Forts and Photographs

I stopped building a new driftwood fort at the South Jetty. It would, of course, never be finished. I sat on a chainsawed round of exotic hardwood and ate my lunch of pizza and apple. I gazed over the rocks and down to the beach.

A small gathering of sandpipers were doing their sandpiper thing in the surf. My mind returned to a scene that occurred on this beach several days ago, when a friend and I sat on a driftlog and watched a large, unprecedented in size-gathering of sandpipers fly together with astonishing, enveloping, acrobatic flair. We were utterly mesmerized and pitied the people in their trucks who missed it because they were speeding down the beach.

Later, my friend told me had witnessed a murmuration in the flight, its technical name, one of the few times I remember a technical term in nature actually doing justice in describing something beautiful in nature.

I looked up to the fort near the dune that I started constructing three months ago. I saw a family checking it out and posing for photographs.

It occurred to me that my driftwood forts have appeared in thousands, if not millions of photographs the past 21 years, posted on social media platforms, shared between family, friends, missing city-enslaved lovers, some even printed out and glued into scrapbooks and photo albums. Yes, photo albums!

Think of that. That’s probably my greatest anonymous contribution to inspiring wonder and joy in lives of visitors to Oregon’s publicly-owned beaches. And I’ll keep building forts until the day I die. In fact, I might die building one. (If a certain person reading this is with me when I expire, just roll me inside the fort, douse me with the whiskey we brought, and light it all up.)

One wonders: does there exist another artist in Oregon history whose work has appeared in more photographs than mine? That’s quite a question and quite unanswerable. I’ll never know. It hardy matters. Watching that family stop their pickup and exiting to go investigate the fort is all the reward I need.

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