Missed Opportunities

NSP Meditations

(That I recognized at the time and occasionally still think about.)

Seeing the Go Go’s in their heyday

Seeing The Grateful Dead at Autzen

Having children (too late)

Learning Spanish (not too late)

Shannon

Taking a newspaper job on Ketchikan Island

Taking a newspaper job in Hood River or The Dalles

Dropping acid before writing the Vortex book

Meeting the cryptic rain writer

Completing the Alaska Highway (I stopped 100 miles short)

Helping an illiterate man who needed help filling out a form that could prove his existence

Providing a man limping along the sidewalk help (I knew him)

Starting a coastal magazine

Getting into film making

Amity

Going out for soccer in high school

Taking auto shop in high school

Learning how to play a guitar solo

Learning how to play the harmonica

Taking Port Orford job 25 years ago

Pushing the rain book to a national publisher

Pursuing archaeology as a course of college study

Giving a TED Talk on rain (it was booked)

Pushing the rain book to a national audience

Judy

Giving a presentation on the spirituality of the ocean at the national Unitarian conference

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A Bald Eagle Splattering

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

I crested the dune and gazed south a half mile down to the beach, to the driftwood fort under my construction for the last month. I had worked on it at least a dozen times and erected a dozen spars to give it a striking appearance from a distance.

High tide was closing in and the ocean battered the jetty. No one was around.

Something atop the fort caught my eye. It was a small, somewhat rectangular mass. At first, I thought it was a float I had previously attached to the end of a spar. But the color and shape and angle were wrong. I kept moving toward the fort, curious.

I reached the beach and kept my eyes fixed on the mass.

The mass moved. Then it moved again. There was indeed a living thing perched atop the fort! It was black on the bottom and white on top. A bald eagle.

I stopped and took a couple of photographs with the camera on my ancient phone.

The bird lifted off and pivoted east over the dunes and shore pines. I took a couple more photographs and then headed toward the fort. I was surprised to find myself running. It felt good. Perhaps more people should run toward a bald eagle without stopping to think why.

In all my years of driftwood fort building, I had never seen a bald eagle perched atop a driftwood fort. A driftlog yes, but not a fort. The image belonged on a unit of Oregon currency, a currency secretly exchanged by people secretly building their own country.

I arrived at the fort and searched for a feather. I’ve always wanted to find a feather from a bald eagle, although I had no idea how to recognize one.

There was no feather, but a different sort of decoration left behind. The fort was splattered in eagle shit, and in such a pattern that it suggested a Kandinsky at work. There was even eagle shit on the cairn I’d built outside the fort! I smiled . I marveled. There had to be some powerful magic in eagle shit on a cairn. It was worth mulling over and deeply intrigued me as all bald eagle things do.

I sat inside the fort and ate a simple meal. I considered taking the cairn with me. If I did, I would assuredly be the only person in Oregon, perhaps the world, displaying a cairn splattered in eagle shit on a bookshelf. And the display wouldn’t be décor.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 41

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , ,

I arrived at the sanctuary properly armed—a Swedish bush ax—an extraordinarily crafted and effective hand tool that basically amounts to a wooden baseball bat with a curved blade at the top. A flimsy machete can’t compare to this weapon of close quarter, blackberry destruction. I had slayed acres and acres of the Himalayan invader on the wildlife refuge with these axes and gifted myself with one when I left. I hadn’t wielded it in ten long years.

The sun was out but losing interest. Bonnie and Clyde worked our way through some newly planted trees along the river. Blackberries threatened their survival and I was hacking and hacking to release the trees from their thorny bondage. The muscle memory of using the ax quickly returned, but a few minutes into battle, I realized that most everything was wrong: I had not sharpened the blade, I wore the wrong shoes, I wore the wrong pants, I wore the wrong coat, and was in fact absurdly wearing a bulky pea coat!

I had forgotten so much.

How does one come to remember something worth remembering? I thought about that as I sliced away.

It started raining but I kept cutting. There would never be a shortage of invasive blackberries on the Oregon Coast to vanquish. The pea coat came off and I hung it on the branch of a Sitka spruce.

Bonnie and Clyde nosed around, doing their dog things, but they seem disinterested in my labor. At one point, they flopped down in the wet grass and watched the river.

I sweated my through two shirts but kept hacking.

An hour went by. The rain let up. I let up.

I looked at my hands: scrapes and scratches like the glory days on the refuge. Blood drawn. I had at least done one thing right—no gloves. You can’t grip the ax with surety with gloves. You have to expose your hands and grip the wood tight. You can swing for the fences that way.

It was time to go. I roused Bonnie and Clyde from their slumber, gave them some treats, and drank water from a bottle. I was soaked, steaming and covered in mud. I donned the pea coat and we made our way back to the house.

I would be perfectly prepared the next time I went into battle. I’ll be perfectly prepared for the rest of my life.

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Oregon Tavern Age: VR

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , ,

A kid sat at the lacquered wooden bar at the South Jetty Bar drinking a shot of something blue on a gray afternoon. His true face was reflected in the Bud Light mirror of the type that hung In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. His true face was etched OTA.

I sat a few feet away at a lacquered wooden table that used to rest in a galley of fishing boat. I love to write at this table and imagine the stories and shots and arm wrestling and clandestine fishermen french kisses swapped across the lacquer during dangerous seas.

The kid sipped the shot and launched into a story to the chef, who had absolutely nothing to do because the kid and I were the only ones in the joint besides the bartender. The story went something like this: the kid was playing a virtual reality shooter game while someone performed fellatio on him. He was drunk and looped on cough syrup and ended up walking naked into the back yard (goggles still on), but didn’t recall doing so. Someone found him an hour later, around midnight, and escorted him inside. He woke up playing the game.

He laughed and finished the shot. He ordered another one. The chef smiled and shook his head. The kid was just being the kid. The chef had heard it all before.

I laughed, picked up a Keno pencil and Keno card, and went to work, but not at Keno.

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Cedar Seat Ass to Chair

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

I built a driftwood fort for a friend, a good writer’s fort complete with a slab of cedar for a good ass-to-chair writer’s seat. The fort is decorated with a 2×4, painted orange, aged by the ocean, and wedged into an aesthetically pleasing position. I tied blue and green ropes around the spars. They provide stability and attractive swatches of color. I placed a sand dollar inside and assembled a cairn in front.

Making forts has kept me sane.

Right now, as I write in longhand in a blue book, I am sitting on that slab of cedar. I survey the world around me:

Clammers clam in the background. A few weeks ago, two elderly women on Long Beach died while clamming at night. The ocean swept them away. No one heard a thing. Dying while clamming at night. I’m still considering the poetry or farce or (?) of those deaths.

A friend recently wrote that I will probably never have anonymity on the Oregon Coast, even the remote southern area. That statement shook me.

A lone crabber bobs on the gray ocean.

Black and gray cumulus clouds contrast with the bright blue sky.

Traces of snow remain in the dunes.

The jetty is deserted.

Maybe anonymity isn’t what I need. Maybe I should show my face around even more and walk the opposite direction of anonymity. How does one ever know in situation such as mine?

A lot has happened in the past year. I have no idea where I’ll go after I sell the house. Will I land in a place where I can continue my ongoing, anonymous driftwood fort art, amusement, shelter and physical and spiritual installation project? Perhaps not. Perhaps there will be a hiatus.

I want to see a coyote on a beach. It’s been a while. Too long.

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Raymond Carver Rain Thoughts

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

Raymond Carver wrote poems and stories with many mentions of rain. In some recent poems of his I’ve read, he doesn’t use the article “the” before rain. He lets rain stand alone. I never use an article before rain. Rain doesn’t need it. Poetry of rain certainly doesn’t need it. Using an umbrella is like using “the” before rain. Let rain fall without introduction or barrier. Can rain wash away insanity? Yes. It can be a clarifying sane friend but don’t whisper that to the officially sane and powerful. If you do, they’ll think your insane. Rain falls mainly on the plain (although not in Oregon) on the sane and insane like but the complainers about rain are the ones who control the weather of our lives.

It is raining as I write this. I want to hear Hank Williams sing about rain. I wrote this years ago: rain ruins guns; the sun keeps powder dry. I have climbed a ladder of rain in my life. It wasn’t even slippery. Remember that great funk song by The Commodores, “Slippery When Wet”? It wasn’t about rain. I have seen hummingbirds fly in rain, once seven at time. You don’t forget something like that. A kind of bad human rain is falling upon me and finding cracks. Seepage has occurred. Water damage has commenced. I need an urgent caulking, but with what kind of caulk? Who will caulk me? There is no rain in hell, only fire. Rain turns certain children into brats. A good stropping by rain won’t improve their surly dispositions. Where is my great cryptic rain writer? Resolute. I must remain resolute to combat the ongoing and imposed dehydration of my soul. I will find my resolve by walking in rain. People cancel appointments when it rains with ferocity. I keep them and make the appointment become part of a rain story. Rain initiates acts of kindness; the sun forestalls them. I’ve got one box of rain books left. Box of Rain. I think there was a song along those soggy lines. I plan on conducting an experiment. I will let rain fill an empty cardboard box (that formerly contained by rain books) and see how long the box holds water. Then, I will have the science and the metaphor I need to survive.

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