On the Beach: Pandemic, Week 20

Sunday

We walk Gleneden Beach every day.  It’s never crowded enough to make social-distancing a big issue.  We do see, particularly on weekends, groups of people for whom this is not a concern, but they are easily avoided.  This day we see the red Coast Guard helicopter flying low and making a couple passes.  Then, a low-flying plane making the same loop.  One of us says, “There’s only one thing they could be looking for.”

 

Monday

Jock Glidden passed a way this week.  With George Lowe he made the first ascent of the fearsome north face of Mt Alberta in the Canadian Rockies in 1972.  A route which would take the life of Tobin Sorenson, the gifted alpinist from Southern California, and which has, in the nearly fifty years since, seen fewer than a dozen ascents. The black and white photographs published in Ascent were grim and I remembered that some of them showed that Jock or George had painted some kind of lightning bolt or dragon on his helmet.  I would paint an imitative yellow bolt on my own red helmet, an artifact long since lost to history.

            I was honored to meet him in 1995 when he was seven years younger than I am today. He was suffering from increasingly debilitating effects of Parkinson’s. He chose to stop eating and drinking and went out on his own terms.  85 years old.

 

Tuesday

A fatal bear mauling in Alaska.  Scant details.  All known circumstances—location mostly–leave open the possibility that the casualty could be a friend of mine.  Hope, Alaska has around 200 residents. I send out some queries. Finally, after a few hours spent fretting, my friend answers safe.  The man was a friend of his and the whole community, small as it is, is on edge and in mourning.

 

Wednesday

The news that a dear childhood friend has passed away.  The guilt for not having seen him in a couple years. The way he hung on for eleven months after the doctors said his body would give out. His sister told me that in his last days she asked if he wanted to see or talk to anyone.  “He said he just wanted to sit and smoke as much as possible for as long as possible.”  His terms. The way the world keeps spinning but I sense a hitch in it, that tiny missing tooth in the great flywheel, that space formerly filled by my friend, Dennis. 

 

Thursday

We are accosted (literally) on Road’s End Beach by an angry man with a stick.  It’s 7:30 in the morning, we are sitting on a log drinking coffee out of a thermos. According to the police this guy is a local who believes he owns the beach.  “You’re in my yard, man.  This is my yard.”  I describe his behavior as menacing, not quite threatening.  We hustled back to the car, nature’s spell broken.  Thinking maybe a can of bear spray could be a useful multi-task tool.

 

Friday

Body washes up on the shore somewhere just south of us near Otter Rock. At first the public’s help in identifying her is requested. She is wearing a lacrosse shirt. Then, after she is identified, as 58 year old woman from Portland, the police issue a statement that says no further information regarding her will be released.

 

Saturday

By walking 45 minutes we can get to place on the beach pretty much completely uninhabited. We are walking back at the end of the day and because it’s the weekend there are places where we have to detour around the large groups, the squealing kids, the kite-flyers, sand-castle-builders, the leash-less chihuahuas and inexhaustible retrievers, the Nike exec on his beach chair with his sockless loafers and laptop.  And finally, the lovers. We avoid them all.  And then: the newly married couple beaming with joy as the wedding photographer records the moment. And then, yet another wedding, ceremonial, with music, and kids running around.  The couple and their witnesses, the celebrant, and all the guests lit-up in the fading golden light as the sun nears the horizon.

 

Coda

The lousy week comes to an end. But we are reminded, in its last hours, that people continue to love, to look to a better future, to move forward into it.  We will, too.

That One Night We Thought We Were Immortal: Remembering Dennis Archer 1952~2020

     Pharoah Sanders circa 2016, a Christian Weber photo*

 

Dog days of summer 1974.  Nixon is being impeached. A television news broadcaster commits suicide on live tv.  Mama Cass dies of heart failure at age 32.  The Detroit Tigers dynasty has run its course and beloved hometown hero Al Kaline will hang up his cleats at season’s end, outlasting Nixon by a couple months.  The war in Viet Nam is waning, at least as far as American lives lost goes; our allies though lost 120,000 soldiers that year.

            The war is something we have thought less and less about since we escaped the draft a couple years earlier.  Dennis drew a low draft number and was ordered to report, but showed up with a last-minute medical excuse signed off by his pacifist family doctor.  I had an untouchably high draft lottery number.  Rosemary, Dennis’s girlfriend, couldn’t be drafted of course, but I remember that her brother Tom, who shared a birth date and therefore a low number with Dennis, had to join the National Guard to avoid going to Viet Nam.  We had all known each other since middle school days.

 

Our nights often began, and sometimes ended, at Misko’s, where a shell of beer cost thirty-five cents and the jukebox hadn’t seen a new record since about 1962. Misko’s was a neighborhood bar that featured hand drawn posters of the owners: “the fighting Misko brothers,” amateur boxers in the 1950s.  One of their sons, Charlie, a year older than us, tended bar. Charlie had played football at one of our high school’s rivals and sometimes I’d sit at the bar and reminisce about what then already seemed like the old days.

Obviously there was nothing happening at Misko’s.  There never was. We were like bored children, whining “there’s nothing to do.”  I was vaguely aware of Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, reputed (and disputed) to be the oldest jazz club in America, reputed also to be the scene of Miles Davis’ getting off heroin (disputed, by Davis himself, though the story never died).  I knew Coltrane, everyone, had played there.  I put a dime in the pay phone and asked who was playing that night.  Pharoah Sanders. We didn’t know who Pharoah Sanders was, but that didn’t matter. 

Dennis was a classically trained viola player who played in orchestras as long as I had known him and yet, his musicianship was part of his life never shared with me. In the winter he would bring his viola into Misko’s because he didn’t want to leave it out in the car in the frigid air. He endured interminable remarks suggesting the case held a machine gun–these were The Godfather years.  He was probably the only classical musician who ever hung out in Misko’s.

Okay, Baker’s Keyboard Lounge. We’re in. How do we get there?  It’s on Livernois, can’t miss it. We were off.

I remember that I drove, which was unusual, as I hadn’t always had a car.  The fact that I did is what allows me to pinpoint the year in memory. 1974 was the only summer I had that car in Michigan.  And, also, my last summer in Michigan; the following spring I drove west until the road ended and didn’t hardly look back.

I can’t remember if we expected to be the only white people in the place.  We should have. But we felt more accepted than merely tolerated.  Yeah, you’re white, we’re over it.  (Note from the future, i.e. now: white privilege much?)

The club was small and dark and the room was almost empty.  We sat at a table directly in front of the band, ten feet from Pharoah Sanders himself.  He was backed up by a drummer, stand-up bass player, and a guitarist.  Sanders was wearing some kind of khaftan, a gown really, and he looked like  some old testament prophet about to summoning the angels with a sacred instrument. And then he blew that horn.

To say that we had never heard, or experienced, anything like it would be an enormous understatement.  It was almost as if the music was inside us, or we were inside it.  Something was happening.

 

Writing in 2016, Nick Marino described Sanders this way:
“A free-thinking astral traveler and spiritual gangster, he’s the official saxophonist of your soul’s awakening.

His definitive song may be “The Creator has a Masterplan,” a thirty-two minute vision quest that journeys from moments of pastoral beauty to demon-purging squall –just like life itself.”

 

That was what was happening: our demons were being purged.  We were hearing a long mad riff on “The Creator has a Masterplan.”  ** Dennis was out of his chair much of the night, moving—you couldn’t say dancing exactly—to the music.  It was as if you could see those astral planes opening up a direct line of communication between Dennis and Sanders’ horn.  Dennis looked as if someone had nailed his feet to the ground so that he couldn’t fall over as he rocked and bowed and howled.  In between tunes Dennis threw all his money at the stage.  If he could have spoken it would have been in tongues.

At some point, we noticed we were the only patrons in the place.  At some point closing  time passed.  We were outside of time.

And then we were out on the street, as if having awakened from a dream.  I drove through the deserted Detroit streets back to our lives which I now knew were unnecessarily ordinary.  Dennis and Rosemary lived in a rundown house just inside the Detroit border.  I vaguely recall that the rent was $100 a month.  I don’t remember dropping them off or what he may have said.  Probably just, “Yes.”  Or something equally succinct.

Dennis and I would stay in touch, but not see each other in person very often in these intervening forty-six years.  He suffered from poor health due to various habits to which he was faithfully wed.  His sister told me that when it was near the end she asked if he wanted to see or talk to anyone.  “He said he just wanted to sit and smoke as much as possible for as long as possible.”

The doctors had given him six months but he took eleven more after that, a fact from which he derived much pleasure.  I have hundreds of memories of him, most great, a few confounding. But if I had to choose one, I’ll take this one, the night he and the music and Pharoah Sanders were mysteriously and mind-blowingly all one beautiful alive thing.***

Shine on you crazy diamond~

                                                                            ∞

* This photo is placeholder until I can access my archives and find one of Dennis and me.

** You can heard this tune on the album Karma from 1969

*** I wrote about Dennis previously in the  essay "The Purposes of Ascent" in my book of essays,                     Warnings Against Myself.