Random Probation Office Thoughts

NSP Meditations , ,

This is not a poem. It will feign being a poem. It will feign being real because what I see is unreal.

I submitted an action plan to live. It might very well be denied. Then what?

Z is back after a year-long absence. He was just released from prison. He’s camping under a bridge outside of town. He promises to stay clean and he’s applying for work at the fish processing plant.

A man just got off work from the plant. Graveyard shift. He’s barely awake.

The smell of fish fills the room.

The local seafood industry would collapse without the local criminal justice system producing most of its employees. An interesting relationship. Maybe a novel in there.

A young man fresh out of prison can’t get a job. The willows are beckoning.

Typos on the whiteboard with the instructions for proper behavior.

A man recounts a story of recently having to kill a fawn after it got hit and wounded by a truck in the early morning. He says it triggered some kind of PTSD event that incapacitated him for six hours. His story reminds me of the William Stafford poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” about the motorist who encounters a dead pregnant deer on Highway 6 and rolls it down an embankment. There is a strange narrative history of modern America from Stafford’s poem to the man’s deer story. I don’t know what the narrative is, however. Neither does America.

I should mention that no one wanted to hear the man’s deer story. I didn’t for sure.

Another man, probably 75 years old, says he still can’t get an ID to look for work. Another 75-year old man is taking a $350 polygraph that he can’t afford but goes on his tab. He’s slowly tunneling into the new debtor’s prison in America.

A wave of nausea washes over me.

I sometimes wish I could illustrate what unfolds here, instead of writing about it, but I can’t draw. I like the idea of a graphic novel about probation life.

A Tibetan proverb goes: When you meet your greatest enemy, you will find your greatest strength.

Back in the car, I grip the steering wheel and notice my hands are shaking.

Waves and Beaches—The Book

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches, Writing , , , , , , ,

Can you recall last time you discovered a book by total chance and it totally reoriented your thinking about a subject? I can. One of my most memorable finds was in a moldy cabin’s soggy library. I pulled it off the shelf, read it one sitting, and nothing about the ocean has ever been the same.

Waves and Beaches: The Dynamics of the Ocean Surface by Willard Bascom is a classic of natural science. I own the 1980’s revised and updated edition but the book first came out in 1964.

Waves and Beaches begins: “Is there anyone who can watch without fascination the struggle for supremacy between sea and land?” Well, no, not if a person is even remotely sentient and actually manages to hit the beach every now and then and notice, I mean really look hard at what is all around you.

Until reading this book, I thought I was noticing everything at the ocean’s edge. As it turns out, there is a lot more to understand about the sand I walk upon and the waves that hypnotize me. For starters, I had no idea mathematics played such an interesting and elementary role in the motion of waves or the slope of beaches. I only wish I’d had a math teacher in junior high or high school who loved this book. It might have made me love math instead of utter indifference toward it.

Bascom’s 365-page book examines everything related to waves and beaches and explains them right down to their tiniest tumble or, literally, a grain of sand.

One of the utterly fascinating benefits of reading this book is learning the names of features I’ve seen a million times but didn’t even know had names. Take for example, the various marks on the beach made by retreating tides: swash, backwash, rills, cusps, domes, pinholes, ripples. I can’t say I’m now obsessed with identifying everything I see at the beach, but a bit more knowledge of the natural world isn’t such a bad thing in life. In fact, a lot more might save the planet.

In Waves and Beaches, Bascom writes simple yet beautiful and informative sentences like: “Waves are undulating forms that move along the surface of the sea.” Or try this one: “A beach is an accumulation of rock fragments subject to movement by ordinary wave action.” And my favorite: “Beaches are ever-changing, restless armies of sand particles, always on the move.” Bascom might have considered himself more of a scientist than a writer, but he knew how to construct metaphors in nature and slyly present them to readers:

“A wonderful time to observe…is early in the morning, especially after a high tide. Often the air is still and pleasant light fills the sky. The beach is clean and virginal, the night’s waves erased the human marks of the previous day.”

Amen.

Beaverwood Paradise

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , , ,

I took the trail along the river that led to the secret estuary. On my previous visit, which occurred in a dream, I was pressed for time and didn’t follow the trail to its end.

Now, here I was dreaming about it again.

Fifty yards into my hike, knee-high water blocked my path. It made no sense. It was low tide and the slough should have been drained.

I backtracked and found another trail at a slightly higher elevation. A hundred yards in, water, water, water. I pulled off my Pumas and socks, then put the Pumas back on, rolled up my corduroys above the knees, and plunged in! Nothing would stop me. I had to see this place.

I walked through three or four pools and then the marsh turned into dune. I hiked through the dunes until I beheld a magnificent beach with an astonishing amount and assortment of driftwood. No one else was around for miles and miles.

There was so much driftwood it was like walking on driftwood flooring. A piece of beaverwood caught my eye. Then another. Then another. Every third or fourth step led to the discovery of more beaverwood. I started picking up the best specimens for my collection like a kid trick or treating on Halloween. I felt like I was losing my mind, but in a good way, a way forgotten by most adults.

I noticed a large sawed round of wood, upright like a coffee table. It had a beaver stick on it. Clam shells were arrayed in half circle a few feet away, as if they were placed there as an offering. Nearby was a little sculpture of intertwined beaver sticks.

What was this? What realm had I entered? Who or what had left this behind?

I left the stick alone. It would have been the centerpiece of my collection but it seemed sacrilegious to take it.

On My New Friends

NSP Meditations , ,

As I examine my life the last two tumultuous years, I seek to understand and acknowledge what helped me survive, and indeed, thrive in many ways,

Family, of course. Bonnie and Clyde and the senior dog sanctuary. My ex-wife. Walks and talks with Glen. The ocean. The beach. Building driftwood forts. My creative mind. Faith in myself. My effort to honor the faith in those who have supported me and still believe I have promise as a person and writer.

And then friends, but more to the point, the new friends I’ve made in the past two years that were the direct result of my writing. In other words, these previously unknown people who read my essays, books and blogs and reached out to me knowing full well the extreme direction my life had turned. Their names are Jennifer and Holt, Kevin and Wendy, Glen, Christina and Sean, another Wendy, Earl and Carolyn. They sought me out, invited me into their homes, came to my home, fed me, listened, provided counsel, and facilitated creative opportunities for me that I would have never envisioned had my life continued the way I thought it would.

I’ve never made any real money with my writing. I broke even on the book and gigging. I paid a few bills with the freelance writing. But, as I have discovered the past two years, there was something vastly richer derived from all the writing than mere recompense. Somehow, the writing went out to Oregon and connected to some extraordinary kind and wise folks, and they are making a tremendous difference in my ongoing reanimation and reinvention. These people have taught me so much about friendship and compassion and withholding judgment. They have taught me about crab pizza, caulking and lost Oregon books. They are my friends for life and our unique collaborations have just begun.

The Coffee Shop Novel Continues

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

I sit down at a plastic table under and ancient wooden awning of a nearly century-old market that also doubles as a quasi coffee shop. This table is the coffee shop’s only seating.

I am drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. It is as thin as a Dickens gruel.

A lithe woman with pink hair and wearing yoga pants walks into the coffee shop. More like jaunts than walks. Her left arm is broken and she has a pink cast. Her story intrigues me and I don’t even know what it is.

I waited for my coffee shop to open after a five-mile walk on a deserted beach in a dense fog. The tide was so far out it practically invited me to walk to Asia. I started and then detoured, wandering among the tidepools and exposed rocks. What exciting life abounds there! I may become a sea star man one of these mornings and break up with the limpets. Sea stars devour limpets.

I recall a moment 15 years ago when I saw a kid on a beach detach a sea star from a rock with a stick. His parents watched and egged him on. I let the kind have it, called him a murderer, made him cry. The parents stood their speechless. They’d raised a killer.

A crow is pecking at a street light.

I am eating my yogurt with blackberries I picked on the way back from the beach. I am supplementing this breakfast with a couple of leftover pancakes a poet made me from buckwheat, walnuts and cranberries.

There is bustle in the coffee shop. A carload of jangly tourists invaded and are ordering energy drinks and chips for breakfast.

I met a man recently who divined the secrets of the comings-and-goings of the otters on the local beach. I now possess that secret knowledge and can regulate my life accordingly to watch them. How many Americans can say they have a daily or weekly presence of otters in their lives? I should conduct a research study into that question.

A large woman is walking up wearing a purple bathrobe. I just heard her order a pack of Marlboros for breakfast.

Morning doves mass on the power line. The quail are loose!

I have much to write today, absolutely none of it with any prospect for commercial success. Maybe I won’t write a thing.

Moments Along a River

NSP Meditations , , ,

I stood alongside a murky green river flowing at angles down the watershed.

Birds flitted here and there. No boats. I noticed traces of poison dispensed by the government to kill invasive plants. Total futility. They have to be removed by hand, just like the invasives in the American body politic.

There was once tremendous logging activity around here and it damn well killed the river. Perhaps a century from now, healing will have taken place. One wonders how the American body politic will fare ten, 50, a hundred years from now. We always manage to move forward, except in income equality and warmongering. Why so intransigent in these areas? Can we ever change in this regard?

A breeze ruffled my threadbare Western shirt. I can’t bear to throw it away.

My mind drifted to a special friend who has disappeared on me and I can’t understand why. We have so many great projects to complete.

Geese honked in the distance. They are special birds because you often hear them without seeing them. I like that metaphor a lot for human beings, as long as the honking sounds as soothing.

No one is around while Astoria is under siege. I struggle with my relationship with Astoria. I probably will for the rest of my life.

I saw wood floating past. I conjured an image of someone wearing a faded Rolling Stones t-shirt and and entering a driftwood fort. That someone is out there.

I thought of another special friend who recently called very late at night and delivered a toxic dose of vitriol with a potency heretofore unknown to me. But I listened and remained mostly silent. There is little use in meeting vitriol with vitriol.

The river seemed listless. I felt listless. I was about to spend the next hour in one of the worst places in Oregon. I would witness official vitriol spilling out into a small room and filling it up like a sinking submarine.

Very few of us would survive.

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