I am frequently asked why I named my publishing company Nestucca Spit Press. Here’s the story.
Nestucca Spit is a pristine stretch of beach located in Bob Straub State Park in Pacific City. (Nestucca is the name of the long-vanished Native American tribe that once inhabited the area.) I discovered it back in 1997 when I first moved to South Tillamook County after relocating from Portland to launch a new coastal life. The following year, I became the caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge and that’s when the special relationship with this beach began in earnest. Pretty soon, a radically new life was initiated by going there when magical things started happening to me on the beach.
It wasn’t long after discovering the Spit, that I learned the incredible story of how it was saved from utter destruction in the mid-to-late 1960s from an insane ODOT plan to relocate Highway 101 right down the beach and over the bar. Had that plan gone through, the area would have resembled Rockaway and it would have led to other highway relocations down sand spits. The Oregon Coast would be totally unrecognizable today if that disaster had occurred.
Nestucca Spit’s savior was then-Oregon State Treasurer Bob Straub, who had a vacation home in Pacific City and loved the Spit and loved taking his dog there.
Over the years, I dug up the previously undocumented story of how Straub used exceptional political guile and harnessed the power of Oregon beachcombers to crush the plan. He saved Nestucca Spit for all time, and my discovery of it 30 years later revolutionized my soul. I consider saving Nestucca Spit one the greatest environmental victories in the state’s history, although visitors to Bob Straub State Park would never know that because there isn’t a single word about it at the park. I’ve tried my best to make up for this inexcusable oversight over the years by sharing the story in as many ways as possible as I can invent.
During the decade of my tenure of service as caretaker, I rambled Nestucca Spit with my dogs over a thousand times and came alive as a human being and writer because of that rambling. That’s why I named my publishing company the name I did—I wanted to honor a magnificent natural space and the heroism of Bob Straub from protecting the Spit from desecration. It was the only name I ever considered. It just popped into my mind when I was starting the business in 2002. Naturally, I was on the beach at the time. I think all my great notions manifest there.
The Nestucca Spit Press logo is a block print of a scene on the Spit. It was made by the artist Cindy Popp, who knows the place well.
I sorely miss those Nestucca Spit days with the dogs. I’ve lost so much of who I was in those early formative days on the Oregon Coast. The goal is to find a way back to that person.
I once had a husky that brought me sticks and logs to help build driftwood forts. After she died, I spread my husky’s ashes inside a fort I built for her. Fort Sonny, I called it. It washed away with the next high tide, sort of what happened to my life recently. Life is like that, though.
When I am gone, and if my body is found, I want my ashes spread inside a driftwood fort. But who will do it? Can I train a dog?
I had a first date building a driftwood fort. I made a five-star barbecued salmon dinner inside a fort. I once sat in a fort with meth addict and watched her drink a beer and scratch scars on her face. I once built a fort with the most beguiling woman I’ve ever met. We were drinking wine and taking photos and I thought she was the one who would merge with me on the Oregon Coast and make a valiant stand against conformity. She wasn’t the one, that was my fault, but she was a damn good builder, with those great arms of hers. I once thought I would get married inside a huge fort constructed beforehand by the wedding party. Then we’d burn it down.
With several friends, I built the biggest driftwood fort in Oregon history not far from Lost Creek on the Central Oregon Coast. It lasted two days before authorities tore it down. They simply couldn’t grasp its audacity and magnificence and I think it struck fear in them. A rich beachfront property owner once destroyed a favorite fort of mine with his accursed placement of riprap to safeguard his mansion. He spent one week a year in that mansion. I met his wife near the ruins a few days after the destruction and she’ll never forget that meeting, I assure you.
About building: relish the labor. Collaborate. Support one another. Talk. Invent. Try out ideas. Invite ideas. Amend them. Discard what doesn’t fit. Embrace what does. Seize the metaphor you are fashioning with your own two hands. Erect spars and stanchions. Hoist, maneuver and interlock crooked wood into shelter, art, studios, secret passages; make pure whimsy or precise architecture that enchants fellow beachcombers. Watch from afar as they crawl inside the structures and return to childhood. Watch them take naps, too. It always happens. Turn detritus into delight, flotsam into fun. Add a little cairn here and there for extra measure. Let everything go with the old sound of the ocean roaring in the background. Relaxation will infiltrate every atom of your existence. Forage for wood! Fetch branches and finagle logs. Fortify your life and find the fort within. Forswear the fiendish foes that finagle frantic fatigue from your soul. Fight the fastidious factory mentality with the fulminations of facetiousness that enable you to forget the furor. Find the best F word in the fort lexicon and free it to fly like a falcon and float on forever. Fort fairies will dance and fort minstrels will sing. Frolic with fort scout dogs. Realize the driftwood fort you will build is unique and belongs to no one except all of us and the eternal cycle of nature. It will not last—that is its simple beauty and profundity.
Several years ago, I built 17 driftwood forts on Ona Beach with 60 sixth graders. They were an astonishing collection to say the least. The most intriguing one was constructed by a group of three girls. It had no walls, just a framed entrance with two poles that balanced upright against one another. When I asked them about this curious design, they didn’t have an answer. Perhaps their fort was built on a purely subconscious adolescent desire to create or find a portal to a different dimension. I walked through the entrance and instantly felt a good vibration. I told the girls and they merely nodded. They already knew.
I once built a super fort at Fort Stevens State Park and left behind a little waterproof notebook and pen encased inside a freezer bag. I called this notebook the Fort Registry. The first page contained these directions: “Please leave your name and your story in building or enjoying this fort.”
Over the next few weeks, I checked the registry for comments. Here’s what was written:
• We came and found shelter in this driftwood forts. The view spectacular, provisions lacking.
• First day on the Oregon Coast Trail. Started today at south jetty. Headed to Florence or beyond. Saw this fort and had to stop. Love it! A great place to take a rest and smoke break.
• Me and my nine-year-old girl found good shelter in this finely built fort. It proved to be a great resting stop on our journey. Wish we could have stayed longer but nightfall is coming and we need supplies from town.
• Help me! I’m on the worst date of my life!
• Cool spot. Me and my girl sat here before it rained and drunk (sic) a beer here.
• Beautiful fort. The ocean air warms my face and the breeze forces salt air into my throat—pushing away fear and worry. In this sum and shade I trust myself and enjoy the moment. Hi! We were following animal tracks and stumbled upon this fort. It’s very nice.
Building driftwood forts during my ordeal perhaps kept me from committing suicide. It certainly kept the writing alive in my mind and positive energy flowing through my body.
Consider this: virtually all driftwood forts are initiated by adults. Why?
I led 27 field trips with Oregon Coast students to build driftwood forts. That’s got to be some kind of record. I’ll never forget teaching a new student from Mexico how to build a fort. He came alive. He was trying to drag logs twice his size. He fell down. He laughed. He was born into Oregon that very moment. We went inside his fort and I ordered pizza for his classmates with my phone. The pizza delivery dude brought them right to the fort!
I’ve built forts in snow, sleet, rain, wind, fog, sunshine, at morning, noon, midnight, sober, drunk, alone, with people. I’ve built forts in the presence of eagles, ospreys, falcons, murres, coyotes, raccoons, gulls, sanderlings, pelicans, sandpipers, ravens, crows, bumblebees, hummingbirds, seals, sea lions, whales and dolphins. I build in collaboration with my bucktoothed friends, the beavers, Oregon’s official state animal, who feast upon willows, alders and cedars in the upper watersheds and let the wood loose into creeks and rivers, where it floats and floats out to the ocean and then comes to rest, gnarled, chewed and stripped, on a beach. Clearcuts help furnish the construction materials, too, the absolutely only beautiful benefit to clearcuts.
I once built seven forts in seven days and it was good. I once built a fort at the same time the incoming tide was simultaneously destroying it. I loved that juxtaposition. Heavy. By the way, that is the only time I have ever seen a fort collapse. They all collapse eventually, but one seems to witness it. Interesting. There is a lesson in that.
I would estimate I’ve built 92-percent of forts by myself (here, I’m not counting the dogs). I have never seen another person building a fort with the exception of people I’ve brought along to build them. I’ve built forts from Hammond to Brookings. It typically takes me a half hour to get a fort going. I never have plan when I begin building one. Something takes over. I would say I complete one out every two forts I start in a single time period but often return to a fort for days or weeks and keep adding to it. A fort is never completed. I will say that corral forts are probably my favorite design because you can easily nap, make out, eat or write inside them and take refuge from the wind.
I published a book about driftwood forts by an inspiring Oregon artist and author. The book sold out in less than a year. It’s a cult tome now. We started an organization called The Driftwood Forts Association. It’s easy to join. Go build. I helped oversee the publication of what surely must have been the only publication ever produced by high school students on the practicalities and metaphysics of building driftwood forts. I wonder if any of them remember that rainy afternoon or have built a fort since then.
What is it about these driftwood forts? Why do I evangelize them so? Why I am writing 2100 words on the subject this morning when I should be trying to write something that will help save my house? I have my various theories: the perfect blend of spirituality, silence, getting off your ass, making art, making mystery, building shelter, exercising, meditating, entertaining and enlightening one’s self and others, building something anonymous and evanescent. They will always go away and in that they last forever. People have scoffed at my passion for fort building. That doesn’t bother me at all because I know how the activity instills goodness in my heart and puts smiles on faces of people I will never meet. What’s wrong with leaving something fun and enchanting behind for others to encounter at the beach? That seems to me a fine metaphor for how to live. It is a completely tactile metaphor as well.
It never costs a cent in Oregon to build a driftwood fort on an ocean beach and never will.
There really are no rules to building forts. I just like using only what it is found on the beach and not bringing tools. Tools clutter the mind. The idea is to use your hands. I also never steal wood from another fort to create my own. I like decorating forts with kelp, shotgun shells, clam shells, skeletons, beer cans, bottles, rope, cigarette lighters, children’s toys, whatever washes ashore and strikes my fancy. I once wrapped a fort with the brown film of a cassette tape. I vaguely recall it was Bob Seger or Paula Abdul.
I was never able to interest a national magazine about driftwood forts and I tried a dozen times, including Architectural Digest. The editors probably thought my queries childish and photographs strange. Imagine them reading those queries in glass towers overlooking cars and concrete inhabited by creatures utterly disconnected from the natural world. If I could lead the Oregon legislature in a fort building session it would change the fortune of this state. I always wanted one of my principals to hold a faculty meeting at the beach where we would build forts instead of looking at screens and papers. My requests were never taken seriously.
And finally, a remembrance of my last moment as a high school teacher: It didn’t happen in a classroom. It was on a beach, Clatsop Spit it used to be called, near the South Jetty. Forty two students and I were building eight or nine forts on the first day of June. Almost a year later, one of them is miraculously still standing, high up in the dunes, an outpost with a tremendous field of fire.
We christened ourselves the Oregon Driftwood Brigade. I recall not teaching particularly well that afternoon, stewing needlessly over a few recalcitrant students, but nevertheless, I felt that I had inculcated the tradition. Perhaps they will continue to build and teach their children to build. It’s been that way in Oregon for a long time. My work in this field is done. It was a good run and I got to run with some incredible young people. The last thing I ever did as a teacher was build driftwood forts. Is there a word for that kind of ending? I can’t think of one, but it might come to me when I build my next fort.
There I was running around, commanding the brigade with shouts and driftwood riding crop, and offshore, an invisible tsunami of opaque law and order was about to rise up from the gray depths, move inland with the speed of social media, and drown me. It did. I never saw it coming. I had my back to the ocean building forts, but it wouldn’t have mattered anyway had I been facing my dearest friend.
I did drown that day, but began breathing later, when I started building driftwood forts again, this time as a physical and mystical act of repurposing and a sweaty reminder that nothing last forever.
Forts have moved to another realm for me now. I gladly went.
Jimmy Breslin. Chuck Berry. Chuck Barris. These men died recently and I’d like to share my somewhat unique connection to each one of them.
Jimmy Breslin first. He passed away at the age of 88 after a long career as a NYC newspaper columnist and author. He wrote probably the most famous column of all time, “Digging JFK’s Grave was His Honor,” in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination. Breslin found an angle for the story where no other reporter even dreamed of looking. I’ve used the column in writing workshops for years as a way of instructing students how to look for an original angle to a story, and that story could be themselves. The prompt is: where am I not looking? I also wrote a column years ago called “The Breslin Angle” where I went to the beach during the Super Bowl and found some truly incredible stories of people (and their dogs) who had no interest in watching the game. Those people included a group of homeless men and women barbecuing hot dogs and drinking cheap beer. They didn’t even know the Super Bowl was being played!
In recent months, I have thought a lot about the Breslin Angle for the life-altering story I am living right now. Where am I not looking? I keep asking myself this question as more and more unexpected events and feelings unfold. I’ve written a lot on that prompt, lately, and it invariably leads to fresh insights on how to survive.
Breslin’s comic novel about the mafia, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, is also an inspiration. It provides the perfect model for the teaching novel I want to write one day, a definitive book, THE BOOK, about teaching high school that no one seem to be able to write. I completed a teaching novel back in 2012 but it never went anywhere—it was an attempt by a rank amateur—and I can see now that its tone and format were the wrong approach, very wrong approach. I think there was one short scene with any humor in it. I see now how important a role humor can play in telling a certain bleak or unjust story, fiction or nonfiction. I certainly plan to inject humor into the book I am writing about my current situation as a newly-minted sex offender who never had sex because at times this story is funny in a black comedy kind of way. I keep reminding myself how funny some of the scenes are in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If I hadn’t found humor in my situation, I would have gone down the drain with it a long time ago.
Next Chuck Berry. He died at 90. I saw him in the flesh when he opened for The Grateful Dead at Portland Meadows on May 28, 1995. The sound was terrible and it pushed 90 degrees that day but I got close enough to the stage to see Chuck, in a suit, then in his late 60s, do his thing for 45 minutes. I’ve always wondered what Portland pickup band he played with for the gig. And to think he would he keep gigging another 20 years after this show! Will I gig in my 80s?
After Chuck, the Dead played one of their final shows before Jerry died three months later. It was completely forgetful performance except for the unforgettable incident where one of my then Hillsboro High School students, buck naked and body-painted, twirled up to me and informed me that she was flying on acid and did I want some? I declined the gift, introduced her to my girlfriend, and then she gave me a big hug and said, “I love you Mr. Love.” Back in class the next Monday, she barely remembered a thing.
I have listened to Chuck Berry’s immortal rock and roll music my entire adult life. His tunes are littered through most of my 500 or so mix tapes. They are raucous or lilting two-minute sonic novels about lust, wanderlust and social upheaval. “School Days” is the best song about high school I’ve ever heard. (Nirvana’s “School” is a close second.) It still holds up because it chronicles a certain endless American teenage desire that is exactly the same as it was in the 50s when he wrote it—get me out of class! There is something better waiting for me! Hail Hail rock and roll / deliver me from the days of old!
Chuck Berry was also a superb author. His, autobiography, published in 1987, begins with this sentence: “This book is entirely written, phrase by phrase, by yours truly, Chuck Berry.” He wrote the first draft in jail, serving time for tax evasion. I consider it the best rock memoir I’ve ever read and I’ve read about a hundred of them. Hmmm, maybe there is something to be said for writing a draft of a potentially great book while behind bars. Maybe I’ve got that going for me now.
Finally, Chuck Barris. He gave up the ghost at 87. He was the creator of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, which Barris also hosted. Remember The Gong Show, with a cocaine-fueled Barris running all over the set and introducing truly bizarre acts? I sure do because I watched it almost every afternoon in junior high when I wasn’t playing sports.
Chuck Barris was also an author of several books, one of which was his 1984 autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. In the book, (which I have read) Barris claimed to have worked for the CIA as an assassin during the 1960s and ‘70s. George Clooney directed the cinematic version of it (I’ve seen it).
I met Chuck Barris once, in 2007, and I will certainly never forget our three minutes together. It was in the liquorless green room of Wordstock, a huge and boring literary festival in Portland. At the time the event was staged in the Convention Center and had a cavernous, industrial feel to it. I was there promoting my book about the Portland Trail Blazers’ 1977 NBA Championship and Barris was there promoting a book I no longer recall. He would have been 77 then and barely stood over five feet. I did a double take when I saw him, but sure enough, it was him! We were the only two authors in the room and he was sitting on a couch drinking a Coke. I got myself a 7-Up and came over to him.
“Mr. Barris, my name is Matt Love and I am an Oregon author presenting at the festival. May I join you?”
“Sure, have a seat,” he said.
We shook hands and I sat across from him in an overstuffed cartoon chair.
I had only one thing on my mind and it wasn’t his book. It was The Gong Show. I launched into a story about me being a high school teacher and having witnessed various student councils raise a lot of money for good causes over the years with The Gong Show concept. I thanked him for that and said it probably happened all over the country and was probably happening right now as we spoke. I told him his idea helped a lot of students and made them laugh at the same time. That is an excellent combination to pull off.
Barris waited for a moment. His face appeared a bit puzzled. “No one has ever said that to me before,” he said. “Thank you.”
He held out his soda pop and we clinked glasses and it resounded through the empty room. Chuck Barris! I was smiling. He was, too.
I knew he had a gig coming up soon so I got up to leave him alone to prepare. I had a gig, too, same time as his. He was in the big room; I was in a little room.
Barris reached out and shook my hand. “Good luck,” he said. I thanked him, walked out of the room, and went and did my show. I don’t recall a single thing about it.
Long ago, I dated (and eventually married) a remarkable woman who taught me some of my greatest lessons on the meaning of Lost and Found. One lesson in particular has always stood out, but it recently evolved because my circumstances dramatically changed.
The original lesson unfolded in the slower days before cell phones and a stray dog crossed our path as I drove us to a movie in Portland. Rain fell in walls across the streets. It was one of those Oregon rains where drivers pull over to wait out the deluge.
She told me to stop—now!—but I objected because arriving late to a movie then ranked as my worst pet peeve. She raised her voice, commanding me to stop. I did. She said, “There are three kinds of people in the world: 1) people who help lost dogs when it’s not convenient; 2) people who help lost dogs when it’s not convenient and raining; 3) people who never help lost dogs. I only date the second person.”
The rescue mission was on right there. It required considerable effort, but we corralled the dripping dog in the car, and read a phone number on his tag. We drove for what seemed like forever until we found payphone. She made a call and left a message. A few hours later, we reunited the dog with its overjoyed owner and celebrated by cooking a fancy Italian meal and going bowling.
Ever since that rainy afternoon a quarter century ago, I have made it a point to help lost dogs (and cats) who stray across my path. Naturally, every time I render aid, I am on my way to doing something else: work, an appointment, meeting, grocery shopping, social occasion. Aren’t we always doing something else when we encounter a lost dog?
In 20 years of living at the Oregon Coast, I have encountered 15 dogs that were strays and rescued 11 of them (yes, I keep score.) Sometimes, a lost dog simply won’t come to me and I lose it during the chase. I’ll never forget my failed attempt at tackling a greyhound on a beach; it was never seen by its owners again.
My most recent successful mission occurred a year ago in Astoria. I was driving the hills of the south slope when I saw what appeared to be a discarded stuffed animal in a drainage ditch. But then the stuffed animal moved, so I halted the truck and got out. Moments later I was loading an elderly white lapdog into the back of the truck. A day later, with the help of a friend, we reunited the dog with her owner. I no longer recall where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing when the dog appeared. I got there eventually and did what needed to be done.
As I said, the lesson imparted to me long ago about the importance of attempting to rescue lost dogs has taken on new meaning because of my unexpected immersion into the criminal justice system.
The number of lost human beings I’ve encountered wandering through this system has been staggering, and I partially count myself as one of them, although I sense, with the help of new friends, family and ineffable forces, I am on my way to finding myself. Still, there is a long way to go because I have learned the journey of finding yourself is a life-long endeavor.
Back to rescuing lost dogs. A thought occurs to me: could I apply the lesson when I encounter lost people? I can easily think of a dozen reasons why the analogy falls apart in reality and metaphor. But I can also think of ways it does hold up in both categories.
On September 14, 1975 approximately 200 people attended a meeting at the Bayshore Inn in Waldport on the Central Oregon Coast in response to a flyer posted around the area. The flyer read:
UFOs—Why they are here. Who they have come for. When they will land. Two individuals say they were sent from the level above human and will return to that level in a spaceship (UFO) within the next three months. This man and woman will discuss how the transition from the human level to the next level is accomplished, and when this may be done. If you have ever entertained the idea that there might be a real physical level in space beyond the Earth’s confines, you will want to attend this meeting.
At the meeting, Marshall Applewhite (Bo) and Bonnie Nettles (Peep) announced the imminent arrival of a spaceship that would transport interested parties to the “next evolutionary level.” Shortly afterward, 23 Waldport-area residents left with Applewhite and Nettles. The incident made national news and prompted CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite to remark during the October 8 broadcast, “A score of persons from a small Oregon town have disappeared. It’s a mystery whether they’ve been taken on a so-called trip to eternity…or simply taken.” Twenty-two years later, on March 26, 1997, coinciding with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, 38 members of Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, including its founder, committed suicide by asphyxiation at the cult’s compound near San Diego. They killed themselves by swallowing a concoction of applesauce, Phenobarbital and vodka while plastic bags were fastened around their heads. All victims wore matching sweat suits and Nike sneakers. Males had been castrated. None of the Waldport people were among the dead.
The New York Post rushed out a book two months after the suicide. I’ve read it and it has some decent reporting here and there. In 2014, a university press published a professor’s book on the Heaven’s Gate cult. From what the online reviews indicated, the book proved a rather uninteresting and broad academic treatment of phenomenon that lacked a human dimension. I haven’t bothered to read it. Just why did these coastal people pack up and leave their lives in a matter of days? Who were they? Who are they now? It’s an existential mystery of the highest order!
Over the years, I’ve heard that some of the original 23 are back in Waldport. Perhaps they are willing to talk. No writer, as far as I can tell, has ever bothered visiting Waldport to seek out this incredible Oregon story. I am still kicking myself for not pursuing it when I lived in the area. I was in Waldport on a regular basis for events or hitting the dive bars and probably interacted with a few of the cult’s refugees.
The more interesting story of Heaven’s Gate is just waiting for someone curious to get on it.
Nestucca Spit Press is excited to join with Astoria-based Sea Creations to produce and distribute The Keyhole Limpet Magical Necklace.
A keyhole limpet is a marine sea snail that has a conical shell. It lives on intertidal rocks and eats algae as it scrapes along the surface. The average keyhole limpet gets hit by 8000 waves a day and can exert up to 80 pounds of pressure on a rock. When keyhole limpets die, many of their shells end up on secret Oregon beaches, where obsessed humans (and some dogs) hunt for them and amass astonishing collections that defy reasoning.
Many collectors swear the shells of keyhole limpets frequently bestow magical powers if worn around the neck. These powers include clairvoyance, clarity, presence, higher math, philanthropy, healing, sagacity, spiritual transformation, incantations, romantic advice, charming eccentricity and creative inspiration. The wearer merely needs to hold the shell aloft, look through the keyhole, open the mind…and keep looking until…something…unlocks…
The Keyhole Limpet Magical Necklace is 100% guaranteed grown and harvested organically on the Oregon Coast. Suitable for humans ages 1-101, dogs, too. The necklaces cost $5.99 each or two for ten bucks. A bulk discount rate is also available for retailers, shamans or other individuals. Just imagine how popular and clairvoyant you’d be if everyone in your workplace or social circle was wearing keyhole limpets around their necks. To order, contact NSP through the web site. We also are willing to donate necklaces for fundraisers.
It wasn’t long after discovering the Spit, that I learned the incredible story of how it was saved from utter destruction in the mid-to-late 1960s from an insane ODOT plan to relocate Highway 101 right down the beach and over the bar. Had that plan gone through, the area would have resembled Rockaway and it would have led to other highway relocations down sand spits. The Oregon Coast would be totally unrecognizable today if that disaster had occurred. 
Over the years, I dug up the previously undocumented story of how Straub used exceptional political guile and harnessed the power of Oregon beachcombers to crush the plan. He saved Nestucca Spit for all time, and my discovery of it 30 years later revolutionized my soul. I consider saving Nestucca Spit one the greatest environmental victories in the state’s history, although visitors to Bob Straub State Park would never know that because there isn’t a single word about it at the park. I’ve tried my best to make up for this inexcusable oversight over the years by sharing the story in as many ways as possible as I can invent. 
