Sunday Morning Meth

I went to my favorite Sunday beach, adjacent to a rest stop where I see so many people dressed in their Sunday morning church clothes, stop, look at the ocean, and then presumably go to church to worship the vague Sky God as opposed to the obvious Sea God. It is a strange thing indeed to see men in church suits looking at the ocean on a Sunday. I always wonder what they are thinking. Do any of them secretly believe something else? The suits look so uncomfortable, too!

It was a beautiful blue and white morning. Three tiny crab boats plied the ocean and I could see dozens of red and orange floats marking the pots.

My fort in the dunes on this beach still stood after weeks or hard rain and winds. A secular miracle! I was walking toward it, nearly blinded by rare sunshine, when I noticed a woman a fifty yards down the beach chopping a driftlog the size of VW Beetle with furious, manic intensity. Even from afar, I could see chips flying. I stopped and watched. I saw her hack away some kindling from what I presumed was a cedar, bundle up the kindling, and then head toward my fort. I craned to my left and saw a large pickup truck in the dunes, where it possibly could not be. There is no vehicle access to this beach. Legal access that is.

I couldn’t figure out how the truck ended up there but there was no way it was getting out unless it was winched out from Highway 101.

My mind surmised meth as the method and motivation for such a scene. I’d seen it many times on Oregon beaches over the years and interviewed a couple meth people for confirmation that meth produced this kind of erratic behavior. Well, at least they had an ocean view and not one from under a freeway in the city. I like to think there is some comfort in that.

I ate my breakfast on a log and watched the crab boats. I walked back to my vehicle parked in the parking lot. I stood atop a picnic table and surveyed the truck.

Two men were around the truck and watched them circle it it the most curious of ways. What was going on? Then they halted.

They had tried to get a fire going (a few wisps of smoke) but it fizzled out and they apparently gave up. The woman left the truck and returned to the beach where she searched for agates while sprinting. The men appeared to be taking naps in the grass.

All of this was at 7 am in the morning.

I could have watched this for hours, a kind of real life drive-in movie, but I had to find another beach for my Sea God service, a service for one, with no sermons, no words at all.