Gold Beach Thanksgiving (Part 3)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

Twenty miles past Eugene, the Reverend saw a sign that read: Drain, Highway 34, Oregon Coast. He was going down the drain so why not see Drain? Why not visit a city with the most depressing name in Oregon? (Boring is second.)

The Reverend rolled into Drain. The Navigator needed refueling and he was hungry so he pulled into a gas station/convenience store. Out front, an old Schwinn three-speed bicycle leaned against the ice cooler.

He got out of the vehicle, asked the attendant for a fill-up, and walked toward the store. He opened the door and saw a line ten deep at the counter. Several of the people were clearly homeless because they exuded all the physical and psychic accoutrements of homelessness.

It was near bedlam inside the store and the Reverend smelled what he thought were biscuits and gravy. Then he noticed something on the counter: a monster-sized crock pot of gravy, thick and steaming, with a shiny metal ladle sticking out. The Reverend read a sign that said a serving of biscuits and gravy cost $2.50. It dawned on him that everyone was waiting for a serving, which doubled the size of the largest portion of biscuits and gravy he’d ever seen, let alone consumed.

The Reverend got in line and observed an elderly woman walk out with her serving in a box. She mounted the bicycle and rode away with one hand carrying the biscuits and gravy, the other hand steering the Schwinn. Drain was pretty interesting! No one in Amity bicycled with biscuits and gravy! The Reverend cracked a little smile.

Ten minutes later he was driving Highway 34 to Reedsport in silence with the box of biscuits and gravy riding shotgun. He figured he’d stop and eat when a park with a nice view materialized. The Reverend passed Elkton and Scottsburg. In many places the highway paralleled the Umpqua River. The emerald water mesmerized him and inspired thoughts other besides Kari dumping him. Rivers can do that if you let them.

The Reverend was famished. The smell of the biscuits and gravy tantalized him, drove him mad. He had to stop and devour them!

A sign appeared. It read: DEAN CREEK ELK VIEWING AREA. Then another sign read: ELK RADIO: TUNE TO 1610 AM.

The Reverend turned into the parking lot of the elk attraction and saw roughly a hundred elk in a field. Some were grazing, some were lounging, some were moving around. They were all less than a hundred yards away. He also saw three ancient and dilapidated RVs in the parking lot that he thought couldn’t possibly have driven here, but somehow they did. Someone had kept them running and the Reverend admired the ingenuity and improvisation that must have taken. He didn’t have any ingenuity like that, although once he had improvised after gambling cleaned him out. So he had some history of rally going for him.

He parked the Navigator, tuned the radio to the elk station, and began eating the biscuits and gravy.

A monotone voice intoned: An autumn bugle signals the rut. September’s mating season leaves the bull elk little time to eat or sleep. Deep resonating bugles roar across the meadows as the males call to attract a female and move in to spar with other bulls and win a harem of cows. If rutting season is in process at the viewing area, do not get out of your vehicle. Racks are symbols of power. Brief sparring occurs when a bull seeks control over another’s harem. The immense antler racks are a symbol of prowess during the rut. Females eventually force the bull out of their herd when the rut is completed and he ambles off to join one of the small groups of males…

The Reverend ate, listened to the radio, and watched the elk. He laughed at the idea that he might be the only man in the world watching elk while eating biscuits and gravy. He liked the new feeling. It was nothing like what he felt back in the mansion, whatever that was. He didn’t really know.

Gold Beach Thanksgiving (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

And that was the genesis of Fortress for Christ and Reverend Dave Bland. Reverend was such a better title than pastor or preacher or minister. It just rolled off the tongue.

The Reverend erected a yurt with hardwood floors and a wood stove near the winery. His pulpit was of custom-made myrtlewood from the Southern Oregon Coast. Word got out in the Christian addict community and his Sunday afternoon service grew to a respectable 50 former and still-functioning Christian addicts (mostly sex and booze). He was all over social media where his sermons garnered a couple thousand hits every week and trickled in a few donations.

For his sermonizing, the Reverend stuck to the Old Testament standards such as Moses and the burning bush, Samson slaying the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and, of course, Jonah and the whale.

How in the world the Reverend managed to graft homilies of capitalism onto stories like the parting of the Red Sea and sell them to his flock like the newest i-Phone? Well, such are the vagaries of a spirituality based on hierarchy. When your spirituality is the ocean or mountains or desert or old trees, you recognize no such hierarchy and don’t rely on homilies to lead your life.

Jonah’s story was the Reverend’s personal favorite, for its always-bad notion of trying to run away from performing a righteous duty. Was he pulling a Jonah right now? Running away from something important? Or was he more like Jackson Browne’s “Running on Empty” and running blind?

The Reverend didn’t know. All he knew was he wanted to see the ocean in his moment of extreme distress, to walk on the beach as so many Oregonians do in similar crisis situations. The beach is the Great Therapist of Oregon and it never charges a cent nor recites banal jargon.

Thirty minutes later, none of the flock had texted him back. An hour later, one person finally responded, not with any offer to help, but something about “thoughts and prayers” and multiple crying emojis.

The Reverend was disappointed but not surprised. His congregation was more about capitalism than compassion. His church wasn’t even a real church by most Christian definitions. It was more of a personal coaching service with the goal of motivating the rich to get richer and the poor, well, who cares?

He loaded up the Navigator and made a couple sandwiches for the road. He considered taking a last visit to the yurt, but why bother? Fortress for Christ was kaput. The Reverend was actually relieved at the prospect. It had never been a true calling, just more of a side hustle. He cherry picked the Bible for lessons of power and conquest. He never sermonized the teachings of Jesus. That was way too unsettling for his flock. Besides, the Parables were over his head. The Battle of Jericho was not.

The Reverend drove south on I-5 listening to sports talk radio. The incoherent, ungrammatical blathering of the announcers kept his mind occupied. At some point, he would turn west and take one of the roads through the Coast Range to Highway 101 and the ocean. But which road?

He passed exits for the coast at Salem, Albany, and Eugene. He’d driven them before and wanted to see something new, new country. The Reverend was surprised to see people living in tents, tarps and pallet shanties in the trees and shrubs along the interstate. He’d seen such a sight around Portland-area freeways, but here they were near farms, orchards and rural rest stops.

Gold Beach Thanksgiving (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations

Reverend Dave Bland woke up in the gilded bedroom of his stone and fir mansion set on a hillside overlooking a winery a few miles outside of Amity. It wasn’t his mansion or winery. They belonged to his wife, Kari. She was one of the wealthiest women in the Willamette Valley.

The Reverend’s wife of seven years wasn’t around. She was probably sweating at yoga or drinking fancy coffee with her winemaking friends or carrying on yet another assignation.

It was the day before Thanksgiving. Traditionally, the couple dined at some swank restaurant where a cliched celebrity chef repurposed meals from classic American cuisine (this season it was Salisbury steak and Swedish meatballs) and everyone reveled in the expensive irony.

But as of Wednesday, Kari hadn’t said a word to her husband about where they were going. That hardly mattered. He was as indifferent to Thanksgiving as a beaver was to a presidential election.

The Reverend checked his phone. He had a text message from Kari sent earlier in the morning. It read:

Dave:

It’s over. I’m flying to Sicily for the holiday. I’ll return in a week and don’t want you there. Please sign the divorce papers in the office and leave a forwarding address. There’s a debit card with $10,000 on it for you. That’s it. The password is our wedding date. I paid your phone bill for the month and signed the title of the Navigator over to you. No more church service either, so tell everyone. It was fun at first but got boring. Good luck. You’ll need it.

Kari

Don’t think about going to the beach house in Manzanita. I changed all the security codes.

Was the poor Reverend in shock? Not really. He knew the heave ho was coming sooner or later, but a text message the day before Thanksgiving? And her flying to Sicily? Well, at least she left him the alimony and a SUV.

So now what? Where to go? How to survive? The Reverend didn’t have a clue. The practical thing would be to locate a place to live. But if he did and paid all the deposits, the Reverend would be as broke as a homeless John the Baptist, though at least he wouldn’t be wearing a loincloth and eating locust and wild honey.

Reverend Bland decided he would reach out to his flock for succor. That’s what a church is for, right? And his flock was rich. He texted several members and waited for sympathetic responses and offers of temporary housing as he packed up a couple workout bags full of belongings. He didn’t really own much of anything except a wardrobe, a phone and an Apple Watch. Everything around him was Kari’s.

They had met in a New Age Christian addiction recovery center (only gentle self-flagellation allowed and lots of healing crystals). His sin was sports betting, hers was pills. They’d hit it off immediately, violated various center rules with their sensual shenanigans, and then got married a week after their release. He was 35, she was 50.

He’d been cleaned out by his addiction and lost a condo, a boat and a semi-lucrative job selling medical equipment. She’d lost nothing except the craving for pills.

Kari told him he was great in recovery talking to the addicts, helping them each have their own Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. He was a born storyteller, she said, who should form some kind of ministry to continue his good work. She would subsidize him.

Growing Agitation

NSP Meditations

In the last several months, I have become more agitated with certain homeless people living in my neighborhood.

To get to the point, they are destroying a city park I love to visit, a unique place where two salmon bearing watercourses converge before the larger one empties into the Willamette River. In the last two decades, agencies and organizations have spent millions of dollars trying to restore these watercourse to fuller ecology and these expenditures have been incredibly successful. Now they are threatened.

My park is a wonderful, subtle, out-of-the-way, quiet natural area where I take respite from urban madness three or four times a week. Or used to.

The destruction began a few months ago as multiple sweeps of other encampments in the neighborhood, dislodged seven or eight RVs and beat-up vehicles and they ended up marooned alongside the park.

Several RVs run loud generators all day. Garbage and accumulations continue to mount. Some of it ends up in the watercourses. One man is operating a bicycle repair shop on the sidewalk. I’ve seen people defecate in the riparian areas. I’ve seen people passed out in the riparian areas.

I’ve previously written for this newsletter about homeless people destroying riparian areas in my neighborhood and the utter indifference of employees of the local watershed council to address the ongoing catastrophe. It’s not our job, our responsibility, they say. I hear that a lot with various agencies connected to this issue. Or I hear nothing at all.

If a watershed is imperiled it is their job. That is obvious.

People live along riparian areas all the time and don’t willfully brutalize them and the flora and fauna that call these habitats home. You can be homeless and live along riparian areas and not have to brutalize them.

I know why this destruction of riparian areas agitates me so much. It is because I spent a good many years on the Oregon Coast doing watershed restoration and saw how it worked to heal abuse perpetrated by farming, logging, road building and shoddy development.

What should I do as a citizen to save this park? Do I put up some signage. Do I start really bitching to the city parks department? Do I talk to the homeless people responsible and ask them to ameliorate their residency?

Yes, I know, if these rigs get swept, they’ll end up somewhere else in the city, but perhaps that relocation won’t end up killing wildlife and wrecking water quality. I consider that a win. I consider for the first time in writing about the homeless, I am angry with the malice shown toward a natural area by clearly struggling people. It is malice. There is no other word for it. If you were indifferent, it wouldn’t end up looking like this place has ended up looking.

I’ve directed almost all my time and energy toward helping Mark and members of the Old Crow Book Club. Maybe I should change course and start focusing on this tiny park and other damaged places of the watershed. I can’t do both.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Homeless of Portland

NSP Meditations, Poetry

My Dad and I were on the back deck on a Saturday afternoon. Our time living together was growing short. Less than a week was all that remained before he moved into an assisted living center.

I’m not really sure what I’ll do with my extra time when I don’t have to provide daily care. Something will emerge. Or someone.

Dad wanted me to read some poems aloud. I’d recently picked up an anthology of contemporary American poetry and he chose Days of 1964 by James Merrill and Filling Station by Elizabeth Bishop, a poet Dad reveres and actually met in Brazil during our family’s missionary service in the late 1960s. He can recite about a dozen of her poems.

I struggled with Days of 1964 with its weird punctuation and line breaks. There was some good grist in there about a staid domestic servant with a secret romantic life but the poem seemed so arch and lacked any blood.

Then I read Filling Station, a poem I had never encountered before. Read one stanza for yourself, about what the poet sees in the living quarters of the family that runs the filling station:

Some comic books provide

the only note of color—

of certain color. They lie

upon a big dim doily

draping a taboret

(part of the set), beside

a big hirsute begonia.

I set the book down, gathered my thoughts, and told Dad that Bishop had perfectly captured in theme what I do when I look for and see subtleties of humanity in homeless encampments. When observed, they suggest to me these people are still hanging on, and perhaps still can make a way out of life on the streets or in the willows.

It’s that Jack o Lantern in the battered RV or the potted Christmas tree outside a tent or original art hung up on the pallet shanty or the one-eyed pit bull as co pilot in the truck that can’t drive anymore.

Sometimes when I look I see nothing but squalor, insanity and drug derangement. But I’ll keep looking there on my next visit nonetheless.

I fear for my character when I stop looking and I fear for many of the homeless when I no longer notice the subtleties.

Dad said he chose that poem for me to read because he knew it would appeal to me because of the way Bishop noticed tiny details of humanity in an otherwise dirty and backward filling station. He said he’d recognized the same in me in our many conversations about homeless encampments. Indeed, I would say this was the subject of a majority of our conversations.

To think that my 90-year old father could link an Elizabeth Bishop poem to my observations of the homeless, well, that was pretty damn astounding.

Wolf and Jessie

NSP Meditations

I sat in a coffee shop editing a manuscript on a weekday morning. To my right sitting on a couch and drinking coffee was a tall, elderly man dressed in black jeans, black Western wear shirt, black cowboy boots, bolo tie and black cowboy hat. It certainly wasn’t a typical look for a Portland coffee shop but somehow it worked.

My mind drifted from the manuscript and I stared out the window. Parked across the street was a dented green VW station wagon from the 90s held together with yellow duct tape. A large pine cone protruded from the front grille.

The driver, a young man with long wavy brown hair reached his hand outside to open the door from there. He exited and was joined on the sidewalk by the wagon’s passenger, a young woman with long wavy brown hair. They were both dressed in black from head to toe. They looked like members of a rock band.

They smoked cigarettes then crossed the street and entered the coffee shop. She sat near the cowboy and played on her phone. He went to the counter and ordered something with six shots in it. He struck up a conversation with the barista and she peppered him with interesting questions. I eavesdropped.

I learned: his name was Wolf, his companion’s name, Jessie. They were in a band! They were the band! He was from Jersey and she was from Maine. They met in Long Island. He asked if she wanted to join him on trip to San Diego. He played guitar and sang. She sang. They formed the band and busked across the country during the summer. They made it to Oregon and gigged farmer’s markets. They were living out of the wagon and running down a dream. They didn’t have a home but they weren’t homeless in my mind. They also weren’t checked out like so many Americans are.

He told the barista the name of the band and where to find it on various social media platforms, but I didn’t catch it.

Wolf took his drink and Jesse’s over to the couch. He struck up a conversation with the cowboy about the cowboy’s attire. Wolf dug it. Wolf and Jessie sipped their coffee drinks and then prepared to leave. Jesse grabbed a few dog treats from a bowl. They said their goodbyes to the cowboy and left the coffee shop.

Back at the wagon, Jessie opened the driver side back door and fed the treats to a brown husky. He was probably in the band, too. Huskies are like that.

Wolf and Jesse smoked cigarettes and drank their drinks on the sidewalk.

It was time to go. I left the coffee shop and took a last look at Wolf and Jessie. It made me wish I had done something similar at their age, with a partner and a dog. Not the rock band thing, but maybe a writing thing. I did versions of it in my 20s and 30s, once with a dog on the Alaskan Highway, but never with a partner, a collaborator.

Maybe it’s not too late. I do have an album of country songs ready to record. I just need a singer.

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