nestucca spit

I am writing this from the dunes overlooking the South Jetty and the ocean. I’ve never written from the dunes before.

A bald eagle rides an updraft past me. A multitude of clammers go at it with gusto. Gulls glide through the trestles. An old rotund man walks a brown dog on the beach. Barn swallows dart around a fort I built two months ago.

My mind drifts toward thoughts of dunes. A year ago I read The Woman in the Dunes, a novel by the Japanese writer Kobo Abe. It is easily one of the stranger novels I’ve ever read and incredibly bleak. It’s about an entomologist engaged in fieldwork who falls into a deep sand pit in the dunes near an ocean. He becomes trapped there and meets a woman who is apparently trapped there as well and living in a crude cabin. They live together in near silence. I think the man dies in the end and is buried by the dunes. I have no recall what happened to the woman.

I remember a woman in the dunes with me. Below is an excerpt from a chapter about her from a book I never published. In many ways that book is about Oregon Coast dunes and finding adventures and philosophies in them. I wonder what I’ll ever do with it. I do know that it contains some answers to some of my current questions in life.

We were hidden in the dunes of Nestucca Spit on a sunny summer afternoon. A had her lean tattooed back to the sky. She looked up to that sky, rather than at me. In the distance we heard a small plane’s buzz. It must have just taken off from the Pacific City airport. Suddenly, the plane, a blue contraption bouncing out of World War I, appeared just off shore. It puttered on a course parallel to the ocean for a few seconds, then changed direction toward us.

The plane passed directly over. We laughed and waved at the pilot. A few seconds later we heard the plane again. We managed to twist ourselves to look to the sky. The plane approached us as if preparing to make a strafing run. It flew overhead and we waved again.

We moved deeper into dunes. Here came the plane again, lower in altitude. A was busy so I waved for both of us. Later, we wondered if the pilot landed safely. There was nothing about a crash in the news.

I recall another woman in the dunes with me—a drug addict, hustler, rock hound, poet and blackmailer. There is a novella in her, a modernized Henry Miller-tale of deceit and carnality and rock hounding. It wouldn’t be a bleak story. No, it would be rather jaunty. I believe we need more jaunty writing for these times and jaunty writing about dunes.

My favorite sand dunes along the Oregon Coast are the ones at Pistol River in Curry County. There are driftwood forts dispersed among them.

I once erected a historical marker in the dunes of Nestucca Spit because State Parks doesn’t really educate visitors to the Oregon Coast’s beaches about the state’s unparalleled legacy of publicly-owned beaches.

Last Halloween I had a concealed encounter in the dunes that was not of this world.

Dune, by Frank Herbert. I’ve never finished it. I tried three times. I will succeed soon, once I can find another copy. It is not widely known that the sand dunes around Florence, Oregon served as inspiration for this novel. Herbert spent time there working for the government in some kind of scientific capacity. I could Google it but I don’t feel like making money for Google, and besides, I can’t because I am writing this from the dunes.

(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.)