For weeks a CD of Dusty Springfield’s soul album Dusty in Memphis rode shotgun with me. I’d scored this silky torch classic in Goodwill for $1.99 and was waiting for the perfect time to listen to it while driving. I’d heard a few songs off this record over the decades, but never listened to it straight through, the way this album was supposed to be listened upon its release in 1969.

But what constituted the perfect time? I would know it when I knew it.

Elmer and I pulled out of the Sunset Bay State Campground at approximately 7:30 on a Saturday morning in September. We were heading home after a weekend of camping and reconnoitering the Coos Bay area.

Earlier we’d walked to the beach with my flashlight leading the way. As soon as we hit the wet sand, we began zigging and zagging, dodging kelp. The stars were out. Not a single other human being. Bliss.

Then I saw headlights from a road above the beach that led to the parking lot of the wayside. A beater sedan turned onto a ramp that led to the beach where it is illegal to drive. The ramp is used to offload kayaks.

Elmer and I turned around and I directed my flashlight toward the sedan so the asshole knew I was there.

But the sedan did not drive down the beach. It left the ramp and got stuck! The driver gunned it a few times. Nothing doing. He gave up for the moment.

By this time I was sitting on a log taking this all in with Elmer at my side. Layers of light gray began appearing in the sky.

Then a woman with long hair got out of the passenger side, took off her top, and started playing with her breasts and dancing as the headlights lit her up. All the while she was filming it with a phone.

The woman returned to the sedan. The driver gunned it again and made it onto the ramp and over to the parking lot. There, the woman took off her clothes and danced in front of the cinderblock restroom while the driver turned the headlights on and off like a strobe light.

She filmed her performance.

It was one of my weirder encounters on Oregon’s socialist ocean beaches, but certainly didn’t crack the top five. What’s ever going to beat the young man pretending he was Jesus on the road to Golgotha, carrying a driftwood cross and wearing a crown of seaweed?

The sky was layered in orange and blue as we left the campground, but one star still shined. I could smell the ocean. Towering cedars, hemlocks, and Sitka spruces waved in the breeze. My mood soared. My mind drifted toward my brief, unexpected encounter with a fellow camper in the campground—a real seeker an artist of the type that often gravitate toward the Oregon Coast and the old sound of the ocean and execute all sorts of magic within themselves and their communities.

Now was the time to listen to Dusty in Memphis. I put the CD in and track one, “Just a Little Lovin’” started dreaming out of the speakers:

Just a little lovin’ early in the mornin’
Beats a cup of coffee for starting off the day
Just a little lovin’ when the world is yawnin’
Makes you wake up feeling good things are coming your way

The 2:14 song was just ending when I spotted my first homeless person of the day, right outside of Charleston. A bedraggled man carrying bags emerged from a recent logging operation. Two deer grazed 30 yards to his left.

I’d never seen deer in the presence of the homeless. It braced me. It was not surreal. It was simply begging for an artist to paint a massive oil painting of the scene, in thick dark hues, a real Rembrandt, but of course without the opulence.

Track two, “So Much Love” began playing. I turned up Dusty.

In the midst of all my darkness, baby
You came along to guide me
You took pity on a lonely girl
When you said you’d stand beside me
I’ll never forget you for what you’ve done
I’ll never turn my back on you for anyone

We drove into the seafood processing village of Charleston, easily one of the rankest and grittiest places in Oregon and home of the most dilapidated RV park in the state. The entire park is a somewhat beautiful, seedy and utterly bizarre moldering and rusting ruin in progress that should interest a filmmaker to make a documentary about it. I’ve wanted to write a novel about this place for years.

On the drawbridge bridge that traverses the South Slough of Coos Bay, a homeless man staggered west down the sidewalk. Staggering east was a homeless woman. They carried bundles of possessions and looked exhausted. They merely had to look west or east for two of the best scenic views on the Oregon Coast.

Do homeless people think about such vistas as they struggle to survive?

Some do. When I lived at the Oregon Coast for so many years, I saw homeless people admire sunsets at the beach all the time. They made the effort to get down there.

Dusty was grooving the chorus on track four, “Son of Preacher Man,” when we approached the Empire District of Coos Bay, and its tiny Dairy Queen shack with incredible views of the bay. What a place to watch an estuary while drinking a milkshake!

The only one who could ever reach me
Was the son of a preacher man
The only boy who could ever teach me
Was the son of a preacher man
Yes, he was, he was
Ooh, yes, he was

Homeless men and women were on the move and not going anywhere along the main drag. Some were splayed, some leaned against boarded-up storefronts. A few had dogs. Almost everyone had some kind of jury-rigged means of transportation for transportation or to convey cans and bottles.

Dusty’s crooning provided the soundtrack to my observations. It did not jell. I tried figuring out the meaning of the juxtaposition of her magisterial smoky and sexy voice from over a half century ago and these current images of homelessness right outside my window.

This figuring out may have constituted an act of surrealism on my part.

Nothing came to me. Absolutely nothing.

Elmer and I cruised out of Empire and headed east into the heart of Coos Bay and North Bend. By now, track six, “Breakfast in Bed,” was dripping out of the speakers the way honey pours out when you squeeze the plastic bear.

You’ve been cryin’

Your face is a mess

Come in baby

You can dry the tears on my dress

She’s hurt you again

I can tell

Oh, I know that look so well

Homeless people were shuffling along both sides of the main drag that splits Coos Bay and North Bend. One man looked 80 years old or older. One man looked like Willie Nelson. I saw a couple roll up the door to their storage unit. I was stopped at a red light and could see clearly they were living out of the unit, something that isn’t uncommon since we have many more storage spaces (many heated) available for quasi housing rather than actual affordable housing.

By the time we neared the cinema complex, track 11, “I Can’t Make it Alone” was playing and Dusty was breaking my heart:

I’ve tried and I know I can’t make it alone
It’s such a hard way to go
I just can’t make it alone
There’s something in my soul
That will always
Lead me back to you

The complex’s sign advertised “Reagan” as one of the movies. The new bio pic starred Dennis Quaid. Under the sign, several homeless people congregated, smoking and drinking coffee. They had multiple shopping carts laden with possessions around them. This juxtaposition wasn’t funny but I laughed because I knew Ronald Reagan’s presidency was where the current homeless crisis in America truly began.

Did you know that one of Reagan’s first official acts was to order the VA to shut down the street level outreach centers serving the alarming number of Vietnam War veterans who were showing up homeless on the streets of major American cities five years after the war ended? I bet that didn’t make it into the film.

And how did I know this revealing tidbit of Reagan’s atrociously callous presidency?

I remembered it from my research paper about Vietnam War veteran homelessness written my senior year of high school in 1982!

Elmer and I kept cruising and kept passing homeless men and women in various states of disrepair. By now Dusty in Memphis had come to an end. Why not hear it again? Maybe I would make sense of Dusty’s songs of love and loss merging with what I had observed of our broken culture breaking right in front of me. Maybe there was no way to make sense of it. Maybe at some point I would turn off Dusty and tune to Save Me Jesus Radio and listen to their solutions, like voting for Trump.

We finally reached Highway 101 and stopped at a red light before turning north.

To my left, a young homeless woman sat on a bench with a golden retriever and backpack at her side. She smoked a cigarette and stared at the sky.

Straight ahead, a group of homeless men walked up from the port of Coos Bay. Two of them carried fishing poles.

A muggy darkness tinged with wildfire smoke and the scent of skunk spray enveloped Elmer the husky and I as we walked down a sidewalk toward the park to being our day.

I carried with me a thousand page history of the world intended for a street library. I’d read it 20 years ago when it first appeared and perused it recently again. When you read sweeping histories like this it all comes down to a single main point—every empire vanishes. There are no exceptions. The reasons may differ, but they always end, sometimes in silence, some even without a historical report.

How will the American empire end? Yes, I think about such things on my walks with Elmer.

Elmer stopped abruptly. Something was massed ahead of us in the middle of the sidewalk three doors down from our home. The dog didn’t bark, but he did go on alert status.

What was it? I inched us forward and then visually dissected the mass: a man wearing a tank top and shorts half way down his ass was curled in a fetal position and not moving. His scooter was toppled in the front lawn of a million dollar home. Two full black garbage bags and a backpack rested near him. I deduced he was riding the scooter and then simply passed out or his heart or brain blew up.

He’s dead, I thought. I always knew this discovery was coming in my encounters with the homeless.

I had no phone with me. I could have returned to the house and phoned it in. I did not. I pulled Elmer around the mass and we kept walking to the park. No welfare check of any kind.

A block later, I felt overwhelmed by a crushing lack of citizenship. I considered turning around. I did not.

These are the times that try my soul like nothing I’ve ever experienced in life.

We made it to the park. Light still hadn’t risen. We paralleled the lawn bowling field. I glanced that direction and saw a coyote standing motionless in the middle of the lawn. He was somewhat lit up by a street lamp. Elmer and I came to a halt. I told him to check out the coyote. He didn’t seem to notice anything. I kept watching the coyote and it didn’t move. I clanged the fence and shouted hello! Nothing.

Over the years of my Oregon life, I have observed coyotes remain motionless for minutes, watching me and whatever dog I rambled with across the woods, dunes, headlands, beaches and twice in this very city park.

They have always outlasted me in staring contests.

Several times during these moments I have divined a message from the coyote, something in a language one writer described as “older than words.”

I have always acted upon these messages and the results have always ended with positive outcomes.

You scoff? I was a preacher’s kid and divined absolutely nothing from God in my many years sitting in a pew. What I did divine was that my ass hurt and I wanted to get home and watch an NFL game.

You double scoff? The indigenous peoples of North America were receiving messages from coyotes millenniums before Christianity and turning them into far more entertaining creation stories than anything found in the Bible.

So there the coyote stood on the manicured grass of the lawn bowling field and…go back to the man; render aid!

Yes, coyotes can deliver messages with ellipses, exclamation points, and, on extraordinary occasions, semi colons! You haven’t lived until you’ve received a message from a coyote with a semi colon it.

Elmer and I circled around the park back to man. Darkness still prevailed. I had no idea my course of action. Rendering aid to homeless people in my experience is very much about winging it.

We went up to him. The man remained in the position we’d left him I could now discern his face—maybe in his 40s or 50s?

“Are you okay,” I said from five feet away.

The man roused and turned my direction.

“Yes. I’m fine,” he said in a Eastern European accent I couldn’t place.

“Can I get you some water?”

“No, but thanks.”

“You might want to move off the sidewalk. Someone could bicycle right over you.”

“Okay.”

He rolled over and out of the way.

“Hang in there,” I said.

“Thank you,” he said.

Elmer and I walked away. An hour later, after loading him up in the car for a visit to the dog park, I looked down the sidewalk where the man had been splayed.

Gone and nothing left behind.