August 31, 2017

Fort Crab

A driftwood fort reeks. That’s a first for me in a thousand driftwood forts. Someone or multiple persons decorated the fort’s exterior and interior with crab shells and crab legs, probably 30 pieces of crab altogether. Someone even staked up a crab shell like the pig’s head in Lord of the Flies. There’s a gathering of feathers and rocks, too. I dub this structure Fort Crab and adorn it with a chunk of crab buoy discovered ten minutes ago at the wrack line near the South Jetty.

I brought my breakfast to breakfast at the fort: Yuban coffee, tap water, plum, two hard boiled eggs, bagel and cream cheese. The sand finds its way into every taste and bite.

The ocean is a uniform gray with bleach-white breakers. I am the only one here for miles around.

My dearly departed husky enters my mind. She’s still visiting me in my dreams. I have some newcomers to my dreams as well, dead people from my former life.

An assembly of gulls on the wet sand point south into the wind. They almost seem like a phalanx.

Why do I sit here on this driftlog and write this rumination? I wonder who will read it? Are my driftwood and jetty thoughts merely circumlocutions? Saying it too slant? Can they reach landfall? Are they merely clouds that never get to rain?

Can I go the distance? The 15^th round? A draw? Can I make it into the fifth set? Can I rally on the back nine into the gale? Can I kick at the end of the distance race and dive across the tape? There is no pinch hit scenario in fashioning a sports metaphor for my current predicament.

I’ve seen the spout from a whale’s blowhole three times in 20 years of rambling Oregon Coast beaches. The third time is happening right now.

Whales practice democracy and some sing mysterious songs. Perhaps they are singing the song of democracy. We can’t hear it. We’re oblivious to its clarion call; we’re underwater with rage and superstition.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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The Old Crow

Book Club

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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.

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

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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.

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.

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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.