Dusty in Coos Bay (Part 1)

For weeks a CD of Dusty Springfield's soul album Dusty in Memphis rode shotgun with me. I'd scored this silky torch classic in Goodwill for $1.99 and was waiting for the perfect time to listen to it while driving. I'd heard a few songs off this record over the decades, but never listened to it straight through, the way this album was supposed to be listened upon its release in 1969.

But what constituted the perfect time? I would know it when I knew it.

Elmer and I pulled out of the Sunset Bay State Campground at approximately 7:30 on a Saturday morning in September. We were heading home after a weekend of camping and reconnoitering the Coos Bay area.

Earlier we'd walked to the beach with my flashlight leading the way. As soon as we hit the wet sand, we began zigging and zagging, dodging kelp. The stars were out. Not a single other human being. Bliss.

Then I saw headlights from a road above the beach that led to the parking lot of the wayside. A beater sedan turned onto a ramp that led to the beach where it is illegal to drive. The ramp is used to offload kayaks.

Elmer and I turned around and I directed my flashlight toward the sedan so the asshole knew I was there.

But the sedan did not drive down the beach. It left the ramp and got stuck! The driver gunned it a few times. Nothing doing. He gave up for the moment.

By this time I was sitting on a log taking this all in with Elmer at my side. Layers of light gray began appearing in the sky.

Then a woman with long hair got out of the passenger side, took off her top, and started playing with her breasts and dancing as the headlights lit her up. All the while she was filming it with a phone.

The woman returned to the sedan. The driver gunned it again and made it onto the ramp and over to the parking lot. There, the woman took off her clothes and danced in front of the cinderblock restroom while the driver turned the headlights on and off like a strobe light.

She filmed her performance.

It was one of my weirder encounters on Oregon's socialist ocean beaches, but certainly didn't crack the top five. What's ever going to beat the young man pretending he was Jesus on the road to Golgotha, carrying a driftwood cross and wearing a crown of seaweed?

The sky was layered in orange and blue as we left the campground, but one star still shined. I could smell the ocean. Towering cedars, hemlocks, and Sitka spruces waved in the breeze. My mood soared. My mind drifted toward my brief, unexpected encounter with a fellow camper in the campground—a real seeker an artist of the type that often gravitate toward the Oregon Coast and the old sound of the ocean and execute all sorts of magic within themselves and their communities.

Now was the time to listen to Dusty in Memphis. I put the CD in and track one, “Just a Little Lovin'” started dreaming out of the speakers:

Just a little lovin' early in the mornin'
Beats a cup of coffee for starting off the day
Just a little lovin' when the world is yawnin'
Makes you wake up feeling good things are coming your way

The 2:14 song was just ending when I spotted my first homeless person of the day, right outside of Charleston. A bedraggled man carrying bags emerged from a recent logging operation. Two deer grazed 30 yards to his left.

I'd never seen deer in the presence of the homeless. It braced me. It was not surreal. It was simply begging for an artist to paint a massive oil painting of the scene, in thick dark hues, a real Rembrandt, but of course without the opulence.

Track two, “So Much Love” began playing. I turned up Dusty.

In the midst of all my darkness, baby
You came along to guide me
You took pity on a lonely girl
When you said you'd stand beside me
I'll never forget you for what you've done
I'll never turn my back on you for anyone

We drove into the seafood processing village of Charleston, easily one of the rankest and grittiest places in Oregon and home of the most dilapidated RV park in the state. The entire park is a somewhat beautiful, seedy and utterly bizarre moldering and rusting ruin in progress that should interest a filmmaker to make a documentary about it. I've wanted to write a novel about this place for years.