Oregon Tavern Age: Return to the Triangle Tavern

Super Bowl Sunday. Noon. I stashed Elmer in the car and walked into one of the greatest OTA joints in the state—Astoria’s venerable Triangle Tavern, right underneath the south end of the Megler Bridge, not far from where people splat when they jump off the bridge.

I hadn’t visited the joint in over a decade. At one point, I thought I might never return but the Triangle had played such a pivotal role in my creative and personal coastal life that the OTA gods demanded a reunion.

Stepping inside, it took all of few seconds to realize that nothing had changed. A female OTA bartender busied herself near the kitchen. An OTA man nursed a beer at the bar. An OTA zombie played a slot machine. Classic rock blared from the speakers. A shit Super Bowl pre-game show aired silently on the flatscreens. The wooden beer fridge looked as good as gold.

I ordered a red ale. I repaired to my favorite place to write in OTA country, the Triangle’s back table with views of the bridge and Columbia River. (My second favorite place is the window table at the Sea Star in Gold Beach.)

How many thousands upon thousands of words had I written at this table? I’d also drank beer here with some of the most important women in my life and you know who you are.

I started writing in my journal and then stood up to walk over to the place where eons ago a bartender framed all of my published writing about the Triangle and bolted it to the wall. It was never coming down until they razed the joint and when they do, Astoria is dead, or more likely, gone the way of Cannon Beach.

It brings me monumental pride knowing that I can boast of being the only Oregon writer alive who has a framed display of his writing about a dive bar mounted on a wall in that dive bar. In fact, this might be the only such display in the history of Oregon! Top that Ernest Hemingway and you’re boring clean, well lighted place!

I read some riffs from my old pieces and then returned to the back table where I began writing in my journal again.

The OTA man at the bar yelled out to me, “Hey! You writing a novel or a journal?”

“A journal,” I yelled back.

“I’m going to start one.”

“It’s great for your mental health,” said the man, me, who has written more than 200 journals since that first one in 1979, millions of words that no one will ever read.

“Yeah, you only get one life and you need that mental health to do it right.”

“Amen brother,” I said.