Seen from a low-flying airplane, the northwestern 40 percent of Marin County is a bit different from what one sees driving on public roads, as I was reminded this week.

Sally Gale with her husband Mike raise grass-fed beef in Chileno Valley, and for Christmas 2007, she gave him a gift certificate for one-hour plane ride. Mike (above) finally had a chance to take the flight this week, and he invited me along.

At 2 p.m. Tuesday, Mike and I showed up in the Aeroventure office at the Petaluma Airport where pilot Tom Dezendorf loaded us into a Cessna that was tied down out front. As Mike and I would later learn, Tom, who mostly works as a flight instructor these days, previously was an Emmy-winning production manager for NBC.

As befits a flight instructor, Tom’s takeoff was as smooth as his camerawork, and if I hadn’t been looking out the window I’d have thought we were still on the runway.

Once we were airborne, Tom headed out to Chileno Valley so we could shoot some photos of Mike’s and Sally’s ranch. Their stately ranch house, which has long been in Sally’s family, had fallen into such disrepair it was uninhabitable before they spent four years (1994-98) restoring it.

From Chileno Valley, Tom at my request headed out to Drakes Estero, crossing Tomales Bay en route. I wanted to photograph this tribal region of the Point Reyes National Seashore where there are continual skirmishes between a Taliban warlord, Olema bin Laden, and the Drakes Bay people.

Bin Laden has been trying to end century-old oyster growing at the estero by imposing a pitiless environmental sharia on the region. His many cruelties by now have raised concern among neighboring peoples, as well as a number of county, state, and federal officials.

New readers unfamiliar with the injustices that prompt this digression into satire can find them in previous postings about Drakes Bay Oyster Company. (N.B. I’m speaking only for myself here and not for Mike.)

As we approached the estero, stockponds like steps descended hillsides in front of us almost to the shoreline.

Northwest Marin contains scores of stockponds the public never sees because they’re hidden in remote canyons or, surprisingly enough, near the tops of ridges. As we flew over some of the higher ones, I wondered what their sources of water are.

On the other hand, Petaluma residents are more likely to have swimming pools hidden out of public view, as we could see while flying to and from the airport. I guess the difference says something about what goes on where.

On our way back to Petaluma, we flew over Point Reyes Station to shoot a few photos. There were no swimming pools to be seen.

That’s the Coast Guard housing complex at the upper left. Just below it are the houses EAH sold at market rates, and below them are rows of trees around a corner of the playing field at West Marin School. To the right of the trees is the EAH affordable housing project.

The Dance Palace is the blue building at lower right. Above it (with a brown roof) is the Arthur Disterheft Public Safety Building, which houses the county fire station and sheriff’s substation. Winding through the upper right of the photo is Papermill/Lagunitas Creek. In the center of it all is Point Reyes Station’s commercial district, which mostly lines the town’s main street, a three-block-long jog in Highway 1.

The term Northwest Marin is sometimes used to describe the Tomales, Dillon Beach, Fallon area, and once in a great while, it is used to refer to all of West Marin (including the San Geronimo Valley) from Olema north.

City-Data.com describes Northwest Marin (see its map below) as consisting of 322 square miles with a population as of July 2007 of 9,366. The median household income in Northwest Marin a year and a half ago was $62,106 compared with $59,948 for California as a whole, City-Data.com estimated.

But that small difference doesn’t begin to compensate for the horrifically high cost of living here. On a cost-of-living scale that considers 100 to be average for communities nationwide, Northwest Marin scores a frightening 191.7, which City-Data.com not surprisingly calls “very high.”

Among Northwest Marin residents 25 and older, 93.1 percent have high school degrees, 46.7 percent have college degrees, and 18.5 percent have graduate or professional degrees.

The “most common industries for males” working in West Marin, City-Data.com says, are: “construction, 17 percent; professional, scientific, and technical services, 10 percent; agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, 10 percent; educational services, 8 percent; accommodation and food services, 7 percent; health care, 5 percent; arts, entertainment, and recreation, 5 percent.”

Listed as the “most common industries for females” are: “educational services, 12 percent; health care, 11 percent; professional, scientific, and technical services, 9 percent; accommodation and food services, 7 percent; arts, entertainment, and recreation, 7 percent; religious, grantmaking, civic, professional, and similar organizations, 6 percent; public administration, 5 percent.”

The average household size in Northwest Marin is 2.4 people, lower than the statewide average of 2.9, and far fewer households in Northwest Marin consist of families (46.2 percent) than is typical statewide (68.9 percent).

Some 7.8 percent of households here are made up of unmarried partners compared with 5.9 percent statewide. An additional 0.9 percent of Northwest Marin households describe themselves as lesbian and 0.7 percent describe themselves as gay men, City-Data.com reports.

In 2007, the estimated median price of a home in Northwest Marin was $838,246 compared to $532,300 statewide. I wonder how much prices have dropped since then, probably not enough to help the 10.6 percent of residents with incomes below the poverty level.

Nothwithstanding how hard it is on the one in 10 Northwest Marin residents with incomes that low, statewide the percentage of people with incomes below the poverty level was 40 percent higher in July 2007 before the recession hit.

The Miwok Indian cemetery at Reynolds (where Tony’s Seafood is located; the restaurant’s white buildings can be seen in the background)   From 1875 to 1930, Reynolds was a whistlestop on the narrow-gauge railroad, and numerous Miwoks lived nearby. A few of their descendants still do. The cemetery belongs to the Miwok Rancheria in Graton, Sonoma County.

Today, of course, is the first day of Spring, and wildflowers have begun blooming around the plastic flowers that decorate each cross.

Now that it’s Spring, “the time has come,” as the walrus said, “to speak of many things,” and I’m going to speak my piece about a couple of West Marin news stories that I’d like to see get more coverage. Both have interesting ramifications.

The first occurred last week when an IRS agent shot himself in the leg while at a practice range in Tomales. Other than brief Sheriff’s Calls in The West Marin Citizen and Point Reyes Light, the incident wasn’t covered in the weekly press.

The Marin Independent Journal gave the story greater play, noting that the gun was a .40-caliber Glock and that the target range is open to the public Thursdays through Mondays for $10 per person. The IJ even went so far as to report the 19-acre range at Alexander and Tomales-Petaluma roads has a county use permit through 2016.

A Miwok inscription near the entrance to the cemetery.

But the real story of the shooting, which no paper has covered, is the handgun itself. Why? Glocks don’t have external-switch safeties. If you squeeze the trigger, they fire.

This might be an appropriate weapon for a liquor store owner who presumably doesn’t have time to release a safety when bad guys burst through his door their guns a’blazing; however, I would think that criminal investigators, even those working for the IRS, probably have a smidgen more advance warning when there may be a need to start shooting people.

I first heard about the problem with single-action Glocks from new-media consultant Dave LaFontaine of Los Angeles, who previously was an investigator for a law firm with law-enforcement clients. As it turns out, there’s been quite a debate in recent years over whether law enforcement officers and others can safely carry Glocks. The rules for law enforcement apparently vary from state to state.

Critics complain that if you holster or unholster a Glock pistol with your finger on the trigger, you may well shoot yourself in the thigh, as numerous people have done. In fact, it has happened to enough people that a DEA agent has even been caught on video accidentally shooting himself. Now there’s a lead for the press to follow up on.

Gravemarkers in the Miwok cemetery are mostly Catholic crosses, but there are also military plaques and this bicultural memorial.

Here’s another story for the West Marin press. As was noted in my last posting, Mark Allen of Inverness Park was lead cameraman for a segment of 60 Minutes that would air Sunday evening. The segment profiled Alice Waters of Chez Panisse, who is leading a “slow-food” movement. It turned out that Mark had a cameo appearance in the segment, with the Berkeley chef hand-feeding him Mexican food at a farmers’ market.

The Bay Area, perhaps to no one’s surprise, is also home to a “slow-sex” movement, The New York Times reported last Friday. At the forefront of this movement, The Times says, is One Taste Urban Retreat Center, which it describes as “a coed live-in commune dedicated to the female orgasm….

“The heart of the group’s activity, listed cryptically on its Web site’s calendar as ‘morning practice,’ is closed to all but the residents. At 7 a.m. each day,” The Times reports, “about a dozen women, naked from the waist down, lie with eyes closed in a velvet-curtained room, while clothed men huddle over them, stroking them in a ritual known as orgasmic meditation,”  ‘OMing,’ for short.

“The couples, who may or may not be romantically involved, call one another ‘research partners.'”

Heading the South of Market commune, which is now four and a half years old, is a former art gallery owner named Nicole Daedone. While obviously intrigued by her, The Times quotes a former resident as saying Ms. Daedone exerts too much control over residents’ personal lives, and she herself acknowledges, “There’s a high potential for this to be a cult.”

However, Ms. Daedone adds, partly to keep that from happening she’s moved out of the commune and in with her boyfriend, Reese Jones. The Times describes him as a “venture capitalist/geek,” a “braniac who sold a computer-software company he founded, Netopia, to Motorola for $208 million.”

Why should the West Marin press pay attention to all this? Because The Times also reported that “Mr. Jones… makes financial resources available to One Taste, including helping to buy a retreat in Stinson Beach.” Who, what, when, where? Of course the weekly press should cover this One Tastefully.

Father Jack O’Neill (center), pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, flanked by Marin County Fire Capt. Todd Overshiner and Mike Krillelea of San Rafael, jokes with guests at today’s barbecue.

A warning sign of Spring: Hundreds of people showed up at the Dance Palace this afternoon for Sacred Heart Church’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Barbecue.

West Marin Irish Music Players, who practice from 7 to 9 p.m. Mondays at West Marin School, entertained guests.

A volunteer bartender at the St. Patrick’s Day Barbecue, Mark Allen (left) of Inverness Park, takes an order for an Irish coffee.

Mark was the lead cameraman for a 60 Minutes segment, scheduled to be aired at 7 p.m. this evening, on “slow-food” advocate Alice Waters of Chez Panisse.

Some 446 chicken dinners were served inside the Dance Palace while outside the community center, Drakes Bay Oyster Company barbecued 1,000 oysters as part of the fundraiser. In the foreground shucking oysters are company owner Kevin Lunny (right) and John Aucoin of Inverness Park.

Anastacio Gonzalez of Point Reyes Station, head of technical maintenance at West Marin School, provided his special barbecue sauce for the oysters. Here he checks to see whether he’ll need to make more when he goes home.

Almost 30 years ago, Anastacio devised the recipe while barbecuing oysters at the old Nicks Cove restaurant. He then took it to the former Barnaby’s restaurant in Inverness (now Thepmonggon Thai restaurant), and later to Tony’s Seafood. By now, barbecuing with sauce inspired by his recipe is a standard way of preparing oysters in the Tomales Bay area.

Today’s rain held off until just after the barbecue finished, which was good because both the chickens and oysters were barbecued outdoors and because many guests chose to eat them picnic style on the Dance Palace’s front lawn. With Spring only five days off, ranchers are hoping to squeeze the last bit of moisture out of winter. When the current series of rainstorms began, my neighbor Jay Haas shot this photo of a stockpond overflowing on the Giacomini family’s land next to ours.

Another warning sign of Spring: The gloomy days of winter are supposed to be over “when the red, red robin comes bob, bob, bobin’ along.” But at Jay’s home this year, the first robin of Spring is not “red, red” but partially albino. (Photo by Jay Haas)

“For some reason, albinism and partial albinism have been recorded in robins more than any other wild bird species,” the website American Robin reports.

“One study found that 8.22 percent of all albino wild birds found in North America were robins. But only about one robin in 30,000 is an albino or partial albino. Most records of robins with albinism are only partial albinos, which of course live longer than total albinos.”

As American Robin explains, totally albino birds have no pigment in their irises and retinas to protect their eyes from sunlight, and many eventually go blind.

When the lot beside Tomales Town Hall came up for sale a while back, the Town Hall board took advantage of the opportunity to acquire yard space that came with an ancient shade tree. Having now paid off well over $100,000 of the note and needing only $20,000 more, the Town Hall on Saturday held a fundraising pig roast, barbecue, and silent action.

Two bands played, one in the yard and one in the hall. Performing here is the band Blue Holstein with (from left) Charlie Morgan on guitar, Vic Marcotte on drums, Don Armstrong on guitar (seen here as lead singer on a Bob Dylan reprise), and Cheshire Mahoney on sax. A former West Marin resident, Cheshire now lives in Ashland.

The roasted pig, which was carved next to Highway 1 outside the Town Hall, was a hit with townspeople, and the line waiting to get in on the feast ran the length of the hall and out the front door.

Meanwhile a couple of blocks away, cartoonist Kathryn LeMieux was holding a moving sale. The sale will resume from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. this Sunday, March 8, at 31 Carrie St.

Why is she moving? In his day job, her husband Don Armstrong of Blue Holstein is now superintendent of Fort Bragg Unified School District, having previously been a teacher in Bolinas and later a superintendent in Petaluma. Kathryn told me the couple is tired of maintaining two homes and having to live apart much of the time, so they’re going to live in Westport (north of Fort Bragg) and rent out their home in Tomales until he retires.

For 11 years during the time I owned The Point Reyes Light, Kathryn drew the comic strip Feral West for the newspaper, and she now draws it for The West Marin Citizen. The move will bring an end to the strip, she said.

Kathryn is also one of six women who 10 years ago started the cartoon Six Chix, which is syndicated by King Features and appears locally in The Marin Independent Journal. Each cartoonist draws one strip a week and takes turns drawing the Sunday cartoon. Kathryn told me her last Six Chix strip will be published Friday.

Frustrated by the “hard work” of producing on deadline while her earnings from newspapers shrink because of changes in the industry, Kathryn said she will give up cartooning to concentrate on her oil painting.

I happened to run into Point Reyes Station naturalist Jules Evans at Kathryn’s moving sale, and he was fascinated by some of the non-artwork she was also selling. “Where else can you buy a possum skull?” he asked me.

Along with an original Feral West cartoon from 2004, I myself picked up a 1960 issue of The Baywood Press, as The Light was called until September 1966. A Page 1 story in the issue reported that sheriff’s deputies were looking for an arsonist who used a blanket soaked with kerosine to set fire to the house immediately north of West Marin School. Assistant fire chief Louis Bloom estimated that $250 worth of damage was done to the home, which belonged to Robert Worthington and his family. They were on a two-week trip to the Central Valley when the fire broke out around midnight.

Another Page 1 story reported that dogs from homes along Highway 1 had killed seven sheep belonging to now-deceased Elmer Martinelli, father Point Reyes Station’s Patricia, Stan, and Leroy Martinelli.

Nor were Kathryn’s sale and the Town Hall pig roast the only fun around Tomales. On the Tomales-Petaluma Road, a succession of motorists kept stopping to photograph Veanna Silva’s camel grazing with a couple of cows. Two-humped Bactrian camels are native to the Gobi Desert of Mongolia and China.

Also intriguing motorists along the Tomales-Petaluma Road is this sign outside the former Aurora School (built in 1873), which is now the home of Jerry and Leslie Swallow. What the sign really signifies, townspeople told me, is that the Swallows’ driveway has a blind turnout onto the the road, and that the Swallows have a sense of humor.

Here are a few other intriguing facets of Tomales, as reported by City-Data.com. The town as of July 2007 had 210 residents whose median age was 46.1 years old. The estimated median household income was $61,107 compared with $59,948 statewide.

Some 94.3 percent of townspeople are non-Hispanic white, 2.4 percent are Hispanic, 1 percent are Japanese, and 1 percent are American Indian. The average household size is 2.4 people compared with 2.9 statewide. Some 56.2 percent of these are “family households” compared with 68.9 percent statewide.

As of a year and a half ago, 11 percent of the households consisted of unmarried partners compared with 5.9 percent statewide. Another 1.4 percent of Tomales’ households reported being lesbian, and 1.4 percent reported being gay men.

City-Data.com calls the cost of living in Tomales “very high.” On the national cost-of-living index, 100 represents the US average, and Tomales comes in at a whopping 168.6.

But here’s what I find to be the most surprising statistics reported by City-Data.com. Back in 2007 before the recession hit, the proportion of Tomales residents with incomes below the poverty level (14.3 percent) was virtually the same as the state average (14.2 percent) while the proportion of residents with incomes below 50 percent of the poverty level (9.5 percent) was far worse than the state as a whole (6.3 percent).

That one in seven townspeople have incomes below the poverty level is all the more surprising given that Tomales is one of the better educated towns anywhere. Nine out of 10 residents 25 and older have completed high school, and 43.3 percent have completed college. More than one in five residents (21 percent) hold graduate or professional degrees.

The only thing I can think of that might explain this disparity between high education and low income could be the ascetic lifestyles of the 30 or so people living at the Blue Mountain Meditation Center off the Tomales-Petaluma Road.

But it’s incongruities such as this that make Tomales so interesting: from a pig roast to finance real estate for the Town Hall, to a camel and a “blind driver” along the Tomales-Petaluma Road, to possum, deer, and horse skulls plus artwork, antiques, and artifacts for sale in a cartoonist’s studio. It’s a great town, and, by the way, it’s going to miss you while you’re gone, Don and Kathryn.

Nicasio Reservoir overflowed early today, symbolically extricating West Marin from California’s three-year drought. The land draining into the Marin Municipal Water District reservoir has received seven inches of rain in the past eight days, district spokeswoman Libby Pischel told me.

On April 1, the amount of water in MMWD’s reservoirs will determine whether the district considers this a drought year, Pischel said, and district projections now are far rosier than they were at the end of January. MMWD reservoirs currently are 75 percent full, she noted, adding that they would normally be 85 percent full at this time of year.

The present storm system and one a week ago have been especially welcome in Bolinas. Two weeks ago Bolinas Community Public Utility District’s main reservoir, Woodrat II, was essentially dry, and BCPUD directors had voted to limit each household, regardless of size, to 150 gallons of water per day. By mid-afternoon today, the reservoir had risen to within two feet of capacity.

“We’re very grateful,” BCPUD general manager Jennifer Blackman told me during this afternoon’s rainfall. “We’re in a much better place than we were last month.” Although “rationing is still in place,” Blackman said, BCPUD directors last week held off voting on further restrictions because the current rain was being forecast.

Nicasio Reservoir that overflowed today is one of seven belonging to Marin Municipal Water District, which serves the San Geronimo Valley and most of East Marin south of Novato.

Shortly after noon, I began clambering up the embankment across the spillway from the dam in order to photograph the historic event.

Twice before in the past 30 years, I did this for The Point Reyes Light to record the ends of previous droughts. It’s never an easy climb. The slope is rocky and extremely steep with few hand holds in some places and dense brush in others.

This time was worse than ever. I was halfway to a ledge high enough to look down on the reservoir when my feet slid out from under me. I dropped to my hands only to have my camera fall out of a parka pocket. With dismay I watched as it tumbled away down the rocky slope.

Gloomily, I crawled and slid after it, muddying my pants, as well as bloodying my hands on the rocks. When I finally reached the bottom, however, I found a happy surprise. The camera had survived the rough descent better than I had. Kodak cameras are apparently as sturdy as they’re cheap. After wiping mine off, I secured it around my neck and once again began climbing.

Luckily, deer trails crisscross the slope, which made traversing it at least possible although not easy. But when I finally reached the ledge from which I could photograph the dam and spillway with the reservoir behind them, the scene easily compensated for my scrapes and bruises.

Seasonal waterfall. Driving from Point Reyes Station to the dam and back, I noted that every gully along the Point Reyes-Petaluma Road had become a stream which flowed into Papermill/Lagunitas Creek. When rainfall is normal, these small waterfalls are annual roadside attractions.

My hill too changes during heavy rains. When I looked out the dining-room window yesterday morning (that’s my cabin in the background), I spotted what appeared to be a piece of plastic flapping in the grass. My first impulse was to wait until the rain stopped before going outside to pick it up, but then I realized that what appeared to be plastic was actually water bubbling up.

An artesian spring had sprung up out of a gopher hole. That’s common in these coastal hills and, in fact, can damage ranchers’ pastures. During heavy rains, hillsides that have become honeycombed with gopher tunnels act like a sponge. If the top two or three feet of soil become over-saturated, wholesale slumping can occur.

And finally for all you cynics out there, no, there is no water pipe or septic line uphill from this artesian spring. Stay warm and enjoy the bad weather. With any luck, we’ll get more of it.

As many other West Marin residents had already done, today I hauled my Christmas tree to the dumpster behind the Point Reyes Station firehouse. Old Christmas trees become highly combustible when they dry out, so the Marin County Fire Department each year provides free disposal.

Photo by Janine Warner, founder of digitalfamily.com

While I appreciated the firefighters’ program, saying goodbye to the tree was the culmination of a bittersweet story. At eight feet tall, it had created a cozy niche of woodland (above) in a corner of my loft. Decorated branches jutting through the loft’s railing had over overhung the dining-room table a floor below, turning guests beneath the tree into colorful gifts.

But even before the little pine served so loftily as a Christmas tree, I had become fond of it. The Monterey pine was a volunteer that had sprung up next to my propane tank and was rooted more in rock than soil. When I first noticed the then-weed-high tree, I doubted it would survive.

But survive it did until this Christmas. When the still-tiny tree became half choked by a fungus-caused goiter, I performed surgery. Unfortunately, I later performed some unnecessary surgery, twice accidentally chopping off branches with a weed whacker.

By this year, the little tree’s branches had begun to engulf the propane tank, which annoyed the DeCarli’s driver because the foliage made it difficult to open the hood of the tank to refill it. Finally, I agreed I’d trim the tree back a bit come winter, and the driver seemed satisfied.

Late last summer, however, the tree’s fate was sealed when the same county fire department that disposed of the tree wrote homeowners around here, ordering us to undertake 10 precautions against wildfires. One of the precautions was to eliminate any combustible vegetation within 15 feet of our propane tanks.

The fire department also ordered us to return a form within 30 days, saying that we had completed these precautions. I immediately set to work making my property safe from wildfires and returned the form on time. However, where the form asked whether I had cleared all vegetation back 15 feet from my propane tank, I penciled in that a small pine tree remained, but it would be cut down at Christmastime.

Photo by Joel Hack

The tree had only three months to live, and I felt guilty every time I looked at it, which was every time I got in or out of my car at home. Finally, on Dec. 19, I took a chainsaw to the little tree and cut it down.

For two weeks, the tree sparkled with colored lights and shiny ornaments. Now as I park my car and see the empty space where the little tree once grew, I pine for it — dead and abandoned in a dumpster behind the firehouse.

In Point Reyes Station, which President-elect Barack Obama carried with 86.1 percent of the vote, brown hills quickly turned to green after the election.

It’s time for another installment in this blog’s occasional series Quotes Worth Saving, which, in fact, is the label on the file in which I save them. Here are a few gleaned from the press during the past three years.

SWANSEA WALES  When officials [via email] asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign [“No entry for heavy-goods vehicles. Residential site only.”], they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the email response [Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu.] to Swansea council said in Welsh, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” So that was what went up under the English version, which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket. “When they’re proofing signs, they should really use someone who speaks Welsh,” said journalist Dylan Iorwerth. BBC, Oct. 31, 2008

All official roadsigns in Wales must be bilingual, and this is hardly the first time confusion has occurred in translations:

VALE OF GLAMORGAN, WALES  Cyclists were left confused by a bilingual roadsign telling them they had problems with an inflamed bladder. The “Cyclists Dismount” sign between Penarth and Cardiff became”llid y bledren dymchwelyd” in  Welsh, literally “Bladder Inflammation Upset” The Vale of Glamorgan Council said new signs were being made. “It is possible that an online translation led to confusion between cyclists and cystitis.” BBC, Aug. 15, 2006

And there are times when despite everything being clearly written, the reader is left wondering, “What the heck was really going on?”

FRESNO  Fresno County authorities have arrested a man they say broke into the home of two farmworkers, rubbed one with spices, and whacked the other with a sausage before fleeing. The suspect, 22-year-old Antonio Vasquez of Fresno, was found hiding in a nearby field wearing only a T-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks.

The victims told deputies they awoke Saturday morning to the stranger applying spices to one of them and striking the other with an 8-inch sausage. Money allegedly stolen in the burglary was recovered. The sausage was tossed away by the fleeing suspect and eaten by a dog. Associated Press, Sept. 8, 2008

She’s no paparazzi, but San Francisco Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik features a “Public Eavesdropping” item in each column. Six weeks after Italy’s most-beloved opera singer died last year, Garchik quoted a tourist in Paris remarking, “I never understood why Pavarotti was chasing Princess Diana.” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 19, 2007

A healing this nation has needed for more than two centuries has just occurred, and like many of the people around me this past evening, I’ve found my eyes periodically filling with tears of happiness.

In West Marin, Barack Obama picks up 86 percent of the vote on his way to winning the presidency. Tuesday night in Point Reyes Station, a crowd at Café Reyes joins in as televised crowds of Obama supporters elsewhere cheer state-by-state election returns.

Back in the 1960s, I tried to do what I could for the Civil Rights Movement, assisting with a Civil Rights broadcast on KZSU, Stanford University’s radio station; taking part in a drive to register black voters in Leesburg, Florida, when it was still mostly segregated; and serving as faculty advisor to Upper Iowa College’s black-student union, the Brotherhood. In those days, this country’s racial divisions loomed so large I would never have imagined that within 40 years the United States would elect a black president. But Tuesday we did.

Yet it is noteworthy that most Americans did not vote for Obama for the sake of electing a black president.

In exit polls, almost two thirds of Tuesday’s voters said their biggest concern was the US economic recession, and a majority thought Obama could cope with it better than Republican John McCain. In short, voters were more concerned with economics than with race, and that simple fact is a wonderful indication of our country’s having matured.

Exit polls found that overall a majority of whites, blacks, and Latinos favored Obama, but unlike white women, less than half of white men, 43 percent, preferred Obama. That statistic has been used to imply that many white men couldn’t overlook Obama’s being black.

In fact, it shows just the opposite. Democratic candidates for president seldom do as well as Republican candidates among white men. President Bill Clinton, for example, won only 39 percent of the the white male vote in 1992 and 43 percent in 1996. Obviously, Obama’s race didn’t hurt him among white male voters.

Tuesday’s election, of course, wasn’t all about race and economics. The United States is currently fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its international reputation has been shredded by the outrages at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. And its healthcare system is causing suffering for many Americans.

For a president of any race to take all this on would be an enormous challenge, but at least Obama begins with a mandate from his countrymen and the blessings of the rest of the world. While voters didn’t elect Obama primarily to restore America’s reputation abroad, that could be the election’s most-immediate effect, as news reports from around the globe confirm.

Watching television, Tuesday night‘s crowd at Café Reyes eagerly waits for the networks to declare Obama the winner, which occurs at 8 p.m. sharp, an hour after the polls close in Point Reyes Station.

Here are the results of local votes on the West Marin ballot (winners in boldface):

Congress: Democratic incumbent Lynn Woolsey, 73 percent; Republican Mike Halliwell, 23 percent. (Woolsey at the same time beat Halliwell 71 percent to 25 percent in Sonoma County.)

State Senate: Democrat Mark Leno, 75 percent; Republican Sashi McEntee, 24 percent. (Leno also bested McEntee 71 percent to 29 percent in Sonoma County and 87 percent to 13 percent in San Francisco.)

Assembly: Democratic incumbent Jared Huffman, 72 percent; Republican Paul Lavery, 23 percent. (Huffman likewise topped Lavery 66 percent to 26 percent in Sonoma County.)

Bolinas Fire Protection District: incumbent David Kimball, 40 percent; Sheila O’Donnell, 27 percent; Shannon Kilkenny, 24 percent; Donald Holmes, 8 percent.

Marin Healthcare District: incumbent Sharon Jackson, 30 percent; Hank Simmonds, 24 percent; Archimedes Ramirez, 23 percent; Frank Parnell, 21 percent; Peter Romanowsky, 2 percent.

Measure Q (Sonoma-Marin rail district, combined two-thirds vote needed): Marin County, 63 percent yes, 37 percent no; Sonoma County, 73.5 percent yes, 26.5 percent no.

Getting ready for disaster is both anxiety-ridden and fun, as some of us in West Marin learned in the last few days. One particularly fun event was the West Marin Disaster Council’s annual pancake breakfast in the Point Reyes Station firehouse.

Retired County Administrator Mark Riesenfeld of Point Reyes Station watches Inverness volunteer firefighter Ken Fox pour batter at the West Marin Disaster Council’s  pancake breakfast Sunday.

During the fundraiser, oyster farmer Kevin Lunny (center) chats with Marin Magazine writer P.J. Bremier (in dark glasses). In the November issue, Bremer writes at length about the Point Reyes National Seashore’s desire to close down Lunny’s century-old oyster operation. Listening (left of him) is Dolly Aleshire of Inverness. Librarian Jennifer Livingston of Inverness stands in the foreground.

Marin County firefighter Tony Giacomini reads off the names of winners in the disaster council’s raffle. Assisting him are his wife Nikki, his son Brandt (who has just drawn a ticket), and Brandt’s brother Ryan (beside him).

Raising money for disaster preparedness, as was noted, is the fun part. The anxiety-ridden part was the drill we disaster council members held last week.

Here was the mock scenario. On Tuesday, a Magnitude 6.9 earthquake on the Hayward Fault (which runs from Fremont to San Pablo Bay) causes massive destruction. Some 2,000 Bay Area people die, and 5,000 more go to hospitals.

Marin County is mostly isolated from the outside world with Highway 101 blocked at Petaluma, the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge closed, and the Golden Gate Bridge reduced to one lane. It takes until Thursday to get a comprehensive assessment of the damage.

So last Thursday morning, about 50 public employees set up shop in an alternative emergency-operations center at the jail while out here on the coast, neighborhood liaisons to the West Marin Disaster Council pretended to look for damage.

I’m the Campolindo Drive liaison to the disaster council. That basically means in case of a disaster, such as a major earthquake, I’m supposed to radio my area coordinator, Kate Kain of Point Reyes Station, and let her know if there are any serious problems on this road.

Thursday was the day to test our ability to use the high tech walkie-talkies we’ve all been issued. We’d received instructions from radio expert Richard Dillman (who also does technical work at KWMR), but most of us had never before used the radios, and I was a bit nervous.

What if I couldn’t remember which of the radio’s many buttons to press when I tried to speak on the air? If I pressed one wrong button, I’d change the band on which I wanted to broadcast. Another button would set off a disruptive beeping at Kate’s house. If I went on the air at the wrong time, I’d interfere with another liaison’s reporting in.

I set the alarm for 9:30 a.m. Thursday, which is early for me, and likewise took an early shower. (I was going to be sharp for this drill.) Methodically, I ate breakfast and read the morning newspaper. (I was also going to be full of energy and in possession of the latest information.)

At 11 a.m. as scheduled, I went out on my deck to radio Kate, whose house I can nearly see from mine. Although I could hear other people radioing in reports, it took me several minutes to figure out the correct button for talking on the air. (It’s under my thumb in the photo above.) Eventually, I managed to get through and report that all was well on Campolindo Drive. Kate thanked me for taking part in the drill, and that was that.

I went inside feeling mightily relieved. I’d passed the test! I’d managed to work that mysterious radio without making a fool of myself! To celebrate, I took the rest of the day off.

This has been an unlikely presidential campaign in many respects, particularly because new facts about the candidates keep coming to light. Here’s one that came to me in a strangely circuitous fashion.

The night before last week’s full moon, I happened to be outside at twilight when the moon rose over the hill above my cabin. The sight was evocative enough that I grabbed my camera and found a spot near my woodshed where I could record the moment.

A corner of the woodshed ended up in my photo, and I was immediately reminded of K-K-K-Katy, one of the most popular songs of World War I. In the 1918 song by Geoffrey O’Hara, a stuttering “soldier brave and bold” sings:

“K-K-K-Kathy, beautiful Katy,/ You’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore./ When the m-m-m-moon shines,/Over the c-c-c-cowshed,/ I’ll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.”

Although my shed is for wood, not cows, I was by now interested in the song. I looked up composer O’Hara (1882-1967) and learned he was a Canadian who left home and became a US citizen. For me, that was noteworthy because my mother did the same thing.

But what about portraying stuttering as humorous? These days that would be considered politically incorrect even though Porky Pig (“Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-Th-That’s all folks!”) has been one of Warner Brothers most loved cartoon characters.

Googling onward, I learned that the actor, Joe Dougherty, who was the original voice of Porky Pig, had a stutter himself. Like many other people who stutter, Dougherty apparently learned to deal with the problem.

A story many of us heard in school concerns the great Greek orator Demosthenes (384-322 BC). To master speaking clearly despite starting out with an impediment, Demosthenes, as we learned, put gravel in his mouth and practiced speeches at the edge of the ocean where the surf drowned him out.

When I checked a list of famous people who’ve stuttered, Demosthenes (at right in a painting by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouy) was, of course, on it. But also, to my surprise, was Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden. In fact, the senator from Delaware turns out to be a sort of latter-day Demosthenes.

“Biden suffered from stuttering through much of his childhood and into his twenties,” notes Wikipedia, citing a speech he gave to the National Stuttering Association in 2004. “He overcame it via long hours spent reciting poetry in front of a mirror,” Wikipedia adds, citing See How They Run: Electing the President in an Age of Mediaocracy by Paul Taylor (Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).

Most of us have heard the tragic story of Biden’s daughter and first wife being killed, as well as his two sons critically injured, in a traffic accident. This happened just weeks after he was initially elected to the US Senate in 1972. It took many months, but Biden (at left) eventually recovered from his devastation, becoming an increasingly influential senator while commuting daily between Delaware and Washington in order to raise two sons by himself. Now it turns out that Biden had earlier demonstrated similar fortitude in overcoming severe stuttering.

This is a man who has risen above major adversities in his life. That alone doesn’t qualify him to be vice president or president, but it does say something about the kind of person he is.