river writing

River Coffee Shop Novel Notes

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I sit on a wooden picnic table. It is early morning along a slack river. I am drinking weak coffee from a paper cup. It is leftover free bank coffee. It was in the car for days.

It occurs to me that I can’t write on picnic tables unless they’re made of wood. Not many of those left in Western Oregon.

On my way here, I hunted for ripe blackberries and found not a single one. It was an incredibly poor blackberry year, one of the worst in recent memory.

On my walk along the river, I encountered the largest woodpecker I have ever seen. It was the size of a rabbit. It had a red head and hammered away on a large branch. I crept close and watched it hammer for five minutes from five feet away. It wouldn’t deign to notice me.

Two huge mastiff-like dogs just left me. They came up and goofed around the table as I wrote. They towered above the table. Their owner, a man in his 40s, apologized. I told him not to worry. His dogs made me laugh and I was grateful for that. They were happy and the man told me they were his first dogs in 17 years. When he was younger, he went though an agonizing death of his childhood dog and couldn’t bear to have another one. Sonny the husky lived for 17 years and has been gone for two. It may take me another 15 years before before I get another dog. If I do, I am naming it Lt Tragg.

I am now writing this inside the car. On my return walk, I happened across dozens of apples on the ground, from an ancient tree a homesteader planted over 125 years ago. I picked one up. I threw it toward the river and heard it made a fat smashing sound when it hit the water. It was a cannonball dive sort of sound. I saw nothing of the splash. I imagined that apple floating down the watershed, endlessly floating until it found the ocean. I threw only one. That was enough.

Moments Along a River

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I stood alongside a murky green river flowing at angles down the watershed.

Birds flitted here and there. No boats. I noticed traces of poison dispensed by the government to kill invasive plants. Total futility. They have to be removed by hand, just like the invasives in the American body politic.

There was once tremendous logging activity around here and it damn well killed the river. Perhaps a century from now, healing will have taken place. One wonders how the American body politic will fare ten, 50, a hundred years from now. We always manage to move forward, except in income equality and warmongering. Why so intransigent in these areas? Can we ever change in this regard?

A breeze ruffled my threadbare Western shirt. I can’t bear to throw it away.

My mind drifted to a special friend who has disappeared on me and I can’t understand why. We have so many great projects to complete.

Geese honked in the distance. They are special birds because you often hear them without seeing them. I like that metaphor a lot for human beings, as long as the honking sounds as soothing.

No one is around while Astoria is under siege. I struggle with my relationship with Astoria. I probably will for the rest of my life.

I saw wood floating past. I conjured an image of someone wearing a faded Rolling Stones t-shirt and and entering a driftwood fort. That someone is out there.

I thought of another special friend who recently called very late at night and delivered a toxic dose of vitriol with a potency heretofore unknown to me. But I listened and remained mostly silent. There is little use in meeting vitriol with vitriol.

The river seemed listless. I felt listless. I was about to spend the next hour in one of the worst places in Oregon. I would witness official vitriol spilling out into a small room and filling it up like a sinking submarine.

Very few of us would survive.

Notes From a River

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The river runs downhill but this course isn’t the low road. On the contrary, a river, if a person decides to flow with it, represents the highest possible road a human being can take. Most don’t; most can’t. Following a river’s metaphors is a road rarely taken. I invite everyone to try. Rivers are everywhere around us. Watch one flow. It never costs a cent.

I pity people who look at the river and see nothing but extraction and commerce.

Did Narcissus gaze into his reflection in a river or lake before falling in and drowning? I could Google to find the answer but I won’t.

If I could order a sixer of Rainier cans from Amazon as I sit by this river, would a drone’s delivery of the beer desecrate the river?

Perhaps my reanimation as a human being the last two years has turned me more into a man of the river than a man of the ocean. I need to ponder that notion.

I wish someone would order me the special CD release of Bruce Springsteen’s The River and have it delivered to me. I miss that album.

Ford is such a great word of the river. It is a verb and a noun. I love words that can go both ways. Love is one of those words.

I have someone in mind I would like to accompany me on this river.

All that time growing up in Oregon City and I never connected to the rivers there: Clackamas, Molalla, Willamette. Certainly other Oregon City youth of that era did. Perhaps I was too busy playing tennis, writing savage anti-administration editorials and reading Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer. I think I missed out.

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