Writer Jonathan Rowe working at an open-air table in the front of Toby’s Coffee Bar in January 2008. I took the photo just after The Columbia Journalism Review published an article he had written about the ongoing faux pas of Robert Plotkin as publisher of The Point Reyes Light. He was now beginning a socio-economics commentary for Harpers.

Point Reyes Station writer Jonathan Rowe, 65, died unexpectedly Sunday morning after being taken to a hospital Saturday.

He leaves his wife Mary Jean Espulgar-Rowe and his son Joshua, a 3rd grader at West Marin School, both seen at right.

His was a life of achievements: in writing and editing for major publications; in Washington, DC, politics; and in helping guide civic affairs here in West Marin.

Mr. Rowe was a new member of the board of directors of the Marin Media Institute, which owns The Point Reyes Light.

A 15-year resident of West Marin, he was also known here as the host of KWMR’s America Offline program. Mr. Rowe’s being an on-air interviewer was especially impressive because he had a severe speech impediment while growing up but overcame it as an adult.

In addition, he co-founded the Tomales Bay Institute and its successor, the West Marin Commons project in Point Reyes Station.

He had been a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly and YES! magazines and had been a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

Mr. Rowe also contributed articles to Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Readers Digest, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Point Reyes Light, The West Marin Citizen, and many other publications.

Last year, he contributed a thoughtful essay, Fellow Conservatives, to the Fall 2010 issue of the West Marin Review. In the article, “conservative” is used in the sense of conserving both nature and community traditions.

A 1967 graduate of Harvard University, Mr. Rowe also earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. In the early 1970s, he was one of Ralph Nader’s “Raiders.”

He served on staffs in the House of Representatives and the Senate, where he was a long-time aide to US Senator Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota). He also served on the staff of the Washington, DC, city council.

Mr. Rowe’s sudden death has shocked many of us. “I am grieving a lot myself like many of you,” wrote Elizabeth Barnet on the West Marin Soapbox website. “He was a mentor, a friend, an editor of my writing, an inspiring writer. We co-founded West Marin Commons.”

Jim Kravets, former editor of The Citizen and before that The Light, wrote that Mr. Rowe’s death is “an incalculable loss, absolutely devastating.”

Linda Petersen, advertising manager of The Citizen, wrote, “I counted Jonathan as a dear friend and mentor with a wonderful sense of humor. I would like to see his dream come true of a united community with one newspaper, which we talked about all the time. I will miss him terribly.”

Already, even before the cause of Mr. Rowe’s death has been made public, townspeople are talking of creating a memorial to him. A more civic-minded member of the community would be hard to find, and many of us are thinking of his family in this painful time.

Those interested in reading any of Mr. Rowe’s writings on a variety of topics can find them by clicking here.

With so many crises underway around the world, writing a less-than-grim posting about current events seems almost impossible. But that won’t stop me from trying.

As was first reported here four years ago, soot on the glass door of my woodstove sometimes creates an apparition of either Jesus or Moammar Khadafy. Back in 2007, I wasn’t sure which one, but with the the flames in my woodstove now resembling the fires burning throughout Libya, the ghostly image must be Khadafy’s.

By the way, Khadafy is fairly easy to write about because, as my friend Dave LaFontaine pointed out last week, it’s virtually impossible to misspell his name: Khadafy, Qaddafi, Qazzafi, Qadhdhafi, Qaththafi, Gaddafi etc.

The variety of spellings results from Arabic having letters and sounds that aren’t found in English, from differences between various dialects of Arabic, and from differing transliterations (the way words originally written in one language are written in another).

Members of Japan’s Self Defense Force hunt for survivors of Friday’s magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami. The disaster has killed more than 14 thousand people, destroyed ships, roads, buildings, and crops, and has caused explosions and fires at four nuclear reactors. Photo by Yoichi Hayashi of  Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

There is certainly nothing funny about the crisis in Japan, but some of the reporting on the disaster has sounded absurd.

Remember your high school English teacher warning you about misplaced modifiers? For example: Walking around a corner, a tall building came into view.

It’s an easy mistake to make, and India’s national daily newspaper, The Hindu, happened to make it last Saturday in reporting on the disasters in Japan: “The coastal city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture was also devastated by a tsunami wave,” The Hindu reported.

“Traveling inbound at speeds upwards of 500 kilometres per hour, the city was completely engulfed.” That sounds like one fast-moving city.

The Ohio River four feet above flood stage in Pomeroy, Ohio. Photo by WSAZ.

Meanwhile, some areas in the United States, particularly along the Passaic and Raritan rivers in New Jersey and along the Ohio River in Ohio and Kentucky, have also been underwater this past week.

In Covington, Kentucky, the Ohio was so high that a riverside restaurant, the Waterfront, which is on a barge, pulled away from its moorings. “One cable remained in place and kept the restaurant from colliding with the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge,” Yahoo News reported.

The mishap required “everyone on board to be rescued using ladders and ropes for a makeshift gangplank,” Yahoo noted. Another news site, however, quoted a customer who seemed to be thinking of 1969 when an abundance of pollution in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caused it to catch fire.

Said the diner, “I was so happy when we got wedged under the bridge, certainly saving us from the toxic waste and the fire.” Say what?

Amanda Weisal and John France on the Today Show.

And now for an update on the household dangers of Facebook. A Jan. 25 posting here described how Facebook led to a wife in Cleveland accusing her husband of bigamy.

As was revealed last August, the wife, Lynn France, had suspected her husband John was having an affair with another woman, Amanda Weisal, so she logged onto Facebook and typed in Weisal’s name. Not only did she find photos of her husband with Weisal, the pictures showed the two of them getting married.

My posting about Facebook went on to discuss the case of Craig Carlos-Valentino (right).

Last November, the 51-year-old Antioch man halted westbound traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge for an hour when he stopped in the slow lane and told officers via a cell phone that he was armed with guns and explosives.

Carlos-Valentino also threatened to jump off the bridge. Eventually he surrendered to authorities. No explosives or guns were found in his car, and his 16-year-old daughter, who had also been in the car, was unharmed.

What was going on? Carlos-Valentino told officers he was upset that his wife was going to leave him. And why did he think that? She’d revealed it on Facebook.

Two weeks ago, Carlos-Valentino pleaded guilty to felony child endangerment and making a false bomb threat. He is scheduled to be sentenced at the end of this month, and prosecutors have said he faces one year in jail.

One might think that couples would realize the problems inherent in dealing with their disputes via Facebook, but many obviously don’t.

On Feb. 28, Hernando Today, an online version of The Tampa Tribune, reported that a couple living in Brooksville, Florida, got into a physical fight over Facebook.

Following the fracas, Hernando County sheriff’s deputies arrested Thomas Gannon, 35, and his girlfriend Tina Cash, 31, (pictured above) at their mobilehome. Both of them were charged with misdemeanor domestic violence.

Gannon said Cash while drinking had become upset and removed their relationship status from her Facebook page. She also “unfriended” him on Facebook.

When Gannon confronted Cash about this, she began throwing things, he said, and hit him in the face with a picture frame. She denied it and claimed he punched her. He denied that.

The incident was bad enough, but because it involved Facebook, it gave the Internet world an opening to snicker. One reader wrote, “White trash at its finest.” Another quipped, “He was framed.”

With so much misery in Japan and Libya these days, it’s easier to endure flooding in New Jersey and Ohio, a breakaway restaurant in Kentucky, accusations of bigamy in Cleveland, a distraught husband stopping traffic on the Bay Bridge, and a Facebook fight in a Florida mobilehome.

These are all serious matters, but they’re not all equally grim.

Artist Sue Gonzalez of Point Reyes Station stands at one end of a large oil painting of hers. The painting is part of a new art exhibition that opened Saturday at the Bolinas Museum.

Sue’s paintings might best be described as impressionistic realism. As has been said of the style of artist Gustave Courbet (1819-77), hers “is not photographic; it shows a keen sense of selection of what to paint among the details of nature to give the essentials of [the] subject.”

Sue’s subjects are inevitably large expanses of water. Although most painters would be challenged to make the unbroken surface of a tranquil bay interesting, Sue is such a master of light and shadow she is able to reveal the subtleties of seemingly simple scenes.

While “there is minimal but recognizable reference to place, Tomales Bay here in Coast Marin,” the museum comments, “this art is about planet water.”

Sue attended the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also took classes at Sonoma State and Indian Valley College.

Stinson Beach and Bolinas Lagoon (circa 1902) by Arthur William Best. Also on display through April 17 at Bolinas Museum is a selection of art from the museum’s permanent collection.

View of Mountain Cottage by Ludmilla Welch, 1890. From the permanent collection.

The Dreamers. Photo by Kevin Brooks from the permanent collection.

Classic Torso with Hands by Ruth Bernhard.

The photographer (1905-2006) is best known for her nudes of women. “If I have chosen the female form in particular, it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual twentieth century,” she wrote. “We seem to have a need to turn innocent nature into evil ugliness by the twist of a mind.

“Woman has been the target of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in photography. To raise, to elevate, to endorse with timeless reverence the image of a woman has been my mission.”

Krishna and Radha by Gajari Devi.

Also showing at Bolinas Museum is an exhibit titled Sacred Walls, Dieties and Marriages in Mithila Painting.

“For centuries, perhaps for thousands of years, women in the ancient cultural region of Mithila in Eastern India, have been painting on their floors and the inner and outer walls of their family compounds,” the museum explains.

“With vibrant color and complex design, their art celebrates, protects and makes sacred or auspicious space in their homes for family rituals and events. Though there are a few male contemporary painters, this is primarily an art tradition handed down through women from generation to generation…..

“Encouraged to expand their creativity to painting on handmade paper, their art has become a source of desperately needed income and attracted international attention to their work.”

Fresh Killed Poultry by Lewis Watts. Part of the permanent collection.

Salud Compadre, Peru. By Steven Brock.

The photography in the current exhibition is from the Helene Sturdivant Mayne Photography Gallery, which is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Bolinas Museum may be small, but it represents some of the best art in the world, as the current exhibition attests. It will continue through April 17, so you still have plenty of time.

The Age of Revolution once referred to the years from 1775 to 1848 when absolutist monarchies were forcibly replaced by republics or constitutionalist states. These upheavals included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and revolutions throughout Latin America.

After World War II, a second Age of Revolution occurred in Africa as colonies freed themselves from their European masters. Most of these revolts were in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Twenty-six wild turkeys two weeks ago marched for food in Point Reyes Station.

Now a third Age of Revolution is sweeping the world. It all began last month when street protesters in Tunisia toppled the 23-year regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. That, of course, helped inspire street protests which earlier this month led to the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak after a 29-year rule. An estimated 365 protesters had been killed by the time he left office.

Immediately protesters in Yemen demanded that President Ali Abdullah Saleh resign after 32 years in office. Saleh has said he won’t seek reelection in 2013, but protesters want him out now. Nine protesters have been killed so far.

Street protests also spread to Bahrain where seven people have been killed in demonstrations against the prime minister, Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa, over economic problems in the island kingdom.

Other street protests in the region are occurring in Libya (1,000 or more protesters killed), Morocco (five killed), Algeria (two killed), Kuwait (some reportedly tortured), and Jordan (eight injured).

Elsewhere street protests have been cropping up against authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and…. Wisconsin?

A fox on my deck last week looking for bread.

The street protesters in Wisconsin, who are upset with their anti-union governor, Republican Scott Walker, are reminiscent of women strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a century ago. Their demands back then? “We want bread and roses too.”

Nor is the fox alone in its desire for more bread, along with roses. Three raccoons showed up tonight to join in the demonstration.

Even a possum waddled onto my deck to take part.

The fox, the raccoons, and the possum all want bread but prefer peanuts. By offering them a few goobers, I was able to convince them to pose with a rose for these portraits.

No doubt authoritarian potentates from Vladimir Putin to Moammar Khadafy to Gov. Walker wish their problems could be solved for peanuts. But they can’t, which is why they find common people around the globe to be revolting.

In the last couple of weeks, I have received two emails from women who survived crises where they live. One incident in particular could have easily had a far worse outcome.

The youngest stepdaughter from my last marriage, Shaili, who will turn 18 next month, lives in Guatemala. Her location sometimes worries me even though her home is in a good neighborhood of the capital, Guatemala City.

Unfortunately, the country has become so dangerous for women and girls, an average of two are murdered each day, that the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco last year ruled immigration judges must consider that fact when deciding whether to grant asylum to Guatemalan women. The country’s murder rate is 3.5 times the rate in violence-plagued Mexico, The New York Times reported last July.

Shaili reading by my woodstove two years ago.

On Feb. 3, Shaili wrote me, “I usually don’t walk in the streets near my house anymore, but yesterday afternoon seemed like a pretty day. I decided to leave my cell phone in the house, just in case. I went to my friend Alvaro’s house and spent the whole afternoon there.

“We were walking back to my house at about 6:20 p.m., so it was getting pretty dark. Alvaro never lets me walk home alone. Anyway, during our way to my house, I had many ‘bad feelings’ when seeing some people, a particular car etc. Something just didn’t feel right.

“I was very close to my house when an all-black car pulled over, and two men came out. The car quickly left, and when I saw the look on the men’s faces, I knew they were going to try to mug me, which was precisely what happened.

“The two men walked over to us and showed us their guns. They told us to give them everything we owned. Luckily, as I said, I was having a bad feeling that day, so I had put my money inside my underwear. I told the guy that I didn’t have anything.

“He heard a jingle in my pocket and asked, ‘Are you SURE you don’t have anything?’ I took four quetzales [the equivalent of 50 cents] out and said, ‘Would you like four quetzales?’ I couldn’t help sounding a bit mocking, just so he would feel stupid. He said no.

“Then the other guy told Alvaro and me to head back towards where we came from. I refused to do that, of course, because I refused to walk in the direction that I knew they were going. I was just so terrified at that moment that I didn’t think. So I said, ‘No, I live here!’

“This was so stupid of me, but the good thing is that I never really specified where I lived, but they now know I live close by. Anyway, they let me go, so I ran until I got to my house. I had never felt as scared. My legs were trembling.

“When I ran straight to my house, I accidentally forgot about Alvaro, but then I turned around, and he had already crossed the street to the other side, so I yelled for him to come, and he did.

“Alvaro’s cap got stolen, and it had sentimental value to him, but he wasn’t as affected as I was because it had happened to him before. For me, it was new and just very scary.

“I cried a lot after that because I was scared. Nothing really happened to me, and nothing of mine got stolen, but still I just hate to think I actually came face to face with two men who are exactly the reason why Guatemala is in such a disgusting situation.

“I had trouble sleeping the nights after that because I kept on dreaming about it,” Shaili later told me. “Now I feel much better. I’m just very paranoid right now. As always, I am being very cautious when leaving the house, and I definitely won’t ever walk here again.”

Second story: A Jan. 25 posting on this blog concerning Facebook prompted a Feb. 9 email from Sheila Castelli, formerly of Point Reyes Station and now living in Taos, New Mexico.

“I saw this post on the Taos Police Department Facebook page,” she wrote, “and chuckled and thought of your blog post. ‘Crews are at Wal Mart,'” the police noted, “‘and will follow you home to get you lit up. Let everyone know.’

“Here is the context. We in Taos County are coming to the end of a non-natural disaster,” Sheila (at right) wrote.

“Since last Thursday [Jan. 20] there has been no natural gas here. The gas supply was intentionally shut off by New Mexico Gas as a preemptive move to save the gas supply in other parts of the state.

“Temperatures here at night have been well below zero.”

The Feb. 10 Taos News explained, “Early last week, El Paso Natural Gas, the company that oversees one of the pipelines from the Permian Basin for New Mexico Gas Company, said it was stockpiling as much gas as it could in anticipation of the frigid weather….

“When it became apparent that the gas supply was dwindling, New Mexico Gas Company said it advised large consumers like the Questa mine and Los Alamos National Labs to cut back gas usage. Other major gas users across the state were also asked to reduce operations. But it wasn’t enough.

“With almost no warning, the gas was disconnected in 14 communities across the state….

“It wasn’t just a matter of pipeline physics. At some point, a decision was made to shut the valve serving rural communities. In an emailed statement to The Taos News, New Mexico Gas Company said it had to move fast when deciding who would be cut off.

“‘The decision to shut off the gas line valve to Española, Taos, Questa, Red River and other northern New Mexico towns was made quickly because the actual valves were in areas accessible and were able to be shut down quickly.'”

Sheila wrote, “I heard of the gas outage on the radio here, and I also heard they were opening a Red Cross shelter. As I have trained as a shelter manager, I called and offered my services. Trinidad, the Red Cross head here, was overjoyed as Taos had never opened a shelter here before.

“So I have been at the shelter since then. I dragged myself home yesterday.

“All the gas meters had to be shut off until the lines were re-pressurized, then all homes visited and [pilot lights] re-lit.

“The National Guard have been here in full force, along with plumbers from all over the country, and they were very perplexed with Taos’ crazy roads and streets. They thought they had been to every home, but it appeared that only 54 percent were back with gas.

“They just couldn’t find a lot of these homes, so they were at Wal Mart, and people were supposed to go grab a crew and lead them to their homes.

“Luckily I don’t use natural gas, so I was fine, but I attended to many freezing folks coming into the shelter. I met lots of new people from the mayor to the homeless and spent several hours playing cards with Taos policemen.”

Sheila wrote that helping others at the shelter was “good therapy for me,” and Shaili wrote that her frightening experience “taught me a good lesson: whenever I have a gut feeling or some kind of intuition, I need to trust it.”

Neither of them expected she’d have to cope with a crisis, but both came away stronger for having done so.

Valentine’s Day will be Monday, and here are some thoughts for the occasion. The first is from Kaiser Permanente, which sent out a mass mailing this week noting that dark chocolate is good for your heart and that “some say it even mimics the feeling of being in love.”

While on the topic of hearts, here is my annual Valentine’s Day greeting from a flock of Canada geese flying over Inverness Ridge, as seen from my deck.

Romantically inclined gentlemen have traditionally given their ladies flowers for Valentine’s Day. Here Mrs. Raccoon, who works part time at Flower Power in Point Reyes Station, shows off a particularly nice bouquet.

How men respond to feminine beauty is to some degree, of course, a matter of culture, as we could see when an attractive young woman dropped what she was carrying during the G8 countries’ summit in Canada last June.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was too preoccupied with his own appearance to notice, and President Barack Obama remained all business while French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi admired her comely derriére.

By now Valentine’s Day is often associated with greeting cards called Valentines, which are typically printed with saccharin
messages or a bit of doggerel: “The rose is red./ The violet’s blue./ The honey’s sweet,/ and so are you.”

The origin of that line, by the way, can be found 420 years ago in Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queen: “She bath’d with roses red, and violets blew,/ And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.”

By the early 1800s, Valentine’s cards were being assembled in factories, and with the development of modern printing in the years that followed, printed messages replaced handwritten notes. The woman holding this large, pink Valentine was photographed about 1910.

There must be something trippy about this time of year. If you’ve never experienced an acid trip, the following kenesthetic hallucination will give you an idea of what it’s like.

Here’s what to do: click on the link at the end of this posting, then “click me to get trippy,” then stare at the center of the screen for a full 30 seconds, then look at your hand holding the mouse without moving it away from the mouse. You’ll be amazed at the result: Happy Valentine’s Day!

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.

Halloween, which will be celebrated Sunday, has its origins in the Celtic festival of Samhain. The name comes from an Old Irish word meaning summer’s end.

The ancient Celts of the Iron Age and Roman era believed the border between this world and the Otherworld was thin on Samhain, allowing both good and evil spirits to pass through. This, in turn, inspired the Celts to disguise themselves with masks and costumes to avoid the evil spirits.

With the Catholic celebration of All Hallows Even, the night before All Hallows (Saints) Day, falling at the same time of year, the two events came to be blended into Halloween. Trick-or-treating originated in the Middle Ages as a practice of poor people going door to door and receiving food in exchange for praying for the dead.

A great horned owl I photographed from my deck at twilight last week.

The symbols of Halloween eventually came to include, along with costumes and masks, jack-o-lanterns (which in the British Isles were originally carved from large turnips), black cats, bats, and owls.

Nor are owls, bats, and black cats the only spooky apparitions around my cabin this Halloween. A deck wraps around two sides of the cabin with steps leading down to the ground at both ends, and at 6:20 a.m. today I was awakened by the sound of footsteps scurrying past my bedroom window.

When I looked outside, I was amazed to see three foxes holding footraces back and forth around my home. Two of them were neck and neck with the other in a distant third place.

A winsome fox steps inside my kitchen.

As previously noted, three gray foxes have taken to dropping by each evening, hoping I will put out bread or peanuts for them.

For three or four years, I have periodically put out the same snacks for my raccoon neighbors, but now the raccoons must compete with the foxes.

They get along with each other fairly well, and I have seen a fox and raccoons eating peanuts nose to nose without conflict. Last night, however, my friend Lynn Axelrod saw one sly fox snatch a slice of bread from between the paws of a raccoon that was about to partake of it.

When the fox tried to do it a second time, however, Lynn cut loose with a Halloween-style “Boo!” and the fox ran off. From the raccoon’s perspective, Lynn had probably just fended off an evil reynard from the Otherworld.

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.

Roughly 200 West Marin residents showed up Sunday evening in Toby’s Feed Barn to honor Duane Irving, who died of a heart attack July 19 at the age of 75.

A succession of residents related their memories of Duane for the crowd, and several remarked on his fondness for ice cream.

Duane’s parents had owned Halleck Creek Ranch in Nicasio where he spent much of his youth. A “Last Roundup” pamphlet, which was given out at the event, noted Duane “attended the little red school house in Nicasio [and was] a member of the last graduating class.”

Former Marin County Supervisor Gary Giacomini (left) lauded Duane’s vision in dedicating land on his ranch to the Halleck Creek Riding Club for people with disabilities. (Photo by Linda Petersen, West Marin Citizen)

At San Rafael High, Duane was an excellent football and especially baseball player, and after graduation joined the Marine Corps.

Following four years in the Marines, Duane broke horses for Bud Farley, whose ranch was later flooded by Nicasio Reservoir, and was game manager and cattle boss for Doc Ottenger, whose land would become part of the Point Reyes National Seashore.

At the request of the late Olema Valley rancher Boyd Stewart, Duane helped establish the Morgan Horse Farm within the National Seashore and subsequently worked in the park’s Roads and Trails Department.

Emcee Cindy Goldfield introduces her mother Joyce, Duane’s companion for many years, who paid an emotional tribute to Duane.

Many West Marin residents knew Duane best for his involvement in Halleck Creek Riding Club. For more than 30 years, he, Joyce Goldfield, and many volunteers helped people with disabilities gain self-confidence and enjoy rugged terrain on horseback.

People who had served as volunteers to lead the riders and people who had been riders themselves both told of their appreciation of Duane.

Xerxes Whitney (left), who was born with cerebral palsy, said he lived on the same hill as Joyce when she started the Riding Club, and “I was one of her first recruits.” (Photo by Linda Petersen, West Marin Citizen)

Despite some difficulties with speech and the use of his legs, Xerxes has developed into a first-rate athlete and now teaches tennis, as well as writes poetry.

He and Duane had played basketball against each other and held nothing back, including “sharp elbows,” Xerxes said. “Duane didn’t care if you could talk or walk,” Xerxes added. He cared about the person.

Perhaps the most-poignant tribute to Duane was offered by a young  woman with Down’s Syndrome. With unexpected eloquence, she described how much she valued Duane’s encouragement and support. Then speaking directly to Joyce, she said that Duane still sees her and loves her. By this point, I like many others in the Feed Barn had tears in my eyes.