Portland, Oregon - 1995/1996
Back in Portland, Oregon. Once we were here. my girlfriend found her apartment, and I stayed with my friend Chris. The trip itself was quite an experience. My girlfriend had a cat and after four days on the road, she couldn't wait to get out of the car and hotel rooms. We met my friend Chris, and the cat jumped out and went running into the woods behind Chris' apartment!! It took us 3 days to find her. My girlfriend wasn't happy, and it wasn't a good introduction to the city, but it worked out okay.
This time around, I didn't work in the parking lots. I was even luckier, as I found a job fairly quickly through a temp agency that put me in a Loan Processing Center through First International State.
Portland is a rainy, clean, flower kind of city. My memories is everything growing all of the time. Its constantly raining, and everything is always green and growing. So many different kinds of trees, plants, flowers, everything.
One of my most memorable memories of Portland is the time it rained so much that large trees began falling over. This is mainly because since it is always so moist, the roots of trees do not have to grow very deep. So if it rains too much, then the soil becomes SO MOIST.. that the lack of depth of the roots will just cause them to fall right over. At this time when we had a very serious lenght of heavy rains, this phenemenon began to happen. Trees were falling onto major highways, into apartments, landslides were happening. It was a mess, but quite interesting as I'd never heard of anything like that ever happening in my hometown in Michigan or anywhere else.
My other big memory is a very rare snowstorm that hit Portland. In other snow-hit cities across the States, snow is absolutely nothing. In Portland, they get snow about once a year and it quickly melts. Where I grew up in Michigan, we'd have snowstorms hit over and over and over, and sometimes as late as June. In Portland, maybe once every year or two they'd have one. Well, I was there when they had one. I was at my workplace, and they sent everyone home. The highways were so filled with cars that it ended up in one of the worst traffic jams I'd ever seen in the city. It was so bad in fact that people weren't able to get home before the snowstorm hit. Then when it did hit, the roads turned icy, and people everywhere were just abondoning their cars on major highways. I'd never seen such a thing in my life! On the radio they were telling people not to abondon their cars, but people didn't seem to know what to do. Anyhow, it was another mess. But quite interesting as I'd never seen anything like it in snow-filled Michigan and even rose, Minnesota.
Speaking of which, I should say something about my girlfriend. She grew up in Oklahoma, so for her to later live in Minnesota with snow was quite a shock to her. She always had the impression that snow would completely shut down a city. Having grown up in Michigan and having seen snow on the ground for six months at a time, the idea that snow would shut down a city didn't make any sense. However, once I lived in Portland and watched how a simple snowstorm could shut down a city, then I realized it was probably similar for her in Oklahoma. In her home state a snowstorm would shut it down. In cities like the ones in Michigan and Minnesota, you had so many snowstorms that the cities were always prepared with salt trucks, personnel, etc. to constantly maintain the roads despite the worse of conditions.
In general, I found Portland Oregon to be a very liberal city much like Minneapolis. The biggest difference though is that Portland seemed to have alot more hippies, deadheads, organic nuts, nature freaks, and the like. There were great mountains and trails right in the city. It was always lush, beautiful, and kind of a fresh mist. One thing I definetely remember though is that Portlanders say that only the tourists have the umbrellas, and thats how you can spot them. Locals never needed them, because it was only a mist. I found this to be true. Always a refreshing mist but without hardcore rain.
As another aside, anyone visiting should go to the Church of Elvis. I don't know if he's still there, but there is a guy with a cape who dances Elvis songs or country songs for money. He also has his own marriage license. His church in itself wasn't much, but he was quite eccentric and a local hero/celebrity.
The other great part of being in Portland is drives along the Pacific Coast. There are lion seal caves, the end of the Oregon Trail, and quie a few other tourist sites. All of which are quite spectacular. In general I found Oregon to be one of the most beautiful states in the US.
While living in Portland, my roommate Chris and I were planning to trips to undertake and new places to go. Unfortunately my girlfriend wasn't really as passionate or interested in this kind of thing as we were. My friend Chris found a job to work in the canneries up in Alaska for the summer. I spent my time researching the possibility of teaching English abroad. Eventually, I was able to find a recruiter conveniently located in Portland which specialized in placing teachers in Busan, Korea. Next journal page starts there!
You can email me at:
Wintermoon2@yahoo.com