In five minutes and eight blocks, contrasts assault me.
At busy Burnside and Sandy in Portland, a young man holds a sign as tall as he is. A photo of an aborted fetus covers most of the sign. Above the photo are the words “Obama-nation.” A few blocks later, nature offers a visual antidote: a rainbow arcing north to south against overcast skies.
Nearby, a car dealership catches my eye for the first time. It’s selling all-electric cars that remind me of water bugs. Too bad the dealership didn’t open next to the one I soon pass on NE 12th. The one peddling Hummers.
Driving east from Portland on Interstate 84 is humbling. I’m but an insignificant speck squeezing between the Columbia River’s slow-flowing expanse on one side and cliffs on the other.
As I cross the Cascade Mountains and encroach upon the high desert at The Dalles, a question arises: is there anywhere else in the United States where the geography changes so radically in so short a distance?
The transition from lush green to withered brown and black is like entering an alien world. The basalt rock escarpments and deeply furrowed hills look impenetrable. One doesn’t pass through but over them, as if traversing a two-dimensional painted movie set.
The panorama is too grand, too sweeping to let a Florida flat-lander like me truly enter. (I venture that most true-blood Oregonians feel the same way.)
Even when I stop and feel the ground crunch beneath my feet, dip my hands in the cold river as I did today, it doesn’t feel as if I belong.
They say that after death people live on in others’ dreams. But I rarely dream about my mother, dead for five years. I much prefer how she materialized last month at my forty-year high school reunion in Winter Park, Florida.
Several friends told me how much they liked my mother. Who could blame them? She swore a lot, was intensely curious about their love lives, and freely dispensed advice on how to attract girls. By the time we were seniors, she let us throw back a beer or two. Better than driving around town and drinking, she’d say. Read More
Tonight on NPR’s “Philosophy Talk” I heard this declaration referring to death: “The world as I know it will cease to exist,” and then there will be nothing.
When I heard this somber reminder of what everyone fears, I was in the car on the way home. I had been drinking wine at a downtown hotel with my youngest brother and his wife, in Portland from Florida for a criminal justice conference.
They talked of a friend, also at the conference, who had miraculously survived kidney and brain cancer during the last dozen years. They described how battling the disease had changed his outlook on life — for the better. Read More
I’m glad the presidential debates have ended. Too much anxiety watching them, though they served their purpose in educating people about both candidates.
After the second debate, I read that eighty-six percent of Fox News viewers believed John McCain had won. That statistic may have been the second-most revealing element of the entire campaign. Objectively speaking, Barack Obama would have had to poop his pants and run awkwardly to the restroom to lose by that margin. So the number helps define the ideological zealotry of the Fox crowd and the blind irrationality it causes. Read More
One of my two world-trekking pilot friends unknowingly gave me a gift. It’s an image that flashes to life at odd moments. I don’t know if the image bears any resemblance to what he saw, to what he experienced on many long journeys.
He told me of flying 747 cargo jets to points scattered around the globe, including many in Asia. His aerial route to and from Europe followed the overland route Marco Polo took to China.
I see lights pinpricking vast expanses of darkness, a trail from seven centuries ago that only explorers can make out, even those looking down from great heights. He didn’t say but I’m sure he pictured himself at ground level all those years ago, leading a caravan somewhere faraway he’d never seen.
He looked familiar. Not his rumpled clothes. Or red blotches mottling his face. The man on the sidewalk reminded me of a close friend’s older brother. So striking was the resemblance that he could have been a down-trodden other brother.
The guy looked done in, as if he’d recently had but lost the financial wherewithal to take care of himself. The world I inhabit appeared to have fallen away, leaving him not yet a street person but auditioning for the role.
Was this stranger a harbinger for those of us living comfortable lives? With the economic news growing more dire and predictions of calamity gaining credence, are we getting pushed to the edge he’s toppled over?
As we passed each other, I was happy our eyes didn’t meet.
At the Portland Farmers Market, roasting chilies perfume every cool breath. Autumn has thinned the crowds but not the produce. Along with poblanos, I buy what may be the year’s last peaches, several varieties of apples, shiitake mushrooms, and more.
The once-ubiquitous volunteers registering people to vote are nowhere to be seen beneath the canopy of blue sky and elms. A sign perhaps that the presidential race is over, except for the vile death rattle from the McCain-Palin attack machine.
People look happy to be here, more so than usual. And why not? We’re surrounded by nature’s bounty on a classic fall day. But I sense something else, something more uplifting, even with the economy gone to hell. Read More
Each morning I obsessively pore over information about visits to Cracked Window. Not that the number is large, though this offbeat post about a bear campaigning for Barack Obama attracted more than ten thousand because The Atlantic magazine’s Andrew Sullivan linked to it.
I’m curious about what gets read how often — which posts resonate and which don’t. What’s also intriguing are keyword searches that lead to my posts and the countries that blog visitors live in. Read More
Four street scenes all within fifty yards of NE 15th and Fremont, expose Portland’s big beating quirky heart:
The first to catch my eye in a thirty-second span is a hand-painted sign on a rickety weathered fence: We Love People. Another sign, this one on a post outside a Starbucks, had read: No Skate Boarding. Someone has erased the “N” and inked in “G.” Sauntering past is a young woman dressed as if winter’s arrived, down to a woolly hat with fluffy flaps and rabbit ears that are pink inside. The finale is a can collector pushing a grocery cart laden with the day’s haul. He belts out a soulful song, though his jolly mood appears artificially induced.
Despite the rain, my day suddenly looked brighter.
I’ve made it halfway through a movie that uses my childhood home on a Central Florida lake as a main setting. One of my brother’s bought the DVD after I learned of the film and wrote about it.
So far it’s like glancing around a museum I visited a long time ago, a familiar building containing exhibits I don’t recognize. I choked up a bit at the first glimpse of the living room, a room I haven’t seen since 1970, the year my family moved out while I was away at college. But my notion that I’d be sent hurtling back and experience wave after wave of bittersweet nostalgia isn’t materializing. Read More
My morning email trek began with discovery of a story that pushes aside all the world’s troubles. Even with NPR blaring about economic travails and bitter presidential politics, I was transported to the East Oregon mountains and into a stranger’s childhood memory.
The 1,004-word evocation of a father’s love for his son isn’t a story one expects to find on a web site devoted to the Portland restaurant and food scene. Maybe I’ll reread “Smoke Follows Beauty” during tonight’s debate to remind myself of what really matters.
After closely following the mainstream media’s superficial coverage of the presidential campaign, I’m not surprised that much in Rolling Stone’s damning new portrayal of John McCain’s life and career isn’t widely known.
The piece feels like a hatchet job but only because the sheer volume of negative information is so shocking. I’ve read some of it elsewhere but mostly in bits. To see it aggregated in a single piece is jaw dropping. Read More
