Dispatch From A Blue State: The Essential Guide To Portland

The Office of Civic Suggestions is pleased to offer the following guide to Portland, Oregon:

Welcome to Portland.

The Office of Civic Suggestions is dedicated to creating a Young-Creatives-Positive environment for the Young Creatives that are assumed to be our largest up-and-coming demographic, so that they will feel comfortable doing whatever it is they do, which is expected to become clearer over time. The city strives to foster the attitude that nothing is required of anybody, and that no one really has to do anything if they don't feel like it. As an example, it is not compulsory to be in a band, as long as you can hear a band from inside your house.

Whereas every homeowner is encouraged to build either a Poetry Post or a chicken house, it is not mandatory. A mini-library may be substituted. The Office of Civic Suggestions is pleased to report that, citywide, we achieve nearly 100% compliance in this endeavor, due to our collective will. This uniformity of purpose is a point of pride in an otherwise diverse population, wherein people between barista jobs rub elbows with people looking for graphic design work.

Conformity will not be monitored, but you really should have a dog, and your dog really should have an outfit, spangly antlers (in season), or, at minimum, a bandana. Also, he or she should go to day care. A spot under a sidewalk cafe table may be substituted as long as it puts the canine citizen in a position to net a belly-rub from a complete stranger. It is felt that dog ownership knits society together in important ways, but those unwilling to contribute should feel free to go out in the back yard and bark just for the hell of it, and if seen unaccompanied at a dog park, should signal their good intentions by accessorizing with a poop bag.

Visitors are advised that it is possible to pass as native by going to the symphony with one pant-leg rolled up on the gear side. There is no citizenship test to take, per se, but newcomers, if they would like to be comfortable, should familiarize themselves with the bitterness scale of beer and be able to use "bioswale" in a sentence. Political involvement is encouraged at every level. Remember to begin your letter to the editor with "so, let me get this straight."

It is not true that it is against the law to situate a Walmart in Portland. Walmart is merely subject to the same zoning regulations as any other commercial entity, including the requirements that all new development be anchored by an independent book store, provide adequate skateboard lockers, and not be a Walmart.

Yes, those are real ferns growing all the way up the trees. Yes, the solar panels are supposed to go on the side of the roof without the moss on  it. Yes, we have a state fungus. No, there is no place to buy an umbrella.

The City of Portland is proud of its support for the arts, and encourages visits to our many galleries, street fairs, and the traveling tagged-railcar exhibit. In addition, all of our children have been subjected to thick praise since infancy, and their scribblings and beadwork are available most weekends at a sidewalk blanket near you, next to a dog. No money need be exchanged, but you are expected to pause thoughtfully and smile. A pocketful of kibble should see you through several blocks.

Finally, the idea that you can create art by merely "putting a bird on it" is a gross oversimplification. It should really be a crow.

Thank you. Please share this flyer with at least five people before placing it, ink-side-down, over a noxious weed.

Drowning Our Troubles At The Brewery

Burnside Brewery Goddess Molly Fox

Dave called me on his new Mobile Cellular Telephone the other day while he was on a walk and I was home writing. I was at that crucial stage between picking at my hair and looking out the window--that golden moment that comes just before bailing out on getting anything written down at all. And he said he was three miles away from the Burnside Brewery. Which meant if we both started walking in that direction, we'd get there at the same time. To add to the serendipity, the Burnside Brewery--unlike other random places equidistant from both of us at that moment--serves up an India Pale Ale that'll put hair on your esophagus and then comb it all the way down. You throw that much serendipity at a girl and she'd be a plumb fool to turn it down. It would be an insult to the universe.

So off I went. It looked like it might could rain; in other words, it was a normal evening. Nothing to put on rain gear for. Walking is very helpful for my writing. In a good walk I can come up with all sorts of turns of phrase and plot points and such that are polished into brilliance later by my inability to recall them. Portland is noted for its rainfall but it isn't a very big deal. Most of the time it's like fog with punctuation. Sometimes it assembles itself into raindrops but a lot of times it's just moist enough to make an old lady's face-fur gleam like fiber optics.

We settled into a booth at the Burnside Brewery. The booths were elevated on a little platform. I've always been drawn to booths. When I was younger they seemed more canoodly. Now they just make it easier for us to hear each other. We sat on the same side to make it easier yet, and watched Saturday evening unfold outside. First Marilyn Monroe went by accompanied by a generic zombie princess. More zombies followed, interspersed with young people expressing their individuality in their arrangements of clothing that is either ripped or stripey or both. There might have been a zombie event in the vicinity or it might have just been the overflow from Voodoo Donuts on NE Davis meeting the overflow from Voodoo Donuts on SW Third. At any rate, a good time was being had by all, as required. Then came a little ripple of thunder.

Where I grew up, there was a thunderstorm every summer afternoon at four o'clock. That is either true, or it is a tidy memory-packet I've assembled for my nostalgia kit based on a single week in 1968. At any rate, it was not unusual, as it is here. Here in Portland thunder is attended with flying eyebrows of surprise, and, in a public place such as the Burnside Brewery, applause. The air thickened abruptly. Soon the polite smokers hunched under their hoodies at the far end of the parking lot began to stream ominously into the building. Then the parking lot disappeared. The sky dropped a single raindrop a mile wide. The picture window grew a vertical river, in spite of being under wide eaves. Dave and I were so entertained by the scene that it took a while to notice bobbing tables beginning to accumulate in our peripheral vision. We glanced down from our platform to observe that the diners at tables were polishing off their beers with their feet off the floor. An army of wait staff began aerobic floor-squeegeeing. Bright yellow sandwich boards reading "CAUTION: WET FLOOR" floated informatively by. The bar split in two with the bow end sticking straight up before sliding into the sea. A pair of giraffes poked inquisitive noses into the front door. I don't blame them. Noah probably didn't serve a good IPA.

We got 1.02 inches of rain in an hour.  It makes sense. We average 2.5 inches for the month of May, but it had been oddly sunny a lot of the month. We didn't have much time to make up the difference, so down it came. We're a fun-loving bunch, but we're not anarchists. Not most of us, anyway.

Murr, Murr, Quite Contrurr

To those who say America has been asleep, lulled by television and cheap electronic toys from China, unaware of what has been taken from us and not moved to protest, I give you Portland, Oregon. Here, sir, we have had a sustained demonstration of outrage and indignation for over five weeks now. We will not be ignored; we will stand up for what is right, we will demand redress. We have just had another change in our garbage service inflicted upon us and we aren't going to take this sitting down.

Yes, we are maintaining a proud tradition of civic whinging that goes back centuries, from when the Romans put together the entire aqueduct system for water delivery. Oh fine, the collective populace said. And here I am with a slave, eight daughters and a fortune in buckets--what do you expect me to do with them?

We citizens were not consulted, unless you count that extended public input process and the publicized three-month trial study. Because if we had been properly consulted, we would have made clear our desire to have the mounds of debris from our daily lives suctioned out at the curb on a weekly basis, just like always. Only cheaper, because we'd strip the fat from the bloated bureaucracy. If the government absolutely must tinker with our garbage service, it could pave a turn-around up at the edge of the national forest where we dump our mattresses and old refrigerators.

Because left alone, dammit, we are a productive people. We produce unfathomable volumes of crap every day, and if the government would just take it away and quit spending money on pamphlets about it, we could produce even more. The pamphlets purport to educate us about the changes in our garbage service.

Do you know where your garbage goes?


Yes. Away. It goes away.

We used to jam everything, rocks and concrete and stinky fish and dead possums and everything, in one big can and the trucks rumbled up the alley and made it all go away. But that isn't good enough for the nanny state. No, some bureaucrat with absolutely nothing better to do decided to make the trucks come up street side, and we got ugly yellow crates to put our cans (flattened, labels removed), glass (separated), and newspaper (bagged up) in. They would never have gotten away with it had they not anticipated the uproar and brainwashed our children about recycling via socialized education, and the little scolds did their dirty work for them. That's right: they made us do more work, and charged us more for the privilege. You know, a person who works all day long might want to have a moment to relax and have a couple dozen Buds and toss the cans in the garbage, but no. What's next? Will we have separate containers for white Styrofoam peanuts and colored Styrofoam peanuts?

No. Actually, now we're going to give you a big blue bin and you can start tossing all your recycling into it without sorting it. Oh, and we're also going to give you a big green bin for your yard debris, and we'll pick it up and compost it every other week.


Fabulous. Now we have two big ugly bins and one smaller one plus our original garbage can. We don't even have any yard debris. We've got Mexicans for that. They cart it away and, I don't know, put it in tacos or something. Can we put our Christmas tree into the yard debris bin?

Not unless you chop it up first, and the trunk is under four inches in diameter.


I see the government's War On Christmas is in full swing. All right. We'll ignore the yard debris can as long as you keep hauling off our garbage once a week.

About that. We're going to give you a free countertop compost container and you can now fill up your yard debris bin every week with all your kitchen scraps, including bones and meat and napkins and pizza boxes and crab carcasses, but we'll only pick up your other garbage every other week.


How's that supposed to work? Stuff smells.

Well, the stuff that smells is what you can now put in your yard debris can. Which will get picked up every week, just like your regular can used to be.


We don't want to put our stinky food in a different can. We want to put it in the old can. We don't want government busybodies telling us what to do.

We told you what to do before, when we came down the alley and picked up all your crap in the giant can on a particular day for a particular price.


Yeah, but that was the arrangement our forefathers got set up for us when they told us to cast off the potato peels of oppression. That was okay.

.............................................

Call me contrary, but I like all the changes. To me they indicate that the government workers I hired to figure things out have, in fact, figured things out. They have studied the problem of diminishing landfill space with a mind to what is environmentally sound, and they have come up with solutions that will benefit us as a society. That, to me, is what a government of the people should do. It's worth celebrating.

And once we winnow out all our food crap and our paper crap and our recyclable crap and our tin foil and our glass and see what is left to put in our garbage cans, we will discover that it is mostly huge piles of plastic crap that we can barely avoid acquiring, because that is how all our goods are packaged now. And we might then be moved to do something about all that packaging, at the source. A few years back, some of our representatives tried to introduce legislation to do just that. But the packaging producers got wind of the plan and poured enough money into the legislators that the problem went away.

That is the other way a government can be run. Kinda stinky.

Summer's Just Around The Corner, But It's A Very Long Block

It's coming up on Memorial Day, the day Portlanders traditionally begin to think about putting out their tomato starts in a few weeks, say, early June, which is our name for early July. At least the old-timers do. Newer immigrants have had their tomatoes out since the official date of the last expected frost, April 15th, and there they remain, precisely the same size a month and a half later, unchanged except for a morose aspect. By Memorial Day the plants will be overcome by gloom. Word might be getting out, however. Nurseries report a decline in tomato-start sales over the same period last year. Upon further analysis, it turns out that the people who believe they can grow a tomato before June in Portland are the very same people who believe the world will end on the 21st of May. We'll miss them.

Nothing says "summer" like a tomato. They are born of heat; their very flavor recalls barbecues and beer, muffin-tops, shot-off fingers and the disturbance of the peace. Here in the Willamette Valley, too, even the smell of a tomato is evocative. We bite into its luscious flesh, seeds and juice streaming down our chins, and close our eyes--it speaks to us. It says "five minutes before winter." It says "time to put the studded tires on." There's nothing like it. We quiver with anticipation as they begin to blush during the World Series. Tomatoes are Red Sox fans, too.

It would be swell to have them ripen a little earlier, and plenty of people try to make it happen. Heat is the key. We throw everything we have at it: black mats and heating pads and the Wall O' Water and hair dryers and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, just upriver. Even the neighborhood cats get in on the action, rumpling up the soil and depositing something warm, but it's no use. We plant varieties like Early November Girl or Beefmaybe, anything advertising a ripening time of 65 days or better, and they're as good as their word. The problem, of course, is that the 65 days are not necessarily consecutive.

There's even talk of giving them a little boost with artificial growth hormones, but that's a chancy proposition. No one wants a repeat of the recent exploding watermelon fiasco; on the other hand, their use in chickens did jumpstart the nugget industry.

We're a sweet and silly bunch, we Portland tomato growers, a group that is all too easy to make fun of, but I salute this cadre of groundless optimists, disdaining the easy pleasures of this modern world and looking forward to our dubious harvest. We plant--yea, even unto the end of the driveway, with prayer, faith, reverence, and a little lime and eggshells, and bless our gullible hearts, we patiently await the rapture. Bacon and lettuce at the ready.

The Woes City

Portland, Oregon: The month of May has recently adjourned after setting a record of one hundred and forty-five consecutive days of rain, smashing the previous single-month record of eighty-nine days in 1876 ("Dead Man's April"). Portlanders woke up last week to the news that a woman who had jumped from a tall building fell directly on another woman on the sidewalk, killing both instantly. Slouching in coffee shops, languidly stroking the ridged scars on their wrists, they pondered, in that crescent of time between the last coffee and the first beer, which of the two women was the most fortunate.

Although suicide pacts among the young have largely been thwarted by lethargy, pedestrians have been observed to linger on bridges. In the animal world, cats are irritable, slugs exhibit zip, and the baby bird population has proven susceptible to drowning, with natural selection now favoring the picky eater.

In those few areas experiencing sunbreaks, rods and cones have snapped audibly; temporary blindness is reported to have led to a spike in fatal car wrecks, some of which have been ruled accidental. Elsewhere, sporadic sunbreaks have been blamed for the socially corrosive introduction of hope.

Sociologists are also studying the possible detriment to the spirit arising from Portlanders' self-satisfaction as environmental advocates, noting that the reputation is largely unearned. Anyone willing to wait a couple years can boast a green roof, they point out, although green vehicles take a little longer.

As always, natives spurn the personal use of umbrellas, which merely add to the number of items that require drying out. These are observed only in the days leading up to the Rose Festival to protect hybrid tea roses in competition. Portland is, in fact, known as the Rose City, an umbrella term (as it were) encompassing many individual Black Spot Fungus neighborhoods, and this holds the key to understanding springtime weather patterns in the area.

Traditionally, the Rose Festival concludes with a week of parades in June, beginning with the Starlight Parade, an evening event named after a mythical sky phenomenon. This parade always features a clown troupe called the Rainmakers, who carry inside-out umbrellas and spray spectators with water pistols, an activity that was finally abandoned when nobody noticed. The Grand Floral Parade is held one week later, with thousands of plastic-covered spectators lining the streets to witness the annual drenching of delicate petals and princess curls. It's a festive scene, and marks the coming of the sunny season, which begins the next day. Meteorologists explain that our prevailing weather pattern arises when a deep plume of moisture embedded in a powerful jet stream stretching from Japan to the Oregon coast collides with the Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade.

The hail, on the other hand, is thought to be caused by the planting of peonies.

We're A Coffee Town

Something wonderful happened last week, and I couldn't be prouder of Portland than if we all parked our Priuses and packed them with potting soil and petunias.

The occasion was a community meeting on the subject of Last Thursday celebrations on Alberta Street. Last Thursday was originally conceived as an artwalk, a monthly romp down the avenue that gives Alberta Arts District its name. The galleries hatched the idea twelve years ago and it has grown into a robust carnival. Folks lay claim to a patch of sidewalk and hawk their wares--everything from fine art to whatever they've managed to string together using beads, dumpster finds and paper clips while watching "Lost" from the sofa they're surfing on. It's not, shall we say, a juried affair.

Dave and I are at ground zero, four houses off Alberta at the end point of the parade, and we've enjoyed the atmosphere over the years--the clowns on stilts, the music, the tall bikes and the general revelry. We stroll past the card tables, dispensing brief grins. As Dave muttered after three blocks of displayed art, "This is the result of an entire generation growing up being told, 'Heather, that is so wonderful! You're so talented!'" Our pocket change is not in much danger. But folks are trying, folks are engaged, and we wish everyone the best.

Early on, during the time referred to as "the good old days" or "the rise of Gomorrah," depending on whether you were talking to Dave or somebody else, there was even a good chance of random nudity. It's a nostalgic sight for an old hippie mama, especially one who now recognizes that pride in the pert bloom of youth has always had more to do with this sort of thing than any spiritual freedom. Dave tends to be less analytical, but is similarly amused to discover that young white women still think dancing means twirling about like a fairy princess. As a form of expression, it's not much more advanced than that old standby for four-year-old girls, spinning in place and pulling their dresses over their heads.

There have been complaints from the neighbors, though, with many objecting to the rise in public drunkenness, defecation, altercation, noise, litter, yard-piddling, and worst of all, the likelihood that someone will have parked right in front of their houses. This collection of outrages happens fully five days out of the year, once the cold and rainy months have been subtracted. The announced community meeting looked to be contentious, with the very future of Last Thursday at stake.

A team of volunteers fanned out with flyers announcing the meeting. Dave, who reports a renewed respect for letter carriers, distributed 350 himself. And when the meeting opened up, the room was packed to the rafters, with all seats filled and people standing five deep against the walls and in the aisles. Young, heavily pierced people bristled in packs; old, well-dressed folks who looked as though they would reliably refer to themselves as taxpayers dotted the crowd. Each regarded the other with suspicion.

Mayor Sam Adams, presiding, laid down the ground rules. To keep any citizen from feeling intimidated by the crowd, he instructed us to refrain from clapping, hooting, or making any noise at all. If we liked what someone was saying, we were to give them "jazz hands," waving our fingers in the air. There was no suggestion for negative responses. The meeting got underway.

And then it happened. One after the other, citizens got up and spoke their piece. "Jazz hands" flapped all over the room. Occasional low booing produced a gentle reminder from the mayor, and eventually subsided altogether. The pierced contingent to my right, consisting of people slightly too young to appreciate the wonder of courtesy that was unfolding, could not contain occasional eruptions of dismay, but even they kept their threats of targeted yard-piddling at a low volume, and eventually relaxed. None of these had signed up to testify, but several were invited to the mike anyway, having worked up a head of earnest indignation in advance, and were indulged by all when they sailed well past their time allotment. For two hours and forty-five minutes, the neighbors of Alberta Street spoke in turn, listened to each other and waved their hands in the air like they were at Kermit the Frog's family reunion. It was the greatest celebration of sustained civility I have witnessed in my entire life.

What is the sound of 3,000 fingers wiggling? Portland, baby. It's no Tea Party.

This article, in an edited and probably tighter and better version, was published in The Oregonian, 2/14/2010, where it unearthed a very angry segment of the population in the comments section.