Topless to the Clearcut

Astoria, NSP Meditations , , ,

I slowed my car down on Fort Clatsop Road, nearly coming to a halt. A woman with long blonde hair, straight as a waterfall, had stopped her blue Schwinn bicycle in front of a gate to a gravel logging road. She released the handlebars and peeled off her black hoodie. She was now topless. She secured the hoodie around her waist and started riding the bicycle around the gate. I passed within 20 yards and noticed a lean jutting profile, a reed of an upper body, no pert or perky anything. I put her age at anywhere from 18 to 55.

A thousand stories instantly mushroomed in my mind. Where does one go with this kind of material?

There was no time for a photograph but I wanted one as proof. No one would believe me. I barely believed it. A woman on the Oregon Coast was riding a bicycle topless into a clearcut on a Sunday morning in late October, mushroom season. It was easily one of the most arresting images of Oregon Coast life I have ever seen. And there was absolutely no metaphor in it. It was a true story and nothing else. I never make anything up about clearcuts.

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River Currents

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I hear dogs in the distance, playing with one another, roughhousing. It’s a wonderful sound. I need it on cassette tape.

The river rolls green and brown and laden with wood: sticks, branches, firewood, docks, root wads, trees. Heavy rain is the reason for the color and conveyance.

I sit at a tilted picnic table covered in moss. I sit between a giant Doug fir and black cottonwood in a state park.

A mansion stands in the woods across the river. Who lives there? Who loves there? I have never met anyone who lives in a mansion.

I am doing the assignment I always gave my students when I taught Siddhartha: go to a river, watch it and write. Write with the current. Everyone got “A’s” on that assignment. How could you fail?

A frog croaks below me.

The amount of wood floating past is astonishing. It all flows to the Columbia River and out to the ocean. In a few years, I might be building a driftwood fort with some of this wood.

Two black dogs approach. Their two elderly owner follow close behind. One of the dogs hustles down the bank and returns with an empty energy drink can. The dog releases it at my feet. I pick up the can and throw it football style. The dog brings it back. He then crushes the can with his paw—10 cents! The two owners come up and we launch into a conversation about the astonishing amount of driftwood in the river. We talk for 15 minutes about driftwood! Talking about driftwood is fun!

The dogs and men continue their walk. I hear the dog crushing another can.

I look down to the river. I want to see a damn beaver!

This would be an excellent spot to write a chapter of the watershed novel. This river is part of that novel. All rivers in the Pacific Northwest that drain the Columbia River Watershed are part of this novel.

I write a while longer and then walk back to the car. I pass a man in his 30s parked in a $50k silver truck, parked in such a way that he can watch the river and not get out of the truck. He is watching the river from his cab. He’s just watching and not on the phone or listening to anything that I can hear. It’s a Monday morning on a work day. He’s not working. He’s doing the Siddhartha writing assignment without writing. It’s all in his head, I presume.

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Light Bulbs

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , ,

The fog drifted here and there. I moved through it without any real purpose. Why have a defined purpose on the beach at dawn? Why not wander? Why not wander into a metaphor?

I followed the curving wrack line. It was stacked with kelp, crabs, seaweed, wood, shells and feathers. I culled the detritus with a stick looking for treasures to decorate my home.

There it was, a light bulb, an old school incandescent model, 60 watts. It wasn’t burned out.

Then another light bulb, an old school florescent tube, definitely burned out.

Previous to this discovery, I had never come across light bulbs in 20 years of rambling Oregon’s ocean beaches. But here they were.

I beach comb primarily for metaphors these days but never go out expressly looking for them. It’s not like I say: this morning I will find a metaphor to help guide my life. The metaphors just materialize and I always stand ready to contemplate their existence, juggle them in the air, and perhaps apply them to my life.

Two light bulbs! How could I ignore that find? Maybe it wasn’t even a coincidence but the ocean rolling in some trash that I could repurpose for abstract inspiration.

A light bulb went on in my mind (an energy efficient one, I might add). At long last, I had the one big idea I needed to transcend my present ordeal.

The idea was that I needed to invent one colossal creative idea to explode me out of marginalization. I feel like I’ve been crawling of late to escape. Forget crawling. Climb inside the barrel of a battleship’s big gun and fire away!

I diagrammed the colossal idea right there in the sand, committed it to memory, and then continued my wandering.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 28

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

The sun rose over the Coast Range and brought forth steam from the pastures. An overnight rain had soaked the ground. Evaporation, part of the oldest religion in the world, the water cycle, was underway.

I was hungry. I was quasi fasting to induce a state of mind that might provide clarity. Whole cultures used to follow the visions of a shaman after a fast. American did it with Lincoln. Jesus fasted for 40 days and met the devil, who brought Burger King (wearing a crown of thorns) and a smart phone. Then: Jesus ate. Jesus texted. Jesus wept.

It was all downhill after that.

Bonnie and Clyde gallivanted through the pasture. Can two senior dogs and a middle aged man gallivant? Yes. Watch us.

I talked to the crew aloud about the coming winter. I promised them I’d never the let rain repel my visits.

We made our way to the river. The evaporation was happening all around us. I fed the crew treats and they drank water from the grass.

I threw rocks at the big leaning alder across the river, checking to see if I still had decent aim. I didn’t.

We stayed for 15 minutes and then headed back.

A few feet into the pasture and something struck me: I didn’t want to go home: I much preferred hanging out with Bonnie and Clyde than doing anything or nothing at home.

I pivoted and detoured us to explore new territory of the pasture. They were game, as they always are in life.

We approached the boundary of the pasture and it was bordered by a willow grove of incredible height and depth. I had never seen a willow grove like this on the Oregon Coast and I had trekked through many of them. We moved closer and came to the edge of the grove.

It was out of a fantasy novel in a world where the wild of nature reigns supreme and imparts all wisdom and unscripted scripture: rivulets, drips, rocks, flowers, lily pads, tall grass, mud, moss, steam, thick willows with branches growing parallel to the ground, ferns everywhere, ferns growing out of thick willow branches, willow portals, willow benches, willow forts. It couldn’t possibly exist on this old abandoned dairy farm because dairy farmers hated willows in their wetlands and pulled them up in the mistaken belief they impeded drainage.

Willows love water. I love willows. I love the word willow. Here in front of me stood an ancient and sacred grove and I simply had to investigates its trails and tunnels, mysteries and metaphysics. I had to climb and climb. I might even swing. Only a fool doesn’t swing when you can swing.

Without my prompting, Bonnie entered first. I knew she would lead the way. I’ve seen more than enough evidence she communes with fairies on a regular basis.

Seconds later, she disappeared into the misty green and black. Clyde resisted, but then I enticed him with a treat and we followed the mystical scout dog.

There was a muted sound in the grove, as if sound could barely float. We wandered and wandered around.

I did pull ups. I swung. I carved our initials into the trunk of a willow double the size of my body.

One day, a decade or two from now, I would return to this giant willow, read my carvings, and see where these two great dogs had conveyed me in the most challenging time in my life.

I no longer recall how long we remained in the grove. At some point, Bonnie led us out into the pasture. There was light all around us. Clyde didn’t even want a treat.

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My Near Beheading on Halloween Part 2

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The clerk was not in the lobby when we returned from the beach. We were the only guests in the motel as far as we could tell. We all went to a room where the Americans carved a Jack-O-Lantern out of a large green squash because there were no pumpkins available and tried to explain Halloween to the Turks. It wasn’t easy.

At some point, after more Raki, Mila went to our room, undressed, and got into the shower together. We were doing more than showering.

Five or so minutes later, I heard a loud crashing noise coming from outside the bathroom. I pulled back the shower curtain and saw a sword slashing through the wooden door. The door came splintering off the hinges and I beheld the motel clerk, now dressed in traditional Islamic garb, wielding what I later learned was a kilij, an ancient sword from the Ottoman Empire with its distinct curved blade. It was ideal for slaying infidels.

Mila screamed. I closed the curtain.

The clerk swung the sword and cleaved the shower curtain and I knew my head was next. I stepped in front of Mila and prepared to parry the blow with a bottle of shampoo.

Mila screamed again and then bolted out of the stall. The water was still running. She startled the clerk and he lowered the sword. She grabbed a towel and covered her body. She grabbed another towel, wrapped it around her head like a hijab and then prostrated in front of the clerk. Mila was chanting something. The clerk calmed down and left the bathroom and out of the room. I turned off the water and donned a towel. Mila looked up at me and smiled.

The commotion alerted my colleagues and they rushed into our room. We told them what happened and Bilyun said it was possible the clerk would inform the local religious authorities and we could be arrested and jailed. A Turkish prison! My mind drifted toward The Midnight Express and Lawrence of Arabia and what happened in Turkish prisons.

We needed a plan! Mila and Bilyun conjured the idea to get out of the motel as fast as possible, catch the first bus to Istanbul (they ran 24 hours), and make our escape before the sex police paid us a visit. Bilyun also devised a plan to handle the clerk and gathered up all our unfinished bottles of Raki to present to him as an apology. We also put together a tight roll of American one-dollar bills to offer as a “tip.”

Bilyun grabbed a towel, whipped it around her head and went down to the lobby with the goods. She would apologize profusely to the clerk, hit him up with the greenbacks, and pour Raki down his gullet.

A couple of hours later, the clerk was passed out in the lobby and we slipped out the back without paying the bill. Two more hours and we were bumping down a road in a mini bus at first light, hungover to the roof. Mila sat on my right. A woman holding a chicken sat on my left. Every now and then Mila would grip my hand. I would turn to her and smile.

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My Near Beheading on Halloween Part 1

NSP Meditations , , , , ,

What follows is the true story of how a motel clerk on the Turkish Coast nearly beheaded me on Halloween night, 1992. I have told this tale around a whiskey burn barrel a few times, but never written it up. Until now.

I was teaching English in Istanbul at a Turkish K-12 school owned by a tire magnate. I had a Turkish girlfriend named Mila, who was a PE teacher at the school and the former point guard of the Turkish Women’s National Basketball Team. We had fallen in love playing rat ball after work. She had the fullest and blackest lips I have ever seen.

When I first started teaching at the school, Mila had been married. Then she got a divorce a few weeks into the academic year.

On Halloween, which the Turks don’t celebrate, Mila and I accompanied several other teachers, American and Turkish, by bus, for an overnight stay in a resort village on the Aegean Sea. I no longer recall the name of the village, which surprises me, considering I nearly lost my head there.

At the last minute before we left, Mila decided to bring along her divorce documents. She said it might prove necessary outside of Istanbul. The hinterlands were drastically more conservative and a hard core Islamist might start an interrogation if he saw her with a foreigner and it appeared the couple was unmarried, loose, fancy free, and flaunting social convention.

That was Mila and me, but on the sly. We lived short stories every time we went out and novels inside her apartment. These were not American short stories and novels.

By afternoon, we had found a motel right on the sea. Mila and her Turkish female friend and fellow teacher, Bilyun, scoped out the lobby before we checked in to determine if the motel catered to foreigners. It did, they reported, but they also reported the clerk, who was dressed in a sport coat and slacks, asked them some personal questions that indicated he didn’t approve of two single Turkish women traveling with foreigners. Mila even had to produce her divorce papers for confirmation of her status.

Mila and Bilyun put on a ruse that they were sharing a room. The clerk bought it and we tipped him well. When we went to our rooms on the second floor, Mila and I pulled the switcheroo and Bilyun bunked with an older gay American man. It was kind of fun sneaking around and posting a lookout on the stairs for a possibly fanatical clerk. It all felt very Halloween and kind of noir.

We had a wonderful view of the Aegean Sea from our second floor room. There was a tiny balcony where two people barely fit but Mila and I squeezed in and we sat down on some chairs and I ran her through some English pronunciations as the sun set, perhaps one the most romantic things I have ever done with a woman.

That night, we all went out together for a grand meal of lamb kebabs and drank Turkey’s version of Ouzo, Raki, or “The Lion’s Milk” as the Turks like to call it. After the meal, we staggered down to the beach for more Raki and then headed back to the motel.

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