End of the Line

A lot of my friends have ended up here as gray powder ashes floating around the South Slough estuary and this is the spot where those who are left behind congregate to have a last shot of Black Jack and a puff on a reefer and tell a joke or two to keep off the heebiejeebies. This is the Winchester Creek arm of South Slough, a few miles out of Charleston Oregon which is the fishing village out at the mouth of Coos Bay.
                            
The tradition goes back to Paul Muirhead who, back in 77 got real drunk and did something real stupid and then in a hungover fit of remorse went off in the sand dunes and got up close and personal with a Colt .45 automatic. Roger Kalawercz did the same in 2009 after the cancer diagnosis but he didn't bother with the sand dunes part and his last bullet, after it was done with his brain-pan, went through the tin on his trailer house and the shingle siding next door on Davy Jones Grocery's storeroom and wound up in the cooler in what was left of a can of Budweiser.
My old pal Jannie Vaughan is in here too after the cancer got through the second time when she said fuck it and declined the chemotherapy. "Once," she said,"was enough." Bill Chard Junior is here, and Digger, and some day I hope to be as well but not anytime soon although you never really know...

            

 A couple guys who were lost at sea didn't leave anything to put in here but we got together anyway and threw the cork in just to make sure their spirits had a place to look through from the other side.
Walking John wasn't a fisherman but he is in there too. An Artist is always welcome in a community based on real life.
                             
WE all became friends at a fishermen's tavern in Charleston called Red's. It was famous in the salmon fleet as the rowdiest fisherman's bar on the West Coast and that is saying something. Most outsiders were either too scared or too smart to set foot in the place, although usually the worst that would happen was you would go home a little later and a lot drunker than you planned. Not counting, of course the occasional unsolicited LSD experience but that only happened a couple of times to guys that had it coming, rednecks that came in to bust up the place or start something stupid and left in tears swearing universal love. Everybody usually had a wonderful time, rich or poor, stranger or old pal, and when somebody had a good salmon or scallop trip they would holler at  Helen behind the bar to ring the bell behind the counter and stand the house a round.
And it seems to me I remember dancing on a table one night because the floor was too jammed to move, pitchers of Olympia beer passed from hand to hand and the money the same because you couldn't move from where you stood, Jannie singing her John Prine country like the call of the wild and me in the corner smoothing out the edges of the melody on my Epiphone 3/4 acoustic guitar.
Red's burned down after Chuck lost the mortgage, he didn't pay much attention to anything after Nancy died, cancer got her too, and the building just sat there in the rain all lonesome needing a roof and the Roger finally did what needed to be done with a can of regular gasoline and a book of matches while the rest of the pals at the reunion party back in 97, those who were left anyway, finished off the keg down at Little Patty's place on Battle Flats, next to where Bob Olson and I started our trip to Altamount.
Nothing is left of Red's now, it's just a bare spot now, but the bamboo still grows wild up on the hill behind there where Muirhead and Short Man and Roger and maybe Blind Bob and Ed O'brien and Mueller and me and Spike used to go to smoke some doobie to punctuate the rythm of the evenings of our golden age.
(EDIT: the memorial was destroyed two years ago by vandals and has not been rebuilt these are the only photos I know of recording how it used to be. Fucking vandals)