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Portland Days 1989
I live across town in the dark corners underground. My shadows follow me out into the light. The sun rises over the rooftops of high-rises and old Victorian houses. The center of the city expands to the West towards the ocean and North to the Columbia Gorge, land of the Chinook and East to Mt. Hood and the desert and South to the lower valley of the Willamette. The urban sprawl stretches out across green fields of once rich fertile farmland. Natives of the land stand down on 5th and 6th Street, their red eyes burning, bottles shattered on the sidewalks and back alleys. Other men, some young and some old carry blankets and bedrolls hanging out with their comrades on the fringe. Others push shopping carts scavenging for old clothes, food scraps and bottles across from Baloney Joes up the Burnside Bridge. The Willamette River runs North and South dividing the city in half. Down on the waterfront Doinysian eyes are on the lanes ahead. Jazz flows like river currents under the Morrison Bridge. The world is sinking , the ocean rising, the trees coming down. The rich are buying up the town. The Gorge winds blow in and the smog lifts for awhile.
I leave the condensed population of the Northwest section from cosmopolitan lifestyles to hobble down shelters for the homeless. From the west I touch the edge of the ghetto coming out on 41st Street. Poverty prevails in the Northeast section, houses boarded up, crack flowing in, drug gangs on the streets, another driveby shooting, bars on the windows, guns behind the doors for protection in the rough part of town, another kid gunned down. Out on Powell Boulevard it’s a long stretch south of Division out to 82nd Street of fast food joints, pawn shops, supermarket chains. The houses sprung up after World War II and before Vietnam. Loans were signed in blood and they’re still paying to live in America and breathe the foul air. The hot asphalt bakes in the heat, the gardens swallowed up by more pavement. The bus stops out on 122nd Street. Back in the Northwest I seek solitude in Forest park with dense hardwoods and conifers and ferns on Wildwood Trail following the rippling creek leading me to a place to sit still and breathe. Intermissions of sunlight appear in the clouded gray skies. Only joggers and nature lovers come up here and to think I’m only a mile or two away from the most densely populated area of the city. My real home is in the woods. I don’t live in the city; I only survive there in a cross section of races and nationalities with different perspectives on existence and sometimes nothing makes sense.
I catch a bus back downtown and enter Powell’s Bookstore of intellectuals of the literary world and beyond. I find old books and new books on medieval art, science fiction, how to, the children’s section to self help psychology, sexuality, books on geography, literature poetry, novels fiction non fiction, biographies and auto biographies. You can spend all day and night here and take breaks at Anne Huges Coffee Room and daydream out the window facing Burnside- watch passerbys or go back to the occult section and seek out a spiritual master , get absorbed in Shirley Mclaine’s Don’t Fall Off The Mountain, read about the planetary aspects in the astrology section, read your horoscope, find the I Ching in the metaphysical section, read the Tarot, go back to the coffeeroom read the Village Voice and The Nation, about what’s the latest in American revolutions and abroad, read about the latest political scandal. You can hang onto the Third Rail all night long until closing time, drink another cup of coffee, read some prose by one of the latest contemporaries, go to the A’s and B’s, find Edward Abbey’s Resist Much Obey Little, The Monkey Wrench Gang or Bukowski’s The Rooming House Mordigals , Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Wendell Berry’s What Are People For. If I had enough money and time I’d buy all those books and go live in a cabin in the country and read and write the rest of my life.
I spend another afternoon downtown eating lunch in a deli, buying another used cassette tape in a record store, purchase another shirt in a second hand clothing shop, drink a few glasses of beer with a friend in a downtown bar, pick up a paper on the corner, buy everything but a dream. What do I really need? A sense of hope , a will to live, a mission to carry out, a destination into the future, a peace of mind in the present, a feeling without seperation or isolation, a place to be part of. I walk the downtown streets observing the theatrics counting my money dwindling away, knowing that I am not free from the working world of statistics equations and evaluations. The traffic keeps moving and the buses leave and arrive. I find my friends wherever I go. We share our visions and dreams exchanging viewpoints. Currents of electricity flow through us and we drink wine under the stars. I am a part of the juice that flows through all of this and I am anoynmous among the masses.
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Thomas Avery
(c) 1996