Gold Beach Thanksgiving (Part 1)

(Note to readers: I sometimes believe that writing fiction about the homeless helps me better address the crisis than writing essays or reportage. What follows in four installments is a short story inspired by a homeless man I met at a street ministry last Thanksgiving who shared his process for cooking a turkey in his encampment.)

Reverend Dave Bland woke up in the gilded bedroom of his stone and fir mansion set on a hillside overlooking a winery a few miles outside of Amity. It wasn't his mansion or winery. They belonged to his wife, Kari. She was one of the wealthiest women in the Willamette Valley.

The Reverend's wife of seven years wasn't around. She was probably sweating at yoga or drinking fancy coffee with her winemaking friends or carrying on yet another assignation.

It was the day before Thanksgiving. Traditionally, the couple dined at some swank restaurant where a cliched celebrity chef repurposed meals from classic American cuisine (this season it was Salisbury steak and Swedish meatballs) and everyone reveled in the expensive irony.

But as of Wednesday, Kari hadn't said a word to her husband about where they were going. That hardly mattered. He was as indifferent to Thanksgiving as a beaver was to a presidential election.

The Reverend checked his phone. He had a text message from Kari sent earlier in the morning. It read:

Dave:

It's over. I'm flying to Sicily for the holiday. I'll return in a week and don't want you there. Please sign the divorce papers in the office and leave a forwarding address. There's a debit card with $10,000 on it for you. That's it. The password is our wedding date. I paid your phone bill for the month and signed the title of the Navigator over to you. No more church service either, so tell everyone. It was fun at first but got boring. Good luck. You'll need it.

Kari

Don't think about going to the beach house in Manzanita. I changed all the security codes.

Was the poor Reverend in shock? Not really. He knew the heave ho was coming sooner or later, but a text message the day before Thanksgiving? And her flying to Sicily? Well, at least she left him the alimony and a SUV.

So now what? Where to go? How to survive? The Reverend didn't have a clue. The practical thing would be to locate a place to live. But if he did and paid all the deposits, the Reverend would be as broke as a homeless John the Baptist, though at least he wouldn't be wearing a loincloth and eating locust and wild honey.

Reverend Bland decided he would reach out to his flock for succor. That's what a church is for, right? And his flock was rich. He texted several members and waited for sympathetic responses and offers of temporary housing as he packed up a couple workout bags full of belongings. He didn't really own much of anything except a wardrobe, a phone and an Apple Watch. Everything around him was Kari's.

They had met in a New Age Christian addiction recovery center (only gentle self-flagellation allowed and lots of healing crystals). His sin was sports betting, hers was pills. They'd hit it off immediately, violated various center rules with their sensual shenanigans, and then got married a week after their release. He was 35, she was 50.

He'd been cleaned out by his addiction and lost a condo, a boat and a semi-lucrative job selling medical equipment. She'd lost nothing except the craving for pills.

Kari told him he was great in recovery talking to the addicts, helping them each have their own Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment. He was a born storyteller, she said, who should form some kind of ministry to continue his good work. She would subsidize him.

And that was the genesis of Fortress for Christ and Reverend Dave Bland. Reverend was such a better title than pastor or preacher or minister. It just rolled off the tongue.

The Reverend erected a yurt with hardwood floors and a wood stove near the winery. His pulpit was of custom-made myrtlewood from the Southern Oregon Coast. Word got out in the Christian addict community and his Sunday afternoon service grew to a respectable 50 former and still-functioning Christian addicts (mostly sex and booze). He was all over social media where his sermons garnered a couple thousand hits every week and trickled in a few donations.

For his sermonizing, the Reverend stuck to the Old Testament standards such as Moses and the burning bush, Samson slaying the Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, and, of course, Jonah and the whale.

How in the world the Reverend managed to graft homilies of capitalism onto stories like the parting of the Red Sea and sell them to his flock like the newest i-Phone? Well, such are the vagaries of a spirituality based on hierarchy. When your spirituality is the ocean or mountains or desert or old trees, you recognize no such hierarchy and don't rely on homilies to lead your life.

Jonah's story was the Reverend's personal favorite, for its always-bad notion of trying to run away from performing a righteous duty. Was he pulling a Jonah right now? Running away from something important? Or was he more like Jackson Browne's “Running on Empty” and running blind?

The Reverend didn't know. All he knew was he wanted to see the ocean in his moment of extreme distress, to walk on the beach as so many Oregonians do in similar crisis situations. The beach is the Great Therapist of Oregon and it never charges a cent nor recites banal jargon.

Thirty minutes later, none of the flock had texted him back. An hour later, one person finally responded, not with any offer to help, but something about “thoughts and prayers” and multiple crying emojis.

The Reverend was disappointed but not surprised. His congregation was more about capitalism than compassion. His church wasn't even a real church by most Christian definitions. It was more of a personal coaching service with the goal of motivating the rich to get richer and the poor, well, who cares?

He loaded up the Navigator and made a couple sandwiches for the road. He considered taking a last visit to the yurt, but why bother? Fortress for Christ was kaput. The Reverend was actually relieved at the prospect. It had never been a true calling, just more of a side hustle. He cherry picked the Bible for lessons of power and conquest. He never sermonized the teachings of Jesus. That was way too unsettling for his flock. Besides, the Parables were over his head. The Battle of Jericho was not.

The Reverend drove south on I-5 listening to sports talk radio. The incoherent, ungrammatical blathering of the announcers kept his mind occupied. At some point, he would turn west and take one of the roads through the Coast Range to Highway 101 and the ocean. But which road?

He passed exits for the coast at Salem, Albany, and Eugene. He'd driven them before and wanted to see something new, new country. The Reverend was surprised to see people living in tents, tarps and pallet shanties in the trees and shrubs along the interstate. He'd seen such a sight around Portland-area freeways, but here they were near farms, orchards and rural rest stops.