January 17, 2018

Bonnie and Clyde Files 37

I brought cheese and oatmeal cookies to share with Bonnie and Clyde. It is a good thing to break bread with dogs outdoors.

Drizzle occupied the landscape. Everything was soundless as we moved through the pasture toward the river. I was astonished and ecstatic how swift Bonnie moved on point. Clyde caught her fresh vigor and picked up his gait. Our mojo was strong.

We came to the electric fence and I heard a tiny crackle. I didn’t feel like navigating through it so I took a new path to find the river. I felt like exploring. I wanted to keep walking with Bonnie and Clyde forever, walk right into a new country.

A song entered my mind, a great song about a river, the Cuyahoga River, the Ohio river that caught on fire in 1969 and helped galvanize the modern American environmental movement. The rock band REM wrote the song and it contains the immortal line: “Let’s put our heads together and start a new country up.”

I wanted to gather dogs and friends and elk and family and a woman of Rilke and start that new country up. And I’m not just talking about on paper. I mean on the ground, near a river. There will be no clearcuts in this county and only animals will adorn our units of currency. The biggest denomination will display a beaver.

Bonnie and Clyde noticed the disruption to our normal routine and perked up for the new path. They like exploring! Most humans don’t. They don’t even know how to read a paper may anymore.

Did I need a paper map to find this new country? Would I have to become my own cartographer?

We traversed a section of wet ground littered with wood after a recent high flow. I liked the way debris looked and knowing that the river had jumped its channel and found some wildness, if only temporary. I wanted to jump my channel, too.

I found a tree, a graceful, old and leaning alder for us to have our lunch. I ate my cheese with Bonnie and Clyde and watched the river churn green and brown. Somewhere, downriver, I knew that new country existed for me. I simply had to keep moving toward it, exploring the only way left me, perhaps with a map of my own devising, but perhaps not.

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The Old Crow

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.