Canyon Road

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/65584

We call them the West Hills, and pay them little mind, except possibly if we're in a newfangled car that will tell us how just much gas it takes (a sobering amount) to roar up the steep slope, at freeway speed, from the tunnel to the Sylvan crest. But on maps they're the Tualatin Mountains, a rugged spur of the Coast Range blocking the way from the Tualatin basin to the valley of the Columbia and its deepwater ports. 

Time was you had to follow the Tualatin River to the Willamette, round about Oregon City, and then head north, past the Falls. It was a long trip, and Oregon City was in the pricey hands of the Hudson Bay Company. So in the 1850s the territorial government, with private backing by Portland powers-that-be, built a plank road, where the Sunset Highway is now. Then you could go straight from the Tualatin farmlands to the Portland docks. One in the eye for Oregon City and Hudson Bay. And probably the reason why I (and most of the rest of us) live here, rather than ten miles upriver at the geographically more sensible Oregon City. Meanwhile, Hudson Bay is quaint history, and Oregon City drifts into the past, a vision of Old Oregon, with a strange sunset patina to it: a vision of the pleasant small-town Oregon I knew as a boy.

Natural History

The rain, a thick boxer who never goes down,
sucks air for another round. The dirty gray sky

is a tarp tied down on a pickup load
of stained mattresses and plastic toys: the scraps

may flutter but nothing's coming loose. Maybe
there's work in Oregon. Maybe not.

A thrash in the river, like a snag but moving
slowly into shore, something huge

but invisible: a sea lion, or a sturgeon
striking at a school of -- something, that

spatters the water like black coins. Time
was we would gone down to the water

hoping to see wonders. Today we hunch
our shoulders and back off to the spine of the levee:

anything that hunts small helpless running things
is no friend of ours.


In response, not very obviously, to this Morning Porch post

Cyclops

"Do you speak Spanish?" asked the waitress.

They've seen me studying languages for years, writing out vocabulary lists, making flash cards, drilling myself in a dozen different languages. This behavior strikes them as bizarre, but endearing. I seem like a nice enough guy in spite of it. I'm sort of a mascot, at Tosi's.

"Well, I read it," I said cautiously.

"I can't figure out what this guy wants. I think it's Spanish he's speaking," she said, dubiously. I hesitated. "Go on, talk to him!" said Martha.

It was Spanish. He was a diffident young man, standing by the hat rack, smiling anxiously, ducking his head apologetically. My decades-old schoolroom Spanish took a few minutes to warm up, but we finally got going.

"He's wondering if he could work a couple hours for a meal," I reported. "He's traveling, on his way to visit his brother up in Washington. He doesn't have any money."

"I'll ask Tosi," said the waitress, dubiously.

It was the Sunday morning rush. Eventually he vanished into the back, probably to wait for another hour till someone had time for him. When we left Martha gave the waitress an extra five. "This is to buy that guy breakfast," she said. We both had a hunch that Tosi would feed him, at least.

Of course, we didn't know if there was really a brother in Washington state, though I thought there probably was: he was definite that he was headed for Aberdeen, which is not a place that someone from down-country Mexico would ever have heard of. Whether he was here legally was extremely doubtful, but that wasn't our lookout. He was a stranger and hungry.

The fact that he had no English predisposed me in his favor. Not from the border country then, which is hard and dangerous country, fertile in criminals: large disparities in wealth always brings out the worst in human beings, and I inherited a certain amount of my father's El Paso knee-jerk distrust of border Mexicans. But everyone in the border country knows enough English to ask to work for a meal. This was a Mexican from deep in the country, obviously. I never did entirely understand where it was he was telling me he was from: he agreed with my suggestion that it was near Guadalajara, but I had a feeling he probably would have agreed if I'd suggested it was near Moscow.

Must have been ten years ago. Nowadays there's always somebody in the kitchen who speaks Spanish. Tosi's son has learned a bit now, because if you're dealing with cheap labor, in the West, a bit of Spanish is indispensable. But in those days the migrants were mostly in the valley or over the mountains, working the fields. There were lots of them here in Oregon, but they were pretty invisible to a Portlander. Now there are whole Portland suburbs, and not small ones, that are predominantly Spanish-speaking.

Immigration is a difficult issue for me, one that cuts many ways. For one thing, I just don't want any more people in Oregon, period. Every new person makes the preservation of the things I love most about this state -- its wilderness, its slowness, its courtesy, and its tolerance -- more unlikely. Immigration accounts for about half the population growth in America generally, I understand: I'm sure it's far more in Oregon. People keep coming here. They keep coming here in spite of an unemployment rate rivaling that of Michigan. And although they're mostly people that, individually, I'm happy to have here, there comes a point when sheer numbers mean more about how people behave than any qualities of the people. People litter in their public parks back east, not because they're despicable people, but because people have already littered in them. One more soda can is neither here nor there: why get het up about it? And people drive fast and aggressively because everyone else drives fast and aggressively. Hell, I drove fast and aggressively, when I lived in Connecticut. It's self-defense. As people crowd together, more and more strangers, the various predators accumulate, the thieves and scammers and muggers. Strangers are both more numerous and scarier, and so you become suspicious and hostile towards them, which makes them all the readier to prey on you. And so it goes on.

So. All that. But. Hospitality is the point. Hospitality is one of those things I'm anxious to preserve. What do you do with a hungry stranger? You feed him, of course. You give him a bed and send him on his way with a full belly. When I was a freshman in college, reading the Odyssey, our professor was at pains to explain to us that what was really horrifying about the Cyclops to the Greeks was not his gigantic stature, nor his single eye. It wasn't even the fact that he ate people. It was the fact that he violated the laws of hospitality. That was a bit of an exaggeration, maybe, but an instructive one. Hospitality is, in most cultures, a cardinal virtue. It's one that's decayed sharply among Americans, during my lifetime -- possibly one of the most striking cultural changes I've seen, during my life, though I haven't heard it much remarked upon.

And of course, it's the most elementary kind of fairness. My people came here, hungry strangers, just a few generations ago. People were kind to us, gave us a meal and a job, even though we were just dumb Norskers, grinning by the hat rack without a word of English in our mouths. Now we're going to slam the door on people who come in the same way? Who can feel comfortable with that?

So I wind up -- without a position, agreeing with everyone and no one. Surprise!

In the Lord of the Rings the young hobbits ask Treebeard which side he is on, and he's a little puzzled to answer. He finally answers, cautiously, "I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side, if you understand me: nobody cares for the woods as I care for them."

Too Big to Miss. Autumn. Why I Hate the Republican Party.

Tosi's. Across the street from me is a billboard of a jaunty young woman, hands on her hips, staring up at a giant cock, with Too big to miss! lettered in italics above her. It's an ad for the Oregon State Fair. What's the world coming to?

To be fair, I guess it could be a giant hen. All you can see is its legs.

---

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...

Autumn, heavy with nostalgia. We don't usually have a Fall, here in western Oregon, the way you understand Fall in other parts of the country. Deciduous trees are a minority here. The fruit's mostly been picked. This is not so much a season of its own as a transition between the two real seasons we have, the dry season (July through September) and the wet season (October through June.) Any western Oregonian can feel it: the huge weather systems building out over the Pacific somewhere. Maybe next week, maybe next month: but soon, anyway, they'll come rolling up over the Coast Range, every week or two, each one bringing a couple days of dark cloud and pouring rain, easing off to a few days of showers and drizzle, and then maybe a bright day or two, possibly even sunshine, before the next one roars over us. It's like the breakers coming in: breakers of cold wet air crashing over the West Coast, one after another, all winter long. This is a quiet, in-between time, waiting for the first wave. We pretend it's not here. We don't want to jinx it. If we talk about weather, we talk about how the dark and the rain will be here soon.

It's the dark that most distresses outlanders. The rain, they've all heard of, and they come braced for it. But for weeks at a time the sky can be dark, dark gray: you go to sleep to the sound of rain and wake to the sound of rain. If you're going to read, even at noon, you turn on the lights. If you're used to the bright days of a continental winter, sun on white snow, it's enervating and demoralizing. I love it, myself: the gray layers of cloud pulled up over our heads like bedclothes. We're held and cradled by the sky. The long dreamtime. And then, you never know when a bright day will come. November, January, March: at any time the clouds can all roll back. The sun reappears, the weather is a soft, mild sixty degrees, and everyone walks out on the gleaming wet streets as if woken out of a deep sleep, staring at the new world.

---

Yah. Health care. I've been deeply disappointed by the whole asinine debate, and the bills shaping up in the house and the senate bid fair to do more harm than good. A weak gesture towards covering the uninsured, one real stride forward -- forcing the insurance companies not to discriminate against pre-existing conditions -- and then a dozen provisions that entrench the current stupidities of the system, digging us even deeper into absurdity. The somewhat more intelligent bill -- Wyden's, bless his heart -- is of course being ignored.

The debate and the bills under consideration have basically nothing to do with each other. It's surreal. To hear the arguments, you'd think universal coverage was under discussion, and some huge government health plan was being proposed. There's nothing of the sort even on the table. Instead, it's business as usual: "insurance" for normal health care -- which is ridiculous: "insurance" is for things like house fires, things you can reasonably hope won't happen, not for annual check-ups, dental work, setting your kids' broken limbs, and nursing care when you're old, which no one can reasonably hope to avoid. And this "insurance" is tied to employment, which may have been less stupid back when people stayed in jobs for more than a few years at a time, but now is deeply, deeply stupid, a huge burden on employers, and a nightmare for the unemployed. There's simply no reason for "insurance" to be our model for health care at all. People act as if there's some God-given reason why there should be third party in the health business between the consumers and the providers. The fact that everyone hates that third party, mostly passionately, should clue you in to the reality: there is no value added, none whatever, by the insurance industry. They're a completely parasitical growth. They need to be surgically excised, now, before they twist themselves even deeper into the healthy tissue.

So anyway. Here I am again, an unhappy but helpless Democrat. I hate what they're doing, but the alternative is even worse. As long as wealth is distributed this way, I have to vote Democratic, out of sheer commonplace humanity, so that people don't die for lack of food and insulin. The damned no-tax Republicans are forcing me to support a centralized bureaucracy that I hate every bit as much as they do. Thanks, guys.

It Rains

Sat this morning, with my massage blanket around my shoulders, hearing the rain rattle and hiss outside. My eyes were unfocused, a little crossed. Every once in a while, apparently of their own accord, they uncrossed and focused, and the room swam into clarity.

Rain. There are few things more comforting to me than the sound of rain. The only time in my life I've lived long without it was the five or six years we spent in New Haven. Even when it rained, in New Haven, it rained wrong. Great big fat drops that actually made you wet. It didn't sound quite right. It was dirty and intrusive. It made people anxious. They'd linger under awnings, peering out at it as if it was nuclear fallout. When I'd just arrived, I was sitting in a cafe with a bunch of other first-year grad students, and it was raining hard outside. Someone suggested we go, and someone else suggested we wait until it stopped raining. I laughed, thinking it was a joke. They looked at me. And I realized that I was truly in a foreign place, where what I'd learned as the rules of nature don't apply. Rain stopped, here. And sure enough, fifteen minutes later, there were only occasional stray drops. Unsettling. Rain as something you could actually avoid, like a pothole in a street. You could just go around it. I never got used to that.

Here the rain sings all winter. The sky weeping gently for all the sin and suffering below. It falleth as the gentle rain of heaven..

Carolee, who inspired me to resume sitting, asked me to tell her about the Pacific Northwest. It rains here, Carolee. It's a quiet gentle green country, and it rains.