pistolfortsunday

November 22, 2023

Sunday Fort Building

Dawn. Slashes of light in the sky. Sunday morning on Pistol River beach on the extreme Southern Oregon Coast. Tide rushing in. Fifty degrees. No one else around. Driftwood galore. I felt energized like I never am in the big city.

Fort time.

I found the perfect spot. A tiny promontory of sand with a steep face. A root wad intertwined by a giant tractor tire would provide an incredible foundation.

If I built it well, it might last an hour and no one would see it.

It’s highly irregular in my fort building experience to construct a fort at precisely the moment a wild tide is coming ashore and ready to topple it. I can count the times on one hand.

What a unique high it is to build under this kind of sublime pressure. Can you finish it before the collapse? Why am building something that won’t last?

Great questions for forts and life. Sometimes you just do something for pure joy and don’t worry about the outcome. It goes against our American grain. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

One never knows where the joy of doing something will lead. That’s truly the ultimate non outcome outcome of fort building.

The selection of driftwood astonished me. There were even choice cuts of beaverwood.

I got into it. I moved with purpose and alacrity. I had evanescent art on my mind and a mysterious woman of Pistol River who deserves a novel written about her.

I built and dived into everything. The labor. The lifting. The love of doing this. The letting go of this and that. The dragging. The drug of the waves. The hoisting. The positioning. The shoring up. The strengthening.

I was wearing a Pendleton sweater over a Pendleton Western shirt and sweat began soaking my body.

A wave crashed the base of the fort. It held. It didn’t budge an inch.

Shit, maybe my Sunday fort might last a day or two.

I left the beach. I was thinking about the book I want to write about fort building. I’ve been writing it for 20 years. I have 100,000 words in the can and several thousand photos.

What exactly would that book look like in format? Or tone?

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.