Journals (Part 2)
The kid walked off the green. I didn't know if he saved par or not.
My mind raced:
The tent had been obviously been abandoned. How long is something abandoned before it can be claimed? I once taught a one-period high school writing workshop on such an ethical dilemma It was about a bike chained to a power pole that no one came back to unlock.
Okay, I would come back the next day and see if the journals were still there. That would make it more ethical?
What is my duty here as a caring person? If that tent and the journals end up in a landfill,what good does that serve?
I kept walking down the path. It ended just past the 14th green onto a dead end street. I wheeled right and beheld the remains of a homeless encampment of seven or so dilapidated vehicles, including a milk delivery truck that appeared as if it had taken a direct hit from a bazooka. In fact, the whole encampment looked bombed out or fought through, like Stalingrad. No one appeared to be still living there. I thought about exploring it and then decided otherwise.
The unsettling of my mind began again. I simply can't escape it, even when I purposely try to find refuge in nature. There I encounter members of the New American Diaspora, on a logging road in the Coast Range, along a river outside Drain, in the willows along a lake near Klamath Falls, in a national forest surrounding Sisters. Everywhere in Oregon. Yes, even on a holiday egg nog and cider stroll at the port in Bandon where a homeless joins carolers and sings “Hark the Herald Angels Sing.”
I turned around and headed back to the tent. I was taking the journals. If I had established one rule in my ongoing mission or adventure or observation or documentation or whatever I am doing with this story it was this: when an opportunity help or learn more arises, and they always do, you must ACT RIGHT THEN. You cannot wait for tomorrow when you've mustered courage or better reflected or developed a strategy. ACT RIGHT NOW. I'd blown so many incredible opportunities the past year by not sensing the moment to care or learn and I was done with that feckless approach.
Move! Got to move! I walked up to the tent. I looked around. No one was in sight. I found an oak branch on the ground, one with a kind of claw at the end. I extend the claw into into the tent. I grabbed the edge of both journals. I yanked the claw toward me with all my might and the journals flew into my hands in almost balletic fashion. (I'm not making this up.) I cradled them under my arm like a football and headed back toward the Rhododendron Garden. I had never stepped inside the tent.
Was I a thief? I'd wrestle it with that question later. Perhaps I'd saved a masterpiece of a memoir, illustrations, comics, a fantasy novel, a collection of Bukowski-like tales of depravity or something totally new to American literature because what was going in was totally new in American history.
As I walked, I noticed the journals were damp. I wanted to read them right along the golf course but I forced myself to wait.
Just a peek. I stopped. I thumbed the Dickens ledger. Nothing! Nothing except a first name and a phone number on the inside front cover.
I opened the pink journal. I scanned its pages and found mostly blank pages, but also stray words, a list and doodles in different colored ink written/drawn in a scratchy script that to me felt like a female's. One the very last page was a page of prose written in orange and pink ink. At first glance, I couldn't read it.
Why write on the last page of a journal before filling the rest of it? Over my long career as an English teacher who required students to keep journals, I had come across a few writers who inexplicably skipped pages and jumped around, but the one I now held was the most extreme in this oddity.
I hustled to the car and drove to my favorite dive bar to better scrutinize the journals. Since there was only one page of prose, I doubted any chance for discovering a major literary revelation, but then again the Gettysburg Address is only 272 words and Shakespeare's “Sonnet 18” is a mere 14 lines.