Mystery Over Journalism

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

Three seals submarine into the river. Their heads pop up like periscopes. They are watching me. I wish they would launch torpedoes into the ships of American acquisition and consumption. They are paper-thin vessels. They’d sink fast and divers would find nothing to salvage.

Two geese honk overhead.

Low tide. Mud everywhere. The mud reveals.

I walk over an acre of driftwood and find a tiny light blue glass float, my first such find in 22 years of Oregon Coast beach combing. But, alas, it’s not from Japan. It’s a local bauble, but I like it, hold it aloft, and consider it a new orb.

The amount of beaverwood I encounter is astonishing. I start gathering it up. I’ll need a mule train to get it back to the car, three miles away, straight uphill.

I’m a middle aged man carrying around beaverwood. Have I lost my mind. No, I have rediscovered it.

I find a black Sharpie. I pull off the cap and find a plank. It works! This gives me an idea…

I build a fort over a massive chainsawed round of an unknown hardwood. I count the rings. At least 150.

As I build, a basset hound appears and noses through my backpack and then plops down in front of the fort and begins to bay. I think he’s talking to the fort!

I laugh so hard I feel it through my chest.

The dog’s owner comes up and introduces me to Hickory. They move on. I keep building and building. This thing is going to god.

I think about taking a photograph of the fort with my phone, but the cloud is full and I don’t know how to empty it because I never use the cloud. Hey, you, get off my cloud!

I loathe how the word “cloud” has been usurped. It’s Wordsworth’s word, not Steve Jobs!

Who cares I can’t document my fort with a photograph? I don’t need to show it to the world and enrich a tech giant. It will be seen by people and dogs who visit this secret beach that I won’t possibly reveal. Mystery over journalism.

I write on the round: “Leave a message.” I leave the marker behind and anchor it with a river rock.

I’ve got 60 pounds of beaverwood on my back. I start hiking for the car.

Right On!

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

The frogs whistled and croaked in the marsh east of the dunes. Hundreds, thousands, singing an antediluvian song. They were my musical accompaniment as I constructed a driftwood fort of an interesting triangle deign. I had never built a fort with frogs singing in the background. I dug it. I should do more things with frogs croaking in the background.

It was my fifth fort on this secluded beach on a secret coast. I’ll resist the urge to name names. Let the secret remain. Mystery over journalism.

A man walking at the ocean’s edge saw me building and altered course to intercept. That’s an exceedingly rare occurrence in my fort building career—perhaps two or three times in a thousand forts. Ninety-percent of the time I don’t see another human being.

He came up to me. He was elderly and evinced a twinkle in his eyes. (Give me that twinkle at his age or give me death!)

He asked me what I was doing. (Give me that curiosity at his age or give me a death!)

I explained my passion and philosophy for driftwood fort building. It took all of 30 seconds.

“Right on!” he exclaimed. No one had ever said “right on” to me in approval of something I was doing right in front of them. I liked it—a lot. How many of us get to experience that in our lives, particularly at work?

Of course I wasn’t at work. I was at play and art.

We said our goodbyes and I went back to building. I saw him walk south down the beach and investigate my four other forts. He went inside one and sat down.

Right on!

Rain Falls…

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , ,

Rain falls in a new existential place for me, as a new concrete era in my life begins.

I see a man walking down the road, talking to himself. He seems incredibly agitated. He’s waving his arms in the air, his arms colliding with rain.

I write from a forlorn coffee shop in a deserted retail complex. They should turn off the FM lite hits and let rain entertain,

Soon, I will write another letter to a friend marooned in rehab. A letter a day for her. She wrote me that they’re keeping her afloat. I include writing prompts and metaphors collected on beaches. I wish I could mail her a driftwood fort.

My legs feel heavy from miles and miles of walking. But I will keep walking nonetheless. In fact, I walked in rain this morning as the light came up over the mountains.

I might hit the tavern in the afternoon and mingle with the OTAs. The talk will be of rain, as it usually it, but it often proves as dull as endless sunny days. Rain begats stories; the sun is their birth control.

I think about an idea for a story about a man who turns into a beaver. The idea was suggested to me by a friend. I wrote the intro to the story in my head, during the morning walk. There will be a creamy porter on tap in the man/beaver’s lodge. He’ll open canned goods with his two front teeth.

Reunions are in the offing. The forecast for them is unknown.

I watched the animated The Cat in the Hat the other day, the first time since I was a kid. What a delight to realize that this is essentially a rain story. The brother and sister can’t go outside to play because of ferocious rain and are bored out of their minds. Then the Cat arrives (carrying an umbrella!) and mischief begins. Mischief ratchets up considerably when Thing I and Thing II show up. Thing I and Thing II intrigue me. They seem like they belong in a rock band. Perhaps we all occasionally need a visit from a Thing I and Thing II in our lives.

The thought occurs me that I’d love to produce a podcast where the only subject was rain: rain memoirs, rain poems, rain folklore, rain songs, all things rain but nothing about the weather. Who would listen to that show? The rain fanatics are out there. I’ve met hundreds of them in recent years.

Oregon Tavern Age: Nowhere to Go

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , , ,

Rain plowed through the OTA landscape and free pool Sunday brought a dozen OTA players and their tournament unfolded with a special slow grace.

An OTA woman ate a hamburger and played Keno.

Capitalism in its various forms played on television.

The joint was decorated for some pagan holiday.

The bartender was asleep on her feet.

An OTA man described his love for “loaded bake potatoes.”

I drank a porter and dreamed about someone who only drank Mexican beer when it rained.

A pool player sunk the 8-ball on the break and there were cheers all around. His friend asked if he wanted to play another game, or two, or three.

“I got nowhere to go in this rain,” he said.

I did not feel the same, but I stuck around a bit longer and wrote in my notebook.

Oregon Tavern Age: Noon Moments

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age ,

I sat at my favorite table in the Sea Star, against the window, where I could observe the strange comings and goings of people. A new lamp on the table surprised me. I plugged it in and turned it on. I was surprised it actually worked. I sipped at my local ale and contemplated whether I should help a distant junkie who was ripped from the pages of Henry Miller novels.

The ale was free because I answered the trivial question: what was Freddie Mercury’s real name at birth? How the answer came to me I had no idea.

It was noon or thereabouts, 2015 or 2016 or 2019. November or February.

Down the bar, an OTA man ordered a shot of Fireball and said it had been banned in several countries because it contained anti-freeze. Another OTA man ordered a shot of Cuervo Gold. They clinked glasses and shot the shots.

I felt a slight bump on the window to my left. I turned my head and beheld the smashed and destroyed face of a woman pressing it against the glass. I didn’t move a muscle. Our eyes locked. She batted her eyelashes. She wanted something. She needed a shave.

I turned away and she dragged herself down the sidewalk.

An OTA man playing pool told the story to another OTA man of how he paid his property taxes with 53 rolls of quarters and pennies. The county official was not amused and said he’d enact a policy against paying tax bills in change. The OTA man laughed at him and walked away.

I liked the extra light the new lamp emitted. It made the window table downright professorial.

Oregon Tavern Age: Hallelujah

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age ,

It was stone dead quiet inside the South Jetty. No TV, no radio. Even the video lottery machines were silent despite two OTAs playing line games and losing.

I was editing a manuscript, a novel written by a former Navy carrier bombardier, about his experience in the Vietnam War. This book is soaring. I love helping bring the writer’s dream to fruition.

Something entered my peripheral vision. An OTA woman dressed in gray sweatpants was standing in front of the digital jukebox. In all my visits to the South Jetty, I had never seen a single person patronize it. No! I craved silence to read the wonderful novel and give it my full attention.

She punched up a selection and I braced for impact. I didn’t brace well enough.

A sonic explosion blasted me out of my chair and the manuscript went flying. I’d never heard the song before and it was awful, a mix of rock, rap, metal, country and crap. The guitar solo rattled my colon. The fluorescent lights flickered. I had an instant headache.

The woman at the jukebox turned to me, cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, “I’m sorry!”

She came up to me and said she had picked the wrong “Hallelujah.”

Wrong Hallelujah—great band name.

She wanted Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” but somehow got Shim’s. Shim? We’d both never heard of him. Or was it a band?

I accepted her apology and the bartender mercifully turned down the sound on the jukebox.

The woman went back to the jukebox and made another selection. Jesus, what was next.

“Cocaine” by Eric Clapton came on. The woman started dancing and turned around to me and said, “This takes me back.”

I had no doubt.

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