So what brings you to Gresham?

"So what brings you to Gresham?"

The friendly man behind the counter of the Super 8 asked me this question Tuesday afternoon.

Caught somewhat off guard, I paused a moment.

"I've heard Gresham is...the place to be," I said, in as genuine a tone as possible.

He laughed. He didn't push the question. "Just had to ask," he said, revealing that he was genuinely curious.

Why indeed? A guy with an out-of-state driver's license and umpteen thousand Wyndham Rewards points probably didn't check in to this place very often.

In the eyes of my Portland friends, the suburb of Gresham---the expansive community on the eastern edge of the metro area, flush up against the Sandy River---is synonymous with "living death." Their image of this place, at least one time, was typified by a story a friend once told me, of being in urban Northwest Portland, and watching the suburban crowds pour out of the Tri-Met trains to attend a Billy Graham revival at the downtown baseball park.

"Greshamites," my friend said of them, with low-grade contempt.

Gresham is the big catch-all for many folk who come to Portland but who aren't part of the young hipster set. They are from small towns in Oregon, or other smaller cities in the Northwest, or California. They come here to work and live, or because they have relatives living nearby.

They represent the uncouth, semi-washed, semi-literate "real Oregon" that stands in such contrast to the image many people outside the Northwest have of this state, but which is intimately and painfully familiar to many Portland urbanites. Some get by on whatever dole they get.  Some commute in on the train and do the jobs of the city. They come back home with their bicycles and walk them from the train stations to apartment complexes. They dine at strip malls. They come in every single color.

Because of all this commuter and other income, Gresham---unlike Hillsboro and the western suburbs of Portland----has a reservoir of middle class wealth. It makes staying here a couple days quite easy.

It has a a wide variety of decent budget motels, fast food outlets, and other typical American businesses. It only took about twenty minutes on the freeway to get here, all of it in the opposite direction from the traffic jams I'd recently had to navigate.

It also has an Uzbek restaurant.

Tanishganimdan hursandman...bodomqovoq...