Oregon City Crime Against Literature Ass Kicking

It was a cold sunny morning in March and I had taken a pleasant stroll along the Clackamas River trail that crosses the old train bridge at high rocks where drunken and stoned Clackamas County youth had cavorted in cutoffs and halter tops for generations. More than a few had ended up dead by drowning or broken necks or stuck in wheelchairs for the rest of their lives. Now the daredevil danger is gone from high rocks and I’m not sure we’re better as a society as a result. Who knows? I’m glad I got to see that daredevil side in my youth, something never done merely to broadcast it to the world, because there was no outside world except the rocks and the river.

What a stroll! I had talked to geese and dogs and found a magical area littered with hundreds of choice cuts of beaverwood. I carried three over my shoulder as I approached my vehicle in the parking lot at the trail head when…I…discovered my driver side window smashed in. Glass was everywhere.

I didn’t say anything. I set down the beaverwood. I examined the interior of the vehicle. The thief or thieves had stolen the only item in the vehicle: a manuscript of my author coaching client Pete’s magisterial novel of his experience as a bombardier over the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. My publishing company will publish the book this fall and it will become one of the classic tomes of the literature of the Vietnam War. This was the final edit and I was halfway through the 900-page novel with all my notes and annotations on paper.

A miscreant had stolen literature! I had to settle the score.

I remained calm. I knew later that evening, after slamming a couple double Canadian Clubs and vaping some dank sinister weed (can weed be sinister?), I would return by bicycle to the scene of the crime, search the willows and sloughs, find the miscreant reading the manuscript by flashlight or blowtorch or wiping his ass with it, or using it to start a fire, and I would rough up that literature-stealing son-of-a-bitch and rough him up good. I’d go full tilt Hemingway on his ass. (Way worse than medieval.) Nothing like getting pistol whipped by beaverwood.

No one steals literature from me and gets away with it.