It was a cold sunny morning in March and I had taken a pleasant stroll along the Clackamas River trail that crosses the old train bridge at high rocks where drunken and stoned Clackamas County youth had cavorted in cutoffs and halter tops for generations. More than a few had ended up dead by drowning or broken necks or stuck in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives. Now the daredevil danger is gone from high rocks and I’m not sure we’re better as a society as a result. Who knows? I’m glad I got to see that daredevil side in my youth, something never done merely to broadcast it to the world, because there was no outside world except the rocks and the river.

What a stroll! I had talked to geese and dogs and found a magical area littered with hundreds of choice cuts of beaverwood. I carried three over my shoulder as I approached my vehicle in the parking lot at the trail head when…I…discovered my driver side window smashed in. Glass was everywhere.

I didn’t say anything. I set down the beaverwood. I examined the interior of the vehicle. The thief or thieves had stolen the only item in the vehicle: a manuscript of my author coaching client Pete’s magisterial novel of his experience as a bombardier over the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. My publishing company will publish the book this fall and it will become one of the classic tomes of the literature of the Vietnam War. This was the final edit and I was halfway through the 900-page novel with all my notes and annotations on paper.

A miscreant had stolen literature! I had to settle the score.

I remained calm. I knew later that evening, after slamming a couple double Canadian Clubs and vaping some dank sinister weed (can weed be sinister?), I would return by bicycle to the scene of the crime, search the willows and sloughs, find the miscreant reading the manuscript by flashlight or blowtorch or wiping his ass with it, or using it to start a fire, and I would rough up that literature-stealing son-of-a-bitch and rough him up good. I’d go full tilt Hemingway on his ass. (Way worse than medieval.) Nothing like getting pistol whipped by beaverwood.

No one steals literature from me and gets away with it.

I admit it; I’ve got the Portland blues. I’m so blue I need a semicolon to communicate it and I don’t even know why or what a semicolon is really for in writing, although some writers swear by its nuance. Fuck nuance! I’ve got the damn blues! I should have used a dash—no nuance in that.

Rain is lightly falling as I write this from an upstairs window seat with a decent view of Mt. Hood. I have a lot of unique Oregon experiences in iconic Oregon places, but not a single Mt. Hood one. I doubt I ever will unless someone leads the way.

More death befell my family, an uncle, my dad’s younger brother, passed away yesterday. Cancer. Death has really been going hard to the body, like Rocky to Apollo, against my family these past three months. It seems like more could be on the way.

I’ve got a friend of almost 30 years in the city who won’t drive six miles to see me while others drove six hours. I need to reevaluate that friendship and when you employ the word reevaluate in the context of a friendship, it’s pretty much over.

I can’t seem to write a lick of anything except for these posts. I’ve got great notions for essays about The Rockford Files and Milan Kundera vying with Jules Verne for contemporary relevance, but really, who will gain anything by reading a thousand words of mine about the greatness and enduring warmth of The Rockford Files?

I just finished reading the latest edition of Street Roots, the fantastic weekly magazine about the homeless issue in Portland and around Oregon. They profiled all the men, 42, who died from the virus while incarcerated. It was outstanding journalism and inspires me to want to write that kind of journalism. I have that ability and desire to report this story, but no one will give me a chance. I’ve pretty much been eradicated from having my writing published in any publication besides one of my own.

I want a dog. I have a strange book about dogs coming out soon and I don’t own a dog.

There is such flakiness afoot in my life. Winning isn’t everything, following through is. When you say you are going to show up on a certain day, then show up. People think texting they can’t make it a couple of hours before they are expected to arrive absolves the flakiness. I think I almost preferred the days when someone simply didn’t show up at all.

My creature comforts have risen exponentially the last couple of months, and I feel indifferent, although I should be grateful when so many people have none.

Am I getting soft after years of steely determination and austerity?

I was bicycling leisurely through a neighborhood famed for its parks, wildlife and strip club that serves incredible steaks. The sun shined and everywhere people were walking, running, skating, riding, playing Frisbee, football, soccer and even a pickup basketball game featuring mostly transients. How did I know they were transients? There was that look I’ve seen so much of lately, and well, the court was situated mere yards from a row of zombie RVs and other vehicles obviously used as transient or not so transient housing. It stirred my heart a bit to think these men still wanted to shoot hoops on a beautiful day in a partially dystopian city.

One domicile, if domicile is the word, arrested my attention. It was a large tent covered by a tarp and surrounded by a fence of new pallets decorated with interwoven tree branches. Someone had spent considerable time on the decoration.

I was thinking about that, when a gaunt young man wearing a white tank t-shirt emerged from his battered sedan and said, sort of looking at me, kind of snarling and smiling at the same time, “There’s nothing to fucking see here, move along, mind your own fucking business.”

There was a whiff of derangement to his face.

He moved off in a new aimless direction after confirming every negative stereotype about homeless people in the city after the decorated pallet fence had undone a few.

I didn’t say anything, just kept bicycling, but his words made me think.

It is my business to observe such things as the decorated pallet fence and the zombie RVs and wonder how it has come to this the last 10-15 years in the city.

When I returned home, I told my dad the story and he advised me to avoid that area when bicycling around. “I don’t want you getting shivved.”

We argued somewhat about that. I was taught by my parents and others and by myself that people are not invisible. I will see them.

I will certainly not avoid this area. I will keep observing, thinking, writing and trying to look past the stereotypes and see the contours. There’s not enough of that going around.

My dad and I were sitting around the other day, discussing racial relations in American history when he recounted one of the more memorable experiences from his high school years. It was 1949 and Dad and his brother Max were attending Searcy High School in Searcy, Arkansas. The public schools were all segregated. Brown V. Board of Education was six years away. The integration of Little Rock High School and Ike sending in federal troops (the 82^nd Airborne?) was eight years away. It was pretty much apartheid across most of the American South and perfectly legal and acceptable and Christian in the former Confederacy.

Dad and Max were on the basketball team and they practiced after school. Once their practice concluded, the Black players from the Black high school got to use the only gym in town to practice. The Black school had no gym. One evening, Dad and Max stuck around for some reason to watch the Black players.

“They were dunking,” he told me. “And we barely had a player who could touch the rim.”

It was a sight that has stayed with him his entire life.

That was within his lifetime. The March on Selma in 1965 is within my lifetime. I know we’ve made racial progress in America, but there is still so far to go, and I wonder if I’ll live to see a day when I hear from people of color that real, substantive, change has come.

I wrapped up my tree planting gig not too long ago. A final thousand or so conifers to complete a two-year touch up of a terrible replanting of a clearcut that is on the verge of being overrun by invasive species.

The tree species were Western red cedar, Sitka spruce and Douglas fir. The stock was superb and grown in a family-run nursery in the Willamette Valley.

My mind moves differently while I am planting trees in comparison to walking, driving or building driftwood forts. It’s always about the trees, whether they’ll make it, whether they’ll make any difference, whether the trees I planted one morning will offset the carbon damage caused by the jet that flew overhead, transporting many travelers to places they have no practical need of visiting, you know, like to run a marathon in Antarctica, to climb Everest, or to swim with whales, or see the place where Hollywood filmed the Hobbit village scenes in Lord of the Rings.

While I plant, I often wonder if some of the trees will make it to 500 years. That inspires me to imagine what kind of world will exist then, if it exists at all in any form we might recognize today.

The other interesting part of this most recent gig was that I planted while listening to the sounds of a logging operation going on somewhere in another watershed. Hearing the whine of the chainsaws and the toot from the whistle punk made me wonder if I was planting life faster than the loggers were taking it.

My life as an Oregon tree planter began when I moved to the Oregon Coast 25 years ago. I planted about 8,000 myself and oversaw the planting of another 25,000 or so in the capacity as a teacher, caretaker of a wildlife refuge, and watershed council volunteer and coordinator. I planted solo, with dogs, with students, seniors, teachers, inmates, friends, family and once even on a date! It was the best paid and unpaid work of my life.

I planted with some of the most wonderful people I’ve ever met in my life. One in particular stands out. I often think back to our tree planting times together. Perhaps wee should revisit those sites and see where our labor went. I bet some of the cedars are pushing 80 feet!