A Secret Cove

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History , ,

I rappelled down to a secret cove near a cape named after an explorer from a country that enslaved and practiced genocide against the indigenous peoples of the New World. Just wade ashore and declare it for the crown in the name of God.

I’m not sure we’ve really got away from that in the 500 + years since.

Change the name of the damn cape!

We changed the names of all the US military bases and cemeteries named after racist Confederate generals and traitors. We changed the faces of the Indian killers and slaveholders on our units of currency.

Wait! We didn’t do any of that….just changed a few creek names from Squaw. We changed a few high school and college mascots. I guess that’s a start.

The hike:

I met a woman on the trail. She was coming up. We stopped and talked. She’d lost her job in tech in Ohio. She’d bought an RV and hit the road. A year now. She’s seen the Pacific Northwest Coast and was never going back to the Midwest.

I met a couple on the trail new to the area, refugees from California smoke and taxes. They love Oregon. But do they know it? They don’t want to pay taxes. Is that a reason to live your life and embrace a community? Is that what the golden years are about? Bitching about taxes when you already have it made?

I keep meeting people who seek another American dream, the one that really isn’t American at all. Thoreau dabbled in it. Henry Miller, too. Kesey for sure. I wish I knew a woman writer who espoused it as powerfully. Maybe one did. Enlighten me.

I saw a dead alder wrapped in orange tape emblazoned with the poison symbol. The tape read: “Killer Tree.”

Actually it wasn’t a killer tree. It was full of life in its deadness. It was hosting all kind of life. When it fell and returned to earth, it would create more life.

There is no such thing as a killer tree, although there are killers of trees and killers of life and killers of watersheds. They don’t strap this tape at the entrances to clearcuts.

At the cove, I sat on a bleached driftlog the size of a school bus.

Gray waves broke against the rocks. I felt intermittent spray.

Two seals bobbed in the surf a football throw away.

I whipped out my peanut butter sandwich. I ate and watched the seals and sea stacks.

In my former life, I would have outed this place. Not anymore.

Mystery over journalism I say. In life and love.

On a Lost Literary Genre

NSP Meditations , , ,

A dull green river glides below me. I sit at a wooden picnic table slathered in moss, a venerable table, isolated from others near the river, framed by two impressive Doug firs. A cobweb hangs from a dead branch.

I hear sheep and chainsaws in the distance, and incongruous pairing. Lots of dogs here, playing ball and stick with their masters. This is a very happy place for dogs; they run free!

It is 37 degrees.

I see a robin perched in a naked vine maple. I inspect the table for carvings of sweet horny math. Nothing. A wasted tableau for equations of love. It might be that, in the Age of the Smartphone, young people don’t carve on picnic tables as they have in the past. They fiddle on their devices or don’t go to rivers to hang out. They certainly don’t carry around pocketknives. You can go to prison for that these days with some prosecutors.

Carvings of love on trees, fences and picnic tables. A lost literary genre of beautiful and often cryptic brevity. We’ve lost something with its passing, but, so too, we lost something in the art of conversation with the death of the rotary phone and the art of communication with the death of handwritten letters on stationery.

It is believed by some scholars that the first North American emoticons appeared in these carvings. They are, in fact, forerunners of text messages, often loaded with abbreviations and innuendo.

A lettering with a pen or Sharpie is not the same! It requires so much more in labor and metaphor to write into wood.

Some would call the carvings vandalism and rejoice at its extinction. But there was history of personal love in these tables across the land in the remotest of places, and one could return years and decades later to reread the equations and take stock of what had since transpired to the carver or the carvee and determine if the equation actually added up correctly or was just another wrong sum.

There are so many wrong sums in these carved equations, but sometimes, they turn out like Newton’s Laws of Gravity.

The rise of the composite and concrete picnic tables also hastened the end of the genre. These tables are so ugly they almost cry out for spray paint!

I carved an equation of love into a picnic table once, eons ago in a state coastal park, the ocean a football throw away. My high school girlfriend sat across from me. She had driven me to the beach in her brown Pinto. I still can’t believe it made it.

We walked the beach and collected shells and rocks. We ate our lunch at the table. (She later immortalized this scene in a work of stained glass.) I no longer recall what kind of knife I wielded. Wait! It was her knife!

It didn’t take long and then it was back in the Pinto and a rambling return to Oregon City in an era of wonderful looseness and shift whistles at the paper mill.

For many years later, I would return to that picnic table, alone, and reread the equation. My girlfriend and I didn’t make it, but the equation was never wrong.

Some 15 years ago, state parks replaced all the wooden picnic tables with concrete monstrosities, utterly Cold War fallout shelter in their appearance. Naturally, they were carve proof.

Some Thoughts on Pope

NSP Meditations

My aunt recently reached out and wanted me to write up some memories of my Grandfather for a memoir she is writing. I was happy to oblige.

What comes to mind when I think of Pope, my Grandfather, is the brevity, mystery and taciturn nature of my interactions with him. We never took a prolonged outing together. I never stayed overnight with him and my Grandmother for any length of time. I don’t ever recall a prolonged conversation with him. But he was around, in the audience (always standing and always quiet) for a few of my junior high football and basketball games, driving my sister and me in one of his Oldsmobiles to Burgerville for a clandestine, much beloved meal, visiting our home and always heading directly for the candy bar drawer, and the cars, oh the new and used cars he researched, inspected, and approved for my mother to purchase. They sometimes didn’t turn out too well, and the VW Dasher was the deluxe lemon of all time. I still smile when I see that make on the road and think of Pope’s lemon.

I have only one possession of Pope’s—a tiny round pencil sharpener emblazoned with the words American National Insurance on it, and that company’s bald eagle logo. That company was his lifelong employer. I still use the sharpener, when I have the rare occasion to use a pencil. I always associate anything written in pencil with Pope.

Conservative Coffee Shop

NSP Meditations ,

Patrons bitch about the power of Portland over the Oregon hinterlands, where this coffee shop survives in a decrepit building in one of the more remote and dysfunctional locales in the hinterlands.

The patrons seem oblivious to the massive transfer of wealth from Portland to the hinterlands that subsidizes everything—everything!–and keeps the hinterlands on life support. In essence, welfare.

Jokes about about Portland socialism. Jokes written by Russian bots on social media. Statements from local elected officials that the best way to fight forest fires is to kill cougars.

The coffee is damn good. Not that damn Portland hippie coffee! Real Grants Pass java. Definitely not child-slave-free grown. Mmmm, good to the last leg manacled drop.

Rain is falling for the seventh straight day and rising the rivers to flood stage. I bet that’s Portland’s fault, too.

The conservatives leave and don’t bus their trashed table or tip the tattooed barista.

I sit at a window writing for my life. It is perhaps, a desperate notion.

A young mom on her phone struggles with two brats. They are hurling toys, running around, bawling. One of them bashes a tiny shopping cart into a potted plant.

A vintage wooden spear gun hangs on the wall. Hmmmm, that gives me an idea. The W.C. Fields in me does.

You can feel this locale dying in its disgust with Portland. It can’t look within. It can’t reinvent.

I won’t be back to this coffee shop, although the old fashioned doughnut baked right here was pretty good and only 75 cents. Would have cost $3.75 in Portland and doubtless been called artisan.

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.

Valentine’s Day Love Broken Heart

NSP Meditations ,

My last name is Love, it’s Valentine’s Day, love stinks, I’m a loser who won’t get lucky, Tom Petty is dead, Prince is dead, Dick Cheney is alive, Maroon 5 played the Super Bow, I don’t have a Valentine except my dead husky, I hate candy and flowers produced in the Third World by child slaves, Valentine’s Day is also Oregon’s birthday and some loveless hack in Salem will cut the beaver-decorated cake today wearing an untucked shirt, a cake that I should be cutting, and what will I do on this bogus holiday but build a driftwood fort in rain, and draw some jagged hearts in the sand, maybe carve a little sweet horny math into a cliff, and recall all my great Valentine’s Day open mics at school where we read poems and sang songs of broken hearts, and I once played in a rock and roll band called Matt Love and the Broken Hearts and we played one hot show and that was it, but one hot rock show in a lifetime is quite an achievement, and the company that made Sweethearts candies has gone bankrupt after something like a hundred years in business, and I used those candies for years as a teaching device, and often wrote well with my students on the prompts associated with those tasteless candies made from lard, corn syrup and cow hoofs, and really, if I look back, I received exactly one Valentine I can truly remember, in sixth grade, from a girl named Connie, who always wore a purple flowered dress, and the card featured two mummies holding hands, the wrapped hands sticking out from the upright coffins, and little hearts exploding from the clasp. Two dead people in love. That about sums it up for Valentine’s Day for me after all these many decades.

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