matt love

The Bonnie and Clyde Files 2

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , , , , , , ,

It was a somewhat overcast morning and rain threatened. The rain just keeps falling and falling this spring. More, please. Keep the enemy forces at bay. It’s our only weapon in Oregon against the developers.

A canine cacophony from the Angels for Sara Sanctuary greeted me after I parked the car. My pockets were stuffed full of treats. Clyde is a fiend for treats. Bonnie just loves everything.

I unlocked the back gate and Bonnie and Clyde happily emerged. Treat time! I greeted them in my funny Bonnie and Clyde voices. Funny how a man’s voice changes when he greets dogs excited to see him. I can’t say I’ve done that with humans, with a certain few exceptions; they know who they are.

We romped through the high grass along the river. Across the channel, across the pasture, deforested hills loom in the distance, hills owned and clear cut by a spectacularly evil timber investment corporation with a secret headquarters in a clearcut in Seaside. (I’ve been inside.) Clearcuts regenerate, yes, and continue their plantation existence until the wiser heads in the watershed ultimately prevail.

I was clear cut. I am trying to regenerate. The more rain the quicker the regeneration. That is and is not a metaphor. Please friends, let Love reign O’er Me…as The Who sang…Only love / Can make it rain / The way the beach is kissed by the sea.

We found our spot where the bank slopes down to the river. I rigged up the writing studio in some mud—camp stool and TV tray. The tray is a metal relic, painted black with red roses on top, from a half century ago, from an era when families owned floor consoles and watched hour or half hour shows together in the living room, shows like Mannix or All in the Family, while eating TV dinners or tuna casseroles chased with fruit-encrusted side dishes of Jell-O. There was probably even conversations between family members. Oh the nostalgia of it all! The tray makes me smile. I am happy to give it new life on the river and provide material support for an Oregon writer trying to figure his new life out.

I whipped out the blue book and pen and jotted down some lines. Bonnie Clyde wandered off to prowl the river. Behind me, an ODFW fish trap counted unseen fish in the river. I wanted to know more about this study. Overhead, cirrus and cumulus clouds mixed together in ill-defined territories and produced various whites, blues, gray and even a streak of black here and there. A couple of small birds raced above the surface of the water. A branch floated by me. I heard rapids running. I saw wildflowers. Beavers were watching.

I looked around and thought: it’s a perpetual haiku here. I thought again: I want to live as a perpetual haiku, observe life that concretely, with the simple clarity that haiku summons in writers. I want my daily practice in all things to be that precise, too.

The water ran clear and shallow. I could see the bottom. I could walk across. It occurred to me that this was a perfect place for a frontier baptism and the singing of “Shall We Gather at the River.”

I remembered my baptism from the TV tray era. It certainly contrasted with this site for potential baptismal. I wore plastic coveralls and the tap water was heated lukewarm. There was a lighted baptismal and a microphone. The congregation sang “Shall We Gather at the River,” as I came up from underwater, a newly minted Christian.

Even then, I knew it would never stick.

The Bonnie and Clyde Files 1

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , , , , , ,

Meet my new canine friends, Bonnie and Clyde! Bonnie is the black female. Clyde is the brown male. They’re a friendly pair of old dogs who have been together a long, long time. They have perfect outlaw names. They have perfect hitches in their giddy-up that go along with my existential one. We are our own little gimp outlaw gang!

Welcome to an account of our regular adventures alongside the Lewis and Clark River. Welcome to my meditations associated with our adventures as I write from a camp stool facing the river with a TV tray as my desk. Read the flowing emanations via pen, pencil or 20-year old Alphasmart word processor. There might be dithyrambs on dogs. There might be diatribes on clearcuts. I might throw in disquisitions on beavers. I might write a Western. Who knows where the flow will lead. Who cares? Release the hounds!

Bonnie and Clyde are residents of Angels for Sara Sanctuary in rural Astoria. The sanctuary is relatively new and takes in older dogs whose elderly owners passed away or can’t care for them anymore. There are 8-10 dogs in the residence of J., the saint who operates the sanctuary. It is an honor to assist her.

I started volunteering at Angels for Sara because it is the only volunteering I am allowed to do (no humans) and I was going out of my mind not being able to serve my community in some capacity. So old dogs it is, three mornings a week.

My primary job is to walk Bonnie and Clyde a short distance down the river, hang out for as long as the mood strikes, and then return to the sanctuary. We have our special resting spot at the end of the outward leg, where the bank levels with the river. There, I set up a portable writing studio and write while the dogs mosey around, take a dip in the water, and pester me for the treats they know I have stashed in the pockets of my corduroys. They don’t even mind me declaim passages from Leaves of Grass or Siddhartha. These old dogs love LITERATURE!

I really don’t have the words to convey what being with these dogs in this location has done for me. I may have to invent a phrase to describe the extraordinarily good feelings that overcome me with Bonnie and Clyde as we share our time together upon the river.

Let the adventures begin!

On a Rilke Biography

NSP Meditations, Writing , , ,

I recently read an absorbing biography of the European poet/writer Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and came away with some valuable insights into writing. I’ve always been taught by his writing in it various forms, used his writings in my own teaching to inspire others, but his life turned out to be equally instructive.

Published in 1986, A Ringing Glass, by Donald Prater, is a book short on literary analysis of Rilke’s work, and long on details of his extraordinarily vagabond life and cultivation of dozens upon dozens of wealthy benefactors. We also learn of the dozens upon dozens of exotic women drunk on Rilke’s writing who relentlessly pursued him and aided him in countless ways.

Rilke never held any job except as a writer of lyrical verse, reviews, art monographs and one groundbreaking novel, The Notebooks of Malte Lauurids Brigge. He existed purely for creating art. He was a total aesthete. He often walked naked in the woods. He was a vegetarian. He didn’t drink. He was married but didn’t live with his wife. He was stateless. He sought and received support from various governments. He often went on and on reciting his verses to people who fell asleep listening to him. He seemed almost entirely unaffected as a poet by the mass slaughter of World War I. He craved rooms with a view. He wrote standing up at a special desk constructed for him. He often wrote about himself in the third person his own letters.

A few quotes from his letters registered with me: “You must change your life.” And: “Because to stay is to be nowhere.” Finally: “Works of art are always the result of having been at risk, of having pursued an experience to the very end, beyond which no one can go. And the further on this road, the more personal, the more unique does the experience become, till in the end, the work of art is the necessary, the insuppressible, the most final expression possible of this uniqueness.”

That last quote really struck me. I’ll be thinking about it while I’m at the probation office later today, particularly that one word, insuppressible. I will also consider the phrase, to the very end, beyond which no one can go. That’s where I am going these days.

 

 

 

 

Thank You Readers

NSP Meditations , , , ,

I want to take this opportunity to thank all the readers of my Meditations blog. By my rough Google Analytics count, some 10,000 people have perused the writing since the blog debuted in late March.

When I started writing these pieces, I really had no idea where they would land with readers. Would anyone care what I had to say? I was unsure of my voice as a writer and how to treat the current subject that is my life. I did know that I wanted to keep writing topics that had always interested me: dogs, forts, beaches, dive bars, books, modern Oregon history, writing and more. I have been encouraged by the responses that many of you have shared with me. Keep them coming. I keep writing to understand and hope some readers are coming to new understandings themselves. If we all can’t keep coming to new understandings, what really is the point of going on? Is change possible? I know it is in me.

I also want to thank the readers who have supported the blog through a financial contribution, or subscription as I call it. If my writing interests you, consider making a contribution or sharing posts with others. It would be nice to expand the audience but that’s not the goal here. There is no goal with this blog. There is only expression and sending it out into the unknown.

In future installments of Meditations, I will be exploring my unique growing up in Oregon City, the ongoing saga of Lost and Found in my life, the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Beach Bill, my volunteering at a dog sanctuary, my dead end searches for jobs, old books that I discover, the interesting people who have reached out to me, and my new idea for a detective novel/show that I can’t get out of my mind.

I am pointedly not writing about American or Oregon politics, but I am sure these subjects will creep into some of the posts. How could they not in the world we are living?

Again, thanks. Stay with me. Reach out to people you love or don’t even know. Reach out to animals and watersheds in distress. Advance, always. Dig into mysteries, such as: just what was going on in that driftwood fort I built where I found the orange dildo and champagne cork? How’s that for a writing prompt!

Laugh. Find joy. Do the good hard work. William Stafford once wrote: “Justice will take a million intricate moves.” I like to think we should all try to make one every day, perhaps every hour.

Matt Love

The Chill Tank or My Ten Days on the Boat in Jail

Astoria, NSP Meditations , , , , ,

As part of my sentence, I served ten days in the Clatsop County Jail. I was assigned to POD 30, or the “Chill Tank,” as it was unofficially called by its inhabitants, because the unit rarely presented serious problems to the guards.

When I walked into the Chill Tank, which had four two-man cells and measured about a thousand square feet, I was immediately overwhelmed by the impression of walking into Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest—the novel and cinematic version of it. Have you ever walked into a novel? Living inside one as it unfolds in liquid time? I have.

During my incarceration, I met 11 different men. Because of overcrowding, I did not have a cell with a bunk mate. Rather, I slept on the floor in a far corner of the common area, behind a steel picnic table, a passenger on a “boat” (the official name for it), a plastic container filled with a mattress that resembled a  cushion from a piece of patio furniture left outside for a decade. I had a small plastic tote for my possessions, which amounted to toiletries, books, writing things and materials to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—practically my sole source of nutrition after giving up eating cheese sandwiches because they were undoubtedly the worst cheese sandwiches in all of mass incarceration nation. They easily violated the Eighth Amendment.

This living on the floor had its distinct advantages, though. From this splayed vantage point, I could see all the eyes of the visiting guards, nurses and other assorted jail personnel but they couldn’t see mine. Let me assure you, you can learn a lot about humanity that way.

There was no equivalent of a Nurse Ratched in the Chill Tank, although there was a medication time reminiscent of the novel and movie where the men lined up for pills that a nurse dispensed. She was actually quite friendly and only dispensed aspirin, antacids and vitamins. A couple of female guards showed the inmates tiny glimmers of humanity, like photocopying illustrations or rustling up a book. One glimmer was even extended toward me and I will never forget its simple grace. We looked each other in the eyes and I thanked her with a nod.

I certainly wasn’t the Chief in the Chill Tank (although I did push a broom around). I was openly writing all the time, 40,000 words with golf pencils on yellow legal paper, a book really, that perhaps I will be the only one to ever read. Just like Notes from the Underground!

During my incarceration, I traded my meat and chicken for paper and pencils. I read the Wall Street Journal daily for the first time. I read nine books, including a Western and something by James Joyce. I watched an episode of Baywatch with other sexual offenders in a library with 89 Bibles and one Koran. I shot baskets at 10:00 p.m. on the roof of the jail while it rained. I played chess. I witnessed private corporations exploit impoverished men and my family. I drank Billy Brew instant coffee made from hot shower water. I taught an informal writing workshop. I was tested for TB. I was told I needed to use deodorant. I talked to my mother on an ancient analog phone. I heard classic rock and advertisements on XM radio and felt rock die within me. I saw men cry. I saw men begging for metal health services. I learned the definition of contraband was “unintended purpose.” I was warned to expect “consistent inconsistencies.” I heard repeated exaltation for President Trump. I never once saw natural light. I was never once told what I was supposed to get out of serving ten days in jail. I never once observed a man talking to his court-appointed attorney although collectively, the men tried, by my count, 34 times.

I met men who had spent seven, nine and ten months and almost two years in jail and their cases hadn’t gone to trial, nor did they know when they would go to trial. They walked from wall to wall 135 times in the Chill Tank and that was exactly a mile. Someone did the math.

I met a man who told me rock and roll stories of his time running a music venue in Boise back in the day. Boston once played Boise and they rocked. He couldn’t stand one of the Eagles. I forget which one.

I met a man who: was a sex offender because of something he did while fishing; walked in the early morning reading the New Testament; served ten days in solitary confinement for hoarding books; had 45 previous incarcerations inside the Clatsop County Jail; wanted to model his life after Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Pumping Iron-era Arnold.

We had our own Randle McMurphy and Billy Bibbit characters. The former claimed he was a direct descendant of a famous artist who had painted the drafting of the Declaration of Independence with mythological strokes. He was released on a Friday night around midnight and was back with us two days later, arrested on new charges. He told me of his walking in rain, to see his old lady in Seaside, across the Bay Bridge, and throwing most of his possessions into the black water as he renounced God forever. He was perhaps the funniest man I have ever met. The latter looked like Billy Bibbit and walked as I presumed Billy would walk. Our Billy, however, wasn’t a self-commit. Was I? That existential thought had occurred to me.

I never have been shown such kindness by strangers in my life. They showed me the ropes and how to make jailhouse taffy and salsa. They wrote for me and drew me illustrations (like the one accompanying this blog. That’s me on the boat, or rather my legs, in the lower right hand corner. This illustration is a perfect rendering of the Chill Tank).

There is more, much more, 40,000 words more to the Chill Tank story. But these thousand will suffice for now.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

A Conde McCullough Tribute

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History , , , , , , , , ,

(I wrote this feature article for a coastal magazine last year, but it never ran. The topic is one of my favorites, Conde McCullough. At long last, there is a proper tribute to his genius.)

On the west end of the Lewis and Clark River Bridge, on the outskirts of Astoria, stands the greatest outdoor display of interpretative history I have ever seen in Oregon. It is a sterling monument of collaboration between a state agency, a genius bridge builder, an artist, the private sector, schoolchildren, poetry and an ideal that bridges can be beautiful and not mere conveyance—and that we should also acknowledge their excellent makers.

Last May, the Oregon Department of Transportation dedicated this interpretative display on the history of the Old Youngs Bay and Lewis and Clark River Bridges. In attendance were the partners that created the remarkable exhibit, including its project designer, Suenn Ho from Portland.

The erection of the display coincided with the repair of the bridges, built in 1921 and 1924, and designed by Oregon’s master bridge builder, Conde McCullough. The display features purposely rusted panels, hand-drawn architectural drawings, a gear shaft, old photographs, salvaged materials from the repairs, a timeline of McCullough’s career, and a brilliant cutout silhouette of the master himself wearing a fedora!

My favorite part of the exhibit is the handwritten inclusion of over 60 whimsical bridge poems and enchanting illustrations produced by Lewis and Clark Elementary students that artisans sandblasted into granite. One young bard named Vanessa wrote: Bridges, water, wow, wow wow / can’t stand their sight / It’s so beautiful / I love the sights, wow, wow wow.

Wow is the perfect word to describe McCullough’s bridges.

Conde McCullough served as Oregon’s state bridge engineer for 18 years (1919-37) and is chiefly remembered for his elegant bridges along U.S. Highway 101 on the central coast that opened in the 1930s during the height of the Depression. McCullough’s bridges seized the public’s imagination with their distinctive and wonderfully eccentric art deco flourishes, such as stylish, often soaring arches of green steel, beveled columns, concrete obelisks, ornate railings and pedestrian plazas. They have since become nationally renowned landmarks of the Oregon Coast.

The Old Youngs Bay and Lewis Clark Bridges contain some characteristics that later comprised McCullough’s distinct style. The former includes beveled obelisks that mark the approaches from both ends, and atop each obelisk rests an odd little decorative lantern.

You get the feeling that McCullough was just warming up with Astoria and then later found his full measure as a designer with his other coastal bridges.

Ho’s project has masterfully recreated the kind of old school workmanship that distinguishes McCullough’s finest bridges. “I wanted something more than just a plaque,” she said. “This display was much more than just information about two bridges. I wanted to honor McCullough and the lost craftsmanship from that era, what was possible back then.”

I remember feeling exactly the same about McCullough when I discovered his bridges and learned something about the man. Perhaps that’s why Ho’s display struck such a resounding chord in me.

In 2011, I published a quirky book called Love and the Green Lady, about my love affair with one of McCullough’s New Deal-era gems, the Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport.  I lived in Newport at the time and crossing that bridge every morning revolutionized my aesthetic and helped me understand that McCullough wanted more from a bridge than just civil engineering; he wanted art, beauty and to impart the human touch into his constructions.

The new interpretative display gets that exactly right in a method that astonished me. It’s easily the most imaginative explanation of McCullough’s work and ethos I’ve ever witnessed and I’ve seen them all. It truly deserves a visit and hands on inspection.

Toward the end of his career, McCullough wrote to a friend: “From the dawn of civilization up to the present, engineers have been busily engaged in ruining this fair earth, and taking all the romance out of it—there is no romance, nor poetry left in the world. If we only knew the truth, the decline of ancient Babylon and the complete dissolution of Sodom and Gomorrah were probably dated from the time they formed the first engineering society. However, I don’t know that there is anything we can do about it.”

McCullough did do something about it. He built beautiful bridges along the Oregon Coast that we still use and admire today. His creative vision inspired others to follow him and one path led directly to the project near the Lewis and Clark Bridge, a display, I might add, that also had the good sense to declare in print: “Thank you Conde McCullough for your inspiration.”

When was the last time you read something like that on a historical exhibit?

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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