Forests and rain and logs. Instead of the political t-shirts of Salt Lake City airport, there are puffy jackets and flannel and toques. A rainy ride into the city on a beat-up train, underpasses with homeless men, old concrete, flashes of hi-tech. It's like a neon-deficient Blade Runner or Neuromancer: underpasses, rain, computers. I was there to meet some friends. Jaclyn, who was on a surprise road trip excellently planned by her partner, Jason, who also hunted down restaurants, handled details, and basically did everything. And Karen and Jay, who came down from Victoria with their car and drove us around.
I was booked into a cheap hotel downtown, with a view of a parking lot and a Denny's sign. The woman at the desk is hard-working but dispositionally relaxed, like everyone in Portland. She's giving directions to a man who's come to the wrong hotel, needs to go to the right one, and isn't good with directions. He turns to go, I step up hopefully, and he turns back and asks, is there a washroom here? The washroom directions are incredibly involved. He leaves without taking the key he needs to get into the main building, comes back, and then I find him milling around on the way to my room, musing "it must be around here somewhere". I say I wish I could help him.
It's a grubby part of the city. I walk through a shopping mall on the way to dinner, and it's clean and trying hard, but there's no money here, somehow. In some places, stores can sit and soak it up; this is a money desert where everything has to struggle. Store fronts are empty, people in the bookstore are reading, dollar store are prospering. There's a skating rink on the ground floor where little kids are circling around and around and a teenager is trying to instruct them.
Portland used to be a lumber, steel, and railroad town, but now has a hipster knickknack- and vegan brunch-based economy. There's a central business district like any other, and then outlying areas of old warehouses and storefronts where a big part of the population subsists by selling each other used clothes and curiosities. Old corduroy pants cycle through many hands, keeping the money moving: people queue up at store counters to sell them, the store stocks them, other people buy them, those people bring them back to sell them again, and the neighbourhood prospers.
The king of the curiosity stores, and a really interesting place, is Paxton Gate. It sells plants and books, but the real draw is dead animals: stuffed, mounted, reduced to skeletons, and preserved in jars. Its staff are young and cheerful and eager to talk: are you looking for anything in particular? "Well, I need a toucan fetus in a jar, but I don't see– oh, there it is." Signs in store windows tell you about the groups the store "stands with" on social issues. Breakfast places describe themselves as "places for diversity and friendship". Other cars let us in. Jason is vegan and Jaclyn is allergic to wheat, and finding places to eat is the easiest thing in the world.
There's also Powell's, a gigantic bookstore – it claims to have a million books – and its legion of awkward employees – Powell's seems to soak up Portland's surplus local authors. And an antique/junk store in a warehouse, with love-testing machines, ancient appliances, bizarre old sculptures, "Kung Fu" signs, and a blocked-off back section where random junk, piled close to the ceiling, brushes the bottom of a gaudy chandelier. It's like someone sacked a small town in the 1930s and is still sorting through the loot. There's a barcade with a 4-person Pac-Man game and Mortal Kombat. I was – no false modesty – great at Mortal Kombat as a teenager. Now I've forgotten all the fatality combinations and get beaten up by the third opponent. It's all very sad. Jay, by contrast, has kept his video game skills up to date. He's hard to touch at Pac Man and later, in Victoria, takes me to school on Burger Time.
Portlandia, a personification of the city as a giant crouching copper woman with a trident: a personification of Portland as a sort of classical goddess, like a more laid-back Roma. If you stuck a giant slice of gluten-free toast on the trident, you'd have Portlandia 2017. It's an enormous statue, but is half-lost among the buildings of downtown, which make a 50' woman look life-sized. Portlandia's not especially well-known, because its copyright is held by its sculptor, who is litigious and has strong opinions about how images of it should be used, and how much he should be paid when they are – a weird situation for a piece of public art.
Rain-slick girder bridges, grubby silo complexes, lamp posts with thick coverings of posters. Great meals served by friendly 20-somethings.
There's also a sloth centre just an hour or so out of town. This was a trip with variety: dry and conservative Salt Lake City, damp and progressive Portland, the humid home of politically neutral but strong-smelling sloths.
I was booked into a cheap hotel downtown, with a view of a parking lot and a Denny's sign. The woman at the desk is hard-working but dispositionally relaxed, like everyone in Portland. She's giving directions to a man who's come to the wrong hotel, needs to go to the right one, and isn't good with directions. He turns to go, I step up hopefully, and he turns back and asks, is there a washroom here? The washroom directions are incredibly involved. He leaves without taking the key he needs to get into the main building, comes back, and then I find him milling around on the way to my room, musing "it must be around here somewhere". I say I wish I could help him.
It's a grubby part of the city. I walk through a shopping mall on the way to dinner, and it's clean and trying hard, but there's no money here, somehow. In some places, stores can sit and soak it up; this is a money desert where everything has to struggle. Store fronts are empty, people in the bookstore are reading, dollar store are prospering. There's a skating rink on the ground floor where little kids are circling around and around and a teenager is trying to instruct them.
Portland used to be a lumber, steel, and railroad town, but now has a hipster knickknack- and vegan brunch-based economy. There's a central business district like any other, and then outlying areas of old warehouses and storefronts where a big part of the population subsists by selling each other used clothes and curiosities. Old corduroy pants cycle through many hands, keeping the money moving: people queue up at store counters to sell them, the store stocks them, other people buy them, those people bring them back to sell them again, and the neighbourhood prospers.
The king of the curiosity stores, and a really interesting place, is Paxton Gate. It sells plants and books, but the real draw is dead animals: stuffed, mounted, reduced to skeletons, and preserved in jars. Its staff are young and cheerful and eager to talk: are you looking for anything in particular? "Well, I need a toucan fetus in a jar, but I don't see– oh, there it is." Signs in store windows tell you about the groups the store "stands with" on social issues. Breakfast places describe themselves as "places for diversity and friendship". Other cars let us in. Jason is vegan and Jaclyn is allergic to wheat, and finding places to eat is the easiest thing in the world.
There's also Powell's, a gigantic bookstore – it claims to have a million books – and its legion of awkward employees – Powell's seems to soak up Portland's surplus local authors. And an antique/junk store in a warehouse, with love-testing machines, ancient appliances, bizarre old sculptures, "Kung Fu" signs, and a blocked-off back section where random junk, piled close to the ceiling, brushes the bottom of a gaudy chandelier. It's like someone sacked a small town in the 1930s and is still sorting through the loot. There's a barcade with a 4-person Pac-Man game and Mortal Kombat. I was – no false modesty – great at Mortal Kombat as a teenager. Now I've forgotten all the fatality combinations and get beaten up by the third opponent. It's all very sad. Jay, by contrast, has kept his video game skills up to date. He's hard to touch at Pac Man and later, in Victoria, takes me to school on Burger Time.
Portlandia, a personification of the city as a giant crouching copper woman with a trident: a personification of Portland as a sort of classical goddess, like a more laid-back Roma. If you stuck a giant slice of gluten-free toast on the trident, you'd have Portlandia 2017. It's an enormous statue, but is half-lost among the buildings of downtown, which make a 50' woman look life-sized. Portlandia's not especially well-known, because its copyright is held by its sculptor, who is litigious and has strong opinions about how images of it should be used, and how much he should be paid when they are – a weird situation for a piece of public art.
Rain-slick girder bridges, grubby silo complexes, lamp posts with thick coverings of posters. Great meals served by friendly 20-somethings.
There's also a sloth centre just an hour or so out of town. This was a trip with variety: dry and conservative Salt Lake City, damp and progressive Portland, the humid home of politically neutral but strong-smelling sloths.
