Oregon On My Mind (Part 5)

Not too long ago, I sat at the bar at my local watering hole, finishing my Oregon IPA. It was a pretty much dead Friday afternoon and some vintage soul drifted through the speakers while Fargo played silently on television.

To my right three stools away, a vaguely 40ish woman with arms covered in tattoos drank a cocktail and fiddled on her phone.

I was about ready to depart when the bartender asked me if I had summer travel plans. I said I might visit the Coos Bay area. I liked it a lot better than the suburban amusement parks of Cannon Beach or Manzanita. I liked the grittiness of the place and there with still functioning Oregon Tavern Age joints where customers still told stories about drinkin, tokin, fightin, loggin, muddin, fishin, home improvement, and how occasionally an osprey accidentally dropped an eel or salmon on their property and they would promptly fry it up for supper.

A few seconds after I ended my praise of Coos Bay, the woman down the bar turned to me and said, “I’m from Coos Bay!” and said it with gusto and pride.

She got up and sat a few stools closer to me. Another drink materialized in front of her and she guzzled it. I got the distinct impression she wanted to talk about Coos Bay and I love talking about Coos Bay, especially to a refugee from the place, so let’s talk!

In short order, I learned she’d grown up there and dropped out of high school in the 90s at the age of 13. She partied hard in the dunes and clearcuts. She escaped to the Willamette Valley and eventually landed in Portland, but had recently entertained the idea of returning to her hometown and starting over; she was through with Portland. Her life was going nowhere and she was on her third cocktail in the early afternoon.

I said I wanted to relocate to somewhere to that area when my Portland days conclude, whenever that might be.

Yes, when will that be?

I then asked if she was familiar with Steve Prefontaine, the legendary Oregon distance runner who grew in Coos Bay and attended Marshfield High School and later the University of Oregon and shattered every long distance record at both levels.

She look at me as if I just proven the existence of Santa Claus. Her face erupted in smile. She finished her drink. Why not another one?

Hell yes, she knew about Steven Prefontaine! She’d competed in the Steve Prefontaine Memorial Run several times in her youth! It was a 10k event held in September with also a 2k fun run but she always took on the longer mileage.

I tried imagining her as a kid poised to take off at the crack of the gun and follow Pre’s indomitable legacy and I wasn’t imagining it too well with her hitting the sauce hard and generally seeming displaced and disjointed in her world.

I asked her if she’d ever visited the Prefontaine Memorial Gallery in the Coos Art Museum. It’s a one-room shrine to the greatest athlete in Oregon history and the most hallowed and inspiring American place I’ve ever visited and that includes the Pennsylvania State House where the slaveholders signed the Declaration of Independence and the Lincoln Memorial.

She said she’d never heard of it. What? I told her she had to go, immediately! I said it can help get your life turned around in ways conventional, cornpone and expensive therapy can only dream about and I knew that from personal experience.

She was intrigued. I told her about the guest register that visitors to the gallery sign into and record their feelings about Pre. I’ve read through various volumes over the years and it’s easily the greatest spontaneous testament to an individual sporting life that exists in American history that I am aware of. I said she had to sign in and share her thoughts. The very act of writing it in longhand could very well spark a revolution in her troubled spirit, although I didn’t say “troubled” but she got the idea.

I do know when I start talking to someone about something uniquely Oregon, like Pre or Vortex I or Matt Kramer or Conde McCullough’s coastal bridges or the state’s socialist ocean beaches or driftwood forts, I tend to get that person very, very fired up. Shit, I fire myself up!

It was time to go. I told her to get her ass to Coos Bay and the gallery. She said she would. Then she went back to her phone and I could tell she was looking up the gallery.

In the past, some have called me Dr. Love and my prescription for a better life has always been the same: Oregon, Oregon, Oregon. And I take my medicine as often as I can. It once saved my life.