Oregon Beaches

5:42 AM Fort

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches ,

They destroy at night. I create in the morning, 5:42 in the morning to be precise. My earliest fort of all time…

A beautiful sunrise over the mountains, purple, orange and white clouds in a dull blue sky, met me. I drank cheap coffee and marveled at my energy and spirit.

I pulled over into the wayside on my way to work, my construction gig, and started walking down the beach. A fort would form itself or not; it depended on what was there or not there; it depended on the fullness of my creative mind or the emptiness of my mind. I saw a massive root wad tilted at an unusual angle. Someone has built tiny cairns on it, and left behind offerings of shells and feathers. A long, thin, round piece of driftwood caught my eye. I retrieved it and leaned it against the root wad. I found two other spars and whipped up the beginnings of a fort or sculpture or whatever it would become today at the hands of others. Doubtless the creation would be destroyed tonight. This was Fort Destroyer territory. But while it stood it will have delighted hundreds of others, and inspired them to create, add, change, strengthen, adorn, collaborate. The Destroyer knows nothing of that.

The Fort Destroyer Continued…

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches ,

I responded with two forts. Fort fairies built two others. I saw them all standing on Saturday morning. When I checked Sunday morning, they had all been destroyed. I noticed a fat motorcycle track leading up to each fort. Mad Max tire tracks. It’s illegal to drive on this beach. No way anyone would have done it during daytime. You’d easily be seen and busted.

The Fort Destroyer had ridden his motorcycle on the beach in darkness and annihilated the forts. He might have even rigged up kelp to help tear them down.

I create, he destroys. Others create, he destroys. A friend suggested I was helping him work through issues. I liked that notion! Destroying a fort as a therapy! Why not? Building them helped me work through issues. I really loathe the word issues in this context. It’s a zero word, like entitlement or appropriation or resonate or dappled or socialism.

The Fort Destroyer really did a number on one of my person favorites. He even took off with the cut log round I had positioned for a stool!

But he did me a favor. This fort had become too big, the entryway too small, the meditative space too tiny. I pulled the wreckage apart this morning and, at 6:30 am, built a new fort that could sleep a homeless family, and probably will tonight. They will be shielded from wind and possibly rain. They can make a fire inside and hear the ocean while the flames hiss and crackle.

I’m not going to stop creating forts, here or anywhere along the Oregon Coast. He can do what he wants. I’ll do what I want. Will creation triumph over destruction? Isn’t that the eternal question we all have to answer every day of our lives. Create!!!!

Fort Destroyer Response 2

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

I had pondered how I might next respond to the Fort Destroyer. I was on the verge of letting go, when a friend suggested I build about a dozen forts in the general area of the destruction, and leave it at that. No notes. No words. A silent, massive, peaceful counterattack of forts and sculptures and other forms of beach art that involved kelp, shells, rocks, feathers, and whatever other treasures the ocean offered. My friend suggested a creative all-nighter but I am more of a dawn’s early-light-kind of person.

A couple of days ago, I drove by the beach where the destruction occurred and to my great surprise and delight, a fort stood! Fort fairies abound!

They are always built. People can’t help themselves. Neither can the fairies. The forts always wash away.

Two days later, the lone fort still stood, and at 6:30 in the morning, with the beach shrouded in fog, I pulled over while driving to work and added some wood and decorative flourishes to that fort, and built another one a hundred years away.

It was the beginning or it was the end or it was nothing linear at all in my narrative with the Fort Destroyer.. Let us see where it goes. I know I enjoyed every second of building in the fog and cultivated good thoughts to use the rest of the day.

Response to Fort Protest

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches ,

A while back, someone destroyed one of the forts I built and left the following note behind in my fort message box:

There’s enough

structures in the

world without you

also adding structures at

an undeveloped beach. I

enjoy undoing your work

every night.

At the time, I didn’t know how to respond, but mulled over the various possibilities:

Don’t respond.

Build another fort and see what happens.

Build a fort and stake it out, wait for him. Gather more intelligence.

Leave a message behind asking for a parley.

Leave an essay behind that shares my philosophy about fort building.

Leave a note behind saying he’s one in a million who hates my forts.

Leave a sentence behind asking why he’s so angry at a corral fort.

Leave an invitation behind asking for a longer explanation for his hostility toward the fort.

Leave him a screed that rips his wrongheadedness about forts.

Challenge to him some kind of duel.

Set up a booby trap.

A week or so ago, I built a new fort not far from where the destroyed once stood. I left behind a note (see graphic) inside a container.

I returned to the fort three days later and it had collapsed in a manner inconsistent with a collapse caused by winds or tides. (I know about these things.) I opened the container but couldn’t tell if the note had been read or not.

Now what? Do I continue to invite reflection and reconsideration? Do I give up? Do I put my fort energy elsewhere?

The Portal

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , ,

I walked a secret beach as the light came up. My mind moved in concert with the ocean rolling in to my left.

In the distance, at the wrack line, I saw an enormous piece of driftwood positioned in such a way that all its branches shot straight up into the sky.

I adjusted my course to investigate and beheld a sixty-foot trunk of a willow. There were beaver marks its entire length. It was the single largest piece of beaverwood I’d ever encountered. It might be the biggest one on earth.

And it was still alive! Green buds were sprouting forth into tiny little branches. It might live for years. A high tide might lift into a nearby place where it could reroot.

I started gathering wood to build a fort within this titanic piece of beaverwood. I built. I interlocked. I hoisted. More wood. More building. More bending and weaving of the branches and spars.

I stepped back to apprise the fort.

It was no fort. I was building a portal of some kind, one with no front or rear entrance. Just an entrance, an opening to somewhere in the mind, the heart, to freedom, to bliss.

One simply had to walk through.

I realized I’d never built a portal before. It just came to me as I built with driftwood. I never build with any preconceived notion. I just let it flow. That is why I build on the beach and will continue to build forts or portals or thrones until I die

Just start building and see where it goes. Writing is sometimes like that for me, but making something out of driftwood is something entirely different in my creative mind. Body, too.

You sweat when you build. I don’t sweat when I write. There’s something right there.

Baby Stroller Driftwood

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , ,

In my 22 years of living at the Oregon Coast, I have seen many people doing strange things on or near the beach. Sometimes I figure out what’s going on, (I think) and other times, no possible explanation exists, and I simply marvel in the mystery and applaud the eccentricities of my fellow human beings. I also applaud there being there, at the ocean’s edge.

A week ago, I saw what surely ranks in my top five of Strange Human Sights at the Beach. Hell, it might be number one. Only the man pretending crucifixion on a driftwood cross might top it.

I could explain that one.

But this new one…

I pulled into a parking lot where a trail led to a secret beach. I was there hunting for choice cuts of beaverwood because this place, along a secret river, is the best place in Oregon I’ve found so far, and I am an expert in these matters. Perhaps the only one

A green sedan from the mid 90s was the only vehicle parked in the lot. It was sagging, beat-up, rusted, and lacked license plates. It had the unmistakable aura of a meth rig.

No one was around that I could see. The driver was hiking? I encounter a lot of these kind of vehicles on the Oregon Coast and they never cease to intrigue me. I seek to learn more about them but not by asking question of their owners. Observation only.

I made my way along the river and scored a few mediocre pieces of beaverwood. I headed back to the parking lot and saw a young reedy man exuding unmistakable traces of meth loading a piece of driftwood about the size of a large end table into the back seat of the car. A white and brown pit bull had its mug stuck out the rear passenger window and stared straight at me. A woman with long black hair and a full head taller than the man stood outside the car. There was tinge of meth about her. She saw me, smiled, and waved. I waved back with my right hand clutching beaverwood.

I saw the man folding up a rectangular baby stroller with fat tires and sec ruing it in the trunk of the car.

A baby stroller? And no baby?

It didn’t make any sense and then it did. They had transported the piece of driftwood from the beach in the stroller!

They would drive the piece somewhere and make some kind of use for it that I imagined was ???????

I felt tempted to go over and ask, but the current editorial mantra requires: mystery over journalism.

But dammit, on occasion I weaken on this stance, especially when a jagged story is ten feet away. I’m a journalist at heart, not a maker-upper.

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