It was just me and Clyde headed for the river on a windless morning. Bonnie howled from the back yard and damn near broke my heart. She got an extra handful of treats, but just left them piled on the grass.<\/p>\n
I can’t bear leaving her behind and must conjure a way to bring her along that doesn’t cause pain. A wagon? Cannabis? Both? Think goddammit!<\/i><\/p>\n
Record rainfall had sent the river over the banks and into the field.<\/p>\n
I saw fresh beaverwood everywhere and evidence of our throwaway civilization. You are what you throw away. How easy a river at flood stage reveals that, reveals our essential flimsiness as a culture.<\/p>\n
Flimsy is a great word to describe us. It’s one of those rare words that sounds like what it is.<\/p>\n
I know something about flimsy. I had been trafficking in it for years. Flimsy is an adjective. What does flim the noun mean? Flim flam man. What about that?<\/p>\n
There is nothing flimsy in a river and old dogs. I grasp them as hard as I can. They are my new friends, my decidedly non-flimsy friends to replace the flimsy friendships that ruled my previous life, cultivated by the friendship flim flam man, the old Matt Love.<\/p>\n
Goddammit!<\/i> I had missed the river running wild because I had been stuck in Portland doing decidedly non-river things intended to straighten the winding channels in my life. It’s a funny feeling being dredged in an office and paying a lot money for the dredging.<\/p>\n
I found a beer bottle in the mud, a high end craft malt liquor. I saw a red canoe entangled in the tall reeds. Where was the body? Clyde seemed out of sorts. No Bonnie, of course. He flopped down on the bank and stared downriver. I picked up the bottle and threw it into the current. I’d never thrown a bottle in a river before. Somewhere down the watershed a transient would find and redeem it and keep his Oregon life going with a fast food hamburger and energy drink.<\/p>\n
Nothing was happening in my heart or mind. Clyde came over and looked at me. He had no interest in a treat. My mind rocketed to an immortal line from John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley<\/i>, when he’s staring at his poodle, \u201cI wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple?\u201d<\/p>\n
(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.) <\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was just me and Clyde headed for the river on a windless morning. Bonnie howled from the back yard and damn near broke my heart. She got an extra handful of treats, but just left them piled on the grass. I can’t bear leaving her behind and must conjure a way to bring her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3394,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[203,5],"tags":[20,206,40,205,52,13,207],"class_list":["post-3393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bonnie-and-clyde-files","category-meditations","tag-astoria","tag-dog-sanctuary","tag-dogs","tag-old-dogs","tag-oregon","tag-oregon-coast","tag-oregon-rivers","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3393"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3395,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3393\/revisions\/3395"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3394"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}