It is now late in the third quarter and the Elks lead 72-37. They have not attempted a single three-point shot. They are still running and running. A clinic it’s called. During one sequence, an Elks player grabs a rebound, rifles a two-hand outlet pass to a guard without hitting the floor. That guard then bullets a two-hand chest pass to a streaking wing down the floor and the wing scores a layup. The basketball never touched the floor. That the way the Blazers used to do it, thinks the writer, and he stands up and claps.

The opposition coach has no answer for the onslaught. His players just keep heaving up foolish three-point shots and missing. The Elks climb golden ladders to snare the rebounds and then thunder back the other way for an endless parade of finger rolls. No dunks. None of the Elks can even touch the rim!

None of the players who score ever gesture to the crowd. They just nod to their teammates.

The writer looks around the gym. He thinks about the misfits and miscreants camped down by the river. He thinks about the book he’s trying to write. He wants to offer some solutions to the crisis and has invented, tried out, then discarded metaphors that might help illustrate how to go about better addressing the problem. One was barn raising. One was Mussolini. Another one was restoring damaged people like you might restore a damaged watershed.

The fast break! That’s it! The metaphor is running liquid right in front of me! I hear sneakers squeak. I see layup after layup. I see teamwork. I see victory.

The writer starts whisking the metaphor in his mind like eggs in preparation for a peasant souffle. It goes something like this:

Suppose we consider a homeless person as a basketball that can’t seem to find its way into the basket. The easiest way to score is a layup. But this ball is always shot from long range, really long range, and it practically never makes it through the hoop. It is always a clanging jumper, a thud off the backboard, or an outright air ball. These are very low percentage shots and always heavily defended by those forces who don’t want everyone to score equally in American life. The rich score with uncontested dunks. The poor shoot from half court wearing blind folds.

Who or whatever is shooting the errant shots is important to consider in our metaphor, as is who comprises the opposing teams. We might consider these later, but the larger concern is the ball. It must find the basket. The ball remains the ball and needs to score. But what happens when it misses the mark and keeps missing it over and over? When that happens, the ball must be defensively rebounded and launched into an offense, a fast break offense patterned from Jack Ramsay’s book. The center on the opposing starting five, a disciplined team drilled to death, rips the rebound out of the sky or wrestles it away from indifference, and fires the outlet pass to the point guard who is already streaking to center court, with two teammates, wings they’re called, perfectly abreast on his left and right, sprinting at full speed yet under control. They are a beautiful and powerful trio of metered poetry in synchronized motion, as they bear down on a breakaway toward a lone defender or two or none at all. The point guard will dribble until he’s stopped or he takes it the hoop to finish or draw the foul. Two points from the line is still the equivalent of a basket. Even if the point guard is somewhat blocked, he might use his pivot foot and maneuver around the defender, or split them if two are present, or come to a screeching jump stop and dish it left or dish it right to a wing cutting toward the key, passing with one hand or a two hands, or a mini lob. He might even go behind his back or through his legs and bring down the house. He might also look left and pass right or vice versa. The wings might even pull up for a short jumper (banking it in off the board!) Hell, the point guard might even feint and fake, and then swish it from the free throw line over the confused defenders. That homeless ball will score on the fast break and find a home in the twine. And if it doesn’t on the first shot, then a trailer roaring up the court behind the first wave of attack will lay the ball in with an easy put back.

This team keeps running this fast break with this same ball until it produces a winning outcome. It might take an entire game or season. The team keeps running. They don’t stop for end of periods or timeouts. It’s the same starting five. No substitutions. The coach stands on the sidelines barking instructions, applauding, encouraging. He’s there to call out a player who isn’t performing his role to perfection. He’s also there to tell the ball to do everything it can to get into the basket. It has to help itself, too. It can’t go flat or take in dangerous air. It can’t be left out in the rain to mold and rot.

The ball is always taken to the hoop. It is never launched as a three-point shot. Sure, there will be misses, bad passes, charging fouls and blocks. But the team keeps running the fast break with purpose and extreme urgency. This is the game of life for this homeless basketball. It’s late in the game or late in the season and the ball is suffering through a terrible losing streak. The team knows their roles because they have a great coach and they’ve practiced and practiced. They know the clock is running. They know no one is really watching them perform. They know the only winning that matters is the winning back of a human being from the brink of annihilation. They don’t tout individual statistics. Their theme song is, “I Want You Back” by the Jackson Five. The school band plays it all game long. It’s the only song they play, outside of “Louie, Louie,” Oregon’s unofficial state anthem.

The writer stops whisking the eggs. He isn’t quite ready to add them to his souffle recipe yet, and certainly not start baking it.

Is this all insane? Is this all a ridiculous bad notion, this experimenting with a metaphor for action to help people dying on the streets and in the willows?

No. It is not insanity. It is fresh and unconventional movement of the mind, as opposed to stasis and sterile imagination. Whatever offenses the homeless advocates and political pros are using now is not working. Shit, those teams aren’t even on the floor. As a result, various human basketballs have rolled out the gym and ended up by the dumpsters in the parking lot or down the muddy embankment to the river, stuck in the trees, marooned until the next high flow washes away them forever.

The writer wonders how in the world the fast break offense he is witnessing with utter astonishment could have possibly landed and rooted in this Oregon backwater. He also speculates the Elks are the only basketball team in the world running a fast break offense.

Somehow the coach knew of Jack Ramsay’s offense, the history of the Trail Blazers’ legendary team featuring Bill Walton that defeated the Philadelphia 76ers and their superstar, Dr. J. The Blazers were a team like no other in the history of the NBA. They played a coordinated, unselfish, ego-free style of fast break basketball in the era of the one-on-one, run and gun, shake and bake, playground game.

The Blazers ran and ran and ran. They ran 3 on 1, 2 on 1, 3 on 2, 4 on 3, it didn’t matter. It was about continuous motion, good execution, a relentless attack. They passed. A rebound and outlet pass or blocked shot that led to an easy score was just as valued as the score itself. They flowed. They knew their roles and relished their specialties. They also had the last player in the history of the NBA to wear Chuck Taylor’s (guess who?) in the playoffs and the last team to have two vegetarians in their starting five.

Somehow, this coach, who’s an English teacher, and wearing checkered slacks and a tan corduroy blazer on the sideline, and whom the writer feels is probably in his mid 50s, did the impossible. He convinced his players to run an ancient fast break offense and not in some weird act of nostalgia replete with tube socks, sweat bands and tight short shorts. They were still modern kids who did the same narcissistic things with their phones as city kids, as well as adults in all regions across the country.

Yes, the coach had somehow convinced them to buy into this throwback cooperative offense in the Great Age of American Individuality because it worked and worked without fanfare. Individualists can’t abide that.

You know, it needs to be stated here: it’s actually more fun to work successfully together at some endeavor than it is working alone. It’s called collaboration. One sometimes wishes Thoreau would have written about the merits of collaboration, but then again, perhaps that’s what Walden is really all about—successful collaboration with nature. The coach often raised that point to his students when he had them read passages from Walden on their phones when they were hiking in the woods behind the high school. Then he’d teach the concept of irony by highlighting they were reading Walden on their phones in the woods and it was written by one of the greatest anti-technology Americans of all time. Double irony. STOP! Feel that rumble beneath you! That’s Henry writhing in his grave. The triple irony, the coach also taught, was that Thoreau’s fierce and uniquely American individualism as espoused in his writings, had been hideously warped by the forces of greed and social media into a sinister and self righteous narcissism that threatened to destroy American civilization from within, and generate colossal profits in the destruction.

And to think: the 5′ 7,” wiry, wilderness-tested, pencil mad, Thoreau would have performed so incredibly well as a scrappy, hustling point guard for the Elks. He would have routinely posted statistical lines such as: 10 points, 18 assists, five rebounds, eight steals. Now that’s a stat line to help the greater good.

The writer would love to see the coach expound on the philosophy of collaboration and cooperation and the needs of the many versus the needed of the few in practice! He also wonders if the players took those lessons home and discussed them with their parents, most of whom had lost all notions of cooperating for the civic good but sure worshiped a mindless freedom that was ripping the country apart.

That fast break offense! Surely, the writer thinks, the coach must have read Ramsay’s strange and rare book, The Coach’s Art, published in 1978, with its sentences like: “A great team playing within itself, playing with control and purpose, is beautiful to watch. Good play seems almost effortless. Five separate wills blended into a single whole playing with one purpose—to win, yes, but by playing its own game in which it believes.”

Or this one: “Success in the fast break game I coach requires good rebounding, sharp outlet passing, deft ball handling, quick land filling, accurate shooting, and great speed getting down the floor.”

Yes, the coach must have read it and committed it to memory. How he had come to find the book was a total mystery, unless someone asked him No one ever had.

He also probably showed his players Fast Break, the cosmic and cult film documentary of that triumphant Championship season and its far out aftermath. Fast Break is only the greatest stoner, Zen Buddhist, cloud nine, sports documentary of all time and opens with a stoned Bill Walton down by a salmon-choked river explaining the concept of playing perfect groovy basketball, team-oriented socialist basketball. There’s animated butterflies in it, too!

And the coach also probably told his team how close the Portland Trail Blazers came to becoming only the second publicly-owned (i.e. socialist) professional sports franchise in American history. A public stock offering was almost held to raise the required $3.7 million fee to join the NBA, but at the last minute, private California money stepped in with the dough. It was soooooooo close. (FYI: The Green Bay Packers are still the only publicly-owned professional sports franchise in the country, quite possibly the world.)

All of these things the writer knew about the Portland Trail Blazers and their 1977 Championship season because he was the nation’s leading authority on the subject and because he knew there would never be another team like that one in the history of American professional sports and that greatly saddened him. The unselfish ethos demonstrated by that red hot and rollin’ team was one that had the ability to transform every aspect of a deeply selfish American society. The 76ers may have lost that series but their ethos eventually prevailed, only no pundit calls it one-on-one anymore.

You need evidence of this? Simply watch any basketball or football game played at any level and observe players pointing to themselves after every accomplishment, routine or not, and asking the crowd to notice them, worship them.

The score is 27-7 and there is less than a minute left in the first period. The Elks are killing their arch rival, the Loggers, and exactly one person in the stands loves it when animal-themed mascots (such as Otters, Gulls, Bears, Wolves, Banana Slugs or Beavers (!) crush human-themed mascots (such as Fishermen, Crusaders, Cheesemakers, Generals, Pioneers or Engineers) in an athletic competition.

That one person is a writer on the road researching a book about Oregon’s homeless crisis. Why is he here, in this particular obscure place? It was random. He just opened a map of Oregon, placed it on the floor, and then tossed a penny into the air. It landed, spun around, then dropped on this river town with its dead lumber mill, dilapidated high school, its dinky gymnasium supported by massive beams the size of busses, and ungrammatical mascot primarily known for its antlers and that it segregated itself by gender until rutting season. (Human beings should consider this arrangement.) He wanted to see if there was any homeless living in this rural town, whose citizens loathed liberal Portland and its homeless losers living in squalor.

Of course there were homeless in this rural town. About two dozen were living in tents, shanties and 90s sedans down by the river, fucking around with meth and booze, or working at the convenience stores. One of the churches (there were11 total) fed them a sack lunch once a week and that was it for Christianity. Can’t coddle these “undesirables,” as the Mayor said at city council meeting. He wanted to pass an ordinance banning the church from handing out the lunches, but someone reminded him of the First Amendment.

The writer is in the stands because he has nothing to do this Friday night and he’d found a decent motel with a room that overlooked the river and the encampment. He’d been watching the encampment from the balcony with his binoculars all afternoon and seen all sorts of strange sights, such a two men playing foos ball, another man sleeping in an igloo-shaped doghouse, and a woman throwing darts at a dartboard and missing every single time with the darts splashing tip first in the river, a bullseye every time.

He arrives at the gym right after the tip-off, sits down on the bleachers across from the scorer’s table, takes a sliver in his right palm, munches on some popcorn, and prepares to take some notes for his book. A minute later, he sets down his notebook, watches the game, and cannot believe the basketball he is seeing.

Here is what he is watching: the moving manifestation and perfect execution of Jack Ramsay’s fast break offense, the very offense that he employed to coach the Portland Trail Blazers in 1977 to their only NBA championship. The writer could not believe it because the offense had long gone extinct at every level of basketball, male and female, thanks to the popularity of three-point shooting, which computers had figured out was a more efficient way to score and thus, win games. No kid or adult wanted to run the floor and shoot a layup anymore. They wanted to fire away from behind the arc and show off their 25-30-percent shooting prowess all over social media platforms.

It is absolutely the most boring basketball ever played, and that includes even the pre shot clock, Dean Smith, four-corners offense.

Somewhere in rural western Oregon, at the foot of the Cascade Range, depleted timber and ranch country, a high school boys basketball team with the preposterously plural Elks as their mascot is playing a Friday night game against its arch rival in the last standing gymnasium in Oregon constructed by the CCC during the Depression. It is also the last gym in the state to sport a sign that reads Fallout Shelter and violates the ADA.

The joint is packed to the rafters. It stinks of sweat and sap. The gym is tiny, a cracker box they used to call them. It has ancient wooden bleachers that will shiv splinters into asses through Carhart pants and Wrangler jeans. The court is smaller than the regulation junior high size of 74 feet long and 42 feet wide. All the coaches in the league detest playing here because they can’t play their usual style of basketball, which amounts entirely to shooting three-point shots. In this cracker box, a player can’t shoot three-point shots near the baseline because to do so would mean standing out of bounds.

But that’s not why the home team hasn’t lost a game in this gym in two decades. They occasionally lose on the road. They win because they never take three-point shots. They make layups, lots of them. They go to the hoop. Most of the layups are uncontested, but sometimes a player who drives hard to the hoop with its medieval metal backboard will end up crashing into the padded cushions bolted to the concrete wall three feet from the end lines. Many concussions and separated shoulders have resulted because of these collisions. Even a couple broken legs. The coach isn’t a sadist, far from it. He’s a basketball purist and purists love mid air collisions near and under the rim.

Time has stood still here. The voters will never pass a bond measure to build a new gym. Three attempts at arson by school board members have also failed and no one was ever prosecuted. The town likes their gym just fine. It reminds them of better days when conservative Oregon was really conservative Oregon.

And in many ways they were right about the good ol’ Oregon days. Tom McCall was governor and decriminalizing marijuana. Prisoners in the state penitentiary published a classic literary review. Coffee was coffee. Donuts were donuts. Beer was beer. Strippers weren’t dancers. Cheese from Tillamook was produced by the state’s most successful socialist enterprise (and still is). Steve Prefontaine was alive and breaking long distance running records while hungover. The Portland Timbers were a bunch of washed-up drunken Brits. Senator Mark Hatfield was saving Yaquina Head from ending up as a rock quarry. Senator Bob Packwood was saving Cascade Head from ending up as a clearcut. The state sponsored a rock festival attended by naked hippies. And the only homeless people were the winos sleeping in the doorways of Old Town in Portland.

Or they could travel even farther back in Oregon time to an era when the gym was constructed by the CCC boys in less than a week, out of lumber milled from local 500-year-old Doug firs felled by crosscut saws, and the federal government hired an unemployed Communist to paint a mural on one of the walls, a mural of muscled men felling towering trees with crosscut saws that hid a few furtive IWW symbols that were so subtle that the capitalists couldn’t detect them.

It was right there, above one of the backboards, painted in that gloriously proletariat style of murals from the New Deal, (and with a dash of Diego Rivera). It was a living (if not fading) lesson from American history that any of the high school’s social studies teachers could have used to teach about the New Deal, FDR, WPA, CCC and the Federal Art Project. All they had to do was march their students down the halls, into the gym, tell them to look up, and start asking questions of the mural and the gym itself. After that, they could take the stairs to the fallout shelter and pretend it was the Cuban Missile Crisis and the end of the world was on its way in the form of a nuclear winter.

But no, these teachers didn’t know a damn thing about the murals or the fallout shelter. They demanded their students fill out rote worksheets on a fancy tablet that sent advertisements to the students as they “studied” streaming shows and gambled on NFL games.

Everything about the gymnasium proclaimed the case for the practical grandeur of American-style socialism, but that is another story to tell and has nothing to do with a high school basketball team that was invincible on its home hardwood, won state title after state title, but played in such a remote rural area that hardly anyone outside the Timber Valley League ever saw the unique old fashioned way they conquered at home and marvel at their magisterial method for total domination.

Even the hometown fans didn’t grasp what they were seeing in the team’s winning ways because they were too dumb to grasp the meaning of a beautiful metaphor running up and down the court in front of their eyes. People who watch Fox News all day and night can’t grasp metaphors, let alone reality. But they do come out to support high school sports in podunk Oregon towns, and do give up, at least for a few evenings, Tucker Carlson for that.