TravelStream™ news feed for member mbgower on TravelPod's free travel blogs service http://www.travelpod.com/syndication/rss/mbgower en-us Copyright ©2009 TravelPod.com Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:40:44 -0400 http://www.travelpod.com http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mbgower/7/1240740000/tpod.html http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mbgower/7/1240740000/tpod.html#comments Travel Blogs http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/mbgower/7/1240740000/tpod.html Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:40:44 -0400 Taking Portland for a spin

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Portland, Oregon, United States

Sunday at 6am, I quietly dress and watch out the window for the next Max. I have less than 2 hours to finish my search for Beverly Cleary.

Yesterday, before a trip to the Rose Garden, Emma and I ducked into the main public library. It's a lovely building with rooms dedicated to history and music. Emma experienced her first card catalogue. They also had a very cool display of one-of-a-kind books, many of which reproduced text by Ursula Le Guin who is another (who knew?) Portland native. I've never read any of her stuff, although I did bring down a battered copy of The Left Hand of Darkness as my emergency travel read. It's such a coincidence that I took it as a sign: next trip here, Ursula Le Guin gets to be the unofficial mascot.

The library also offered up clues on this trip's Beverly Cleary scavenger hunt. The central library's children's section is named after her! The kids' librarian tells me Ms. Cleary served as an intern at the branch when she was a teenager, so the room was renamed in her honour. She's alive and kicking at 90, living somewhere in California.The librarian also mentions there's a park in the northeast, where the books are set, with bronze figures of the main characters.

Last night I was dissuaded (though obviously not effectively) from taking this wee jaunt. We have a 10am flight, so Julie would like to arrive the designated two hours before time at the airport. That means we need to leave the hotel before 8am, so I've got less than 2 hours to catch the Max, find this park, enjoy the moment and retrace my steps.

I sprint to make the Max, but this is the edge of the fareless zone, so although I get there in time, I need to prepurchase my ticket before boarding. Max closes its doors while I'm madly punching buttons, and I'm already 15 minutes behind schedule.

I get off the next Max at the same stop Emma and I made on our first night when we went to see a hip hop retro at the Hollywood Theater. I was very slightly cautious that night, wondering what part of town would be hosting the event. Even at night it ended up looking fine; in the morning, it's positively pleasant.

The librarian was a little light on details of exactly how to get to this park from the station, so I need to ask directions a few times, but 25 minutes later, I'm standing at the Beverly Cleary Tribute Fountain, watching first sun on statues of Henry Huggins, Ramona and Ribsy the dog. Small plaques give quotes from each series, and list all her books, from 1950's Henry Huggins to Ramona's World in 1999. It's a quiet, gentle tribute to books that celebrate full lives lived in a small, quiet neighbourhood.

On the walk back, I realize that this is also where Emma spotted the Beverly Cleary School when we were bussing to brunch at Tour de Crepes last Thursday morning. It's standing on my right as I head for home. It's a nice circular feeling to this final experience, connecting the dots on our wayward routes around town. I miss a last sprint to the Max on the way back as well, but still arrive a full 10 minutes before 8am.
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Portland, Oregon, United States

Portland brings out my schizoid nature. One second I'm celebrating the city's enlightened philosophy, the next I'm ridiculing a shop offering "organic airbrush tanning." After a while, the number of hybrids on the streets here begins to amuse rather than inspire me. Am I a cynical optimist, or a happy fatalist?

Rain greets me outside, after I finish the amazing Dungeness crab Benedict at Veritable Quandary. Portland is notorious for rain, but this is the only sampling I get in our 5-day stay. The air tastes and smells like dust -- that indescribable sensation at the end of a dry spell that fills my being, on some molecular level, with a sense of minerals and metals infusing the atmosphere, not just present as the hard surface under my feet.

I seek shelter under the trees near an overramp. A homeless guy sits on the concrete wall there, and we exchange pleasantries about the blessing of the trees' shelter, before settling into a quiet regard for the rain and the relative stillness in the city.

Portland has a lot of panhandlers. My feelings toward them are even more complex than at home, where I have some sense of owning the problem and know where I can usefully donate money. Here in another country, I'm enough of a cynic to think that the only thing that giving away money will accomplish is to guarantee that the next tourist will also get asked for money, likely by the same people. But this guy is blocks away from the action. The only thing that passes this way is the Max. His jeans are patched. One of his uppers is separating from the sole.

Eventually I feel the next Max vibrating towards me, say goodbye to the guy, turn to leave and then pause. "Would you be offended if I offered you some money?"

"No man, I could use it."

He takes the rolled bill graciously, and I walk out into the rain.
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Portland, Oregon, United States

Conspiracy theorists are forgiven for wondering if I made this whole trip up. After all, the only photo is a peopleless shot of a painted wall. Our camera, despite freshly charged cells, has decided all it wants to do is flash a "replace batteries" sign at us. The crap shots of the stag picture are the only images we take until Julie arrives with her mom's Canon (and then we lack the cable to upload photos).

The same theorists might wonder where the hell Julie is in this expose. Does she even exist? The impetus for this trip was Julie's conference with the American Society for Indexing. I've been if not forbidden then certainly discouraged from discussing this society or their conference, because it is almost impossible to mention them without thinking of something funny to write. Personally, I think indexers are predominantly in the same camp as Julie -- they are highly educated, detail-obsessed women who have some self-awareness that their field is obscure and may seem arcane. There's even a good spark of fun in a group that adopts the kohlrabi as its official vegetable (because like an index, no one knows what it is, or what to do with it).

But Emma and I still take some merciless fun identifying the indexers when we enter the lobby of the hotel. There are three conferences going on here at the moment: the US Fencing youth nationals; some Intel chip design think tank, and the indexers. Only one of these groups is composed almost exclusively of grey-haired women with glasses. The odd thing is that without stretching things too much I can draw parallels between these conferences.

Information management and retrieval is the critical challenge for the Internet specifically and computer systems generally. Search engines are an associative response to this problem, but anyone who tries to google an idea as opposed to a phrase or keyword quickly encounters the limitations. Like youth fencing, lots of thrusts, few clean hits. Indexing is all about exposing information so that you can, with precision, hit the exact spot in a book or website you desire. There is simply not the chip power (or the sophisticated software) to replace the human ability to slice information in this way. Indexing and library sciences (or to use the business speak Information Architecture) suddenly find themselves the subject of boardroom meetings and group thinks. Who knew?

Julie may be the poster child of this group -- at least, they keep asking her back to do presentations. As such, she is effectively out of this narrative, either rehearsing her Friday morning powerpoint, or attending all-day workshops on taxonomy. Even our hotel room is something of an isolation chamber because my "vacation" is subsumed by a work deadline that causes me to spend most of my minutes at the Doubletree hunched over my laptop, and Emma is deep-sea diving in the ocean of books drifting into our room from Powell's. We interact with Julie at lunch and dinner and at Powell's.

During the night's assault on the children's literature section, I spot a Beverly Cleary Children's Choice Award at the bookstore, which makes mention of the author presenting it in 2002. Beverly Cleary is in high demand in our household. Her delightful, gentle books are so beautifully observed that I find myself reading on after the kids have gone to bed. I am currently a volume ahead in the adventures of Ramona. Cleary's first book (like all of them, set in her hometown, Portland) appeared almost 60 years ago, so we've all assumed she was dead, but if she was alive six years ago, who knows? The woman at the children's books info desk is pretty sure Cleary has mortally uncoiled, but a quick search shows that no, apparently she's still alive!

I take it on myself to go looking for Beverly Cleary, as a sort of tribute to my wife, who is absent from the fun. I fall asleep humming my new objective to the Long Ryders' tune "Looking for Lewis and Clark."
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Portland, Oregon, United States

Saturday I abandon my family and the downtown shopping experience this trip has become, and stroll to the riverside.

The Willamette sambas north through Portland, dividing the city into east and west and laying out bridging opportunities for eager engineers. At 9:30 am, the west bank path is meagerly populated but the Eastside Esplanade, which actually drops onto floating paths along the river, is crawling like an ants nest. It's an impressive mass of movement; spandex attired couples pushing strollers pop out of the milieu occasionally.

The west path of the Willamette (emphasis on the second syllable as if it's a line from Rocky Horror, e.g., Willamette, Janet, I love you) has a swath of park the width of a cricket pitch along its length, while the eastern sliver scrabbles for space amongst road systems and wheezing old industrial properties. I'm reflecting on the oddness of a greenspace on the downtown side of the river when my subconscious is tapped on the shoulder. There seems to be more people on the path now. Hmm.

My thought processes don't tend to detect gradual changes in their surroundings, so I continue compiling my mental version of Portland's water front (sort of the nucleus Baedeker's that forms before I can do my journaling) until I realize that yes, I am now dodging more trundling entities. The bridge ahead of me is now teaming with human shapes too. The sound of a marching band playing Walk Like An Egyptian drifts downriver to me.

There's this great scene in a Warner Bros cartoon where Bugs Bunny is trying to question a long stream of animals about why they are fleeing in the other direction. Bison, giraffes, tortoises flash past without Bugs getting a word in edgewise. I have a similar problem here, although there's no Tasmanian devil on the loose. Finally, I mercilessly obstruct an out of shape guy labouring along, who wheezes that it's the March of Dimes.

I let him huff on his way and continue wading upstream until I pass under the bridge and get the path to myself. After the rush of people, it's very peaceful. Then I realize how much less peaceful this place would have been a few decades back. A sign (Portland is well-endowed in signage, most of it helpful) informs me that this was a four-lane freeway in the 70s before the governor gathered support to turn it into a riverside parkway. The picture of the old road system is horrid, a massive pretzel of concrete lanes from which one can imagine any number of cans flying out car windows to the neglected river below. Another sign illustrates the massive projects underway to redirect sewage away from the river to treatment plants. Coliform levels are half what they were 10 years ago.

The magnitude of relocating 8 lanes of traffic to create a park is such an unlikely endeavour that I get another one of those insight bursts that are the benefits of travel -- of removing from one's normal scope and ken. I'm as guilty as anyone of viewing my surroundings as static instead of seeing them constantly (d)evolving. My consciousness needs a lot of tapping on the shoulder before my attention is nabbed: hey, change happening here! It appears that even with the context of history and a new city around me -- even with the newspaper-selling streetguy laying it out for me -- my bias is to view things in stasis.

I met a business associate for happy hour after her work yesterday (great Peruvian restaurant called Andina) . Lori is a project manager for a non-profit education organization, but her real passion right now is her community south of Portland. She's working on an incorporation plan for the 100,000 mainly immigrant inhabitants. The overall vision is to bolster the development boundaries, increasing density in a contained core while freeing up the farmland to feed that population. They have the acres they need to be self-sufficient, and are working on the light transit plan to connect them with the Portland hub. We've both read Barbara Kingsolver's glorious "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and other variations on the 100-mile diet, but where I've merely expanded my own garden and frequented more farmers markets, Lori has seen the possibility of something more landscape altering.

Portland has as much political bunfighting as anywhere, I'm sure, but certain people here clearly have a sense of being able to get things done -- there's a feeling that change for the better really can happen. They can, after all, replace the onslaught of highway traffic with the slow march of Saturday morning walkathons.
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Portland, Oregon, United States

After two days of elk burgers and bleu-cheese-stuffed kobe sliders, my body is craving greenery, so I acquiesce to Julie's desire for dinner at the Blossoming Lotus. I was a lazy vegetarian for almost 15 years, but I still view the words Organic Vegan Fare as slightly ominous. A world without cheese is a sad place.

The gentle waterfall and "quiet please" signs on each of the wooden tables do nothing to ease my feeling of foreboding, a sense not shared by anyone else. "I feel very calm in here," says Emma. The menu is brief but actually sounds fine, excepting the nuts that pepper all the ingredient lists. The jury is still out on how severe my allergies are -- a few friends (and occasionally, my wife) maintaining I may be psychosomatic -- but the death potential isn't what I react to at the Blossoming Lotus.

First, I've suffered through enough forgettable vegan food to realize you really need to know what you're doing in the kitchen when you reject the crutch of all the animal byproducts that can elevate an okay dish to something enjoyable. Second, the whole uncompromising attitude of some vegans has echoes of fundamentalism. When I go to wash my hands, I need to cross a Quiet Zone protected by a series of floor signs reading "No shoes, no cellphones, no children." As I remove my loafers in order to practice basic hygiene, I can't help wondering if there's some video camera somewhere. Am I on Candid Camera?

I am unreasonably suspicious of the Blossoming Lotus. The Indian Bowl is excellent. I can feel the nourishment flowing out to my limbs. Emma and Julie also give their fare thumbs up, and Emma's branded another unsuspecting service worker in Portland "my new boyfriend." All the quiet signs are for the adjoining yoga studio, so maybe it's just vegan yoga practicers who have a weird problem with the Sound of A Man Walking on Carpets.
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Portland, Oregon, United States

Emma comes back from buying her coffee with no change from my $5 bill.

"What? I gave her a good tip."

We have a fun few minutes verbally fencing about the generosity of tipping with other people's money before settling down to reading in the cafe at Powell's.

We've been meandering around the city all day. Our gay concierge, after a prissy moment of uncooperativeness (maybe he thought I was hitting on him) became incredibly helpful about the best vintage clothing and record stores in town. We fueled up on yummy challah french toast and latkes at Kenny and Zuke's, right beside the hotel, then walked around and record shopped, ending up at Powell's again before going to meet Julie.

Portland's a nice city, and I don't mean that just in the sense of a fine experience. People we ask directions from, or just get in conversations with, are invariably pleasant. A homeless guy selling a street newspaper apologizes for holding us up when we end up chatting after turning down his offer to buy the paper. This guy, it turns out, will voice some themes for our trip. We have an upbeat chat about the economic downturn, about life on the streets. He has observations on urban planning. "Portland's getting it right. It's a model."

Later, after I get some smaller yankee bills, we loop back to try to find him and buy his paper. I've always liked the philosophy of these street tabloids. Written, produced and sold by street people, it's a great way to simultaneously give people a voice and a (meagre) means of income. "The Big Issue" in London is a damn fine magazine; Portland's 4-piece broadsheet is closer to the thin publication put out back home, but the connection has been made.

I never get his name, but the guy is as garrulous when we reappear. "Oh, I was thinking about you two after you left!" He then gives us a few suggestions and directions for places to go like the art musuem and the rose gardens, and we're on our way.

With Julie's arrival, we move across the river to the city's northeast quadrant, and our accommodations shift to the more commodious but pedestrian digs at the Doubletree Hilton. I miss the Ace Hotel's great selection of ecalyptus, lime and cilantro shower fragrances, but we do get a broad view back across the river from our 12th floor. The foreground is filled mainly with empty parking lots. Over five days, hardly any cars park there -- more evidence of Portland's public transit success.

The stop at the Doubletree is really just to toss bags in the room. We're back in Powell's gravitational pull in no time so that Julie can see the big Welcome Indexers sign on the marquee and walk in past the panhandles, who've adopted the strategy of writing their pleas on cardboard and silently holding them up to the literate customers coming out Powell's doors.

Julie quickly finds her way to the Rose Room, where all the kids' books reside. She's a collector of children's literature and goes into raptures at the wall of all the Newbury Award winners. I'd make more fun of the gasps of excitement from Emma and Julie over the next couple of hours, but hear myself also freaking over some discounted books by Neal Stephenson and Arturo Perez-Reverte. By dinner time, we've gathered three baskets full of books and haven't made it into half the rooms. Who says print is dead?
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Portland, Oregon, United States

The danger for a writer visiting a new locale is the easy generality. The challenge I face -- the temptation -- is to capture that defining quality which summarizes a place. Unfortunately, it's so easy to confuse insight with glib generalization. Confined to the few blocks of downtown, I'm in no position to offer any precise, accurate description of Portland. Which doesn't stop me from trying.

First, cars do not drive the city. Portland planners have suffered through a lot of productive meetings to get folks out of their Sport Utes and onto their bikes and feet. The free public transit throughout part of the city core, called the Fareless Square (which is more of a herniated polygon), is just one of many innovations. Along the river side -- sometimes floating on the river itself -- are bike and pedestrian paths. If you get sick of walking and want to hitch a ride home, GPS tracking on all transit vehicles allows anyone with a cellphone to get real-time information on when the next bus is getting to any stop in the city. The result is wide, clean streets with no grid lock and very light traffic. Maybe the interstate gets snarled, but the only thing I noticed about the freeway as we took Max in from the airport was that the train was travelling almost at the same speed traffic.

The second observation, more a physical discomfort I experienced than something I saw: Portland requires comfy shoes. Yeah, there's all that walking, but the real issue is the amount of standing that happens in record and bookstores. I can walk for miles in a day -- I thnk I did that just in the main Powell's bookstore -- but standing around and browsing the stacks is tortuous. Powell's has sporadic benches to ease the tootsies, and an in-house cafeteria where you can take up to 5 potential purchases and read. There's even a re-stack cart right by the tables for the tomes you decide against purchasing. But the record stores are large and merciless. Emma and I thought we'd hit the remaining 4 downtown music stores yesterday afternoon. My feet gave out long before I got through half the bins at our first stop, 2nd Avenue Records. "Ahh, my feet could stand sitting," I lament. Emma looks at me. "That's actually pretty funny."

Speaking of records, Emma has just emerged from the bathroom clothed and ready for whatever action Friday has to offer. She's opted to wear Julie's best shoes, so I think it's time to go flip through some more stacks.
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Portland, Oregon, United States

Beware the Sicilian curse. I'm not really sure if that's what you call it, or even where I ever heard it first, but I always liked the ominous sound of: "May you get what you wish for."

Emma attains her desire for a "nice cool plane" to Portland. I put on a jacket and it's still almost uncomfortable (which is likely how my mind wandered to how cold it would be outside the plane, and hence my last entry). The Arctic climate on the flight makes for a dramatic arrival in Portland, where the heat rushes at us as we step down the ramp (or should I use the awkward industry phrase "deplaning"?). It's 86F in Portland.

An effortless half hour later, during which I convert the temperature for Emma and bore her with an imperial versus metric diatribe, we're hopping off (detraining?) the light rail system and walking through the clean streets to the Ace Hotel. The big bike rack out front is full; cultured 20 somethings with laptops populate the lobby.

The Ace Hotel is an old office building renovated into an art hotel of natural surfaces and heady aromas. I've done enough business travel that it's a pleasant feeling tossing bags into a space that feels more like a friend's funky bedroom than a film set. The fire exit chart above our door is made from fabric, the little paths to the exits sewn in red thread. The wool blankets on the beds have stag heads (our room has an elk theme).

The hallways possess something of a Barton Fink atmosphere, but of a kinder, flame-free variety. The aromas come from the Stump Town coffee shop right off the lobby. We pass this as we head out the door to the first of what will be many visits to Powell's bookstore.

If you carefully bulldozed all the used and new bookstores in Vacouver and Victoria together, hired a contractor to connect them all, then got someone to come up with their own colour-coded, Dewi decimal system, you might have something approaching the size and scope of Powells. It takes up a whole block of Portland's downtown. Emma and I cut diagonally through it on our way to find food, and get enough of a gander to realize we should have brought a bigger suitcase for the flight home.

Finding food in Portland at 4pm proves slightly more difficult than expected since most restaurants close during the late afternoon. Happily, the microbreweries, which don't so much dot as coat the downtown streets in their multiplicity, all have happy hours. We plunk ourselves down in the vast space of Deschutes Brewery and soon I'm sucking on an amazing nitro stout made on the premises. The malts have been roasted such a dark black that the liquor has an awesome smoked taste that goes perfectly with the elk burger I order. Despite lots of tasty looking stuff on the menu, I feel this is the correct choice. I recognize synchroncity when I see it, and what with the hotel room decor, I announce to Emma that this must be some kind of stag night.

Emma is a good travel companion for me. She puts up with this kind of corny play on words, even occasionally laughing graciously at my attempts at witicisim ("The elk burger is medium-rare... I mean, I've never had one before!"). There's a certain rhythm people can attain in a conversation, especially when everyone can talk and is happy to be interrupted by more ideas and non-sequitors. She's enough of my daughter to carry this off with aplomb, and before we know it we've chatted our way into the dinner hour. We leave as the rush arrives.
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Aberdeen, Washington, United States

The plane breaks open somewhere over Washington State.

His first thought, once the shock of the cold passes, is that he's lost his pen. He's been meaning to keep a pen and notebook handy to write down those odd ideas about tambourines or morning glory or whatever before they disperse from his mind as fast as they arrived. He's actually brought a pen this trip and now it's gone.

It would be a good time to write something, not too long obviously, but a couple of snippets. He's sorry everyone's going to hear about his pancaked body, so maybe something light.

There really is so much beauty, even flapping away up here with his eyes streaming and fingers going numb. His daughter is somewhere, too. Maybe still in what's left of the plane, maybe performing her own hasty plummet. He'd like to smile at her, shrug a bit, signal 'What can you do?'

"Damn!" he thinks in a quick blast of grief. "No more time." And in the few seconds left his body and soul toss about so many recollections that he really is surprised so much has happened.. Even with the pen, even without this sudden end, he'd never have had the time or skill to jot them all down.

"I needed to be more succinct," he thinks.
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Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

We're hustling across the Vancouver airport in a bid to make an extremely tight flight -- which thank goodness is delayed by ten minutes -- when I realize we're encountering the first law of airports: an arrival gate will be as far as possible from the next flight's departure.

I make this problem worse by assuming gate 95 must be on the other side of gate 75. By the time we trace back to the carefully hidden hallway to US Customs, we have 15 minutes to make our flight to Portland.

There's a little bit of Uncle Sam in the Vancouver Airport -- literally. Vancouver has a whole section where you in essence enter US soil and get pre-screened for your flight into America. Being in Canada doesn't seem to make the US officers any more friendly.

We squirm in line as if we need to pee, watching person after person take up time removing their shoes. They do this not in advance, but just as they're about to walk through the metal detector. You'd think people would get the idea to take off their shoes without being told, but nope, there are small but cummulative delays, each one of which makes our chances of making the connection drop a percentage point.

In moments of stress I always notice odd details: a guy in front of us has on toe socks. The more practical detail I notice is that there are only 9 gates beyond customs, and we've still got 10 minutes before the flight leaves, so there's a good chance we can make the dash down what must be a short hallway. Emma's through the metal detector. She's got her stuff. Shoes in hand I move forward and...the security guard decides to let things clear up a bit before waving me through.

Now we're racing around the corner to get to the gate and... My God! The gates are in another building! We race down an escalator, along a people mover; Emma's starting to get asthma. "Just remember, this is fun!" I shout as we fling off the mover and almost wipe out with the deceleration.

As we're running, I'm thinking "This is crazy, even I wouldn't book something this tight! How could the system have done this!?" Up an escalator, into another cafe section, around a corner, down a little corridor, and finally! Here's gate E95. With no one at the check-in desk.

We've missed the cut off.

A few people are sitting around watching us pant and look forlorn. Emma wheezes her way onto the bench and flops down. "It's okay," I say, "There must be other flights today." I look at the board. Yep, one at 4:00. Hey, in fact there's one at 13:10. That would have made a lot more sense.... Oh.

I get Emma some water and a Happy Planet juice. "So," I say sitting down beside her prostrate form, "that wasn't actually our flight. It's the next one, in an hour."


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