Henk Pander and Tom McCall (Part 1)

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History , ,

The great Dutch/Oregon painter Henk Pander died a week ago. The tributes poured in as they should have,

I knew Henk. We collaborated. One of his paintings of an Eastern Oregon landscape adorns the cover of my Oregon sesquicentennial anthology, Citadel of the Spirit. I ended up buying the painting. Henk also contributed a wonderful essay to that project. I wish I still owned that painting but unfortunately I gave it away in a moment of crisis.

Henk is well known for may artistic achievements, but my favorite painting is the super-sized, monumental, psychedelic, antediluvian portrait of legendary Oregon Governor Tom McCall on display in the Capitol. There undoubtedly isn’t another official portrait like it in all America.

I had seen the portrait several years before I met Henk. It staggered me so much at the initial viewing that I researched the painting and wrote a two-part column about it for a magazine. Part of that research included visiting Henk’s studio in Portland, which I rate as one of the highlights of my writing career. It was there that I saw the painting that was the cover of the anthology a couple years later.

Sadly, the story of the portrait was typed on a computer that gave up the ghost a long time ago and the file was partially corrupted. I was only able to retrieve the first part of the piece. It is below and I haven’t done any retouching, and the includes leaving in a significant historical error. I will rewrite the second part from memory in a completely different writing style, correct the error from part 1, and post it soon.

***

The Portrait

On a sunny August morning in 2005, as I drove east across the Willamette River in Salem on the way to Portland, I caught a glimpse of the Oregon Pioneer, the 23-foot gold leafed statute that stands atop the state capitol. Seeing it instantly compelled me to change my itinerary, as I knew I wanted to observe the proceedings of the Oregon Legislature, then nearing the farcical end of one of its longest and most inept biannual sessions in state history.

Some 30 years ago I had ridden a bus to the capitol for a grade school field trip. I can’t remember if I actually observed the Oregon Legislature create part of 1970s Stone Oregon Era, but it seems highly likely. I’ve returned since then, as a teacher leading my own students on a fantastic field trip and as a citizen lobbying ineffectively to protect the Oregon Coast.

On this visit, however, I had no official mission. Rather, I simply felt an intense desire to sit in the balcony of the House or Senate as a true Oregonian and angrily observe the partisan demise of the Stone Oregon Era as an ecologist might angrily observe a wetland being filled with concrete detritus in preparation for the construction of an automobile dealership.

I parked near the capitol, hustled up the steps, pushed through the revolving doors, turned right at the bronze state seal embedded in the floor, shook my head in despair on seeing the mural of Lewis and Clark at the now-drowned Celilo Falls, walked up the stairs, and emerged into a spacious and ornate lobby in front of the chamber of the House of Representatives. Approximately 75 people, some elected, most not, and at least three former Republican Speakers of the House, congregated in the area, conversing, cajoling, talking on cell phones, emailing from laptops, flirting, seducing, negotiating, text messaging and lobbying. All waited for the doors to be swung open and the debate on this bill or that bill to begin.

As I wondered if any part of this mise en scene had anything to do with serving Oregon’s public interest, the appointed time for the House to convene had come and gone. I overheard the reason was because the party in power remained in secret caucus, which undoubtedly meant they were plotting to exert some political advantage that would in some way debase life in Oregon and enrich some interest group.

I milled about, took a few notes purely out of reportorial habit, and scanned some other governor’s portraits that hung grouped together on a far wall.

Then, turning around, I saw across the lobby something hanging on another wall, quite large, colorful, and what appeared from a distance to be a work of art, possibly a mural. Immediately, caught in trance, if indeed trance is the word, I moved toward the attraction, oblivious to the crowd I had to part rudely to get at it. In seconds I stood before, or should I say under, an immense and luminous oil painting of a colossal Tom McCall standing in a beach landscape.

“What the fuck is this?” I heard myself say aloud.

To say the least it was unlike any portrait of any American or European political figure I had ever seen. In fact, it was quite unlike any painting I had ever experienced in person, and as it mesmerized me, I couldn’t decide which one of its characteristics ranked number one in rendering it so utterly spectacular: Was it the far out artistic quality that I recognized as expressionism, perhaps even surrealism? Was it that it seemed removed from time? Was it that it was actually on display in a capitol building? Was it that the subject was a former governor of Oregon whose political vision and leadership has had such a remarkable and lasting influence on me? Was it that everything he accomplished was being proudly undone or left to whither by a cabal of zealots, mountebanks and parasites just a few feet away from me, and the acute awareness of this obscenity began a bilious fury within me? Was it that the dominating position of this portrait surveying the entrance to the House chamber as it did, acted as a kind of totem or monolith, vibrating a power that suggested any representative would be turned to stone if she gazed upon McCall while selling out Oregon’s public interest? Was it that it bore no resemblance in style or aura whatsoever to the other portraits of Oregon governors? Was it that it depicted McCall at the Oregon Coast where I live and thrive? Was it that I was looking at the greatest painting in Oregon history? Was it that until a few seconds ago I didn’t know this portrait even existed?

In the portrait, which I estimated to be approximately 7′ by 6′ in size, McCall is wearing a gray three-piece suit curiously unbuttoned at the last button, a blue, brown and white striped tie, and brown dress shoes. His face is haggard, aged, suggestive of a malady within, but also paradoxically, pulses with a kind of primal wisdom. His hair is white, tousled, and Founding Fatherish. He is extending his right hand as if trying to shake hands or welcome someone to join him or perform an act of transmutation. He is standing on a beach, with his right shoe in the aqua-colored ocean and his left on dry sand. Boulders and rocks are strewn about. His body casts a long shadow. Out in the ocean, to McCall’s right, a red and white colored pole is suspended vertically, barely submerged into the water, and is attached to a line or string that runs left to right downward at an angle, presumably touching land at some point.

In the short distance behind McCall’s left, is a towering piece of driftwood, pointing into the sky, guarding the shore like a giant sentinel. It obviously has been cut from a coastal watershed many years ago by a saw of some kind, conveyed to the ocean via a great flood, drifted at sea for generations, and finally come to rest as its gnarly root wad lies buried in the sand in such a way that nothing in nature short of a tsunami could dislodge it. Flying behind the driftwood is a red and white helicopter. Below the helicopter is a headland, slightly eroding, dotted with snags and misshapen, unfamiliar conifer-like trees that appear ancient, as if from the Permian Era, 270 million years ago, when conifers first originated. In the far background, obscured in a fog or cloud bank, there exists a landscape that seems to be a separate world all unto its own.

I recognized loosely the story contained within the painting, as I’m sure many other older Oregonians would have as well if they had stood beside me. But our memory of this story is different, more concrete, more journalistic than the scene depicted in the painting, and derives almost solely from photographs. These images, now iconic, derive from the legendary 1967 episode when Governor McCall landed by helicopter on five Oregon beaches as a spectacular tactic in support of a bill determining what would control the future of Oregon’s coastal beaches: the public or private interest? McCall had flown west to the sea, accompanied by oceanographers and the media, to show Oregonians he favored the former.

In these photographs, McCall appears sometimes as a scientist, peering though a transit to measure angle, holding a surveying stake, taking notes, and more famously, as a viceroy, alone, eyeing a motel, whose petulant owner had fenced off the beach in front of his establishment and kicked off an elderly couple picnicking there, thereby igniting an unprecedented and unique Oregon controversy that ultimately ended with a near unanimous bipartisan passage of what was then called, and is still called, the Beach Bill.

That landmark law defined and protected the public’s right to freely recreate in, and access, the dry sand areas of Oregon’s ocean beaches, thus prohibiting development there, even on private property, forever.

I sat down on a cheap metal and vinyl couch a few feet from the portrait that positioned a sitter to stare directly up at McCall. I turned around. Not a single other person in the lobby was looking at the painting. Suddenly, as clamor arose when the doors to the House chamber opened, I lost all interest in observing legislative proceedings.

Returning my attention to the portrait, I was drawn to its bottom, specifically the rocks and boulders. In the lower right corner, I read: Henk Pander 1982.

As in Henk Pander, the renowned Dutch-born, expressionist/surrealist artist living in Portland whose work I knew and admired? He painted this portrait? How was that possible? As in 1982, the year I graduated from Oregon City High School?

Something about the rocks and boulders haunted me. They appeared fluid, primeval, alive, as if they had existed since the dawn of creation. And then it struck me: I was looking at a religious and secular masterpiece of art where Henk Pander had captured the exact creation myth and Big Bang explosion moments of the Stone Oregon Era.

As I exited the capitol, I knew I must discover how this painting came to be, and what, if anything, this story meant for Oregon or me.

Oregon Tavern Age: Heritage Pub

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

It was noon on a gray and rainy Friday.

But I didn’t allow my mood to match the weather. I was feeling great after dropping off copies of The Old Crow Book Club at the Clackamas Book Exchange, a block off SE 82nd Ave, and its river of concrete, commercialization and homelessness.

Linda the proprietor of the shop was excited to help me sell the book for a few bucks each. She would retain all profits to assist in keeping this very, very second-hand used bookstore alive.

I told Linda that the Clackamas Book Exchange will be the only bookstore to carry the book (unless another one reaches out to me, which they won’t). Linda loved the distinction and she praised the striking cover of the book, which resembles a bottle of Old Crow, the rotgut whiskey.

“I always drank Lord Calvert myself,” said Linda.

“Why?” I said.

“So I could say the ‘Lord was always with me.’”

We laughed pretty hard at that.

The Heritage Club has gone through many iterations but, according to the bartender, the same family has owned the property since 1922! Jesus, Silent Cal Coolidge was President!

The joint’s décor reflected three or four different decorating schemes, including a former strip joint and biker bar. I liked the lack of cohesion. Who wants order with interior design in OTA country?

But was the Heritage Club authentic OTA country? Not really. I’ve just got to let go it’s going to last the course of my lifetime.

Absolutely nothing interesting was going on with the patrons, except that one OTA couple was on their second or third double screwdriver.

The Heritage Club was all fried food, gambling, phones, tablets. No storytelling at all. I longed to hear an osprey story or a sodden tale of way too much Jägermeister and shitting one’s self in a bathtub.

The only thing memorable of the surroundings was a poster of an attractive woman with a plea that she contact her aunt.

I sat at a back table and watched Tiger Woods limp around Augusta National. I wrote some notes for a future piece of writing. I daydreamed of being in the Sea Star in Gold Beach. I hoped The Old Crow Book Club would find a special way out into the world. I believed it contained unique magic. But one really never knows where a book goes.

Linda, the Bookstore Clerk

NSP Meditations

I browsed a second hand bookstore known as the Clackamas Book Exchange located a couple blocks off 82nd Avenue and its swollen river of homelessness and human and commercial squalor.

It’s an excellent mom and pop shop, with tiny rooms full of weird, wonderful and cheap books. And the Western section is beyond superb, if you care for Westerns, which I do. Some writer should write a modern Western where homelessness is the core of the story. The plot would feature a hero exhibiting the outstanding character of someone like Shane who does something to solve the crisis. He or she gets shit done but without fisticuffs or gun play. Typically nothing gets done in a Western without fisticuffs and gun play, but some writer needs to take a run at it. Perhaps an idea for a plot will come to me on one of my walks.

I visit this shop at least once a month. I always enjoy talking to one of the clerks, Linda, and elderly woman who told me she began volunteering there to help out a friend who owned the shop, then the friend died of covid, and Linda took over without pay to keep her friend’s dream alive.

Yeah, there are still Americans like that. You just have to get out into the world and meet them.

I asked Linda if any homeless people come around for books. Yes, she said. All the time.

Linda told me she always has bundles of free books for them. They often insist on bartering for the freebies and provide her with cheese and crackers or chips or flavored sodas. She feels bad about taking the items in barter, but really has no choice. The homeless people won’t take no for an answer.

“So I eat a lot of cheese and crackers!” she said, laughing. “I’ve been gaining weight.”

As Linda recounted her experiences with the homeless, she also mentioned that when she first moved to Portland six years ago, rents soared, she couldn’t find a safe, affordable place to live, and she was on the verge of living out of her car. Then, luckily she found an apartment but was still barely making it. Sometimes, if the bookstore was doing well, she would draw a small wage to supplement her Social Security benefits.

I listened and marveled at her story. I also began hatching a specific scheme to distribute my forthcoming book about the homeless in my neighborhood, The Old Crow Book Club, in Linda’s shop.

After making my purchase, a $2 Western, I told Linda I was a local writer and was coming out with a book about homelessness in a neighborhood not far from the shop. I asked if she would be willing to distribute the book to her customers and the homeless men and women whom she provided free books. And I said distribute for free.

Linda was intrigued, so I ran her through a possible scenario for the shop, making it up on the spot.

We’ll set up a display on the counter and anyone who takes a copy can make a donation to keep the shop running or to set up a fund to pay for purchases of books by homeless people who may want something else besides bargain bin castaways. I mean, the Sherlock Holmes is going to cost more!

I then told her of my philosophy of distribution for The Old Crow Book Club. I was going to stock it in street libraries around Oregon, practically give it away, because I wanted as many readers as possible to consider the homeless crisis and money didn’t matter.

Linda said, “Do you realize that if your book helps one person, it could change everything?”

“Will you help me?” I said.

“YES!”

She was almost screaming when she said it.

Oregon Tavern Age: Bassmaster Classic

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

Sunday. Noon. OTA country, somewhat dismal OTA country. The Bassmaster Classic blared on a screen. Three redneck announcers talked all things catching bass in tournament conditions. The amount of high tech gear deployed to catch bass was incredible. I didn’t understand a word the announcers were saying. I didn’t even know there was a professional bass fishing league.

Two female OTA bartenders dozed behind the bar.

I drank a local IPA.

Two OTA men sat at a table near a window that overlooked a parking lot where several people lived out their battered vehicles. One of the men drank water, the other a beer.

Another person played video slots. They said nothing; they drank nothing.

There was a commercial break from the Classic. An advertisement for Disney-themed diapers came on. I couldn’t tell if it was for kids or adults.

I had absolutely nothing to do on a Sunday. Earlier, I had spent a pleasant morning with my Dad at his assisted living center. I read aloud to him some chapters of Ecclesiastes from the Old Testament. I’d never read them before but 30 seconds into the reading, I knew Bob Dylan had read this book of the Bible dozens if not hundreds of time. All the wordplay is right there, and the mysterious character of the Preacher. It was a thrilling read and Dad and discussed some of the passages.

The Bassmaster Classic was being held in Knoxville. The Tennessee River ran right through town. It looked pleasant.

I would never visit there. I will never step foot in the American South again.

It was time to go, maybe head out to watch the fishing boats on the Willamette River trying to land a fake hatchery salmon.

The Old Crow Book Club is Here

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , ,

Readers:

I’d like to announce the release of my new book, The Old Crow Book Club. It emerged quite unexpectedly from my writing of this newsletter, which will continue for the foreseeable future because the issue of homelessness is something I can’t stop caring or writing about. I like to believe I engage it in a novel and meaningful way.

If you purchase the book through my website at nestuccaspitpress.com, I will throw in an extra copy for you to leave in a free street library in your neighborhood. I can also supply a cheap set for a book club.

You can also help the book’s distribution by making a donation via the website to hire homeless men and women to stock street libraries around the Portland metropolitan area. I’ve already implemented this unique distribution model and could use additional support, and perhaps, one large benefactor.

I will derive no profits from any sales of The Old Crow Book Club. All monies earned will fund expanded distribution. Thank you for your support and keep reading the newsletter. I have a lot more stories to share.

The introduction to The Old Crow Book Club is below:

I had written over 200,000 words about Oregon’s homeless crisis in multiple genres: essay, satire, short story, children’s story, a Hallmark Christmas film treatment, stream of consciousness, memoir, reportage, epistle, polemic, even a poem set in a dystopian gas station.

If I published all the writing, it would amount to an 800-page book!

A lot of it was writing about how I was writing about the homeless. I had name dropped Jean-Paul Sartre, Gertrude Stein, Rebecca Solnit and Denis Johnson. No one wanted to read that meta drivel. No one wanted to read a Manhattan phone book without a narrative or denouement.

It was all one big fat misshapen mishmash of a book, with even a real kitchen sink thrown in and other images as well:

A game of foosball in a homeless encampment.

A baptism of a homeless man in a kiddie pool.

An osprey that dropped an eel from the sky into a homeless encampment and they fried the damn thing up for supper!

A domicile constructed from discarded encyclopedias.

A homeless man blowtorching crawdads on a grill.

A homeless heavy metal guitarist who lived in a tent camper surrounded by dozens of Santa Clauses and headless dolls.

A dumbwaiter constructed inside a two-storey pallet shanty.

A women living in a homeless encampment who erected a stripper pole.

A homeless man mushing a team of huskies pulling a trio of baby strollers loaded with cans.

A pirate fleet of derelict boats in the Willamette River that raided decks of luxury houseboats for furniture and propane tanks.

A homeless man who used an abandoned refrigerator as an armoire.

What did I really have? What was worth keeping? What was worth distilling? What was worth publishing? What to say about a national emergency that breaks my heart every moment I encounter it, something that occurs two or three times a day in Oregon wherever I go?

I decided to take a walk around the neighborhood and held out hope that some guidance might emerge.

A block from home, I looked left up a street and there was my homeless friend Mark, sitting on a sidewalk, reading a book, and drinking a can of malt liquor. I stopped and stared.

Mark was the book! Mark the bibliophile, Mark and his Cannery Row collection of other homeless men and women in the neighborhood with their bittersweet storytelling, hilarious conversations and addled antics that all went down precisely where Mark was now sitting.

I didn’t know how the book would turn out. I did know it wasn’t going to be a microcosm of anything. Instantly, I cut 190,000 words from the manuscript and felt so happy I almost kicked up my heels.

And I already had the title: The Old Crow Book Club.

Three New Nestucca Spit Press Books Out!

NSP Meditations, Writing

Friends of Nestucca Spit Press

It’s been a busy year of writing for me. I have three new books out this spring: Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction, The Old Crow Book Club, and The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley.

They are all available for direct purchase through the NSP website using PayPal and credit cards. If you prefer another method of payment, let me know. Website address: https://www.nestuccaspitpress.com/

Amazon carries Choice Cuts and The Savage of State Street.

All titles are available at select bookstores. The Old Crow Book Club will also be distributed via street libraries. Readers can make a special donation through the website to fund this unique distribution model that employs homeless people.

I always appreciate your support. NSP is going on its 21st year in business and we are now one of Oregon’s longest running independent publishers.

Descriptions of books below:

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay’s fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author’s writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created the Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk. The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members’ stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty of Smoky Epley’s pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrotea newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013 at the age of 66.

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present the story and writings of Smoky Epley, the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history, and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

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