River Coffee Shop Novel Notes

I sit on a wooden picnic table. It is early morning along a slack river. I am drinking weak coffee from a paper cup. It is leftover free bank coffee. It was in the car for days.

It occurs to me that I can’t write on picnic tables unless they’re made of wood. Not many of those left in Western Oregon.

On my way here, I hunted for ripe blackberries and found not a single one. It was an incredibly poor blackberry year, one of the worst in recent memory.

On my walk along the river, I encountered the largest woodpecker I have ever seen. It was the size of a rabbit. It had a red head and hammered away on a large branch. I crept close and watched it hammer for five minutes from five feet away. It wouldn’t deign to notice me.

Two huge mastiff-like dogs just left me. They came up and goofed around the table as I wrote. They towered above the table. Their owner, a man in his 40s, apologized. I told him not to worry. His dogs made me laugh and I was grateful for that. They were happy and the man told me they were his first dogs in 17 years. When he was younger, he went though an agonizing death of his childhood dog and couldn’t bear to have another one. Sonny the husky lived for 17 years and has been gone for two. It may take me another 15 years before before I get another dog. If I do, I am naming it Lt Tragg.

I am now writing this inside the car. On my return walk, I happened across dozens of apples on the ground, from an ancient tree a homesteader planted over 125 years ago. I picked one up. I threw it toward the river and heard it made a fat smashing sound when it hit the water. It was a cannonball dive sort of sound. I saw nothing of the splash. I imagined that apple floating down the watershed, endlessly floating until it found the ocean. I threw only one. That was enough.