Bonnie and Clyde Files 9

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , ,

Water ran high in the Lewis and Clark River after heavy rains. It was an overcast and humid morning. Green was exploding everywhere.

When we reached our usual spot where the bank slopes to meet the river, Bonnie and Clyde fanned out to eat salad. I dug out the camp stool and TV tray stashed in the root wad of a downed alder. I unfolded the stool and steadied it in the wet ground. I set up the TV tray and noticed three slugs crawling across the rose-decorated black metal. They left tracks of meandering yellow slime that I sensed was a secret message to me. I tried to divine its meaning and struck out.

I rubbed my hands in giddy anticipation of writing about these images and the secret message! I wouldn’t dare remove the slugs from the tray! And in fact, I would nudge them into the pages of my Blue Book! Top that Henry David Thoreau and your cute little woodchuck! I’ve got slugs writing me with mustard secretions! Talk about gold!

Oh thank ye merciful Gods of Verse for the bestoweth upon me of these wonderful slug-induced metaphors. I raiseth a can Rainier to the sky in your glorious honor!

Clyde came over and demanded a treat. He would not leave unless I gave him one. I did.

I begin to write. The slugs joined in, or at least the tiny one did. My mind drifteth with the river. The river runneth. The slugs sluggeth. A barn swallow diveth across the surface. I wanted to swimeth into the channel and cleanseth my body.

What? Something strange was happening to my syntax. I couldn’t help adding “eth” to all the verbs that floweth around and through me. The river brougheth forth the condition, I was certain. The slugs slime might have also made me drunketh. Or had I losteth my mind?

It occurreth to me: shouldn’t we all try to findeth a place where we can’t help ourselves but useth verbs in the “eth” ending?

Yes, we all should.

Wait, I almost faileth to mention that I had another probation meeting this morning.

At the river, with Bonnie and Clyde, I forgeteth.

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Lost and Found 14 B / Endings

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The harbor seal pup flapped its way across the sand and stopped. It had traveled five yards. A few minutes later and five more yards. Then another five and five.

It had a little under 500 yards to go to reach the safety of the ocean and perhaps reunite with its mother, if indeed the mother was still alive. Or perhaps the extreme high tide had thrown off any hope of reunion and this was an ultimate lost and not found.

I watched this journey from atop the jetty. At first I stood, then I sat down. I took a few photographs of the pup and then got up and moved across the rocks to parallel its course. I kept my eyes on the pup and almost bumped into a bald eagle perched on an ancient trestle. I stopped. The eagle didn’t move and stared straight at me. I had never felt so panicked in nature. It was like nature was ladling primal energy over me and dissolving something unknown within. I started crying. I had never cried in nature before. The eagle lifted off and I was alone.

Something unprecedented came over me. I became the pup. I entered its consciousness. I could feel my arms flailing in the sand and my body drying up in the heat.

This was no metaphor. This was no New Age channeled crystal blue persuasion (delusion). I was that pup struggling to reach the ocean and perhaps reunite with a loved one and sail on to some new place. I was watching the new ending of my book and I didn’t know how it would end.

There was no way I could watch the pup’s death on the beach unfold in front of me. It was useless to call anyone official to help. I climbed down from the jetty and headed for the parking lot.

On my final look, I saw the pup make another five yards. It found a small depression in the wet sand filled with water, a saltwater bathtub. It rested in the bathtub for a minute or so and then left comfort and went another ten yards. There were more bathtubs ahead the pup might find. I gleaned no hope from this, none.

I sat in the car and cried. I thought: I’m not going to make it. It’s just too far to go.

Bonnie and Clyde Files 8

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , ,

Bonnie and Clyde prowled the high grass along the bank. I sat at the TV tray inches from the river and let my mind drift with the current. I waited and waited and then a mesmerizing commenced…toward boats of all things, toy boats. I thought that perhaps I would bring a toy boat to this river and play with it as a child might play, if a middle-aged man had a great notion to play with toy boats on an Oregon Coast river with no around except two old dogs. Yes, he does, or he instantly had one now!

It occurred to me that in my youth I never had a toy boat. I was always the Army/Marine-toy-kind-of-kid, tanks and trucks, half tracks and howitzers. Is there something inherently wrong with a child who never had a single toy boat? Only toy tanks? It also occurred to me that I had only one indelible memory of any boats in my youth: eating octopus from a sherry glass in a formal dining room aboard a cruise ship bound for Brazil that was transporting my family into missionary service for the Church of Christ.

I stared at the river and the rocks below the surface and imagined constructing a harbor for my boat, or better yet, a toy ship, perhaps even a fleet of toy ships! Why stop at a fleet? Why not a flotilla? Why not include an ark, yacht, battleship, cruiser, minesweeper, trawler, drug boat, Love Boat, freighter, Huck Finn raft, Coast Guard cutter, amphibious landing craft, corsair, barque, schooner, sampan, a canoe, yes, a canoe on the Lewis and Clark River, modeled after the canoe Lewis and Clark’s men ripped off from the Chinooks before they departed Fort Clatsop.

Clyde came over and nuzzled my pocket. Treat time goddammit! The spell was broken. I packed up the studio and we headed home. As I walked, I couldn’t stop thinking about toy boats. I knew I would begin my search for one soon, perhaps that very morning. They were out there, lost, forlorn, dry docked, languishing on dusty shelves of the thrift stores. I would find the boats and return them to the water to float again. It occurred to me that I was trying to do exactly the same thing for myself.

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Lost and Found 14 A / Endings

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After building a fort at the beach, I ate my breakfast while sitting on chainsawed round of driftwood. I also counted the rings in the round—79. A tree, (Douglas fir, I think) had made it to 79 and then fell victim to a chainsaw somewhere in the upper reaches of the watershed. Someone had cut a round for firewood or a lacquered tabletop and then something went askance and somehow it found its way to this beach and to serve as my chair.

I sat facing the ocean. It was one of the lowest tides of the year, a clam tide, but clamming was closed because of lethal levels of toxins.

There wasn’t a single person in sight of me. I whipped out a pen and notebook and started writing the last lines of the book I was currently writing about the tumultuous last year of my life where I lost everything I held dear and found myself searching for a new purpose in the faceless face of a massive marginalization.

The writing was going well from the round. I hadn’t intended to write the ending, but the fort building activated something in my mind (as it always does), and it just came to me. I had no idea what the ending will be to my ordeal, but I was writing it nonetheless. That probably makes no narrative sense. Welcome to my state of mind.

I finished two paragraphs. The book’s ending was complete. I stood up from the round, packed up my things, and shook out the sand. I picked up a piece of interesting driftwood the shape of a baseball bat and headed toward the South Jetty. I would never visit this beach again. There was nothing for me here.

The baseball bat served as my stretching apparatus and dumbbells and I exercised as I meandered. I scaled a dune and approached the driftwood fort that miraculously still stood from the last day of my teaching career, a fort-building field trip from a year ago with my creative writing students. I say miraculously because driftwood forts don’t last a year—they can’t. Evanescence is their essential nature.

I stopped at the fort and inserted the baseball bat into the structure’s roof. I’d done something similar with other pieces of driftwood and often spent a few minutes shoring up the fort. I suppose I was battling its evanescence.

This fort was different; it had exceptional history and perhaps that explained my sustained effort at casual maintenance. It would most likely stand for years, possibly the rest of my life, because during our field trip ten high school boys had dragged a stockade’s worth of driftwood off the beach, and built the fort high up in the dunes, in the perfect spot, sheltered from super storms, high tides and bonfire vandals.

No, this fort would not vanish. In the coming years, I would enlist it as a private reminder of my good Oregon work as a teacher, a memory that had vanished from most people’s minds. I suppose evanescence works both ways.

I gave the fort a final glance, took the trail into the dunes and along the jetty. I’d taken it 300 times or so since moving to Astoria, many times with Sonny, but this was the last time. This manipulated magical place near the entrance of one of the mightiest and wrecked watersheds on the continent had offered up so much inspiration and so many stories, but it was dead to me forever.

But on this last visit, I got the ending for my book.

Then I looked toward the ocean and down to the beach. I saw something, a kind of blob, moving west toward the water. Moving was the wrong word; flailing was a better description. What the hell?

I climbed atop a flat rock of the jetty for a better view. It was a harbor seal pup, gray and splayed in the sand, struggling to reach the ocean, well over 500 yards away, and the sun was coming out.

It wasn’t going to make it.

My book’s ending changed right there.

Russians at the Jetty

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Fog enveloped the South Jetty on Sunday morning at dawn. A clam chowder fog. Not a fake chowder one from Sysco, but a real one harvested by OTA men nipping Crown Royal from flasks and armed with duct-taped clam guns.

I walked north through the sand and dune grass to the Columbia River on one of the lowest tides of the year. I couldn’t see a damn thing but I knew I would find her.

No human was within a mile of me. A single gull matched my pace. I like gulls a lot. They don’t talk or text at the beach. I threw my feathered friend a strawberry for good luck and he veered off to feast.

Walking, walking, walking, north, north, north, walking parallel to the mighty 30-foot black jetty, a rock fortress of hubris meant to rearrange nature. It has worked. It won’t forever. Oh, to see the day when the real estuary returns! I’ll be dead by then and glad of it. But the real estuary will return one day, a reckoning of astonishing proportions, the sort of reckoning that becomes a legend told in solemn tones round the beach bonfire with frosty cans of Rainier and a driftwood peace pipe sending wisps of wisdom into the night.

I found the river’s edge. I damn near walked to Washington. I couldn’t see 20 yards in any direction.

Ideas came to me. I formulated formulas for rebirth and a kick-ass detective novel. I took notes!

I kept walking. I would parallel the South Jetty back into the park until I couldn’t parallel anymore.

A quarter mile later, a thin man appeared in the fog. He was standing atop the jetty, searching for a way down to the beach, on the ocean side. He smoked a cigarette with his right hand and clutched a white bucket with his left. I moved toward him and inspected his features: definitely Russian. How did I surmise his nationality? I’ve seen a lot of Russians with buckets and cigarettes on Oregon Coast beaches in 20 years, and here was another one and his presence utterly delighted me.

A woman emerged from a trail and joined the man. She was carrying a rake. She looked as if she had just walked out of Tolstoy or Chekhov, the whole Russian peasant woman thing: long dress, stocky build, hunched, head covering, the 19th century works.

The man turned to her, spoke some Russian, and pointed a path through the slick, jagged rocks. They came together and started making their way down to the beach. She held the rake upright over her left shoulder like one of the Czar’s soldiers marching with a musket to save Moscow from Napoleon.

The Russians were off to hunt mussels encrusted on the jetty’s rocks, exposed by the extreme low tide. She would rake and he would smoke. Later, there might be vodka.

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Finding Inspiration

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I seek inspiration to transcend. I look for it everywhere When I am not looking, it bumps into me or flies overhead.

In recent months I have found inspiration in:

Fog at low tide

A Russian couple hunting for mussels at the South Jetty

Two old dogs named Bonnie and Clyde

Rivers

Foxgloves

Thin Lizzy’s “The Cowboy Song”

Bob Seger’s “Strut”

Eating radishes from the garden

The writings of Rachel Carson

The cheap crispness of a frosty Rainier on a 85-degree day.

Driftwood forts

Counting tree rings

A battered bald eagle

A 1976 book about the Chinook Indians that is the best book about the Columbia River I have eve read

Flying the Oregon state flag with a stick of beaverwood as a pole

Scenes from the ancient basketball movie, One on One

A stranded sea lion pup who fought for life

Friends who help me with my yard

A friend who found me a toy boat

A friend who gave me magic healing potions

A friend who gave me a boss zip-up hoodie emblazoned with the logo of a local butcher shop

Flywheel mowers

A former student who sought help in writing a eulogy for his best friend

A friend who keeps writing me letters worthy of being called literature and will be visiting very soon

People and artists who live utterly different and are not derivative in their art or personalities

An elderly man who will give me a chance

A $52.46 royalty payment from Amazon

Godfather’s Books

Readers who still seek out my books

People who still want to take writing classes from me

People already gearing up to go to work in 2018 to reclaim the country

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