He’s a four-year-old yellow Lab with enough energy to power the entire Pacific Northwest for a year. Jake probably scared them all off when we went for our after-dinner walk. Elk, looking for a place to bed down for the night. Some evenings I can see shapes roaming around out there in the grass. I’m not going to give her a reason to pull the trigger. Mom’s just waiting for me to accidentally set one of these places on fire, a smug “Surprising nobody” already chambered and aimed straight at my heart. I can’t believe I’m being paid to do this-and far better than usual. The air is heavy with mist, the roar of waves, and the smell of a campfire somewhere.
It looks painted by one of the landscape artists whose works fill the windows of half the shops in every tourist stop along the coast, full of soft clouds glowing purple and gold. The sky this evening doesn’t even seem real. It’s visible from the upstairs bedroom, but the weather has been unseasonably warm this week, and I don’t see any sense in wasting a minute of it indoors. From the edge of the impeccably manicured lawn (not my job this time), a wide field of the invasive beach grass stretches to a gentle swell of dunes that just blocks my view of the ocean. I’ve spent most of my time here on the back porch, curled up with a book in an Adirondack chair, like some kind of heiress. To have stuck out in somebody’s mind as anything but a cautionary tale is what I call progress. Like I said, historically I haven’t exactly left people with very nice things to say about me. And it’s easily the nicest place I’ve been entrusted to watch over. This is the farthest from the city I’ve been hired. Which is great, because my car was really beginning to voice its complaints about all the miles I was racking up doing take-out deliveries in between, which, in a foodie haven like Portland, was not insubstantial. It took a while to build up the requisite cred to do much more than water plants and feed cats, but I’ve managed to make it a pretty steady gig. Since starting this gig, I haven’t been in one place long enough to get bored, space out, drift. The constant change of scenery keeps me on the road-literally and metaphorically. The money isn’t spectacular, but I like the variety.
Better than smashing through their living room windows, I suppose. Thirty-three years old and spending my time sampling other people’s lives, like an interloper at a gathering of socialites, stealing tastes of fine cheese and expensive wine from roving silver trays. He’s a veteran, wanted to go back and see how it all looks now, or something. The couple who hired me are in Vietnam for three weeks. By the time I arrived, they’d all hightailed it off to wherever rich people go at the first sign of bad weather. Almost everybody who owns here is a strictly seasonal resident. Transplants from Seattle or California or wherever who wanted a little slice of heaven, but aren’t willing to stick around for the hell the winters can bring. Most of the places in this development are for sale too. Where’s the prestige in Weedy Lots off the 101 with Ocean View? Strawberry Dunes-whatever. The upper crust has to gild everything, I guess. I don’t know why-there aren’t strawberries, and the dunes are the same muddy sand color as every other dune on the Oregon coast, blanketed in waist-high, pale-green beach grass I’ve come to learn is actually a non-native, invasive species. The beach house is in a very private, very gated community called Strawberry Dunes. I keep waiting for somebody to call the police, to report a squatter in the house, except there’s nobody else around. The driveway is made of wood pavers-like, real wood, I’m not even joking-and my shitty Toyota is parked on it like a giant turd dropped by some colossal, prehistoric horror. I could barely afford the gas it took to get me here from Portland.
This time, the road took me to the edge of the Pacific Ocean, to a sprawling Northwest-style Craftsman, all cedar and stone, nestled along a lonesome stretch of Oregon coast called Neacoxie Beach.