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 where beauty and decay share a smoke on the curb, 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, symbols of a cities clash between phony-ass “woke” compassion and systemic failure.
A city so brazen in “fuck it” energy, in 2022 some guys opened the “Shroom House” an illegal but legal psilocybin dispensary on Burnside. No secret menu, no hushed exchanges, just psychedelic mushrooms in the display case as if it was a bakery. Despite it being illegal, it still managed to last just a few days before the authorities stepped in, but for that brief moment, it felt like the most Portland thing ever: part rebellion, part hallucination, all-in on chaos and hope.
But for me, Portland was more than all of this, she was also a revolving door, a city I kept circling back to, as if written into my story long before I knew how to read. 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 of myself scattered about i never knew existed.
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 flailing in the deep end, drowning in confusion and nauseous with the sense that something beyond my control 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 leaking out along the trail. Stepping into Portland felt like waking from a vivid dream, only to discover the dream wasn’t a dream at all, it had always been my life. The only difference was the lens and the fact I now knew there was no waking up.
I returned at 26, after a winter ski-bumming in Breckenridge, Colorado, tired not from the mountains, but from the weight of wanting love so badly I was willing to trade 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, then six months in 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 and eventually landing 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 me entertaining the idea that a city could be a sentient pulse, beating to a rhythm we no longer know how to dance to. Speaking in a language we’ve mistaken for madness and dismissed as the late-night scream of an addict echoing down a piss-drenched alley or in the smash of your car window at 2 a.m.
Perhaps she’s more than just a backdrop, but rather a cognizant vessel pulsing with thought and we are her neurons, firing through her urban brain via sidewalks and freeways. And just as we carry cells, living out quiet, unseen dramas, cities carry us and our unseen dramas. And in the same way our bodies respond to stress, cities too respond.
A broken car window, a dead battery, a ticket tucked beneath wiper blade. Maybe these aren't punishments or random inconveniences, but signals. Shocks to our system delivered through the material world from an intelligence that functions beyond what our senses conceptualize, following laws our minds can’t comprehend and our egos aren’t ready to accept.
Yet we take it personally, every trip-up on the curb, missed bus and stolen bicycle, when really it’s just a “personally” tailored fitness program for the mind, to break us, to provoke adaptation that will make us stronger and more resilient to the inevitable. Suffering is woven into every human being’s contract, an ancient current we all drift into. And for me, that current happened to flow through the middle of a foggy city with graffiti and vegetation bursting through the cracks in the sidewalk.
Sure she gets broadcast to the world as chaos: burning dumpsters, shattered windows, the National Guard rolling in, but maybe that chaos is just a wake-up call and Portland is just vibrating ahead of her time. Maybe she’s trying to stir something ancient in us, something sacred we’ve forgotten.
Maybe it’s through that chaos she’s trying to say: Wake up and smell the roses you idiots!!!
So yeah, I guess this is my love letter.
To Portland.
To the teacher hiding in plain sight.
Thank you.
