Reedsport at Dawn

Elmer the husky and I walked below a grassy dyke of a creek that flows behind Reedsport and into the Umpqua River. We started our walk in total darkness but pretty soon the darkness started turning to light—my favorite time of the day.

You have to be outside to truly enjoy dawn, and when dawn lifted up east over the Coast Range on a weekend morning, I marveled at the sky and the creek, a watercourse close enough to the ocean to slide with the tides. I could smell the salt and mud of the estuary and if ever you are lucky to live near an estuary, like I did on Nestucca Bay for a decade, you will know how such intimate proximity energizes one's life.

I looked up to dike and saw a woman walking parallel to me. She carried a big grocery bag full of something in her left hand. She smoked a cigarette with her right. She meandered on the dike and occasionally stopped to take photographs of the creek as more and more light began to envelop the landscape.

The woman evinced homelessness by her gait (I've seen homeless people walk this way hundreds of times), the bag, and the strange time of day to be out smoking, carrying a bag and taking photographs.

But in Reedsport? Yes, in Reedsport. Two days earlier on my drive through the city enroute to Coos Bay, I had seen about a dozen homeless people along Highways 38 and 101, doing weird, addled things, such as a barefoot man casting a fishing line with a bobber into a cherry tree in full bloom. (What a poetic image that was!)

Elmer and I paralleled the woman for a hundred yards, then I turned to watch the sun rise higher over the Coast Range. I wheeled around a minute later and the woman had vanished. But where? There was no way off the dike except back my direction.

Where had she gone?

I was puzzled but not for long. I inspected and surmised she had taken a path off the dike into a wooded area along the creek. The wooden area was bordered by a wrecking yard and ship repair facility. She was obviously living down there by herself or in an encampment and was out for a walk for pleasure or supplies, maybe both at the same time.

Yes, homeless people take walks in natural areas. I've seen it hundreds of times. I even saw a young homeless man one early morning, in the distance, clad in all black, carrying a guitar down Nesika Beach on the Southern Oregon Coast where presumably he was going to play a song to start his day. I remember thinking: what would he play first?