After two nights I checked out of the Best Western and split Forest Grove. My date from the Grand Lodge had agreed with me that it was the only place worth staying around there. But I had business to take me elsewhere for a few days.
I headed into Portland on the Pacific Highway in mid-morning. I needed to do some work. The Starbucks website had said that the Safeway Starbucks in Forest Grove had wi-fi, but when I toted my backpack in there and asked the woman behind the counter about this, to confirm, she said "no" in a way that implied somehow an "of course not."
It wasn't hard to see why. The parking lot seemed half-full of people sitting in their cars doing nothing at all (something I do on the road sometimes, but I don't like it when there are other people doing it). Across the street on the main road was a Goodwill thrift store. At once I was remembering why I ever time I came to Oregon, thinking this is where I would live and make a life for myself, that I wound up fleeing as fast as possible, wanting just a breath of fresh air.
The Starbucks in nearby Cornelius, just one town in towards Portland, supposedly was a real Starbucks which would certainly have wi-fi. It was just a couple miles down the road.
At first when I rolled into town, and saw the quaint town sign with flowers, and the coffeeshop beside a bright tanning outlet in a modern strip mall, I felt like I'd climbed up one level of civilization. I immediately began to regret some of my earlier harsh take on the far suburbs of Portland.
But after I went inside, and tried to work, I immediately corrected myself again. The clientele weren't much different looking in demeanor and appearance that the ones in the Safeway Parking lot, the kind of people who if they have laptops are working on a resume for a part-time job they hope to get.
Working was futile. The woman behind me, at least 350 pounds, took out her phone and made a long loud call to make a doctor's appointment.
The young men behind the counter was very friendly, chatting me up in almost a girltalk sort of way that felt frankly gooey. I wanted to growl at him like a G.I. on leave, hey mack, just give me my java.
Later he talked to his equally half-way-to-effeminate young man across the room at times. Half the young men of that generation seem to be that way to me lately---in an earlier era, you might think they were surely gay, but if you listen to them, you can tell they are not, and if they were gay now they would be really effeminate.
I could have coped with those kinds of distractions, because I have before, but in the coffeeshop they were playing not the usual corporate-planned rotation of songs (someone is genius there in Seattle on this) but a bunch of pop hits, which really destroy my ability to concentrate. When they started playing Tom Petty's "Breakdown", in which that talented man repeats the title in many lines, I couldn't take it anymore. So I packed up my backpack as quickly as possible and fled the place.
Needing some mouthwash and sundries, I noticed a nearby Walgreen's (a standard bit of civilization which Forest Grove seems to lack as well), and hoofed it across the quiet highway, past some flower-laden island berms and bricks barriers that had installed by the city to spruce up the town in recent years.
It's a strategy that, were I in charge of planning for any of the little towns orbiting Portland, I would heartily adopt. It really does change the mood ones feels, on a daily basis, if it seems people give a hoot about such things.
It made sympathetic to the folks in some of these towns, among whom there must surely be a practice of taking a hard-line stance against the "Old Oregon" ways with some kind of local-fascist vigor, implementing such surface improvements to invite in new development as quickly possible, as if not only to enjoy such amenities but also to proclaim loudly to the world that "we are not the hicks in the next town over."
My trip to Walgreen's was successful, but it had the side effect of allowing me to see what Cornelius looks like, just a few blocks off the highway. The feel of modern civilization drops off quickly, just as if does on a large scale as one leaves the better parts of Portland and its prettier siblings.
No comments:
Post a Comment