Dad was dead, gone, and I was feeling dazed and depressed.

Elmer the husky to the rescue!

I reclined on the couch, not reading or writing, just thinking about my new path. Outside, the sunlight blasted through patches of clouds.

Elmer came up to me, inches from my face and began barking.

Get off your ass! You got to move!

Fifteen minutes later we cruised through the park and I saw a man of indeterminate age sorting through a substantial collection of rocks resting on a picnic table.

He exuded the unmistakable vibe of homelessness, but a homeless rock hound?

Elmer and I moved closer to spy. I looked toward the street and saw an ancient and battered station wagon crammed full of possessions and totes. A homeless domicile for sure.

Totes = storage for rocks. The man had carried the totes over to the picnic table, unloaded his collection of rocks, and then returned the totes to his vehicle.

Elmer and I stopped some 30 feet away from the man. We were somewhat behind him so he couldn’t see me watch him sort and admire his collection, some the size of bowling balls.

In the course of writing about homelessness in Oregon, I have seen many a bizarre sight, but the homeless rock hound ranked among the most bizarre.

Or perhaps it wasn’t so bizarre. Perhaps it was a man holding on to a cherished collection and that aided his survival. Maybe it was like having a dog in your life.

At some point, the man would retrieve the totes, load up his rocks, and carry the weight back to his vehicle. Then where would he go?

I could have asked a million more questions of the man and his collection, but Elmer and I walked away.

Dad died about a month ago. As the appointed personal representative to oversee his estate, I have been handling that task with alacrity, as he would have wanted. The duties are considerable and somewhat complicated. The process is slow and compound by the sluggish nature of others involved.

His service at the veteran’s cemetery is in two weeks. It will be short, as he desired: military honors, three poems. No testimonials. No religious invocations. Toward the end of his life, poetry mattered to him a lot more than Christianity. There were truer answers and observations in the poems he recited to me than all the verses in the Bible he knew by memory.

Sometimes I drive by his assisted living center and mistakenly turn into the parking lot. Visiting him there almost daily for almost three three years was the central part of my life. It’s been strange not performing that service anymore.

While clearing out some drawers I found a bundle of his sermons from the early 1960s. Fascinating reading and deep look into his mind and faith at that time. But all of that changed for him when reality hit for him a decade later and his thinking evolved.

I plan on relocating back to the Oregon Coast in several months and start a new phase of my life. The plan is to find the grittiest community because I want that in a community and it’s all I can afford. It will be wonderful to reconnect with the ocean on a daily basis and run Elmer the maniacal husky for hours and hours and hours. Who knows what great notions will emerge from that experience. And it’s high time I started building driftwood forts again.

I will know absolutely no one wherever I move. But as my dad counseled me decades ago when I first moved to the Oregon Coast: you make friends where you are.

Amen to that.

Elmer the husky and I strolled through a park with fantastic views of the Willamette River and resplendent with century-old Douglas firs and Oregon white oaks.

It was a late morning and dry.

Looking down a slope, I saw two bicycles of decidedly the homeless type leaning unattended against a picnic table. One backpack rested on the table.

Something to the right, up the slope, caught my eye. It was two homeless men, one white, one black, roughly 40 years of age, standing less than a foot away from an oak. Both men had one hand placed on the tree as if they were giving it a physical examination or performing a Vulcan mind meld.

This was a first for me in my countless observations of the homeless in Oregon. There are always new firsts.

The white man was holding a can that bore the unmistakable resemblance of either malt liquor or hard lemonade.

Elmer and I moved closer.

The white man was discoursing on the properties of the particular oak they were touching. I caught drifts of his lecture, if lecture is the word. He was clearly an expert—perhaps self taught from growing up on a Willamette Valley farm or a horticulture program in the Oregon State Penitentiary. Perhaps he was trained on the job. He might have even once been a former professional arborist. Any story is possible, at least with the homeless men and women I meet. I have long stopped stereotyping them or making assumptions.

They moved away from the oak and started walking toward the picnic table and bicycles. The white man saw me and said good morning and I said the same thing to him. They passed us and a few steps later, stopped at another oak, laid hands upon it, and the white man began another lecture. I saw him trace the grooves in the trunk with a finger.

Elmer began sniffing and maneuvering to take a possible Mike Johnson. I watched the men.

The white man continued to place his hand on the tree as he sipped his hard lemonade. The word oracle popped into my mind. Perhaps the oak was an oracle of some kind to the man. The Druids used to worship trees. We’d most definitely be a lot better off as a species if that tradition had continued.

The men soon left the tree and walked to the table. They sat down on it and began talking, presumably about oak trees, their lore and secrets. The men shared the hard lemonade as they talked.

I dearly wanted to join their conversation.

The Mike Johnson was a no go and Elmer tugged me out of my stance and we went on our way.

A recent reading of Fame and Obscurity, a collection of Gay Talese’s magazine profiles has caused some serious reflection about my writing about the homeless.

Talese was one of the early practitioners of the uniquely American non fiction writing style called New Journalism. Basically, the style was defined by its liberal use of fictional techniques to tell real stories.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote was the book that made the style famous (billed as a non fiction novel) and it was also used by Joan Didion, Lillian Ross, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and many more writers.

Fame and Obscurity was published in 1970 and among its profiles were Frank Sinatra turning 50, Peter O’Toole at 30, Joe DiMaggio at 60. Talese was also masterful at capturing the odd jobs performed by New Yorkers during that era.

Talese would spend significant time with his subjects, sometimes a month or so, and was strictly observational (unlike Thompson) and never inserted himself into the narrative, let alone drive it (unlike Mailer). He was the fly on the wall who heard it all.

My point in writing this reflection is that lately (even before reading this book) I have been pondering my style when it comes to writing about homeless. Has it gone stale? Are the vignettes I post superficial in the treatment of people in extreme distress?

Some thoughts:

Talese’s subjects knew he was writing about them, whether they were celebrities or not. My subjects almost never know I’m writing about them. None are celebrities.

Talese had the luxury of observing his subjects interact with others over an extended period of time. With the exception of the members of the Old Crow Book Club, whom I interacted with on almost a daily basis for well over a year, all my meetings and observations last, minutes, seconds. Is that enough time? I guess you could what I’m doing is writing sketches, a popular 18^th and 19^th genre that appeared in magazines and newspapers. Is it a frivolous approach?

I will say my form of New Journalism, if that’s the word for it, has helped two people get into housing.

What we need, I think, to improve the journalism about the homeless is more follow-up to the initial reporting. You never see that in Street Roots, the weekly newspaper advocating for the homeless. In fact, they have no deep feature writing about the homeless (although they do about the dense and confusing policies addressing the crisis). It’s damn hard work to follow up on any story and takes weeks and endless legwork. Also remember, Talese and the New Journalism crowd were the highest paid non fiction writers from that era. They could make a living from it, get book contracts, and sell movie rights.

I don’t know where I am going with all this. It is important to me to occasionally check in with myself about my approaches to writing on a subject.

What I would like to do with my future writing on the subject is something similar I did with the book club: regular interactions with a group of homeless people where I can observe and participate and try and find some deeper meaning than just these ephemeral moments of extraordinary agony, pathos or the plain old bizarre.

This is what reading Fame and Obscurity did for me. And I found it for 99 cents in a Presbyterian church thrift store.