oregon history

The Inspiration of Henry Kaiser and Vanport

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“This achievement has been largely forgotten by Oregonians,” wrote Peter Marsh in his fantastic 2021 book Liberty Factory: The Untold Story of Henry Kaiser’s Oregon Shipyards.

That achievement helped win WW II and might prove instructive today as a strategy for Oregon and the rest of the nation as they address the homeless crisis, which of course primarily comes down to this obvious fact—there isn’t enough housing—and attempts to provide it are frustratingly slow despite that in many places, like Portland, the money was allocated years ago. YEARS.

Wait, forget instructive. Kaiser’s achievement might offer the inspiration and solution.

Let us consider Henry Kaiser, the former shipping magnate and founder of a health care empire.

After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and America entered WW II, America needed transport and war ships and needed them fast. It was a national emergency.

Henry Kaiser built the ships, including the famous Liberty ships, approximately 1500 of them, at his Portland and Vancouver shipyards on the Columbia River.

There was a critical need for housing to house the Kaiser shipyard workers to win WW II. It was a national emergency after all.

Henry Kaiser built the housing on 650 acres in a flood plain of the Columbia River. He bought the land. The housing he built became Vanport and became Oregon’s second largest city in less time than a college football season.

Portland City Hall initially balked at Kaiser’s Vanport initiative, probably because it boggled limited imaginations of employees and threatened to expose their sloth. But Kaiser had the ear of FDR and FDR sent Eleanor to Portland and she told City Hall to get out of the way. They did. This was Eleanor talking! There was a world war going on!

Do we ever need an Eleanor Roosevelt in charge of the homeless crisis in America today? This is a federal issue. It’s a national emergency. The federal government is charged with promoting the general welfare. The general welfare of America is corroded when hundreds of thousands of Americans are living on the streets and in the woods.

Henry Kaiser built 10,414 apartments and homes in 110 days. That became Vanport and 44,000 shipyard workers and their families eventually lived in a community that included amenities such as the first large scale child care center in the world and an extension college that later became Portland State University.

I should also add that the Vancouver Housing Authority built housing for 35,000 people working for Kaiser’s Vancouver shipyard across the Columbia River in roughly the same amount of time.

It was a monumental accomplishment of private initiative to house people in a national emergency and not a single monument to Kaiser exists in Portland. As of this writing, not a single print newspaper in Portland has bothered to review the book and get this story back in play. Moreover, I suspect no one governing the homeless crisis in Portland or associated with the Homeless Industrial Complex has ever heard of the incredible Vanport story, except for the fact that a flood wiped out the city in 1948 and killed 15 people.

Let me address a few points:

Yes, the housing was substandard. Yes, it was built in a flood plain. Yes, we didn’t have land use and construction regulations at the time. And yes, we didn’t have a hundred agencies and organizations involved because they didn’t exist at the time. There was basically one entity, more of a force, Henry Kaiser and his dedication to build ships to win the war. Well, that and to turn a profit, which he certainly did.

But Vanport was housing nonetheless with running water, plumbing, electricity and sanitation. It wasn’t tents or pods or shelters or shanties or RVs buried in squalor. It was built in less than four months!

In some instances, the City of Portland and Portland voters have allocated funds or approved tax measures to build low-income housing and erect emergency shelters four years ago and construction hasn’t even started. What is going on?

Vanport housed people who wanted or needed to work. American needed these people. It makes a difference in a person’s life if your country needs you. Not Wal-Mart or Nike or McDonalds, but your state or country. I mean, what if an Oregon politician framed it that way? And went down to the encampments and started talking, not making speeches, but acting like he or she was on the front lines of a crisis, a state of emergency, and asked the residents to get involved?

Tom McCall would have done it. So would have Bud Clark and Vera Katz. Certainly Barbara Roberts.

A final point: Once an American with immense wealth who wanted to become wealthier got in the business of building ships and emergency housing to serve the country. He cut through red tape and marshaled extraordinary material resources and human will in response to a national crisis. He built houses because we needed housing and he built them with lightning speed. He had a President and a President’s wife behind him.

Take from that what needs to be taken. There is a lot there.

This essay also appears as part of my New American Diaspora newsletter that I hope readers will subscribe to read my pieces about Oregon’s homelessness issue. You can subscribe here:

https://mattlove.substack.com/

The Greatest Gig in Oregon History

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(This essay is adapted from my book, The Gigging Life. It represents original reporting about a Ken Kesey story that almost no has had ever heard of, but is my favorite.)

The greatest Oregon literary gig of all time is The Bend in the River Media Referendum. It culminated July 4th weekend 1974 in Bend, Oregon and traveled well beyond words and stories and embraced grassroots politics and the promise of democracy during the darkness of the Vietnam War and Watergate years.

It was a frantic, four-month, statewide gig for a better Oregon future, funded by taxpayers, and orchestrated by the greatest Oregon writer and impresario of all time.

Ken Kesey pulled it off, with a lot of help from his friends and some Merry Pranksters, too. In essence, The Bend in the River Media Referendum is the Wild West story of a lost Merry Pranksters gig.

It has virtually disappeared from Oregon history.

Until now:

Let Ken Kesey begin the tale. His essay, “How it All Came Together,” opened the 126-page Bend in the River Reality newsprint magazine published a month after the Bend in The River Media Referendum concluded. It’s one of the more psychedelic and prescient publications ever produced in Oregon and virtually unread in over four decades. Very few copies remain.

Kesey wrote:

“The madder you get the madder you get….”

So there we are after Sunday supper sitting around the dirty dishes and fresh coffee, talking, me and Gary Mikklesen (Mikklesen is ten years my junior plus his dad worked for my dad making prize winning Darigold ice cream for the Eugene Farmers’ Co-operative Creamery but then see I worked as second-string ice cream maker under Gary’s Dad, Mick Mikklesen, during my adolescent son-of-the-boss years… all of which makes Gary and me somehow eye-level on the Lane County turf) …talking about the bleak, sad feeling of seeing things long-loved go under the Roller of Heartless Progress, sipping coffee and griping, getting mad and madder, wondering what could be done about the problem by a notorious novelist gone bad and a slick-talking feed store proprietor, done to somehow stall or at least call for a re-appraisal of the Awful Roller, when I suddenly remember the pig farmer in Montana…

THE PIG FARMER’S NOTION

As a panel-scarred veteran of numerous Humanities Conferences (the JFK Symposium in Kansas City and the Montana Land Use Conference in Billings, to name a couple) I have been impressed both by the commendable wealth of information attracted to these events and by the lamentable dearth of this wealth. The people just aren’t getting the information. This was never made more clear than on the final day of the conference in Billings when a raw-jawed pig farmer in the hotel elevator asked me, “You one of them eck-ollygists flew in here to talk to yerselfs?”

I had to admit I was. I asked what he would do, if he were king, to change the situation.

“Put it on TV,” he answered. “just like they do the political conventions. Then let the folks at home vote t’see who won. Simple….”

This project has been our attempt to adapt that Montana pig farmer’s notion to the Oregon situation. It wasn’t quite as simple as any of us first figured.

THE GRANT

As Gary and I were discussing our fantasy, the phone rang. It was Joyce Theios, Vista Burnout, calling from San Bernardino, asking to speak to Faye about onion sets. Faye wasn’t there but the call seemed fortuitous. An ex-Vista Volunteer seemed exactly what was needed. I explained the project to her and asked if she would like to be the secretary. Joyce assured me she would help but it was to be definitely understood that she was “not the secretary.” (In the months that followed there were quite a number of fine folks, both yin and yang, who acted as “Not the Secretary.”)

Joyce helped Gary and me apply for the grant. I remember the first line of our first application as a prime example of how not to mince words:“Dear Humanities People: we need a hundred thousand bucks. . .” We then submitted a revised budget for 87 thousand. Then 75. And finally—with the help Bill Korns, Phil George, Bob Wynia, Jim Williams, Kathi Wagner, Barbara Platz and Chuck Ackley—we were allotted $12,000, as planning or “seed money,” by the Oregon Committee for the Arts and Humanities.

Joyce was the one who first heard from Chuck Ackley that our fantasy had actually been funded. She told me over the phone that the Humanities people considered us a definite gamble but nevertheless a gamble definitely worth taking. After she hung up I called Gary at his feed store in Crow: “Mikklesen, we got trouble. . . “

ADULT OUT-OF-SCHOOLERS

I found out one of the stipulations of the grant was involvement with a recognized Humanist and an “adult, out-of-school public.” Gary had covered this in the application by saying we would hold a bunch of what he called “town meetings” with me acting as the honcho Humanist.

“Honcho what?” I demanded in dawning aghastment? “You mean we have to hold meetings all over this mother state! Who’ll come?”

“Wall-l-l-” Mikklesen mused over the phone, “—if you don’t think we got the juice to draw a crowd—.”

“But even so, what’ll we do with them? We ain’t the King Family. . .”

“Why, chief, didn’t you say you used to do a little magic show, silks and ropes and so forth…?”

THE GLARE OF DEMOCRACY

Eventually I did remember the trick we had used in 1972 when we were trying to get the Peoples’ Party going—to hold nominations and elections as a way of involving the audience. It had been far more effective than the usual one-way political bombast. So what we did at each Oregon meeting was have me get up front at first and run thirty or forty minutes of rap off the top of my shiny head, then open the floor to nominations. When the blackboard got full someone always closed the nominations and we heard from each candidate in turn.

Looking back, I judge this part of the project my favorite—listening to these nominees speak, feeling for them, seeing them thrust without preparation into the glare of democracy at its starkest, and watching them at first blink and bumble and blush then, finally, grandly, bloom in its light.

After the speeches we would elect however many the gathering thought right, those elected to be delegates at a Council. All we could tell them was that this council was to convene in Bend on the 4th of July where they would address themselves to the issues concerning the next 25 years of our state’s future, then present these issues to the public via some kind of exciting new ballot. The meetings broke up with everyone confused but enthused.

Someone could write a book about the unlikely and inspiring story of the Bend in the River Media Referendum. It most assuredly deserves a book-length treatment because nothing comparable exists in the annals of American history: a celebrated novelist gigging across his state on the taxpayers’ dime, at the tail end of the criminal Nixon Era, to rap with citizens and envision a new path for a better Oregon in 2000.

Unfortunately, this short essay will have to suffice for now. But it’s a story ready-made for an author or filmmaker.

The chief source for the following account of the Bend in the River Media Referendum is the Bend in the River Reality, a truly remarkable piece of counterculture journalism, some newspaper clippings, and interviews with David Dumas and Walt Curtis, both participants in the community meetings and the culminating event in Bend. It was Walt Curtis who said, that on the drive over to Bend with Kesey, Kesey said in the back seat, “Oregon is the citadel of the spirit.” That’s what he was feeling after spending four months talking with so many Oregonians and listening to their concerns and desires for their state’s future.

The central idea behind the Bend in the River Referendum was to give the people the, “magic scepter of democracy,” as Kesey described the grassroots process that called upon Oregonians to gather across the state in their communities and talk, and better yet, listen to one another.

The process entailed holding meetings in Portland, in Eugene, Corvallis, Albany, Salem, Springfield, Ashland, The Dalles, Coos Bay, Newport, Astoria and Fossil (!), where attendees identified and discussed the issues and then cast ballots to prioritize them for further discussion. Kesey hosted these conclaves.

At the meetings, delegates were also selected to represent their cities at the Bend in the River Media Referendum over the July 4th weekend. The plan was to tally all the ballots from the meetings and devise a working agenda for the final gathering. In Bend, delegates would meet in groups on specific issues and make policy recommendations. (It should also be noted that after these meetings, held in venues such as churches, fairgrounds, schools, libraries and colleges, Kesey and crew would repair to a local watering hole and invite anyone who wanted to join them. Can any Oregon writer do that sort of thing today?)

Who came to the meetings? Ken Babbs, writing in The Bend in the River Reality, described them this way: “They were young, but not all; there were long hairs but short-cuts too. They wore overalls and business suits, granny gowns and chic pantsuits. Some carried babes in arms. They came on foot and bike, in pickups and Torinos.”

Accounts of the initial community meetings in Eugene and Portland portray confusion, a penchant for digression, and a distinct counterculture flavor. It is clear from reading Bend in the River Reality that Kesey and crew knew that their ad-hoc, freewheeling approach wasn’t going to fly in the hinterlands, or even in Portland. This wasn’t the Oregon Country Fair. They tweaked the space ship, reeled in the sky pilot, and tightened the focus for future meetings. Apparently, the modifications worked.

Concurrent to the community meetings effort, the Bend in the River organizers also published a ballot in many newspapers across the state and urged people to participate in the process even if they didn’t attend the meetings. All they had to do was fill out the ballot, tear it from the paper, and mail it to the Bend in the River headquarters in Eugene. Eventually, participants returned some 5000 ballots.

One hundred and seven delegates convened at Central Oregon Community College in Bend to stage the Referendum. There were early disagreements on procedures, agendas and wording on abortion rights that threatened to disrupt the proceedings, but they dissipated and the gig went on. Dr. Andrew Weil showed up to talk about the medicinal benefits of plants used by Native Americans. David Brower railed against nuclear power. Former US Senator Wayne Morse, the Tiger of the Senate, trying to regain his seat, gave a fiery speech on the perils of secret government. Delegates formed groups on the following issues: Land Use, Health, Education, Energy, Nuclear Power (moratorium), Amnesty (for Vietnam War draft resistors), Computers (data collection!), Economy, Communications (the role of the public trust in media). Fifty-nine credentialed members of media came from all over the West, including a writer from Rolling Stone and photographer Annie Lebowitz. Interestingly enough, neither the Oregonian nor Oregon Journal sent any reporters to the event. They probably considered the whole thing too hippie and out of touch with reality.

Which it was and was not. That was the whole point.

The Referendum culminated with a 90-minute show Sunday morning promulgating the policy positions on the issues. It was aired live on Oregon Public Broadcasting. The Merry Pranksters live into the living rooms of Oregonians!

Prior to the broadcast, Kesey gave a quick lecture on manners and timing and warned that the Bend in the River concept was on trial and Middle America was watching. Imagine that! Ken Kesey warning his tribe to behave!

The show began. Kesey appeared and explained the spectacle about to unfold. People at home were asked to improvise ballots and mail them in later. Then the discussion about Oregon’s future began. Ninety minutes later, after a closing Om chant for all Christian Middle Oregon to ponder, the show ended. It largely went off without a hitch.

There is probably nothing comparable to that live program in the history of American television, at least how it was detailed in the Bend in the River Reality. Someone captured it on tape. The tape has gone missing. I know it’s out there, in a Eugene basement or Springfield attic. Someone find it and throw this artifact up on YouTube.

David Dumas recalls how The Bend in the River Media Referendum ended:

On the last day, after the media event ended and the news people were gone, the Pranksters set up the gymnasium for a party/dance that I would describe as a cross between a square dance and an acid test. Kesey, playing the high priest, was breaking open chemical light sticks and anointing everyone. I was wearing an old maroon sweater with jeans, and Kesey came over and covered me with eerily green florescent galaxies. Glowing, we formed a rumba line and snaked our way around the auditorium.

A month later, Kesey and crew published Bend in the River Reality: The BITR END and distributed it via the mail and other unknown methods. Kesey concluded the publication with a poem. Its second part read:

The people have a wisdom no government can equal. The people are the computer, and technology needed to tap this human resource bank is minimal.

The people are not dumb.

The people can run the ship through the rapids ahead better than any group of elected officials.

The officials need only gather the information and mount the argument and present them to the people; the people will do the deciding. . .

It can be done soon. It must be prepared for now.

Because if the people aren’t driving there is always the possibility that some maniac might grab the wheel.

Official channels, like the Media Referendum, must be made available to the people as a means of impeaching any part of the system that has gone awry—any time.

It can be done. It must be prepared for.

The gig was over. But it was also not over. It’s never over.

Whether The Bend in the River gig made any difference how Oregon ended up 45 years later is a matter for further inquiry, conjecture and debate. It is no coincidence that in the aftermath of that extraordinary gig, the thousands of Oregonians it directly, organically engaged with peace, love and a willingness to listen and learn from all walks of Oregon life, coupled with the progressive measures enacted during Governor Tom McCall’s second term, a zeitgeist for improved livability was seeded. Over time, those seeds germinated, and later grew Oregon into one of the most desirable places to live in the country. It’s the story of modern Oregon.

Made in Oregon Catwoman Lust (Part 2)

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In the summer of 1938, a young German immigrant named William Gruber and his new wife honeymooned at the famous Chateau in the Oregon Caves National Monument. Gruber, an organ maker and piano tuner residing in Portland, was also a serious photographer. He had a fascination for stereographic images, once a commercially popular photographic format in the late nineteenth century (as black and white stereoscopes), but then a novelty mostly of interest to 3-D aficionados.

While at the Chateau, Gruber met another Oregon man, Harold Graves, president of Sawyer’s, a postcard publishing company in Portland. There meeting was sheer coincidence—Graves wasn’t on vacation, but had stopped for the day to photograph deer on his way to California on business. And according to View-Master lore, Gruber walked into Graves’ photo set-up and captured his attention by using a strange double camera he’d invented, which took two pictures simultaneously to produce a stereo pair.

The two men began to talk about Gruber’s camera. Later that evening in Graves’ room, Gruber told Graves of his idea of printing seven color stereo pairs on tiny film transparencies and mounting them side-by-side on a thin reel that a person could watch and rotate manually on an inexpensive, handheld, binocular viewer. In 1939, Sawyer’s View-Master: “Three Dimension Color Pictures” debuted at the World’s Fair in New York City.

Seventy years and an estimated billion reels later, View-Master is still in business, now owned by Fisher-Price. Its original concept of seven pairs of stereographic images affixed to a reel and viewed by a binocular viewer has essentially gone unchanged. A reel purchased in 1939 will work with a viewer made today and vice versa. The only object remotely comparable in American culture is that someone using a rotary telephone can still make a call to a cell phone and vice versa.

In 1968, my father, a minister in the Church of Christ, signed the family on for Operation 68, a two-year mission to Belo Horizante, Brazil. The unfortunately named Operation 68 originated at Camp Yamhill, located in the Willamette Valley, after youthful campers issued a zealous challenge to the adults to do something constructive in the larger world as America was coming apart at the seams.

We couldn’t take much with us on our sea voyage to Brazil, but my mother did bring along two View-master players—one for me and my older sister—and a lot of reel packets. “Batman: The Purr-fect Crime” serial, released in 1966 as a companion to the campy television series starring a stiff Adam West as Batman, was one of the titles.

If I recall correctly, my Batman serial was essentially my only connection to American poplar culture, as we had no radio, television or movies. My mother brought along a few other secular titles, but the vast majority of View-Master reels at my disposal in Brazil and after our return to Molalla, Oregon in 1970, were Biblical in nature.

As I search my mind today, and consider how well I know my Old and New Testament stories, I must rank View-Master as my greatest Bible teacher, with my father’s sermons a close second, and Sunday school a distant third. In particular, I remember the three-reel packets “Miracles of Jesus” (water into wine!), “Parables of Jesus” (Good Samaritan), and the “Teachings of Jesus” (Prodigal Son), where I undoubtedly formed my impression of Jesus as blonde haired, blue eyed, and vaguely counterculture hero who fed the poor, healed the sick and lame, and didn’t judge anyone, lest ye be judged.

All of this inexplicably came back to me when I was driving one day, thinking about Oregon. The memory of Julie Newmar as Catwoman simply exploded into my consciousness and I immediately called my mother and asked her about Brazil and View-Master. I also asked if by some miracle she’d held onto the viewers and reels. It’s been nearly forty years and nearly a dozen moves since the missionary days.

Two days later a package arrived from my mother. I ripped it open and the reels spilled out on the counter. Also inside, tucked in more securely, were two viewers. Freeing them both from tissue paper, I instantly recognized mine. I picked it up, and after a nearly thirty-five year absence, two old Oregon friends were reunited.

Then I inspected the reels. No Catwoman! Where had you gone Julie Newmar? No matter. It took less than a minute to locate a coveted View-Master title online and I ordered it for twenty bucks.

While I waited for Catwoman to arrive, I brushed up on my Jesus, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, Noah’s Ark, and Samson and Delilah (she wasn’t hot). As I looked through the binocular portals, and the stereo images of the various Biblical characters, some clay, some actors, on the cheesiest of sets, I felt an extraordinary intimacy with these stories that television, video games or even a book could never replicate. The world isn’t flat, you know.

A week later, my order appeared and I loaded up reel one…click click… Purrrrrfect. A digitized alien in Avatar or Lara Croft as the Tomb Raider could never compare to a celluloid 3-D Julie Newmar as the Catwoman—in my hands! It wasn’t even close, but the Oregon boys growing up would never know. Their lust would just have to originate somewhere else, most likely in digitized and boring two-dimension. And for that, I truly pitied them.

Returnable Kindness

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A man with the look of living outdoors sat on a lawn chair in the asphalt parking lot of the Seaside recycling center. He was organizing his returnable cans and bottles with meticulous care. His bicycle leaned against the fence and was rigged up for heavy transport. I came over and said hello and offered him my beer cans. He thanked me and called me brother. I asked him how he’d fared since the amount of deposit doubled from five to ten cents. He told me he’d doubled his wages to $50-$75 a day and that his standard of living had mightily improved: better food, medicine, clothing, etc. I told him I used to collect cans and bottles as a kid growing up in Oregon City for movie and candy money. He wondered if there was a single kid left in Oregon picking up cans and bottles for candy and movie money. We both had our doubts. I asked him if he knew anything about the Bottle Bill, Oregon’s visionary 1971 law, the first of its kind in the nation, that mandated a five cent deposit on returnable cans and bottles. It was the very law that now employed him. I mentioned it was signed into law by legendary Governor Tom McCall (the tall man pictured here). The man didn’t know anything about the bill or McCall but he did now and seemed utterly delighted with the new historical knowledge. It’s fun being a continual part of something historic and visionary! (I feel that way every time I visit one of Oregon’s free socialist ocean beaches.)

I said goodbye to the man, walked away, got in my car and started the engine. I saw the Kindness and Gratitude publication on the passenger seat. I picked up and brought it over to the man. I explained its origin from an Astoria-based writers’ group called The League of Intertidal Writers. He handled it with care as he perused its contents. He looked up to me and said, “I’m a writer, too.”

“Join us for our next workshop,” I said. “You can even haul away the cans and bottles!”

He said he’d consider it. He said thanks for the publication and called me brother again. I got called brother twice in the space of ten minutes. That was his gift.

(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.)

Vortex I Light Man and River

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I received a communication the other night. It started like this:

I did the lights at Vortex. I had PGE come out and erect two lighting towers on top of which we placed a 1000-watt Super Trooper spotlight with color filters. While the stage was being built, we set up by the bathrooms and projected a liquid light show from atop our panel truck onto a white screen we attached to trees while Notary Sojack and River played. We ran out of dope early so we had to make a trip south before the weekend of the convention.

Incredible. I asked him about River. In all my years of researching and gigging this unending far out story, River had never come up as a band that played the festival. In fact, I had never heard of a Portland-based band called River from that era.

After all these years, I’m not too sure that they were all there or if they performed as a complete entity. What kind of music? Beyond my capacity to define.

Beyond my capacity to define…that’s about right when it comes to Vortex I.

River existed though and the light man sent me visual proof. They opened for The Grateful Dead! At a SE Portland club called Springer’s. All ages show. $3.50 a ticket.

He went on:

We were putting on a lot of festivals in those years and it is difficult to remember who played where and when… Bullfrog Lake I, II and III, SkyRiver I, II and II, Buffalo Convention, I was making LSD as fast as I could give it away and memories are muddled a bit!

The light man wrote up his wild Vortex story on his web site: https://www.fallingstarmedia.com

There are some historical inaccuracies in his account, and he acknowledged this when I pointed them out, but really, I urge anyone with any interest in the tale of the only state-sponsored rock festival in American history, to read his story. I absolutely needed his narrative in my book about the festival, but as I found out, I heard some of the best Vortex stories after the book’s release in 2004. They keep coming. They probably will never stop. I am happy that people still seek me out and want to share them. There is a magical power in this Oregon story of peace. I only wish I had somehow got it to the attention of a national audience. It deserves it. Now more than ever.

(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.)

Bumblebees and Butterflies

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My gaze was transfixed by a clump of vegetation rooted in the sand distinguished by its tiny purple and white flowers. The flowers attracted bumblebees and butterflies. This was happening near my super fort.

So I sat on the beach and watched while I ate my breakfast. There was nothing else to do.

Such is life when you’ve just passed submitting 60 job applications and can’t get a job. That’s a statement of fact, not woe or lament. To rally, I start over every morning at the ocean and wait for a new kind of wave to roll in and take me somewhere new. That’s a fact, too.

I am more bumblebee man than butterfly man, but I could have sworn the butterfly was Oregon’s state butterfly, the monarch. Never before had I seen one on the beach. It is something beautifully incongruous to behold. It’s not supposed to be there, but there it was. I wish more people were like that., including myself.

If indeed it was a monarch, I sat on sacred socialist Oregon sand, near Oregon’s official state structure, the driftwood fort (constructed from wood produced by Oregon’s official state animal, the beaver), watched Oregon’s state butterfly, had Oregon’s official state sea shell, the hairy triton, in my pocket, while a jogger hauling like Steve Prefontaine, Oregon’s official state athlete, ran through the surf.

I damn near overdosed on Oregon right there.

Then a hummingbird whizzed by and went to the flowers!

I got dizzy, stood up, backed up a bit, then passed out, but thankfully, inside the fort. All was safe there.

(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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