Riding with Willie and the Blazers: Five Star Uber Rating

Monday. It has been a nice spring for work. My contract of late has me commuting down to the neighborhood of Albina on the east side. The design firm that hired me has an office in an old brick building on N Russell Street, on the flank of the hill coming down towards the railyards beside the Willamette River.

This afternoon, when it was time to migrate home from the office, I got my iPhone and punched up the Uber app, and almost immediately after hitting "Request UberX," the app announced "Arriving Now."

I could see from the map in the app that the driver was just few blocks away, right in front of the inspection barn for Lyft, the competing driving service to Uber. He must have been hanging out there, as many drivers do.

When I saw the driver was so close, I  quickly wrapped up my conversation with co-workers, said good-bye, and carried my backpack down the front stairs and out the front door. The ground floor is a restaurant, but it does not open until the evening.  It still took about a minute for the driver to arrive. He came around the corner in a black sedan.

I motioned him over to the curb by the building, opened the back door, and got in the back seat . I wondered if I knew the driver, but I saw it was a driver I didn't know yet, an older black gentleman, large of build. He talked with the thick raspy accent that made me suspect he was a local, and it turned out I was right. He said his name was Willie.

How Portland has changed. Whenever I meet a driver who has been around a while, we always wind up talking about that.

Willie said he grew up on "Wilder Street". At least that's what I thought he said.*

"You ever heard of it?"

"It rings a bell," I said. "But I can't place it."

"Wilder Street. Right next the Lloyd Center," he said, referring to old shopping mall in the east side downtown.

I pictured that he must be talking about some small side street that I had not yet stumbled across.

The ride home was quick. As we came up East Burnside from MLK, we were stopped at the traffic light on 12th in the midst of a thick traffic that comes across the Burnside Bridge. He motioned at the dozen or so cars in front of him on the hill.

"See this," he said. "On Wilder Street, we played stick ball in the street all day long and didn't see this many cars. That's how quiet it was. That's back when a lot of people didn't have cars."

He brought up the Blazers, and I seized on the chance to talk about my newfound enthusiasm for the local sports franchise. How could I not be into them, since on half the days I commute to work, I traverse the front of the Moda Center where they play (and where "Birdie Sanders" was born, about a week after I started work).

"Amazing," I said. "I'm so into the Blazers. I never thought I would be, but I finally am."

The Blazers were a good sports story too, having been written off for dead and the beginning of the season because of defections of key players. Yet were now deep into the playoffs. Everyone said this was due in great deal to injuries to other teams, allowing the Blazers to get much further than their resume seemed to indicate they could. But that's all part of the game, as they say.

I waxed quickly on my theory of the NBA: "It's certainly the Steph Curry era, isn't it? Every era has a dominant player, and it's obviously him. Golden State is going to be a dominant team for a long time going forward."

"But they need a rival," I added, without letting a beat intercede. "They need someone scrappy that can rise up and beat them from time to time."

"Looks like it's going to be the Blazers," Willie added, as if finishing my thought, chuckling loud as we drove down Burnside. 

*It turns out I'm pretty sure he was saying Weidler Street, which is now one of the main traffic arteries through that district of East Portland. His having played stickball now sounds very impressive.