Editor’s Note: For those keeping score at home, I am still recovering from injuries involving a broken collarbone and arm due to a bike mishap which will be detailed in an upcoming blog post, of course! I’m recovering from surgery and the healing process requires intensive rest. Will Simmons who writes the Pittsburgh Orbit blog offered to contribute and I can’t thank him enough. I like that this piece offers a glimpse into how Portland is perceived from the outside world. It’s nice to be able to provide content until I can make my return, hopefully in August.

Everyone eats here all the time…maybe? Food trucks on a sunny day, somewhere in Portland. (photo: trazeetravel.com)

This is a work of fiction–or, at least, of the imagination and speculation. Your writer has only ever been to Portland once, as but one of many stops on a five-week (nearly) coast-to-coast (and back) road trip more than twenty years ago. The details of that visit are extremely vague–a rainy night in an old movie theater, seeing Japanese spaz-rock band The Boredoms at a big nightclub, The Museum of Advertising, squabbling with our local hosts, a big breakfast at a lumberjack diner on an island–or maybe we just had to cross a bridge. Who knows?

I loved it. But I loved it in the way you get excited about any brand new place you just get to have fun exploring for a few days before moving on or heading back to the real world. What do I know?

Everyone in Portland is a beer geek, right? (photo: Willamette Week)

So what gives this no-nothing any right to author a post for the prestigious Portland Orbit? Well, I’m going to tell you something. I took an oath–yes, a blogger’s oath. Orbit C.O. David went down with a broken arm incurred in that most Portland of circumstances–a bicycle wreck. David’s convalescence will greatly impede his ability to report, photograph, and write, so I stepped-up with an offer to do what bloggers do best: figure out how to make it all about me.

Where even office buildings look like the wallpaper in an opium den and are named like microbrews and/or circus acts. The Fair-Haired Dumbbell (proposed). (photo: Norris, Beggs, & Simpson)

[Cue: fantasy music and shimmering soft-focus.]

That single visit way back in 1993 may be short on specifics, but it made a deep impression. Clean, crisp air, an enviable climate^[1], gentle, easy lifestyles, a fierce old hippie/new indie–dare we say pioneer–spirit, ample natural beauty in all directions, trees and flowers everywhere. Some of these things aren’t going to change, but we wonder about the others.

What of the city itself–what does it look and feel like? The Internet offers us ways to travel vicariously like never before. Maps show pretty much everything east of the Willamette River as a giant grid, with a few bisecting angles and some gentle curves–Jeffersonian in its sensibility with enough interesting variances to not seem completely metric.

“Virtually” touring the city via Google Streetview (without knowing where to go) a bunch of the stereotypes jump right out: plentiful trees, bicycle infrastructure, uh…youth/yuppie-oriented businesses, hippie colors, and yes, expensive-looking brand new condos. I was surprised by how pancake flat so much of the east-of-the-river/majority of the city appears to be–aren’t you guys in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains? The wide streets and long stretches of low-slung buildings seem very western (or, at least, mid-western) to these eyes.

Is this what Portland looks like? Burnside & 28th: new condos, novelty bicycle rack, old-school cocktail lounge, a store called “Smut”. (photo: Google Maps)

…or is it more like this? Stark & 82nd: wide streets, low-slung buildings, lots of parking, (almost) no trees, very flat, but with some hills (or is that a park?) in the distance. (photo: Google Maps)

Friend and co-worker “Rizzo” moved to Portland with her husband three years ago and though still a relative newcomer she’s already adopted the native complaints of rising rents and “damn Californians moving here!” The couple were ousted from their cute, rented bungalow in Mt. Tabor by a landlord looking to sell the place for the better half of a million bucks. From afar, it sure seems like the real estate market is off-the-charts nutso and its attendant crush of people sounds like a headache and a traffic jam all rolled-up in enough stress to harsh the mellow of even the kindest (now legal) bud.

Are Portlanders already moaning about the golden days of…what were the golden days? The pre-hip eighties? The punk rock nineties? The microbrew/locavore aughts? The last day before Portlandia^[2] first aired?

Take the high road. White people retro bicycling (photo: dollface.net)

We imagine the palest of “whitopias,”^[3] a place where over-educated liberals congratulate themselves on their acceptance and diversity of opinion–at least when it comes to transgender rights, body piercing, and euthanasia–but may go days without seeing a black person. Media would have us believe the inmates have taken over the asylum–that every denizen of this quickly-growing middle-to-large-sized city is a hopped-up doobie-smoking punk rock vegan costumed bicycle-riding gluten-free transvestite. It can’t really be like that…can it? I would assume there are, you know, “real people” who work everyday jobs, drink Budweiser, shop at Wal-Mart, and watch network TV at night^[4]–but you wouldn’t know that from the press.

The future’s here right now, the song says, if we’re willing to pay the price. It’s a strange, wonderful, and horrible time to be alive, I suppose–the whole world at one’s fingertips, every thought, image, and deed but a click away. But what do we really know? Ah, heck, I need to get out and visit David, Rizzo, and the gang and see what the hell is really going on.

[1] This cool weather-lover considers 45 degrees and drizzling to be ideal. On the other hand, I imagine it would be a bummer if you don’t ever get real snow.
[2] It is impossible to write a Portland imagined piece without name-dropping this ultimate national media satire of its citizens. I’ve only watched a couple of episodes and stopped because I just didn’t think it was that funny. People tell me the same thing about Dilbert: “You don’t get it.” I think I probably do.
[3] Pittsburgh also ranks as one of (perhaps the) “whitest cities,” depending on who’s counting and what measure they’re using–but that’s mainly when you consider the entire region, which includes six very rural counties surrounding Allegheny, and the city’s overwhelmingly white suburbs.
[4] SteelersBars.com lists two establishments (A & L Sports Pub and Skybox Sports Bar & Grill) that suggest at least some of Pittsburgh’s ex-pats haven’t traded in their Terrible Towels for hemp dashikis…yet. Whether the natives ever show up for “an imp ‘n Iron” is unknown.

I got away from Portland and it seems like it’s taken me a while to get back. At Christmas time I found myself looking out a window and watching waves in the Gulf of Mexico. It was scenic and peaceful and for a few seconds I may have relaxed. I was over two thousand miles away in a section of Florida with the Spanish name Perdido Key which translates to lost key. It’s a quarter of a mile from the Alabama border which adds to the exotic mystique. So when I do want to get lost, it’s nice to have the option of visiting my in-laws at their condo. The area has a desolate exurban, Omega Man feel to me with tall, empty, at least around the holidays, condo buildings. To get there, we braved a red-eye flight  and then another flight. Some heavier than usual turbulence  created a bit of a panic attack in a male passenger a couple of rows back. To calm myself, I worked up a Drunk Uncle style comedy bit in my mind. Turbulence became “turpulence.” There was even something about a turpulence angel sitting on my shoulder that seemed funny at the time, but no one was laughing. Planes that drop in the sky are not the same type of thrill you can get from a roller coaster.

 My four coat system, actually a coat, a down vest and two sweaters, was thwarted by mid 70 degree weather.  I couldn’t wear any of that on Christmas. I appreciated the change of pace, of course, it’s the holidays, and what you might call a vacation. I didn’t think  much about the Portland I had been immersed in during the last year. At last, I was staying in a condo that wasn’t on my nerves and no one was making snide comments about. I came to realize that New Yorkers and the Wall Street Journal boost my I.Q. Although the I.Q. bump flattens out when you read USA Today. When it was time to leave, we battled delays and two planes with mechanical issues. We weren’t getting to Houston in time to get back to Portland. When given the option to stay in Florida an extra couple of days we took it.

Taking the plunge.

We stayed long enough to catch the polar plunge at the bar at the Florida-Alabama state line named the Flora-Bama Bar. Polar plunges don’t seem the same when you live in Portland with its cold rivers  which mean anytime you swim you’re in for a polar plunge. Still it was a hoot to see folks spill out of the bar on New Year’s Day, some in goofy costumes, and run into the surf. Later in our visit it had cooled down by Florida standards. It was under 50 degrees with a chilly breeze.

Global Warming Proof: Polar Bears Frolic in FLA!

We met a few people who had an interest in Portland. A lady sharing our plane fiasco, as we tried to leave the first time, remarked about how expensive Portland was becoming. She was visiting Portland on her way to Mexico. We rented a car to get back to my in-laws’ and the young lady at the rental counter lit up when we mentioned Portland. She said she wanted to visit. Knowing how much effort it takes to travel to Portland, always with the two separate plane trips, I later thought I should have told her that if she wanted to make the effort to go to a west coast city, it should be San Francisco. While probably more expensive, I see it as a tourist mecca. I just can’t get past thinking that all Portland has to offer is a chance to stumble around downtown eating Voodoo Donuts and going to a kick-ass bookstore. Okay, so I’ll never get a job with the tourist bureau. As we were leaving the second time a United Airlines worker, who changed our seats so my wife and I could sit together, told us he wanted to move to the Pacific Northwest. At that point Florida was experiencing the same rainy and cold weather. Besides he had lived on the Oregon coast for some time when his sister was in the Coast Guard. He wasn’t picky, Portland, Seattle,  it made sense if he could transfer and have a job where ever he wanted to work.

Icy icicles, at night!

Then I was back in Portland. I felt like I was facing another year of fanatically reading up the weekly newspapers trying to make sense of what’s what. I picked up the Portland Mercury and fully appreciated the humor of Alex Falcone in his  Not Invited Back cover story. I was thinking, wow, that was really good. If only I could convince him to work for the Portland Orbit, for free. While reading one of the illustrated year-end reviews of this and that in the Willamette Week, I saw that they were saying Carrie Brownstein had ruined Portland. It took a couple more panels before I realized the piece was satire. The Best Thing I Heard This Year column mentioned bands I hope to check out like Divers, Guantanamo Baywatch, Summer Cannibals and Woolen Men. Getting back into the Portland lifestyle, we spent a Sunday buzzing around filling the refrigerator back up with preciously harvested organic food while also experiencing the rare Portland ice and snow storm that netted me two days off from my school system job, which made up for the two days we had originally planned to have to get ready for going back to work. Sure it’s back to the grind and my attempts at adulthood, which I could do anywhere, but I’m here, in Portland to have another look around and continue in my pursuit to figure it out.

After posting about emergency preparedness, I spotted a poster one afternoon on my way home from work. Hmmmmm, Zone 2?

If a nuclear blast hit downtown Portland… Wait a minute. I’m already invested in worrying about an impending earthquake. Do I really need to consider a nuclear blast? Unless somehow really has it out for Mayor Hales and Councilman Novick, I’d like to think we’re safe from a good old atom bomb bombing. I had to consider what the sign meant by Zone 2.

Okay so if I’m in Zone 2, I have lung hemmorhage and third degree burns to look forward to. This sign was spotted at least a couple of miles from downtown so perhaps I don’t have to consider moving to East Portland yet. I think I may worry more about the impending condo implosion.

These posters were placed as a reminder of the 70th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I appreciate how we have to consider the consequences of the havoc brought on by nuclear war.

My thought was to create a pledge, probably not too original but If I can get all seven billion plus of us to sign this, I think I could get a handle on ending the threat of nuclear war.

So please cut and paste this, print it out and post it where it will be seen by your friends and neighbors and even your enemies:

A Pledge to Prevent Nuclear Escalation

I, (your name here) pledge to no longer consider making nuclear weapons, use nuclear weapons in any shape or form or proliferate the ones that have already been made.  

Sure it’s an over simplification but it’s a start. Let’s get ready for the earthquake and hope we never have to deal with the folly and the skin and lung ailments that would result in a nuclear blast.

While I’m getting political on the pages of a blog that usually concerns itself with random acts of creation and other assorted trivial matters, I thought I’d throw out a shout out to the people at the bridge this week. While I missed most of it because I started a new job I did catch enough to see the conclusion of the stand off. The end was actually the ship escaping the Portland area by scurrying under the St. Johns bridge. The only coverage I was able to provide is a picture I took of the action as it was being broadcast on our television set.

The Fennica is an arctic ice breaker ship working for Shell oil. I can only assume it is on it’s way up north after having it’s hull repaired in Portland. There were people hanging off the bridge on what looked like colorful ribbons and many kayakers in the water making a desperate attempt to keep the ship at bay. While I’m not a fan of that cutesy label kayactivists I admire the efforts of anyone fighting the Coast Guard and Big Oil. Of course it failed. I documented our run in with the Coast Guard on this blog. I’m aware of how tough they can be. In fact what I saw on the news looked like a Coast Guard boat running over a kayaker while a woman in a Bay Watch bathing suit jumped out of another boat to grab the man who had been knocked out of his craft.

Sometimes it all seems like a whole lot of something for nothing but I appreciate those who tried. I understand that many of the folks were outside agitators from Greenpeace, but there were people from Portland who were also willing to risk being arrested for the cause.

I really see it as a time to start considering our energy future and whether it’s worth tampering with the delicate ecosystem of the Arctic. Every time there has been a sHell No! protest in the area in recent weeks I’ve had some prior commitment but I’m proud of the people willing to raise a little Hell to bring some awareness to the struggles of our times.