Yaquina, 2/6/12

Tomorrow’s my birthday and thinking now of what I’ve done to earn it.  Cruel? Yes. I tend to be so toward myself and this is not a little fact. This in fact is my first autowrite in several months. I have been journaling, but somehow stories are not happening. I did write one poem a couple of months ago, Irrelevance, which began as a sort of a self immolation and ended a celebration. I suppose this is also a tendency. What I cannot seem to figure out is why I my stories are not finding the page. Perhaps it is that they are not yet stories.

I’ve been consumed by teaching lately at [omitted] and [omitted] and [omitted]. This is a journal entry. Autowrites are not journal entries. Autowrites need to crack the case that has formed around my creative self. I must find a way to continue this fracture. The recent story, should I say, the pressing story at hand is the Yaquina Bridge story. All of the elements are there, everything I need to build it into something that speaks for itself. It is based on the non-fictional, but lurches toward fiction at every moment. The story needs to go inward. It needs to be about the narrator, an “I” who is somewhat lost, a little split and torn against himself. This needs to be evident in the first lines.

The girl he’s with is not a bimbo. She is not a love interest, but she is forward and makes her intentions of the narrator understood. She is the “woman” she speaks of when the boat goes aground. The thing that is building between them is the boat with the full spinnaker flying up the bay. It is the boat digging its keel into the muddy shoal.  It is the boat left at anchor to ride the tide all the way down while the narrator and the girl and the friend who keeps things grounded find a room in the town.

The boat rests in the mud in the dark bay while the boy and the girl sleep without touching in the hotel bed.  The friend who keeps things grounded sleeps in his bag on the floor. They sleep away the rocking of the boat, and they rise in the morning to get pastries and coffee. They drive in the narrator’s truck to find the boat. This is where the real story begins, for this is where the magic is.

They drive across the bridge and peer through the suspension cables at the water, trying to spot the boat, see whether she has sunk or floated. There is no sign but they know where to go and they turn left fast off the bridge, head up the coast of the bay. They know they will be coming to the lot they saw with the outbuildings and the assortment of carnival gear. A skeleton of a Ferris wheel tower is visible above the low trees. They drive toward the tower like pilgrims. An there, there is an opening, a driveway. They drive though a broken gate and on into an expansive lot, beyond which they spot their boat bobbing lightly some 200 hundred yard off shore, at anchor.

They are elated. They have found the boat but now the problem: how get to the boat without swimming and risking hypothermia. “That would be dumb,” says the girl. They walk around the building and spot a truck parked near the door at the far end. It is a long cinderblock structure with high slotted windows. They walk to the door and see that it is open. The interior is dark and smells of rank, stale food. There is a sound issuing from deep inside, a buzzing grating sound both mechanical and oddly contrived. The three decide to walk down the hallway to locate the sound for that is where they may find the owner of the truck and a way back to the boat. This passage is the story.