In all the time I have been in Portland (off and on for two years) I have never once taken the MAX out west to Beaverton or Hillsboro. Never really had a reason too. But my experience of the area felt incomplete, so I finally went out there. I've driven through before on Highway 26 en route to the coast but that didn't count.
Overall impressions as follows: Hillsboro a surprisingly nice old-style downtown area. It is after all the Washington County Seat. Ate lunch at a tacqueria (don't remember the name) where for 4 dollars I got a huge burrito platter that left me overstuffed. No one there spoke English, luckily I have enough rudiments of Spanish to understand when they called out my order number.
Beaverton is a shit-hole. No two ways about it. As far as I can tell it
is just a haphazard collection of ugly strip malls and way too much
traffic. It is the most "no there, there" place I've been in awhile. They
are attempting a sort of urban-style development at the Beaverton
Central MAX station, but so far it looks like they haven't quite got the
concept that you need more than 3 buildings that look pretty, surrounded by
acres of parking.
The nicest surprise of the day was discovering Tualatin Hills Nature Park. It is not really hilly but the woods are beautiful and it is directly accessible from the Merlo Road MAX station. I walked for about an hour on the well-marked paths.
There are 217 acres, which isn't enormous but at least its something. There are lots of Ponderosa Pines there, which is unusual in the northern Willamette Valley region.
Heading out, I am soon across the old redline into the pricey section known as Alameda. The dividing line is Prescott. The reason is the view. Alameda is the ridge that runs west to east across northeast Portland, and from the side of it there are what realtors call "territorial" views to the south. Nothing spectacular by regional standards but enough to make it desirable. A bit to the east of me is a neighborhood of genuine mansions, but here as I walk down 18th street it is mostly the same bungalows as in the "ghetto" but the demographic is entirely white and always has been. The same house probably sells for at least 75,000 dollars more here.
I'm usually on my bicycle on this route, but as much as I love biking, walking is better. Given the time, it is my first choice.
The pavement as I head down-slope is rough, cracked old concrete. I walk in the street if there are no cars around. Okay, there are always cars around. But on a street like this during the middle of a weekday (being one of the five consecutive days in which most inhabitants leave their dwellings and toil in some fashion for another person, to earn pieces of exchange scrip known as money: what the relation is between the particular form of toil and the number of scrip tickets given is a mystery I have not yet solved) the street is quiet and the cars, though present, are slumbering at the edge or in special houses known as garages. Most of these "garages" would be large enough to house an entire family if properly insulated and finished. This is my fantasy of the moment: all these car-bedrooms have been turned into spiffy little people rooms.
At the bottom of the hill I pass an elementary school, a cacophony of laughs and screams from the playground. Brings me back to another time and place, long ago in another century.
Crossing Fremont Street I enter Irvington, a neighborhood of immense craftsman homes and equally huge shade trees. Irvington is a relative (and sort of surprising) rarity in Northwest cities: a neighborhood with shade trees lining every block. Until about the 1980's, most residential streets in Portland, Seattle, and other towns in the region, were virtually treeless. Even today it is mostly up to the individual homeowner to plant something on the parking strip, and it tends to be rather haphazard.
But Irvington is a wonderful place to walk on a breezy fall day. My mind wanders into deep introspection, low November sun shining golden through the turning leaves. I could walk like this forever. Who needs people? Noisy bothersome creatures, forever thinking up new absurdities like the leaf-blower. The perfect invention if you don't want to hear yourself think, or simply want to go deaf.
After about 20 minutes I reach Broadway and turn east, then south again, then east again through the unfortunate experiment in urban renewal known as the the Rose Quarter. Broadway itself is a fairly lively street but the area south of it to I-84 and west to the river is one of those sad examples in the philosophy of tearing down nice old stuff and replacing it with a combination of faceless modernist high rises and parking lots. But it is a wonderful place to imagine possibilities. The basics are there: a street grid, the MAX light-rail line, a couple of well-intentioned parks. So I stand at, for example, the sea of parking spaces at 6th and Halsey, looking east toward the empty blandness of a 1970's office tower, and construct what I want. [in the print zine version of this i will have drawings of my imagined cityscape.]
From there I make my way across the noisy thoroughfares of MLK and Grand Avenues, down past the Rose Quarter transit center (an oversized bus stop) and down to the Willamette River and the Steel Bridge. I’m not sure if Steel Bridge got its name from being made of steel or after someone of that name. Whichever, I like walking across it. I like walking across all the bridges in this town (at any rate all the ones that are accessible to pedestrians.) The Steel Bridge is a big old piece of dark industrial iron machinery, beams and rivets, counterweight draw mechanism, two levels: heavy rail lower and light-rail/automotive upper. Pedestrians and bicyclists walk across a special added concourse on the lower level next to the train tracks. The river glistens dark and smooth below, traffic and Max trains rumble by above. Once across, I walk south a bit, past a strange clanging steel sculpture and small bands of drug dealers and customers, then through the Japanese American Memorial (to the dark days of internment in the Great Good War) and dodge traffic across Naito Parkway and into Oldtown. It’s the homestretch now and I won’t bore you with details of the rest of it up to the Main Branch Library. But regardless, I love to be downtown. It is the real city. Everyone is there, rich, poor, cop, biker, SUV limos, skateboards in the traffic, and thousands of pairs of feet, walking. And look up at the older buildings sometime. I have spent entire afternoons lost in the decorative detail way up there, some of it you almost need binoculars for. That was craftsmanship.
At the library I ran into my friends Chris and Sierra checking out a stack of CD’s. I could write a whole zine just about them. I met Chris in the days when we both lived in a strange little city in the high desert just east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Reno. Oh my, how I don’t miss it (except for some good people.) And yet I do sometimes. Sunshine all winter. The Pneumatic Diner, the Truckee River, all those beautiful dilapidated old motels, all that bright shining nothingness downtown. Chris and I met through music (we both wrote and sang angry heartfelt ditties, and painted and wrote and philosophized) and ended up supporting each other morally through the bleakness of our Nevada lives. You never forget that.
That’s how it is on my walks and perambulations. After all the zigs and zags I end up back with old friends, in a new place in time and space, but in that moment of visitation the relationship continues and grows, becomes more real, solidifies further into the thing that eventually, looking back from death, I can say it was.
I took the Number 8 bus back up to Alberta. An incident en route illustrates the depth of misunderstanding and mistrust between people of different skin tones. As we approached the Rose Quarter Transit Center, two young (teenage) African American girls yelled a request at the bus driver to let them off at the red light before the bus stop so they wouldn’t miss their transfer to the MAX. The driver did not respond. The girls were upset and one said loudly to the other, “Fuck that prejudiced bitch, she don’t care.”
Would the driver have opened the doors if it had been two noisy rude white girls? I doubt it. Everyone knows the drivers are not allowed to let people out between stops. It is simply policy. But the girls seemed quite convinced it had to do with their being of African ancestry, and were rudely vocal in expressing that. Is it racist of me to wonder what kind of attitude that is, and how it arose, and why it persists? Granted, stupidity and rudeness are common to teenagers (and all other ages) of every color and culture. But this moment demonstrated the continued existence of something fundamentally askew between white and black America, white and black Portland. Like the crack in a stucco façade that only hints at the crumbling bricks. I don’t know how to fully diagnose and treat it, I’m just saying it is there.
Leaving the bus at Alberta I stop into the Co-op for some fruit and other items. Much as I love this little store, it is an outpost of cultural colonialism. I have never seen an African American shopping here. But what am I gonna do? The alternative is Safeway or the corporate yuppie store down the hill. And at least these people are doing something to create a world beyond the anonymous gigantism that tries so hard to rule us.
So here I am in this city. Okay, let me back up. Here I am in this place. No, I’ll back up again. Here I am.
This place: in approximately the center of the Northwest coastal region of the country called the United States. Let me be more specific. Inland about 70 miles from a vast body of water, along two great flowing arms of water, towards the southern end of the north-western portion of the great land mass known to many as North America. And right here, an intense conglomeration of people (several hundreds of thousands) known as a city. A conglomeration, a collection, a conflagration, an explosion, many explosions, uncounted thousands of them, contained in the steely hearts of a ceaseless army of brightly painted chariots. They call them cars. They are everywhere and they are the obvious rulers of this place. But I will return to this subject later. Back to where I am.
Portland. That's what they call it, so I do too. It doesn't mean anything. It is a center for the shipping of goods on waterborne vessels, but that's not the reason for the name. It was named arbitrarily after another city far to the east on a different sea. By the flip of a coin, I am told. The other choice was Boston. Thus saith the legend.
So here I am: a walker in a land of exploding steel chariots. What should I do? Only thing I know how: keep on walking. How many miles of streets are there in this strange city? I don't know but it will take me many years to walk them all. But how else can I learn the secrets of the place? So come along and I'll show you some of what I find, and some of what I know could be different. For as much as I might love a place, I am forever rebuilding it in my mind's eye into what I know it can be. A delicate balance between the eternal perfection of what-is and the ideal that everything leans toward. Oh, and we'll meet some people too.
To start with something simple. Today I walked downtown. I currently have no regular obligatory contract of toil, thus I have lots of time. If I have a couple of books to return to the library, well, I might as well walk 60 blocks south and west to do it. It is early November and the weather has been cold and windy. The primary autumn weather pattern in this western Cascadian region is of moist, relatively mild southwesterly systems blowing in all gray and rainy. (Cascadian refers to the range of volcanic peaks which rises to the east and provides the most obvious geographical reference for almost a thousand latitudinal miles.) But an alternate pattern that sets in often enough to be considered almost normal is that of cold dry air whooshing from the vast eastward interior through the Columbia River Gorge, clearing the sky and sending drifts of dry leaves skittering along the streets. The coldest bit of this recently was Halloween, when I happened to be wearing a costume with very little insulative value. I looked good though.
So. My days have been rather… un-packed. Unpacked like a heap of luggage opened and strewn about the guest-room floor. Lazy, unkempt. But heck, if I can get myself roused and out the door by 1:00 PM, whose business is it anyway? I admit I sometimes feel sheepish when every day my housemates are up and gone to their jobs and real-life responsibilities by 7:00 AM. I’ve been looking for work, so far with no luck, but haven’t tried all that hard either. The thing is I keep stumbling into ways of making money informally (all quite legal, rest assured Mom) so that so far since returning from far-flung travels I have been content to live close to the bone and bike or walk around a lot, create some art, read some books, write.
Today I finally set out at about 12:30. I’m living in a house about 2 blocks south of Northeast Alberta Street, pretty much smack in the middle of the north-central part of the city (looking at a map.) The neighborhood has been predominantly African-American since around World-War II when, as in many northern cities, there was an influx of African Americans from locales far to the east and south. (African Americans are people whose ancestors came as enslaved captives in chains from a continent on the other side of the ocean to the east of America. After a long period in which they were forced to work for no pay, usually on one particular farm for many generations, they were given the freedom to move about the country and find paying work wherever it might be offered.)
Like the other migrants at that time, they came to Portland to work in burgeoning war industries. And as in most other cities the locals were scared of them because they had dark-hued skin and spoke a somewhat different dialect of English. Perhaps there was also a fear based on the sense of thinking that these people might be righteously angry, and might take out that anger by robbing pale-skinned people at knifepoint. Perhaps there was even a kind of jealous sexual envy, based on the well known belief that men of African ancestry generally have much larger penises than men whose ancestors come from more northerly lands, and thus (in the logic of males) are better lovers and will steal all the white women. So through a process of deliberately exclusionary lending and renting practices known as “red-lining”, most of the African Americans were confined to certain northern sectors of the city.
Now, lo these many years later, redlining is illegal (never was strictly speaking legal) and no one can stop a person of a particular race from living in a particular neighborhood if they want to. So on the one hand, there are many African Americans fulfilling the dream of living in far-flung subdivisions of clap-board McMansions, and on the other hand an invasion of very pasty skinned people looking for nice old bungalows in a “classic” urban setting. And finding the best prices and selection right here in the erstwhile ghetto. Now it is called the “Alberta Arts” District, and a fine neighborhood it is. I really mean it. I have greatly mixed feelings about this process of what we might call cultural imperialism, but all in all it is the best neighborhood I have ever lived in. It is at that precarious point where there are lots of creative people and a wonderful energy, and it has a soul. Five years from now it might just be another overpriced string of chain boutiques and condos. God forbid. But for now I can walk around it and enjoy, for example, the simple fact that there is no Starbucks within 30 blocks of the house I live in. And I do almost all my grocery shopping at a homey little food co-op, the kind I remember from when I was little and my folks were active in the old Capitol Hill Co-op in Seattle. (Actually my most vivid memory of that place (circa 1973) was looking at the flies stuck in the bulk honey.) The Alberta Co-op is like that (no flies in the honey though) the way natural foods stores used to be before some hippies grew up and created corporate health-food megalo-markets like Wild Groats and Whole Fools.
But today I’m walking south, away from Alberta, down to the core.