monday monday

We buried Richard yesterday. Sent him down the river. John Barleycorn takes another one. At all of the funerals, it is often a gathering to see who's left and to guess at who's next. Very few Applegate valley men remain. They played too long at a game we all lost. It is curious to me that at every gathering, every memorial, every wake, someone says, "We've got to stop meeting like this." But it is at this time of life, the middle, that these are the only reasons we meet. We don't get together for coffee, we don't make time for old acquaintances. We see each other at these moments, these transitions, where we stand around and dump some old drunk's ashes in the river, against the law, against the weeping old mother's wishes, and somebody always comments on the speed at which the ashes move through the water on the journey away from us.

I don't know why I go. I guess it is to see the ghosts, the ones who are still standing, who have stayed the course, kept the party going long after it ended. I need to see them, to remind myself of where I would be. There was one particular ghost there -- a mean one, a bad memory -- and he finally worked up the nerve to approach me after several beers. "I thought you'd be a hag by now," he said. I didn't answer. "Instead, you look 30 years younger than the rest of us." I think what is difficult about being someone's victim is seeing them again after so long. I smiled and talked to him as though he'd never raped me at all.

I remember several years ago when I saw another ghost, a nicer one, Crazy Billy at McKee Bridge one morning. It was early spring, the sun breaking over the ridge behind me, the air chilled with the nearness of passing winter. Billy crawled out from under a blue plastic sleeping bag in the back of an open pickup bed. "Where's the party?" he asked me. "Party's over, Billy. I been clean a couple of years now." He said, "yeah, me too, pretty much." I'd heard he was dead -- OD'd in LA. It wasn't quite true. Nearly.

So, that was a quick trip back to the southlands.

On Saturday, we took a fishing boat thirty miles out into the ocean out of Newport. We each caught a halibut. If you've never done that, its kind of fun. But the thing is that they are 600 feet down, laying on the bottom of the ocean. Reeling up 600 feet of line takes awhile. I got the first one. their bellies are white and the other side is camouflage. They look like flat round hunters without guns. I remember asking my brother, a fisherman turned basketweaver, if he was ever afraid when he was out to sea. "You deal with that before you get on the boat. LIve or die, he said. I found that was true. For all my trepidation prior to boarding, I was never afraid. I was out there, thirty miles from shore, catching sharks on fishing poles, porpoises racing the bow of the boat as we sped for home, and I hung over the edge like the most natural thing in the world. My father was a sailor. He would have been proud.

Some ghosts:
Mark Fossen
John Who
Michael Topar
Ken Powers
Ed Gregory
Richard Bohannon
Sherman Butler
Marc Kinney