Portland is a Place of the Escaped

“No one’s from here,” was the line people would use when we’d talk about how we didn’t know many native Portlanders. The first time I heard it I was sitting at a whiskey bar on Alberta Street with four people from Nebraska, watching the Cornhuskers play Arizona State in football.

The man who performed initial maintenance on our apartment had a daughter living in South Korea and we talked about that as he fixed our kitchen ventilation shaft, and then about how hard it was to get a job in Portland. Possibly why she left for Korea. When we came to the topic of all the young people constantly moving there, the way you passed U-Hauls driven by guys you knew were on their way in to rent a house and start a band, he said “I’m getting real tired of the drain,” meaning people moving in to take low-level jobs.

There are those that believe that living in a better city will make you into a better person. Portland is the kind of city people give up their dreams for. A place so desired by some that just making it there, merely existing, surviving in the city is good enough. People that leave their towns with bad weather and little natural beauty, places like Cleveland and Indianapolis and Detroit, come to Portland to solve their problems, to seek new beginnings.

You know when you meet someone from the Midwest or the South that had been there for a few years that you can’t try to talk to them about the good parts of where they’re from. They’ve renounced it. They’ve built it up so negatively that if you tell them you like where you’re from they write you off as an enemy or an idiot. You can’t both like where you’re from and live there.

Statements like “I haven’t been home in eight years,” or “That’s why I’m never going back,” are said with pride. Of the 50 or so people at work, five were original Portlanders, but the majority went to the Trailblazer games when the tickets were free or cheap. Though they might have found their satisfaction and happiness in their hometowns through work, vocation, or family, in Portland they work as servers and line cooks and retail clerks and find their satisfaction in the city they struggle in. They were fans of the city because it wasn’t their home.

I met people that said “I came here for all the music” but never went to shows. They might have friends in bands that played their house parties but when Modest Mouse played four nights at the Crystal Ballroom they were too broke to go. A dishwasher’s salary doesn’t afford a lot of concert tickets.

Then there were the hipsters. Everyone has heard a belly full about them and their irony, their facial hair, their bad fashion, their tall bikes, their PBR, the way they avoid being taken seriously. Those that sought to escape the culture their country forced upon them by making a joke of it. But really, talking about hipsters is now about as passé as actually being one. What they are and how they act wouldn’t be worth mentioning if they weren’t such a large part of the Portland youth culture.

More people I met talked shit about the hipsters than were actually hipsters themselves. People that read LookAtThisFuckingHipster.com and laughed about it at non-ironic parties. The word hipster became a slander in certain circles of friends. Something to be derided and laughed at. It implied exclusivity, pretentiousness, a lack of regard for anything earnest, garish fashion, and a general foolishness.

The friends I made were sincere people. People that came from hard places, good places but still places that people liked to escape from. The city was full of people like them. Portland is a place of the escaped. Both kinds.