Oregon On My Mind (Part 5)

NSP Meditations, Sports

Not too long ago, I sat at the bar at my local watering hole, finishing my Oregon IPA. It was a pretty much dead Friday afternoon and some vintage soul drifted through the speakers while Fargo played silently on television.

To my right three stools away, a vaguely 40ish woman with arms covered in tattoos drank a cocktail and fiddled on her phone.

I was about ready to depart when the bartender asked me if I had summer travel plans. I said I might visit the Coos Bay area. I liked it a lot better than the suburban amusement parks of Cannon Beach or Manzanita. I liked the grittiness of the place and there with still functioning Oregon Tavern Age joints where customers still told stories about drinkin, tokin, fightin, loggin, muddin, fishin, home improvement, and how occasionally an osprey accidentally dropped an eel or salmon on their property and they would promptly fry it up for supper.

A few seconds after I ended my praise of Coos Bay, the woman down the bar turned to me and said, “I’m from Coos Bay!” and said it with gusto and pride.

She got up and sat a few stools closer to me. Another drink materialized in front of her and she guzzled it. I got the distinct impression she wanted to talk about Coos Bay and I love talking about Coos Bay, especially to a refugee from the place, so let’s talk!

In short order, I learned she’d grown up there and dropped out of high school in the 90s at the age of 13. She partied hard in the dunes and clearcuts. She escaped to the Willamette Valley and eventually landed in Portland, but had recently entertained the idea of returning to her hometown and starting over; she was through with Portland. Her life was going nowhere and she was on her third cocktail in the early afternoon.

I said I wanted to relocate to somewhere to that area when my Portland days conclude, whenever that might be.

Yes, when will that be?

I then asked if she was familiar with Steve Prefontaine, the legendary Oregon distance runner who grew in Coos Bay and attended Marshfield High School and later the University of Oregon and shattered every long distance record at both levels.

She look at me as if I just proven the existence of Santa Claus. Her face erupted in smile. She finished her drink. Why not another one?

Hell yes, she knew about Steven Prefontaine! She’d competed in the Steve Prefontaine Memorial Run several times in her youth! It was a 10k event held in September with also a 2k fun run but she always took on the longer mileage.

I tried imagining her as a kid poised to take off at the crack of the gun and follow Pre’s indomitable legacy and I wasn’t imagining it too well with her hitting the sauce hard and generally seeming displaced and disjointed in her world.

I asked her if she’d ever visited the Prefontaine Memorial Gallery in the Coos Art Museum. It’s a one-room shrine to the greatest athlete in Oregon history and the most hallowed and inspiring American place I’ve ever visited and that includes the Pennsylvania State House where the slaveholders signed the Declaration of Independence and the Lincoln Memorial.

She said she’d never heard of it. What? I told her she had to go, immediately! I said it can help get your life turned around in ways conventional, cornpone and expensive therapy can only dream about and I knew that from personal experience.

She was intrigued. I told her about the guest register that visitors to the gallery sign into and record their feelings about Pre. I’ve read through various volumes over the years and it’s easily the greatest spontaneous testament to an individual sporting life that exists in American history that I am aware of. I said she had to sign in and share her thoughts. The very act of writing it in longhand could very well spark a revolution in her troubled spirit, although I didn’t say “troubled” but she got the idea.

I do know when I start talking to someone about something uniquely Oregon, like Pre or Vortex I or Matt Kramer or Conde McCullough’s coastal bridges or the state’s socialist ocean beaches or driftwood forts, I tend to get that person very, very fired up. Shit, I fire myself up!

It was time to go. I told her to get her ass to Coos Bay and the gallery. She said she would. Then she went back to her phone and I could tell she was looking up the gallery.

In the past, some have called me Dr. Love and my prescription for a better life has always been the same: Oregon, Oregon, Oregon. And I take my medicine as often as I can. It once saved my life.

Oregon On My Mind (Part 4)

NSP Meditations

A front page story about the death of a Portland homeless man appeared in the Saturday, July 29th edition of the NY Times. The headline read: “A Homeless Crisis is a test of Portland’s Identity.”

To summarize, a downtown fentanyl addict, a homeless young man, was befriended by a young man who worked as a paramedic and lived in nice apartment in the neighborhood where the addict lived on the streets. The young man tried to help the homeless man, as did others, but the addict eventually overdosed and died.

It was a sensitive and heartbreaking feature and the focus on one person who died was an interesting editorial approach. But there were so many questions the reporter could have asked, but did not. For example, he should have asked the young man who was trying to help the addict: did you ever ask about his drug abuse?

I know from personal experience with members of the Old Crow Club that once trust is established with homeless people, at least the ones I’ve been around, it is acceptable, even required to ask this question of someone you are trying to help so you can determine what level that person can reciprocate. If they can’t reciprocate in some meaningful way, the help probably isn’t going to work. This is something that is never discussed in the homeless advocacy media, because, I believe, they think it smacks of judgment and paternalism. Bullshit!

It took me a long time to get there with the homeless men and women in my neighborhood. The book had to come out before I go deeper. Now it seems perfectly natural to do so.

A recent encounter with the homeless, however, did not provide me a way to go deeper because it simply wasn’t possible.

The encounter went like this: a few days ago, on my morning walk through the park with my neighbor’s kooky rescue mutt, we rounded a corner and approached a baseball diamond when from a distance, I saw two people on a strip of grass next to a parking lot. One was sitting, the other standing. Scattered around them were possessions, including a large cooler and bike.

Naturally I steered the dog in the direction of the couple because that’s what I do every time I see homeless people.

As I approached, I determined it was a man who was standing and a woman who was sitting. The woman was youngish, cream-colored in the face with long frizzy hair. The man was short and appeared identical to the indigenous people of Mexico I observed decades ago on my travels in Central Mexico.

The woman saw me, waved and said hello with gusto and a big smile. I stopped ten feet away from her and the dog came to a perfect heel and stared at the woman.

It was then I noticed that she wore a black blanket over her shoulders that didn’t really hide her ruffled pink bra. The man didn’t say anything but had a pleasant face and a parted head of big hair straight out of the 70s.

The possessions around them made no sense. There weren’t any clothes or food. It was mostly children’s toys and, well, unknown shit.

I saw the woman’s arms covered in symbols and lettering, written with a Sharpie.

She asked me to call an emergency number that I didn’t catch. She said her sister had been with her at this very spot two hours ago. Then a man in a van who was an undercover cop picked her up and whisked her away to do drugs and have sex. He’d also stolen the sitting woman’s phone. She asked the standing man to confirm the incident and he did.

I asked her questions about the man in the van and who or what organization I was supposed to call (I didn’t have my phone on me). She answered me but the answers made no sense. She said she was a volunteer fire fighter and pointed to something standing upright next to her that I had inexplicably failed to notice: a brand new fire extinguisher, industrial grade, not some home office thing. She said she put out fires around town with it. Mostly downtown, but she was through with downtown and that’s why she had relocated to the neighborhood.

Every once and a while, I looked at the dog look at the woman and man. He was utterly confused but remained motionless and didn’t utter a sound. As John Steinbeck once wrote about dogs, “Who said the thoughts of dogs are not deep?” (This is a crude paraphrase from a line in Travels With the Charley.)

I told her I had to get going and wished her a good day. As I was ready to depart, she complimented the dog’s orange color and my Western shirt. Why is that so many homeless people like my Western shirts and corduroy outfits? This is a great, great mystery to me.

Oregon On My Mind (Part 3)

NSP Meditations

Let me now turn to Portland, and the famous downtown fountain/statue of an elk that miscreants inexplicably vandalized during the summer 2020 BLM protests that quickly devolved into something else but Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was too chickenshit to do anything about it, as was then Governor Kate Brown.

I can see tearing down or spray painting Harvey Scott or Teddy Roosevelt, but an elk! The elk of of Oregon! My favorite statue in Oregon! It really was the last straw for many progressive Oregonians.

So city officials whisked the defaced statue away, put it in storage,

and

…

…

Three years later, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I’ll spare you the details of this colossal administrative incompetence. The elk should have been put back up in its original fucking position, with the same fucking fountain, on the same fucking street grid, within a month after the protests ended! One fucking month! It wasn’t that fucking hard!

That the elk is still in storage and Portland bureaucrats do whatever it is they do in Portland these days, is the perfect shitty symbol of the total ineptitude of Portland and Multnomah County governing, and this comes from someone who believes in progressive governing. But like so many Oregonians today, there is no confidence in completing even a singular task like re-erecting a statue that wasn’t even all that damaged, just spray painted. Christ, five Eagle scouts from Molalla could have it back on line in a days!

Who is the one city commissioner charged with getting the elk back out there? They should be harangued non-stop and made to suffer the political consequences. Just an elk you say?

No, no, no. So much more. Erect the elk and invite Portlanders to rejoice. Throw a party with music and juggling and beer and weed. You want to bring back downtown, go full on elk! It’s so obvious a way to create dynamic energy for restoring the area.

Oregon On My Mind (Part 2)

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History, Pioneer Pride

Not too long I paid a visit to my hometown, Oregon City, and naturally I took a stroll along the Promenade that overlooks downtown, the Willamette River, Conde McCullough’s first beautiful bridge and the old paper mill.

To the north, traffic crawled across the second ugliest bridge in Oregon, the Abernathy I-205 monstrosity. The ugliest is the Glenn Jackson-205 span across the Columbia River. I’m glad Conde wasn’t alive to see them built.

I truly love this place and once visited it with one of the great loves of my life. She’s gone and I blew it.

I still can’t believe none of my teachers from my old high school up the hill from the Promenade ever walked their social studies or creative writing classes to this magisterial spot. We could easily made it down here in back in one period.

Pure 3-D Oregon history exists here, the grandest outdoor historical theater in the state if not the region. Conde’s bridge, salmon, the CCC boys, sturgeon, the OC Elevator, log booms (back then)Willamette Falls, Native Americans, dams, mills, pioneers, etc.

But no, I was back in class with American history textbooks and videos of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

One day I want to stroll the Promenade and see and hear the Willamette Falls drop freely. I want all the concrete poured around it removed. It might happen in my lifetime. Plans by the Grande Ronde Tribe, who own the old Oregon City mill site are slowly dismantling it, but it doesn’t feel fast enough.

I also hope to see Celilo Falls uncovered, resurrected. That’s even a longer shot, but it will happen one day and then a grotesque act of cultural genocide that occurred in 1957 with the completion of the Dalles Dam will somewhat be rectified.

Someone needs to immortalize Oregon City in modern Oregon literature. It’s not going to be me. I’m not capable of it.

There is one thing definitely wrong with the north end of the Promenade. One of Oregon’s congressional representatives, from the 5th District which encompasses my hometown, recently elected Lori Chavez-DeRemer, a Trumpian Republican, has an office on this sacred public place. A Trumpian who’s dumber than a clearcut stump! This cannot stand! Whoever she runs against in 2024 in the general election, I will work full time for free.

I took a peek inside the Elevator but didn’t ride it. The Elevator was the name of my high school newspaper I wrote for with extraordinary zeal. That paper is long gone.

Speaking of writing, the office of my orthodontist was on the Promenade in the 70s and 80s. There was a dental hygienist who worked there back in the day who looked almost exactly like Farrah Fawcett in her Charlie’s Angels heyday. I had a spectacular crush on her as a junior high kid. I later wrote about this crush (in the third person!) and it was published in my high school literary review. It was was my first piece of creative writing ever published.

Oregon On My Mind (Part 1)

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

I’ve got a lot of Oregon on my mind and I want to share my thoughts on my favorite subject to write about:

The University of Oregon increased the salary of its head football coach from $4.7 million to $7 million annually with an additional $200,000 every year until the contract expires in 2029. He will also receive $1 million in deferred compensation if he remains head coach through the length of the contract. The university offered this new contract to a mediocre, if not awful in-game coach who lost to OSU after leading by four touchdowns!

This new contract came approximately a week before the announcement that the University of Oregon is leaving the Pac-12 Conference to join the Big Ten in 2024. Surely the Oregon Legislature will pass a bill and the Governor will sign it into law that requires Oregon and Oregon State to play a football game every season. If not, an initiative drive should be begin immediately. I think it would pass by a 90-point margin. On the other hand, who gives a shit. It certainly doesn’t affect me or anything meaningful in the state. The extra television revenue does keep a lot of people lavishly employed in the athletic department and that’s what it’s all about.

We really have lost our way in this state if the University of Oregon can leave the Pac 12 for nothing but money. Yes, bring on Rutgers versus Oregon but not Oregon State versus Washington State.

Private donors raised millions to pay the Duck football coach more and who are these people to that dole out such obscene largess for a medicare football coach who hasn’t uttered a single original word at a press conference? How does this enrich their souls?

Two days later after the coach’s pay raise, the Oregonian reported that a program in Multnomah County that houses low-income families has almost run out of money and 200 people, including children, might be out on the streets soon.

Of course it’s two different pots of money, but really is it? It’s the wealth of a state not going for the good of the state.

Governor Kotek recently signed a bill into law that allows all Oregonians to pump their own gasoline, something we haven’t been able to do since 1951. I DON’T WANT TO PUMP MY OWN GAS EVER! Thankfully, the law stipulates that gas stations in the most populated counties must have an attendant onsite to dispense fuel if a customer prefers that option. AND I AWAYS WILL! The price per gallon must remain the same for self serve or full serve. I love talking to attendants and get the lay of the land. I sometimes tip them if I get my windshield cleaned. They know things about a town that Google will never know. They tell stories. They remark about the weather or my corduroy car coat.

In recent days I’ve had the good fortune to come across some ripened blackberries on my walks and I picked and ate them right there in the early morning. I have yet to see a homeless person eat any blackberries, and that surprises me. It would seem obvious to do so. Thimbleberries, too. I saw some ripe thimbelberries near a wetland down by the river and it reminded me of all the ones I used to harvest when I was caretaker of the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. I made a compote from my haul and then used it to marinate salmon. Incredible. I may have to try and recreate that recipe with city thimbleberries.

I haven’t visited the refuge since I left in March 2008. I need to go back up there and see the thousands of trees I planted. It’s time.

An Oregon City Legend

NSP Meditations, Pioneer Pride

After spending an afternoon at the library reading the current edition of The Atlantic, and trying not to lose my cool over the unceasing noises generated by employees and patrons to the point of making a formal complaint, I retired to a local dive for a beer. Can’t people shut up in libraries anymore?

I entered the joint and walked up to the bar. Three plates of chocolate cake with green icing graced the counter. The bartender informed me someone was having a birthday party. Did I want a slice?

No, I certainly did not. Beer does not go with cake. Crown Royal perhaps.

I ordered a local IPA and sat near my usual table because it was occupied by a woman drinking a pink cocktail and playing on her phone.

Hits from the 70s and 80s played over the PA. Duran Duran didn’t sound half bad.

Little League baseball played on television and the kids kept muffing ground balls while everyone in the stands watching them were watching their phones.

Zombies worked the slot machines. Three people sat at the bark and worked their phones.

I had brought along my notebook and thought I might write a letter or some drivel.

Inspiration wasn’t forthcoming.

I wished for the appearance of a homeless man or woman, which typically happens here. They always liven up the joint in ways people fiddling on their phones never can.

It was a weekday afternoon. I felt listless. I reflected on the morning’s news that a friend from high school was almost dead from pancreatic cancer. In fact, he was probably dead as I sipped my beer and eavesdropped on the woman’s conversation about caring for her truculent mother in a manufactured home somewhere in a nearby rural area. It wasn’t going well and she wanted out.

My dead classmate was a legend at Oregon City High School, a true daredevil who had ridden a motorcycle or climbed over the arch of the Conde McCullough arch bridge in downtown Oregon City, who had run the Seaside Marathon in Chuck Taylor’s after a night of drinking, and so on and so forth. The stories were legion and I didn’t a tenth of them.

I once bicycled the Oregon Coast in the early 90swith him and three other guys and I saw this madman sneak in behind a full log truck barreling down a steep grade somewhere just north of Coos Bay and draft inches behind the truck. He must have been going 70 miles an hour and was screaming like a berserker the whole time.

Rest in peace Steve Connolly. You were a true Oregon original and sucked all the marrow out of life.

I finished my beer and left. Outside a homeless man and woman sat at picnic tables and played on their phones as a dog looked on.

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