December 14, 2018

Beach Axiom

In my many years of going to Oregon’s publicly-owned beaches, I always try to live by this axiom: don’t expect to find what you want find. That includes limpets, beaverwood, love, forts, wisdom, ideas. Go with no expectations and delight in the unexpected finds.

I recently violated my axiom and learned a valuable lesson in honoring it.

I was after beaverwood and figured a beach that had several small forested streams and rivulets running through it would provide a nice haul. So I went there expecting to find beaverwood and found absolutely nothing. The longer I searched the more I realized I was violating my axiom.

After a couple miles, I gave up, got back in the car, and took the route back home.

Before arriving home, I saw an entrance to a beach that I hadn’t visited in some time because I find it unremarkable and typically driftwood free.

Why not? I had nothing to do at home so I stopped in the parking lot, walked the short dune path to the beach….and beheld a staggering amount of driftwood that measured approximately 500 yards in length! It was all new wood, none of the ancient bleached beauties, and contained more beaverwood in one place than I had ever seen before.

How and why it all gathered at this spot was a mystery to me. Perhaps the wave experts would know, but I wouldn’t bother consulting them.

I collected more than 70 pieces and was astonished at the variety, including sizes and shapes that were previously unknown to me. Some could fit in my back pocket, like tiny ears of baby corn, others were the size of bazookas, and another was an entire alder tree!

It took three trips to the car to load up.

My collection mounts. My faith in the beach axiom is stronger than ever.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.