Typewriter Rescue

NSP Meditations

Oregon was on fire. Facebook was doing its best to make it worse. I couldn’t travel to help my parents evacuate from their Clackamas County home. I had absolutely nothing to write and had just written about nothing. My favorite Pendleton shirt reeked of mold. I don’t have a dog. There wasn’t any wood left on my beaches to build a driftwood fort. The President was urging Americans to vote twice and break the law in order to ensure a lawful election result.

So . . . I went to my favorite animal thrift store and felt certain something in there was going to change my life for the better. I knew it! I can say for the record that I have purchased items from a thrift store that have changed my life for the better, quite drastically in fact.

I saw it. A blue portable Brothers Charger 11 typewriter from the 70s. Mint condition. $11! I found a piece of paper and ripped it around the platen. I hit the keys. Nothing. The ink was dry as a desert, dried out as American’s civic mindedness in the face of catastrophe.

Not matter about the ribbon. I could buy one online and be clanking away in a matter of days, perhaps even in OTA country! I’d be making a racket writing letters and streams of consciousness and pissing off the old timer who sits near my table and watches absurd B-Westerns. My god, the rifle fire from the Army killing the Indians is twice as loud as a typewriter. But when we come together, oh what a great noise it will make!

I left the story giddy and I strode into the smoke and fog with a tinge of happiness. Now to put that typewriter to work.

Waiting for Fogot

NSP Meditations

Sunday morning. Thick fog. Time as taffy like a friend wrote me.

I walked a rural road. I saw an old man off the shoulder in a parking lot of an abandoned building. He was clutching a Bible in his right hand and holding it against his chest. Apparently he was waiting for something.

The man was familiar to me. A year ago or so, he got catfished by the Ukrainians and lost his house, savings and sanity. He was now homeless and living in the trees somewhere near me.

I approached him. His face was utterly vacant. I asked him if was okay. He said yes. I asked if he was waiting for a ride to church. He said no, then yes, then that he didn’t know if his ride would brave the fog. I asked what denomination of his church. He didn’t respond. Did he even know?

I told him to have a great day and walked away to the beach.

A few yards down the road, I turned and saw the man reading the Bible in the fog, waiting.

What to Write About

NSP Meditations, Writing

What do you write about when you have nothing to write? I don’t have writer’s block. I simply have no book to write for the first time in 20 years. I have three books in the can so that’s saying something, I suppose. There was such urgency with the Western, the X-Mas tales, the dog book and collection of ghost-written short stories, but now, nothing is urgent because there is no project.

It feels strange, off, vertiginous. I do have an idea for an ecological-themed mystery/detective novel called The Watershed, but it requires considerable on-the-ground research across the region and obviously that’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever. So here I am writing about not writing.

It occurs to me as I write this that I could start assembling all my writing about driftwood forts and choosing the best photographs for a possible newsprint publication. But that’s not writing a book. The driftwood fort book is already written.

Perhaps an idea will come as the result of misfortune such as the one that inspired Love & The Green Lady, or how a brutal breakup inspired Of Walking in Rain, or how a pulverizing catastrophe inspired Bonnie and Clyde.

Perhaps I am not seeing opportunity in the Pandemic and the disaster of the Trump Residency and the fires and the ongoing call for racial justice.

I don’t know.

A Vortex I Story

NSP Correspondents, NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

(I received the following email from a reader not too long and thought it might interest those who know the incredible story of Vortex I.)

I just found your book, The Far Out Story of Vortex I, and bought it. I wish I had known about the first book,I would love to see the pictures. I was at Vortex and stayed for 5 days. If this is no believable so be it. I was on a Honda CL350, which was the last motorcycle allowed onto the main grounds, not the parking lot, and I had to agree to take people to and from the medical area in exchange for getting in. My memories are no longer as sharp as they used to be, I am now 77 years old, but I have often spoke about my first impression.

I was a graduate student at Purdue in Industrial Psychology, and had become a tourist hippie (grubby clothes, long hair, some pot, but with a job and every intent to have a career). I had been riding a bike for about a year, saw Easy Rider, and said to myself, “I can do that.”

I heard about Vortex while traveling north on the California coast. I had never before (or since) been to a music festival. When Woodstock happened the year before, I had just returned from Europe, and was too tired to go.

I was told the requirement to get the bike in (ride medical people around), and so I first went in and pitched my small tent. Then I returned to the entry area, and said to the young lady that let me in that I was ready to ferry anyone to the medical area. She said something like (I cannot remember anything exactly enough to quote it) ‘Oh, here comes ………. now!’ I looked up and saw a lovely young lady wearing a colorful print skirt and a hair garland; that’s it. I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is going to be a fun adventure. She climbed on the back of the bike and I took her over there.

We went straight to the LSD bad trip tent, and I found out that most of the problems were traceable to the fact that much of the LSD was laced with strychnine. This meant that many first LSD trips were accompanied by terrible stomach pains.

During Vortex I took part in the “wet sauna” and watched the Army Reserve helicopters overhead, with soldiers hanging out yelling to the naked hippie girls in the lake, who yelled back (we jumped in the lake after the sauna and the chanting of OM. The soldiers were basically hippie guys who dodged the draft by joining the reserves.

If you are interested in whatever else I can remember, prompt me, otherwise, thank you for this book.

Jan Ditzian

When Fog Met Smoke

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

I’ve taken many a walk on Oregon’s socialist ocean beaches, but the one the other morning (Wednesday) was unlike any other.

It was early and I walked alone. Where the sun should have been was nothing but a dull orb. Smoke had met fog and both were engaged in some kind of cosmic battle for the sun’s appearance. There was a metaphor in there somewhere, but I had other thoughts on my mind, like more lyrics for a country song.

Everything around me was colored a blunted orange and gray. It was the strangest combination of color I’d ever observed. At one point I took a picture of the color but the image turned out merely gray. Interesting, I thought. My camera couldn’t pick up the color.

The ocean was doing its thing, of course, as were the few gulls I encountered. I walked to my complex of forts expecting them to be smashed to smithereens from yesterday’s gusts.

Surprise! Joy! Not a single one blown out! I get better at fort building with every new fort. What’s that they say about having to do something for 10,000 hours to become an expert at that activity. What about 100,000 hours at something?

As I left the beach and walked home, I wondered if this unique color would last all day, and how it might color people’s lives. I also thought about the last line from a poem by Richard Hugo, perhaps my favorite poem, “Port Townsend, 1974,” a poem set at the ocean’s edge.

That line is: we are absurd.

Oregon Tavern Age: Horny Rod

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

I know a retired log truck driver, let’s call him Rod, or horny Rod as he is better known in OTA country.

Rod drove a log truck through practically every state, federal, tribal and privately-owned forestland in the Pacific Northwest. His recall of these places is truly astonishing.

He is a walking, talking, drinking museum of all things logging in the region for almost half a century and claims the distinction of being one of the last log truck drivers alive who carried a single log on his rig. One. An old growth beauty that perhaps even he was sad to see cut.

Well, not just a museum of logging lore, but of the hard livin, lovin’, drinkin’, fightin’ ways of a logging man.

Sometimes I take notes after Rod recounts a particularly crazy story, like the recent one about going home one drunken night with half the team of the Forks female bowling team in the 70s. He just loved the Forks babes back in the day. Forks was goddamn wild.

He also told me how he heated a can of chili every day for lunch on the job. Just placed it on the engine block after a load to the mill or run back to the clearcut and it would be bubbling in minutes.

Rod and I got sideways one afternoon a while back. He dropped the n-word when we were discussing the NBA player protests. I cut into him right then and there and said I wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing and I got up and left.

We were a little cold to each other after that, but later, he gave me a token for a free beer without telling me the reason.

Maybe that counts for progress in OTA country. Who knows?

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