THE COAST ROAD

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Between Pacific City on the Oregon coast and the Cape Meares lighthouse to the north is a narrow two lane blacktop road that serves both the locals and the tourists—the dairymen and the fishermen, the hiker and the bicyclist—by providing access to land and sea. At the same time, the road serves by giving definition to the land, a physical definition through its function as a line that takes the measure of the terrain as the lines on a contour map do, now rising, now falling, here looping, there straightening; and a transcendental definition through its function as a poetical metaphor that takes the measure of this geography as a poem takes the measure of an idea or theme.

The poem uses the collision of words, the separation of phrases, to express itself. The road finds its expression in the brown cows ruminating cud, in the rusted jetsam that once was truck, in the solitary chimney standing sentinel over the blackened rubble that once was house, in the red barn, the sand dunes and mats of salal, the towns of ramshackle and renovated that punctuate the road, in the estates of chime and glass, cottages with frayed lace curtains and unkempt lawns, the bright green rectangle of new laid turf, the stumps and deadfall littering clear-cut hillsides, the mongrel yapping at the end of its chain, a rock slide, a bent and twisted guardrail, the missing sign, the rock and sand, and, finally, in the lighthouse, barely visible through the evergreens, a revolving blip of light out on some final point of land that measures the waves steady thump and rumble.

There is something elusive about this stretch of pavement, an ambiguity, a question hovering like the fog that is so ever-present hereabouts. There is meaning beyond the sum of its parts, beyond form and meter, beyond linguistics, beyond theme. So, too, do the many parts of the road scene, all the constituents along this strip, seem to speak more eloquently when conjoined than when examined individually. And, just as a poem only finds its voice after assembly, so it is along the road. There comes a grace to the man slopping his sow against the backdrop of the distant headland, a heroism to the lone chimney lost in the expanse of field and dune, a tender emotion, a moving presence, to that archetypal American family—mother, father, brother, sister—in matching shirts and shorts with their station wagon and dog down for a day at the beach.

Meaning is often incommunicable, beneath the surface, defying elucidation. Words hint at meaning; but often meaning can only be experienced. Abstraction is elusive; substance is not. The traveler suspects some hidden meaning lurking beneath the surface value of asphalt, house, widow, business, land form, grocer, seascape, and lighthouse, feels a need for explication. But unless he pauses in his travels, suspends his journey and noses about turning stones, that suspicion will rise on a sea breeze and be gone, the traveler none the poorer, but none the wiser either.

Pause, suspension, waiting, sitting quietly are keys to scanning this road. Everyone hereabouts lives in three-quarter time, and this waltz tempo helps define the area. By contrast, Highway 101, running a few miles inland, is an upbeat four-four proposition. Travelers propelled along by destination, by assignation, would not likely choose the coast road for their journey. The hard traffic stays on the 101. It is the quick link between Lincoln City and Tillamook. Cape Meares, Oceanside, Netarts, Cape Lookout, Sand City, Tierra del Mar, Kiwanda, and Pacific City are out-of-the-way places. Log trucks will vie for space on the 101; large, loud, and aggressive, they are no bargain. The odd truck plying the coast road gives some ground, like as not, perhaps a wave of the hand, not smiling, not friendly mind you, but not contentious either.

Businessmen on the 101 push their machines with abandon. The retiree in his motor home, seeking some refuge for the refuge he is driving, seeking some glimpse of the Pacific, some sound of the gulls, will be found pulled off in a turnout, nose to map, perplexed, dismayed. He is on the 101, after all, with little quarter given.

The coast road is the other road the retiree seeks where stopping on a whim becomes the attractive alternative, and experience finds opportunity to wander from the objective to the subjective, from destination to journey, from denotation to connotation, from white line of highway to white line of breakers.

Along this coast road the traveler is rarely far from the pounding surf. It is not a place to be in a rush; there is time here, but not seconds and minutes nor even hours. There is morning, afternoon, evening, and night. There are weeks and months and years. See it in the ramshackle building, some collection of homespun architecture nailed together over decades, the pumps still out front marking it as a gas station of a by-gone era. Out back are the odds and ends of automobiles, disarrayed like children’s toys after a morning’s play, hoods askew, wheels and doors gone, windshields shattered.

Attached to the building’s flank, a rusted metal stack pokes above the roof line and smoke curls gently up and away. The door dings open, the traveler waiting at the pumps. Out ambles a boy with a ball cap pushed back on his head, dungarees oil stained, the suit short-legged, hand-me-downs, his hands stuffed deep into his pockets. Has he just wakened?

The traveler asks for gas and for the distance yet to Pacific City. The boy, imitating the father who is from Kansas, says, “Three mile.” He spits, like the father, then turns slowly away to the sound of an old dump truck rapping in deceleration down the hill, hauling gravel.

Boy and driver exchange nods, pumps gas absently. The tank full, the boy milks the pump, adding pennies, then done. “Eight dollar fifty cent,” says the boy to the traveler. The look might be called vacant, but his youth keeps it just this side of blank, an imitation again of the father whose eyes are long absent, doing the same thing over and over again, eking out a living here on the coast road, a fair life, the father says, quiet like, can’t complain none, wife’d like the city some, spitting, pumping gas, telling the tourists time and again, three mile, knowing that soon enough those city people on their fancy bicycles will start coming through, never buying nothing, bottle of water maybe, or them Powerbars he’d been stocking, just wanting to use the can, telling them, nope, broke, which it ain’t but he just don’t cotton to giving things away.

This is the rhythm, the pace of life, on the coast road. If there is a rush, a hurry, best turn right at the junction and head her over to the 101.

All the varied entities that the traveler meets along the way—the beach cottages, the dilapidated sheds, a pair of horses standing head to tail, a grain elevator, hay ricks, sties, skunk cabbage, creek, the gathering wave—constitute the words and phrases of the road. The bay collides with the headland and a gentle mist rises. The rhymes here are less aural than visual: The martin winging against the pale dawn sky gives flight to black and white cows scratching at fence posts; an old man profiled at the end of the jetty fishing is mirrored by the snag hanging leafless over a swift creek.

Equally varied are the themes, the motifs, of the coast road. Central to the road, both physically and metaphorically, are the sand dunes that lie between the Kiwanda headland and Cape Lookout. All along the road through these dunes are signs warning of the soil stabilization project, prohibiting motor vehicles. The loops and swirls, the tread marks across the flats and through gullies give testimony to the effectiveness of the deterrent.

The traveler feels a tension here. This is the arena where the road’s two protagonists, man and nature, do battle. A State Park ranger, who officiates at the fray, occupies the foreground as the traveler approaches. The ranger nods curtly, then turns away from the traveler to continue his note taking, keeping score.

The sand, covering many square miles, is a most fragile environment. Though only the two lanes of blacktop cut it, the advantage in the short-term seems clearly with man. Thinly treed, matted with salal and grass, the dunes provide habitat and forage for rabbit and frog and snake, hoppers and sliders. Here man plods across the soft ground, trips in the tangled weed, starts at the sudden leap of gray-green, black-eyed frog. Overhead a red-tail hawk circles, hunting. A moth the color of weathered cedar ignores the curse of the man and floats and dips and flutters.

Resentful at his immobility, man brings his machines, though clearly this is no place for motor and wheels. This is a wild land, as-it-was land, save for the signs and the two lane blacktop bisecting. Man comes with his machines, becomes the ultimate predator, preying on the land itself. The ensuing destruction is rapid and all encompassing; but here, unlike the hillside on which the devastating effect of clear-cutting is readily apparent, it is difficult to see man’s impact.

“It’s just sand for Christ sake,” says the ATV enthusiast.

Only the geologist, the biologist, the botanist, the entomologist can truly take its measure. And then post signs. All the same, a frog meeting with an all-terrain vehicle faces the same odds as does the bicyclist who strays into the path of a log truck out on the 101.

At the end of this particular stretch of pavement comes, finally, the lighthouse. This seafarer’s beacon warns of the treachery of rock and tide, illuminating darkness, piercing fog. It was not supposed to be on this point of land; it was supposed to have been built on Cape Lookout, some miles to the south. All the building material, however, got delivered to the Cape Meares site; and, with no coast road here in 1890, with access so difficult, so dangerous, the lighthouse rose where the materials dictated, the harsh terrain having the final say.

That seems fitting, thinks the traveler, watching the light go round. Man proposes; the earth disposes. Not in the short-term, of course; for in time even this lighthouse will be gone. For the moment, the beacon seems an appropriate response to the question raised by the coast road. Here is the best of 19th century engineering wedded to the land, functional, beautiful. This marriage of science and humanity provides the elusive quality that rises like the fog all along this stretch of pavement, this sinuous man-made track through nature’s glories. Like an alchemist’s dream, there is a balance, a blending of the ingredients that defies addition. Here the metaphor of the coast road manifests itself.

The traveler trains his eye on the far horizon: The endless sea. The light goes round. Seagulls cry. Chilled by the stiff breeze, the traveler steps through the door at the base of the lighthouse and begins his upward spiral.

TROUBLE IN MIND

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… gonna lay my head on some cold railroad line, let the 2:19 pacify my mind …

Murders have existed since Cain slew Abel, and stories about murders have always attracted eager ears. When stories become songs, ballads result; and a substantial portion of all ballads involve murders. From infanticide to genocide, all variations of man’s inhumanity to man are included; from Scandanavian eddas to African myths, every culture has its demons and demigods.

Most American ballads originated in Ireland, Scotland, or England and were brought to the United States by emigres. They all tell tales of misadventure. The word ‘ballad’ derives from the root word ‘ball’ which is found in both Latin and Greek forms to mean ‘dance.’ (Another form of ‘ball’ gives a spherical object.) The pronunciation of ‘ballad’ and the vagaries of early English spelling created a variety of terms that all came to mean a song sung to tell a story. 

Before printing, events of the day were orally reported by the town crier. The more conspicuous of these events became repeated and memorized. After the advent of printing—1440 in Germany—the events of the day were printed on broadsheets and posted. Music became integral to the process both to entertain and to aid memory, and melodies joined with lyrics which enhanced the telling. The songs that resulted were inevitably accompanied by simple instruments such as flutes, drums, banjos, and guitars.

With the advent of printing, the presses began churning out broadsheets, and the ballad was then posted on bulletin boards, doors, walls, and windows. The word ‘ballad,’ also spelled ‘ballet,’ may have gained additional meaning from its alliterative association with ‘bulletin.’ The songs were the headline news of the day, and like headline news stories, most died as soon as they were sung. But the more popular songs were passed on, reinterpreted, and eventually changed to suit some new occurrence.

The composers of old ballads, for the most part, remain unknown. In 1860, Francis Child published an eight volume work that included 305 ballads.The melodies and themes have been used time again to create new songs or to give a new slant to the old work. Jealous husbands, unfaithful wives, deceitful lovers taking gun or knife in hand to resolve the unrequited relationship, hard driving boss men, hard hearted bank men, slave drivers, prison wardens, and whip wielding plantation owners all can be found in the stories told by ballads.

Humans have a predilection for gruesome events. From ‘Hunt-A-Killer’ website comes this:

… thousands would flock to these public executions [hangings], and the mood would usually be jovial. With people rushing to get a good spot close to the gallows, these public spectacles were known irreverently as the “hanging fair”, “stretching”, or “collar day.” The events held a carnival-like atmosphere.

Murder ballads from the British isles (Celtic traditions) and their American variants most often find men killing their wives and lovers (‘Tom Dooley,’  ‘Banks of the Ohio,’ and ‘John Lewis.’) Blues, originating in the southeast United States, began as the work songs of slaves, but by the early 20th century, the themes had become centered around women killing (or rejecting) their men (‘Send Me To The ‘Lectric Chair,’ ‘Silver Dagger,’ and ‘Frankie and Johnny’), with the men succumbing to a variety of vices that usually involved drinking, gambling, and fighting.

‘Lily of the West’ provides an example of a murder ballad that became a love song. Originally an Irish ballad, the song tells the tale of a man enchanted by Lily (or Flora or Molly-O depending on the version.) She had other ideas, however, and her new lover paid the price. He was knifed by her jealous suitor. Mark Knopfler, of Dire Straits fame, joined with The Chieftains to record an Irish version of the song. After its arrival in America, ‘Lily of the West’ soon became a standard. A few of the lyrics were changed, ‘Ireland’ replaced with ‘Louisville,’ and the murder, in the American version, often became a matter of self-defense.

As often happened, the same popular melody was used to tell a much different story. ‘Lily Of The West’ became ‘The Lakes of Pontchartrain,’ songwriter unknown but thought to have been written sometime after the civil war. A common practice of all song writers was this business of appropriating melodies, which cannot be copyrighted, and then adding their own lyrics. Bob Dylan, in his early days, did this repeatedly.

The murder ballad (infanticide and a hanging) ‘Mary Hamilton’ might be as old as the 14th century, but the 16th is more likely. While not a story with specific  historical precedent, many disparate incidents from various reigns (Russian, French, Scottish, and English) conjoin to make up the song’s lyric.

The king or tsar or prince has his way with one of the queen’s maids, she becomes pregnant, kills the baby by casting it out to sea, and is hanged in due course. Originally known as ‘The Fower Maries,’ dozens of versions have been recorded, the most compelling may be that of Joan Baez on her eponymous debut album of 1960. 

Dylan, feeding off the success of the Baez song, ‘borrowed’ the melody and wrote ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’ in 1963. The lyrics tell the story of the murder of Carroll by a wealthy young man named William Zantzinger. Dylan and Columbia Records were threatened with a lawsuit by Zantzinger, but the suit came to nothing. A video available on the internet is that of 22 year old Dylan performing the song after an awkward interview with host Steve Allen.

The folk movement of the 1960s began with the success of the Kingston Trio. These clean cut college boys with the button down shirts recorded ‘Tom Dooley’ in three part harmony, simple instrumentation, and a memorable refrain. While not as topical as Dylan’s account of the murder of Hattie Carroll, Tom Dooley ( or Dula, a Confederate soldier) tells the story of the 1866 murder of Laurie Foster and the subsequent hanging of Dooley. The song went, in short order, to number one on the charts; and folk songs, fusing with blues and rock, became the most popular music genre of that decade.

Historically, most ballads and early blues were performed by single performers with cheap battered instruments. The early balladeers, like modern day buskers, would station themselves on some conspicuous street corner and sing the news. Blues men sang on porches, in town squares, and, when they could get the gigs, in juke joints, smoky dim lit rooms often heated by a barrel burning wood. Inevitably, they would sit on straight backed chairs, sing their songs (often quite a variety) and drink their whiskey. Video of an old blues man named Sam Chatmon (1899 – 1983)  provides an example. Chatmon, who played with the Mississippi Sheiks in the 1930s, was 79 years old when the video linked below was recorded by Alan Lomax, John Bishop, and Worth Long at Chatmon’s house in Hollandale, Mississippi.

EMPTY HEAD, OPEN HAND

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Begin with a ubiquitous story of tea: The professor visited the master to test his understanding of zen. The Master offered tea. As the tea steeped, cups were placed. The professor went on explaining his visit, explaining zen, explaining Buddhism and its import in Japanese life. The master lifted the pot and leaned to pour tea for the professor. As the cup filled, the professor became quiet. As tea began to run over the table and onto the tatami, the professor could no longer contain himself. Stop, he cried. Stop, it’s full, it’s full. The master withdrew the pot, setting it carefully onto a trivet. Just so, he said. 

Lyn Hejinian (1941 – 2024)

The brain of a human contains 86 billion nerve cells. Unlike a tin pail filled with water, sensations, perceptions, conceptions will never ‘fill’ the brain. Consider the man, like the professor, who is full of himself. The metaphor describes a person who has an exaggerated notion of self worth. Egocentricity is his stock and trade.  

Empty headed is another metaphor used to indicate a person who does not think before he acts and so often behaves impulsively and mistakenly. The metaphor often suggests an unintelligent person, though behavior is not necessarily related to intelligence. 

Many 19th century psychologists subscribed to Sherlock Holmes’ notion that the brain was a vessel whose volume was finite so best not to clutter it with nonsense.  

The cup of tea suggests the metaphor rather than the physical fact; and the professor might be described as empty headed despite his discourse. 

The master might also smile at the notion described above of empty headed. He would no doubt say that an empty head is just the thing. One cannot add to a full head. The metaphor has morphed from an impulsive person who acts without thinking to an intuitive person who acts without thinking. 

Consider poetry. E. E. Cummings, perhaps, a good place to start, a poem titled Since feeling is First: 

since feeling is first both 

who pays any attention 

to the syntax of things 

will never wholly kiss you; 

wholly to be a fool 

while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves, 

and kisses are a better fate 

than wisdom 

lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry 

– the best gesture of my brain is less than 

your eyelids’ flutter which says 

we are for each other; then 

laugh, leaning back in my arms 

for life’s not a paragraph 

And death i think is no parenthesis 

This is not, obviously, a Shakespearian sonnet. This is: 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?  

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.  

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,  

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date. 

Consider: The dog ate the car. Though syntax and grammar are correct, diction has led us astray. Though understandable, the words make no sense. The reader might even feel somewhat used: the brain reads ‘cat,’ does a double take and so reads ‘car.’ 

If we write: the dog eating the car left spilt milk on the kitchen stool pigeons flying overhead; and then change the shape of the line to: 

the dog eating the car 

left spilt milk on the 

tumbled stool 

pigeons flying overhead 

What results is jumbled syntax and an open ended poem (of sorts) that invites (or perhaps repels) the reader into the process rather than closing him or her, as the case may be, out (slam). 

Shakespeare’s sonnet does not invite comment about form or grammar or syntax or diction. One may reflect, but the poem is a closed book. 

Poet, essayist, and educator Lyn Hejinian became the leading figure of the Language poetry movement of the 1970s which supported experimental and avant-garde poetics. She became more concerned with the specific issue of openess in both language and life after the death of her daughter-in-law at a young age. She rejected the notion of closure and thought that inclusion and acceptance (the open hand) were imperative to facing both the travails of daily life and writing words. 

In her essay ‘The Rejection of Closure,’ she writes: The ‘open text’ is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies.

The open hand and the empty head are not two things. 

THE OLD WAYS, A Remembrance of Everett Darr

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Darr’s Mountain Shop was three stories high and  sided with rock. The gneiss blocks sat a bit proud of their mortar making for a good climb to change the light bulbs up under the eaves that illuminated Darr’s Mountain Shop. Everett Darr had been, in his day, a solid performer on rock, snow, and ice. He feigned disinterest or annoyance at my buildering solos, but there was a twinkle in the old man’s eye.

On Mt Hood’s Eliot Glacier: (R-L) Darr, Mount, and Calkin, 1930s. (Photograph courtesy of Gary Randall Photography.)

By then, this early spring of 1978, all that remained for Everett of climbing and skiing were remembrance and tall tales. Bone breaking falls and old age had made his joints arthritic, his walk a shuffle. Nothing, however,  had diminished his spirit.

Tough as an old boot is a cliché, but Darr was; he would give a man nothing that was not earned, neither wages nor respect. Some disliked his gruff manner; others accepted him as he was. Some thought his stories a bit too tall, but the man’s record speaks for itself.

Washington’s North Cascades saw Everett and wife, Ida, make numerous pioneering efforts on peaks that were, in the 1930s, all but inaccessible . Mt Hood, on the other hand, was in his backyard. Darr, with Jim Mount, put up a first ascent of what became the Wy’East Route on Mt Hood. In 1940,  he added another first ascent, this time of St Peter’s Dome in the Columbia River Gorge again with Ida, Joe Leuthold, and Jim Mount.

But those days were gone now. Only the memories endured.

Down in the basement of the Mountain Shop where the rental skis were kept, time passed slowly on rainy winter afternoons. Everett would always stop by and tell a tale. He never mentioned his triumphs, only the hard times. The grey skies reminded him of a night in the North Cascades after an attempt on Mt Goode. He and Leuthold were caught out by darkness, wind, and rain. They crouched in a tree well with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Leuthold rummaged in his pack. Extracted a bottle of whiskey. They drank to their two left feet and cowardly retreat.

Another day in early spring on Mt Hood: weather coming down with the darkness. He, Ida, and Joe, skiing this time out, came to a steep pitch laden with snow—it might have been Newton Clark glacier, or Eliot, or Coe. Everett did not always have the names quite right; but if all the facts were not straight, that was just too bad. The listener always knew he had been there, and usually before anybody else.

That steep pitch they faced had stopped them. Below, the crevasses had begun to gape open. A fall would be a dangerous occupation. They had traveled light, as usual, and a bivouac was not an option. Leuthold did have a length of rope. He offered a belay. Everett gallantly deferred to the lady. Ida roped up, poled off gingerly, turned slightly downhill for a bit of speed and just then a slab cracked and sloughed off beneath her. Down she went, flailing to stay on the surface of the slide.The rope went taut, and held. The avalanche rumbled off down the mountain. Everett hooted to salute his wife’s survival and skied quickly across the firm slide path.

One storm bound day in the basement of the shop—the snow had just slid off the roof three stories overhead and had effectively destroyed a Volkswagen parked too near the building—Everett leaned against the mounting bench and regaled me with an account of storm climbing. The middle of January had finally delivered some nasty weather. He and the usual suspects spent the night in the old Timberline cabin on the Palmer snowfield. By dawn they were off. Through wind driven snow they plugged up the snowfield.

Reaching what they determined to be the Triangular Moraine, a pow-wow was called. Conditions were, well, marginal. Wet and cold, they decided to climb on. Through the morning hours, the winds subsided, the snowfall became intermittent. Someone suggested they have some lunch and wait for the weather to worsen.

But up they went. As the day waned, the storm returned with a vengeance. Voices were lost in the wind and snow. They communicated with tugs of the rope. As Darr—or Calkins or Mount or Leuthold—crested the Hogsback, the wind tore at him. Up he went, a sack of bones and flesh in flight, picked up and tossed in a bundle down slope.

They huddled together. Great sport, they all agreed; but the day was gone, so down they went. Darkness had caught them, but it didn’t matter. They had not been able to see anything for hours anyway. Skill or luck or just plain orneriness saw them back to the cabin.

Looking north from Leuthold’s Couloir, photograph by the author, December 1981, with the Columbia River beneath the line of cloud and, in the background, Mt St Helens and Mt Adams.

One dismal spring day with rain and sleet, I waited as I heard Everett coming down the stairs, one step at a time. It took awhile. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked around the corner into the shop. Outside, ravens commenced squawking.

“You got my hat?” Everett says to me.

“No, Everett,” I say. “I surely don’t.”

“Why not,” he snaps

I raise my eyebrows.

Everett shakes his head, puts on a sour face. He looked back up that long flight of stairs. He had remembered where his hat was.

Suddenly, he grinned, an elfish smile. “Damn steep stairs, ” he says. “How about roping me up? Awful steep. How about a belay?”

And then he turned, took a good hold on the rail, and up he went, one step at a time, up he went.