Goose Grease

My pal Nan has a photo on her facebook page of an osprey sitting on the head of a plastic owl scarecrow, which pretty much tells you how owls and ospreys relate on the food chain. I see them around the marina where my sailboat lives. The plastic owls.

Back in the summer of 1992 I made a very long voyage in a 14 foot rowing-sailing craft, putting in at West Linn above the falls on the Willamette, down through the locks and on down to Astoria in 6 days, no motors, thank you very much, and not much sailing either seeing as how the wind blows up the river in the summertime, damn near 24/7 as the saying goes. But I digress.

It took a very long and miserable Sunday to even get to Portland, you wouldn’t think it was that far down the river but it is, and there were ski boats all the way going very fast not much caring about the idiot with the dreadlocks in a little rowboat. Getting myself set up to take the massive breaking wake of one such high speed dimwad I pulled real hard on the starboard oar only to hear it snap off at the fulcrum under the leather. I fished it back together with some sticks and the leather and some tuna cord but it didn’t improve my mood any or help with the blisters that were rapidly forming on the palms of both hands and on the cheeks of my tender butt I can still feel them, and later on in the bathtub…but that is another story.

So it was with a certain feeling of relief I noticed a sparsely occupied small boat dock on the west bank under the Steel Bridge where the condos across from the freightyards at union station nestle along the river there in NW Portland between there and the Broadway Bridge. I rowed on past while I thought about it but not very far and it only took a minute to get back there and swing around to the inside of the dock and tie things up and collapse into the bottom of the boat and roll out my sleeping bag kind of squinched over and I slept on my stomach all night while the city around me clanked and roared. I was tired.

There was only one or maybe two other boats there, and a gate over the walkway to the headwalk so I might not get disturbed and the half abandoned look of the dock made more sense when I saw the three inch layer of goose poop that covered every foot of the dock. Those Canadian Geese, or Black Brant, or whatever they actually are are not stupid and they don’t bother to migrate any more they have easy pickings around the city.

Here last summer 19 years later, I was going by that same little dock,  and there are still only one or two boats tied up there but as I got closer this is what I saw. Some kind of horror-movie plastic wolf or fox with rabid red eyes in a very menacing pose. Two of them.

And it did look like there was considerably less goose poop on the dock.