Culvert: A Love Story…Part 1

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

She brought her lover out to the rain country to meet him, her best friend. They had a long-standing pact: new lovers had to be approved or disapproved, in person. They called it a “test,” and they devised special code phrases before the meeting that signaled approval or disapproval of the new lover when in the midst of the new lover. They both enjoyed the game very much.

A few months ago, she had approved his latest lover with special enthusiasm by repeating the code phrase five times in a row. Six months ago, he had had disapproved of her latest man because he spoke in double negatives and never read a book.

In this particular meeting, he would say, “You rang,” as disapproval and “toots,” as approval.

There was a substantial new wrinkle to this visit. She was bringing a woman for the test, an overnight test at his house. It didn’t bother him in the least, and it was a novelty. Novelties sometimes make for great stories, in print and real life.

He knew she’d been with women before, but it was typically a booze and cocaine inspired thing. On Halloween or New Year’s Eve.

It had never come up when they were lovers, and in love. They never spoke of being in love and what should be done with it. It was like going out to dinner and eating all the side dishes and leaving the main course on the table and never saying a word about eating it.

They should have never stopped sleeping together. In fact, they should have married, had children, and raised them in a cabin in the woods where there was the rushing sound of a creek making its run to the ocean. A creek full of fish, the creek where they had met so many years before in the most unlikeliest of circumstances that had involved the magical scoop of ice cream into a cone, Beck’s music and a bicycle.

It was right there, in their grasp. They could have built a thousand cairns along that creek and changed the course of Oregon history with their love. What a gig they could have been together.

As it was, he had written a hundred thousand words about her. She had read them all. Only she got it, him, his writing. No one was even close.

But convention had swayed her and she surrendered to the shaming potential of mass disapproval. She denied their destiny. He was ready to embrace it, but never pushed. It was always her choice, first and foremost.

He settled for less. He just wanted her in his life, some way, forever. She said the same, about the settling They’d once spilled blood to seal this compromise. Nothing would corrupt that blood oath.

Settling. That’s a corruption all unto its own. Only the settlers know the ultimate cost. The settling drills tiny silent holes in the settlers’ hearts.

Then atrophy.

Her new lover was a preacher’s kid, a preacher’s daughter, a pariah to her old man. He was a preacher’s kid, too, but that is another story better left untold—for now. People need to die first.

The truck pulled into his driveway. He watched them drive up in her lover’s truck, a beater Nissan. So far so good.

They were all introduced and he stowed their gear in the back bedroom. The new lover was blonde and pure punk rock right down to the combat boots. So far so good.

He barbecued fish on the patio and they got into the wine and whiskey and the Stones. They talked of interesting things and about the new lover’s banishment by her parents. She quoted some good words of compassion from Jesus and he knew them all too well. So far very good.

It was strange to see them kiss. He still loved her but had let go of all that a long time ago. He wanted her to be happy, with a man, woman or monasticism; it didn’t matter. He just wanted to be in her corner and her in his. They would be good cut men for each other for life. Every person needs a good cut man in their corner.

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Firewood Man

NSP Meditations , , , ,

I met a man who was hauling firewood in a trailer. It was the same man I had met a year ago who was then assembling the greatest eccentric stack of firewood I have ever seen. It was not really a stack. Rather, it was a labyrinth of ten or 15 or 20 cords in the front yard of his rented cabin that overlooked the ocean.

The previous year he had told me he had been recently released from prison after serving 14 years for rape. He was starting over and firewood was his only means of earning an income. His sister had set him up with the cabin, a truck, a trailer and a chainsaw and then he went to work.

We had discussed his labyrinth in considerable detail and his methods of finding and cutting up wood that he didn’t have to pay for. He was a wood scavenger and scavenged at the beaches, the rivers, the clearcuts, the shoulders of country roads. His firewood sold for $200 a cord—cash only—and he had orders from 50 miles in every direction. His firewood had a stellar reputation—never green. He also helped stack it. And the customers loved his firewood dog, a large poodle.

Now a year later, he was moving the last cords of the labyrinth to his new home a mile away. He had bought a rundown manufactured home on a half acre—with cash. He could expand his base of firewood operations there. He might even open a bank account.

He was smiling. We shook hands. He had started over with firewood and a dog. He drove away and I stood there in complete awe, humbled.

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A Western Set in Western Oregon

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History, Writing , , , , , , , , , , ,

I have watched half the episodes of NetFlix’s new Western serial Godless, and proclaim it highly worth viewing. In fact, I would rank it as one of the better runs at the genre in the last 30 years or so. The writer/director wonderfully bends the cliches and introduces some interesting female characters that belie typical female characters in modern Westerns. The dialogue is sparse, almost Old Testament at times, and so far the show hasn’t been riddled with gratuitous sex and violence.

Of course Godless is gorgeously filmed in the ranching high country where virtually every Western of distinction since the advent of film has been filmed. It was either the high country or the SW desert. I understand the cinematic reasons for that, but still, the panoramas are the same and readily identified about a half dozen or so from previous Westerns, including, I think Duel at Diablo, one of my all time favorites.

If only John Ford had filmed a Western in Western Oregon, set on west side of the Coast Range, where it really gets tiny, strange, green, dank and claustrophobic. Ford loved big open spaces and tall skies to tell a Western. There are no big open spaces with tall skies on the Oregon Coast, excepting of course the biggest space and sky on the planet, the Pacific Ocean. How come no one has ever filmed a Western at the ocean? Consider that!

Ken Kesey wrote a Western set in the woods near the ocean. It’s called Sometimes a Great Notion. It is has chainsaws, clearcuts, a wild river, honky tonk music, fist fights, whores, talking dogs, rain, cheap beer, Cain versus Abel, death in the woods, cuckolding, and deer swimming in the ocean.

Zane Grey wrote a Western called Rogue River Feud (about salmon fishing) that was set on the Southern Oregon Coast, but the deep purple prose just doesn’t hold up, neither does the happy ending.

There was the Western Honey in the Horn by HL Davis, Oregon’s only winner for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1935), but that novel’s style reads more out of the 18th Century Western Europe than modern American literature circa post early Hemingway.

There was a two-hour special of Gunsmoke, latter in the show’s run, filmed in the upper Rogue River. I had a man send me his self published memoir that included an essay about his being an extra on the production. He said all the extras were flying on acid the whole time and I asked if James Arness as Matt Dillon dabbled. Sadly, no.

Yes, there were Paint Your Wagon and Meek’s Cutoff and the original True Grit, but I’m talking west of the Coast Range and something more modern.

Perhaps modern like this:

Rain and wind howled. The streets and sidewalks of a desolate coastal town were empty. It was high noon.

I pushed open the double doors to the animal shelter and entered like it was a Wild West saloon. I shook the water off my pea coat duster and my craft fair hat crocheted by a hundred-year-old woman loaded on peach schnapps.

A smocked barkeep came up to the counter. She looked worried. No one came out in a rain like this. A scotch-colored mutt on the floor behind her growled.

“Can I help you?” she said.

“I want to walk a dog, an old dog, and I want to walk him on a dirty leash.”

She smiled. The mutt stopped growling.

“How old?”

“The oldest you got.”

A few minutes later she produced Daisy, a pointer mix the color of Ouzo cut with water with nicks all over her body.

Daisy. A good country name. A lass from rain country.

“How old?”

“Thirteen, we think.”

I noticed a bowl of treats on the counter and grabbed for them. I loaded my holster and then took up Daisy’s leash and pushed through the double doors. In my mind they were swinging behind me.

Rain and wind almost blew us into the nearby river. We angled toward the beach and the jetty. The ocean was throwing drift logs onto the rocks. Harbor seals rested on the docks. A man slept in his van. Another man appeared from the underbrush wearing a t-shirt and tacked into the wind. It felt good having a sidekick. I was walking an old dog, packing treats, gulls were about, and it was a dark dog day afternoon in the rainiest month on the Oregon Coast. There was good work to do to clean up this dog-neglecting town and I would start after a long walk with an old dog and a breakfast of Hamm’s and eggs.

(Okay, a little rough, maybe more noir than a Western, but why not merge the genres?)

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Oregon Tavern Age: Solo Pool

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , , , , ,

I walked into the Sea Star Lounge on Tuesday afternoon. Near the entrance it was raining. Across the street, sunny. Down the block, overcast.

A woman with a dark complexion and long brown hair was playing pool by herself. She bordered on OTA but the visage wasn’t quite there yet.

I ordered a local porter, took my customary seat at the table near the window, and whipped out my notebook to write something utterly without commercial prospects, which is probably my lot as a writer.

Nevertheless, I continued writing my erotic novella about tennis set in the 1970s when America cared about tennis and tennis was sexy.

My mind drifted toward a special woman of tennis now sorely severed from my life. We never played together and that was my fault. It was a goddamned amputated heart, double faulted, broken string, country song from the 1970s with tennis twanging in my head. There was whiskey and sand dollars and long rallies from the baseline with wood rackets in the song. There were kisses across the net.

The Sea Star woman appeared to be playing 8-ball against herself. She played fast and crisp. She knew her away around the corners of pool table and chalked up the cue after every missed shot. At the moment, solids were on a good run.

She was not drinking.

It occurred to me that I had never seen a woman play pool alone in OTA country, let alone a weekday afternoon in November. What a strange novelty. There was something of a novel in this fact. Was she a hustler?

She drained the 8-ball on long bank shot that cracked through the lounge. She finished off the rest of the solids and put her cue into the rack. The cue ball remained on the felt.

I hadn’t written a word in my notebook.

She gathered up a big purse and duffel bag and headed for the door. She carried herself and her luggage as if she was someone on foot and had no specific destination in mind.

“Thank you,” she said to the bartender, who was miles down the bar.

I watched her leave and then looked out the window and saw her walking north down the sidewalk as light rain fell.

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Some Lines on Rain

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

Harder rain, please, to kill the sound of a crying dog on a chain.

From Here to Eternity contains arresting lines on Hawaii’s rainy season rains. But somehow I can’t relate.

A 90-inch year is possible this year. Past 90 and the weird turn pro. Past 100 and things fall apart.

In the past few days, I have talked only to rain and only to dogs walking in rain.

My best rain shoes sprung a leak.

I’m still gathering rain stories for the sequel to the rain book I will never write but am currently living.

I’d like to write about rain in a new way when I write my detective novel. Rain is always clichéd in crime fiction. I want to reverse that. I want it to provide fresh revelations and not just ablutions, either.

I wonder if anyone is reading my rain book at this very moment I am writing about rain.

I saw a woman on the beach waking in circles while rain came down in walls. Her car had Arkansas license plates. It is quite possible she was going mad or happy in Oregon Coast rain.

I faced down a harbor seal in rain.

I saw a three-ton piece of driftwood get thrown up into the sky while it rained. It could have have crushed a corrupt Congressional committee had they convened on the beach.

Rain assists in erosion. Erosion is such an interesting word. It sounds like what it is.

I keep expecting to read news that someone is going to take another run at filming Sometimes a Great Notion. Perhaps they would hire me as the rain consultant to the project. I’d get it right this time.

I am trying to think who had the most beautiful face in rain I have ever seen. There is a candidate from years ago on Nestucca Spit.

Rain can sting, the sun only burn. The stinging alerts; the burning hurts.

I recently met someone with a passion for Rilke who went to a cafe to wait for rain. That sounds exactly what Rilke might do.

Why doesn’t the predicted rapture come in rain instead of fire. I guess it already did with the flood myths that are part of every human culture.

I saw someone hitting tennis balls against a backboard in rain, with a wood racket, something I used to do all the time in my youth (listening to Earth Wind and Fire). It is a sight almost vanished from American culture. I think the “someone” was well over 70 years ago. Good strokes, especially that slice backhand.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 32

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , , , , , , ,

On my drive to the sanctuary, a blockaded bridge forced a long detour along country roads. It was a cold and bright Sunday morning in late October and I lowered the window to listen to the country.

For miles and miles, I heard almost nothing but chainsawing and saw men and women everywhere cutting up firewood and falling trees, dead and alive.

Is this the sound of the country? I pondered that question.

I was anxious to reach the sanctuary. Jacque had said it was okay for Bonnie to join Clyde and me provided I kept her on a leash and didn’t allow any running. It was the best news I’d heard in six months.

The duo barked up a maelstrom when I pulled into the parking lot. I loaded up with treats, got my emergency leash out of the trunk, unlatched the gate, hooked up Bonnie, distributed treats, and we were off to the river.

Sun lit up the pasture. Fresh elk scat steamed in the grass. A few dandelions tilted at attention. Clyde picked up the pace and started to lope. Bonnie caught his drift and pulled at the leash. I slowed down and cajoled a snail’s pace with treats and special instructions. They understood, they’d read Steinbeck. I was talking dog talk to the dogs. I think I almost prefer that language these days. It is a language blissfully without jargon.

I heard a chainsaw in the distance, then another, then another. It was a crew. The hills were alive with the sound of chainsawing for profit. This was a mini logging operation, a mini massacre, not a grandma in tight Wranglers slicing up alder branches after a windstorm.

We reached the river and I heard more chainsaws downstream. The whole world seemed to be chainsawing. Doesn’t anyone in rural Oregon go to church anymore?

I decided to make use of the sound and cut up a cordwood of thoughts:

  • Donald Trump took a chainsaw to American democracy, civility and compassion. He unleashed the grinding jagged teeth, the gasoline, the roaring noise, the erosion, the mud, the slash piles, the fires, the smoke. He polluted the very ground where he stood and cut. Woodland creatures became refugees. Baby birds died in their nests.
  • I once saw and old woman in Reedsport carving a statue of a naked Donald Trump from a Douglass fir log. She gave him a microscopic penis.
  • I’ve wielded a chainsaw many times in my life, cutting firewood, and never cared for the experience.
  • Chainsaws were invented in America and seem a perfect metaphor for many aspects of American culture.
  • A judicial chainsaw severed my constitutional rights. I used one to cut away the deadwood of ego and self aggrandizement.
  • I used to wield a chainsaw with my writing. Not anymore. I’m wielding the crosscut saw these days, but I could use someone on the other end of the saw.
  • The sanctuary is the opposite of a chainsaw. The sound of dogs is the antithesis of the sound of a chainsawing.
  • Has anyone written a poem or country song about chainsawing?
  • The word used to describe what an army of chainsaws financed by far flung corporations does to forests in Oregon, clearcut, is the wrong descriptor. It sounds too pretty. It has alliteration.
  • I wrote a short story about a clearcut. I once had a special relationship with a clearcut. I once took dates to a clearcut. I once ran my three dogs in that clearcut.
  • I once knew a female poet who wrote a poem about the evil of clearcuts but she had never seen one up close, walked through the scorched earth. It was a fake poem for many reasons but primarily because there was no onomatopoeia of the chainsaws in it.
  • Can you create a positive metaphor with a chainsaw? I will try: my adventures with Bonnie and Clyde chainsawed open something entirely new in my creative mind and you are reading the results of that.
  • Man chainsaws a forest to death, no story. Dogs chainsaw a man back to life, a story, my story.

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