Portland is a Place of the Escaped

“Come to Portland,” Adam Gnade’s letters read, “the trees are as tall as the buildings.” He often wrote to me in Seoul of blackberries and house parties and walks up to Mount Tabor. When I walked onto his porch with a backpack full of Russian and Mongolian souvenirs I still believed in his Portland and the larger America it was built upon. I knew I was coming back with far too little money and resources, but America still was the land of promise to me and I thought if I could stay positive and work hard enough I could turn my ambition into success.

I had been told that I could live in that city without a car. That was largely false. Yes, I survived biking to work and back, a total of five miles every day. But I didn’t thrive. To live in America and not drive is to diminish your participation in the common culture. And this is no small sacrifice. You miss it. You miss the freedom a car provides. You feel as though the rest of the population has capabilities you lack. I knew many people that didn’t drive cars. Almost all of them had either a spouse or a partner who did.

Nearly eight percent, read a common newspaper statistic, of people in the City of Roses commuted to work by bike; the statistic detailing how many of those eight percenters did so by choice was never cited. I enjoyed the exercise, the self-sufficiency of it, but I wasn’t doing it out of choice. I was doing it because I couldn’t afford a car. There were many days in the rain when I wished I had a car, any car with a stereo in which I could listen to my music and drive. It’s hard to find something noble in riding a bike to work day after rainy day if you haven’t chosen the lifestyle.

There were many things about Portland that revealed themselves over time. A casual observer or tourist doesn’t notice the prevalent underbelly of poverty in the city. In the nine months I lived there I failed to adjust to it. The 15 bus ran east down Belmont where I moved to and west along Morrison. I lived in an apartment on southeast 15th, a one-bedroom in the Wellesley Court building.

The majority of the passengers riding the 15 weren’t the oversized-glasses, meant-to-be-ironic-haircutted and tight-jeaned hipsters that you hear so much about. Instead they were the transient, the homeless, the drug-addicted. The 15 carried passengers west to a shelter on 12th and Stark and east to the methadone clinic on 26th and Belmont. Transients in need of care. Men and women that smell and speak of a life most of us spend our days working to avoid. Uncomfortable humans.

Transplants speculate why so many people are homeless in the city. Drug use is sometimes cited — the city was notorious for hard drugs in the eighties. Culture sparks like “My Own Private Idaho” helped grow its reputation. The mild climate is surely a factor—it rarely snows and the winter temperatures get below freezing for a relatively short time.

The bridges might not be a draw but they help to shelter the community. Along with the freeways that intertwine over the banks of the river, the city structures make good ceilings. Portland has eight bridges downtown and more as one leaves the city — the most remarkable to my eye the St. Johns Bridge on the northern end of town.

The Gothic-style St. Johns spans the Willamette River on the north side of the city. In that same month with Stormy and the breast milk we crossed that bridge going the wrong way looking for a show. It was around midnight under those dark, eerie towers that I first took to the structure. Once we got turned around we drove up into the hills, into the woods.

We parked along the yard of a cabin and walked through the forest along a path lit by tea lights into a clearing where about thirty people milled about. The landowners had dug a pit eight-feet deep by twenty-five feet long and twenty-five wide. A lamp hung from a wire strung above the pit. More tea lights lined the edges, behind them people sat cross-legged eating bread and drinking wine.
A songwriter by the name of Miles Anthony Benjamin Robinson started the show drunk and played a short set. Then the Castanets — a loosely defined folk group of ever-changing members revolving around Ray Raposa — sat down in the pit with the fire in the side wall casting light up into their faces and making them look bigger than they were. They covered Tom Petty’s “You Got Lucky Babe” and after some coaxing from the crowd Raposa played his great song “Dance, Dance.” He sang into the woods:

She says come in from the rain
well hell I came in from the rain
it was cold she had room
hell I suppose I’m not averse to being tamed
but things go how they go
and come the snow
I was starving in my sleep
with every road away closed
and a fridge full of shit that didn’t keep

“So this is Portland,” I thought. “This is how it’s going to be.”

It was never like that again. When I told people at work about that show few believed me. It sounded like something a Midwesterner would make up. Some fantasy of the city that didn’t exist.

Being around non-natives meant listening to a lot of bad information. The St. Johns Bridge was built by a man named David Steinman, who did not also build the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, as many transplants wrongly informed me. That man was Joseph Strauss, who actually built Portland’s Burnside Bridge, an icon of the city. The crisscross iron framework central to understanding the quadrants, as it connects east to west and completes the line dividing north from south.