Dancing at Dawn In May

For them this point would have been the beginning. Recently, though, there have been hints of a pre-predecessor, and nobody knows where he came from. They speculate, of course, but regardless of his origins, if he stood at this point and gazed out across the sea...and he very well might have...he would have known he was on the verge, the very tip of something. It could have been the beginning; it might have been the end. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

For me, it was still unclear if this was the end or the beginning, at least in the broader sense. I did know I’d just been scrutinized thoroughly by Sheriff Ronny Coleman about the death of Randy McIntire, but at the time I didn’t know who Randy McIntire was or even that he’d died. I’d come to this town asking questions though, and that was enough to cause the sheriff to question me. Normally, in these small coastal towns people are either very well known because they live here, or they’re just passing through; they don’t say much and nobody says much back. Of course, they could be tourists, in which case they are looked on as necessary evils and either laughed at or ignored.

I’d been sitting at a table in Ole Anderson’s Café nursing a cup of coffee when the sheriff walked in. You could tell he was the sheriff. He wore a khaki shirt with a badge pinned on it and a Smokey-the-Bear hat like state troopers wear, but the rest of his attire spoke more of his former profession than his official position. He sported extra heavy blue denim jeans...stagged-off...with steel suspender buttons and side leg pockets. A pair of White’s Buffalo-Smoke-Jumper boots poked out from under the stagged-off jeans, and 2" wide, black and red striped suspenders held them up. He was tall, lanky, middle aged and broad shouldered, and he kind of threw his feet out in front of his body and loped when he walked, as if there were still limbs out there to trip over, you just couldn’t see ‘em now. He’d been a logger before he’d become a sheriff.

Sheriff Coleman had an honest, age-wizened face, but there was fire in his eye and I didn’t have to look hard to tell he was mad, real mad, but after a grueling ten minute interview starting with the statement..."I hear you been askin’ a lot of questions around here"...he decided he wasn’t going to get anything useful out of me and went on to other prospects.

He left, followed by two younger deputies, and when I saw the patrol cars sail safely out of the parking lot and onto the highway, I asked the waitress...the friendly talkative one..."Who was Randy McIntire?"

"He was just a high school kid," she told me, "who lived around here. He was a forward on the basketball team. His body was found in a culvert this morning with his throat cut. A state game warden saw blood in the water from the culvert and thought somebody’d poached an elk and hung it in the culvert to cure. They do that, you know, poachers do, cut poles and prop them up in the big culverts. Then they hang the meat inside so nothing can get at it. The meat won’t get too warm and spoil, and they won’t get caught with the carcass in the back of their pickup.

Anyway," she went on, "I heard his body was just laying face down in the water. There was no weapon or anything, so they don’t think it was suicide. Besides, I don’t see how a guy could cut his own throat, do you?" She made a face that wasn’t pleasant, and I shook my head in agreement.

I left the café after that and followed a couple of leads on the case I was supposed to be working on, but when everything I did developed into a dead end, I started feeling a little tainted about the death of Randy McIntire, just by being here. That’s why I came out to Cape Blanco...to be cleansed. It was a kind of cleansing that often worked for me, when I could get to the sea, and my best guess is it worked for the folks who crossed the Ice Bridge and the people who’d come before that, too.

When I felt thoroughly cleansed, or at least thoroughly soaked and chilled to the bone, I climbed back in my car and started off to find a motel. I wriggled into the great big black and red mackinaw that I’d laid across the back seat of the car earlier that day, and turned on the heat.

I speculated that Randy McIntire’s ancestors had come from Scotland, though it’s hard to tell anymore, with all the divorces and kids taking stepparent names. But one thing I knew for sure, this wasn’t the end of my journey to the Oregon coast. It certainly wasn’t the beginning, though. This whole thing started for me a couple of days earlier and several hundred miles to the south.