Portland and Seattle

Things I love about Portland: It’s so easy to use the public transit. When I recall Budapest, the difficulties we had around public transit made such a bad first impression that the rest of the city never really recovered for us. By contrast, in Portland I got on a bus and, without any advance preparation or going to a special place to buy a special card, was able to pay cash. (Money. It’s a thing, people.) The bus driver was most helpful, explaining that a day pass was exactly the same price as a round trip, but I could use it all day. 

And I already mentioned how over-the-top friendly Oregonians seem to be. Both bus drivers. The guy in the drugstore with a gray ponytail. The woman in the post office, who seemed overcome with pleasure in being able to serve me. Indeed, I was helped by everyone in Portland, or at least everyone was trying to help. At one bus stop, a woman started chatting so I asked her if the bus went to Forest Park.

“Yes it does,” she said, “but I wouldn’t go there if you paid me!” She warned that people going to Forest Park are always getting stabbed, and a friend of hers was so afraid of this happening to him that he left Forest Park as soon as he’d arrived. Well, for all I know this woman was on her way to the park to spend the day stabbing people. So I eschewed the wilder side and walked to sedate Washington Park instead.

Christina and her young son, Henry, were great hosts (her husband Robert was away so we weren’t able to meet him in person). We reminisced about our high school years, mainly me making sardonic remarks on the bus. (I suspect I am a bit wittier in Christina’s memory than in real life.) Because the weather was unusually hot for Portland—in the 90s F while we were there—Christina suggested the park, or the coast. But when I really wanted to spend the day exploring the city, she came up with recommendations for that too.

If one is a woman unafraid to shave her legs (how is this still a fear?), or if you are OK with nonconforming gender presentations, or clowns living next door, Portland is for you. And where else are you going to see a gray-ponytailed guy wearing a “Ross Perot ’92” T-shirt? I had a wonderful day. Once I’d sorted my errands with all the helpful people, I started walking through the Pearl District, where lots of warehouses have been turned into coffeeshops and so on. It’s probably even a nicer place to have coffee when the weather is more typical.

Barista, a nice place to have a coffee, is in this building.

The first shoe vending machine I have seen

Portland is divided into quadrants by Burnside Street running east to west and the Willamette River north to south. Northwest Portland is home to some gorgeous old apartment buildings. 

I used to live on Everett Avenue in Chicago, and when I saw a building called the Everett, I instantly wanted to move in. I kind of mean it. Portland is the first place we’ve been on these travels where I could imagine myself actually living. Not that it would happen; among other reasons, I’m tired of starting over and over in places where I don’t know anybody. But Portland just has that friendly, relaxed, you-can-bike-here-without-getting-killed vibe. Maybe it’s the legalized marijuana. We saw that advertised everywhere in Oregon and Washington.

Speaking of smoke, we hadn’t really noticed it, even though there were warnings about air quality and T. is asthmatic. I noticed when I walked up the Overlook Trail in Washington Park, though. Not because I smelled smoke or found the air difficult to breathe, but because when I got up the trail, I couldn’t see any mountains—not even nearby Mount Hood!

I did see some lovely trees, though, and an interesting statue which from a distance I guessed was a war memorial. In fact, these have been neatly reversed. Trees form a “living memorial” to Oregon’s Vietnam veterans, while the statue proved to be of Sacajawea, “the only woman in the Lewis and Clark expedition, and in honor of the pioneer mother of old Oregon.”

Portland is the City of Roses and this part of Washington Park shines in two exceptional ways. One is that it has a restroom free to all (most places in the city sternly warn NO PUBLIC RESTROOMS, lest a homeless person come in). And there’s a free shuttle to take you around the park. That’s in addition to the regular city buses.

The one must-see in Portland, Christina told me, is Powell’s City of Books. It’s been open since 1971 and takes up an entire city block. As a reader and writer, I’m a huge fan of independent bookstores and visit them wherever I can in the world. Powell’s was a joy to browse. 

I felt a tangible lifting of my spirits from being in such a great bookstore and seeing it filled with people and good books. There must be hope for America when so many people are reading so much thoughtful work, from Peggy Noonan to Ta-Nehisi Coates and from Shirley Jackson to Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

We had some great food in Portland too. Japanese with Christina and Henry, and then T. and I went out to a “fast casual” Indian called the Bollywood Theater. Fast casual is all the rage here apparently: you stand in line to order at the counter, they bring you your drinks, then you sit down and out comes good food. The only thing wrong with Portland was that we had so little time there. We’ll have to come back for some cooler, clearer weather. Watch out, Robert!

Sun through haze!

And so we were back on the Greyhound bus, bound for Seattle. As soon as we crossed the Columbia River, I noticed the Washington state highway signs. Most state highways are identified by a number in the middle of an outline like the shape of the state, but Washington State uses a profile of George Washington. (Utah used a beehive. A beehive is the Utah state symbol, apparently because of hard work.)

We landed at the Hostelling International hostel, the American Hotel, in Seattle’s international district. Like other West Coast cities, Seattle is expensive. T. was looking at accommodation and we figured a couple nights in bunk beds here or there was do-able. We were in a 4-bed (female) dorm and it was full every night. But it was a nice hostel,with individual power points and reading lights at each bunk, and breakfast and towels included. And we weren’t the oldest people staying there. There were Baby Boomers who reminded me of that couple we met in Bologna, who were celebrating their 65th and 70th birthdays and hostelling all around Europe.

The thing about a hostel is that you meet people, and they tend to be friendly. One guy was biking everywhere and asked me if I was from Seattle. I told him I’d only just arrived and he said, “Oh, only I was hoping to find out if you can get a Greyhound bus from here.” Well, I could tell him that—we’d just walked from the station! He biked over there later and reported that he’d gotten it all figured out. I guess he’d take his bike on the bus.

The first place we went in Seattle, after dropping our bags, was the bar on the corner. It was a very local place, the type with a pool table and jukebox, Pabst Blue Ribbon signs and cheesesteaks. The latter were “very good” according to a man who, I later deduced, was Joe himself of “Eat at Joe’s.” It was uncanny to see the man in the portrait over the bar sitting on a stool at the end of it.

I love a place like Joe’s—almost as much as a big joyful bookstore. Seattle has one too: the Elliott Bay Book Company. It’s in Capitol Hill, called that for no reason I can determine, the heart of the LGBT community and apparently also nightlife. Browsing there, I came across an article by Rick Perlstein who, long ago, was a colleague of mine in the Editorial Collective of the Grey City Journal. Rick has become a historian of the Richard Nixon era and, as we know, it has been fifty years since 1968 when Nixon won the presidency. The magazine I bought contained reflections on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that year, later assessed as a “police riot,” and to what extent it influenced the election. Given all the time we’ve spent thinking about Vietnam, I was ready for this.

Rainbow flags at all intersections, Capitol Hill

The Elliott Bay Book Company

But all the excitement around Seattle wasn’t intellectual. The hostel had a live local band in from 7:00 that evening, with free pizza, beer, wine, and even some bite-size brownies for everyone. What a deal! The band, Tupelo, was made up of Boomers, so older than most of the people in the audience (as are we). It was an appreciative audience, though, and the numbers grew as did the age range. Tupelo started with “Leaving On A Jet Plane” and continued with a wide variety of songs everyone seemed to know, along with some groovy, or poignant, originals. We don’t get much nightlife but for this, we didn’t even have to go outside!

Statue of Jimi Hendrix, Capitol Hill

Our daytime tour of Seattle started at Pike Place Market, where we enjoyed free samples of peaches and some lovely lemon cheesecake. You could eat all day at the market for the best prices outside the hostel. A young guy stopped us and asked about the patches on my daypack; he wanted recommendations of where to backpack in Europe. So we talked to him for a while about Ljubljana, Riga, and other favorites that are perhaps more discovered, like Berlin. The España patch drew attention later from someone working in a convenience store who sounded completely Americanized to me, but was originally from Uruguay. He had patches, too, but they were from volunteering with the peshmerga, the military forces of Iraqi Kurdistan! 

The obligatory symbol of Seattle is the Space Needle, built for the 1962 World’s Fair. It is not the tallest building in Seattle, though, so waiting for more than an hour to go up it did not seem like a good investment of either time or money. The Seattle Center, which also includes a glassworks exhibition by local sculptor Dale Chihuly, is reached via a monorail—all very futuristic in Jetsons terms.

We didn’t go in the Chihuly Garden either—it’s shockingly expensive. Most things in Seattle are; even the Pinball Museum, which might have interested T. with its vintage machines, charges $15. That’s a lot of money to pay for something that isn’t the Prado. Fortunately Seattle has some great things that are absolutely free, including walking around, seeing historic sites, and at least one museum. It’s run by the National Park Service and is part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park.

The Klondike River, which in 1897 was the mecca for any number of people most of whom never got rich (at least not finding gold), is in the Yukon Territory, in Canada. But through shrewd marketing Seattle positioned itself as the gateway city for journeys up the Inside Passage and into the Yukon. Thus, the free museum here. It has fascinating films and exhibits, especially about the diversity of people who ended up in the far north in those days. I never knew, for instance, that the original Klondike find was by two Native men, Keish “Skookum Jim” and Khaa Ghoox a.k.a. Dawson Charlie, and a white man, George Carmack, married to Keish’s sister Shaaw Tlaa.

It all ended badly for the woman, as things so often have. George Carmack left Kate, as he called her, and remarried in the Lower 48, the U.S. not recognizing his marriage to a Native woman. Kate Carmack was unsuccessful at recovering any of the fortune her husband and brother had found.

There was also some interesting stuff about the “Buffalo Soldiers,” black troops who were sent to keep order in the lawless north, despite prejudice against them. It is thought that these soldiers’ nickname was given to them for bravery by some Cheyenne, who revered the buffalo.

You are never far from indigenous history in the Pacific Northwest. A Chinook artist, Duane Pasco, carved the totem poles that decorate Occidental Park, in Pioneer Square.

Pioneer Square is the oldest part of Seattle, which only means post-1889, when a fire destroyed many blocks of the city. Most of this neighborhood was rebuilt in Richardsonian Romanesque style, which means lots of pretty red brick buildings. These, along with the original Skid Row (logs used to skid down the street to Yesler’s mill before hard times fell on the lumber industry), were preserved by public effort from demolition in—you guessed it—the 1960s.

Smith Tower (1914), until 1931 the tallest building west of the Mississippi

We were walking around trying to get access to the waterfront. Entirely by accident, on a rather insalubrious side street, we came across a historical sign at the former site of a disco called Shelly’s Leg.

The eponymous Shelly Rauman lost her leg in a freak accident and, with the money she got in compensation, opened a gay disco in 1973. Most gay bars of the time were refuges hidden away in dark places, but Shelly’s Leg (I love her sense of humor) was bright and celebratory. Eventually it burned down, and the scene has moved on from Pioneer Square. But Shelly’s Leg set the tone for an open and inclusive culture still associated with Seattle today.

We wound up back in the international district where we were staying. Seattle’s Japanese community has long been large enough to constitute a Japantown. Before World War II, this community thrived with businesses like a teahouse in the historic Panama Hotel. 

The forced internment of Japanese-Americans after 1941 was a source of great trauma here. Many people felt that obeying without resistance, however unfair, would show their loyalty to the U.S. Some of them had sons in the U.S. military, who served with distinction. After the war the internment period was never talked about in some families. It was not until the third generation that people began to question and speak up about what had happened to their community.

I wanted to go up to the top of the Columbia Center downtown, which is taller than the Space Needle. It was $22, though, and there was a sign warning of low visibility (because of the smoke we could not escape). Once again, I did not take out my wallet. Instead, we decided to get a beer, something that is supposed to be available everywhere in Seattle. Buying it turned out to be remarkably challenging. The first place only took cards—no, thank you. The second place would not let us in without I.D., which I normally would have had with me, but we didn’t feel like producing at our age. Third time lucky. The bar was a dive and playing grunge music so loudly we couldn’t talk at all, but at least it sold lager! All the local brews taste like India Pale Ales to me, whether labeled IPA or not. Too hoppy.

I liked Seattle. It’s the kind of place I overhear conversations I want to be part of. At Henry’s Taiwan, where we had lunch, we sat next to three women who were talking about the Narnia books, the writer Nicola Griffith, and all-women spaces in the ’80s. Back at the hostel, waiting for our night bus, there were a few young people sitting near us who had been through-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, until a detour (fire!) truncated their hike. The woman, who spoke English with what sounded like a German accent to me, turned out to be Italian but to live in Austria. She’d been working for Medicines sans Frontieres in Myanmar, but all the violence she was dealing with in the Rohingya genocide had burned her out, so she’d just decided to hike the PCT. I eventually did join in their conversation because I’ve always wanted to through-hike the Appalachian Trail. When I pronounced it Appalatchian, with a short a, the guy asked me where I was from; and when I said Tennessee originally, he said he was from Knoxville! He’d hiked the AT himself five years ago.

Tai Tung has been going since 1935.

It was really interesting to talk to them, but we had to move on. The hostel was full that night so the hikers were just going to sleep in a park somewhere. I guess, if you’ve chosen to live in the outdoors for months, that might not be such a big deal. We had a much more pleasant evening ahead, meeting T’s cousin Cuin at the oldest Chinese restaurant in Seattle.

Cuin is her cousin Deirdre’s son. We’d already met his brother, Cade, in Yellowstone, but this was not our first time meeting Cuin. He and his girlfriend Courtney stayed with us for a while on their trip to Europe a few years ago. It was great to end our Seattle trip with a visit to family and, yes, another pint at Joe’s.