A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES
Ann sat at the kitchen counter
contemplating the daily squares of the More Time Moms Family Organizer calendar
on the wall above the erasable magnetic bulletin board. Outside, February was
crawling over shards of shattered ice into its fifth week.
She said, “We’ve got to get out of this
place.” I agreed. I thought travelling for an early and extra week of spring
was a great notion. Ann asked me where we might like to go, somewhere close,
somewhere south and west of Edmonton .
Ann flung a figurative dart at a mental map: “Portland ?”
Powell’s City of Books , I thought, the mother overload. I once
spent a lot of time and money at the Powell’s on the south side of Chicago by
the university, a multi-level warren of shelves, but I’d heard shoppers
required a map for the mother store in Portland because it’s storeys of
stories, an entire city block of books. Certain niggling gaps in our library
needed to be plugged. It occurred to me too that possibly, maybe I could shopput
a copy of my latest novel onto Powell’s shelves and wouldn’t hilarity ensue if
I got caught doing that?
I said, “Let’s.”
The unofficial motto of the actual city is
Keep Portland Weird. That pithy tourist t-shirt slogan while true is also
something of a slight as it suggests a laissez-faire attitude on the part of
Portland’s civic administration which pretty much seems to have got things
right for its 650,000 citizens. The inland port, once the terminus of the
Pioneer Trail, is divided east and west by the Willamette
River which meets the Columbia about ten miles downstream. The
Pacific coast is another 50 miles distant. Downtown is on the west bank of the Willamette . By my calculation its core stretches from the
Portland State University
campus in the south north to the funkier Pearl District. The scale is human and
the place is designed for people.
For a pedestrian Portland is Nancy Sinatra’s boots. The west
waterfront is an extensive and scenic ribbon of manicured green. The core is
peppered with parks or greenways, some of which extend for blocks, and public
squares. Bike lanes are painted on the roads and green signs indicate
skateboard routes. Commuters are served by three trams which run in loops,
light rail MAX trains which reach all quadrants of the city and extend to the
airport. All these tracks are criss-crossed by busses. Visiting riders can
utilize the entire system all day long for just $5.
Ann and I stayed downtown on Clay Street , steps
away from Portland
State , the city’s arts
district and the great stone edifice that is City Hall. The Hotel Modera is
retro-hip, a refurbished travel lodge evoking the days of land yachts with
fly-away fins and lots of chrome. Its earthy two-tone hallways were dimly lit.
The carpet pattern suggested enlarged fragments of broken records. From time to
time we felt as if we’d walked into the nightmare sequence of a German silent
film.
That disorienting cinematic effect was
often enhanced by extensive sampling of local micro-brews. On our second visit
to the Yard House on Fifth Avenue ,
I was cavalier, I ordered a Proletariat Red. The establishment’s literature
boasts its collection of beers on tap is the world’s largest. The bartender
said they didn’t have that one. I was mildly mystified because I knew I’d enjoyed
a couple somewhere in the vicinity, somewhere within staggering distance.
Ann and I were enchanted by the barroom of
Jake’s Famous Crawfish. The fridges were wood framed with see-through doors,
misty with condensation. We were detective noir characters, me and my moll. A
man wearing a mesh ball cap who was part of a party of three waiting for a
table in the restaurant ordered a Bud Light. The bartender straightened his
two-button white waistcoat and stared at his customer; eventually he sneered,
“Really.” The blue tap was at hand but swill was not served. About 15 minutes
later another drinker sidled into the recently evacuated space beside Ann and
me. He couldn’t decide what he wanted. I suggested a Bud Light.
Years ago when I was a university student
the syllabus for one of my English courses included two works by James Joyce:
‘Stephen Hero’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,’ the former being
a first draft of the latter. The professor noted that the main character also
appears in the pub scene in Joyce’s masterpiece ‘Ulysses.’ He said ‘Ulysses’
was a problematic book: “I either mention it in passing or we devote an entire
semester to it.” I cannot remember the gentleman’s name but I could picture him
as we stood before 1005 West Burnside. Powell’s is problematic: you either walk
on by like Dionne Warwick or like the Rolling Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show,
you spend some time together.
Ann had a list on her iPhone. I had a paper
list in my pocket and a second one from an envious friend. We browsed the
green, blue and gold rooms before agreeing to split up. I went upstairs into
the red room and then like a magpie in the land of shiny objects wandered into
the purple room to examine the books about baseball. Immersed in that aisle I
remembered what it was like to collect O-Pee-Chee cards: “Got it. Got it. Got
it.” I did eventually purchase a Modern Library edition of Raymond Chandler
whose prose both created and transcended his genre of detective noir. My other
find was a Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick whose groundbreaking
short stories and novels introduced an everyman, workaday element to science
fiction. I purposely avoided Powell’s orange room where the music books are
shelved.
Down by the river in a neighbourhood
promoted as historic called Yamhill, Ann and I stumbled upon Second Avenue
Records. We flipped through the bins of new and used vinyl. I was a Bruce
Springsteen character in the shop, not a boy prophet walking handsome and hot
so much as wanting it all or nothing at all. I didn’t possess the pre-scribbled
constraint of a list nor did I ask the two hipsters behind the counter if they,
like Powell’s, shipped large orders. I was afraid the answer might be yes. Ann
and I lingered but not for very long.
When we travel Ann and I habitually
establish an unofficial headquarters outside of our accommodations. Riding the
B tram we spotted an inviting dive on Montgomery ,
a short walk from our hotel, where the tracks begin to twist down toward the Willamette and the bridge over to its industrialized east
bank. Schmizza Pub & Grub had picnic tables outside arrayed by the rails
and they were rife with drinkers, smokers and dog owners. We visited three
times. The craft beer was palatable and the pizza was delicious.
But something was bugging me. I’d noticed a
corporate lunch hour Schmizza sign downtown on a street named for a dead
president near the Court House. I collared our Montgomery manager and asked him if there was
a legal conflict what with two such disparate pizza parlours using the same
name. He said, “It’s a franchise.” I’d already investigated the borderline
sanitary toilets; I looked around at the shabby décor and at the regulars,
skaters under slouch toques, eccentrics under fedoras or baseball caps, who
owned their barstools. I said, “Really?” I thought, ‘The franchise fee must run
around $5 and the brand manager is either a burnt-out case or dead.’ He swept
his arm toward the beer taps and the shelves of liquor, “My difference is the
wall. I don’t really pay attention to head office, they leave me alone.”
Unfortunately, a couple of more important
things are neglected in Portland .
Nestled between Chinatown and the Old Town and within a triangle whose vague
points are the Greyhound station, the University of Oregon team store and
Voodoo Doughnut (sweet-toothed doughphiles swear Blue Star Donuts is better) is
a skid row the likes of which I’ve never before encountered where I’ve lived or
visited. Portland ’s
homeless population, some of it nomadic given the temperate climate, seems
alarmingly disproportionate to the city’s size. People wrapped in crusty tarps
and filthy sleeping bags live under bridges, on sidewalk corners, on the
greenways and in central Pioneer
Square . Portland
is justifiably renowned for its food truck scene and vibrant weekend market but
eating and drinking on the street in front of the hungry and the desperate
strikes me as inadvertent taunting.