Sunday’s Trailer Stash, a musical fundraiser at Marconi Conference center to buy supplies for the Marshall Disaster Council’s emergency trailer, turned into a star-studded event.

Ted Anderson’s traditional Irish music, followed by Ingrid Noyes and the Marshall Community Chorus and Kazoo Band, began the bash, which ended with two songs by legendary folksinger Maria Muldaur. As a fundraiser, the event was both a musical and financial triumph. More than $2,500 was raised to outfit the trailer.

Maria Muldaur, who is probably still best known for her 1974 recording of Midnight at the Oasis, continues touring and dropped by with no advance publicity. She and another folk music great, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, together sang Richland Woman Blues by Mississippi John Hurt. She also treated the audience in the center’s Buck Hall to an a cappella version of It’s a Blessing by Mississippi Fred McDowell. In 2005, she recorded this “field holler,” as she called it, with Bonnie Raitt.

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who happens to live in Marshall, likewise performed with little advance notice (except on this blog). Ramblin’ Jack played San Francisco Bay Blues accompanied by Corey Goodman on piano and sang the traditional song The Cuckoo, She’s a Pretty Bird, accompanied only by himself.

There were other surprises as well. The boogie and ragtime music of a young pianist named George Fenn greatly impressed the crowd, who responded with enthusiastic applause.

Two organizers of the event, Paul Kaufman (on piano) and Kristi Edwards (on flute), performed a happy parody of the 1926 song It All Depends on You. (“I can be happy, I can be sad, I can be good, I can be bad, It all depends on you. I can be lonely out in a crowd, I can be humble, I can be proud, It all depends on you.”)

In Paul and Kristi’s version, which the audience joined in singing, the words were: “We can be safe, We can be glad, We can be nervous, And we can be sad, It all depends on you. We will need lanterns, We will need shovels, Bolt cutters, hammers, To fix our hovels, It all depends on you.”

I happened to be sitting in the second row when Rick Pepper of Marshall (on steel guitar), accompanied by David Harris (on harmonica), cut loose with some gravelly voiced blues.

Not long after Pepper began belting out two Robert Johnson songs, someone sat down beside me.

I was concentrating on the performance, so I didn’t immediately look over to see who it was.

When I finally took a moment to see who had joined me in the second row, I discovered it was Ramblin’ Jack. “This is great,” exclaimed the Grammy Award winner as he listened to Rick and David.

A bit of a surprise for those who do not know him well, Corey Goodman, chairman of Marin Media Institute which has bought The Point Reyes Light, is also a first-rate jazz pianist.

The biotech entrepreneur from Marshall is perhaps best known in West Marin for being the first to expose Park Service misrepresentations regarding the Drakes Bay Oyster Company.

Corey is seen performing with Tim Weed, West Marin’s accoustic virtuoso, who plays everything from guitar to classical banjo. Tim’s collection of classical works for the five-string banjo, Milagros, is regularly featured on National Public Radio.

Also a singer and songwriter, Tim performs in many places. This Sunday, Nov. 21, he’s scheduled to play from 5 to 8 p.m. in the Station House Café.

Despite having a magnificent lineup, the Trailer Stash fundraiser didn’t draw a huge crowd. I’d guess only 75 to 100 folks found their way to this extraordinary concert, and notwithstanding the similarity of names, none was trailer park trash.

A storm in January 1982 dumped 12 inches of rain on West Marin in 36 hours, flooding roads all along the coast. Towns such as Bolinas and Point Reyes Station were cut off from the outside world. Slides were widespread, and Sir Francis Drake Boulevard north of Inverness Park was blocked by mud.

As it happened, there were no sheriff’s deputies or Highway Patrol officers in the Inverness area when the slides occurred, and the Inverness Volunteer Fire Department became in effect the only law west of the Pecos. It requisitioned food from the Inverness Store and distributed it to townspeople. An emergency kitchen was set up in St. Columba’s Episcopal Church.

In October 1989, slippage along the San Andreas Fault, which runs down the middle of Tomales Bay, the Olema Valley, Bolinas Lagoon, and across the Golden Gate, caused the Loma Prieta Earthquake. The temblor, which measured 6.6 on the Richter Scale, killed 63 people in the San Francisco Bay Area and left thousands homeless.

West Marin got off relatively lightly although Highway 1 south of Stinson Beach was so badly damaged it had to be closed for 18 months.

This area was not so fortunate six years later when a wildfire in October 1995 razed more than 45 homes on Inverness Ridge and charred 11 percent of the Point Reyes National Seashore. It took an army of firefighters from around the state to douse the blaze, which at one point was consuming an acre of brush per second.

With disasters such as these fresh in people’s minds, the Marshall Disaster Council expects there will be more and has acquired an emergency trailer for the east shore of Tomales Bay. Here’s the story from one of the organizers.

Tiny, the Marshall Disaster Council mascot, with trained volunteers Rich Clarke and Paul Kaufman in the new trailer, which is designed to hold urgently needed emergency supplies. The trailer will be on display outside Buck Hall at Marconi Center for Sunday’s Trailer Stash, a Musical Fundraiser.

By Paul Kaufman of Marshall

There will be a disaster; we just don’t know when. Residents along Tomales Bay’s East Shore (and hundreds of stranded tourists) could very likely be cut off from timely emergency and medical response.

The Marshall community is mobilizing to provide a cache of local emergency supplies. Thanks to a grant from the Marin County Office of Emergency Services, Marshall now has a brand new 7-foot-by-16-foot mobile disaster trailer.

But it needs to be outfitted with a cache of emergency supplies. While the Red Cross has helped with cots and blankets, Marshall still needs vital rescue and medical items including back boards, halogen work lights, a bolt cutter, a safety harness, fire axes, extinguishers, flares, and stand up tents.

In short, Marshall Disaster Council volunteers are trained and committed to help during a disaster. They just need the tools for survival; hence Trailer Stash, a Musical Fundraiser, which will be held at Marconi Center’s Buck Hall from 2 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 14.

The performers will include: Ingrid Noyes with the Marshall Community Chorus and Kazoo Band, ragtime pianist George Fenn, traditional Irish music by Ted Anderson, harmonica stylist Dave Harris, the golden voice of Rick Pepper, acoustic guitar virtuoso Tim Weed (left), jazz pianist Corey Goodman, romantic ballads by the Kristi-Paul Duo, and Grammy Award-winning folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

Disaster Council volunteers are asking for a donation of $10 per person at the door or $25 per family. It will be a potluck, so please bring a salad, garlic bread, or soft drinks, and we’ll supply fresh Tomales Bay Oyster Company oysters raw, barbecued, or smoked.

Heroically cheerful despite bizarrely bad luck, Doreen Miao and her dog Tully back at home Sunday.

The victim of a freak traffic accident, Doreen Miao, 57, of Point Reyes Station, returned home last Thursday after six days in Marin General Hospital.

As readers of my Oct. 28 report in The West Marin Citizen know, Doreen and her dog Tully had been walking beside Highway 1 just west of the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road Oct. 25 when a passing car hit a buck as it bolted across the highway. The deer was thrown into Doreen, who was knocked down and suffered a compound fracture to  one leg, a broken clavicle, and rib damage. (In a production glitch, The Citizen printed the Oct. 28 report a second time on Nov. 4.)

Doreen on Sunday told me that all she remembers of the accident is walking along the highway and then being in an ambulance. Photographer Marty Knapp, who lives on nearby Tank Road, told the Highway Patrol, as well as me, he saw the oncoming car, saw the buck bolting toward the highway, heard an impact, but did not see it.

Marty said he was not immediately aware that Doreen was lying on the ground, but two neighbors who could see her rushed over to help.

The photographer added he feels certain the car hit the deer rather than hit Doreen. The sound of the impact was what one would expect if a car traveling 25 mph were to hit a 200-pound buck, he explained, far louder than if it were to graze a pedestrian. Despite the blow, however, the blacktailed deer managed to recross the highway and disappear.

The driver of the car stopped and told officers he had hit a buck, but he was not aware of Doreen’s being involved. His car received only minor damage, the Highway Patrol noted.

Doreen, a native of Shanghai who has lived most of her life in the United States, walks her dog Tully to the post office and back almost every day. After the crash, Tully, a miniature Australian shepherd, returned to the post office where townspeople recognized him.

Vickie Leeds, owner of Cabaline tack shop, took Tully and Doreen’s cat Maui to the Point Reyes Animal Hospital. From there, the pets were transferred to a kennel in Novato. Thanks to a neighbor who picked them up from the kennel, Tully and Maui joyfully returned home Sunday.

For the moment, Doreen is using a walker to get around her house, but she’s as happy to be home as Tully and Maui are.

More than a year ago, I posted a story about Anastacio Gonzalez of Point Reyes Station starting to bottle his famous sauce for barbecuing oysters. The sauce has now been refined by replacing high-fructose corn syrup with sugar, so this a good time to update the original posting, much of which is repeated here.

The sauce was already so popular that Anastacio would occasionally receive orders from as far away as Florida. Whole Foods stores, however, prompted him to refine it when they told him they were interested in carrying the sauce but not as long as it contained high-fructose corn syrup.

Anastacio this week told me he is “very pleased” with the new version. “It’s not exactly the same, but it’s very close.” On Wednesday I sampled the new version, and the main difference I noticed was a hint of celery and onions now in the sauce.

Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce is bottled in Portland, where his stepson Matt Giacomini lives. The first shipment of sauce without high fructose corn syrup sauce has just arrived and will be delivered to West Marin merchants next week.

Cookbook author Steven Raichlen a while back set out to determine who invented West Marin’s practice of barbecuing oysters. In BBQ USA: 425 Fiery Recipes From All Across America (Workman Publishing Company, 2003), Raichlen writes, “As I talked to folks in these parts, one name kept coming up: Anastacio Gonzalez.”

Anastacio told Raichlen that the barbecued oyster was born after a shark-and-stingray fishing tournament in 1972.

Anastacio Gonzalez, who in June 2009 retired as head of technical maintenance at West Marin School, spoons his “Famous BBQ Oyster sauce” into shucked oysters grilling on his barbecue.

I myself moved to Point Reyes Station in 1975, and I’ve watched Anastacio’s invention spread around the Tomales Bay area. Jars of Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce are on sale at the Palace Market, Toby’s Feed Barn, Perry’s Inverness Park Deli, Drakes Bay Oyster Company, Tomales Bay Oyster Company, Hog Island Oyster Company, the Marshall Store, and Golden Point Produce in the Tomales Bay Foods building.

And within the next few weeks, the improved sauce will also be sold at the meat counters of 35 supermarkets stretching from Oxnard (Ventura County) to San Diego. Here’s the story.

The 2000 census found that more than a tenth of West Marin’s population is Latino. Many, but not all, belong to immigrant families from three neighboring small cities not far from Guadalajara: Jalostotitlán, San Miguel el Alto, and Valle de Guadalupe.

Anastacio’s family is from Valle de Guadalupe, and before he arrived in West Marin, his brother Pedro had come up from Mexico and taken a job on Charles Garzoli’s ranch near Tomales. Anastacio visited Pedro in 1968 and “liked the area,” he told me. So in January 1969 he emigrated to West Marin and went to work as a milker on Domingo Grossi’s ranch.

He later moved to Joe Mendoza Sr.’s ranch on Point Reyes. “By then I was legal [had been officially granted US residency], so I bought a car and drove to Mexico for three months.” Meanwhile, Pedro had moved to Anaheim, Orange County, where he was working for a company that made electrical wire.

At Pedro’s urging, Anastacio reluctantly went to work for the company and stayed two years. “I started as a coiler and worked my way up to extruder operator. The day they gave me a raise [of only 10 cents per hour] I quit.”

In 1972, he came back to West Marin and began working for Point Reyes Station rancher Elmer Martinelli, who also owned the West Marin Sanitary Landfill. “I worked at the ranch parttime and at the dump parttime pushing garbage [with a bulldozer].”

Always amicable, as well as hardworking, Anastacio was invited to join the Tomales Bay Sportsmen’s Association, which held a two-day “Shark and Ray Derby” every year. “At the end of the second day, Sunday, we always went back to Nicks Cove,” he recalled. Then-owner Al Gibson provided association members with a deck where they could party and barbecue their catch.

In 1972, Anastacio was grilling shark and stingray fillets when Leroy Martinelli, Elmer’s son, showed up with 50 oysters and told him, “See what you can do with these.” With Al’s permission, Anastacio went into the restaurant’s kitchen to see what ingredients he could find. “I put together the sauce my mother used to use for shrimp,” he told me.

“I customized it a little bit, and it turns into this [his now-famous sauce].” Part of the customizing would surprise many people. “In my town, the guy who used to make the best carnitas [shredded pork] used Coca Cola,” Anastacio noted, so he did too.

(The new recipe contains neither the Coca Cola nor the ketchup that Anastacio first used.)

The Nicks Cove owner was as impressed as association members. “We can sell this,” Al told Anastacio and offered him a job barbecuing oysters. Anastacio was already working six days a week, but he finally agreed to do it. “We got oysters for six cents each and used to sell them barbecued three for a dollar.” Nowadays, the price is often $2 apiece.

“I was there for about three years. Then Tony’s Seafood offered me a better deal, a percent [of sales]. Nicks Cove used to pay me $20 per day. When I went to work for Tony’s, I doubled the money or better.” From Tony’s, Anastacio took his barbecuing technique to the Marshall Tavern, which was owned by Al Reis, then of Inverness. “I was barbecuing 4,500 oysters on a weekend. Sunset magazine interviewed me in 1980. That’s when everything went crazy.

Ad in The Point Reyes Light around 1980.

“After Sunset, I’d get people from Sacramento asking, ‘Are you the one?'” Jose de la Luz, better known as Luis, regularly assisted him. “We were working 12 hours a day to catch up,” Anastacio recalled.

Anastacio worked at the Marshall Tavern about four years until the IRS closed it. After that, he barbecued oysters at Barnaby’s by the Bay in Inverness for half a year or so and then moved to Mi Casa, which was located where the Station House Café is today.

Each time Anastacio moved to a new restaurant, the one he’d left would continue to barbecue oysters, trying to duplicate his recipe. “Whenever I left,” he told me with a laugh, “I left my footprint. All the same,” he added, “the customers were following me wherever I went.”

And throughout all this time, Anastacio repeatedly volunteered his barbecuing for a variety of worthy causes: West Marin Lions Club (of which he is a former president), Nicasio Volunteer Fire Department, Sacred Heart Church, Western Weekend, and St. Mary’s in Nicasio (where one day’s barbecuing brought in $4,500 for the church’s building fund). During the Flood of ’82, Anastacio barbecued 6,500 oysters for the National Guard, who were staying at Marconi Conference Center.

While barbecuing oysters, Anastacio ladles melted butter on top of his sauce.

Although Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce is now sold throughout the Tomales Bay area, his biggest outlets could prove to be 35 Northgate Gonzalez supermarkets, which are owned by Anastacio’s cousins, who also own a bank. “One of the owners [Antonio] is married to my brother’s daughter,” he explained. The Southern California supermarkets sell the sauce at the meat counter rather than just stock it on the shelves. “Antonio is in charge of the meat departments of all the stores,” Anastacio noted.

Even with the sauce, there is an art to barbecuing oysters. Anastacio ladles melted butter on top of his sauce while the oysters are on the grill. And he stresses that the oysters need to be shucked before barbecuing. Cooks sometimes try to skip the shucking by placing unopened oysters on the barbecue and letting the water inside the shells steam and pop them open. It may be less work, he said, but “you ruin your oyster.” It becomes overcooked and rubbery.

And while it’s called oyster sauce, it has other uses as well. I found it delicious on hamburgers, and Anastacio told me, “I’ve been using it on chicken, ribs, salmon, on almost anything you put on the grill.” In fact, as a bartender at Nicks Cove discovered when he ran out of V-8 juice, it’s also a great Bloody Mary mix. Just add lemon juice and Tobasco sauce.

For the moment, most oyster barbecuing is occurring around Tomales Bay, Anastacio noted, but with any luck, people throughout California will soon be giving it a try. The main thing he needs now, Anastacio said, is a distributor.

Point Reyes Station’s levee road (AKA Sir Francis Drake Boulevard) should flood less often during heavy storms in the future thanks to a county Department of Public Works project now underway.

Road supervisor Pete Maendle (left) of Inverness Park this week told me a box culvert under the levee road had become completely clogged with silt. This has sometimes led to a drainage ditch from Silver Hills causing flooding near the White House Pool parking lot.

Part of the project involves cleaning out sedimentation basins that are supposed to trap the silt, which consists of decomposed granite, before it reaches the culvert.

The channel downstream from the culvert empties into Papermill Creek, and county creek naturalist Liz Lewis said workers so far have found two juvenile steelhead, six to eight sticklebacks, and two prickly sculpin in the project area.

The state Department of Fish and Game has told the county to complete the project by Oct. 15 in time for winter rains and fish runs. County superintendent of road maintenance Craig Parmley said today he hopes the $25,000 project will require only five or six days of work.

Although the work isn’t expected to last very long, Lewis and Parmley both noted it has taken seven years to get the many state and federal permits the project required. The biggest delay was in getting permission from the Army Corps of Engineers, Lewis said.

Fortunately, the permits will allow the county to carry out ditch maintenance in the future without going through the permit process again, Parmley noted.

While the project is underway, a series of cofferdams keeps ditch water out of the worksite. Water in the dams is being pumped into Olema Marsh.

Once this project at White House Pool (in background) is completed, the county hopes to carry out similar work in Inverness, Inverness Park, and Bolinas, superintendent Parmley said.

Bolinas photographer Ilka Hartmann this Thursday is taking a bus to Hollywood where her son Ole Schell will celebrate his 36th birthday Friday. But that’s not the main reason she’s going.

Ole, who grew up in Bolinas and now lives in New York City, will be on hand for the West Coast premier of his documentary film Picture Me, which he directed along with former girlfriend Sara Ziff.

Ilka Hartmann reads a review of her son’s film in the German periodical Geselleschaft.

Friday’s premier is a very big deal. The documentary has been shown at film festivals in New York, Dubai, Germany, Italy, Spain and Estonia. In New York it won the documentary award at the Jen Arts Film Festival; in Milan, it won the audience award and the best fashion film award.

The film is being shown in theaters (or soon will be) in France, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand, and it is about to be aired on television in England.

Sara (left) as a runway model is seen in the film wearing the gauzy gowns, tiny bikinis, and dramatically cut dresses of the world’s top fashion designers.

Fashion modeling can be a glamorous, highly paid career for a lucky few, but even for them it can have a dark side, the film reveals.

Along with company-store-type debt to modeling agencies and sexual abuse by photographers, there is widespread cocaine use to fight fatigue. Even models who are grown women are pressured by the fashion industry to have figures as skinny and androgynous as an adolescent girl’s. Bulimia is all too common.

Sara got into fashion modeling at 14 when a photographer stopped her as she was walking home from school in New York. That led to assignments all over the world. She appeared in magazine ads, on billboards, and on designer runways. Not long ago, Ilka told me this week, she herself had seen a picture of Sara on a billboard South of Market. She was wearing a black leather jacket in an ad for The Gap.

Ole attended the film school at New York University and met Sara while in New York. After they became a couple, she agreed to let him follow her around with a video camera, shooting her world of glamour, high pay, and grinding exhaustion.

The film is highly nuanced. We watch an almost blasé Sara receiving $80,000 and $111,000 checks for her assignments, as well as a choked-up Sara admitting she has found herself in situations so compromising she can’t tell her parents about them.

Because Sara’s parents are also in the film, Ole’s access to her private world is striking. Nor is Sara alone in revealing for the documentary some of the abuse she has experienced as a model.

Ole and Sara as pictured in the Geselleschaft article. The headline translates from German as, “Food for the photographers.”

A model name Sena Cech tells Ole, “I’ve been modeling two years, working really hard.” Nonetheless, she adds, “I am in huge debt on my credit cards because I’ve been paying for my own food, clothes, and travel.

“I’m still in debt to all of my agencies. They fly you over [to Europe], so that goes on your debt. When you first get here, they hire you a driver [and] get you an apartment, so that goes on your debt. They have to make copies of your [model’s] book, so that goes on your debt. They send out the copies, so that goes on your debt. They have to pick their noses, so that goes on your debt.”

Nor is the agencies’ exploitation of its models merely financial.

“I think it is really common that the photographer would try to sexually take advantage of the model,” Sena (left) says and describes what happened to her.

“I had one [casting] experience with a very well-known photographer, who’s well known for being sexual.

“He’s very famous and a big deal. My agent’s going, ‘Go meet this guy, and whatever you do, make a great impression on him.’

“They started taking pictures. Then, ‘Oh, baby, can you do something a little sexy? Can you take off your clothes?’ I took off my clothes. I had no problem with that. I have no problem with being naked.

“Then the photographer starts getting naked. I’m going, This is getting weird. Why is the photographer getting naked? Nobody’s going to take pictures of him.

“But then his assistant starts taking pictures of him naked and then goes, ‘Sena, can you grab the photographer’s cock and twist it real hard? He likes it when you squeeze it real hard and twist it.'”

As she tells the story, Sena looks more and more disgusted and finally blurts out, “This is so gross! I did it, but later I didn’t feel good about it. I didn’t feel good telling my boyfriend about it. I didn’t feel things went the way they should have.” All the same, she adds with a grimace, “I did get the job.”

And that’s the conundrum Ole’s film so deftly shows. The models know they’re being exploited in several ways, are being required to work inhuman hours, and can become so fatigued they have trouble staying awake while on the runway. But the chance to earn large amounts of money is also alluring, and in the case of Sara, the money eventually allows her to attend Columbia University and make a downpayment on a home.

When it comes to who is doing most of the exploiting, the models blame their agencies, lecherous photographers, and clothing designers who think their dresses will be more appealing to other women if the models resemble anorexic waifs.

In the 1980s and 90s, the models were usually grown women, the movie notes, but now girls as young as 14, 15, and 16 are often seen on runways far from home. These girls are easily replaceable and are typically the most vulnerable to abuse.

Picture Me is a brilliant documentary. It has many things to say, and it lets the models themselves say them. The dialogue is mostly conversational in tone. There is no screaming, no ranting. Some of what we see is sad, but some of it is humorous. It’s the nuances that give this film its power.

If you followed news of the three-month-long Gulf Oil Spill earlier this year, you know how distressing it was to see the victims. Well, it was almost as sticky at my cabin for 12 months before Terry Gray of Inverness Park and I finally capped another gusher one week ago.

For the past year, visitors to my cabin had arrived badly in need of a cleanup, their hands having become sticky from grasping the railing at the top of my front steps. Even the raccoons that show up each night at my kitchen door sometimes appeared to have sticky paws.

A tub of tree sealer sits where sap was dripping onto the railing of my steps.

A year ago, tree trimmers had cut off a pine limb which overhung my roof, and that had caused sap to drip from the wound onto the deck, railing, and steps below. After trying unsuccessfully to cap the leak by myself, I asked Terry for help.

Having concluded a girdle of cloth wouldn’t work because the sap would merely flow over it, I had already tried creating a collar using the inner tube from a wheelbarrow tire. Unfortunately, the bark of Monterey pines is striped with cracks, and sap flowing down those cracks went right past my rubber collar.

A new approach was needed. Before Terry showed up, I bought a caulking knife and a tub of tree-wound sealing compound at Building Supply Center.

It was Terry’s job to climb up on my roof two stories off the ground and slather the black goop all over the stub of the cut-off limb.

But within hours of his doing this, the wound was again dripping sap on my deck and railing.

So I asked Terry to come back and try again, for I had another idea.

This time he used a pocket knife to cut a shallow groove in the dry outer bark in order to divert the flow of sap away from the deck and railing.

The idea sort of worked but not totally.

Some sap continued to land where visitors would step on it and get it on their hands.

So Terry came back for a third try.

By now we were beginning to feel like BP struggling against the forces of nature.

Terry decided to lengthen the groove and build up its outer edge with sealer, which hardens within a few hours. At first, this approach seemed to work, but by morning the railing was again sticky with sap.

On Terry’s fourth try, he raised the edge of the groove even more but decided what was really needed was a wooden shelf to catch whatever sap overflowed the groove.

When Terry came back for a fifth time, he cut a shelf with one side shaped to fit around part of the trunk.

The shelf, which was attached to the trunk with wood screws, looked like it might be the perfect answer. But it wasn’t. The dripping became worse than ever because of sap oozing from the screw holes.

After cursing his shelf idea, Terry on his six try removed it, smeared tree sealer over the screw holes, and further built up the edge of the diversion groove.

He also smeared sealer on another wound where a very small limb had been cut off the tree.

It too, we now realized, was responsible for an occasional drip.

Terry headed for home fearing that the abandoned shelf’s screw holes would plague us for some time to come and assuring me he’d be back in a day or so to work on the damage.

But there wasn’t any. “You stopped the dripping ,” I told Terry when I got him on the phone. “Congratulations!”

Terry was naturally pleased but remained a bit dubious given all we’d been through. However, a week has now gone by without a drop of sap falling on the deck, railing, or steps below.

Today Terry climbed back up on the roof to check the stub of the sawed-off limb and apply more tree sealer. The leak has indeed been capped, he reported when he climbed back down.

Our persistence had been rewarded, and Terry hadn’t fallen off the roof. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! I chortled in my joy.

We can learn much about a society from its signs whether they announce weekend events at the Dance Palace or warn: “Speed Limit. Radar Enforced.”

“The sign brings customers,” wrote the French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621-1695), but sometimes signs can make it appear that the merchant has changed her mind. Take this pairing of signs on the door of the Busy Bee in Inverness Park. To be fair, I photographed the signs today when the bakery wasn’t scheduled to be open, but the juxtaposition was still surprising.

In wartime, signs can be far more jarring. In 1982, I photographed this graffiti on a building in Guatemala during that country’s long-running insurgency. The right-wing graffiti on the left translates as “Death to the EGP (Guerrilla Army of the Poor) and the CUC (Committee for Peasant Unity).”

The graffiti on the right warns villagers: “Not a bread nor a tortilla for the guerrilla.”

This writing on a burned-out van proclaims: “Viva, the Army of Guatemala! Death to the Guerrilla Army of the Poor.”

Guerrillas too, of course, have traditionally written their own graffiti here and there. This warning was scrawled on a wall in San Agusta­n, El Salvador. Back in 1982 when I shot the photo, control of the town had been going back and forth between the government and the guerrillas. The insurgents’ message on this wall pockmarked by bullet holes is a threat directed at government informants: “Death to the ears.”

Wartime graffiti can at times be merely sarcastic. Because of deforestation brought on by trees being felled for heating and cooking, the Guatemalan government three decades ago restricted cutting trees in the wild.

However, guerrillas back then often toppled trees across rural roadways to block traffic. The trees, of course, had to be cut up to reopen the roads, and that prompted this graffiti which, judging from its red-white-and-blue colors, was painted by a member of the far-right National Liberation Movement (MLN).

The MLN graffiti sneers, “Thanks for the firewood, guerrillas, mules and sons of the whore.”

Even when signs are meant to be merely humorous reality can sometimes intervene. While in Paris in 1985, I saw a maid trudging wearily down the street with food for dinner. Immediately, I was struck by her incongruous juxtaposition with a billboard she was passing. It showed a laughing, topless woman about her age joking, “My shirt for a beer.”

Equally surprising was this scene I came upon a week ago at the entrance to Tilden Regional Parks Botanic Garden in Berkeley. Was this a guard cat or was the cat staying behind the sign so it wouldn’t be disturbed by dogs? I don’t know the answer, but I’m looking for a sign.

Homebuilding techniques are not a topic I usually spend much time reading about, but I’ve found a new book titled Crafting the Considerate House to be surprisingly intriguing.

The word “considerate,” by the way, is being used here to mean more than just environmentally considerate, although that’s included. Indeed, the book in places argues that certain so-called “green” construction techniques are in reality not all that friendly to the environment.

I probably wouldn’t have picked up the book were it not that the author, David Gerstel of Kensington, has been a friend for more than 30 years.

David is a successful homebuilder, as well as a writer. Crafting the Considerate House is his fourth book, three of which are geared to builders. What sets this book apart from others in the field is that its often-humorous narrative describes the actual construction of a house, which the author built in 2007 on 19th Street in San Pablo.

At each stage of building, from designing the house to installing kitchen cabinets, David’s book explains why he decided to do what he did and what the tradeoffs were when he rejected the alternatives, whether they were in the foundation, the framing, the design of a staircase, or the carpet on the floor.

In planning and building the house, David writes, the “values that guided the construction” were that it had to be healthy to live in, environmentally considerate, ‘dollarwise,’ and ‘architonic.’

Architonic, a word David coined, is used to mean “the quality possessed by buildings that satisfy all our senses, not only the visual (with which the term ‘architecture’ is so heavily associated).”

Some of this is fairly straightforward stuff. Good ventilation is vital to air quality inside a house, for example.

By dollarwise, David means frugal spending so as to avoid waste, to preserve money for meeting various construction goals, and to keep within a budget so that a tradesman and his family can afford to rent the completed house. (David makes clear he is not writing about building “MacMansions.”)

An architonic house, meanwhile, looks attractive to passersby and fits the character of its neighborhood. It’s comfortable to live in for a variety of reasons: windows are placed to let in the proper amount of light, the floor plan is laid out so that sounds from one room don’t carry into another, there is plenty of space for social events, and so forth.

The most controversial part of the book is bound to be his calculations as to what types of construction are considerate of the environment. Some of his advice is generally accepted. Low-flow faucets and low-flush toilets save considerable water. However, he also notes that hot-water heaters that are too far from faucets waste significant amounts of water.

Front elevation of the 19th Street house.

Nor does he believe that on-demand water heaters, which are often considered green, are the best approach dollarwise or environmentally. For example, they are more expensive to install and require more maintenance than hot-water heaters. In addition, they occasionally encourage overuse of hot water, he writes.

In contrast, creating a good “thermal boundary” with insulation and tight sealing to keep a house from losing hot or cool air to the outdoors is extremely important environmentally, David notes. It greatly affects the amount of energy needed for heating or cooling.

Creating rooftop gardens, on the other hand, can be an environmental travesty, according to his book. Do these “green roofs” on large, luxurious homes benefit the environment, David asks, or are they “merely… a green veil to disguise the predatory character of the building beneath?”

After listening to a biologist expound upon green roofs, David writes, he pointed “to a nearby old warehouse [and] asked [the biologist] whether he would like to put a green roof on top of it. ‘Oh yes,’ he replied. I explained that as a builder I saw a potential consequence that might not come immediately to his biologist’s mind. Putting a garden atop the warehouse would require that it be heavily strengthened.

David Gerstel building cabinets.

“Constructing the concrete footings, columns, trusses, and steel connections required for that strengthening, not to mention all the components of the green roof itself, the waterproof membrane, protection for the membrane, drainage mats, irrigation systems, soil, and plants, would register a series of substantial environmental impacts.

“They included: Extracting raw material from the earth for every component. Processing it. Manufacturing it. Transporting it. Transporting workers back and forth to the site to reconstruct the building and install the green roof. Disposing of or recycling of waste. And then more impacts from extraction through transport and disposal for year after year of maintenance.”

“‘Oh yes,’ the biologist assured me, he knew about all of that. ‘Well in that case,’ I asked him, ‘was it possible the environmental benefits that a garden atop the warehouse roof would deliver might be outweighed by environmental hits left in its wake?’….

“If, in fact, it appeared that the roof would result in net environmental damage, would he advise against the green roof? ….He said he did not care about cost/benefit analysis. ‘I’m not a numbers guy,’ he said. ‘Building roof gardens is not just what I do for a living. It’s more than that. Providing wildlife habitat is my spiritual life. I’m a birds-and-bees guy. It’s who I am.'”

That answer, David writes, “outraged a friend who has devoted much of her life to protecting plant and animal habitat. ‘The hubris of it,’ she exclaimed. ‘To create a small patch of artificial habitat, he is willing to destroy who knows how much natural habitat. And he calls himself a biologist!'”

Front porch of the 19th Street house.

Crafting the Considerate House has caused me to think about many of these issues for the first time, including how well my own cabin was built. Fortunately, mine was designed to minimize construction waste, and that, David writes, is crucial. Supposed “green” construction, he adds, often talks as if reusing, recycling, and reducing building materials are of equal importance when, in fact, “the mantra should read reuse, Recycle, and REDUCE!”

If you’re planning to build a house, or have one built, you might do well to first read David’s book. He takes you along as he makes decisions regarding everything from types of construction, to building materials, to costs, to potential problems. You may be able to save yourself some money, and you will certainly end up with a better house.

Crafting the Considerate House by David Gerstel, 243 pages, $17.95 paperback, published in 2010 by Latitude 67.

“Oh God, thy sea is so great, and my boat is so small.” Fisherman’s prayer from France’s Brittany coast.

‘Stacked Boats II,’ 48-by-48 inches, in the I Wolk Gallery.

A Point Reyes Station artist who in recent years has managed to survive on small boats is Bruce Lauritzen. In fact, for the past month, exhibitions of his idiosyncratic “Vessel Series” have been featured at two galleries in the Napa Valley.

His abstracted representations of boat hulls had been scheduled to come down this Thursday, but the show has now been extended to Sunday. Lauritzen sold a 72-by-36-inch canvas titled Yellow Boat (above) for $12,500 the day the show opened, which was “unexpected for hard times,” the artist acknowledged. More have sold since then.

Among the paintings on exhibit are ‘Rembrandt’s Boat,’ 54-by-54 inches, (left) and ‘Boat House,‘ 54-by-54 inches, in the I Wolk Gallery.

The show, called “Voyages,” is split between two galleries, the I. Wolk in St Helena (Lauritzen’s gallery before Ira Wolk was killed in a bicycle accident) and Ma(i)sonry in Yountville, which is also showcasing a wine line by the new owner, Michael Polenske.

Here the artist is seen at a Marin Museum of Contemporary Art show in June 2008, discussing his painting ‘Still Waters III’ with two guests.

Attending on scholarship, Lauritzen graduated from California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He earned a master of fine arts degree at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Lauritzen later taught at the College of Marin and the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He was also a member of the Marin Arts Council’s founding board of directors.

The artist’s work is in more than 100 private, institutional, and museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Achenbach Foundation at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor.

‘Boat on Trailer,’ 44-by-61 inches, I Wolk Gallery.

I. Wolk Gallery is located at 1354 Main St. in St. Helena, and Ma(i)sonry Gallery is located at 6711 Washington St. in Yountville. Those planning to see Lauritzen’s large paintings of small boats need to call ahead (707 944-0889).