South Coast Sightings of the Homeless
Highway 101 along the Oregon Coast attracts members of the New American Diaspora who often perform unforgettable acts. Some of these people live in the woods or dunes outside of town, but many are on the move, on foot, on bicycles, (once a unicycle) in RVs, in sedans with smashed windows, some with dogs, most totally alone. Where they are going, I have no idea. I have asked a few of them. They almost exclusively do not know. But they are out there, and in increasing numbers and the unforgettable nature of their behavior is ratcheting up for sure.
Here's what I mainly observed or heard about along Highway 101 on the Southern Oregon Coast in the course of a recent year:
A young transient-looking couple with gear was walking in the shoulder near Port Orford with the two dogs and a goose. Yes, a goose. The couple were chatting away and the goose cackled.
An elderly man was sitting on a guardrail in Ophir. His wagon was next to him. He had dumped all the contents of the wagon, presumably his life's possessions, in the shoulder. He just sat there, staring at the ocean.
A woman with a baby were camped inside a driftwood fort on Nesika Beach. Her rickety sedan was parked on a street above the beach. It was clear from the interior of the sedan, she and the baby were living out of it.
A battered white van of the domicile nature variety was idling in a Highway 101 Gold Beach underpass, blocking traffic. An obese young and scroungy-looking man in a t-shirt and shorts was writing something on the wall of the underpass. He got back in his van and drove away. He had written in purple chalk: “Joe Biden is brain dead.” A few minutes later, the van was parked near a river. There was a goofy mutt sitting upright in the passenger seat.
A large man or woman was wearing a Bozo costume was walking down Highway 101 in Gold Beach. He or she was also wearing a surgical mask.
A young bedraggled man was cartwheeling down the sidewalk of Gold Beach. His cartwheeling technique looked sound.
A trace of snow fell. A short woman of indeterminate age was walking the same sidewalk the cartwheel man had cartwheeled. She wore an oversized black cloak, medieval executioner or Dickens' Christmas ghost in style. She also wore brown house slippers and carried a bag of cans.
A young woman with a definite homeless vibe was wandering around Gold Beach clutching a sheaf of papers. No backpack, water bottle, energy drink or cigarette. Just the papers. She wore a spaghetti strap black top that barely covered her breasts. She had on faded jeans that barely covered half her ass and revealed pink panties. There was a wide expanse of bleached skin about her chest and stomach that she occasionally rubbed as she walked. Her hair was black and short. Was she a writer?
It was just after dawn. A young man wearing a t-shirt in 40-degree weather stood on Nesika Beach picked up a piece of driftwood roughly the size of a bazooka and pretended he was firing shells toward the ocean; then he pretended the driftwood was a rifle and began shooting at invaders; then he shouldered the “rifle” and began marching around in circles. While he marched, a young woman, wearing a Rasta-colored hoodie and plaid pajama bottoms saluted him. The whole time she was swigging from a plastic bottle that contained an orange-colored drink. They were living out of a driftwood fort.
An elderly man camped in a tent in an RV park near Ophir. He had arrived in strange fashion: another elderly man, driving a beat-up muscle car from the 60s, had driven him to the camp site, but abandoned him sometime in the middle of the night several days ago, and now he was alone and without transportation. For the next few days, he “camped” and drank malt liquor from cans, smoked from a pot pipe, listened to a tiny transistor radio, and kept a fire going, which he regular doused with lighter fluid. One morning, the man was drinking coffee and smoking a joint while shirtless outside his tent. He relayed the story that his buddy got “into a funk” after hitting the vodka and drove away. The man didn't own a phone so there was no way to reach his “friend.” A day later, the man was gone. He'd thrown away the tent in a dumpster and walked away.
A shiny silver car pulled up in front of a Gold Beach dive bar. It was a four-door Jaguar, a few years old, mint condition, probably a 40-50k car. Clean as whistle with no road grime. A bearded man, the driver, exited the Jaguar and headed for the joint. It was the same bearded man often seen wandering down road near Nesika Beach, carrying a guitar without a strap, sometimes with a couple of dogs, who was living in a tent on the beach. It was also the same man occasionally accompanied by a woman with no teeth who was living out of a battered sedan with three of the windows smashed out. She was with him now and also headed inside the joint. Two dogs remained in the back seat. The couple moseyed up to the bar and ordered rum and cokes. They took their drinks to the video poker machines and started playing line games. How in the world had they come into possession of such a car?
Someone scaled 40 feet up a sandy ocean side cliff on Nesika Beach and carved “I Love Meth” into the wall.
An elderly man was sitting in a plush recliner secured in the bed of a big pickup truck. He was parked in Port Orford. This was how he “camped” as he cruised up and down Highway 101 with his mutt during the summer. Obviously when it rained, it was more difficult to live this way.
A young man regularly slept in some shrubbery behind the Port Orford Library. He would visit the library every day it was open and sit in a plush chair and use his phone. Then the phone disappeared and he started using the library's computers. He got kicked out for viewing pornography. He then sat all day on a bench in the lobby of the library where he ate his meals and used the restroom. Then he got banned from the property after video surveillance recorded images of him having sex in an alley of the parking lot. His parents showed up and tried to convince him to return to their home in the Willamette Valley. He refused and was last seen wrapped in a blanket, wandering the streets of Coos Bay to the north.
A young man wrapped in blankets wandered out of a Saturday morning rainstorm and into a Gold Beach coffee shop. He asked if he could charge his phone. The barista said he had ten minutes. An elderly woman came up to the man and bought him a coffee so he could remain longer. She offered to buy him a pastry but he politely declined.
An elderly man with long gray hair played a ukulele in a tiny city park alongside Highway 101 in Gold Beach. Behind him, a young man and woman lived in separate makeshift tents pitched in the park. The ukulele player wasn't homeless but lived nearby and visited the park every day to provide food, water and music to the homeless people there. He didn't know any songs because a brain injury prevented him from remembering lyrics. He just strummed progressions as the spirit moved him.
I want to point out that all of these scenes unfolded on an approximately 75-mile stretch of Highway 101 on the Southern Oregon Coast. Similar such odd behavior undoubtedly occurs every day all across Oregon, but, I am of the belief that the intimate proximity to the shoreline, the ocean, something about its old sound, eternal back and forth, the ever changing colors, the pelicans and whales and seals, the tiny fishing boats, the tide pools, the beach bonfires, everything about standing or sleeping near the edge, produces a different sort of odd behavior in homeless people. That is my theory and I arrived at it after 25 years of observations on the Oregon Coast from Astoria to Brookings. Perhaps the mountains and deserts of Oregon produce their own unique odd behavior. I'll have to look into that.