Chakras, subtle bodies and the aura
so many times in countless articles — who
was here first.
The Siuslaw and Kuitsh people began
settling the coast more than 9,000 years
ago. They have probably lived in the same
locations for hundreds of generations.
Who knows if that paper mill, hotel
or housing development was built on an
ancient significant site? Or on top of sacred
burial grounds, or over summer root-
picking fields or a shaman’s spiritual place?
Susan Swift, formerly known
as Seal Rock masseuse Susan
Parker, seeking pure light
I
t’s a modest apartment in Newport
where I sit with Susan Swift to go
over “quite the life” as any listener
might say about this feisty, spiritual
and articulate, world-traveling woman.
The hitching post Susan and I tie
our respective philosophical steeds on is
“philosophy” and
“fate,” although we
could have brought
in a whole team of
other steeds to pull
the conversation
toward all spiritual
GO BENEATH THE
directions.
SURFACE WITH
“I know what
PAUL HAEDER
is mine to do,”
the 73-year-old
Swift states early on in our talk. Since her
life here on the coast — Five Rivers first
— not only started in 1972 as a search for
environmental justice, she also fell into a
what would be a life-long walkabout as a
student of karma, Dharma and the meaning
of interconnected “souls.”
Before the Central Coast mountains,
Waldport, Seal Rock and Newport, Susan
was living the Southern California lifestyle
in Compton.
The Alsea basin seems worlds away
from her birthplace of Inglewood. Quickly,
though, she and her husband and a whole
slew of residents became embroiled in cloak
and dagger drama, rising to the level of the
US Forest Service spraying chemicals on
their land, Dow Chemical and their lawyers
attempting to wear down citizens’ groups,
bugged telephones, and various sundry
nefarious things unfolding in a seemingly
isolated rural community.
One of Susan’s cohorts has already been
featured in my column Deep Dive — Carol
Van Strum. For more information on those
battles with toxics, bad science and broken
promises by officials breaking the rule of
protecting public health, safety and welfare,
read Oregon Coast TODAY, “Toxic
Avenger.”
Sometimes a young life lived produces
an amazingly detailed and complex life, for
sure. However, in the end, when a journalist
runs into a person like Swift, with seven-
plus decades under her belt, a series of
floodgates open up.
Coast as Healing Center
DEEP
DIVE
Toxins, Dirty Water,
Building Family
Sure, Citizens Against Toxic Sprays
is a big part of her foundation, 45 years
ago when she was living in the woods, in
a teepee and a small shack with Calvin
Parker, husband number two (one of three,
but who’s counting), and her son Joe Lund
from a previous marriage.
C.A.T.S. was created with the organizing
skills of Susan and others in the rural
community, propelled by fear — the
debilitating, permanent and deadly harm
being perpetrated by officials and for-profit
companies upon adults, children, pets,
penned animals, wildlife and drinking water
through herbicide spraying.
There’s plenty of newspaper copy and
radio clips on Susan’s life out here, her
singing, putting on events for the legal
battle against the chemical companies
and their spraying ways; her work on the
Lincoln County Planning Commission and
other issues tied to public health. She’s been
featured in a Nov. 23, 1980 article in Salem’s
Statesman Journal.
What anchors much of what I see while
talking with Susan (and in reporting on the
people of this area) is best captured in one
short passage from that article about Susan
written by Kristine Rosemary with the
Statesman Journal:
Now, to make any sense of the art of
diplomacy as practiced in the hidden rural
valleys and insulated towns of the Oregon
Coast Range, you must consider this:
It is a place of overlapping generations
of emigrants, each with its own notions
of how to live with the land. Rain and
shards of Chinese-looking mists blow into
those hollows in a thrashing wind. And
writhing vines of domestic blackberry gone
feral make a slow triumph of thorns. The
children of homesteaders who came to farm
these fertile valleys were joined 50 years
after, by a second wave of urban exiles.
An emblematic quote and a microcosm
of what this Oregon Coast now faces with
population influxes, lack of affordable
housing, more pollution to contend with,
climate change and shifting economic,
cultural and generational baselines. What
is left out even in this Statesman Journal’s
prescient description is what’s not included
Susan Swift, RN, formerly known as
Mrs. Parker, Swedish massage therapist, is
keenly aware of Native American history
as her daughter, Autumn Rayne, is part
Cheyenne. What has been germinated from
those early days in Five Rivers, then in
Waldport, and then to the Valley and even
Portland, is a determined septuagenarian
who has lived on a wildlife refuge in India,
ended up in Egypt on a spiritual journey
and has met the Dali Lama.
There are stories layered onto life
lessons, like shoots on an old fig tree. Her
past, Susan says, is her journey forward.
She’s helped Mo and her husband (of
the Oregon Coast’s famed seafood and
chowder restaurants) get through the last
days of their lives as their in-home certified
care taker. She’s played guitar and sang
with husband number three — musician
and instrument maker, and she’s chased
elephants out of her garden of succulents.
Iterations of her life include head of the
Lincoln County Planning Commission,
nursing school, working at a mental
health unit in Portland, and now writing,
which she’s recently pursued in a memoir
workshop at the senior center.
The coast is the healing breath she takes
with her wherever she ventures. Susan
believes she has past lives (that we all do)
to account for and to make amends with, as
well as to understand in order to carry forth
on a pathway to enlightenment. Ironically,
Susan Swift says her gift of energy empathy
and nursing came at a young age: “I first
learned my hands could take away pain
when I was 10 years old.”
•••
Read on, as Deep Dive continues at www.
oregoncoasttoday.com
Paul Haeder is a writer living and working
in Lincoln County. He has two books coming out,
one a short story collection, “Wide Open Eyes:
Surfacing from Vietnam,” and a non-fiction
book, “No More Messing Around: The Good, Bad
and Ugly of America’s Education System.”
oregoncoastTODAY.com • facebook.com/oregoncoasttoday • September 13, 2019 • 5