Castor Canadensis (American Beaver) Man (Part 4)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

One summer afternoon, James was outside his RV, rearranging the gallery, whistling, when the park owner came up to him. Months ago, he had asked James about the beaverwood and James told him he enjoyed collecting interesting pieces. Back then, the owner gave him a strange look.

His look now was different. He told James the wood had to go, It was becoming an eyesore. James asked how so and the owner stumbled in response. James pointed out some real eyesores in the park, the year round, collapsed nativity scenes, the disused carpentry set-up and five rusted barbecues leaning against a rig. The owner waved it all away. The beaverwood had to go or James had to go.

It was an astonishing sight to behold to see James drive his Honda out of the park with beaverwood stuffed in the back seat, coming out the trunk, strapped down on the roof rack. He didn’t leave a stick behind and figured he’s just find a free place to camp for the summer and what to do with the beaverwood later.

That’s how James’ Honda ended up at the boat ramp. He’d seen it before while collecting and thought even then it might be a good place to camp near a river and really get to know a river. He might get a few answers from the river. Hell, it worked for Siddhartha and Huck Finn!

He’d stay for a couple of months and devise a plan for new housing when hard rain arrived. At one point, he knew he’d have to return to the world and face the faces he never wanted to see again. He was caught in a story he didn’t want to live.

It begs the question: how do you live your own story when others think they already have one written one for you, their first draft of story, riddled with errors, and badly in need of revision?

James took a run at the question every now and then and he always came up with the same answer: you build one, you keep building it with what you have around you, with what is innate, you rebuild even when sometimes the story gets washed away or torn down.

In other words, you build your story like the way beavers build their dams and lodges, in silence, off to the sides. You model the way beavers live. They are not mindless. They are mindful, attuned, in tune with nature.

But oh my…James did much more than just model. He did more than merely emulate.

Castor Canadensis (American Beaver) Man (Part 3)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , ,

Back in the RV, James handled his souvenir. Rain drummed the roof, a real Keith Moon bashing, and James could hardly think. Think! What did those serrated markings on the stick mean? Somewhere…long ago…he’d….learned….about….creatures…that ate wood…and built dams!!!!!!!!

Beavers! Of course! Oregon’s state animal!

James jammed to the library and looked up all the beaver books. They were loaded! Dozens! He pulled them all off the shelves and spread them out on a table.

For the next six hours James read and read and read. The academic tomes touting the hydrological benefits of beavers were as dry as a desert. The children’s books about beavers were easily the best, better written, eccentric, passionate. There was even a pop-up beaver book! Yogi Bear and the Beaver Dam. For the love of castor canadensis! Behold the bucktoothed wonders! James thumbed through the pop-up book for half an hour, giddy at every turn of the page. He particularly loved the lodge and tracing the contours of it with his fingers. He wanted to visit a beaver lodge, but not merely view it from a bank. James wanted to venture inside! To do that, he’d have to swim and submerge underwater. The pop-up book made it look simple.

For the next three months, James collected beaverwood of all shapes and sizes and brought them back to the park. He stacked here and stacked there. He built a makeshift picket fence. He filled a dozen milk crates and three garbage cans.

What was it about beaverwood that so mesmerized James? Why the obsession with beavers? Sure, they were an astonishing animal in many ways, particularly the role their dams played in sculpting the landscape and evolution, but there was more. James tended to look past the science and the history of the near extinction of the species due to the fur trade. There was something in the serrated markings on the wood that spoke to James. When he handled a piece of beaverwood, he held it close, turned it slowly around and around. He felt the markings. A beaver had done an efficient number on a piece of wood, really chewed it up, brought it crashing down to earth.

But there was beauty and originality and purpose in each piece, if anyone cared to notice. Each piece was unique. Each was part subsistence and part shelter. Each was part of a unique supply chain connecting concrete and metaphysical producers. Each was…a piece of art! Beavers were artists! They sculpted with their incisors and didn’t even know they were making art. It was primal. It was instinct. They had no choice but to make art with the material that fed and housed them. Was there anything in nature remotely comparable? Perhaps bees and their secreted honeycombs. Perhaps shells constructed by sea snails that eventually wash up on the beach.

As the beaverwood collection grew it became more of a crude gallery, a gallery curated by one person, a gallery visited by one person. At one point, James wondered if he should stop building his collection. He was getting some strange looks from the other residents of the park.

Do beavers ever stop gnawing? Stop building? Stop making art? Stop the supply chain? Hell No!

Truth be told, James couldn’t stop. And to that, we say Hell Yes!

Castor Canadensis (American Beaver) Man (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , ,

It need not concern us to delve into specifics about the events that propelled James to the secret watershed. It could have been an act of infidelity (not his), an addiction that bottomed him out, a real crime or a thought crime, a sickness or accident, a stoning on social media, a fire or a firing. A calamity of one kind or another (or in combination), struck James out of nowhere and he suffered an extinction of self. And when you go extinct in this fashion, something has to replace the former self or you merely remain in oblivion but not oblivious to your condition.

In the aftermath of his extinction, James lit out for the territory, driving west until he ran into the ocean, then driving south, south, south, until he somehow found himself living in 24-foot, 40-year-old rented Winnebago in a remote RV park named after a dead Native American tribe. The park was a block from the beach, and wonderfully disheveled in appearance, but not a creepy dishevelment. It was populated by men and women taking part in the new American diaspora, those checking out quietly of American society because American society sucked worse than Pat Boone covering Little Richard or John Wayne playing Genghis Khan or Mark Zuckerberg preaching about improving our lives through social media.

James began beach combing, river walking, estuary adventuring and stream surveying for the simple reason he had nothing else to do. Prior to arriving at the park, he’d had very little experience in nature so it was all new to him and he delighted in his solitude (although he wasn’t really alone) and his discoveries, particularly an orange dildo inside a driftwood fort.

One morning, James hiked along a forested trail that traversed a headland and had no idea where it would lead. He was paper mapless in an era when paper maps were dead, but he didn’t care. Just let a great notion of exploring unfold. They always work out when you don’t rely on received wisdom produced by digital dipshits. You might meet a magical woman on a mountain or walk through a herd of elk to enter a dive coastal bar. You might find that macrame top or corduroys that change your life.

Several miles later, the trail descended to a cove and an isolated stretch of beach. There was a couple acres of driftwood, in some places stacked twenty feet high. James tunneled into the driftwood, hunting for treasures. He noticed that many of the pieces, some tiny, some the size of baseball bats and flagpoles, were stripped of bark, and had strange chew and gnaw marks at both ends. A sort of whittling look. He picked up a few and inspected. He held one piece to his mouth like a corn on the cob, rolled it, and simulated chewing. It didn’t make any sense. He found a stick he liked and slipped it in his back pocket for a souvenir. He had no idea why.

And thus it began. Beaver fever had struck.

Castor Canadensis (American Beaver) Man (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , , , ,

Our Oregon tale begins on an abandoned county boat ramp along a remote river in a secret watershed on the Southern Oregon Coast.

Come look! You will see encroaching willows and alders, beer cans and vaping pens, the remains of camp fires. Come closer! You will see signs of castor canadensis, American beaver, perhaps the most enterprising and entrepreneurial animal in nature, and one sadly relegated to scientific study, and boring scientific study at that.

Until now. Oh, there is so much more to beaver! So much more to tales about beavers than stealing fire from humans!

Come look even closer! You will see an abandoned 2001 or 2002 Honda Accord, once tan, but now a curious congealed color of rust, moss and mold that only exists on the Oregon Coast in places where it can rain 90 inches a year. Call this a nurse car because ferns and tiny conifers have sprouted from its crevasses. Near it stands the crumbling remains of a large driftwood fort, more of a lodge, intricately constructed, sturdy, interwoven, interlocked, decorated in a style anthropologists might call a kind of voodoo. Beaver voodoo! (Good rock band name.)

Over the years, drunk, stoned and methed teenagers had used the car for short sport, siring a few miscreants in the back seat, but even that had stopped as foliage further engulfed the road and swallowed the car. The car was returning to earth. A hundred-year flood might hasten its fate.

But what of the car’s former owner? What happened to him? Who was he? Who is he? Where is he?

Well, if truth be told, and this story really did happen, and is being written by a writer wielding a quill (bald eagle) pen, the man is no longer a man, he is Castor Canadensis Man. He transformed—no evolved—into a beaver. And if more truth be told, he’s pretty damn happy about it! It’s much better being a beaver than being a human in America these days. That’s pretty obvious. For one thing, you don’t have to believe your vote will count fairly in a presidential election, although you still have to contend with merciless gentrification from lower (richer) life forms.

His name was James. That was his human name. James like the apostle. His beaver name is coming soon.

There are no beavers in the Bible. Just beasts. Strike that! There are a sheep gone astray, a jawbone of an ass, and a whale who spits out a loser. One shudders to think what Jesus could have done with a parable about a beaver and a sinner! It might have changed the course of Christianity and we could have avoided the Inquisition and American Exceptionalism.

Thoughts on an Early Morning Drive

NSP Meditations

Up early, moving toward a new life. Driving down a super slab in darkness.

A wreck on the highway. A truck venting smoke from underneath the cab. Thousands of headlights backed up. Some commuters may never make it to work today. Might be a good thing.

Trucks and more trucks. Triple trailers sashaying like dancer on Soul Train.

I keep it slow. No hurrying in my life anymore.

I am thinking about my walk on the beach with Glen the previous afternoon. Our old friend, the old bald eagle, put in his regular appearance. He stood on the wet sand and paid no attention to the vehicles zooming by him. Who zooms by a bald eagle standing near the ocean? They never slowed down.

I summarized to Glen my idea for the detective novel I’ve been cogitating for a couple years. He listened and asked questions. I pitched some plot points and plot turns. He listened and asked questions. He also taught me a new word—dremel. Soon, I’ll be needing a dremel in my life.

Glen has become one of the great teachers in my life. We met cleaning toilets.

The sky beings to lighten. Orange and yellow sneak into the picture.

I’ve got jazz going. There’s a break. The DJ’s surely stoned. It is absolute joy to hear someone rhapsodize about an obscure bossa nova track.

I keep thinking about recent meetings and reunions, all which took place at tables in the far corners of non-corporate joints.

The reunions went smashingly well. Laughter. Storytelling. Hands across the table. Candor. Truth. Empathy. Revelations. We all want to be cared about.

We’ve all been through a lot. We’re 20 and 30 years into this together. We’re rallying and growing stronger.

The meeting was with a first time author in her 80s. She’s written a fantastic book about mind, body and heart. She wants to get more readers. She’s willing to gig. She needs some advice about where and how to gig.

I can help her.

Hawks on the fence posts. I never stop counting them.

Sky transcends into a different shade of light blue. Purple contrails heading south.

Plumes from a mill and plumes from the ag processing plant. The early shift at work.

Driving. Driving. Driving.

I turn off the jazz. I drive and the stars and crescent moon disappear and I remember the earth is traveling at 23,000 miles an hour.

Elk Drive-Thru

NSP Meditations , , ,

I stop in for some elk drive-thru. There they are, all males, 20-30, old dudes with lots of points, lounging in a pasture with some geese.

I just put in a call to an old friend, someone I deserted years ago in her time of cancer. I will work hard to reclaim a friendship that began in the 1980s. I will have to earn her trust and follow through. Follow through. That’s what it’s all about—in everything.

What a place to write, on a bench with elk a hundred feet away.

Random non-elk thoughts enter my mind:

How come I can’t find a real wool or fake wool crew or v-neck sweater in thrift stores? There used to be hundred, thousands. Not a single one in years. (I have one left and it is unraveling as I write this.) All fleece and shiny acrylic pullovers! Fleece totalitarianism! How did this style ever take over (white) men’s outerwear fashion? I don’t want to look like a martinet college football coach on the sidelines or lying at press conferences. I want to look like a writer or old fishermen or scotch sipper!

You can’t make art wearing fleece! You can’t tend a burn pile wearing one!

In the big city, I will meet a woman I met on a mountain. I’d never met anyone on a mountain before. It’s sort of a thrilling prospect to see where such an initial meeting might go.

Reunions are afoot. New work might be materializing. I want to work.

My beach installation has reached nine forts.

I assisted a woman on the beach who had lost her dog. Mission accomplished, but not then. We didn’t find the dog. She did later, but thanked me in a text for the attempt.

Reading two Westerns at the moment. One is by a female author, Jessamyn West. Her Massacre at Fall Creek, published in 1975, is a minor classic in the genre. Relevant today. Funny. Smart.

I want to write a modern Western. They still sell! None of the new ones published are ever set in Oregon. Why is that? And you never read about Westerns set at the ocean. I think I’d call my Western Meth Town.

I look up from my notebook. An elk is coming toward me. I put the notebook on the bench and wait. Waiting for elk.

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