Richard Slagle?

Have we read these clues properly?

“Yes Richard Slage Jr was his name and he was hit head on and killed heading to work with his wife who was seriously injured but survived. He is still loved and terribly missed.”

Melissa Beam

US-30, Clatskanie, OR, United States

It was March 30 and I was driving west along Oregon’s scenic, Highway 30, near Clatskanie on my meandering journey from from Seattle to a speaking engagement in Manzanita, Oregon, on the coast. Traffic along this stretch of two-lane was sporadic, clusters of cars and trucks stacked up behind slower drivers where the road was too curvy to pass and then stretches of a mile or more where you would neither pass nor even see another car ahead or behind you. When I saw this roadside memorial up ahead it called out to me, somehow. Some do that. Others, don’t, and I can’t really explain to anyone’s satisfaction, including my own, just how that works.

I quickly checked my rearview and since there were no cars behind me I pulled over in a safe-looking, wide spot on the shoulder, grabbed my camera and walked the fifty or so yards back to the marker.

RICHARD SLA??L? Twenty-seven years is a long time. And yet someone still remembers, still journeys out to this rather lonely stretch of highway to tend a memorial for a man named Richard, who seems to have left his life on this Earth in this very place back in nineteen-ninety-six.

Sometimes the clues are scarce. Or faded. In this case, I took an image and then pumped up contrast and texture to try to make the carved and faded letters of Richard's name reappear. Best I can tell, his name was Richard Slagle and he was thirty-five years old when he passed.

There is an attempted permanence to this marker; that stone which someone lovingly carved Richard’s name and lifespan into into was meant to endure, too big to get lost or randomly picked up and moved. (I imagine a Dremel tool with a grinding bit in someone’s callused hand, a few, errant tear drops and maybe an open beer. I could be completely wrong.)

The flowers adorning an upright, white cross imply both abiding love and certain, inherent beliefs, though I realize that nothing implied is ever quite for certain.

Once again, someone or multiple someones have expended time and creative energy to mark and honor the passing of someone dear to them at the very place their lives together were broken. And twenty seven years later, someone is still tending this marker. Such kindness gives pause.

Richard would have been sixty two.

Richard passed in 1996, but someone still cares for this roadside memorial. The flowers were still colorful, not too faded. They must have been placed anew within the last year, or so it would seem.

Here’s the GPS info captured by my iPhone from the location of this memorial.

When my mother died in a car wreck that almost took my sister, as well I needed to go and stand at that place where it happened. I needed to see it, walk that stretch of road, again and again, try to understand, get a sense of that place where she took her exit from the world that we continue to wake and sleep in. I did not build her a memorial at the crash site. We didn't have that sort of relationship anymore. But even more so, because she was driving drunk and in a jealous rage at the moment of her departure. She did not leave those of us who loved her on good terms.

I crawled in through the broken window at the junkyard, in sweltering heat to sit there inside the crushed car she died in, needing to feel something more, understand better, but in the end, did not ache to leave some mark of loyalty in the world for her. Not there. Not like that.

Perhaps it’s no surprise then how acutely aware of others’ tributes, their very personal and heartfelt exit markers I have been, ever since. And so, as the spirit moves me, I pull over. I look for a safe place to stop. I stand with the departed and with those left behind trying to make sense of things, bowing at their alters, reading their notes of loss and gratitude, trying to honor their hints and often bumbling efforts to memorialize their loved ones' passages.

From time to time I'll add another of these memorials, here. It won't make a lick of sense to some, but perfect sense to others. I’m ok with that. There are no written rules for this sort of thing, as far as I know, and yet, each Roadside Memorial I've encountered, whether alongside some crumbling, two lane road in rural Thailand or a busy freeway in urban Illinois, each always has some elements in common, the most discernible of which is a profound need to express one's sense of grief and loss. After all these years I still find it worth the effort to pull over, get out …then to listen to whatever voices might be carried on the breeze, touch the edge of someone else’s tale of loss, say thank you to a world big enough and imaginative enough to allow this possibility, too..