First Day of School

6:32 a.m., September 2, 2025.

Elmer and I step out the front door. Fog has commandeered the Empire District. I can’t see the house across the street, but that’s a good thing because then I won’t have to observe the ongoing ruination of three generations of an American family.

Dawn has arrived but it proves largely irrelevant. Fog has swallowed the street lights. We began walking into a gray gauze. My face is instantly wet.

Fifteen seconds later, a woman materializes in the middle of the street. Her back faces us. She stands stationary. She wears an orange and purple outfit and is barefoot. Her hair hangs straight and long, blonde and matted.

I’m going to say something but I don’t want to spook her, so I don’t.

We pass within ten feet of her and she still hasn’t moved. I angle to see her face but see nothing. I wanted to see something.

Twenty yards later, I turn around. The woman has turned around and walking away.

We pass the house with its moldering and rusting display of cars, trucks, boats, RVs and trailers. Grand total: 17. We pass three deer hiding out in a side yard. We pass a cat asleep on a driveway. I hear dogs barking and the clanking and creaking of a lumber mill. We pass an old homeless man rigging up his contraption for hauling cans and bottles. His pit bull snoozes beside him. We pass the young homeless woman asleep in her 90s sedan. We pass a homeless man picking and eating blackberries.

I look skyward and can see brighter blunted light above the fog. A counterattack against invisibility is underway.

We reach the boat ramp and it’s packed with trucks, trailers and boats, all of them seemingly brand new. There must be five million dollars worth of recreational possessions being put to use.

I observe two battered vans and two vehicles that serve as mobile domiciles. They’re regulars here. One of their owners, a man in his 70s or 80s, makes coffee from the trunk of his car decorated with a Trump 2024 sticker. He’s listening to heavy metal music on his phone, as he does every morning. He’s definitely a Black Sabbath man.

The tide is way out. The water is flat, not a single wave.

I love the heavy smell of an Oregon estuary in the early morning; it smells like victory. Well, there is also the smell of cannabis from the parking lot, but that only adds to the moment.

We approach the trail to the beach. A police car idles nearby. As we maneuver around it, I see no one is inside. I instantly know what that means.

We hit the sand and I let Elmer off leash. He races ahead and I follow at a slog jog. He stops and drops a Ted Cruz on a pile of seaweed.

I see a police officer entering the homeless encampment. He disappears into the fog and willows. Should I wait and watch what happens?

No. If I here gunfire…then…I’ll do what?

We head south. Pelicans dive bomb into the bay. Geese, gulls, sanderlings, cormorants and crows fly around or hunt in the mudflats

I see lights of fishing boats on the channel.

The fog is losing its superiority.

We walk until we can walk no farther. We turn around. I look left and see something 50 feet away bobbing on the water. It’s the head of a harbor seal. I see his whiskers! He begins moving directly toward me, head still above water. Elmer comes over and watches.

The seal submerges, then undulates out of the water, makes a tremendous splash, then disappears. What a way to start a morning!

The police car is gone when we reach the parking lot.

We begin our walk home. We pass several homeless people I’ve never seen before. One is a man and woman yelling profanities at one another. Another rockets past us on an electric scooter.

We pass multiple kids waiting for the school bus. Every one of them plays on a phone. It’s the first day of a new school year. Everything is possible. Or is it anymore for a kid going to public school in Coos Bay?

I wonder about those kids, their future, the country they will inherit. I wonder if a man my age today saw me walking to Mt. Pleasant Elementary on the first day of school in 1975, a half century ago, would have thought my fifth-grade future and the future of the country I was going to inherit was to be rosy or doomed or somewhere in between.

In all my years walking to elementary and junior high, I never once saw a homeless person. The kids waiting for the bus in Empire see four or five every morning. And there’s the ride to school. Maybe nine or ten more.

What if I was ten today and walking to my Oregon City elementary school on the first day of a new school year? Would I see homeless people?

Yes, Oregon City has several hundred homeless people. I know this because I served many of them at a street mission on 5^th Street not that long ago.