- drought

- Craters of the Moon Confession

- old words

- oregon stories

….  Reflection, an essay

… 1972, an essay

… Corvallis, Oregon, a short-short…

Oregon and Oregon Inspired short fiction and essays…

…Corvallis, Oregon, a short-short…
“…Down the street from the cottage was a restaurant where I had breakfast most mornings, a place called ‘Nearly Normals.’…”

…Water, Travel, Learn, Happy, a short story
“…It was like my time with Primo, in a land of dust and salt, him saying to me, “They will love our pasta, they will drink our wine,” and making me laugh and laugh and forget the troubles I had come through….”

Pepper had her 84th birthday party on May 6th at Bernice’s Bakery.
I’ve known Pepper since I was a little kid.
We used to sit on the bench outside at Bernice’s and talk.
She would complain about politics and I would buy her coffee and listen.

Here are some photos. There are a lot more on my facebook page.

These trees, and the quiet of forest edges in rain and snow…. photographs, words…..  where do they go when they are only in this Aether?

So much scrap writing in these years and hours…..
some fragments here… true moods.

a year ago today everything changed forever for many people.

Sometimes I’m woken by good dreams of her. She will be in the kitchen of the house where we lived. I smell the spices, basil, garlic, thyme. I’m standing next to her and helping – peeling onions or slicing bread. She’s talking, telling me about her day. I’m listening. I start to reach for her, trying to touch her face. In the dreams she scowls and I wake up saying her name. I have to get out of bed then and turn on all the lights and turn the radio up loud. It’s set to a station that plays 20 rock-and-roll songs in a row and never has any news. I go make a cup of coffee and sit at the kitchen table and look at my reflection in the window, waiting for morning.

That was a chancy Spring. The weather raged back and forth through April and May. Winter didn’t give up easily. A warm, bright day would be followed by a fast storm with ice, wind and darkness. I loved that Spring, the way each morning was; waking in the dark, I would wonder what the day would be. I was always dressing wrong – on storming days my light coat and then having to run to work to stay warm. Then the next morning, in a clear dawn I would be wearing a parka and by afternoon it would be seventy degrees and sunny.

I walked everywhere then, not owning a car, and that Spring I became fond of my boots and took care of them, drying and waterproofing them carefully. The slush of melting snow, the oily puddles in the gutters, it was nothing; I leapt over what I could and splashed through what I couldn’t.

Now I own a car. A Buick. I drive it everywhere. I gamble too.  Poker at the Oxford everyday. All the gamblers I know old own cars and don’t walk much. Hurrying to avoid details we step on the gas and rush between jobs, the cards and little else. Instead of changes in the weather we watch for changes in luck, and we smile and nod to each other as if we were friends.

She would tell me that I shouldn’t do this, that I should not keep thinking of her. She would tell me to realize that six years is a vast amount of time. But I still imagine her coming back to me. Like the knowing of a good hand which must come again — she will knock on my door some evening, or it will be her voice the next time the phone rings. Over the long-distance hiss she will ask  me how I am.

I was walking home from work on a windy afternoon. The mountains were white with snow that had fallen earlier in the day, but in town the sidewalks and streets were dry. The sunlight was coming in low, beneath the Western clouds, and everything was gold as if it were Autumn instead of Spring. The air was ripe with the smell of cottonwoods and damp earth and I was very, very happy.

I lived on the North side of Missoula, near the railroad tracks and the cluster of abandoned, brick warehouses. It was a neighborhood of small, wooden homes with long, narrow back yards. I was walking in an alley, and by the corner of Sherwood and Pine I saw her. She was working in her yard, starting a garden. Because the light -  the color of it – and because she was beautiful, I stopped. She was shoveling at the sod, tearing it up.

“Hello,” I said.

She was startled, but when she looked at me she smiled. Hair across her face, sleeves of a faded, flannel shirt rolled up above her elbows. She said, “Hello.”

A garden, a plan for it. How good the soil might be. We talked like that, with me on the outside of the yard, leaning on the fence, and her ten feet away leaning on her shovel. She recognized me from that one time in the cafe.

Once in a person’s life. Once.

She tosses her head while she is rolling down her sleeves. It’s grown dark and I’ve put on the parka I was carrying over my shoulder. She waves goodbye and goes inside.

The next morning is clear and blue like days of promise should always be. I call the cafe and tell them that I can’t come to work. Then I go to her house and knock on her door. She lives alone. I’m shy, never having been so attracted. Every word she spoke with me the evening before seemed to fit. I was understanding her. It seemed silly then. It doesn’t now.

She opens her door. She is surprised. I comment about the day. She’s twenty years old. I’m older. The weather was perfect.

Because she had a car we drove out of town and then walked up along the snowy slopes near Mormon Peak. We found a ridge where there where huge granite boulders sixty feet high, and managed to find a way up to the top of one. In the sun, on the warm rock, we pointed at what we could recognize. There was Mount Sentinel. Over there was the city. Those green patches down below were fresh fields. But nothing else makes sense — she’s telling me this while I look away from her — she doesn’t know me, we’ve just met, she has a boy friend whom she expects to marry. She tells me that she’s never been impulsive before, and I say, “neither have I.” Then we climb down to her car and drive back to town. When she drops me off at my place she leans over and kisses me. I blush, and in the dim light that has come with the late afternoon, I see her eyes, see how the are large and dark, see that she is leaning towards me and we are kissing again.

Every morning she is coming into the cafe. Sitting at the counter by herself, waiting until I have time to sit down with her and talk.

Then one night I can’t sleep. I go and knock on her door, wake her up, and ask if she will forget about her garden and her boyfriend and spend the summertime walking with me. Just like that. She looks closely at me, questioning. I tell her that I want to be alone with her, walking — backpacking — from Stephen’s Pass, North, to Canada. She laughs and is away and now she is unbelieving and almost scared, but she says, “Yes.” She does, she looks at me closer, knows I am asking her truthfully, and knows how wild a plan it is, how different and impossible it is for her, and she says again, meaning it, “Yes.”

And we did spend those three months together, walking along the Continental Divide, though no one understood. Not her parents, or her boyfriend whom she said goodbye to, or any of them, those people who were her friends.

Once in a lifetime.

After we come back from that summer’s long walk we moved into a house together. I worked and she went to school. That was an easy time. We’d come home to each other in the evenings and talk. We took turns cooking meals and sometimes we would go out dancing. Her long hair, which she would untie, made all the other men look. But I was proud and sure. We had been alone with each other in the mountains. We would stay together.

Then in October she started coming home late each evening. One night after she had come in, I followed her into the bathroom were she was undressing, and put my hand on her shoulder. She spun around and faced me. “Your rough hands,” she yelled, “put your rough hands somewhere else.”

She had met someone else, someone who wasn’t just a worker. She said to me, when everything was ending, the morning she was loading her car with clothes and books, “I’m so bored. I’m bored with you.” It was winter then, the sky was flat and empty. I was standing near her, not understanding. She got into the car. She drove away.

Now she lives in Portland, Oregon. I heard that she is married.

Thunderheads over Scapegoats. Cold, clear streams in the Swan range. What we saw together comes to me when I can’t sleep.

Times in the kitchen. We would be baking bread and while waiting for it to finish, drinking beer. Her arm resting across the table next to coffee mugs. A vase of dried flowers. Her hand in mine. One, dim lamp. Not rushing. We’d tell each other stories and make plans. Land. A home. Children. More long walks. We’d laugh and take the bread out from the oven. Breaking off large, hot pieces, we’d eat them with butter and look at each other while outside the darkness was perfect.

She’s arching her back, pushing me into herself. Hair wildly messed, the sheets and blankets on the floor. It’s cold in the room but we are both sweating. “Harder,” she says, “harder.” Then she’s holding me so tightly that I almost can’t breath, but I do. Four in the afternoon. A Tuesday. I’m laughing and saying, “You.” She’s wearing socks. I still have my shirt on, and now she’s laughing too, letting me go, looking at me. “Tell me a story she says. I reach down and toss a wool blanket over us and curl into a ball under it. Camping out. Hot fires on raining nights. Dry sleeping bags. Dripping Spruce trees spiraling upwards a hundred feet. Under the blanket I turn to her. She finds my mouth and I taste salt on her lips. Where are we? In a rented room where I lived alone and where she first came to visit me, brining me simple gifts; a new shirt, a bottle of wine, a crystal to hang in the window to catch that Spring sunlight? Or in a tent, forty miles from any road, by the Danahear river? Or screaming at each other in the parking lot of a shopping mall on a cold day in February, me jealous and accusing, her saying, “So what.”

When I touch these memories I ache, trapped in sad metaphors, in Spring.

A Great Blue Heron ins flying above the Clark Fork, upstream. It’s early evening, the sun is behind the Bitterroots and I’m looking out my window again. What is the chance that another heron will be flying above the Willamette, above tall cottonwoods? There’s a full moon low in the East, just clearing Mount Jumbo. In Portland it will soon be large over the cascades. Will she look out too and see both? Will her heron cross in front of that great silver penny, as mine just did?

Tomorrow I shall clean this apartment. My clothes stink and the food in the fridge is going bad. When I’m done I’ll write a letter and take it over to the freight yards where they put together the trains. I’ll find an empty boxcar and read my letter to it, putting just the sounds of the words on the train. West-bound. Spokane by noon. Seattle by night. The trains often turn South at Seattle. With luck, my words will make it to Portland, where a wind coming inland from the ocean might carry them out of the boxcar and mix them with the foggy morning. She’ll be getting up, looking outside, opening a window. Breathing the moist, orange air, perhaps she’ll think of me, here in this concrete world where there are no safety nets.

#

Snow and rain on a cold afternoon in May
how many hours ago was that hint
of summer?
I lit a fire in the old sauna and went and
sweated.
out with
layers, dripping and
remembering
to
breath
and to
forget…..
On a ship, on the equator, on the spring equinox
(i had just been hazed and become a Shellback)
one of the lifer’s — covered with tattoo stories –
hands me a small, illegal, flask of vodka and says,
“Drink to remember.”
It was blazing hot, and I had complained to him,
the sailor, about the heat, and he said,
“Pretend you are in a sauna.”
…. all these years later, this memory comes unexpected
the blue of the south pacific
the blue-mood of this day
the dripping rain
the sweat
memories…. ghosts of the lost and found
and all
my mistakes
as i remember to breath…….

This May rain, cold and mixed with snow
walking this morning on the island, the flood is receding
but there is still a mallard couple back there.
The bright male, and beautiful woman-duck, they are
in the rain  by themselves and they are
their own company.
I don’t get too close.
They don’t fly, and after I have their picture
i walk slowly back to the inside warmth
and clutter
of my desk and this screen and
my place of memories
here
by
a window
where the rain-light comes.

Memories of a friend of mine who died several years ago, come to me. Today they came because a while ago someone wrote me a letter and asked, “Did you know Greg Bechle, the poet?” And in thinking about him, I wrote this:

For several years I was a close friend of Greg’s. That’s a sad sentence. How can someone be close in past tense? He’s dead, died in 2009.  I saved his life once by convincing him to get drunk. I also left him down by Ennis — we had driven together to an Earth First! Rendezvous where we were supposed to have worked on a story together, him writing, me taking photos, for a national magazine where we had gotten a paid assignment, but he had recently become so strange and then got very drunk on top of it, that I left him there and drove back to Missoula alone. I didn’t understand what was going on with him.

I liked how Greg wrote. I was living in the ten by ten foot shack behind my friend Raz’s on Alder street in Missoula. Greg would come by my shack late at night and we would take turns reading each other  poetry from my notebooks or from his notebooks. I had a woodstove. If either of us didn’t like what was being read, we would rip the pages out of the notebooks  and throw them in the stove. And sometimes I would play my saxophone as he read, loud enough that several times the police came to tell us to be quiet. But I was about to move out with my girl. She was pregnant. I was about to start a very different life, one without room for craziness.

Then I saved his life. When almost everyone else had stopped talking to Greg, before he had started getting treatment for his schizophrenia, he was down at the corner in front of the court house next to the World War One memorial. Greg said he was going to stay there until all the troops came home from Kuwait. This was the first gulf war. 1990. It was also right before my son was born, and I was freaking about how-in-the-world would I be able to support all of us. I was trying hard to stop doing what I have always done: giving away all my money, agreeing and have my writing thrown into fires, befriend people with sparks who seem to be waiting for a friend…

Greg was camped there by the statue of that soldier who is running through barbwire and throwing a grenade. A statue with names of dead boys on its side. I went and tried to talk to Greg when he was first there, and he said something like, “Whenever Bush talks I see black bombs come out of his mouth.” He wasn’t being metaphorical. He was psychotic . He was also dressed in his worn out thin cotton clothing and near-worthless, thin shoes.

Greg had been at that statue for at least two weeks. Other people came down there to protest the war, but they would stay on the opposite side of the statue from Greg. It was social for them, standing close to the street, holding signs, being yelled at by rednecks, and yelling back. For Greg it was personal crazy and bad lost and alone. Then it got suddenly cold. Sub zero with a bit of snow and wind.

I had a big bed with piles of blankets. A kitchen with a coffee grinder and a cutting board  where my girl and I would put our fresh baked loaves of bread . I looked out side and saw the blizzard and the darkness and said I had to go somewhere and would be back soon.

I drove down to Wordens market. I bought a pint of half and half and a packet of hot coco. I mixed it in a big cup and heated it in the microwave. Then I drove over to the statue. It was 11pm. I thought Greg was dead. He was laying under a blanket, and he and the blanket were covered with 2 inches of snow. His feet, in the worthless shoes, were sticking out of the blanket and were covered with snow. I grabbed one of his feet and shook it until he was awake. He wasn’t dead. He sat up. He said, “Steve.” I gave him the cup of hot cream. He drank it. “It’s too cold out here,” I said. I took out all the money I had. It was less than $50. I gave it to him. I said — and I lied –  “All the troops are home and they are here in Missoula down the street in Charlie’s, and there is a big, hot stove there. ” I said, “I’ll give you a ride there.”

But I didn’t come in with him. Later he said I saved his life. I’m fairly sure I had. It got down to about negative 15 that night. No one would have woken him.

He also told me a story about walking 24 hours and forty miles to the newspaper publisher down in Hamilton and how when he arrived they were closed up for the night, and how he then threw a rock through the window.  He was angry at the paper for its publishing of pro-war editorials. He stood around on the side walk for several hours, yelling at passing cars, until finally he was arrested. Then he was taken to and locked up in Warm Springs — the mental health hospital — for a few months. When this had happened, the article I read about Greg in the paper, the Missoulian,  only described him as if he was simply nuts. The stories he told me though were much more than that. He said, “I lost my mind but I’m better now,” and then took a notebook from his back pocket, looked at me, and  read.

We lean on words because they make us human. . .

I wish I had made more room for him in my life, the life “without craziness,” because, really, he was a good one, a rare one. I wish I had those pages we burnt. I wish he could show up here somehow, this big house, and knock on the door and say to me, “You want to hear some new words?”

I would turn off all the screens and pull up some chairs and open the saxaphone case…
I miss Greg.