Recently I was emailing my good friend A---, a native Portlander who lives in New York City. He and his wife M---- are both old college friends of mine. He's a successful graphic designer. She's a successful artist. Three years ago they rented out their house in SE Portland and moved to Brooklyn with their young daughter to experience Gotham for a while, with the intent of eventually returning to Oregon. He told me in his most recent email that they are moving back to Portland in August.
It's good news for yours truly, since he is probably my closest long-time friend here in Oregon. I've felt somewhat alone without the two of them here. I've come to realize that this has been very good for me, in a way that hearkens to the spirit of state motto itself: Alis Volat Propiis. I felt as if this summer was my last chance to pull of this kind of personal Oregon bootstrap "all on my own," as I was when I first came here.
In my email, I warned my friend jokingly that leaving New York City can feel like "crash landing in the jungle" for a while. I knew he already was well aware of that, but I liked taking the opportunity to express a bit of post-NYC camaraderie with someone who knew exactly what I meant.
The phrase "crash landing" is exactly what came to mind yesterday after I drove the last few miles from beautiful, chic downtown Lake Oswego to my hotel off I-205 in Clackamas. I knew that Clackamas itself wasn't exactly the most inspiring place in the metro area, at least by my criteria. Nevertheless it was still a rude shock when I got there in the late afternoon.
The hotel itself---the Clackamas Inn and Suites---is actually a pretty nice place. I have no beef with it at all so far.
It's only a few hundred feet off I-205. As I always do on the first try around here, I missed the turn lane off the exit to get into the hotel parking lot and had to spend the next ten minutes looping through side neighborhoods for another opportunity to get there. It's one of the ways that Portland is like suburban New Jersey. The freeways and roads are such that if you miss your exit or turn, you are completely screwed for a while.
But that's not what gave me the rude shock in Clackamas. It was everything else around the hotel. When I first got off the freeway, I saw a sign for the nearby Hampton Inn, the budget entry of the Hilton group.
Hampton Inns are not my favorite hotel (I think they are overpriced for the value) but seeing one is usually a good sign for the quality of the surrounding neighborhood. But this is Oregon, and in this case it proved what is becoming increasingly obvious to me about Portland as a whole---it has some awesome, unique neighborhoods, both urban and suburban, but the drop-off from niceness into blecch is often very steep, almost in a Third World way at times. In this case, the "nice neighborhood" around the Hampton Inn extended pretty much to the edge of the parking lot.
It wasn't obvious at first glance, until the last stage of my multiple awkward left turns to get back to the Clackamas Inn's parking lot. I wound up circling through the driveway of the business next door---a 24-hour adult bookstore occupying what once had been a restaurant.
After checking in, I went up to my room on the third floor and looked out the window to the street below to survey my surroundings. On the sunny sidewalk in front of the hotel, right at the interchange by the freeway exist, small clusters of people wandered up and down the sidewalk. First came a muscular man, shirtless with multiple tatoos in a manner suggesting his body had been sculpted behind prison walls. He saw me looking at him from the third floor and gave me a curious stink-eye look.
Next came a pair of young women wearing mini-skirts and Goth-Preppie outfits in the style of streetwalkers. Then aimless punkish kids in small groups crossing the street to the convenience store, which upon close examination looked seedier than the average one---all of this within 100 yards of the busy metro freeway.
This is the kind of Portland culture that my native Oregonian friends detest in a manner suggesting shame. As I've mentioned, they have quite a different view of this place than does the rest of the country and many transplants, who see Portland "through Rose City colored glasses," if you will. To them, Portland is a high-tech hipster entertainment paradise (which it is, to be sure), the "place where young people go to retire."
Despite this, it's been difficult for me to allow myself to publicly make the same observations of the "real" Portland, since I am not a native (moreover is the fact that many of the native Oregonians I know seem to downright hate Colorado---go figure).
I remind myself that I've earned the right to speak the truth about this place, as I see it. Not that one needs to earn such a right, really. It's only in my head that the necessity for this right exists. But having granted it to myself at last, I seem to be making up for lost time.
The romantic notions I had a long time ago (and even recently) about Oregon and what I thought my life would be here are all long gone---burned away by the brutal sunshine of real experience. Once that happens, and the romantic patina is gone, there is no going back to the illusions one once had. It doesn't mean I like this place any less than I did. In fact the more-nearer-to-realism mindset I've achieved this time actually gives me greater empathy for people here. I'm less confused by what I encounter here, and thus my mind is constrained by far fewer stressful thoughts than it once was.
Really I'm not so different than the hipsters and other folk who came here hoping for some kind of life reboot. It's just a different kind of reboot---a personal one. But aren't all true reboots highly personal in that way? It took me almost three decades of bashing my head against Oregon Illusion to finally break through, but at last I almost feel downright comfortable here.
But just not in Clackamas, thank you very much.
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