Oregon Tavern Age: Milo

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The door to the outdoor smoking area opened and a black Lab puppy bolted into the Sea Star Lounge. He had a rope attached to his collar.

I sat at a table in the rear of the joint, next to the karaoke stage. I put down the finest cup of coffee I’d ever tasted in Oregon Tavern Age country. Actually it wasn’t a coffee, but an espresso concoction of some kind. I had ordered a regular drip coffee but the bartender had inexplicably whipped me up the drink. On my first sip, I thought about inquiring, but held off. She was busy serving $1 candy corn jello shots to a patron.

This was not my preferred table by the front window, but I had to relocate because the sound of a Sylvester Stallone action film playing on television made reading an anthology of poetry opposed to the Vietnam War impossible. Not half an hour earlier I had discovered the book on a sidewalk. It was a marvelous find and reminded me of what poetry used to mean when strife, racial division, violence, matters of morality and protests in the street tore this country apart. The result of that tearing was the election of Richard Nixon.

History always repeats itself and here we are today. But where is the anthology of protest poetry? Where is the great protest of rock and roll? Parodies on Saturday Night Live and talk show monologues aren’t cutting it. Social media protests just sell advertising and enrich massive corporations.

Funny how you can stimulate your mind and sense of history by finding a 50-year-old book on a sidewalk that cost 50 cents. Funny how reading this book in a dive bar on the Oregon Coast makes you want to write a protest poem for our times.

So I grabbed a Keno card and golf pencil and went to work.

The puppy has made his way around the lounge and by this time his owner emerged from the smoking area holding a bottle of Budweiser. He was an OTA giant with red and gray beard. The puppy ran over to him and he grabbed the rope and hitched the dog to a table near mine.

I watched all of this desperately wanting a dog.

The man went up to the bar and the bartender produced a bowl of water for the dog. The man came back over to the table with the bowl and another Budweiser and set the bowl on the carpet. The dog lapped up the water and then flopped down.

You go yourself a puppy,” I said

“Yeah.”

“What’s his name?”

“Milo.”

I called to Milo and he romped over and we horsed around. I was using my goofy dog voice with him. It felt good to use it again.

We struck up a conversation and I learned the man was living in a RV down by the river. He and Milo had walked a couple miles to the Sea Star. He had another dog, 18 years old, back in the RV. The man had recently reacquired Milo because Milo’s mother, the man’s other dog, had been struck and killed by an automobile. The man had seen it happen and took back the runt of the litter and here it was in the lounge lounging, in training to become an expert OTA dog., which entails quietly hanging out in taverns for hours on end and gobbling up any french fries dropped on the floor in stealth.

I commented how well-behaved Milo was for a puppy.

“He likes it in here. We have our routine.”

The man asked me if I owned a dog.

No. I had lost my beloved husky of almost 17 years a couple of years ago and still wasn’t ready. I might never be ready.

“I need this dog for therapy. Dogs, man, they are best therapy,” he said.

I knew something about that.

Milo’s master excused himself and got up from his chair to play the slots. Milo whizzed on the carpet and then fell asleep. I sipped my espresso, reopened the anthology, and started reading a poem about Norman Morrison, the Quaker who self-immolated in front of the Pentagon. It was bracing reading in OTA country but I needed the bracing. I read a few more poems and then picked up the pencil and went back to work. But I was writing about dogs instead.

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A Disquisition on Student Bus Shelters

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Let us consider the subject of privately-constructed school bus shelters on the Oregon Coast. They are a ubiquitous presence on practically every back road in the region. But sometimes they are very hard to see.

Some observations about them:

I have seen a few shelters along rural Willamette Valley and Central Oregon roads but they predominate at the Coast. The prodigious rain, of course.

Most of the shelters stand at the end of long gravel driveways, always gravel. People who can afford paved driveways into the deep woods or pastures don’t build bus shelters.

No two shelters are the same, but every one I’ve seen is made of wood. Some have benches, built in chairs, others do not. Most could accommodate one or two students but I have seen a couple that could hold five or six. Some have concrete pads and windows. Some are painted. Some are painted in multiple colors and decorated with sunflowers or mushrooms or cartoon characters. Some have a shingled, metal or cedar-shaked roof. A few are rigged with electric power. I once saw one with a tiny rusted wood stove! I once saw one with a spire and another with a weather vane.

Who built these shelters? I’ve never seen one being built or repaired. Are they even legal? Some appear to rest on public property. What did the students in these shelters talk about? What about the kid who was always alone? I want to talk to someone who spent every rainy school morning of his/her grade school and junior high life inside a shelter waiting for a school bus. What was it like? Was there someone who used the shelter and was attending high school. How did this person fit inside? They must have been a pariah at school.

Virtually every shelter I’ve encountered no longer seems in use. You can just tell. They exude forlorn and abandonment. Most are falling apart, collapsed, buried in blackberries, swallowed by the forest, gone to seed, decomposing in the rain. No one ever seems to dismantle them that I can tell, although how would I know.

In 20 years of living on the Oregon Coast, I have never seen a student inside a shelter waiting for a school bus. Why do rural students no longer wait in them? I’ve seen students waiting in idling vehicles right next to perfectly dry shelters that had not yet succumbed to the elements. How come parents don’t or won’t leave their children in shelters anymore? Do students flat out refuse? Is the school bus shelter a dying or already extinct form of architecture?

These are fascinating cultural questions and changes to ponder.

Recently, while driving past several decaying shelters on a curving road in an especially remote area, I came up with the idea that they could be repurposed as art galleries, mini travel centers, libraries, vegetable or flower stands, or road kill skull museums. You could even leave an old portable cassette player behind with a few choice country music tapes from the Willie and Dolly golden era.

I’d like to collaborate with a visual artist and photographer to produce a coffee table book or zine about student bus shelters. We would travel around coastal Oregon and document their disintegrating existence with words and images, perhaps video. We might actually interview some of the shelter makers if we could somehow find them. If anyone is interested, let me know.

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A Random Day

NSP Meditations

A 47-year old Nabokov paperback for four bucks. Never cut. Never read.

A man in a loincloth steps out of his RV with his mutt and throws bread into the rain for the gulls. They swarm around him and don’t let a single crust hit the ground.

I recently sat across the table from a 75-year-old Oregon poet who has written a collection of Oregon-themed poems of extraordinary vitality. We must find a way to publish them.

A woman told me she is saving her tips for a special meat order to fill her freezer.

I grow weary of celebrities leading our civic discourse.

A man orders a shot of whiskey and a shot of tequila and a beer. He says George Clooney has a a new brand of tequila on the market. He says robots are taking over. He says his uncle buys wrist watches on QVC and then sells them to his friends. He says he wants to own a Rolex.

I saw an orange feral cat at the jetty. He was nicked up and looked straight into my eyes. I’m not a cat man but I almost became one. I had a chance to save a sentient being and failed.

There is a lower to middle class, largely white, diaspora going on, in the cities, in the small towns, in the incorporated rural areas, people leaving the rat race to nowhere, to check out. I have witnessed it everywhere I look. It’s been somewhat reported in the news media, but mostly in connection with the opiod epidemic. Many of the people of this diaspora are bringing their dogs and cats with them. They are rustling up ancient RVs building makeshift shelters. They have stopped working. If they don’t find shelter, they are going to fade away. They are not Tom Joads. They are not On The Road. They are something entirely new in our unique history of transiency.

There is the next great American novel in this diaspora. I sometimes think I am the only writer noticing this but I could be wrong. I don’t believe the talent of a novelist resides within me to handle this material, but if I join the diaspora as a kind of reverse Nick Carraway observing the underclass, perhaps it would emerge.

You can’t help but notice this novel when a man in a loincloth feeds gulls outside his RV and he was happy doing so. It was raining, too, and the man was exuding tinges of a Raymond Carver character, but just tinges. I wonder what Carver would have made of him in a short story.

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A Book of Poetry

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I found a book of street poetry on a sidewalk. It cost 50 cents. The title: Where is Vietnam? American Poets Respond. It was published in 1967 by a major New York publisher. It is an anthology containing poems by heavy hitters from that era, Dickey, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kunitz, Levertov, Lowell, and by first time poets, poems by high school students and a six-year old boy. It is a book of poetry meant to be read aloud, read standing up, read in the streets, read to people, written to change people’s hearts and minds about an illegal and immoral war before Richard Nixon got his hands on it. This is a book of poetry of poetry in action. It contains poems about the Quaker Norman Morrison who self-immolated in front of the Pentagon after placing his bundled infant daughter on the sidewalk. Remember him? Is anything in poetry like this anthology happening anywhere in America in the Days of Trump? I haven’t read anything about it, but I am not privy to the inner workings of the poetry establishment or its counterculture, nor do I read their publications. Perhaps American poets are responding to Trump and taking their poetry to the Red State and Red County streets. The poetry might even be tinged with purple. Who cares what color it is! Reading this anthology inspired me. It made me want to respond to Trump as a poet. It made me want to find a mimeograph machine and publish one-page purple-toned editions of protest poetry by poets and non poets and dogs and distribute the editions to red diners and red gun ranges and red churches. A purple flood of poetry to bust the levee. But there will be no anger or loathing or dismembering in these poems. There will only be rational appeal to our higher angels. Some of the poets will even quote Sly and the Family Stone. It will be a family affair to bring us back to the table or to the table for the first time. I believe poetry can help with that. Did this poem help you get closer to that idea? Ideal? If so, write a poem and distribute it in places where poetry is no longer heard or found.

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Writing Along with Monk and Rollins

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Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins duet on “I Want to be Happy.”

So do I. Some people don’t.

Rain falls and then it doesn’t and I write in concert with jazz.

I just chopped garlic and onions for a mushroom and tomato and rice stew. Jim Harrison would approve. I need a dog here to lick the bowl.

I saw tri-colored yoga pants in the most unlikeliest of places.

A harbor seal followed me for two miles. I called out to him.

I had my hands on lavender cords and they fit, but…they were women’s pants and I couldn’t do it. I’m not there yet.

A former student called me out of the rain and it was good to hear his voice.

I found a book in a laundromat called Crazy Salad, a collection of essays about women, written by Nora Ephron. I started reading it right there. It was published in 1973 and contains more insight into women than any other book I have ever read about women.

A new river is about to emerge in my life.

I saw a man splayed on a gravel bar, flapping his arms like wings.

I met an elderly man who was pulled over for driving eight miles an hour down Highway 101. He told me he was zonked on a prescription opiod and the police arrested him.

I attended a craft fair in an unheated lodge decorated with mounted heads of deer and elk.

My Friday night entertainment this Friday night will be listening to a 2-A high school football playoff game on the radio. In mono. I’ll be tabulating all the cliches from the lone announcer. Heavy rain is forecast. Let it rain on a football field when football players are playing. Let fumbles and dropped passes commence.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 29

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I sat on the bank and watched an American dipper dip in the rapids of the Lewis and Clark River. This was the first watching of a dipper in my life.

Bonnie and Clyde snoozed behind me in the grass. They were content. I’d fed them an assortment of fine treats, including pumpkin-tinged meat biscuits stolen from a friend’s pet during a recent pet/house sitting stint. It’s a fine thing when you steal something for two dogs named Bonnie and Clyde.

The river wasn’t doing much, except being a river. I thought about all the firsts in my life on this river, with these dogs. These firsts keep occurring and suggest a reason why more people should visit rivers without any intention or goal. Bring a dog along, too.

The dipper (aka as the water ouzel) hopped here and there, testing footholds, then found the right rock to dip her beak and draw life from other life in the river.

We all hope to find that right rock with the solid foothold.

My mind moved toward a novella I just finished reading, A River Runs Through It, by Norman Maclean. I never cared much for the film adaptation, and had never read the novella before rescuing it from a coastal garage sale or defunct Portland street library. It was free either way.

Why is that free books discovered at random or books costing less than two bucks discovered at random, are the ones that seems to change my life of late? Could an Amazon algorithm ever do something like that? It wouldn’t be random. It wants to turn a better profit.

There is no algorithm with these two old dogs. They are helping me undo the algorithm that currently ensnares me. Our adventures are random, beautifully random. More random please. Rivers bring randomness. Is randomness even a word?

I read A River Runs Through It in one sitting, sitting on an easy chair I hauled home for free years ago. This work is a classic of literature of the river, being a preacher’s kid and fly fishing. The first two categories greatly interest me, the latter does not. It’s a weird thing to read how some people are so obsessed with what they can extract from nature—the noble (often dangerous) extraction narrative. It is a deep mine of American literature (and also of nature-based reality shows like The Deadliest Catch). Hemingway was a warped master of this idea. I like to believe I write about what nature offers or gives that doesn’t involve killing something and then making a personal philosophy out of the methodology of the killing. Driftwood forts do no harm. Neither does tossing apples to deer.

Maclean writes in the novella, “A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.”

That certainly feels true to me. The Lewis and Clark River certainly speaks to me in ways I can’t imagine it speaking to anyone else. A river has many voices and I simply can’t understand the one that rhapsodizes the perpetual taking from it without ever whispering a haiku of gratitude.

What are these Bonnie and Clyde adventures about? I never think about an editorial line with them. Something at the river randomly presents itself and we flow with its randomness. I think that’s a damn good way to live and I wasn’t really living that way before. Too much planning and calculation. Not enough watching the dipper dip when I never expected to encounter a dipper.

Maclean also writes in the novella: “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.”

I’m counting on it.

That won’t be random.

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