Watching A Depoe Bay Storm

The waves smash the rocks. Gulls lift and cry. It is Sunday morning in Depoe Bay and I watch a big storm.

I think to a marker I saw yesterday in a Depoe Bay park commemorating the death of a young woman who left a Chinese restaurant bar on Highway 101 one night a few years ago after having drinks with her grandmother, and ended up dead and fished out of the ocean very soon thereafter. According to news reports I read online of the event, there were no suspicions of foul play.

So why? How? Suicide or accident? Death by daredevil? There was nothing else in the news about the death that I could find. Was there more to this story of a death of a 22-year old woman on the Oregon Coast after having drinks with her grandmother in a Chinese restaurant bar? It seems like there is is, but perhaps that’s just a writer’s conceit.

I’ll bet the sock shop on the drag is open and someone is buying socks during the storm.

I don’t visit Depoe Bay very often, but there have been some memorable times here over the years, in the cedar grove, at the wall watching whales, and meeting a man in a dive bar who was an extra during the filming of the charter boat fishing scene for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, filmed in Depoe Bay in 74 or 75. The man told me Jack Nicholson and the rest of the cast were kicked out of every bar in Depoe Bay for rowdy drinking and cocaine use, and back then, there were about a dozen bars around town.

Good ol’ Jack. We just don’t get those kind of madcap stories in Oregon anymore and I find that sad.

It’s a wall of gray outside except for a few tinges of green on the waves.

I sit near a sliding glass door and rain is finding its way in through the frame at multiple angles. I should write a poem about this door. It’s calling out for one. It presents so many metaphors. Or I could just write a poem about the door without metaphors. Doors deserve poems, too. Even badly installed ones.

I’ve got some decent coffee in a white mug as I write this and watch the storm and think.