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| Matt Love, photographed at the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. OCT photo by Niki Price. |
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The Writer, the Refuge
Between the honking geese and the
crashing surf, Matt Love found his voice
at the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge
[Read Love's semi-monthly column, "One Man's Beach"]
By Niki Price
Oregon Coast Today
When he first moved in to the caretaker’s cottage at the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge, Matt Love couldn’t name a single species found there. He didn’t know much about watersheds, land use issues or the conservation legacy of his home state of Oregon. He wanted to quit teaching, but he didn’t know if he could survive.
Love was only sure of one thing. He wanted to become a writer.
In the 10 years since that moment, Love has transformed his life. As the volunteer resident at the refuge, he has introduced hundreds of students from around the state to the Nestucca Valley’s flora and fauna, and shown many their first breathtaking glimpse of the Oregon coast. He has overseen the removal of thousands of invasive Himalayan blackberry plants and the introduction of 15,000 native tree saplings.
Along the way, between nursing the wicked wounds inflicted by the blackberry thorns and watching the barn swallows nest in his garage, Love realized his dream. He’s penned newspaper articles, magazine stories, essays and columns, written three books and edited another. He’s rediscovered the joy of teaching, and has helped a new generation of students see their own work in print. And, thanks to his dogged research and enthusiasm for Oregon history, he’s been invited to speak at many literary events. This Sunday, Jan. 27, he’ll be in Lincoln City as part of the Oregon Legacy Series.
Love also founded his own publishing company, Nestucca Spit Press, which is named for the three-mile stretch of beach just south of Pacific City. You can see nearly all the Nestucca Spit, Cape Kiwanda and Haystack Rock (and a sweeping view of the Pacific), from the refuge’s Cannery Hill. Love estimates that he’s walked the access road, from his house to the headland, more than 7,000 times.
“The opportunity to become caretaker of this refuge was the greatest thing that ever happened to me. It was the opportunity to get connected to the land, to get myself physically and mentally in shape,” he said. “Here, I had a chance to think and work, and have the free time I needed to become a writer.”
This isn’t just a one-sided relationship. The refuge, which was established in 1991 to help Aleutian cackling geese and other wildlife survive in the increasingly developed coast, has thrived during his tenure.
“Matt has been an invaluable resource to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” said Roy Lowe, who oversees the Oregon Coast Refuge Complex. “His work in forest restoration, along with the countless children and young adults he’s worked with, taught and mentored over the years, will be his lasting legacy.”
A new direction: west
Love’s journey began at a standstill, when he was stuck in traffic on Hwy. 26. It was 1997, and he was commuting from his loft in Portland to a teaching position at Hillsboro High School. It was one of several short-term assignments he had picked up since earning his master’s degree from Lewis and Clark College in 1988, and it just wasn’t making him happy, he said. “The commute had gradually become the same, day in and day out. One day, I just said ‘That’s enough for me.’ I was dying for something. A change.”
Before long, he had secured a job teaching at Neskowin Valley School, an independent country day school in the forest near Neskowin. Among his students there, in the 1997-98 school year, was the daughter of refuge manager Eric Nelson. In 1998, Nelson asked Love if he would be interested in the caretaker’s position, which offered a small but functional home in exchange for 32 hours of work every month. “I remember the first day I walked up here to take a look at the house. I had no idea it was so close to the ocean. I walked up on Cannery Hill and said, ‘My God.’”
Love moved in with his wife, Cindy, (the couple has since divorced) and his dog, a Shepherd mix named Ray. Love taught at NVS for one more year before finally taking the plunge.
“I knew I could break free from the bind of having to earn a living. I sold the loft, paid off my wife’s student loans and lived off the rest for two years. It was an investment, because it gave me time. I could drive to Salem and spend a day in an archive, and no one was paying me,” he said. “This thing, this place, was like a large government grant. I was subsidized, but I busted my ass, too. I hacked so many blackberries, especially in the first three or four years.”
At first, he wrote only for newspapers, covering Nestucca Valley High School sports for the Tillamook Headlight Herald and the bar scene for the Astoria-based Hipfish (the column, “Let it Pour,” still has many fans up north). He freelanced for a variety of magazines, including Ruralite and Bear Deluxe, and worked part-time for the Nestucca-Neskowin Watershed Council.
Love finished a full-length book on his first year on the refuge, and began to submit it to publishers. After receiving at least 50 rejection letters, he decided there must be a better way. He launched Nestucca Spit Press in 2003.
The press’ first edition was “Grasping Wastrels vs. Beaches Forever Inc.: Covering the Fights for the Soul of the Oregon Coast,” a collection of Love’s personal essays about Oregon’s conservation legacy, its publicly-owned beaches and the ongoing struggle to conserve them. In 2004, he published “The Far Out Story of Vortex I,” which documented the famous 1970 free rock festival held in Portland’s MacIver Park.
About that time, he realized something remarkable: he was ready to teach again.
“In 2004, I got a job teaching writing at Taft High School (in Lincoln City) and I finally figured it out. Now everything was seamless to me. The environmentalism, the teaching, the writing, it’s all just one thing,” he said. “I was a much better teacher, more at ease, and I found the kids at Taft wrote such amazing things. They were the finest students I’ve ever taught, and they were so hungry for what I had to offer. We did great work together.”
He left that position in 2006 to concentrate on his third book, “Red Hot and Rollin’: A Retrospection of the Portland Trail Blazers’ 1976-77 NBA Championship Season.” It completed his “Beaver State Trilogy,” and has found an eager audience. He continued to work for the Lincoln County School District, coordinating grants for history and writing instruction, and has kept a steady schedule of author’s appearances and readings around the state. His yet-unpublished first book, the one about his first year on the refuge, is under consideration by a large publishing house.
Meanwhile, he’s been promoting the first Nestucca Spit Press by another author: Travis Champ’s “Old Nehalem Road.” He’s also working on “Citadel of the Spirit,” an anthology for OSU Press in honor of the state’s sesquicentennial, in 2009. It will be the first literary project he’ll complete away from his writer’s refuge: in March, Love will be moving to a rented house in the South Beach area of Newport. He’s looking forward to living closer to the school district’s headquarters and to his work on the board of the nonprofit Writers on the Edge.
He’s leaving, in part, because changes are coming for the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. This summer, the USFWS will pave the access road from Hwy. 101, build two parking lots and construct a wheelchair-accessible trail to a viewing platform on Cannery Hill. If the planners’ predictions are correct, hundreds of people will visit the refuge every day of the summer season. In short, it will cease to be the quiet sanctuary that nourished his growing career. “I always knew that if the public was going to come up here, I was going to leave. It’s going to be a very different environment,” Love said.
No matter where he travels from here, he’ll never forget where his writing career was born.
“When I came here, I didn’t know anything. I had read some nature writing. Big deal. You gotta get out here and see it,” he said. “Having this interaction every day stimulated me to write about conservation issues, which are deeply connected to the larger Oregon story.”
Now, he said, “I know every tree, who planted it, what the species is and what year it went in.”
14th annual Oregon Legacy Literary Series
Author Matt Love is the last speaker in this year’s Oregon Legacy Series. His presentation, complete with a Google Earth orientation for Nestucca Spit, MacIver Park and other areas featured in his work, will begin at 3 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 27, at the Driftwood Public Library, 801 SW Hwy. 101 in Lincoln City. Admission is free, thanks to the Friends of the Driftwood Public Library For more information, call 541-996-1251.
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