, soaps, and jewelry were for sale.

In the main auditorium, Point Reyes Station painter Christine DeCamp discusses her colorful art with visitors to the show.

Who’s the naughtiest of all? “The US Postal Service wants to close your North Bay Processing and Distribution mail facility [in Petaluma] and send all of your mail to Oakland to be processed,” the American Postal Workers Union warned last week.

“If your ZIP Code starts with 954 or 949, this affects you. If this happens, all your mail will be delayed by at least one day! This will delay delivery of your checks and bills, your prescriptions, your packages, your movies, your absentee ballots, and everything else you receive in the US mail.

“Under this plan,” the Postal Workers Union adds, “if you want prompt delivery, you will have to pay high Express Mail rates.

“The USPS is required to notify affected customers and hold a meeting for public input. This meeting has already been held. Were you notified?”

The union has urged the public to send its concerns to Theresa Lambino, Manager, Consumer and Industry Contact, San Francisco District, Box 193000, San Francisco, CA 94188-3000.

However, your letters were supposed to be postmarked by this past Saturday. Unfortunately, the mails are already so slow that most people didn’t have time to respond before the deadline. Personally, I’d send a letter anyhow.

If you want to see how we got into this mess, check my Nov. 6 posting.

Landscape painter Thomas Wood held a two-day show in his Nicasio studio last weekend. Although many of us are familiar with his art, the chance to see so much of it displayed together in his small studio was a special treat.

The artist with (left to right at bottom) Rock Creek Canyon, Eastern Sierra and Eastern Sierra, September. Above them is a painting of Limantour Estero.

Wood has taken part in more than 65 group shows and more than 45 solo shows. Works by Wood and Point Reyes Station photographer Art Rogers were shown together at West Marin galleries in 2008 and 2009. A year ago he held a one-man show in Toby’s Feed Barn Gallery, and every year he takes part in the Ranches and Rolling Hills art show that benefits the Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

Other shows have benefited Marin Conservation League, the Gulf of the Farallones Marine Sanctuary. From 1998 to 2003, his 20-foot triptych Tomales Bay was on display in the Point Reyes Station Library. In 2000, one of his paintings was selected for the State Senate Art Collection. But in what may be his most unexpected recognition, from 2005 to 2008 his painting California Hills was on display at the US embassy in the Central American country of Belize.

At left: Okanagan Lake, B.C. (top) and Port of Olympia, WA (bottom).

Wood’s only painting on display that did not depict a landscape was the maritime painting at lower left, and even it was tranquil as a landscape, certainly not the Wreck of the Hesperus. (By the way, although many people think Wreck of the Hesperus was a painting, it was originally a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.)

“Born in San Francisco, Wood spent childhood summers at the family ranch (settled by his great-grandfather in the 1870s) in the Carmel Valley, where he painted the golden hills and brushy canyons in the California light, beginning his lifelong love of painting and reverence for nature,” his website notes.

“He attended the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State University, earning an advance degree in English. He taught writing and literature in New York and California before deciding in the 1980s to pursue a professional career as an artist.”

A third-generation artist, “he is the son of artists Mireille and Phil Wood and the grandson of the California plein air painter and muralist Gottardo Piazzoni,” the website adds.

Although Wood’s paintings were priced at $800 and up, they were selling well last weekend despite the current recession. “My work invites contemplation of nature’s truths, beauty, and relevance to our lives,” said Wood, and obviously a number of West Marin’s art collectors agreed.

The American Postal Workers Union is urging the public to back a congressional measure, House Bill 1351, so that the Postal Service will be saved rather than gutted with mail service drastically reduced.

On Sunday, an APWU member in front of Toby’s Feed Barn handed out union fliers and collected signatures in support of the proposed legislation.

“The Postal Service is critical to our economy, delivering mail, medicine, and packages on time and for a good price,” the union notes. “Yet plans are underway to close thousands of post offices, eliminate Saturday delivery, close mail processing facilities, cut services, and lay off 120,000 employees.”

What a great idea! Throw 120,000 people out of work in the middle of a recession! Sort of like lightening the ship by tossing the crew overboard.

“The problem,” the APWU says, “is that a bill passed in 2006 is pushing the Postal Service into bankruptcy. The law imposes a burden on the USPS that no other government agency or private company bears. It requires the Postal Service to pay a 75-year liability in just 10 years, to ‘pre-fund’ healthcare benefits for future retirees… The $20 billion in postal losses you heard about doesn’t stem from the mail but rather from [the] congressional mandate.

“This congressional mandate costs the USPS more than $5 billion a year, and it is the cause of the Postal Service’s financial crisis. Meanwhile the USPS has overpaid billions of dollars into federal pension accounts.”

On Sunday, Point Reyes Station postal clerk Kathy Runnion sat beside the town post office gathering signatures on petitions that ask Congress to change the 2006 law. Kathy has spent the last 22 years working for the Postal Service.

“Legislation pending in the House of Representatives would prevent a collapse of the USPS, without drastic cuts in service, without massive layoffs, and without terminating collective bargaining rights for postal employees,” APWU says.

“H.R. 1351, introduced by Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA), would allow the Postal Service to apply the billions of dollars in pension overpayments to meet the Postal Service’s financial obligations.

“How much will this cost you as a taxpayer?” the union asks. “Not a single cent. That’s because the Postal Service doesn’t run on tax dollars. It’s funded solely by the sale of stamps and postage.

“Approximately 200 members of the House of Representative have signed on as co-sponsers for H.R. 1351, both Democrats and Republicans,” says APWU, “but more support is needed.”

The union notes that “the postal service hasn’t used a dime of taxpayer money in 30 years… Customer satisfaction and on-time deliveries are at record levels, labor productivity has doubled, and for six years running the American people have named postal employees the most-trusted federal workers.”

More details can be found at SaveAmericasPostalService.

Of course, the Postal Service sometimes delivers surprises. In last week’s mail I received an offer for a free cremation. Perhaps I should rush right out and get one before the offer expires.

Dr. Corey Goodman of Marshall (left), who uncovered the National Park Service’s using bogus data to discredit Drakes Bay Oyster Company (owned by the Lunny family of Inverness), questions Pete McCloskey, a retired congressman (center), and Paul Berkowitz, a retired ranger and criminal investigator for the Park Service. Behind them and serving as moderator was Laura Watt, an assistant professor of Environmental Studies at Sonoma State.

During a symposium Sunday afternoon in the West Marin School gym, McCloskey and Berkowitz discussed “corruption” at the top levels of the National Park Service (NPS). Low-level rangers, they agreed, were more likely to be honest.

Berkowitz, who for 33 years was a ranger and criminal investigator for NPS, has written a book, The Case of the Indian Trader, which focuses on a particularly egregious example of corruption that occurred at the Hubbell Trading post on a Navajo reservation in Arizona. The book, however, also describes many other cases of criminal behavior by NPS staff, such as child molesting, theft of government funds, and shredding crime reports on people in NPS’s favor.

More than 115 West Marin residents showed up for the symposium, forcing organizers to put out extra chairs.

McCloskey, who spent 15 years in the House of Representatives, noted that the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which is chaired by Darrell Issa (R-San Diego County), will begin an investigation on Nov. 7 of Point Reyes National Seashore officials. “The alleged misconduct is serious and could result in the loss of the Lunny family’s business,” Issa wrote Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar. “Time is of the essence, as the family’s reservation of use expires next year.

“In light of a damaging draft Environmental Impact Statement released on Sept. 3, 2011, it is imperative that a thorough, objective review of whether NPS’s conclusions are based on flawed science occurs immediately.”

Among those summoned to testify before the committee are: Gavin Frost of the Solicitor’s Office (he has already turned up skulduggery within the Nation Seashore administration); Don Neubacher (former superintendent of the park); Jon Jarvis (NPS director, as well as the previous director of the Pacific West Region of NPS); Dr. Marcia McNutt (adviser to the NPS; Sarah Allen (former science adviser to the National Seashore); Dr. Ben Becker (NPS scientist); and Cicely Muldoon (current superintendent of the National Seashore).

McCloskey, 84, had been a colonel in the Marine Corps and was awarded the Navy Cross, the Silver Star and two Purple Hearts for outstanding service during the Korean War. The former congressman had also been a lawyer in Redwood City, a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, and a lecturer on legal ethics at the Stanford and Santa Clara law schools. He warned that any NPS official who doesn’t testify with total honestly will be charged with perjury.

Berkowtz had taken over an NPS investigation that had been triggered by Western National Parks Association allegations against Billy Malone, who operated Hubbell Trading Post. The allegations were based only on faulty intuition, but WNPA wanted Berkowtz to find something, anything, for which the trader could be prosecuted.

Berkowitz instead found that the NPS was hiding exculpatory evidence, had lied to get a search warrant, and then had seized much of Malone’s private property although the warrant did not provide for this. The case had been going on for a few years and had become expensive. WNPA, which was well over $1 million in debt, hoped to sell Malone’s personal property to pay off its debts.

The investigator said the Army’s cavalry originally kept order in national parks, which explains rangers’ uniforms. In 1916, however, the Park Service was created as a “civilian version of the military. It was disciplined, regimented, and had a rigid application of standards.” Over time, however, the Park Service abandoned critical components of military conduct, so that there’s now “an enormous variance of management competence.”

In 1976, the law that established the Park Service was strengthened, Berkowitz said, giving NPS authority to investigate all federal-law violations in national parks. He concluded by saying he loves national parks and would never want to harm them. However, he added, NPS leaders’ corruption must be stopped.

The annual pancake breakfast was held Sunday morning in the Point Reyes Station firehouse. The event is always a fundraiser for the West Marin Disaster Council and the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department.

Having fun at the pancake breakfast was Rich Clarke of Marshall, a member of the West Marin Disaster Council.

Approximately 325 people attended the pancake breakfast, and a firefighter told me the crowd was the largest in years. He credited sunny weather for bringing out so many West Marin residents.

West Marin Commons sponsored a Halloween barn dance in Toby’s Feed Barn Friday evening. Band members (from left): Brian Lamoreaux on guitar, Sue Walters on bass, Ingrid Noyes on accordion, and Erik Hoffman on fiddle. Because the feed barn is unheated and the band sits next to an open door, there will be no more barn dances this season. It’s becoming too cold for the musicians.

However line dances, square dances, and even waltzes kept the dancers warm.

Angel mother Denise Spenard of Marshall and devil daughter Maia, 8, had a jolly time wearing Halloween costumes to the barn dance.

Approximately 65 people showed up Sunday morning in West Marin School’s parking lot to take part in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began Sept. 17 in New York City and since then has spread around the world.

As of two weeks ago, there had been protests in 70 major US cities and more than 600 smaller communities. There had also been protests in more than 900 foreign cities. A Time magazine survey earlier this month found that 54 percent of Americans have a favorable impression of Occupy Wall Street while 18 percent do not.

The movement is in essence a protest against the unequal distribution of wealth in the United States and elsewhere. In this country, the protesters’ slogan “We are the 99 percent” refers to the disparity in wealth between the top one percent of society and other citizens.

The phrase came out of the 2000 presidential candidate debates between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Gore repeatedly accused Bush of supporting the “wealthiest one percent” rather than the welfare of everyone else. That was followed by a 2006 documentary film, The One Percent, made by Johnson & Johnson heir Jamie Johnson. The film noted that the wealthiest one percent of Americans then controlled 38 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Already this country’s disparity in wealth was well known. In 2001, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel winner in economics, had written that the wealthiest one percent of US citizens at that time controlled 40 percent of America’s wealth.

Among those assembling to be photographed at West Marin School was Congressional candidate Norman Solomon (in blue shirt). Sunday’s protest lasted less than half an hour and caused no disruptions.

Because Occupy Wall Street has no list of specific demands, only that income should be spread more evenly and that large corporations should have less influence over government policies, some politicians and mainstream media have dismissed it as irrelevant.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va) characterized the movement as “growing mobs” and said President Barack Obama’s “failed policies” have pitted “Americans against Americans,” leading to the protests. White House press secretary Jay Carney then accused Cantor of “hypocrisy” since Cantor has been supporting Tea Party protests. “I can’t understand how one man’s mob is another man’s democracy,” Carney said.

The protests are coming at a time when millions of Americans have lost their homes and many millions more have lost their jobs largely because of big banks’ risky lending, which triggered a stock-market crash that has led to a recession.

Many congressional Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have said they support Occupy Wall Street. In contrast, several high-profile Republicans have denounced it. Presidential candidate Herman Cain, a former banker and pizza chain owner, called the protests “anti-capitalist…. Don’t blame Wall Street, don’t blame the big banks if you don’t have a job and you’re not rich,” he said. “Blame yourself!”

Candidate Ron Paul, however, shot back, “The system has been biased against the middle class and the poor…the people losing jobs. It wasn’t their fault that we’ve followed a deeply flawed economic system.”

Point Reyes Station photographer Art Rogers, who currently has an exhibition at the Jack Mason Museum of West Marin History, documented the event. Here he directs protesters to find spots where his camera can record everyone’s face.

Giving support to the protests have been a number of labor unions and even several well-off people whose wealth puts them in the upper one percent. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, 28, granddaughter of the conservative, Texas oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, earlier joined Occupy Wall Street protesters and said, “We should acknowledge our privilege and claim the responsibilities that come with it.”

Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke observed: “People are quite unhappy with the state of the economy and what’s happening. They blame, with some justification, the problems in the financial sector for getting us into this mess, and they’re dissatisfied with the policy response here in Washington. And at some level, I can’t blame them.”

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney was more emphatic, saying income inequality and economic performance are the main motivators for the protests, which he called “entirely constructive.”

As it happens, Occupy Wall Street is the brainchild of Canada’s Adbusters Media Foundation, which publishes an advertisement-free, anti-consumerist magazine Adbusters. The foundation last summer proposed a peaceful occupation of Wall Street to protest corporate influence on democracy. By now Canada itself has had protests in all 10 of its provinces.

In this country, Vikram Pandit, head of Citigroup, has called the protesters’ sentiments “completely understandable” and said Wall Street has broken the trust of its clients.

Conservative Republicans have called the protests “class warfare,” but Bill Gross, manager of PIMCO’s Total Return Fund, the world’s largest mutual fund, disagreed. “Class warfare by the 99 percent?” he asked. “Of course, they’re fighting back after 30 years of being shot at.” PIMCO’s co-CEO Mohamed El-Erian concurred that people should “listen to Occupy Wall Street.”

Bloomberg news service on Oct. 12 reported, “Hedge-fund manager John Paulson, who became a billionaire by betting against the US housing market and then profited from the recovery of banks, criticized the movement. His townhouse was among those targeted by marchers who left a fake tax-refund check made out for $5 billion on his doorstep, which was barricaded by police.

“Paulson & Co. and its employees have paid hundreds of millions in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high paying jobs in New York City since its formation [in 1994],’ the $30 billion hedge fund said yesterday in a statement. ‘Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City and continue to grow.'”

Regardless of New York tax rates, the Occupy Wall Street movement by Sunday had spread 2,580 miles from that metropolis on the East Coast to this small town on the West Coast.

Only in Point Reyes Station, there was no Zuccotti Park where sometimes-animated protesters have been camping out near Wall Street. Here there was just a brief get-together in the parking lot of West Marin School where 65 residents stood absolutely still to be photographed protesting.

The editor and publisher of The West Marin Citizen, Joel Hack, will retire after this week’s issue, which will be published Thursday, Oct. 20. Advertising director Linda Petersen of Inverness will take over ownership of the weekly newspaper.

Joel Hack at Drakes Bay Oyster Company

“I’m leaving because I’ve been doing this for 17 years,” Hack, 67, told me Sunday, “and it’s time to stop.” Publishing a small-town weekly, he added, “is constant, 24/7 and 52 weeks a year. I’ve had five weeks off in 17 years. It was approaching burnout.”

Before Hack started The Citizen, he had been the editor and publisher of The Bodega Bay Navigator for 12 years. But after unsuccessful negotiations with Robert Plotkin of The Point Reyes Light and after losing several major advertisers in a real estate market down turn, Hack in August 2006 dropped the print version and began publishing exclusively online.

So why did he start The Citizen in West Marin? In November 2005, Plotkin, a new resident in Bolinas, bought The Point Reyes Light from me. At the same time, he offered to buy The Navigator from Hack, but when they couldn’t strike a deal, “he decided he would just take Bodega Bay over,” Hack said.

As the new owner of The Light, Plotkin (right) told The San Francisco Chronicle he wanted to create a paper with the “sophistication of The Economist” and the “flair” of The New York Observer newspaper. (Chronicle photo by Eric Luse)

Instead of providing highbrow reporting, however, Plotkin quickly offended many West Marin readers with coverage that was often lurid, a full-color, front-page photo of two chickens, whose throats had just been slit, hanging upside down with blood pouring from their necks, a girl chomping into the severed head of a goat during festivities on Mount Tamalpais etc.

When The Light started covering Bodega Bay news, “it was one more thorn in the side of West Marin readers,” Hack said. “We have nothing to do with Bodega Bay,” was their response. “Why should we be reading about it?”

Nor did The Light go over well in Bodega Bay. Plotkin sent three reporters to cover stories there, Hack said, but the venture “lasted only about a month.” With Plotkin unfamiliar with Western Sonoma County, Hack explained, “the coverage was a little off.” Plotkin ran into the same problem when he tried to extend The Light’s coverage to Fairfax in East Marin, Hack added.

Reporter Lynn Axelrod of Point Reyes Station inspects last week’s issue. Her reporting and editing are expanding under The Citizen’s new structure.

Meanwhile, Plotkin and I soon had a falling out, and I stopped submitting occasional pieces, for which I was not charging, to The Light and sent them to The Navigator website instead. In selling The Light to Plotkin, I had signed a non-competition agreement that I would not write for another Marin County newspaper, but attorney Robert Powsner on Plotkin’s behalf, got Judge Jack Sutro to issue a bizarre injunction against Hack and me that barred my posting on Hack’s website.

Powsner told Sutro that my posting on the website was “damaging or destroying” The Light, and the judge accepted the claim. In chambers, Sutro told lawyers for both sides that protecting Plotkin’s $500,000 investment in The Light outweighed constitutional prohibitions against censoring free expression.

Moreover, the now-retired jurist didn’t seem to understand the Internet and ruled that a Sonoma County website is the same as a Marin County newspaper.

Linda Petersen had been my houseguest when Hack began looking for an advertising representative. She took the job and played a major role in getting the newspaper off the ground financially. Her role at the paper eventually expanded to include business and reporting. What will her title be as owner? Hack has suggested “la jefa” [the chief], she responded.

Hack was already feeling “a little thing of anger” toward Plotkin for trying to go into competition with him after he revealed The Navigator’s finances during business negotiations. Then came the injunction. Added to that, “readers in West Marin were pissed off,” Hack said, so in July 2007,  he started his own weekly newspaper in Point Reyes Station. The results were gratifying.

“People popped in and wanted to work on The Citizen,” Hack said. “Outside contributors and staff had a sense of what a community newspaper should be. In the first year, we did very well. We had lots of advertisers and lots of readers — really good readers.

“But within the first six months, the stock market crashed, and the whole economic system collapsed. The recession dug its heels in. Where we had been flying high, things had gotten very much more difficult, and they haven’t improved… Real estate dried up, and in total, Realtors [had been] the largest advertisers.”

Nonetheless, The Citizen “had a winning formula,” Hack said, “because we were also publishing The Marin Coast Guide, and that saw us through.” These days “we struggle,” he noted, “but at times we break even.”

In contrast to Plotkin, who often was viewed as an outsider in West Marin, Hack did his best to take part in the community. Here the mustachioed publisher served a guest at the 2008 community Thanksgiving Dinner in the Dance Palace.

With a second newspaper in town, The Light was “losing between $5,000 and $15,000 a month,” Plotkin himself reported. Across the country newspapers were losing money, Plotkin wrote, so “this is not unique to The Light, although there have been some aggravating factors, namely myself. My sensibility is at odds with many in the community.”

Of that there was no doubt. During the first couple of years under the last publisher, editor Tess Elliott wrote after Plotkin sold The Light in May 2010, “it lost one third of its subscribers; the effects of those years continue to reverberate. Our reporters still regularly hear complaints and flat out refusals to talk.”

As for Plotkin, he had acknowledged he would take a “financial bloodbath” when he sold the paper. He reportedly received about $150,000 for The Light after paying $500,000 for the newspaper and periodically subsidizing it.

What’s next for the two newspapers? Could the 63-year-old Point Reyes Light and the four-year-old West Marin Citizen ever join together as one? Nothing is in the works, which is too bad, for it means two small-town weeklies will continue to split West Marin’s readership and advertising.

Both papers have had to take dramatic cost-cutting measures. The Light can no longer field as many reporters as it once did, and both papers have had to relocate to cheaper quarters. In the last year, The Light moved out of Point Reyes Station and now operates from a small office behind the Inverness Post Office. The Citizen, which had been renting the old Point Reyes Station Library next to the Pine Cone Diner, moved into filmmaker John Korty’s former studio on B Street.

The Light is now owned by Marin Media Institute, and friends of The Citizen have begun looking for investors from the community to become part owners, along with Petersen.

As for Hack, what will he now do? “I don’t know,” he replied, “but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”

Back when I owned The Point Reyes Light, we had a police scanner in the newsroom that continually squawked out the radio communications of the Marin County Sheriff’s Department, the Highway Patrol, the Marin County Fire Department, and West Marin’s seven volunteer fire departments.

Most of the time the radio chatter went in one ear and out the other, but we perked up when messages were of particular interest to West Marin, and one of the most interesting I ever heard was broadcast in the late 1980s.

A cow was stuck in a tree in Hicks Valley about a half mile west of the Cheese Factory along the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road. I immediately told reporter Sarah Rohrs to grab a camera and drive out there right away.

Although Sarah hurried, Hicks Valley firefighters had already gotten the cow down out of the tree before she arrived and could shoot a photo. Nonetheless, the incident was the lead story on Page 1 that week.

As it happened, the cow had apparently been leaning over an embankment for some grass when it fell into a tree below. The animal was uninjured but wedged between the tree trunk and a large limb. Firefighters merely pulled down on the end of the limb, and the cow rolled out.

AP Photo by Pers Johansson

I thought I’d never run into a story like that again, but three weeks ago something similar happened in Saro, Sweden. A moose standing on its hind legs fell into an apple tree and got stuck. Resident Pers Johansson, who discovered it, told CNN he had been coming home from work in a rainstorm when “in the wind I heard something screaming…

“At first I wondered if it was the crazy neighbors. But then I heard it again and went and checked. I saw something really big up in a tree in my neighbors’ yard, and it was a moose. It must have been drunk after eating fermented apples, and as it was reaching out for more fruit, it must have slipped and fallen into the tree.”

Johansson and the neighbors cut off some of the tree’s limbs, and here again firefighters came to the rescue, bending down the tree so the moose could slide out of it. A fire department spokesman told CNN, “Once free, the moose collapsed on the ground and fell asleep, so we let him sleep it off.”

Apparently the firefighters have an annual problem with moose eating fallen apples, which ferment in their bellies and get them drunk. Ending up in trees, however, is far less common.

Sow and piglet.

At first it seemed right out of the Old West. Around 1973 and 74 when I edited The Sebastopol Times, Western Sonoma County began having a problem with rustlers. Hundreds of sheep were stolen around Jenner, and steers were rustled in several places.

One night a rancher notified Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies that some men had just grabbed a calf along Coleman Valley Road and stuffed it in the trunk of their car, which the rancher described. A short while later, a deputy spotted a car matching the description and stopped it.

When the deputy looked in the car, however, he concluded the occupants could not be the rustlers. All of them were dressed in tuxedos and said they were going to a dance. So he sent them on their way, not realizing the rustlers had hurriedly changed into formal wear for just such an encounter.

Sonoma County sheep ranches and Midwestern hog barns, such as this, are now being targeted by rustlers.

Once again rustling is in the news. Sonoma County deputies this month arrested two brothers for stealing at least 20 sheep in recent weeks from ranches in Petaluma and Sonoma. Luis Ortiz Orea, 28, of Petaluma and Pedro Ortiz Orea, 30, of Santa Rosa are scheduled to be arraigned Monday for the alleged rustling. The brothers sold the stolen sheep in another county, Sonoma deputies said.

Rustling on a much larger scale has also been occurring along the Iowa-Minnesota border where at least 1,000 hogs have been stolen, mostly from large operations but also from smaller farms, during August and September.

Until recently such rustling had been rare, local police note. The reason for the spike in hog rustling, The Wall Street Journal reported, is that market prices are at an all time high of approximately $200 per pig. “Hog and cattle prices are soaring on increased demand overseas. The high price of corn, driven in part by the ethanol industry’s appetite, has also made feed so expensive that many hog farmers have shrunk operations.”

According to investigators, at least 700 hogs have been reported stolen in Nicollet and Kandiyohi counties, Minnesota, and about 200 have been reported stolen in Mitchell County, Iowa. They add that the actual numbers may be even higher.

“The pig rustlers back trucks up to unguarded hog houses that contain thousands of pigs, according to police,” The Journal added. “They load up a few dozen animals at a time into a trailer and drive off under the cover of night.” The rustled hogs may then be taken to a crooked slaughterhouse or dishonest pig farmer.

Approximately 180 hogs will fit into a semi trailer, suggesting that the thieves have raided the same hog operations several times. Losing 180 hogs costs the owner $36,000, and in Iowa, where there are 19 million pigs, any theft of more than $10,000 can draw a 25-year jail term, confirming what a dirty crime it is to steal pigs.

Tomales held its annual Founders Day parade and picnic Sunday. Steve Rosenthal, superintendent of the Shoreline School District and principal of Tomales High, was honored as parade marshal. Bert Crews and Dru Fallon O’Neill, both of Tomales, were the parade announcers.

Seen here passing a lineup of motorcycles at the main intersection in Tomales, a noisy caravan of fire engines led the parade, their sirens drowning out this cell-phone call.

Slide Ranch, which is located between Stinson Beach and Muir Beach, provided a contingent of two goats and a llama.

Indian Valley Carriage from Novato carried a jug band. At the very back sat Ingrid Noyes of Marshall playing an accordion and kazoo.

The Sanchez family in a 1950 McCormick Farmall. Three generations of the family took part in the parade.

Maryann Diaz-Romero, vice president of the board of the Tomales Regional History Center, wearing a pink blouse from its collection, with the Martinelli family and a wagon that promoted the historic dairying exhibit currently at the center.

Antique cars driven by the Traversi and Simoni families, with three generations from each family, were among the highlights of the parade. From front: Myrna and Al Traversi with their grandchildren Matthew and Jacob in a 1928 Model A Ford, Steve and Michelle Traversi in a 1913 Model T, Wayne and Kimberly Simoni in a 1912 Studebaker EMF, and Troy and Mary Ellen Simoni in a 1931 Ford Model A roadster pickup.

Among those riding in the line of antique cars were a family of five who showed up from Dubai. Troy and Mary Ellen Simoni have lived in the United Arab Emirates for the past year and were home on vacation with their children, Olivia, 12, Nathan, 10, and Sophia, “nearly 8.” The children rode with their grandparents, Wayne and Kimberly Simoni of Sebastopol.

The Tomales High cheerleaders drew heavy applause from bystanders.

Anna Erickson, a 5th generation member of a local ranching family, drove the Hands Full Farm float. The farm is in the Valley Ford area.

The Ancient and Honorable Order of E Clampus Vitus, a fraternal organization dedicated to the study and preservation of Western heritage, has memorialized events in Tomales history. As the organization, which is known for pranks, paraded up Highway 1, a Clamper broke away from the group. To bystanders’ amazement, he grabbed a spectator, whose name is Debbie, and gave her a passionate kiss on the lips. When she laughed, so did everyone else. It turned out that the Clamper, Kevin Dixon of Vallejo, is married to Debbie. The kiss, he told me later, was a spur-of-the-moment idea.

An All Terrain Vehicle (ATV) driven by young people pulled the Tomales Elementary School PTA’s float.

Marissa Thornton of Tomales drove a float promoting the Tomales Farm and Flea Market, which will be held from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Oct. 23.

Redwood Empire Harley Owners. The parade contingent said their 300-member group has collected $1 million for the California Council on Aging’s “meals on wheels” program.

Dan Norwood of Dan’s Auto Repair in Tomales drove a wobbly car that kept coming apart only to be reassembled by clown mechanics.

DT Motor Sports of Bodega Bay with Miss Bodega Red, Tia Minto, 11.

The crowd picnicking in Tomales Park enjoyed a variety of fare, as well as beer and wine. Crafts and used books were also on sale. Madam Zublatsky (Roberta Vinck, a marriage and family therapist in Tomales) read palms, with all proceeds going to the park.

The Greg Rocha Band provided entertainment for the picnic. From left: Chick Petersen on guitar, Greg Rocha on drums, Lyn Carpenter-Engelkes on vocals, and Steve Christoffersen on guitar

The Tomales Elementary School PTA raised funds with face painting.

On Feb. 11 while a crowd of 100,000 people in Cairo’s Tahrir Square were celebrating the downfall of Hosni Mubarak, a group of men grabbed CBS correspondent Lara Logan and sexually attacked her. The men stripped her, stretched her vagina and rectum with their fingers, tried to pull off parts of her scalp, and attempted to tear her limb from limb.

Someone in the crowd shouted, “She’s an Israeli, a Jew,” which she isn’t, and the attack intensified.

Logan (left), who was ultimately saved by a group of Egyptian women, had felt certain she was going to die. During a 60 Minutes interview on April 30, she described the ordeal and how the thought of her two small children kept her determined to live.

Some snide commentators, however, used the brutal incident as an occasion to criticize CBS for sending an attractive blonde into a crowd celebrating a revolution’s success. For these critics, it was also an excuse to slam Islam. Ignored by the critics were Logan’s being an experienced war correspondent and the fact that atrocities against women occur in almost every culture. Two years ago, for example, in the primarily Christian community of Richmond, at least five assailants raped and severely beat a 15-year-old high school girl.

It should be noted that there is a long and honorable tradition of newswomen covering wars and revolutions.

In 1995, my former wife Cathy published a book titled Margaret Fuller’s New York Journalism. It concerns a prominent editor and reporter who in the 1840s became the first female foreign correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.

As such Fuller (right) covered Giuseppe Mazzini’s revolution for the establishment of a Roman Republic. In 1850, however, she was forced to flee Italy after France intervened in the struggle.

She, her husband, and child set sail for New York City on a freighter. After two months at sea, they were within 100 yards of New York’s Fire Island when their ship ran aground and all three drowned.

One of the best-known women photojournalists of our time was Lee Miller (1907-77), who covered World War II for Vogue magazine.

Miller photographed the London Blitz, concentration camp victims, children dying in a Vienna hospital, the first use of napalm, and the execution of the prime minister of Hungary. Accredited to the Army as war correspondent for Condé Nast Publications, she traveled with Allied troops across Europe during its liberation. Miller was never injured in the fighting, but the horrors she documented caused her to suffer severe episodes of clinical depression, along with post-traumatic stress syndrome, when the war ended.

Besides being a photojournalist, Miller had been a model and a fashion photographer. When she took a bath in Hitler’s bathtub after the fuhrer’s death, David E. Scherman, a photographer for Life magazine, shot what is probably the best remembered picture of her.

Thirty years ago, which was around the time I was reporting on the insurrections in El Salvador and Guatemala for the old San Francisco Examiner, photojournalist Susan Meiselas’ pictures of the nearby Nicaraguan revolution were the envy of the rest of us. The Magnum photographer’s shots of Anastacio Samoza’s soldiers and the Sandinistas, who defeated them, provided Americans with many of the images we had of the conflict. This is the cover photo for Meiselas’ book Nicaragua, which is among the best collections of war photos I’ve seen. Although the book was originally published in 1981, new and used copies can still be found.

At the moment, the woman photojournalist who is dazzling the world is Amy Weston of the London-based WENN photo agency. Her photos of a woman leaping from a burning building during the London riots have been called the “iconic” images of the Aug. 6-to-10 violence.

The woman, Monika Konczyk, 32, was trapped above the first floor after rioters set fire to a furniture store. Hearing people on the street yelling, Weston stopped her car and found this desperate scene. Konczyk had climbed out a window onto an awning but was too frightened to jump into the waiting arms of police and firefighters below. Finally, she did and immediately ran away, traumatized but physically uninjured.

After snapping her shots, Weston became alarmed by a group of young thugs who showed up. She tucked her camera under her sweater to hide it and sprinted to her car, bringing back photos that virtually every daily newspaper in Great Britain ran on its front page. Almost immediately the pictures could seen in print or online around the world.

My admiration for the present crop of female journalists is hardly unique. “Women led the way in the coverage of the rebel advance into the Libyan capital of Tripoli,” Jack Mirkinson wrote in the Huffington Post two weeks ago.

Among them have been Sara Sidner of CNN, Lourdes Garcia-Navarro and Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson of National Public Radio, and Missy Ryan of Reuters.

But the woman reporter who in particular has caught my attention is Zeina Khodr of Al Jazeera (right). She too is a veteran of combat reporting.

In recent weeks I’ve watched Khodr in helmet and flak jacket advancing across Libya with the rebels, taking cover when bullets came her way and remaining calm and articulate through it all.

You can see Khodr in action by clicking here.

Celebrants at Saturday’s Inverness Fair picnicked outside the firehouse on fare that ranged from hot dogs, to beer, to burritos, to ice cream.

The Inverness Fair came when it was needed most. It was a dose of fun in wretched times: fighting in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Iraq, Yemen, and Afghanistan; terrorism in Norway, England, and Pakistan; famine in Somalia; financial chaos in the United States and Europe.

It would be easy to succumb to Weltschmerz during periods such as this. (A useful word that English borrowed from German, Weltschmerz, pronounced velt shmerts, refers to weary sadness brought on by the evils of the world, a sort of romantic pessimism.) Thankfully, for six hours Saturday on the Inverness Firehouse green, no Weltschmerz was allowed.

Among several musical groups performing were Kit Walker and Mariana Ingold. Born in Uruguay, Ingold is a composer, singer, and musician. She has made award-winning educational videos of Uruguay, Brazil, the United States and Spain. In addition, she has worked on environmental and educational projects. Ingold has released numerous albums and at present is recording with Kit Walker (left). Walker, who lives in West Marin, has recorded for Windham Hill and others. His jazz and neo-classical recordings are particularly well known. Walker and Ingold will perform again in Inverness’ Blackbird Café at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 20.

Inverness Garden Club had rows of plants for sale, along with a table for selling alpaca “poop.” A section of herbs was labeled “THYME SQUARE.”

Outside the Inverness Library, tables overflowed with used books. Throughout the day, a constant stream of fairgoing investigators showed up to inspect the books. Further up Inverness Way, a flea market was similarly popular.

Former Shoreline School District trustee Gus Conde sold notecards to raise funds for West Marin School in Point Reyes Station.

Families ate ice cream and listened to the music while Michael Mery of Point Reyes Station manned a Marin Agricultural Land Trust table.

Sue Taylor of Point Reyes Station, selling her handwoven rugs, was one of several vendors who took part in the fair and added to its color.

A day without Weltschmerz! Wunderbar!