Portland For A Getaway

I hadn't spent a night away from home without my family for over a year.  With my New York trip officially canceled I was feeling like all chance of escape was erased...so I arranged to spend the night at my mom's apartment in Portland.  The plans went awry a couple of times and it seemed as though it wasn't going to happen when it all fell into place.

Reconciling myself to life in a small conservative town in the bible belt of Oregon has not been easy for me, as you all know.  I have never met so many non-liberal, government hating, public school hating, homeschooling, gun toting, religious people in one place in my entire life.*  That's because I've grown up in such sheltered places as Richmond, San Francisco, Marin county, and Santa Rosa.  The Oregon of my youth was Ashland, where the hippies are rampant and the ranchers, though ostentatiously and proudly red-necked, are fewer.  I get tired of hearing public programs being dissed and hated.  I get tired of seeing Sarah Palin signs.  I get tired of seeing ball-sacs hanging from enormous trucks.  I get tired of  not taking the Lord's name in vain. 

I've been feeling particularly blue and lonely lately.  It feels like a day doesn't go by when someone hasn't pissed on the things I believe in.  I find myself asking why we didn't take a closer look at McMinnville before settling here?  I know it would have been difficult to find out the things I now know without actually living here.  I've guiltily been fantasizing about moving to Portland.  However, we can't afford to sell our house even though we can barely afford to live in it, and I never want to move again, and I've planted fruit trees I'd like to see mature, and my son LOVES it here in our little town in spite of the fact that he is still grappling with intense dislike for the religious factor here.  Even if we desperately wanted to move, unless we were willing to walk away from the house in a foreclosure and rent an apartment (which we aren't willing to do at this point), we will probably never be able to afford to move again. 

So we're here.  For better or worse this is the place we've landed.  The rose colored glasses have long since been torn off in the scuffles and I'm getting dangerously close to the point where I might flip off the next person with brass balls dangling from their unnecessarily enormous gas guzzling penis truck. 

So how can a non-religious, public school supporting, non-gun bearing liberal maintain her equilibrium and goodwill while not feeling a sense of belonging in the community she lives in?  I figured it out:  I must make more frequent pilgrimages to the progressive liberal mecca of Oregon.  PORTLAND; a leftist's oasis in a surprisingly conservative state. 

It was wonderful.  I went to Whole Foods and Trader Joe's to stock up on a few things and you know what was absent?  Not a single person was shopping in their pyjama bottoms and flip flops.  You know what else was conspicuously different from shopping at Winco in McMinnville?  So many fewer children per cart.  And you know what else?  The median sized person was actually median sized, unlike me who has become a fair representative of median sized in my town.  That's not good for either me or my town.  So many people were absolutely NORMAL sized.  Just average.  Not huge.  Almost no one wearing ratty sweats. 

Bicycles are everywhere.  I'm not sure whether there are more bicycles or more scooters.  The cars, in general, are smaller.  People on foot everywhere.  This may explain why the people, in general, are also smaller.  Cars actually stop, even when they aren't legally required to, to let bicycles and people pass them.  They stop for pedestrians! 

Portland is the most beautiful city I've ever spent time in.   Naturally there are parts of it that are less attractive than others.  It's still got a real industrial feel to it but mixed with an incredible culture of art.  My mom's neighborhood on the west side near 23rd street is gorgeous.  The streets are lined with enormous mature trees that create green canopies over the whole road so that the sun comes through in a kind of lush green light.

Lush.  That word kept coming to me.  The flowers, the city gardens exploding with flowers and green and with the cherry trees and the chestnut trees blooming overhead it feels so lush.

I walked to Powell's books and spent two or three hours there.  Powell's is where I go to pray.  To worship at the feet of literature and literacy.  To admire creativity and expression.  It's all there. 

Except for the only book I happen to be in.  The "Apron" book is missing.  That was disappointing.

Portland is not the most diverse city in the world.  In fact, compared to San Francisco it's pretty weak in diversity.  However, compared to McMinnville it's wonderfully full of different textures and colors of people.  Hopefully time will improve the dynamic in both my little home town and in Portland.  Still, I felt relief spending a couple of days in a place less Caucasian than the one I live in.  Spending my first 8 years of life in the East Bay in California made an enormous imprint on my young psyche and dramatically shaped my idea of how racially mixed a normal community should be.  I took it for granted that white people weren't a majority in the world until I moved to Ashland Oregon when I was 8 and a half years old.

Here is motivation to get the car fixed!  We don't use our car much and it's not generally a hardship for us to have it broken.  However, while I was letting down my guard and breathing more deeply in the city (funny, huh?!  Cause the air sure wasn't cleaner) I realized that it's important for us to spend time in Portland as a family.  It's only 35 miles away from us but may as well be a continent away with how culturally different it is.  It's taken living in McMinnville for four years for me to fully appreciate how drastically different the two places are.

If Max grows up to be one of those men with the two story tall testicle trucks who wants to secede from the union and settle in a compound with his own arsenal and have 7 children, I don't want it to be because he didn't see all the other possibilities for life choices. We do the best we can to temper the environment in which he spends most of his time.  My parents made many decisions that I might have questioned as I grappled with them as an adult, and now as a parent myself, but one thing that shines out at me about my youth is that no matter what else it was lacking, my parents filled my life with culture, with different religious views and art.  They took us to plays and concerts and in our house we learned about food, about real food, and my mom did art projects with us all the time.  She constantly encouraged us to explore our creativity and to ask about politics and religion and different cultures.  We watched educational programs on television and not too much else besides Star Trek and Three's Company.  She gardened and canned and so I also learned to appreciate how much work it takes to produce good food.

I lived for 8 years in the small town of Ashland, much less conservative than McMinnville is and my parents made sure that we visited the Bay Area every year and never lost an opportunity to provide us with more exposure to the arts and to music.  Now that I'm raising a son in a small town myself, I understand why we took so many trips to California and to bigger cities like Eugene and Portland and why we took trips up the coast.   My parents, whether they did it particularly for themselves or for us kids, provided a lot of breaks from our small town life to see the bigger world around us.  I need to do the same for Max.

I came home refreshed.  I feel at home in Portland.  The overwhelming majority of people there share my political and cultural ideals.  I like the quiet of my small town.  I do.  I love my house.  I love that I get to have more than 3 chickens.  I do have friends here in my little town too.  Not a lot, (and fewer soon as two good friends prepare to shut up shop to move to Portland), but I do have a few people I can be myself around without giving offense.    Around whom I can express my approbation of Obama's efforts as president so far without creating  social discord.


My mom said that I was, indeed, amongst my people in Portland.  It's a feeling I cherish.


So that was my weekend.  I have more trivial things to say about it and some pictures to share later, but right now I have to get my Monday back on track. 

How was your weekend?







*Not all the gun toters are religious, not all of the religeous people are public school haters, not all the homeschoolers are relgious, and so on.  But when considered collectively, every single direction I turn in is rife with potentially explosive conversations in which either I unwittingly cause someone offense or they cause me offense.