Pistol River Beach Dreaming

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , , , , , , ,

I had a dream about the mysterious beach at Pistol River on the South Oregon Coast.

In the dream, I saw ancient driftlogs, bleached wooden whales, forts, sculptures, dunes, trails, hidden valleys, dry lake beds, and footprints of human beings, animals and birds. There was even old and empty brown 40-ounce bottles of cheap Pacific Northwest beer brands no longer favored by the growler people.

I ran on this beach once, when Ray and Sonny were in their prime and I was coming alive as an Oregonian. I came here with Sonny, again, when she was an invalid. Now I am here alone, as an existential invalid.

The dream drifted toward Pistol River, a river trapped at the mouth, trapped by sand, a river running parallel to the ocean, an ocean 30 yards away, a thin lake that grows and grows but never becomes fat. It is an estuary denied, stalled, but not forever.

Rain. The Pistol River awaits rain, heavy rain, to wash down the watershed, collect and collect, build a mass of water with enough power to break on through to the ocean and allow the salmon and eels to return.

I feel like a trapped estuary. I can’t break though to the ocean and start anew where all life began and begins. I need an existential mass of winter rain to burst me through the sand and release me to the waves. There I will swim and float. I might even surf. I will not drown.

At some point in the dream, I sat on a log and my husky was darting here and there. The ocean rolled green and white. I was rolling with it. I was harmonious in mind and body. There were no birds anywhere. The beach was agate and keyhole limpet free. A person I once knew appeared to me. She sat down on the log next to me. She was wearing a familiar green dress. We began talking. We had never done that before, just sit down on a log together and talk with the ocean rolling in yards away. That was a mistake. We never opened up at the ocean to one another like the ocean opens itself with every last wave that comes ashore.

It was a vague notion in the dream, this opening up at the ocean for us, but it felt like there was still time, if we act.

The dream ended.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Notes from a Notepad

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , ,

I am writing this from a log in front of a driftwood fort. I am writing it in a blue, pocket-size, six-ring notepad with a plastic hardback cover, a notepad of the type that were standard issue for most American men who pumped gas 50 years ago. I paid a nickel for it. Once the paper runs out, it’s finished because paper to refill it has long since vanished. I want to honor this notepad’s miraculous longevity by entering useful or useless observations that spring to mind when I visit the beach.

A para glider floats over the ocean. He’s rigged up a tether to an ancient rood wad so he doesn’t float away.

Someone has dropped scrap wood near the fort for a future bonfire.

The ocean is rolling in with full stereo sound. I actually prefer when it’s playing in mono.

I passed a fishermen at the jetty. He told me he hadn’t caught anything. He looked like a television hit man.

It’s starting to rain.

I’m wearing a 99-cent corduroy coat made in Yugoslavia one of my former students bought me from an animal shelter thrift store. She told me it “screamed you.”

I passed a shell and glistening mound of jellyfish.

There is no one within miles of me.

Sanderlings and sandpipers dart around to my right. Shouldn’t they have migrated by now?

The para glider is floating my way.

A great friend returned from his mysterious journey. We held our reunion on the beach and walked and talked and lost track of time. It is good to have him back. He provides original thinking. He asks good questions. He knows about knives and turmeric.

Mushrooms are growing nearby. I think I should know more about mushrooms.

I think elk are watching me.

I am going to start writing a letter. I love writing letters and I love receiving them. I miss receiving letters from a certain writer with the best Oregon pickle story of all time.

The tide is receding. I see a gap that I can run though and reach the jetty. Time to run.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Oregon Tavern Age: Calling Dr. Bombay

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

Two black dogs pulled an old man in a wheel chair towing a cart. They were mushing him south down a sidewalk, parallel to Highway 101.

I watched this from across the road. A few seconds later, the dogs did a u-turn, crossed the highway, and approached the Sea Star Lounge in Gold Beach. The man reined in the team, said something I didn’t catch, and they all came to a halt in front of the lounge.

The man, clearly Oregon Tavern Age, with long gray hair, detached the cart, hitched the dogs to a utility pole and watered them. While they drank, he took out a vaping device and vaped. A whiff of cannabis drifted my way.

The dogs flopped down on the sidewalk and instantly fell asleep. The man wheeled himself up to the door and maneuvered himself inside. I followed. I had to. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

There was a strong urge to address him, get his story. I suppressed it. I wanted to see this unfold without a nosy writer’s intervention. In OTA country, sheer observation instead of journalism often produces a better story.

He rolled to the bar and angled between a couple of vacant stools. The female bartender asked what he wanted. I didn’t sense he was a regular. He hesitated briefly, then ordered a Bombay Sapphire gin and tonic. After glancing up at the television over the bar, he added, “Calling Dr. Bombay!”

Dr. Bombay! I couldn’t believe he referenced Dr. Bombay from the Bewitched sitcom, which was currently playing on the television, thankfully without sound. Apparently, Samantha had just wiggled her nose and Dr. Bombay magically appeared, holding a martini and riding crop.

I never liked the show all that much in reruns as a kid, but I did like Elizabeth Montgomery’s nose wiggle. Pert is the adjective. Pert. Pert. Pert. I saw a nose wiggle like that once and it haunts me still.

The man put in an order for three hamburgers. One for him. Two for the dogs. He sipped his drink and watched the show.

I ordered an ale and sat at the bar. A few seconds later, a large androgynous-looking man sat down next to me. He ordered a lager and kamikaze. His phone rang and began talking to someone that I quickly deduced was his wife. He told her he was having lunch, all perfectly true. Then he launched into a tirade about his dead beat brother who wasn’t helping out their ailing father.

His drink order arrived. He pounded the kamikaze and the beer. He dropped the phone, picked it up and kept talking.

He ordered another round with a few nods. He was still talking on the phone as he nodded, but now his conversation involved his two tours in Iraq and being blasted against a wall by an IED.

The drinks arrived. He slammed the kamikaze and sipped the beer. He turned his mouth away from the phone and ordered a shot of Rumple Minze. I winced. If you don’t know what it is, you’re better off.

On television, Darin was fixing Dr. Bombay a colossal martini.

The bartender brought over the shot. The vet shot it and kept talking, now something about a busted transmission.

The OTA man’s food order appeared in a white paper sack. He thanked the bartender, drank the last of his gin and tonic, placed the glass on a stool, and wheeled himself out. He never paid.

The vet ordered another Rumple Minze. I was almost surprised the bartender served him. Almost.

It was 11:45 in the morning. I looked out the window and saw the dogs devouring the burgers. The man was eating his, too, chasing it with a vape. Three minutes later, the dogs began easing the man off the sidewalk and into the highway. I walked outside to see them off. They disappeared from sight and I went back inside to finish my beer and hope to see Samantha wiggle her nose.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Bonnie and Clyde Files 24

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

Dear Bonnie and Clyde:

I apologize for my absence of late. I have dearly missed our zany adventures, physical and metaphysical, along the river. The physical adventures barely last half an hour, but the metaphysical ones, well, they are timeless.

You two are my next book, if only I knew how to publish it. There might be one method out there, old school. It might allow me to publish the book and help raise money for your care and the care for more senior dogs in a country that seems to be producing more and more people who give away or abandon senior dogs when the dogs become inconvenient. And I’m not talking about the financial expense of caring.

Our adventures will resume soon, perhaps even today. Treats are stockpiled. I’ve got my rain uniform wrinkled and ready.

Clyde, that tongue of yours! It’s only rock and roll but I like it.

Bonnie, your ongoing and mysterious communing with river and woodland sprites! You are a Led Zeppelin/Lord of the Rings kind of dog.

I have often visited the sanctuary in deep despair, but then I hear your howling at the gate. I set you free, gimping into the pasture, we make for the river, we traverse thistle, we dodge swallows and elk scat, and then something sublime always happens to me. This is a certainty, like a law of personal gravity where my gravity disappears in such a silent way that it defies a simile, but begs for one.

You two have sustained my spirit. You have been wondrous, wide-open, smiling therapy in a world where therapy is so narrowly defined, dour and expensive.

Fall is here and the river will change with rain. Perhaps I will construct us a Huck Finn raft. I want to float a hundred feet down an Oregon Coast river with old dogs as my sidekicks—you two. Then I’ll drag us out to a gravel bar, build us a driftwood fire and roast hot dogs on a stick of willow. Not that eat hot dogs, but I know you two will. That’s all that matters.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Cliffs of Love

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , , , , , , , ,

At first light, at high tide, I walked north down a semi-secret beach trying to empty my mind.

It was no use, the emptying that is.

I looked west to the limitless ocean and east to the sandy cliffs that hemmed me in. Even at some distance I could see carvings into the sandy face of the cliffs.

These weren’t carvings by an ancient people suggesting the spiritual or supernatural. They were messages of lust and love, inspired by the ocean and the plasma of all mammalian things alive, scratched into a blank canvas of sand and dirt, messages declaring ideas and sentiments for all the world to see, at least the few people who walked by these cliffs and bothered to pay attention.

A person like me.

I went over to inspect them because I like to think of myself as the Oregon Coast’s premier anthropologist of such cliff carvings. I’ve studied them for 20 years, from Hammond to Brookings, and I never grow tired of reading and thinking about them. They make me smile and wonder. They enlarge my heart and capacity for love. They make me want to edit. They make me want to write my own equation for love.

I have never carved an equation or name into the face of a cliff. Quite obviously, that I haven’t is the result of something severely lacking in my life and it’s all been my fault. Perhaps now, I am ready to carve. Doesn’t everyone want to carve?

The cliffs at this semi-secret beach were covered with letters, words and symbols, the most I have ever seen in one place. There were even complete sentences. You must really love someone if you carve a complete sentence of love into a cliff—and punctuate it—or so the former English teacher in me thinks.

I scaled a dune to the base of the cliffs, read the writing here and there, and then looked up: some were 50 feet above me, straight up, no footholds, no visible way of getting up there. Except to crawl and hang on.

Commitment. Carefree. Precarious. Dangerous. Dumb. Bravado. Wild. Rock and Roll.

Why do it? Why not, if you feel it.

I thought about the carvings. Questions/observations came to mind:

Are most of the equations and names carved by one person or in tandem?

What percentage of equations are gay and lesbian?

Why was the name “Matt” the highest carving on this cliff?

Why, with a couple of exceptions, were male names all the highest carvings? Think about that. You could write a book answering that question. Maybe I will.

If it’s only one person, is the other member of the couple present, watching down below?

In recent years, I’ve notices names in Spanish. America is changing. Good. More of that change. A faster pace, too.

What’s the average age of the carver?

Are the carvers more tourists or locals?

I’ve never seen a menage a trois equation.

How long do these carvings near the ocean last? They certainly aren’t as enduring as carving initials into fresh pavement or a tree.

I scaled back down the dune and faced the ocean. Then I turned around and scampered up the dune. I found a perfect driftwood chisel pen along the way. I was going to carve my first equation. I did. It was easy. It should have been written years ago.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Thoughts on Tom Petty

NSP Meditations , , ,

I saw Tom Petty live, once, 1986 or 87 or 89, at the old Civic Stadium in wonderfully gray and slow and non-corporate Portland. The Heartbreakers were backing Dylan on one of Bob’s desultory tours from that era, but they came on first and ran through a set that none of us could really hear. So we drank beer and pretended to have fun.

His most overlooked albums are Echo from 1999 and a soundtrack for an obscure Edward Burns movie, She’s the One, from 1996, that isn’t even listed on his Wiki discography page! In fact, this latter record is truly incredible for its curt storytelling. Petty even covers Beck’s “Asshole” and Lucinda Williams’ “Change the Locks.” No one talks about it today. It’s a phenomenal, strange, beautiful record. I only wish I wouldn’t have dumped it a thrift store when I was administering poor hospice care for myself when after dying last fall.

Petty was probably the most unattractive rock and roller of all time. But it didn’t matter then. They put him on album covers and his record sold. It was the music. He fought the suits his whole life. He usually won.

I probably the only writer in American who ever wrote a short story with Tom Petty in the title. It was a Christmas tale called The Tom Petty Christmas Mission and I consider it one of the best, most eccentric things I have ever written. You can buy it as e-book on my web site and see how much Petty’s music infiltrated me. My ex wife did the wonderful illustration for the cover. I wish all his fans could read this. They would see a different side to his influence.

In my former ancient life as a teacher, I played at least a dozen Petty songs at our lunch jams, open mics and rock festivals. At Newport High School, we actually staged an all Tom Petty lineup. I played “Free Falling,” “Even the Losers Get Lucky,” “Last Dance with Mary Jane” and my favorite Petty song of all time, “You Wreck Me.” It contains perhaps the only line about corduroy in the history of rock and roll. I’ll be the boy at the high school dance / I’ll be the one in the corduroy pants.

We rocked the living hell out of that one. I was wearing corduroy at the time.

RIP Tom Petty. You were/are a part of my creative life.

And I know those 8-track and cassettes are still out there. I will find them. They will be heard again.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

«‹ 284 285 286 287›»