On Beaverwood

NSP Meditations , , ,

My beaverwood collection grows and grows and grows. The other day I found one of the more spectacular pieces (pictured here). Look at the size of this…well, log. It’s a damn beaver log!

It is possible that I have the largest collection of beaverwood in the world!

What I plan on doing with my collection, I don’t know yet. It seems to have taken on more than just a collection. It’s working on so many subconscious and metaphorical levels that I can’t begin to classify them. Why bother? It’s going somewhere. Art. Spirit. Love. Story. Philosophy.

I love showing my collection to people. When I explain the facts of beaverwood and the distinct gnawings and chewings at both ends of a piece, people seem delighted and instantly coverted to the idea that these pieces are a unique form of art and worthy of serious attention. The pieces also transmit a simple tactile lesson in ecology and reveal the magical nature of how everything flows down in a watershed.

Why it took me so long to recognize the powerful education that beaverwood teaches, is a mystery to me. I guess I was simply ready and there they were…all around me. Always appearing. Always calling to me. Always a new piece. Always different. If a passion is distinct, original, and came out of nowhere, it seems destined for something special and perhaps with someone special.

Laundry Room Thoughts

NSP Meditations

I am sitting in a rickety chair inside a laundry room. My clothes are drying. Rain is falling hard outside and sent the hummingbirds and quail into hiding. I haven’t written anything from a laundry room in decades. It feels like a strangely decent place to write. Earlier, I wrote a letter in longhand while the clothes were washing. Presently, I am typing this on my AlphaSmart word processor. I am allowing my thoughts to meander with the sounds of the dryer turning and tumbling and the change and buttons making their cracking sounds against the metal.

It is chore day: vacuuming, laundry, cleaning, clearing, building some new shelves, re-positioning items here and there, unloading beaverwood from the car, etc. The Bonnie and Clyde book has moved into the production phase and that is a tremendous relief but also stirs up feelings of great loss because that project has consumed me for over two years. At the last minute I cut 10,000 words from the manuscript, a fifth of the total! It was actually pretty easy and the right decision. That section will become another book I’m thinking of calling A Discourse on Dogs.

My installation of 14 driftwood forts on one beach is no more. A freak windstorm toppled half of them and battered the others. Oh well, that is the nature of driftwood forts. I’ll build new ones on the sites of the dead one. I’ll use the remains of the dead forts and new materials delivered down from the watersheds. What a glorious driftwood year it has been.

The other day, I helped carry an elderly man out the door of an OTA joint. I was assisted by a young woman who had brought him into the bar. She told me he was a roommate. He was either drunk or insane but certainly enfeebled and barely able to walk. They were on foot and I thought I was going to have to walk a half mile to get him safely home. But once we got outside the joint, she saw a roommate walking across the street and hailed him over for assistance. Odd indeed.

I may have a friend visit me. I have another friend in town visiting me. I’m showing him certain Oregon Coast marvels, one of which is beaverwood. He’s delighted with the choice cut I gifted him. It will be traveling across the country in his luggage soon. Beaverwood stashed in luggage!!!!

With Bonnie and Clyde and the OTA books finished, my mind turns toward writing fiction. I am ready to unleash all my creative energy into that pursuit, a novel, more tales, perhaps even a podcast that serializes some of the projects. A possible new collaborator is also emerging. Whether this writing will be published conventionally or unconventionally, I have no idea. The point is to release my writing in that direction and see where it leads. I am on a new literary path, one that I never foresaw for myself after the personal cataclysm. Bonnie and Clyde helped me discover it.

Three Quotes

NSP Meditations

James Dickey wrote in a letter to a friend, “When loneliness becomes creative rather than destructive, the artist is alive and in his element.”

Is that true? How does one know when one is lonely? I know it’s not the same feeling as solitude, which I cultivate. Solitude is necessary for the writing life, but it demands a high price. I lost great girlfriends because of this need for solitude. I don’t think I’m like that anymore. The old self was pretty vainglorious about this. I think I can find a balance if the opportunity ever presents itself again.

Milan Kundera wrote: “The past of each one of us can be just as easily arranged into the biography of a beloved statesmen as into a criminal.”

This might be the truest sentence I’ve read in the last ten years. It has always been true, but in the age of the Internet, it seems this “arranging” occurs much more frequently and almost instantaneously. I suppose the Internet allows a person to “arrange” one’s biography to read what the writer wants others to believe. What is real out there when it comes to truthful biography. I’ve been wrestling with that question for the past few years. I once knew someone who wanted to write my biography, and I was surely surprised by her desire, because my life hardly warrants it. But she insisted. I’ve lost contact with with this former great friend and confidante. The story of my life is certainly more interesting, considering what’s gone down.

My friend L and were walking along the South Jetty and we were talking about my personal extinction when she stopped,turned to me, and said: “I think this makes you so much more of an interesting person, to see what it did to you and what you did with it.”

I took a little step back from that quote. I hadn’t considered this perspective or seen this insight coming. But L provided it and it’s still percolating in my mind.

The Meth Miscreants

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , ,

I pulled into the parking lot of the beach wayside and looked for the spires of the driftwood fort nestled in the dunes. I’d built it a couple of months ago, had kept adding and shoring since then, and left behind a message box that hadn’t produced a single interesting thought.

The spires were gone. That surprised me. I had seen them from the road only two days ago. There had been no storms or super high tides to topple the fort.

It was a glorious sunny morning and I took the trail to the fort and found it destroyed and the message tin box gone. All manner of deep truck tire tracks surrounded the remains of the fort. It had been attacked and ravaged!

The Mad Max meth crew! I’d observed them here multiple times doing all sorts of inexplicable things.

I wasn’t mad, actually more amused and mystified. Who are these people?

I rebuilt the fort in a corral style and dug out some cleverly disguised tank traps nearby. They would easily ensnare a meth truck joyriding in the dunes.

Gus!

NSP Meditations , ,

I was sitting at a table outside my domicile, drinking wine from a paper cup, listening to quail in the hedges, writing the last few pages of my 150th or 155th journal, when a huge black lab/rottweiler mix appeared out of nowhere, bounded toward me, and nearly knocked the table over.

The wine was saved.

This was not a dog I recognized from the neighborhood and I know all the dogs. He had the look of an escapee!

I greeted the beast and rubbed his neck and head. I grabbed his collar and read “Gus” and a phone number. I pulled out my phone and called the number. A man came on the circuit and I explained the situation. He told me Gus had busted down fence and bolted down the road, not too far from where I was sitting. He’d be over 30 minutes. Could I wait? Sure.

Gus and I goofed around and then I used a neighbors leash to secure him to a bumper of a vehicle. I got him some water and treats I have stored in the back my car for just search and emergency purpose.

He wolfed down the treats and buried his head into my lap. He drooled a great dog drool. At last he settled to the ground to rest.

Thirty minutes later, I reunited Gus with his owner. The man gave me $25 in folded cash for my effort. Class. It doesn’t seem like there is all the much class in the country these days. The word never gets used. It was nice to see it on display in such a happy circumstance.

Gus hit the road. I went back to the journal and wrote about Gus. I suspect I’ll see him again. He had that look in his face.

On Seal Rock

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches, Oregon Coast_History, Poetry, Writing , , , , , ,

What is the official color of the Pacific Northwest Coast? Let a poet define it: “…it happens when I begin my little ritual of naming the colors. That’s grey, I say. That is not grey, I say. But more than grey, a white grey, green grey, blue grey, rose grey—my little ritual—and then, and then it overtakes me.”

The poet’s name is John Haislip, the poem is “On the Beach Late Before Sunset” and it concludes Seal Rock, perhaps the finest book of poetry I’ve ever read about the Oregon Coast and the people who inhabit its landscape. Seal Rock nails the magical, primitive, punishing, damp, gray, reclusive nature of surviving on the soggy monochrome coast with the same vigorous accuracy as Ken Kesey did in Sometimes a Great Notion. And I make that claim because I’ve lived at the Oregon Coast for 22 years and have had a lot of wet, grey time to read a lot of poetry about the Pacific Northwest.

I only know of Seal Rock’s existence because of an offhanded remark in a dive bar by my friend, Tim Sproul. We were drinking cheap Pacific Northwest lagers and talking poetry when Sproul told me I had to read the book. He also said he studied under Haislip in the University of Oregon’s MFA program in creative writing in the late 1980s and had great admiration for him as a teacher and mentor. Haislip was a professor emeritus at the university who passed away in March 2011 at the age of 85.

It took some time, but I tracked down a copy in a public library. After reading this slim 52-page volume that won the Oregon Book Award for poetry in 1987, I read it again, photocopied it, annotated it, then drove five miles from my home to the village of Seal Rock at the 150 milepost marker on the Oregon Coast and explored the beaches. There, I walked into John Hailslip’s poetry, his grey.

Seal Rock overtook me in a way no book of poetry has before. It helped me transcend a great personal loss. I sensed I had a mission to herald how incredible these poems are and that’s what I’ve been doing for years. Find a copy. Read the poems and learn. The lessons are tough.

My favorite poem in Seal Rock is “Counting the Gulls.” The last stanza reads:

As now it’s coming on
From who knows how much
Multitudinous grey
Out there all week—
Or through the next?

Or how about the next six months? Haislip writes about grey better than anyone I’ve ever read and one can sense from these poems that he regularly communed with gulls and rain. He also uses the word carcass as a verb, as in, “carcass off in the poisoned air,” and I’ll never get that image out of my head, which is what great poetry is supposed to do, not make you feel confused or unintelligent.

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