Portland

New Natural History

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November 19, 2011

Our near-downtown neighborhood buzzed all summer about the coyote. Facebook and blogs noted its daily (and nightly) moves with awe and fear. TV stations joined the chorus. It was if an alien had landed in our midst. The sightings advanced closer to our house, and one night my wife and I heard unfamiliar sounds growing […]

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Murderous Weather

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April 15, 2011

The Killing, an intriguing new TV show on AMC, ranks high on my edginess scale. The storyline is stark and disturbing. Grief of the victim’s family is palpable. The setting, gray and wet Seattle, adds to foreboding that permeates the show. But the ceaseless torrential rain and thunder remind me of my many years in […]

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Tragic Rerun

October 13, 2010

The flowers are gone. So are the candles, hand-scrawled notes, and other remembrances that for months crowded the sidewalk beneath a sign advertising passport photos. But the story they told is still with me, replayed every time I pass the intersection of NW Glisan and Broadway in Portland. It’s where a TriMet bus ran down […]

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No Hugging Allowed

March 19, 2010

Two years ago, I was waiting in the hallway of a small Portland high school. I was there to interview students and a teacher for a story. As kids milled about in the din between classes, many hugged each other. Some embraces looked like reunions between dear friends who hadn’t seen each other for years. […]

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Lofty Views of Home

February 6, 2009

How to feel insignificant and awed at the same time: 23 stunning satellite photographs of Earth, courtesy NASA’s huge archive. Las Vegas looks more inhospitable than Antarctica. How would my city, Portland, fare from this lofty perspective?

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Snow Lessons

December 14, 2008

Snow in downtown Portland is rare and scant enough to incite giddiness. Decades ago, however, blizzards buried the city. Doing historical research, I’ve come across microfilmed newspaper clippings from early in the last century that describe snowfall measured in feet, not inches. In some instances, the city was so paralyzed that food shortages occurred. What […]

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I‘m a terrorist. No doubt about it. I didn’t want to go over to the Dark Side, but some forces are too powerful to resist. The Obama Fist Bump nailed me, or OFB as we converts call it. It happened today on a Portland pedestrian bridge over Interstate 5. I was among throngs of people […]

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Raptured?

April 21, 2008

Portland being Portland, it’s not unusual to see pairs of shoes dangling from overhead wires. I imagine the fun some jokers had flinging footwear in the air until one of them got lucky. Somewhere in Northeast, where I live, I once saw high-heels similarly perched above the middle of a street, string looped around the […]

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