A corpulent elderly woman sat at the bar of a dive joint. I sat below her at a table six feet away. She unwittingly flashed me her ass encased (somewhat) by thong underwear.

An elderly man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and brown wig played a slot machine in a dive bar.

A homeless man shopped in a grocery store. He wore a leather vest with nothing underneath.

A homeless man sporting an eye patch and wielding a cane asked an employee of a grocery store where the sunglasses were. He had a tattoo of a buxom and naked woman on his left arm.

Fishermen filleted tuna at the boat ramp.

An osprey dived into Coos Bay and came up empty-handed.

Elmer the husky took a whiz in the fog on a mystical beach sculpture.

The theme from The Magnificent Seven played on a slot machine. What a soundtrack to lose money to!

Multiple residents appeared in physical form and dress as Muppets, if the Muppets had mainlined lard, booze, meth and fentanyl for three decades.

A homeless woman wore a black knee-high sock on one leg and a white one on the other.

A police officer walked into the fog and willows to investigate the homeless encampment adjacent to the boat ramp.

Two homeless men fly an Avengers kite on a Coos Bay beach.

A seal emerged from the bay, undulated, submerged with a splash.

A homeless woman wearing ripped black fishnet stockings carried a skateboard through the mud flats.

A homeless woman asked me for ibuprofen.

A grown man wore a Lycra Spiderman costume in a grocery store.

A hutch. Plush recliner. Sofa. Office chair. Ottoman.

Such are the pieces of furniture that have showed up recently in and around the homeless encampment located on a stretch of Coos Bay beach that Elmer and I traverse every morning. The collection continues to grow.

I have never seen anyone use the furniture. I have never seen anyone carrying the pieces to the encampment. I have no idea how they will be removed. Fire? King tide and storm surge? Community clean-up? Never?

The furniture angers me and I dislike feeling anything angry in connection to the homeless.

Regular readers of this newsletter know I will not truck with homeless people destroying natural areas and this encampment is well on its way to destroying an approximately three-acre wooded site adjacent to a rivulet that empties into Coos Bay. The damage: compacted soil, stripped branches for firewood, fires, garbage, creatures squashed or driven away. It infuriates me and I don’t give a damn for the jargon-laded reasons homeless advocates excuse the carnage to a watershed.

Four months ago, when I first moved to the area, this encampment did not exist. A tent every now and then, but never more than a couple days.

These new residents, and I’ve met several of them, are slightly or overtly menacing. They do strange things in the sand and mudflats with rakes and their bare hands. Some cannot speak or refuse to speak. There is the whiff of hard drug abuse and possible prostitution going on.

Should I start carrying a knife? It has occurred to me, but that feels like a surrender of some kind. What about my phone? I never carry my phone with me on my morning walks.

These walks in the early mornings with Elmer along Coos Bay have completely revitalized my mind and body and after the stasis, depression and creative drought that crept in after the death of my father and the disposition of his estate. These walks have become a physical routine, creative bonanza, and spiritual necessity.

Now they are becoming despoiled by the encampment and the habits of its residents.

In recent mornings, I’ve seen homeless people on the beach doing something inexplicable and I just turn around; I didn’t want to edge near the weirdness and start my day by detouring around a freak and then having to watch my back. And yes, I have started watching my back. So has Elmer. He exhibits a very aggressive posture when we encounter certain homeless people. He did the same in Portland.

I sense a conflict within me by writing about this. Perhaps my feelings demonstrate selfishness, privilege (a hackneyed word I absolutely loathe).

We’re talking about ruining an estuary ambiance of tranquility on my morning walks. The people doing the ruining are shattered Americans with parents, siblings and children somewhere out there. I am face to face with them every day, when they have faces.

I really don’t what to think when I see 40 brown pelicans undulating in the fog above the bay at dawn and revel in the staggering haiku beauty…

and….

then that magical moment is annihilated by something new, sick, twisted and ugly emanating from the encampment.

On the walk home all I can recall is the shit not the beauty.

How do I go about trying to rid myself of the anger at the annihilation, something that’s happening almost every morning?

Cairns have started appearing on the Coos Bay beach where Elmer and I walk every morning. These are no ordinary New Age-inspired cairns of palm-sized, flat rocks you might come across on a hike in the desert or woods or a yoga retreat.

These cairns are constructed with massive rocks, some that must weigh over a hundred pounds, if not more. Many of the rocks are not flat, which is highly irregular in cairn construction. Typically there are five or six cairns for Elmer and I to dodge around. Elmer always chooses the tallest one to mark with a whiz.

They never last a day because high tides never leave one fully standing.

Their appearance would seem to represent the handwork of a two-person team. It would also seem homeless men and women from the nearby encampment are the cairns’ creators, although I have never observed anyone making them. It just stands to reason because I have observed residents from this encampment making sculptures with driftwood and scratching designs in the sand with sticks and garden tools washed ashore.

If my tidal calculations are correct, the cairns are built during the night, possibly well past midnight, when favorable low tides uncover rocks used for construction.

At night, the sounds and smells of an estuary, heavy lifting, conversations of collaboration, angles perceived, imprecise placement, then a balancing act.

Were the creators addled during the construction? Conventional wisdom would suggest that, but unconventional is often the best adjective that describes the doings of homeless people, at least in my experience. So maybe the artists, if indeed that’s who they are, just felt like making art and used the moment and materials at hand.

In ancient times, and it some remotes places on the planet today, cairns served (serve) as directional markers for travelers, signposts without words or numbers. They also can designate boundaries and spiritual sites.

When I pass by the cairns I do wonder if they are marking some direction in our culture, a direction I can’t discern yet, let alone understand. That these cairns never last is the tricky part of this meditation. Many cairns in arid climates last for hundreds of years. These Coos Bay one only last less than 24 hours and are by far the heaviest and most strangely shaped cairns I have ever seen.

That’s a potentially powerful metaphor if I could ever solidify it.

I always place a rock atop one of the cairns before leaving the beach and I have no idea why. Something subconscious is perhaps telling me to contribute.

A blue folder rested on the mud in front of me. I picked it up to investigate. Fifty yards behind me stood a growing homeless encampment tucked back in the willows of Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast. Its character grows more sinister every day.

The folder contained multiple pages of notebook and unlined legal-size paper with handwriting, some of it outlined with colored pens. The writing itself was mostly legible and contained garden variety grammatical errors and odd capitalization.

I surmised they were poems, fragments of poems or perhaps lyrics to unfinished songs and must have come to rest on the mud not long before I discovered them because they were not damp and everything else was. I started reading at random and instantly determined they were written by a young man because everything written was about a lost love for a young woman, a desire to reclaim that love, or recall it with romanticism or quite possibly delusion.

That I found the folder while walking with Elmer the husky down a Coos Bay beach at six in the foggy morning on a weekday should have surprised me. It did not. I somehow have developed a knack (skill?) of finding lost or abandoned writing by homeless people in Oregon. Could be Portland. Could be Klamath Falls. Could be Coos Bay. I’ll find it and relish the finding.

It’s always thrilling to make such a discovery perhaps because I keep thinking I’m going to come across a work of literary genius one of these days or better yet, a cry for help that I can act upon.

How did I know this particular Coos Bay discovery was written by a homeless man? I just knew and also knew I was lucky to have found it when I did: another 15 minutes and the incoming tide would have swamped and destroyed it.

How it came to be there, I would never know. Initially, I thought to leave the folder atop of large piece of driftwood. The writer might come searching for it. Or perhaps the writer discarded his poems on purpose with serious poetic panache. Let the sea sweep them away. Maybe I had no business removing them from their possibly watery grave.

No. No. No. I was not leaving the collection behind. I was taking it home with me and would read every word and bring something of them to the larger world. This has always been my forte and favorite role as a writer: finding lost, abandoned, obscure or entombed writing (and stories) and get it out to the world by any means necessary. It pays nothing but rewards in so many ways.

I might have read all the writing right there, but Elmer started attacking me, the tide was rolling in, and we had to get moving.

Back home, I read everything twice. Before I share some of the poet’s work, a few observations/questions:

His name is Kenny. I know this because included with the writing was a printout of his prescription medications recently picked up from a medical center. (There was no address or phone number or I would have called him.) The printout also informed Kenny he would no longer be able to refill the prescriptions at this particular medical center; he must find a primary care physician. That a man in Coos Bay is taking five Medicaid-funded, Oregon Health Plan prescription medications to help keep him alive but is also homeless (and a poet) surely says something remarkable about this nation, but I don’t seem capable of putting it into writing here.

Kenny made multiple revisions to his writing and all the revisions improved the poems.

He had an interesting way of mixing point of views within a poem/song. Was it intentional?

Why was the list of prescriptions with the poems? Maybe Kenny recognized the list as a modern American poem, a masterpiece of the corporate and pharmaceutical banality that distinguishes the names of modern drugs.

Proventil

Norvasc

Augmentin

Synthroid

Zestril

Flomax

Some of Kenny’s standout lines sounded like material for some good country songs. My favorite riffs:

Never did I say this love was not true cause your body laying the way you do.

Pleasant dreams inside her eyes

cause without you Babe I would not know life

I said without you Babe

I would not know life

Pleasant dreams insider her eyes

cause without you I’d be lonely tonight

She’s coming in all fours tonight

She’s coming in all my doors

She said what that photo of us really says

And without a doubt, the best line, sheer gold:

Harden my heart with the wood you find on the floor

That is grade A country music!

In all probability, someone living in the encampment knows Kenny. Kenny may even live there himself.

My mission: Operation Return Lost Poems. There is hope for a homeless man if he’s writing about a lost love.