Of Walking in Rain

Thoughts While Driving in Rain (again)

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , ,

Rain slides the highway into the sea. Rain buckles the road. Rain brings rocks and mud down from the hills. Rain sends creeks across the shoulders.

I am driving through it, sloshing, sliding, surfing, on my way into the mountains and snow flurries.
Horses, goats, sheep and cattle stand angled into rain or take shelter under scrawny oaks or Doug firs. If there is an image that conjures depression, this is it.

I tune in a radio station playing songs I’ve never heard. One woman (Bonnie Raitt?) sings about writing a love letter listening to a love song on the radio. It’s a great song and she makes me believe she is writing a love letter, a dearly departed literary genre.

Past flooded fields. Past a herd of elk. Past fallen oaks. Past grim towns. Past so many abandoned homes and farms. People used to live there. People still could live there. Why aren’t these properties being repurposed to address the housing and homeless crisis? Why isn’t there a new Homestead Act, that invites people willing to put some sweat and improvements into the property, build equity in it, make something happen. Anything is better than decay. I don’t have the answers; I am just observing and thinking as I drive. I see these places all the time and the bones on them look decent. They are rigged for power and water and septic. There is land to grow food. Imagine a program, a partnership between banks, government, churches, non profits, housing/homeless advocates and absentees property owners to rehab a thousand such derelict properties in rural Oregon over a five-year period. Operation Re-Homestead Oregon. It could work. It’s not working now.

Driving on. Hundreds of boats, cars and RVs abandoned in fields or driveways. Why? Someone made an investment once. What happened?

I switch my mind to writing fiction and where I want to go after the Bonnie and Clyde book comes out. It was excruciating to write and fiction offers a certain liberation that I crave. I want to transport myself away from where I have been in recent years, to a place where I am in control of the narrative and characters. I have two solid idea for novels and a host of Oregon tales to write.

Here comes the snow flurries. I need to concentrate. I turn off country radio and put my mind to it.

When the Weird Turn Pro

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , ,

Going on 48 straight hours. When the rain gets weird, the weird turn pro. Now is the time to turn pro.

Eight to 12 inches forecast for this stretch. It will flood here and there, maybe everywhere.

I always notice how hard rain on the Oregon Coast erodes the infrastructure: roads, bridges, dykes, culvert, fields, houses, etc. What we build to rely on seems so flimsy compared to hard rain. I also notice how people come to rely on each for a different kind of help after relentless, overpowering rain.

My rain book is out there. Someone is reading it as I write this.

Not too long ago, someone dear to me, called up late at night, (it was raining) and read passages about us from the rain book. I could not detect the tenor in the reader’s voice. She was drunk, however.

The post office hasn’t opened yet. Someone couldn’t make it through.

The summer forest fire season in the area is officially over. Oh how the conservative politicians loathe that! They want more forest fires to torch federal land so they can blame cougars for the torching. When conservative politics come face-to-face with commonsense ecology, the former places ideology over those things as concrete in fact as gravity. It is something to behold to hear a politician blame cougars for forest fires and sea lions for the decline of fake salmon.

These men and women are immune to the great notion of reflecting upon what rain can mean.

Rain brought the internet and cable television down! Rejoice in the absence! Local teachers might have to teach!

I pick up a Western set in the desert with cunning Apaches while the rain six guns the roof.

Driving In Sunday Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , ,

Down, down, south, south. Highway 101 on a Sunday morning. A three-hour trip begins in rain, substantial rain, falling straight from the sky. No wind to move it like walls.

I’ve got local radio on. Obscure stations coming in and out, playing equally obscure songs such as something by Maria Muldar I’ve never heard before. Just who was Maria Muldar and why is she singing to me on February on the Oregon Coast?

I dig her voice a lot. It’s got rain in it, which of course strikes me as irony because her biggest hit is about a midnight oasis in a desert.

I see a young woman wearing a small back pack, walking in the shoulder, taking on the phone. I see a young man carrying an enormous black umbrella. I see a woman walking a husky. Shaky-looking men ride shaky-looking bicycles. The men and the bicycles are heavily laden with their stuff of transient life.

Drive on. Watch. Listen to the radio and think about rain, and my recent reunion in rain with a friend.

This feels like it could be a five inch day on the Oregon Coast.

Through a clearcut that seems to last forever, one of the most brutal I’ve ever seen. Murder. Mud. Stumps. Slash piles. Slides. Death. Deconstruction. How can this be legal? Driving through this ecocide darkens the soul.

Water running over the roadways. Puddles. Ponds. Lakes. Police lights. I slow down. I see a wreck on the highway, well, a actually off the highway. A driver apparently splashed through a lake, lost control, flew into the air, and landed in a flooded field. I look for a body and don’t see one.

Big trucks tailgate. Who are these men?

Concentration wears me out. I need a respite from rain. I detour to a tavern I’ve always want to visit. I pull up and go inside. It’s 9:47 in the morning and the joint is open. I order coffee and meet the owner of 42 years, working the Sunday morning shift. We talk. It takes all of 30 seconds to realize I’ve just walked into one the greatest Oregon Tavern Age stories of all time. I take notes. I’ll write it up later. I’ll add it to the book about Oregon Tavern Age life that never seems to end, but how can it when you visit a tavern in a deluge at 9:47 a.m. on a Sunday in February, and a great story greets you like a nice welcoming pat on the back?

The coffee jolts me to life and I drive away, taking my time, noticing rain, wondering if I’ll make it home before a culvert plugs with beaverwood and 101 becomes impassable.

I drive and drive. The creeks flow brown and swollen. The rivers run think with wood. Rocks tumble down from the cliffs. Radio disappears. Into the heart of record rain, but it’s not dark.

Rain, Rain, Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , , ,

Eight or nine days straight, three or four more forecast. Well, past mere accumulation of inches. Last night it was first a tickle on the roof, then a tap dance, then a torrent, then a gentle sweeping, then plopping until dawn. What variety! A true maestro-less orchestra fallen from the sky! I listened to it in my spaceship as I read a detective novel. I thought of new rain people in my life, including one new extraordinary fanatic who described people who live in Oregon that use umbrellas as, “weak sauce.” I love that line.

Oh the beaverwood I will find when the rains recede and a low tide exposes the rivers and estuaries! I will have days of hauling ahead of me.

Yes, rain, relentless, formidable, but I have managed to keep the beach streak going and I even built a fort yesterday as the light was coming on, a strange little sitting fort, where someone can sit on a round of wood and stare at the ocean. In the coming rainy days, I may erect a crude roof over the fort. It will, of course, leak.

While walking in rain a few mornings ago, I came across the carcass of a whale. A few beachcomber fiends had already sawed away a quarter of the bones! They will find their way into crafts, totems, instruments, and god knows what else. More people should bring whales into their lives, their homes.

A friend sent me a link to a video linked to rain. A song came on the radio that referenced rain in the typically cliched fashion is presented in songs and books and movies. When really falls hard in Oregon, and when one is paying attention, it so much more than just rain. Meteorologists will never grasp this concept.

I caught Casablanca on TCM the other night while it stormed outside. Some great, great, fake rain scenes in that classic. It’s the black and white that does it. And the fedoras and trench coats! Bogie never uses an umbrella! I think. I want to believe he didn’t. You can’t be tough with an umbrella! It’s also impossible to whip out a revolver in a downpour and shoot a Nazi if you are holding an umbrella. You can’t get the drop on anyone if the umbrella is in your gun hand! Bogey drilled that Nazi good, and then the plane with his great love flew away in rain, and he and Louie walked away in the mist and a beautiful friendship had begun. Friendships that begin in rain are something else. They can’t be dissolved.

Rain Falls…

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , ,

Rain falls in a new existential place for me, as a new concrete era in my life begins.

I see a man walking down the road, talking to himself. He seems incredibly agitated. He’s waving his arms in the air, his arms colliding with rain.

I write from a forlorn coffee shop in a deserted retail complex. They should turn off the FM lite hits and let rain entertain,

Soon, I will write another letter to a friend marooned in rehab. A letter a day for her. She wrote me that they’re keeping her afloat. I include writing prompts and metaphors collected on beaches. I wish I could mail her a driftwood fort.

My legs feel heavy from miles and miles of walking. But I will keep walking nonetheless. In fact, I walked in rain this morning as the light came up over the mountains.

I might hit the tavern in the afternoon and mingle with the OTAs. The talk will be of rain, as it usually it, but it often proves as dull as endless sunny days. Rain begats stories; the sun is their birth control.

I think about an idea for a story about a man who turns into a beaver. The idea was suggested to me by a friend. I wrote the intro to the story in my head, during the morning walk. There will be a creamy porter on tap in the man/beaver’s lodge. He’ll open canned goods with his two front teeth.

Reunions are in the offing. The forecast for them is unknown.

I watched the animated The Cat in the Hat the other day, the first time since I was a kid. What a delight to realize that this is essentially a rain story. The brother and sister can’t go outside to play because of ferocious rain and are bored out of their minds. Then the Cat arrives (carrying an umbrella!) and mischief begins. Mischief ratchets up considerably when Thing I and Thing II show up. Thing I and Thing II intrigue me. They seem like they belong in a rock band. Perhaps we all occasionally need a visit from a Thing I and Thing II in our lives.

The thought occurs me that I’d love to produce a podcast where the only subject was rain: rain memoirs, rain poems, rain folklore, rain songs, all things rain but nothing about the weather. Who would listen to that show? The rain fanatics are out there. I’ve met hundreds of them in recent years.

The Reconsideration of Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , ,

It’s one of those days when you must embrace record rain or surrender.

You can walk into it, like I did earlier, and reconsider this and that. Rain is good for the act of reconsideration, an act of the heart and mind that feels like a lost American art these days. Doesn’t everyone want someone to reconsider them? Someone even wrote a song about it…and Warren Zevon covered it well.

This kind of rain requires some good rain reading material. Of course, in moments like these, I go to Simenon and Maigret and immortal lines of rain from an author who never treats rain with cliché. It is a character in his murder mysteries.

I have only a few copies of my rain book left. I wonder who is reading it?

I much prefer the phrase, “It came out of the rain,” rather than, “It came out of the blue.”

There is tiny river running outside my window. I just saw a garden gnome float by.

I can’t get the image of a homeless man I saw recently out of my mind. There he was, in the shoulder of a rural road, miles from anywhere dry, standing under some conifers, it was raining with prodigious force, and he wore nothing but a blue tarp and yellow booties. He posed like Christ on the cross.

I set aside Maigret and return to Jill Lepore’s magisterial new one-volume history of the United States, These Truths. I’ve read dozens of these kind of American histories, but hers is unique. She doesn’t come out and say it directly, because professional historians aren’t accustomed to making huge metaphorical leaps in their thinking when it comes to understanding our nation’s past, but I intuit she knows slavery, which rooted and prospered in the sunny climes of the South, led to a nakedly unjust Constitution that favored the South and built them into a power disproportionate to their free peoples, an equal power that still undermines our nation today. We’ve yet to truly live up to the ideal. Not even close. I wonder if I’ll see another effort in my lifetime? I so wanted to Lepore to digress and think: Had there been rainy climes in our South, no slavery, a better nation. Had we been a nation of rain instead of the sun, well, things would have turned out much differently, much better. No sun. No slavery. Rain. Equality.

«‹ 3 4 5 6›»