oregon rain

Notes for a Rain Novel

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain ,

A woman of the sun comes to visit a man of rain. There is possible romance in their weather. He looks forward to walks with her, forecasting what their future might hold in the land of rain. She’ll throw out her forecasts as well. Two forecasts will perhaps merge and reveal the true weather in their lives.

Both of them need new true weather. They know that, but it remains somewhat unspoken in their communications.

She visits and during her visit, it rains a record amount: rivers flood, roofs leak, roads get washed out. It pushes everything to the brink. In some cases, over.

They cannot leave his domicile. He wants them to brave it, walk in rain, relentless rain. He has the clothes ready for her. They might even work.

She won’t walk. She won’t advance into rain, into walls of gray. Her eyes and voice begin to change as the sounds of rain on his domicile begin to infiltrate her in ways she didn’t fathom. It feels almost dangerous and her mind races.

He walks alone. While he walks he thinks of her and wonders if rain had not fallen in record amounts, she might think differently of him and this place. For the first time in his life, he doubts rain. He wonders if it finally came to him in the form of something evil. The thought shudders him. He has always believed in rain and never in the cliché that rain foments depression.

By day four, it goes well beyond stir crazy for her. The medications have failed. She has to leave and they make plans for her escape from rain. No, not really from rain, but from him.

The novel takes place in the time the rain begins until they drive away (in rain, of course) and she returns to the land of the sun.

Of Thinking in Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , ,

A woman from the land of sun bought a copy of the rain book. I wonder if it will work in her mind and heart while reading it where there is no rain. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Maybe that book was really one big fat metaphor.

I just returned from a long walk in rain and my thoughts of projects, people and possibilities were raining through me.

Rain is tinkling on the roof as I write this.

One of the sights I particularly notice when I am walking in rain is how rain erodes human constructs: roads, bridges, houses, boats, cars, barns, chairs, toys, lawnmowers, etc.

Many people are eroded by rain. Some can escape.

I wonder if I’ll ever leave the region where it can rain 90 inches a year. What would a year in the desert do to me?

More signs of the new American diaspora are appearing. People are on the move and checking out. They check out in various ways. I still want to be engaged with America and American people.

This blog may go on hiatus soon, as I turn to fiction and fiction that doesn’t work well as presented on a blog. We’ll see. After two years and over 600 posts, maybe it’s time to scale back….once a week instead five or six times. Something interesting is always happening to me and I suppose I’ll still want to share it with the few reader who are reading this.

Thoughts While Driving in Rain (again)

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , ,

Rain slides the highway into the sea. Rain buckles the road. Rain brings rocks and mud down from the hills. Rain sends creeks across the shoulders.

I am driving through it, sloshing, sliding, surfing, on my way into the mountains and snow flurries.
Horses, goats, sheep and cattle stand angled into rain or take shelter under scrawny oaks or Doug firs. If there is an image that conjures depression, this is it.

I tune in a radio station playing songs I’ve never heard. One woman (Bonnie Raitt?) sings about writing a love letter listening to a love song on the radio. It’s a great song and she makes me believe she is writing a love letter, a dearly departed literary genre.

Past flooded fields. Past a herd of elk. Past fallen oaks. Past grim towns. Past so many abandoned homes and farms. People used to live there. People still could live there. Why aren’t these properties being repurposed to address the housing and homeless crisis? Why isn’t there a new Homestead Act, that invites people willing to put some sweat and improvements into the property, build equity in it, make something happen. Anything is better than decay. I don’t have the answers; I am just observing and thinking as I drive. I see these places all the time and the bones on them look decent. They are rigged for power and water and septic. There is land to grow food. Imagine a program, a partnership between banks, government, churches, non profits, housing/homeless advocates and absentees property owners to rehab a thousand such derelict properties in rural Oregon over a five-year period. Operation Re-Homestead Oregon. It could work. It’s not working now.

Driving on. Hundreds of boats, cars and RVs abandoned in fields or driveways. Why? Someone made an investment once. What happened?

I switch my mind to writing fiction and where I want to go after the Bonnie and Clyde book comes out. It was excruciating to write and fiction offers a certain liberation that I crave. I want to transport myself away from where I have been in recent years, to a place where I am in control of the narrative and characters. I have two solid idea for novels and a host of Oregon tales to write.

Here comes the snow flurries. I need to concentrate. I turn off country radio and put my mind to it.

Oregon Tavern Age: Silver Dollar Kindness

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , , , , , , ,

February rain deluged Coos Bay, record rain, rivers on the roadways, lakes in the parking lots.

I needed a break from the hairy drive south down Highway 101 and stopped in front of the Silver Dollar Tavern in Coos Bay. Why not? I’d never visited before.

It was 9:47 on a Sunday morning. I walked inside, and found a stool at the bar, a long wooden bar, inlaid with silver dollars minted before World War I. I noticed a “Cash Only” sign hanging near jars of pickled grotesqueries the size of RV propane tanks.

An elderly woman came up to take my order. She was not OTA. I hesitated for a second, then…ordered a coffee. I looked left down the bar and saw three OTAs drinking coffee and watching golf on television.

The bartender brought the coffee and asked my name. She shook my hand and introduced herself as Jessie. In short order, I learned Jessie had owned the Silver Dollar for 42 years! We discussed the many changes to the Oregon Coast the past couple of decades. She just couldn’t understand the exponential rise of the homeless and the shifting of their habits and manners. A lot of Oregonians don’t. Have we given up trying to understand? I haven’t.

Jessie had to work on the books and crack open the first Hamm’s can of the morning so she excused herself. She told me she’d return. I watched her retrieve a can from the cooler, watched her exquisite technique, heard the crack, and thought about the half million cans of Hamm’s she must have opened inside the Silver Dollar. It had to be some kind of record.

I looked around at the dimly lit rectangular interior. Somnolence reigned so supreme I almost fell asleep. The chairs were still on the tables and an OTA man in coveralls mopped the floor. I saw four blue-felt pool tables and hundreds of pool trophies locked up in cases. I marveled at a deep fryer that must have have fried its first meal 75 years ago.

Jessie returned and asked me what I did for a living. I told her I was a writer. I asked for the most memorable story of owning and tending bar at the Silver Dollar. I wanted murder, mayhem or a man with a leashed cougar who limped in and order a beer. She paused, scratched her chin, and then told me the following:

Decades ago, a big man, a really big man, barged into Silver Dollar and saw a little man, a really little man. He towered over the little man and started insulting him because of his size. It continued for some time and ratcheted up. Jessie observed, patiently from the shadows, thinking the big man might stop. He didn’t. She instructed the big man to meet over by the video lottery machines for a private conversation. The man seemed surprised but complied. Jessie told the man she couldn’t have that kind of cruelty in her bar. He was 86’d forever as a result and perhaps should consider changing his ways and becoming someone kinder. The world needs more of that, not what you have to offer, Jessie said, quietly. The man left the bar. Fifteen or so minutes later, Jessie got a call on the bar’s landline. It was the man. He thanked Jessie for her advice and giving him something important to think about: kindness.

Jessie finished the story and moseyed away to the books and deep fryer. I sipped my coffee. I had never heard a story like that in OTA country before. I extracted a pen and notepad from my pea coat to take a few notes. A few minutes later, Jessie appeared in front of me, holding something in her right hand.

“This is for you,” she said, extending her hand. I reached out and took possession of a tiny black velvet sheath. Inside the sheath was a pen. I pulled out the pen and it was silver, shiny and had a black rubber grip near the point. The pen read, “Silver Dollar Tavern.”

I held the pen aloft and tested its balance. It felt good. I made a few marks on the notepad. The pen wrote well.

Jessie explained that she gave away 4000-5000 pens away annually at the Silver Dollar! I couldn’t believe it. I’d never seen such a thing in OTA country. I just knew stories and poems and love letters were being written with these fine pens. Yes! The pen is mightier than the sword (or text message). Kindness is mightier than judgment and wrath.

I told Jessie I would cherish the pen and write well with it. She said to stop in my next time through town. She might have more stories for me. I told her I’d be back in a month and would want another pen. She laughed and then came out from behind the bar, and gave me a mighty hug! A hug in OTA country! She told me to drive safe. I took a last sip of coffee, walked out into Ali-like jabs of stinging rain, and hit the road.

When the Weird Turn Pro

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , ,

Going on 48 straight hours. When the rain gets weird, the weird turn pro. Now is the time to turn pro.

Eight to 12 inches forecast for this stretch. It will flood here and there, maybe everywhere.

I always notice how hard rain on the Oregon Coast erodes the infrastructure: roads, bridges, dykes, culvert, fields, houses, etc. What we build to rely on seems so flimsy compared to hard rain. I also notice how people come to rely on each for a different kind of help after relentless, overpowering rain.

My rain book is out there. Someone is reading it as I write this.

Not too long ago, someone dear to me, called up late at night, (it was raining) and read passages about us from the rain book. I could not detect the tenor in the reader’s voice. She was drunk, however.

The post office hasn’t opened yet. Someone couldn’t make it through.

The summer forest fire season in the area is officially over. Oh how the conservative politicians loathe that! They want more forest fires to torch federal land so they can blame cougars for the torching. When conservative politics come face-to-face with commonsense ecology, the former places ideology over those things as concrete in fact as gravity. It is something to behold to hear a politician blame cougars for forest fires and sea lions for the decline of fake salmon.

These men and women are immune to the great notion of reflecting upon what rain can mean.

Rain brought the internet and cable television down! Rejoice in the absence! Local teachers might have to teach!

I pick up a Western set in the desert with cunning Apaches while the rain six guns the roof.

Driving In Sunday Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , ,

Down, down, south, south. Highway 101 on a Sunday morning. A three-hour trip begins in rain, substantial rain, falling straight from the sky. No wind to move it like walls.

I’ve got local radio on. Obscure stations coming in and out, playing equally obscure songs such as something by Maria Muldar I’ve never heard before. Just who was Maria Muldar and why is she singing to me on February on the Oregon Coast?

I dig her voice a lot. It’s got rain in it, which of course strikes me as irony because her biggest hit is about a midnight oasis in a desert.

I see a young woman wearing a small back pack, walking in the shoulder, taking on the phone. I see a young man carrying an enormous black umbrella. I see a woman walking a husky. Shaky-looking men ride shaky-looking bicycles. The men and the bicycles are heavily laden with their stuff of transient life.

Drive on. Watch. Listen to the radio and think about rain, and my recent reunion in rain with a friend.

This feels like it could be a five inch day on the Oregon Coast.

Through a clearcut that seems to last forever, one of the most brutal I’ve ever seen. Murder. Mud. Stumps. Slash piles. Slides. Death. Deconstruction. How can this be legal? Driving through this ecocide darkens the soul.

Water running over the roadways. Puddles. Ponds. Lakes. Police lights. I slow down. I see a wreck on the highway, well, a actually off the highway. A driver apparently splashed through a lake, lost control, flew into the air, and landed in a flooded field. I look for a body and don’t see one.

Big trucks tailgate. Who are these men?

Concentration wears me out. I need a respite from rain. I detour to a tavern I’ve always want to visit. I pull up and go inside. It’s 9:47 in the morning and the joint is open. I order coffee and meet the owner of 42 years, working the Sunday morning shift. We talk. It takes all of 30 seconds to realize I’ve just walked into one the greatest Oregon Tavern Age stories of all time. I take notes. I’ll write it up later. I’ll add it to the book about Oregon Tavern Age life that never seems to end, but how can it when you visit a tavern in a deluge at 9:47 a.m. on a Sunday in February, and a great story greets you like a nice welcoming pat on the back?

The coffee jolts me to life and I drive away, taking my time, noticing rain, wondering if I’ll make it home before a culvert plugs with beaverwood and 101 becomes impassable.

I drive and drive. The creeks flow brown and swollen. The rivers run think with wood. Rocks tumble down from the cliffs. Radio disappears. Into the heart of record rain, but it’s not dark.

1 2 3 4