Portlandia, revisited

It seems a little better now, more or less...

Once in awhile, I like to take a road trip by myself, even if I have to stop every 90 minutes to make sure I don’t drive my Miata (nine years old, 44,900 miles—real old dude mileage) under a semi, as well as for other 64 year old guy reasons. I decided to drive up to Portland to see my kids.

I moved to Portland in October, 1983 to go to work at The Oregonian. My ex-wife was from Oregon, and I was very interested in living in a western state with good fly fishing. I constantly amaze myself with my requirement that fly fishing be close by, and how many major life decisions I make with fly fishing as the central organizing principle.

It’s as good as any other criteria I can come up with.

“We can’t stay there. There’s no fly fishing nearby.”

“I can’t do that. The salmon fly hatch is coming off then.”

And so on.

I never lived the Cool Portlandia Experience, really. I lived in suburban Beaverton and Cedar Mill for the 28 years I was there. When I moved to Portland, it wasn’t remotely cool at all. Portland then was a late-stage extraction industry casualty. They had cut down a lot of the trees, Big Timber was exiting, and it was transitioning to a high-tech Mecca. Portland was pretty down on itself in 1983. I was 22, so it was all good, in the way that it’s all good for many 22 year olds.

Portland then was an urban design playground, a preservationist’s fantasy. There was a smugness to Portland back then that existed way before I got there, but they weren’t wrong, in a lot of ways.

I became interested in Portland in 1982 or so. I read David Halberstam’s Breaks of the Game, his epic account of the 1976-1977 Portland Trail Blazers NBA championship run. Then I read an article about Seattle’s vibe in Esquire around then. Having lived the Midwest Lifestyle © most of my life, I was ready for something more exotic.

Plus, they had the fly fishing.

Before I accepted a buyout at The Oregonian in 2012, I was planning to move into the Pearl District or South Waterfront (of course, by then I had delusions of coolness at 51). One guy decided he didn’t like me anymore, so my life changed dramatically, and I left for California, which all cool people wind up doing. Ahem.

OK, not all of them.

Sadly, I came to California under tragic circumstances. My good friend Rex Babin at The Bee had died, and I was asked to come down to replace him as editorial cartoonist. I started at The Bee on January 2, 2013.

The first thing I noticed was Sacramento had a distinct skunk aroma, and their little carcasses littered my commuting route. Oddly, I haven’t smelled that since I moved here.

I saw that Sacramento was in early stage Portland aspirational mode, maybe the way Portland was in about 1990—lots of potential, pleasant, easy to get around, nice people, and, on average, 56 degrees warmer than PDX on any given day. My shoulders and hair were continuously wet from Portland weather for 28 years, so it was good to exchange that for needing to use lotion on my feet to keep the white spots from the sun at bay.

Sandals, you know. That’s what Californians wear. And shorts. I used to be kind of a clothes horse in Portland, for some reason I am now at a loss to explain. I was the only guy in Armani on Broadway. When I came here, I ditched all of that stuff and now can barely be troubled to wear a loincloth and a knife in a sheath.

One issue I had with Portland weather was the fleece temperature differential equation. If it’s 63, you are just fine in your fleece. If it moves up to 66, you’re uncomfortable. Portlanders knows this.

I go back to Portland every six weeks or two months or so. At first I missed Portland desperately, and thought I was going to eventually move back. I still can’t rule it out, exactly, but I’d probably try to bi-locate.

When it’s not the rainy season.

As I would go back and forth from Portland, I could see it was getting better and better since I left, generally. Maybe my departure led to a renaissance. Great new restaurants, watering holes, coffee shops, and infilling of neighborhoods that had seen better decades.

Then came the pandemic.

The homelessness situation had gotten horrific, and city leaders seemed paralyzed. A once vibrant downtown had turned into a Blade Runner montage of graffiti, garbage, and abject human suffering. You could also, Portland leadership decided, buy drugs right out in a no-police zone.

That was a mistake, right? It was.

Portland as I knew it seemed like a three-legged dog. It got around, but barely. The neighborhoods fared better than downtown, which now felt unsafe, dystopian, deserted—abandoned is the word I’m looking for here. I recall being in the Paramount Hotel on Director Square over the Christmas holiday and if I saw five people walking around, that was a capacity crowd.

In 2020, after the George Floyd police murder in Minneapolis, protests erupted around the nation, and Portland seemed especially hard hit. The Trump Administration had sent in federal “police” without name tags to attempt to stabilize the rapidly deteriorating situation. The trouble was confined, actually, to about an eight block area around the Mark O. Hatfield Justice Center and surrounding blocks.Fox and Friends made sure that this scene was what you got to watch, and Trump hammered on Portland as scapegoat for weeks.

After a stretch of this, Gov. Kate Brown called her friend, Vice President Mike Pence, who she knew from the National Governors Conference. Brown got Pence to dial it back, the nametag-less gestapo left, after killing an innocent man.

But Portland’s reputation was in tatters. The Rose City became the poster child for Fox News hysteria/libtardism run amok.

Of course, that’s not precisely true. Media narratives rarely are. Portland friends would post beautiful scenes of Portland’s waterfront and mock the perception. But something was wrong, anyway, Trump or not.

Before I moved to Sacramento, I would watch Portlandia and view it as a comedy. Trump and friends tried to turn it into a documentary.

To calm myself down after Trump’s election, I started watching Portlandia again.

Like, every single one. Multiple times.

I saw this as a thumb-sucking exercise more than anything. Comedy, familiar scenes and locations, characters I felt I almost knew, and some I actually knew: Sam Adams played The Mayor’s assistant, for example, and I was friends with Pat Boyle (Pat Mann), and she was in a lot of episodes as a tv news reporter, a city commissioner, a perplexed neighbor, you name it). There were other familiar faces and acquaintances as well.

I would watch Portlandia as some sort of well-written home movie, searching for a touchstone that would calm me down, even a bit.

On this trip to Portland, I was shocked. Not that it was bad.

It was good.

Downtown on Memorial Day Weekend, there were thousands of people walking on the sidewalks, and there were hundreds milling about in the Park Blocks, even at night.

This is not to say that Portland has cured its problems. It hasn’t. The city is facing a series of extremely difficult budget cuts and unpleasant Hobson’s choices that are going to hurt, badly. But I saw a little flower poke up through the cracked cement that I hadn’t seen in five years, and that’s not nothing.

I did a Portland Tourist Day, and maybe that was mitigating. I went to Jake’s Grill with my son and his friends, the Pittock Mansion and the Portland Rose Garden with my daughter, and, the night before, my oldest son’s concert somewhere in North Portland. Oddly, the weather was ideal, 72, clear, with the familiar brilliant light quality.

Portland has transitioned from a fun little model railroad city to a real big city with real big city problems, ones that every major city faces in the United States. To blame Portland’s problems solely on Portland itself is a misplaced emotion; there is a federal role to help these places, and it just hasn’t stepped up. Under Trump, it won’t get better. If billionaires are getting a tax cut to the tune of $4.5 trillion in the “big, beautiful bill” as Trump and his minions complain about Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or any of the other dozens of major cities in the United States, that’s intellectually dishonest.

Trump intellectually dishonest? Huh. If Trump asked Congress to spend as much on our urban centers as he’s spent gold-plating the Oval Office with tacky geegaws, they’d be fine.

If I ever met Trump, I’d tell him about Oregon Sen. Mark Hatfield, who was chairman of Appropriations (as Sen. Packwood was Chairman of Finance), Rep. Les AuCoin, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, Attorney General Dave Frohnmayer, Sen. Gordon Smith, and a few other principled Democrats and Republicans who actually communicated civilly with each other back in The Day, which was, by my read, the 1970s through the 1990s.

Blumenauer, a seriously progressive Democrat who was also number four on Ways and Means, was chairman of Democrats for Hatfield in 1986, if I recall correctly.

Blue cities aren’t in the United States, in Trump’s eyes. They’re just crack dens, whore houses, and vacant lots waiting to be razed while the One Percent live in their gated communities. The GOP-despised Joe Biden spread the infrastructure bill wealth to a lot of red states and red congressional seats, whose members of Congress voted against the bill and took credit for the new bridge going up in their district.

Portland and other similarly affected places in America are going to have to go it alone, again. Now that we’re in Us vs. Them territory, everyone is going to have to step up.

The funny thing about Portland, Seattle, Denver, and a lot of other major cities are islands in a red sea, reviled in the rural parts of their respective western states, and yet those cities are the economic engines that drag the red parts along with them, rather than the other way around. No Intel, no Nike? No fancy Black Butte and Sunriver vacation rentals, either.

Too bad few people understand interdependence these days. It’s not cool in this Darwinian moment in history.

That road trip to reconciliation is going to way longer and more onerous than the one I just took.

Portland looks like it has, for a moment, started on its road trip back, however tentatively.

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Hey, YBs!: I didn’t have a ton of time in Portland, and for those of you who are saying, “Hey! You didn’t call me”, I’ll be back in a few weeks, and I’ll buy you a coffee. Maybe a car. That’s it for the moment, and I will catch up with you tomorrow. Have a great evening. —J.