Oregon Coast Wild in the Pandemic
The Pandemic struck, many died.
Some learned how to live better,
then promptly forgot everything
once liberation arrived,
like how politicians praised
hero service from the front line
but wouldn’t raise their minimum wage.
She drove from the High Desert,
over the Cascades, over the Coast Range,
to ride out five summer days of the plague
in my 42-year old Winnebago with an 8-track player
marooned in a disheveled RV park
where most of the residents
believed everything a hoax, conspiracy
and survived on socialism.
I hadn’t seen her in a decade,
the last time,
a sunset inside an obelisk
on the Yaquina Bay Bridge
for sensual sunset shenanigans.
The ex watched their four kids,
third daughter probably mine,
likely conceived inside
a bizarre, glass, cedar house
crooked on stilts
overlooking the Pacific.
We met at the Nesika Market,
bought two bottles of red wine,
walked to a beach
where gold bugs prospected a creek,
meth miscreants scaled cliffs
to carve nonsense in the clay,
and a homeless man lived in a cave.
We drank wine,
built a driftwood fort,
toasted to LOVE,
which happened to be both
our real last names.
We hiked Humbug Mountain and performed acrobatics on a bench.
We stepped across Pistol River where it meets the ocean. River otters watched us.
I spray painted a stencil of a beaver on her baseball shirt.
We barbecued salmon caught earlier that morning.
We drove the curvy road to Agness and stayed in a cabin above the Rogue River.
I broke out the guitar around a fire and played my song Organic Oregonian:
Got hippie blood in my veins
I key cars with California plates
love Ken Kesey and Steve Prefontaine
never see the sun and never complain
We explored the Elk River way up in the watershed.
She slipped off shoes, rolled up pants,
waded in slack current
as beaverwood floated downstream.
I watched her from a drift log on the opposite bank.
She forded the river,
approached me,
grabbed my belt,
wrenched freedom.
I wrote a country song about it,
a classic only we ever heard.
We watched a Jane Russell movie marathon on TCM.
It was just the five of us: me, her, Jane Russell, Jane Russell’s tits.
We read stories aloud.
She pissed in the woods during a drizzle.
She showed me how to apply for Pandemic unemployment benefits.
We roped down to a secret beach in Samuel Boardman State Park.
We meandered up a trail alongside the Illinois River holding hands.
“Keep on comin’ covid!”
she would redneck hoot and holler
when the moment called for it.
She didn’t want to return to the desert.
Her eyes watching the Rogue River run said that.
She had to leave.
A wildfire on the McKenzie River destroyed her family’s business.
Her oldest daughter attempted suicide.
We didn’t survive.
Nothing Oregon Coast gold can stay.