John Dellenback Trail

Elmer and I pulled off Highway 101 into the parking lot of the John Dellenback Trail near Lakeside. Destination: the towering and sweeping dunes one must traverse to reach the ocean. It was a sunny weekday in early winter.

I’d never seen this place before and relished watching Elmer run wild in this dunescape. A new adventure for us. We keep racking them up.

As we exited the car, I noticed a pile of belongings, including a piece of rolling luggage in a decommissioned camp site.

There was simply no way this pile could represent the possessions of a homeless person in this remote area of the Southern Oregon Coast. Impossible. Someone must have dumped the pile for some perfectly rational or inexplicable reason and driven away.

The pile moved! I saw the back of a head with matted hair nod.

There was simply no way it could be a homeless person in this remote area of the Southern Oregon Coast.

I stopped myself: I’d seen homeless people in much more remote places in Oregon than this. (Agness, Oregon for one.) And at least this parking lot had restrooms and water.

Elmer tugged on the leash. He was raring to go.

We explored the dunes, and let me say for the record here: this is a must see for every Oregonian. We were extras on the set of Lawrence of Arabia for an interminable David Lean long shot. Elmer went bonkers in the sand, running amok, running around me. I chased him and we both fell every now and then and rolled down a dune. It was the happiest I’d felt since my dad died.

We returned to the parking lot 90 minutes later, exhausted.

The pile remained and the head still nodded. A park ranger drove past the pile.

I decided an investigation was warranted. We would cruise by the pile on our way out of the parking lot.

Minutes later, I idled the car 20 feet behind the pile. The body turned my direction. It was a woman in her 50s or 60s. She was playing on her phone. I powered down the passenger side window to ask if she needed help. She glanced at me, registered nothing in her face, turned slowly around, and back to her phone.

A hundred questions combusted in my mind. I’d asked the same ones a thousand times since writing about the homeless in Oregon.

I’ve probably answered a half dozen of them.