one cowboy friend of mine he used to live in the san rafael valley but moved because he and his wife and small children were harassed so much by drug deals, he told me a story i used in the novel about one night at 3:00 in the morning for drug dealers on their way back to mexico banged on the door and wanted something to be. and, he made in a butter sandwiches them. he went outside, holding the sandwiches in one and one hand on a plate and a 357 revolver in the other hand just in case they wanted something more than the peanut butter sandwiches. gave them the food in a little while later, about two weeks later he and his wife were out of town on a vacation and they came back and found their host-- house had been broken into and the freezer, where they had just butchered a, had been broken open and all the steak stolen out of it. he said he was pretty sure it was the same guys letting him know that they didn't like tina butter. [laughter] anyway, one of the reasons i did turn this into a novel is that as a journalist you are restricted to the facts, even in this day and age of new jou

what is going on down there and of course almost every day that i am down there or nearby in the san rafael valley, i've encountered undocumented aliens coming over the border. i certainly encountered an awful lot of drug smugglers because for various reasons the area we live in is more of a drug corridor -- drug-smuggling corridor than an area for smuggling illegal aliens. i can think of one incident when my wife, leslie and i were hiking only a mile from patagonia and we were bird watching of all of the innocuous activities and we can round up the band in the road and there were five guys offloading bales of marijuana into a beat up old station wagon. i really it of 50 feet from them and of course we stopped cold, they stopped cold and dave ran off into the bushes in the creek and the guy driving the volkswagen golf in and drove off and made a u-turn and drove back past us kind of giving us his best treasurer of the c dot dress their probably to let us know he didn't think would be cool if we called the cops which we did any way. [applause] but in another case, kind of a humorous one abou