An Ode to Portland
Before we could leave, we had to say goodbye to Portland, that moist stain in the Willamette Valley’s crotch that’s either rotting or fermenting depending on who you ask. She’s earned the name city of roses not for some bureaucratic, tourism-board bullshit, but because she is crawling with them. They peek out of fences, hang heavily above sidewalks and crawl up the side of houses.
In my last place, they nearly joined me in the shower, i’d open the window and there they’d be, bobbing in the breeze like a dogs tail who’d been home all day waiting for you. Their sweet perfume would strike my nostrils the way a tangy jam jolts the tongue. I’d stand beneath the showerhead, eyes closed, nuts hangin’ low and melt in pheromonal ecstasy.
Her sidewalks rise and buckle like tectonic plates, pushed upward by the relentless creep of ancient tree roots whose leaves fall amongst cigarette butts, human turd and rusty needles. Her walls are wrapped in ivy, graffiti and the sharp stench of piss.
She’s Half-feral and half-lazy as shit, a city full of guys that are girls, girls that are guys and everything in between. A place where for every homeless person is a house with a ‘Love is Love’ sign sprouting from the security of a fenced in lawn, a visible line marking where compassion ends. Conflicting symbols of a cities clash between phony-ass “woke” cultural and systemic failure.
Portland is a city where beauty and decay share a damp quilt and a smoke on the curb. A surreal, dreamlike place that taught me more than a few lessons and offered a mirror I wasn’t always ready to look into.
Divided by the Willamette but stitched together by bridges and rain, each bank blooms with neighborhoods pulsing at their own frequency, creating one giant, tangled web of cafes, dive bars, food carts, bookstores, sex shops, strip clubs and yoga studios.
But for me, Portland was more than all of this, she was also a revolving door, a place I kept falling into and stumbling out of, as though she were a cosmic waypoint along a route I didn’t know I was on. A quiet accomplice of the universe, luring me back into the unsolvable game of life. Whether I had drifted aimlessly, or was pulled by the invisible currents of destiny mattered not, what mattered was that she beat the hell out of me. I would fumble through her, convinced I had what I needed, only to find pieces i never knew existed scattered about. Each return offered another lesson tucked beneath the moss and rain, one I hadn’t even known I was missing.
I first arrived in Portland when i was 24, just one day after a suicide attempt that followed four months on the Pacific Crest Trail. And just a few days after arriving, as if i didn't feel weird enough, I left for my cousin’s funeral, who had, unlike me, succeded in committing suicide. Leaving me utterly flailing in the deep end, drowning in confusion and deepening the sense that something beyond me was in motion.
That journey hadn’t just left me in a daze, it stripped me down entirely. I felt hollow, like everything I thought I was, had slowly been unraveled along the trail. Stepping into Portland felt like having just awoke from a very real-feeling dream, only to realize the dream wasn’t in fact a dream, rather it was and always had been my life, only now I was seeing it through a totally different lens and now realized there was no waking up.
I returned at age 26, after an emotionally testing winter ski bumming in Breckenridge, Colorado, i had been longing for love so much that i was willing to exchange my life for it. As “chance” would have it, that love happened to live in Portland, where i returned for a short, two-month stint, drunk on the idea that love will solve my problems. After a humbling escapade through Europe, I ended up in Chicago with my tail between my legs swearing never again.
Age 27, year 2020, We all remember 2020 don't we? I boarded the plane for Portland just as the pandemic began to unfold, in fact, Trump declared the national emergency speech just as we were taking off.
Perhaps it was an omen, one I failed to recognize at the time. After all, I hadn’t wanted to move to Portland; I was walking my lover’s path, not my own. Naturally, it didn’t take long for it to unravel. Six months later, we were kindly evicted.
With nowhere else to go, we ended up in a tiny, rustic shack back in Breckenridge. No running water, no electricity just a wood stove and a roof over our heads.
From there, we drifted to Flagstaff, where a gracious friend let us sleep in their woodshop. And finally as winter rolled around back to Wisconsin to wait out the cold,
Talk about a spank in the butt!
Alas, enough money was saved to buy a car and by next spring heading west once again to,,, SURPRISE! Portland. Though not led not by personal desire, but rather by the same force that had guided so many of my moves:
love.
For the fourth and final time, I found myself back in Portland, once again signing a lease in a city I didn’t even want to be in, and once again, within five months, evicted.
Over the next year and a half, I bounced around: first living with one of my best childhood friends in the St. Johns neighborhood for six months, helping them renovate and move to a new home in Yacolt, WA; then six months living out of my car, Ravie, using Wallace Park as my homebase, then six months in Ladd’s Addition, with a roommate whose venom still lingers in my blood. Eventually, I landed gracefully in Goose Hollow neighborhood, in what would become my final year in Portland.
And so what, who cares. I asked myself “why am i even sharing my chronological odyssey with Portland in the first place?” “WHO GIVES A SHIT?”
Maybe it’s just my ego wanting to be seen immature and out of control under the delusion thinking this nomadic life is noble and cinematic.
“everyone! look what i went through!”
And perhaps that’s true.
Or maybe it’s not.
Maybe it’s me entertaining, in an abstract way, the idea that a city is just as “human” as you or I in ways that our puny, material world minds cant even begin to conceptualize. That Portland, isn’t just piss-soaked sidewalks and street lights, but consciousness, a wounded soul or a sentient pulse manifested in a language we’ve forgotten such as the smash of your car window at 2 a.m., the screams of addicts echoing through alleys and the caws of a murder of mangy crows on the telephone wire. In her own twisted way, she was always communicating with us and teaching us lessons.
And the relationship you can have with her?
It’s real. Just as real as one with any human. Just as raw. Just as complicated.
If that’s true, then Portland wasn’t just a city to me, she was a teacher. A harsh one. A mirror. One who unapologetically held me accountable for becoming who deep down I knew I wanted to be. Every flat tire, spiraling thought loop, broken window and parking citation wasn’t a punishment nor was it just some random inconvenience.
It was initiation.
An invitation.
Not because I was special. But because that’s how transformation happens. It isn’t neat or linear. And that pain? It’s not mine. That’s the thing. Pain feels personal, but it’s not. It’s shared. Archetypal. Woven into every human being’s contract.
We all get dragged through the mud. Just in different ways. Grief. Doubt . Identity collapse. Existential dread. These aren’t unique to me. They’re universal patterns, ancient currents we’re all dropped into at some point. The monsters we meet look different, but the battle is the same. And for me, those monsters happened to wear the face of a foggy city with graffiti and vegetation bursting through the cracks in the sidewalk.
Looking back now, Portland broke me. But she also gave me the space to put myself back together. She trained me, mercilessly. Beat the hell out of me with metaphorical brass knuckles and steel toe boots. Sometimes it felt like Ender’s Game, like my life is a simulation designed to push me past who I was, fast and without explanation. And Portland played every role: the battlefield, the enemy, the mother, the mirror. But her cruelty had a strange kind of wisdom to it, like some old mystic crone leaning against the bricks behind a dive bar, smirking, reading your thoughts and talking to you without saying a word “Ohhh, you thought you knew what was coming did you? You thought you were ready ehhhh??,” but before you have a chance to ask any questions she disappears into a half drank pint of Mt. Rainier.
And so maybe cities, like people, carry frequencies and Portland is just vibrating ahead of her time.
She gets broadcast to the world as chaos: burning dumpsters, shattered windows, the National Guard rolling in, all neatly packaged as “the news,” as if those reporting know.
What a joke!
We think we understand ‘the way’ based off our tiny fractal of existence on this tiny speck that we call Planet Earth when most of our civilization still believe someone other than themself is going to bring them to salvation.
And so maybe the chaos is the wake-up call. Maybe she’s trying to stir something ancient in us, something sacred we’ve forgotten.
Like she’s saying: Wake up, you idiots.. This is the result of your way
So yeah, I guess this is my love letter.
To Portland.
To the teacher hiding in plain sight.
Thank you.
