Image Courtesy of the Miwok Archeological Preserve of Marin

Lost Faces: Ethnographer Isabel Kelly studied the Coast Miwok Indians of Marin and southern Sonoma counties, including the family of Maria Copa, whose grandmother is shown at left. Kelly’s work is compiled in ‘Interviews with Tom Smith and Maria Copa.’

The Graton Band’s Last Stand

It’s money, not morals, that stands between the pro and con casino forces

By R. V. Scheide

“I became Indian. I ignored her. Silence, the Indian’s best weapon, an aunt of mine once said. Be an Indian, cut yourself off with silence any way you can. Don’t talk. Don’t give yourself away.”
—Greg Sarris, “Reading Narrated American Indian Lives,” from his 1993 collection of essays, Keeping Slug Woman Alive.

Greg Sarris strides into the lobby of the Rohnert Park Doubletree Inn on a sunny afternoon in mid-October, running late as usual, slight beads of perspiration running down his forehead and neck and disappearing down a long-sleeved white shirt open to the second button.

The chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria has just returned from Paris, where, in his other persona as Loyola Marymount University professor and critically acclaimed author, he attended a conference on Native Americans with other scholars and American Indians.

The French, he ruefully notes as he sits down and stretches his long legs out under a coffee table, were much more interested in the Indians dressed in authentic beaded and feathered costume than with the academics.

Sarris is rendezvousing at the Doubletree with 30 or so members of the Graton band in preparation for that night’s Rohnert Park City Council meeting, where the tribe’s proposed megacasino and resort was topic A on the agenda. In roughly an hour, they’ll be facing down hundreds of Rohnert Park citizens angered by what they view as the behind-closed-doors agreement between the city council and the tribe that permitted a casino to invade their community without public input. On this night, they’ll get a chance to voice their opposition.

The anticasino activists claim the proposed 360-acre casino, hotel, and restaurant development will exacerbate Rohnert Park’s already significant traffic problems, deplete the region’s scarce water supply, degrade the environment, and create more crime in the area, thereby destroying the city’s way of life. The leader of the opposition, Assembly of God pastor Chip Worthington, openly calls the conflict over the casino a “cultural war.”

The Graton band insists that the $200 million it has agreed to give to the city over the next 20 years will offset the casino’s impact on the community, in addition to putting Rohnert Park’s strapped city budget back in the black. But since no study has yet been done to determine the actual dollar value of those impacts, opponents say the deal is not good enough. Since August, when the tribe announced it was relocating its proposed Indian gaming facility from the Sears Point area to Rohnert Park, the debate has become increasingly incendiary.

Missing from the argument over the casino, at least so far, has been any discussion of gambling’s moral implications. Neither Sarris nor Worthington really views the present conflict over gambling as an ethical issue. That seems odd, because both have been influenced by religions that morally prohibit gambling.

Sarris in particular has been heavily influenced by the Bole Maru, the spiritual resistance movement that helped rescue Northern California Indian tribes such as the Southern Pomo and the Coast Miwok–the ancestors of the present-day Graton band–from the brink of extermination.

Among its many tenets, the Bole Maru forbids mixing blood with whites, drinking alcohol, and gambling. Without the resistance movement, the Graton band might not exist today. Now, ironically, the tribe has turned toward gambling for its survival. Whether it is moral or not is of little concern to either side. In our culture, money talks and morality walks.

As the battle over the casino has heated up, media access to tribal members has been strictly limited. The Graton band have preferred to communicate through a well-organized public-relations campaign rather than grant interviews. Sarris agreed to an interview with the Bohemian after being told the topic of the discussion would be the morality of gambling and how it relates to the Bole Maru.

Flanked by tribal vice-chair Lorelle Ross and tribal secretary Jeanette Anglin, Sarris is no longer the young man gazing out from the back-cover jacket photographs of novels such as Watermelon Nights and Grand Avenue. The shock of black hair has receded and is flecked with gray; faint worry lines crease his face.

But at 52, Sarris–who is of Kashaya (southwestern coastal Pomo), Filipino, and Jewish descent–is still tall and good-looking, with wide shoulders and a thick chest that betray heavy gym work. The heavily caffeinated Ripped Force sports drink he’s sipping cuts through the jet lag fast as Sarris warms to the topic of the Bole Maru.

The Bole Maru was an amalgamation of traditional Native American spiritual beliefs and Victorian-era Christianity. The movement’s origin dates to 1870, when migrant Pomos brought first word of the Ghost Dance from Nevada’s Paiute tribe to Northern California. Stressing resistance to cultural assimilation, the Bole Maru ironically borrowed many of its tenets from white culture, including religious-based prohibitions against alcohol and gambling.

“When the first Dreamer, Richard Taylor, came back [from Nevada], he saw the people in great disarray,” Sarris says. “There was drinking, there was a sense that it was all over.”

For up to 10 millennia, Northern California’s Indians enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with nature that, according to the somewhat romanticized vision of Vinson Brown and Douglas Andrews in The Pomo Indians of California and Their Neighbors, enabled each tribe member to “relate himself deeply to his environment, the woods, the waters, the rocks, the plants, the animals and birds, and other creatures in a way that modern man has surely forgotten.”

Squabbles between neighboring tribes were infrequent; California’s fearsome ecology–featuring drought, flooding, earthquakes, and Mt. Konocti’s eruption 5,000 years ago–was the major enemy.

The Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok occupied what is now southern Sonoma County and northwest Marin County. At the peak of their civilization, they numbered 20,000. They lived in round thatched huts clumped together in small villages of 600 to 1,000 inhabitants known as tribelets, and used their prodigious talent for weaving to make baskets for cooking, storing acorns and water, and for devising ingenious traps to capture fish, rabbits, and other wild game.

Nothing in the Indians’ 10,000 years of existence prepared them for the arrival of the Europeans. By the time the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill brought European-Americans flooding into California in 1849, the tribal populations had already been reduced by an estimated 90 percent from the deprivation and disease inflicted by the Spanish and Russian fur traders during the past century and a half.

But if the Spanish and Russians were brutal, the Americans turned out to be oppressors par excellence. The Indians were quickly pushed into the wilderness; many were massacred in cold blood, such as the band of 188 Lake Pomos–men, women, and children–cornered on a small island in Clear Lake that were slaughtered by U.S. Army troops in 1850. Today, only a small plaque next to a grassy knoll not too far from the Robinson Rancheria and Bingo Casino in Nice commemorates the Bloody Island Massacre.

When the Gold Rush was over, the number of the Graton band’s ancestors had dwindled to 20. Without the Bole Maru, the tribe may have never recovered. “The purpose of the Bole Maru was strictly functional: to rebuild a tribe that had been decimated,” Sarris says. “What it did was rebuild the tribe so that the old blood lines were developed.”

The movement’s spiritual leaders were known as Dreamers. They drew upon visions from dreams and dance-induced trances to guide their respective communities through the lean years of the early 20th century, when the federal government and the state of California banished so-called homeless Indians to small rancherias, often in the middle of nowhere.

The Bole Maru rules were harsh, tolerating no mixing of blood between Indians and whites. If Kashaya-Philipino-Jewish Sarris had existed during its early years, he might have been killed at birth or at least banished from the tribe. The prohibitions against drinking alcohol and gambling, adapted from Christian morality, were designed to thwart unscrupulous whites who used liquor and games of chance to pry away from them what little wealth indigenous people had.

“Mabel McKay was the last of the Bole Maru Dreamers,” Sarris says, speaking of the internationally renowned Pomo medicine woman and basket weaver about whom he wrote the biography Mabel McKay: Weaving the Dream. McKay, who passed away in 1993, claimed that the intricate designs for her baskets came from her dreams, and in much the same way, the Bole Maru Dreamers wove the fabric of the material and spiritual worlds together in a blueprint for survival. Something worked, and the Graton band now claims 568 certified members.

Sarris neither drinks alcohol nor gambles and says he’s been heavily influenced by Bole Maru Dreamers like McKay and the late Essie Parrish. Nevertheless, he sees no conflict between the Bole Maru’s prohibition against gambling and the Graton band’s effort to establish a casino in Rohnert Park.

“The Bole Maru doesn’t exist anymore,” he says. “It was a remarkable thing what they did, to keep the tribe going.” But even Dreamers like Essie Parrish eventually backed off the movement’s strict antiassimilation doctrine, he adds. “She said go to school, integrate, we need to survive.”

The Bole Maru borrowed freely from Christian doctrine. Although the Bible contains no passages that specifically forbid gambling, many clerics have long insisted that the teachings of Jesus are incompatible with indulging in games of chance. In a 1999 article for nonprofit conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, writer Ronald Reno cites numerous Biblical passages that have been interpreted in such a manner.

“Jesus commanded, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:31),'” he writes. “Gambling, meanwhile, is predicated on the losses, pain, and suffering of others.”

Studies have shown that up to 10 percent of those who gamble may have problems controlling their gambling activity, leading to familial problems such as divorce, bankruptcy, child abuse, domestic violence, crime, and suicide. Allowing fellow human beings to suffer thus is immoral, Reno insists, because it violates the commandment to love thy neighbor.

As Reno correctly notes, studies have also shown that poor people tend to gamble in numbers larger than their proportion in the population. “Scripture exhorts us to look out for the poor and disadvantaged, and issues strong warning against taking advantage of their plight,” he says, citing passages such as Prov. 14:21, 14:31, and 22:16.

Gambling also violates the Protestant work ethic. “Work has been part of God’s design for mankind from the very beginning. We are to invest our time and energies into labors that supply our needs and those of our families (Prov. 31, 2 Thess. 3:10, 1 Tim. 5:8), and that allow us to share with others (Eph. 4:28). Gambling, meanwhile, portends something for nothing.”

Since Florida’s Seminole tribe opened the first Indian casino two decades ago, the opposition to the subsequent national gambling boom has been led by Christian ministers, so it’s no surprise that the opposition to the proposed Rohnert Park casino is led by Assembly of God pastor Chip Worthington. What is surprising is that Worthington doesn’t see this as a religious or moral battle.

“This is a cultural war,” he says via telephone from his church office. “The culture of Rohnert Park is family-oriented, with many parks and schools and nice neighborhoods, and a lifestyle that is dominated by families getting together to have barbecues. Culturally, gambling will destroy this city.”

When asked to talk about the religious aspects of his antigaming stance, Worthington says, “It’s the Protestant work ethic. You work hard, you invest your money, you save it in the bank, and over time, you prosper,” he says. “I believe the get-rich-quick morality of Indian gaming is wrong.” However, he insists that casino opponents are not the religious zealots portrayed by local media, but concerned citizens who are mad as hell and not willing to take it anymore.

“Religion and ethics have little to do with this; it’s all about the almighty dollar,” says the Assembly of God pastor. “If we held to our religion and ethics, there probably wouldn’t be any gambling.”

And the genocide of Native Americans might never have occurred, he could have added. Perhaps 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was correct when he wrote, “The last Christian died on the cross.”

Asked to explain what he means by “cultural war,” Worthington leaves the Graton band out of the picture, framing the conflict as one between Rohnert Park citizens concerned about the environment, traffic, crime, and potentially declining home values, and Station Casinos, the Nevada-based gaming company providing financial backing to the proposed casino. Estimates of the proposed casino’s annual take have ranged from $150 million to $500 million.

“Basically, what they want to do is drain our local economy,” he says. By federal law, Stations, which will operate the casino for the tribe, is allowed to collect as much as 50 percent of the casino’s annual revenue. Like the revenue earned by big-box stores like Home Depot, that money will leave the county. That still leaves the $200 million over the next 20 years the tribe has agreed to give to the city, but that isn’t enough for Worthington.

“If they were negotiating with me, they would be giving us a lot more money,” he says.

Apparently, everyone in Babylon has his price.

Sarris and Worthington are a study in contrasts. One leads the push to establish a casino; the other leads the opposition against it. One is a smooth-talking intellectual; the other is a garrulous, plainspoken minister for a church that condemns homosexuality and abortion.

Politically, Sarris leans to the left. The deal the tribe cut with the Rohnert Park City Council contains progressive elements, such as a unionized casino labor force and environmental mitigations that would normally draw praise from local liberal groups if the proposed development didn’t happen to be a casino.

Worthington is a tough-talking conservative who opposes big government “paternalism” but concedes that Indian sovereignty grants the Graton band the right to a casino. “This paternalism drives me crazy,” Worthington says. “I think this is nothing less than Las Vegas-style paternalism. I think the tribe has a right to a casino, but I just hope they can put it in a place where they can get their economic engine to work without destroying our lifestyle.”

He says he’s currently working on a proposal that will move the proposed casino to an undisclosed location outside Rohnert Park. In the mean time, the campaign to recall Rohnert Park’s city council is underway. He suggests the real answer to the problem of Indian self-reliance is to abolish the Bureau of Indian Affairs and distribute its $3 billion annual budget to the Indians, which by his calculations would amount to $50,000 annually per person.

The reality is that Indian gaming is so far the only method that’s been able to restore Native Americans to some semblance of self-reliance. It’s far from perfect. As Newsweek magazine reported last year, only one in 20 Native Americans receives money from gambling. Many tribes are isolated geographically, and casinos are either out of the question or don’t do enough business to provide meaningful income.

But in California, at least, a reserve trust fund established by Proposition 1A in 2000, the Indian self-reliance initiative overwhelmingly approved by voters, has finally started to pay out increments to the state’s nongaming tribes. The Sycuan tribe in Southern California have dramatically raised their standard of living, and casinos in Northern California such as Cache Creek, owned by the Indians of the Rumsey Rancheria, where the Bole Maru Dreamer Mabel McKay grew up, are doing well enough to provide healthcare and college scholarships to tribal members.

Sitting in the Doubletree lobby, Greg Sarris knows the Graton band’s window of opportunity is closing. Some gaming industry experts predict that within the next 10 years Internet gambling may make Indian casinos obsolete. Time is of the essence. For the past decade, he’s led the fight to restore the tribe’s federal recognition, which was removed by the Rancheria Termination Act in 1958. Recognition was restored in 2000, but many Graton band members are still sore about termination.

“They came in August of 1958,” recalls tribal vice-chair Lorelle Ross. The Termination Act disbanded the rancheria but granted individual Indians the right to own the 16 acres of land as private property. Unfortunately, state and federal agents didn’t mention concepts such as property taxes to the new landowners when they showed up at the rancheria. “Anybody who could was out harvesting, and it was never explained to them.”

As levels of indebtedness increased, tribal members began selling off their property. Ross’ father was one of the last ones to hold out, but eventually debt forced him to sell all but one acre of his land.

“Mom is still the original owner of the property,” Ross says. “But in most cases, they lost everything and you don’t have that generational link to the land.”

When recognition was restored, Sarris said publicly that the tribe wasn’t planning on building a casino. The tribe explored other options, such as organic food processing, a cheese factory, and a winery, Sarris says, “all of which need capital or there is already a glut of here.”

“No bank was going to give us money,” he continues. Enter Station Casinos, which also bankrolled a controversial casino in the Sierra foothills outside Auburn. “Any good economist will tell you we made a prudent decision. As I tell my friends, do the math.”

Doing the math has replaced dreaming for the Federated Indians of the Graton Rancheria. It’s simply a matter of survival. Some of Graton band members still weave baskets, but unlike Mabel McKay, they no longer dream their designs. Such dreams no longer have a place in a culture supposedly founded in part on the doctrine of loving thy neighbor. That this culture can only offer the victims of its genocidal rage the right to build casinos is a sign of not just how much they’ve lost, but how much we’ve all lost.

But Sarris is not ruling out the possibility that they may someday dream again.

“Mabel McKay always said the spirit doesn’t go away and hide under a rock,” he says with a mischievous smile.

With that, he stands up to join the rest of the Graton band to prepare to face the angry citizenry of Rohnert Park.

The tribe get their way that night. The Rohnert Park City Council refuse to rescind the deal, despite a raucous crowd of more than 500 protesters.

But Worthington promises the battle is far from over. “The bottom line for me, why I’m fighting this like a dog, is that I’m not going to give up democracy to these guys,” he says, referring to the Rohnert Park City Council. “For too long, we’ve let these guys ruin our city.”

From the December 4-10, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Photograph by Michael Amsler

Going Native: A visit to one of the North Bay’s wildlife centers offers the opportunity to observe animals and learn about their habitats and habits. Shown: Safari West.

Wild and Wooly

Whether you desire casual observation or hands-on contact, numerous opportunities exist in the North Bay to hang out with the animal world

Just inside the pleasantly noisy courtyard at WildCare in San Rafael–which encompasses a wild animal rehabilitation center and the Terwilliger Nature Education Center–a worker, hose in hand and a pail at her feet, is attempting to feed fish to some of the resident birds in the outdoor bird pond. These once-wild, fish-craving characters include a pair of crotchety pelicans named Fred and Scoma, a quartet of cormorants, and three gulls, all of which have damaged wings and are unable to fly or survive in the great wide open.

A number of freeloading herons and gulls, nonresidents all, are waiting on the rooftops and fence posts for the opportunity to swoop in and snatch a fish from Fred and Scoma and the other not-so-speedy seabirds. These outsiders (you know they don’t belong here if they can actually fly) are kept at bay with judiciously aimed squirts of water from the hose.

All around the courtyard are pens and cages containing other unreleasables, known around here as “animal ambassadors”: Azor the kestrel (missing a wing after being shot with a BB gun), Vlad the turkey vulture, Kali the red-tailed hawk, Aurora the bald eagle, Leonard and Eullalie the ravens, Sage the opossum, and Willow the wood duck. These are the unlucky ones (if being loved and adored and hand-fed fish can be called unlucky), because, though fully recovered and completely free of pain, their injuries have rendered them incapable of feeding or defending themselves the way most of the other patients here, upon their release back into the wild, are able to do.

“We look at them as ambassadors for their species,” says Melanie Piazza, director of animal care for WildCare, which encompasses a multiroom clinic and a large educational classroom. “Thousands of children come through here for our camps and school visits, and hundreds of walk-in adults and families, and they see these beautiful animals they wouldn’t get to see up-close anyplace else. Hopefully, those children will gain an appreciation for these animals, so when they see them in the wild, they won’t be tempted to shoot them or catch them or do anything bad to them.”

That said, for the majority of the wounded and orphaned animals brought in to WildCare, the goal is always to release them again, back to whatever lake, pond, forest, hill, or marshy field they came from. It’s a goal that is successfully met thousands of times a year.

“If they are native and they are wild, they come here,” says Justine MacLean, volunteer manager for WildCare. “We get foxes, bobcats, opossums, songbirds, pelicans, cormorants, raptors, hawks, woodpeckers, squirrels, and bats,” she says, reciting only a fraction of the total, adding, “Actually, we’re due for a bucket of bats coming to us from the Humane Society any minute now.”

As if on cue, the bats–hidden from view in a small carrying container–are hustled in through the front gate, across the courtyard, and into the hospital area,where a team of staff and volunteers are waiting to examine the newcomers. According to MacLean, WildCare is 95 percent volunteer-run and presently operates with the help of around 400 active volunteers, between 70 and 125 of whom work with the animals in the hospital. Many of these are foster-team members, who take home the clinic’s many assorted creatures and give them whatever care is needed until they are ready for release.

With so many sacrificing their sleep time to play host to baby beasts and wounded birds, it’s clear that people are getting something out of this relationship. On WildCare’s volunteer application, candidates are asked why they wish to become a volunteer. According to MacLean, the top answer is “I love animals.”

WildCare is one of many institutions in the North Bay where regular folks are given the opportunity to come into contact with animals they’d normally only see from a distance and would rarely ever get to know personally. Many organizations have been established to preserve, study, rescue, and/or rehabilitate
a wide range of animals, and most of these institutions offer the public special opportunities to meet and greet some of the beautiful beasts.

For those who feel drawn to do more than just look, there are plenty of opportunities for volunteers to take their affinity for animals to a deeper, more mutually rewarding level. The Marine Mammal Center, in the Marin Headlands, rescues and treats injured and orphaned marine animals–seals, sea lions, dolphins, whales, and sea otters–and runs an educational program that brings in over 60,000 school kids a year.

As for other animal-rescue and adoption programs, there are an abundance of such groups in the North Bay, including of course, the Humane Society and other animal shelters, along with independently operated groups such as the Sonoma County Bird Rescue Center, Forgotten Felines, Reptile Rescue, Turtle Rescue, and Sonoma County Wildlife Rescue. In Petaluma, teenagers care for dozens of onsite animals at the Petaluma High School Wildlife Museum (the largest student-run museum in the United States) and work up to their elbows with fish at Casa Grande High School’s on-campus salmon hatchery.

All of these organizations depend on animal-loving sponsors and volunteers. Without exception, the volunteers and regular staff workers claim their hours spent with the animals are fascinating, rejuvenating, joyous, and inspirational–words one might expect to hear from someone describing a spiritual practice.

“The feeling of working with animals–of working for the animals–is incredibly satisfying,” says Susan Holzer, volunteer coordinator of the Santa Rosa Humane Society, which boasts 180 active volunteers. “Our people often say they get more out of their contact with these animals than they put into it. It simply feels good to be around animals.”

“Hey honey, how ya doin’?”

With a few affectionate words of greeting, naturalist Bud Higgins cuts the motor on Safari West’s massive 1952 Dodge power wagon, glances into the back seat to see that his passengers are aware of what’s about to happen, and warmly addresses the very large, very imposing adult ostrich now rising up and trotting over to check us all out.

“Hi honey, what’s up?” Higgins says.

The ostrich, frighteningly tall, pokes her head in among the outstretched hands of the sightseers, nibbling curiously as she works her way from person to person, all around the vehicle.

Being bitten by an ostrich is not so bad as one might think. And there’s something undeniably exciting and wondrous about staring face to face with a creature so alien, so dinosaur-like. At any rate, Higgins informs us, it’s the feet we should be wary of, not the beak. “An ostrich’s feet are built to defend it,” he says. “If it wanted to, an ostrich could disembowel a lion–or you or me–with one good swipe of its talons.”

At Safari West, located on 400 acres in the hills of Santa Rosa, visitors have a rare opportunity to observe animals that would normally not be seen outside their native land of Africa. Roaming the interior portion of the preserve are groups of zebras, elands, Watusi cattle, springboks, Thomson’s gazelles, wildebeests, Cape buffalo, and others. Elsewhere on site, one can make the acquaintance of giraffes, lemurs, cheetahs, warthogs, African crested porcupines, fennecs, and five dozen separate bird species, including the African spoonbill, the sacred ibis, the golden pheasant, and more.

“Safari West is not a zoo,” says Higgins, one of Safari West’s team of naturalists and backcountry tour guides, starting up the truck again and heading deeper into the hills. “We are a living, breathing, working, functioning wildlife preserve,” he says, “with emphasis–and I mean strong emphasis–on the word “preserve.” We work with a lot of endangered species. We also work with a lot of animals that are actually extinct in the wild, and we’re helping to bring their numbers up in North America.”

There is one herd of creatures visitors are not likely to pay attention to on their tour of Safari West: the herd of volunteers. These people work behind the scenes, cutting fish and mice into bite-sized pieces in the bird kitchen, trimming hoofs of giraffes, hauling feed from one end of the preserve to the other, helping deliver babies, and generally assisting the veterinarians in their care of the birds and the beasts.

Safari West–and its nonprofit research and educational organization, Friends of Safari West–is also host to numerous research projects being conducted by students and staff from UC Davis and Sonoma State university. Currently, there is an ongoing study exploring the behavior of the Cape buffalo. To encourage such scientific exploration, Safari West has developed a thriving internship program for high school and college students, giving participants a chance to test-drive a possible career in the veterinary sciences or animal care. Many of Safari West’s older interns and volunteers do make career switches, jumping into animal-related fields after finding something meaningful and powerful during their time among the ring-tailed lemurs and Watusi cattle.

“Being around animals is a special privilege,” says Peter Lang, owner of Safari West, originally started as a private preserve and research facility before Lang opened it up to the public about 10 years ago. It is the only location of its kind to exclusively feature African animals, many of which came to Safari West after time spent in zoos and amusement parks (such as Los Angeles’ long extinct Lion Country Safari drive-through attraction).

“Not many people get to experience that closeness to these kinds of animals,” says Lang. “Some people see them only once in their lifetime. We see these animals every day. We are all really very lucky.”

“It’s very special,” agrees Peter’s wife, Nancy Lang, who served 20 years curating the aviary at the San Francisco Zoo. “We live here, and the thrill of seeing these wild creatures doesn’t ever go away. The passion remains. Every day is different out here. Every day is a challenge.”

The only wild animals one is likely to encounter at Slide Ranch, out on the Marin coast, are the squealing packs of untamed school kids out on a field trip or perhaps the local mountain lion who’s been making off with the ranch’s resident chickens and ducks. Part of the Golden Gate National Park system, the 33-year-old Slide Ranch is, as executive director Ross Herbertson eloquently describes it, “a spectacular location on the edge of the continent, the ocean waves chewing away at the foot of the coastal bluffs, with the animals grazing upon the rolling hillsides.”

The nonprofit educational center is a working farm, sustaining a small team of teachers-in-residence, that fosters a respect for animals, plants, the earth–and the food chain. In so doing, visitors are given the opportunity to work the farm. “Virtually every program participant gets to milk one of the goats, work in the garden, feed the chickens,” says Herbertson.

While a pen full of buff Orpingtons might not seem as glamorous as a dazzle of zebras (“Not a herd,” Bud Higgins will tell you, “a dazzle”), there is no doubt that chickens and goats, when you are given the opportunity to touch them and care for them, can be every bit as exciting and eye-opening.

“Particularly for the children,” says David Haskell, who runs the volunteer program at Slide Ranch. “Some of the power of this place is the connection to what some animals actually do for us. They provide us with food.” Food, according to the Slide Ranch credo, is how all things connect to the earth. “Not just the fowl,” Haskell says, “but the ruminants–the sheep and the goats–which are bred and raised, sheared for their wool, and occasionally slaughtered for food. That’s the cycle of life on a farm.”

What Slide Ranch is all about, according to Haskell, is connecting people to the earth. The ranch does that with its children’s programs, and its energetic volunteer program gives adults the opportunity to spend time on the premises and have some of that connection too.

“That’s very important to us,” says Haskell, who’s been building the volunteer corps since moving from New Zealand to Muir Beach about a year ago. There’s always plenty to do on a ranch. Particularly important to Haskell are the sheep- and goat-breeding programs (talk about close contact), where, for instance, more hands are always needed to transport a ewe that’s in heat to the ram who’s ready to pass on his genes.

In the near future, Haskell hopes to develop a butterfly program. “I’d like to get a group of volunteers interested in planting a butterfly garden,” he says, standing at the edge of the ranch’s magical-looking garden area on the hillside overlooking the ocean. “Perhaps when we know those chrysalis will be pupating and metamorphosing in April or May, maybe we can have a butterfly celebration where we all gather to watch the butterflies emerge from their cocoons. Butterflies are wonderful pollinators.”

Since 1970, 145,000 people have come out to Slide Ranch, which last year alone saw 7,000 visitors walk through the gate. While those numbers can’t be substantially increased–the Golden Gate National Park system has set rigid limits on how many bodies the land can accommodate at a given time–a long-planned, multimillion dollar expansion and “renewal” of Slide Ranch is about to begin, intended to increase the quality of the ranch’s experience and enhance visitors’ sense of connection to animals and the earth.

“That sense of connection is a healing thing,” Haskell says. “When I come out of nature, I feel renewed. That’s what people take away with them after a day out here on the farm with the animals.”

The underlying philosophies that guide and motivate each of these organizations are as varied as the volunteers and workers and caregivers who sacrifice their spare time to experience all of this day-to-day contact with animals. Whether patching up animals to return to the wild, keeping animals in captivity to protect them from extinction and to educate the public, or even celebrating certain animals as food, what these institutions have in common is an appreciation for the importance of the earth’s many birds, bugs, and colorful creatures.

Another thing they hold in common is an awareness that working with animals is not all magic and awe. Sometimes such contact can bring heartbreak and sadness. For one thing, these critters can hurt you. To work with animals, all volunteers must get tetanus shots and, in some cases, are required to have rabies shots as well. Occasionally, though most of these organizations exist to preserve the lives of their animals, tragedy occurs and animals are lost. At WildCare, which deals with so many wounded and orphaned beasts and birds, death is far from uncommon.

Safari West has seen problems, too. In 1995, while the Langs were transporting a number of animals from Southern California to Safari West, two lechwes (a kind of antelope) died–one from dehydration and one after being gored by another animal–and Safari West was subsequently charged and fined $1,500 by the USDA, which oversees the animal care at such facilities.

Though such incidents are rare, and though caregivers make every effort to avoiding injury to themselves, they are part of the experience. “Working with wild animals is a far cry from working with domestic animals, like cows or cats,” says Safari West’s media rep Aphrodite Caserta. “Although they share many medical problems with domestic animals, wild animals also have an entirely different range of diseases and problems. Added to that, they are unpredictable and, well, simply wild.”

She points out that, like all other conscientious live-animal parks, preserves, and caregiving institutions, Safari West has stringent policies and procedures in place to train its people in proper handling techniques. This helps minimize the risk to both the staff and volunteers, and to the animals under their care. As a member of the American Zoo and Aquarium Association, Safari West also provides professional development and training to all onsite staff in order to reduce such occurrences.

“There are good days and bad days,” says Lang. “There is life, but sometimes there is death, and we all take it hard when it happens, but we try to learn from it. This kind of work can be painful–literally. We all get bitten and scratched, dragged and kicked, pecked and stepped on, and sometimes we have to deal with the death of an animal. Still, the victories outshine the difficulties.”

Back at WildCare, Justine MacLean is trying to explain what it is about the animals that draws people to visit or become volunteers. “Most people realize that the only contact wild animals have with humanity is negative for the wild animal,” she says. “What people who come here are trying to do, many times, is to address that in their own lives. They are trying to make compensation for the damage we do by having cars, by cutting down habitats, by wreaking the kind of general destruction that human beings inflict on nature, intentionally or not.

“There is some part of humanity that is lost when you are not in contact with animals,” MacLean continues. Can that lost part be found in coming face to face with an opossum or a red-winged blackbird . . . or a bat? “Absolutely,” she says. “When you are working face to face with a bat, you start to see things that are absolutely amazing. For some people, there’s something in those animals–not just bats, but all animals–that reminds them of what’s human in themselves, while for others it’s just the opposite. They see that there’s absolutely nothing human about these animals.”

While WildCare works to acclimatize its animal ambassadors to the presence of people, the rest of the facility’s clients are deliberately left as untamed as possible. It is not uncommon for a foster caregiver to come rushing in, delighted, and when someone asks what’s up, she’ll reply, “My opossum bit me!”

“That’s a good sign,” says MacLean. “That’s what we like to see. She’s foster-caring an opossum, and it bit her. In other words, it hates her guts. That’s beautiful, because when it comes time for the release and we open that box to set him free, he’s not going to sit around blinking at you; he’s not become so unafraid of humans that he’ll turn around and be caught by someone or hit by a car–he’s going to run. It’s natural for a wild animal to have an aversion to humanity, and we try to do nothing to cure them of that aversion.”

Looking up, Piazza and MacLean see a Humane Society animal-control officer walking in with another closed container. “Oh my God,” they both exclaim, with just a hint of a laugh. “More bats!”

Want to talk to the animals? Volunteer positions are almost always available at the Bay Area’s numerous animal promoting institutions. To learn more about the volunteer program at WildCare in San Rafael, call 415.453.1000, ext. 21, to register for an orientation. Safari West holds volunteer interviews the third Sunday of each month at 4pm. For further information send an e-mail to vo*******@********st.com or call 707.579.2551. To learn more about volunteer opportunities with the Humane Society of Sonoma County, contact Susan Holzer at sh*****@**********ne.org or call 707.542.0882, ext. 218. Slide Ranch at Muir Beach in Marin County has a range of volunteer positions and is open to suggestions for volunteer-force projects at the ranch. Call David Haskell at 415.381.6155 or visit the website at www.slideranch.org.

From the November 27-December 3, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Presents of Mind

Express your love with gifts that don’t take up space

Way, way back in the early 1970s, when Top 10 radio was a crime against humanity (wait a minute– it’s still a crime against humanity!), there was an especially sappy song that became a nationwide sensation. It even inspired a Coca-Cola commercial. It was Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “What the World Needs Now,” sung by the 5th Dimension, and right after establishing that what the world needs now is love, sweet love, the musical bridge asserts, “Lord, we don’t need another mountain / There are mountains and hillsides enough to climb / There are oceans and rivers enough to cross, / enough to last till the end of time.”

While this song is still banned in certain civilized countries (talk about a weapon of mass destruction!), and though its intrinsic insipidness has not been diminished with time (nor has its anti-environment message), we’ll say one thing about it: It perfectly sums up the most pressing problem that exists regarding Christmas today.

In short, we don’t need more stuff, but we could use more love.

Lord, we don’t need another knickknack, we have knickknacks and doodads enough to fill the garage and the closets till the end of time. So what does one give the loved one whose cupboards are already full of the whimwhams and trifles of Christmases past?

It’s easy. You express your love by giving a clutterless gift, by which we mean a gift that does not linger about in true physical form. These are gifts of the mind and the heart, but they are gifts without corporeal matter or substance. Such gifts might include things like naming a star after a lucky relative or buying a love one some real estate on the moon, which you could do if you wanted by calling the Ministry of Federal Star Registration in Palm Springs (800.528.STAR) or by visiting the Lunar Embassy at www.lunarembassy.com.

Gift certificates and gift cards are always a good clutterless gift, but unless they are cards from a restaurant or a movie theater, they will probably result in yet more clutter. So to help the holiday shopper who has set out to disseminate less gewgaws, baubles, and bric-a-brac, here are a few suggestions for gifts that cannot and will not spend the year gathering dust in the back of someone’s storage space. Aside from a possible paper certificate or disposable gift packet, these thoughtful gifts communicate your friendship and your love without having the bad taste to actually exist.

This is your clutterless gift guide.

Physical Love

One time-honored method of expressing your love is to nag your family members about the state of their health. Down deep, the phrase “Are you getting enough exercise, dear?” is really just another way of saying, “I care about you, and I don’t want you to suffer a heart attack just yet.” To that end, why not give the, ahem, gift of health by slipping someone a trip to the gym or a date with a personal trainer. Sure, if you wanted to go the whole enchilada, you could buy someone a full-on membership to a health club, but if you are hoping to dole out your love in smaller portions, there are a number of North Bay health institutions that have invented clever ways to help.

Curves for Women, currently the fastest-growing health franchise in America, has over 6,000 locations from coast to coast, with several in the North Bay, including Santa Rosa, Cotati, Rohnert Park, Petaluma, Sebastopol, Napa, Novato, Fairfax, and San Rafael. Serving only women, in small, pleasant, well-organized facilities, Curves for Women uses an extremely gentle fitness approach and has developed schedule-friendly 30-minute workouts for busy women. For the holidays, Curves is offering gift certificates beginning at around $75. Should this appeal to the woman-loving, health-supporting gift giver in you, you can find the nearest Curves in the phone book or on their website at www.curvesinternational.com.

Innovative Fitness is a Canada-based company with a unique approach to fitness, focusing specifically on smart personal training without all the trappings of a big health club. They now have a facility in San Rafael and for the holidays are offering a clever gift idea. Instead of stocking stuffers, you can give a “Sneaker Stuffer,” a gift-certificate program ranging in price and scope from the $49.99 “Pump Up” sneaker stuffer (a 60-minute health and fitness consultation with a 60-minute personal training session), all the way to the $199 “Firm Up” stuffer (a 60-minute health and fitness consultation, a 60-minute health and fitness evaluation, and three 60-minute personal training sessions). To find out more, check the website at www.innovativefitness.com or call Vince Danielson at 415.454.1657.

Jaws of Love

There is no grander expression of love than to suggest the adoption of a baby and the formation of a new kind of family bond. But let’s face it: babies smell, they make a lot of noise, they injure the once-healthy sex lives of their parents, and they should not, as a general rule, be left in the care of others for months or years at a time, at least not until they are old enough for boarding school.

How useful then that we can adopt certain animals at a reasonable fee and enjoy the sense of connection we feel to the animal kingdom, without ever having to have the filthy things in our own homes. There are few animal preserves or animal welfare organizations on this planet that have not established some sort of adoption program as a way of raising money for their important work. There are usually hyphens involved: adopt-a-dolphin, adopt-a-wolf, adopt-a-wombat, adopt-a-bat programs . . . Imagine the thrill you’ll create when you give a loved one his or her very own adopt-a-shark membership. Sharks are dangerous and toothy, and are really quite excellent as gifts, especially for that young lawyer on your Christmas list.

The Fox Shark Research Foundation in Sydney, Australia, offers an especially nice adopt-a-shark program and, unlike other such programs, does not force embarrassing names, like Lumpy and Scarface, on the sharks your money supports. Founded by one-time great white shark victim Rodney Fox, the organization has been working to promote the preservation and scientific understanding of the endangered great white.

Adoption packages range in price and come with different goodies and “privileges.” The standard package runs $100 Australian (about $75 American), and allows a “parent” to choose from a list of identified sharks that have been tagged and now live off the Neptune Islands. Your shark-loving loved one will receive an adoption certificate, a photo of the shark, and a bunch of statistics about shark markings and other scientific stuff, along with regular updates about how the little maneater is doing. To adopt, visit the website at www.sharkfoundation.com.

Backseat Love

Most people live in a place without ever learning much about it, never exploring the nooks and crannies just outside their front door. Golden Gate Jeep Tours in San Francisco (www.goldengatejeepttours.com) has a number of road-riding packages that will take your loved one on private guided tours, in a jeep, to the hidden corners of San Francisco, the Sequoia Redwoods, or off the beaten track at Muir Woods. Packages are pricey but worth it. Not only do riders get the trip through the hills and byways of the North Bay, they get a driver who is a knowledgeable source of historical and geographical information. Tours tend to run around $200 per person, but a gift of a backroad tour is one that will certainly not be forgotten and will definitely not end up in next year’s garage sale.

For the economical gift giver, a company called Extranomical Tours (www.extranomical.com) offers dirt-cheap minivan tours of the wine country ($39 per person), Muir Woods ($19 per person), and even Yosemite ($85 per person). Call Golden Gate Jeep Tours at 415.457.4400 and Extranomical Tours at 866.231.3752.

Universal Love

Let’s just say it straight-up: Your Uncle Charlie really doesn’t need anything new. He’s already got everything. Mom and Dad just want to know that you still think of them from time to time. And your boss does not need or want an assortment of collectible cheeses. Truth is, most of the people on your gift list don’t really need anything.

But there are people on this planet who do need things. There is a family in Burundi that could use a goat. A village in a Haiti, where they are ill from lack of clean drinking water, could use a new well. There are children in dozens of poverty-stricken countries who would like to go to school or be immunized against deadly diseases. There are plenty of people who’d love a few fruit trees, which could feed their families and provide income. Homeless kids in America need some new clothes.

You can give these things through World Vision, an organization that provides lifesaving items, medical supplies, tools, and other necessities to poor people around the globe. Through World Vision’s gift program (www.worldvisiongifts.org), you can send a child to school for a year for just $50, which includes tuition, school supplies, and a uniform. The cool thing is you can do it in your loved one’s name.

For $75 you can buy a goat for that family in Burundi, and your friend will receive a special card describing the gift and its impact. On the World Vision website, there are over a hundred such gifts. Want to give that water well in Uncle Charlie’s name? World Vision will show you how, and your donation will spread the love around a whole lot further than you would by giving anyone another thingamabob. After all, as Burt Bacharach has firmly established, it’s love, sweet love that the world needs now, not another Chia Pet.

Going Giftless

How to gracefully give the gift of nothing

By Sara Bir

Quite some time ago, I quit giving my family Christmas presents. We are just not a fun clan to shop for. Dad always wants computer accessories, but none of us understand exactly what. My brother likes to shop for camping gear nearly as much as he enjoys using it, and my aunt’s condo is too small to house knickknacks. Mom always says, “I just want to see my kids and have world peace.”

So a few Christmases ago, we made it official: no presents. No stress, no shopping, no returns, no exchanges, no wading through novelty shops at the mall. Just pure, unmitigated holiday dee-light. It’s very liberating. But in order for it to work, there are a few basic guidelines.

Get everyone in on it. A giftless Christmas will only work if everyone in your family–not just you, obviously–participates. If there’s a sole dissenter, point out that since no one else is buying presents, he or she will accordingly get none. That’ll get ’em to your side right quick.

Go somewhere cool and new. How many Christmases have you spent holed up in the house, eating too many crackers with port cheese spread and growing testier with every passing minute? There’s a whole world out there to explore, so why not do it on Christmas? Visit people who you know don’t have many guests and are as fed up with boring Christmases as you are. Camp out at a National Park. Go on a day hike (warning: on Christmas day, every family in the world decides to go to Muir Woods). Play exciting and different board games. Pretend you are Jewish and go see the sing-along Fiddler on the Roof at Osher Marin JCC in San Rafael.

Overcompensate with food. No one said you have to save money by not buying gifts. Splurge on a really nice dinner at an elegant restaurant you’ve always wanted to try–better yet, make something at home, something decadent. And don’t forget: Christmas cookies are better than gifts!

Keep the grog flowing. While self-medicating with wines and spirits is, frankly, a depressing method for overcoming holiday woes, it does not mean that keeping the eggnog virgin will make the troops merry. Get some good shit and drink it–it’s Christmas!

Don’t renege on the ungifting. Last year, I saw this Spanish soap that my mother has always liked but never been able to find. So I bought a bar (costing all of $5) and gave it to her. She was scandalized, claiming I had ruptured the purity of our new family tradition. I learned my lesson. Next time I see something for Mom, I’m saving it for her birthday.

Have young kids? It won’t work. The main reason Christmas was ever fun in the first place–outside of Christmas break, animated Christmas specials on television, and the sudden proliferation of sweets–is toys. Piles and piles of new toys. Wait until everyone is grown up to play the ungifting game, just to be fair.

From the November 27-December 3, 2003 issue of the North Bay Bohemian.

© Metro Publishing Inc.