Distress Signal

Wind and rain flogged Elmer and me as we descended to the Coos Bay beach adjacent to the boat ramp. Waves broke black and white onto the shore.

It was 7:30 in the morning.

We relished the punishment because nothing energizes my creative mind and spirit more than walking in hard rain down a beach with a dog. It’s also my secret weapon to transcend these times that try our souls.

Something to my left arrested my attention. A person or persons had erected two 6-8-foot driftwood crosses at the entrance to the homeless encampment. Sentinels or totems? Or merely the result of drug-induced chaos?

A grimy and shredded American flag—displayed upside down—whipped in the wind. The crosses didn’t budge.

Elmer sprinted over to the crosses and christened the one flying the flag.

There my husky was, taking a piss on a driftwood fort flying an American flag as a distress signal, at the entrance to a homeless encampment destroying a wetlands with a magnificent view of Coos Bay and the President would deliver the State Union speech later that evening.

The image cried out for a massive oil landscape painted in multiple shades of thick and crusty gray, even the stars and stripes rendered in gray.