The Short History of an Oregon Seventh Grade Football Season (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Sports , , , , ,

A Father and Son coached the Ogden Junior High Raiders’ seventh grade football team in the fall of 1986. The school was located in a rural area of Oregon City and surrounded by fields, pastures, a creek, wetlands and stands of alder, oak, Doug fir and cedar. Beavers and otters inhabited the creek. Salmon spawned, there, too. Deer and pheasants foraged on the football field. Bald eagles and blue herons often showed up.

It was Morning in America according to Ronald Reagan and he was well into his second term of laying the foundation to destroy America. Thirty-five years after this seventh grade football season concluded, at least one of the players ended up drug addled and homeless and living along creeks and rivers not all that far from the school.

(That, however, is another story, not just an Oregon story, too, and left to detail later, in another literary project. It will unfold in the form of a mini memoir where the Son volunteers at a Christian street mission in Oregon City that serves the homeless and encounters one of the players 35 years after coaching him.)

The school opened in 1965 and was named after an English Indian killer and fur trapper, Peter Skene Ogden. Its colors were sky blue and gold. The school’s mascot said it all. The logo was a bearded man with an eye patch clutching a dagger in his mouth.

Ogden Junior High had an undistinguished history as a football school. Their attendance boundary tended to produce plodding lineman and fullbacks but no players with any breakaway speed, which is all it took to dominate junior high football, or any level of football.

Over the years, teams typically ended with 3-3, 4-2 or 2-4 seasons so finishing with a winning record was always an announced goal from Ogden’s coaches, mainly hack social studies teachers who handed out worksheets, rolled film, and called it teaching.

This was the first and only year the Father and Son would coach together, but later they would reflect and rate it was their best collaboration of all time. They would recount stories of that season, and in particular one player, Touchdown Tommy Eubanks, who in fact, never scored a touchdown and fell down a lot.

The Father was a master teacher who played in a single wing offense during his Oklahoma high school football days in the immediate post WW II era. The Son had just graduated from college and was thinking of becoming a teacher. He had played football in his youth and loved the game until high school came along and martinet coaches killed that love. The interesting part of the Father and Son’s relationship to football and each other was that the Son had once scored three touchdowns as a Gardiner Cavalier in a 56-0 rout of his Father’s Ogden seventh grade team of 1977. They talked occasionally about that game and how the Son’s coach wanted to run up the score against a city rival.

They promised each other they were not that kind of coach. They pledged to make participation about team, make it fun, and find and deploy opportunities for seventh grade boys to learn something more valuable besides football, which was supposed to be the point anyway. If they won some games, so be it. They would play hard, with guts and honor. They would go out for pizza after games whether they were victorious or not and tell glorious stories of sacks and touchdowns and Father and Son would pay for it and tell the team to police their tables out of respect for working people.

The Son was the head coach and did all the offensive and defensive playcalling. That might sound like an odd arrangement since the Father was older and already established as a coach, but he insisted. Besides, he admitted the Son knew a lot more about football. For coaching a six-game season, the Father and Son were each paid $600.

Of Walking in Homelessness

NSP Meditations

A new routine has developed since dad moved into assisted living: I drain a cup of cold coffee, wait for first light, and then walk out the front door and meander to the assisted living center to join dad for breakfast.

I have always preferred early morning walks to any other time of the day. I took about 7000 such walks when living at the Oregon Coast and it was the perfect experience (with or without dogs) to get my head straight for what was coming later that day. Often I would write in my mind on these walks and upon my return home, write it up on paper.

I never listen to music or podcasts on my walks. I want input from the world serve as my soundtrack.

This new city routine is obviously and vastly different from my beach one. Whereas I used to pass sanderlings, gulls, driftwood and piles of kelp, now I pass bedraggled and blasted-out members of the New American Diaspora as they begin their day of living on the streets or in the willows.

On each walk, the weather, wet or dry or somewhere in between, I typically encounter:

Two men bicycling and pulling jury-rigged contraptions full of bottles and cans.

A woman staggering down a street.

A man carrying a gas can.

Derelict RVs and their puttering generators.

A man living in his car with a big dog.

Someone asleep on the parking lot of a drug store.

Men and women rifling through recycling bins for cans and bottles.

A man slumping in a bus shelter.

A man sweeping leaves away from the entrance to his tent.

A man cursing a power pole.

A man acting like a toreador with a blanket.

A newly shattered window of a vehicle or shop.

A man working on the engine of his 50-year old RV.

Someone asleep under the cedars in the park.

Two tents pitched on a sidewalk.

A man living out of a pickup.

A man walking and drinking a can of malt liquor.

A man asking me for a cigarette.

All of these encounters take place within three quarters of a mile of my house. I see some of the same people doing the same things, but there are always new people doing new things.

I often find myself writing in my mind on these walks. At first, it was almost exclusively about homelessness, but I’m running out of literary gas on that subject. In fact, this piece is mostly fumes.

Lately, I am writing stories that have nothing to do with homelessness. They are about a junior high football team in the 80s, a high school classroom in the 90s, maybe another Christmas tale before Christmas.

Sometimes before entering the assisted living center, I see homeless people milling around. Sometimes it’s barely above freezing or raining hard. Some of these people are old and frail enough to live in the center—if they could afford it.

Breakfast arrives at the table in the dining room and occasionally I tell dad about my encounters. He listens and shakes his head. We discuss the eternal Marvin Gaye question of What’s Going On? Or the eternal Bob Dylan statement of We Live in a Political World Where Mercy Has Walked the Plank.

We have no solutions. We have no prognostications. We sometimes get angry. We never stop caring.

Sometimes I point out the homeless people shuffling or bicycling past the dining room windows, but usually not. I wonder what they think when they see senior citizens eating breakfast in a clean, warm, well lighted place?

I have started to believe these early morning walks to the assisted living center are crushing my spiritual fitness. Maybe I should drive instead. You don’t see as much that way.

Baby Beaver

NSP Meditations

I have seen a great many sights in or along Oregon’s riparian areas in my lifetime, but a sighting a while back topped them all: a baby beaver gliding in a creek and then gnawing a tiny stick of willow from a bank. This marvel occurred four blocks from my home.

I was on a walk with dear friends and their kooky dog. We stopped at a bridge to admire daffy ducks and something near a log caught my eye. It wasn’t a duck. It was a small beaver, alone. I double checked its beaver status, meaning observe the tail: if it’s flat, you have a beaver, if it’s narrow, you have a nutria, an introduced species.

It was flat! I could not believe it.

This marked the third time in my life I’d observed a beaver in nature. The other two times were at the Oregon Coast and magical, but they didn’t compare to this sighting. I had been so blue of late, wondering about my role, my writing, my father, my future.

Then the appearance of this little heavenly bucktoothed creature. My friends were excited at the observation but certainly not to my fanatical degree. Jesus! I now knew how a Christian might feel if Jesus did actually return!

What a Christmas gift from Oregon’s Watershed Gods. I’ve given them a lot the last quarter century, and here they were thanking me.

A Short History of Christmas in an Oregon Logging Camp

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

It was a few years before Pearl Harbor in the lush and bountiful Hood River Valley. A few years later, in one of the most amoral events in modern Oregon history, many residents of the area would dispossess their friends, neighbors—fellow American citizens—of their orchards, homes, businesses and identities, and applaud their forced relocation to concentration camps.

That amorality has never been satisfactorily rectified, in apology or reparations, but that is another story to tell and it isn’t a short one.

Before American entered World War II, a married couple from the valley lived inside a canvas tent in the woods. They were residents of a logging camp. He was a tree feller for a gyppo logging outfit. She was the camp cook. She whipped up delicious squirrel stews and fried up juicy elk steaks.

His name was Melvin and her name was Katie. Their last name was Green. They were teenage sweethearts who never attended high school because there wasn’t any need for such higher education. There was a need for workers so they went to work and began their hardscrabble way in the world.

It wouldn’t take long for the Greens to make a name for themselves in the valley. News of hard work gets around. In time, Melvin joined with his three brothers to form Green Brothers Logging. Similar Oregon families from that era, from Glendale to Garibaldi, Bend to Brookings, Mulino to Medford, Coquille to Condon, did the same. They were all prototypes for the Stampers in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion.

Yes, the Greens would flourish, but first they had to survive.

Melvin and Katie lived in the tent for two years, yes winters, too, in the foothills of the Cascade Range in and around the Mt. Hood National Forest, near Timberline Lodge, built by the WPA New Deal boys during the Great Depression. President Roosevelt came out to dedicate it and gave a charming speech.

FDR said:

I am very keen about travel, not only personally—you know that—but also about travel for as many Americans as can possibly afford it, because those Americans will be getting to know their own country better; and the more they see of it, the more they will realize the privileges which God and nature have given to the American people.

So, I take very great pleasure in dedicating this Lodge, not only as a new adjunct of our National Forests, but also as a place to play for generations of Americans in the days to come.

Wasn’t it great when America used to build grand public places like Timberline Lodge? Why can’t America build such places today. That too, is another long story, an endless epitaph of a novel.

Melvin felled trees on public land that were milled in Oregon. There were old growth forests still around back then, millions of acres of gigantic conifers. You know, trees so big that only one would fit on a log truck. Five and Dimes used to sell post cards of the image.

These were interesting, rugged, taciturn men, these loggers from this era, before logging became a mechanized and corporate mass destruction of watersheds and all its creatures. Sometimes for the sheer helluva it, these loggers would leave a remote and ancient grove of cedar, Douglas fir or Sitka Spruce alone, never realizing what those stands would mean to future Oregonians. Go see for yourself in God’s Valley or the Opal Creek Wilderness and admire these living monoliths. There, you might ask why people ever turned away from nature as God and looked to superstitious monotheism and its cruel hierarchies.

The loggers never thought they’d run out of large trees. They did. And the fight to save the last of them would later tear the state apart. The gap has never been bridged.

Christmas was coming to the logging camp and there was no better time for an O Henry “Gift of the Magi” moment for a present exchange between the Greens. Well, nothing except for the Greens were flat broke and had nothing to barter to raise a few dollars to buy simple gifts.

But they both knew something magical would come to them. It usually does when you’re in love, destitute in pocket but not in spirit, and collaborating on a dream.

A day before Christmas Melvin brought down a colossal Doug fir and found a baby spotted owl dazed and confused in a nearby snow bank.

He picked up the owl and warmed it with his breath. He put it in his pocket and headed back to camp. This was going to be Katie’s gift. They’d nurse the owl back to health and then set him free and have a Christmas story for the ages. Melvin named the critter Kris Kringle.

Katie had no idea what to get Melvin for Christmas. She was searching through yarn in her hope chest. Perhaps she would knit Melvin a scarf. She spotted a cherished coil of red satin and instantly changed her mind.

It was almost time for Melvin to return to camp. Katie stoked a fire in the stove, seasoned a venison chili bubbling in a kettle. She lit some bear grease candles around the tent and they cast a flickering glow on the Greens’ tiny Christmas tree decorated with paper chains, strings of popcorn, and wooden ornaments whittled by Melvin. An otter-like elf was Katie’s favorite.

Katie needed only a few minutes to fashion her present. Off went her clothes, on went the present. She had to pirouette to get it all right. Then she climbed under the wool blankets of their double cot and waited for Melvin.

It was now dark outside and light snow began falling on Christmas Eve.

Melvin entered the tent and produced Kris Kringle from his pocket and said Merry Christmas Katie! The owl roused to attention, fluttered up, flew to the tree, and landed on a branch. Katie exclaimed tidings of great joy, but remained under the blankets. As Melvin told her the story, he forked out a slice of venison from the pot, and fed it to Kris. The owl gobbled it up.

It was then that Melvin thought it odd Katie was in bed. She was always preparing supper or tidying up when he returned from the woods.

He asked if she felt okay. She said she did.

Katie threw off the covers with gusto and revealed her naked body wrapped in a red satin bow!

Merry Christmas Melvin! she said.

Melvin didn’t say a word. He just cracked a smile.

It was Christmas Eve in a logging camp in the Oregon woods, and that meant something.

Katie would tell this story for decades and tell it to the family of this author. The author knew one day he would write it up, and luckily lived long enough to do so, only because Melvin saved his life on a joint family camping trip at Lost Lake in the 1970s. The logger saw a neighboring camper’s vicious doberman sprinting toward the unsuspecting author sitting on a stool, whittling. Melvin screamed, sprang into action, grabbed a hatchet, and intercepted the dog before it chomped the author’s face. The dog backed off and Melvin marched up to the neighboring campers with the hatchet in hand. They broke camp and drove away 15 minutes later.

F*** You, It’s Christmas

NSP Meditations

I was in a jaunty mood and didn’t know why. Jaunty typically doesn’t correspond to seven in the morning, 31 degrees outside, while walking to visit your dad living in an assisted living center.

Nevertheless, jaunty it was. Maybe the streaks of red, orange and purple in the sunrise were responsible.

I strode the sidewalk and passed the usual miscreants congregated in front of the convenience store. I crossed the street and assessed the range of facial expressions of the commuters idling at the stoplight: vacant to grim.

A man walked toward me. Gradually I took him in: sixty or seventy years old, long unkempt red hair, beard, filthy red-colored Arctic coat, a pronounced scowl on his visage. Clearly a man of the streets. I’ve seen enough on my neighborhood walks to know the look and sense the vibe.

We were on the verge of passing one another. Our eyes met.

He said, “You want to share a cigarette?”

Share? I wasn’t smoking.

“No,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”

He didn’t slow down. He shot me a glance

“Fuck you,” he said with anger. “It’s Christmas.”

I stopped, turned. He passed me. He didn’t look back. I exclaimed, “I don’t smoke!”

He kept walking. I called out, “I don’t smoke!”

Nothing.

I started laughing. It was wonderfully absurd. He was so surly, such an asshole, and I relished every moment of his asshole character.

I continued on my way and started writing a Christmas song called “Fuck You, It’s Christmas,” right then and there. That’s always the best time to write a song.

(Song begins with a slowly strumming nylon-stringed guitar. Some variation of a G, D, C chord progression)

Walkin’ to see the old man at the Portland old folks home

Red, purple and orange streak the December morning sky. Beavers build dams nearby.

It’s colder than a Republican Senator’s corroded heart but I feel good ’cause Willie Nelson’s still alive

An old homeless man wearing red walks toward me. He’s got a Grinch scowl on his face

He says, You want to share a smoke?

I say, I don’t smoke.

He says, (Big choir blast here, singing the chorus, really a Stones “You Can’t Always Get Want You Want” thing)

Fuck you, it’s Christmas / Fuck you you don’t smoke

Fuck you it’s Christmas / I hope Santa fucks you up

Okay, it’s a work in progress.

I told dad the story at breakfast. He laughed a big laugh. He quoted something by Jesus to me and I knew I’d have to work that into the song.

Oregon Tavern Age: Trumpian Hallmark Movie

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age ,

It was 9:50 in the December morning. I was in Oregon City OTA country waiting for a fish market to open so I could purchase their legendary crab cakes. Nothing like killing time in OTA country during the holiday season!

A Hallmark Christmas movie called Snow Bride played quietly on TV. I sat at a table, sipped a can of craft malt liquor, and thought about writing a letter.

An OTA geezer sat at the bar and drank a Crown Royal on the rocks as he lectured a dreadlocked female OTA bartender. Yes, there is such a real person in OTA country.

The geezer was lecturing her about liberals, Hunter Biden, Pelosi, AOC, blah, blah, blah. He knew it all and it was all the Democrats fault.

Oregon was a Blue state, he acknowledged that, and hated that fact.

Everything out of the geezer’s moth was a demonstrable lie, bullshit manufactured by Fox News talking points.

Prior to Donald Trump, this geezer would have been talking about how fucked up he’d got the night before decorating the tree and how he’d shit himself in the bathtub and accidentally cooked up dog food for supper. Not anymore.

Cue “Taps” here for the death of OTA storytelling.

An OTA man entered the joint and ordered a well whiskey and a Rainier. He took a seat at the bar.

He and the geezer then launched into a happy reminiscence about the classic Rainier TV ads from the 70s, when Rainier was actually brewed in the Pacific Northwest by union men and women.

Shit! They weren’t talking about Biden or Democrats!

Then they began a running commentary on the improbability of the Hallmark movie’s plot.

A hot babe had crashed her sedan into a snow bank. She was on her way to meet her milquetoast fiance. For some reason she was wearing only shorts and tank top despite the freezing weather. She was going to die of hypothermia and it was almost Christmas and a Christmas Day wedding at some rustic lodge was planned. Fortunately, she remembered her wedding dress was in the back seat so she slipped it on to avoid dying.

A hunky rescuer who was not her fiance arrived and…well…you know the rest.

The men noticed the woman’s sedan had California plates. They start mocking dumb Californians! They were really giving it to them and it had nothing to do with Gavin Newsom, high taxes and super wokeness. It was just good old fashioned Oregon Tavern Age hate for anything Californian!

Oh Merry Christmas to me! What tidings of comfort and joy!

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