Places VI: Portland, OR (2006-08)

    I first arrived in Portland during a golden era. The city was still rough around the edges, but slightly less grimy and dangerous than in previous years. I wasn’t the only one who had gone west seeking creative counterculture comrades. Flocks of disillusioned youth who felt tired or unwelcome by the antiquated traditional attitudes that dominated most of the country also found Portland to be a beacon of a more laidback, accepting future. The city was full of shared houses of idealists, working as little as they could while juggling passion projects on the side. At the time, it felt positively brimming with possibility. Sure, I was frequently woken from my makeshift bed on a friend’s couch by gunshots in the night, but it did keep costs down.

    My first room was $250 a month. It had a linoleum floor that I covered with rugs from the thrift bins where they sold unsorted goods by the pound. The house used grey water, the runoff from sinks, to flush the toilet, which as a good environmentalist I was willing to deal with, even though it gave the house a musky odor. There was a small, unkept backyard and a front porch that was a favorite spot of a local one-eyed black cat that my roommate would hang out with even though every time it got into our house it would run upstairs and pee on her mattress. I found a shitty job in a call center, and at night I’d draw, make collages or cook big pots of kidichari with my roommates. I volunteered at the co-op down the street and got a bike so I didn’t have to take the bus everywhere. I was home. 

    Until ten months later when we were kicked out so the owner could sell the place. Unbeknownst at the time, our migration had unintentionally set in rotation the great wheel of gentrification that would later swallow up most of what we had built. We had primed the pump, and in a few short years Portlandia would bring a second wave of youth who wanted all the hipster cred of living in the ‘it’ place without actually contributing anything other than their parents’ money.

    I moved into the attic of an artist house I was friends with, an unfinished room floored with mattresses and a variety of miscreants. The room was affectionately called the ‘opium den,’ a title that, while not literally accurate, was true in spirit. Lest you think that a questionable name, the title chosen for the house itself, despite many objections including mine, was The Trash Factory. What wonderful implications. It was a joint commercial/residential space that had previously been a brothel, and then a quickie wedding chapel owned by the former chief of police. Its front door opened to a four lane throughway right off a highway exit, sometimes on summer evenings we would sit and drink and smoke on the porch roof overlooking the street, inevitably witnessing countless car crashes. In lieu of rent for my humble accommodations, I cooked meals, washed the endless piles of dishes in the sink, and helped to build a recording studio in the basement. 

    By this time I was working as a dumpling chef for a super hip ‘fusion’ (asian food made by white people) restaurant downtown. I loved my coworkers, especially hanging out and joking with them after everything was shut down, often while finishing up any bottles of wine that had been open for ‘too long’. The job was stressful, as kitchen jobs are, and it was exacerbated by management’s high expectations matched with their lack of understanding about how kitchens actually function. To cope with the stress my direct supervisor recommended alcohol and would personally get me drinks from the bar when they thought I was too worked up. This created some unhealthy habits. 

    But really, even outside of the drinking culture at work, I wasn’t responsible enough to handle a place where there was always something interesting going on and so many vices were easily accessible. I attended house parties, concerts, raves, dance nights, gallery shows, movies, bars, food carts, clubs, and all other distractions of a modern urban life. And I lived it up, until I eventually crashed out. Broke and humbled, I crawled back to Vermont to put myself together before impulsively launching into my next adventure. 

Places V: Orcas Island (2005)

On two sequential nights, in two separate cities, I met the same two girls because we were staying in the same two houses with different friends. During a party at the second house, they told me they lived in a park on an island and said that if I wanted to go back with them I could crash in the park bunkhouse for a bit. This sort of thing was more or less normal for me at the time. The next day we woke up early, did some light cleaning, and left for Orcas Island where I was immediately offered a job teaching at an outdoors camp for local schools.

 

If Montreal had psychedelic undertones, Orcas was like stepping straight into a dream. The park encompasses a mountain, several lakes, and is home to swaths of old growth, the eldest of which are upwards of 1,000 years old and 300 feet tall. In their undergrowth, foot long green and brown banana slugs turn dead leaves and wood back into soil, leaving a slimy trail in their wake that is rumored to numb the tongue if licked. In the ancient canopies nested eagles, formidable raptors that stood about three feet tall with a wingspan more than double that. At the peak of the mountain was a four story stone tower and if you climbed up to the top there would often be eagles passing remarkably close by. While exploring I would often come upon small clearings of rocks from old collapses or slides that were completely covered in six to twelve inches of the softest moss. The island was small enough that you could watch the sun both rise and set over an ocean full of sea otters, seals, and all manner of strange tidal creatures and detritus. My dreams there were so vivid, complete with recurring characters and storylines, that I started to journal them.

My coworkers were all decent sorts and we had good times with the kids, leading hikes, searching for weird water bugs, playing games, leading campfire songs. I got to learn and teach cool skills, like how to break the spines of a nettle so that you can eat the leaves raw without being stung, and how to kayak. Since we were fairly isolated and lived together we often hung out in our off time too. Excursions into the quaint little town. Kayaking across the ocean to camp on a deserted island. Visiting the Historic Rosario Hotel to witness Christopher Peacock (or, as one member of our group familiarly referred to him, Chris Peacock) demonstrate his considerable skills on the organ. Or more often, swimming in the lake, making a fire by the lake and getting in trouble the next day for being too loud. We also all purposely flipped our kayaks over in a lake that still had ice on parts of it, although that was actually required by work.

When they left I stayed on to work park maintenance with a small summer crew. Even with the natural beauty and three day weekends to enjoy it, by the end the isolation was getting to me in an unhealthy way. Perhaps it was the primal power of the ancient wilderness, the intense dreams, or the fact that my primary cultural input at the time was Murakami, LeGuin, and Lynch, three artists known for their strange, often dark, outsider takes on reality. Personally, I think it was that the ocean is too powerful for me to ever feel comfortable having it so close to me on all sides. Towards the end of my time there I was told that a local tribe had a story about how a powerful vision was given to a seeker praying at the lake that I was camped next to and how after that it was acknowledged by the tribe that the island was not a place to settle permanently but to visit for spiritual cleansing and guidance. I knew then that it was time to go.

*As previously mentioned, most of the art I made on the road was ritually burned but i did save this poem about my time on the island

the sight of first light 

hitting tree tops

with mountain lake backdrop 

makes me stop

in awe of what i saw 

i draw art with sea stones

'till i'm too tired to bother

then watch the sunset reflect 

off receding sea water

walk through ancient forests 

or run around without shoes

drink and sing songs 

until we're drunk enough to steal canoes

or sit out by the lake 

and listen to the frogs

smoke cigarettes with sage 

and dedicate them to dead gods

watch otters eat fish 

watch deer eat grass

sit by the fire 

'till the logs turn to ash

and when the fires gone 

and the last embers die

we'll fall asleep on the lawn 

looking up at the sky

Places IV: The Road (on and off 2004-2010)

        Having obtained a near useless degree, I spent the summer saving up money, working as a carpenter’s assistant while living with my parents. I wanted to go to the west coast, it was warmer, which seemed nice, but mostly it seemed more relaxed, more open minded, friendlier. It was known to be a multigenerational mecca of countercultures, and like the beatniks, hippies, and punks before me I was going to go places, meet people, have adventures, make art, and find myself. That fall I caught a ride to Portland Oregon with an old classmate from high school and after a few recovery days, one of her roommates dropped me off at an on-ramp so I could hitchhike out to the coast. 

I spent most of the next seven years living out of a backpack, occasionally with a room of my own but most often crashing wherever I could. Cheap campsites, beaches, shelters, city parks, closets, couches (perhaps yours at some point), yards, and floors. I stayed with old friends and friends of friends, but also with random strangers that I connected with in person or through the internet and who were willing to let me stay in their homes for free, something that seems inconceivable in today’s world. 

To not overstay my welcome I was frequently on the move. Hitchhiking was my primary means of transport and it was surprisingly effective. Most people I met were kind and besides rides I was offered food, places to stay, and work. A few had agendas I wasn’t interested in but I was never threatened or attacked. Occasionally I was harassed by police, but I was careful to follow laws and so their shakedowns, although frustrating, always came to naught. Because hitchhiking out of cities was difficult, I would sometimes take local buses, find a rideshare, or just walk. In fact, walking became my dominant hobby and on days I wasn’t traveling or socializing with others, I spent much of my time either walking around or in parks or libraries. I also filled sketchbooks with drawings of cafes, people, and scenery, letters, poems, and journal entries, all of which I would ritualistically burn once the book was full. 

I explored the west coast. My memories and experiences are too extensive to list here but I would be remiss not to include a few snapshots: My first time seeing the giant redwoods. Watching the sun set and the full moon rise over a Big Sur beach. Driving an RV with no breaks along the cliffs of the Pacific Coast Highway. Sneaking into a luxury oceanside resort to soak in their lithium spring water hot tubs. Rolling into Olympia late at night and immediately being greeted by someone with a bike trailer full of free pizzas. Sitting around a fire listening to a camp maintenance man wax poetic about his experiences working on Alaskan fishing boats (bonus points for his Spalding Gray references.) Getting a ride through wine country with a cork salesman who brought me to a number of fancy wineries. Working at various EDM festivals and then staying up all night to dance. Cooking pastries in cobb ovens at 2 AM in the middle of the Wyoming forest at the national rainbow gathering. 

It was a quest of spiritual discovery and was accompanied by the highs and lows one expects to face on that path. The beautiful tranquility of a golden-warm afternoon contrasted with a rainy night, cold and alone in a tent; The kindness of those who fed, housed, and helped me contrasted with those who threw garbage or yelled at me from car windows. In my head I was propelled by and carrying with me the momentum of every alternative movement that dared imagine a better world. But in retrospect, I can see how, like many of my idols, I was also hurt and running from truths I wasn’t ready for. While this lifestyle was a personal choice for me, there were factors that pushed me towards it. Disillusionment combined with confusion about my identity lead to depression and feeling alienated from society. The road was on the outskirts of societal norms, a liminal space, always changing and evolving just as I was, full of infinite possibilities. Enlightening but exhausting. I met a lot of great people and got to make and see friends often, but it was also lonely and unstable. After a nice run of it, I needed a home of my own.

Places III: Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico (2002, 2003)

In college, I had a summer job digging holes in the middle of the desert. Technically, some of the holes were in the Colorado Shrub Steppe and the Great Plains Short-Grass Prairie, but it all felt like desert to me. Ostensibly the job was for scientific purposes, studying the effects of changing rainfall patterns on the flora of different terrains, although my involvement was largely menial. In addition to digging I sometimes measured things, carried things, counted plants, and helped construct large metal structures. We started at sunup so we could leave by early afternoon when the heat became intolerable. Before crawling down into the holes we did our best to clean out the black widow spider webs that had accumulated the night before. 

I stayed at a nearby research station consisting of 10 adobe houses laid out in a circle with a small pond in the middle. At dusk the pond would be visited by throngs of bats, drawn by the insect swarms that thrived in the artificial oasis. The houses had a back door that led to a small patio and infinite desert. Nearby was a longer building that had a wing of research labs and a meeting space/social area. The buildings were connected by a small sidewalk, on which in the early evening hours you could often find rattlesnakes warming their cold blood, as it held the sun's heat longer than the desert sand.

Sometimes I would share housing, sometimes it would just be me and the caretaker, who was nice enough but kept to himself unless necessary. The station was owned by a university and there were often groups of students staying there while they worked on various projects. They were largely agreeable people and I got to know some of them quite well. We got into some classic college shenanigans such as going out into the desert under a full moon on mushrooms, or using a large jug of embalming alcohol from the laboratory to make big bowls of jungle juice (being very careful to use ethyl, not isopropyl, so we didn’t go blind or die). Sometimes I would go back with them to Albuquerque on the weekends to get into city shenanigans but I also enjoyed my time alone in the desert. There was all sorts of new nature for me to explore. Badgers, tortoises, strange new varieties of deer, snakes, black widows and wolf spiders galore, kangaroo mice, horny toads and other scampering lizards. No cacti, but plenty of spiky and pokey things. At night, a porch light would slowly attract bigger and bigger beetles and moths until around 2 AM when they would start surpassing the size of my hand. I watched the monsoons roll in and drop torrents of rain and lightning, melting the crusty sand into beachy mud. 

The fact that I returned for a second summer of labor is a testament to my appreciation of the desert’s majestic beauty and quirky characters. Although the temperate forest will always feel like home to me, I returned to the desert several more times in the years to come, having had a very kind introduction to it. 

Places II: Montreal (2000-2004)

By the end of high school my patience for Vermont's small town culture had been all but exhausted. I felt misunderstood, isolated, and I was naive enough to believe city life would solve these problems. I had initially wanted to go to New York as I thought it would help me connect with my heritage, something I was interested in at the time. But Montreal made more sense financially and still met my requirement of being a big city, so I went with it. Despite its proximity, Montreal was technically in a foreign country, falling over the Canadian border. Adding to its international aesthetic was the strong Quebecois regional identity that enforced use of the French language. In spite of culture and laws, Montreal was largely bilingual and any of my garbage French was met by replies in English. 

Montreal was cold, its winters were long. Its climate partially insulated and protected the city, a shield of frozen snow and ice temporarily staved off the inevitable gentrification of expansion. Most of the city was made of concrete, bricks, or stone, connected by wrought iron stairs and fences, materials that could withstand many seasons. Buildings were connected in long blocks with few alleys to preserve heat. As a result there was nowhere to plow snow to, following storms the snow was scooped from the streets and trucked to the edge of the city to be dropped in the St. Lawrence river (It's easy to forget that Montreal is an island, gifting it a lazy, psychedelic undertone present in Leonard Cohen’s early work.)

The best way to cope with the winter was by staying inside. Because it is an old city, most spaces were small, and although often dirty as well, they retained their comfort by virtue of not being a part of the frigid outside world. Besides the underground city, a conglomeration of malls, hotels, and office buildings, united by tunnels and a subway system of rubber wheeled trolleys, there were a million hole in the wall venues, smokey bars, bodegas, tea bar hash fronts, basement bakeries, cafes, record shops, galleries, bagels pulled from giant steaming cauldrons at 2 in the morning, cheap pizza, falafel, samosas, and of course poutine. I found my favorite art house movie theater, comic and game store, punk bar, dive bar, and restaurants. The legality of alcohol allowed my still untapped alcoholism to flourish, allowing me access to social skills while also robbing me of the memories necessary to retain social relationships. 

As a result of the cold, many residents carried themselves with an air of coolness and indifference, as if ignoring the cold negated it. An apathetic hipness descended from ancient strains of ennui brought over from Europe. The youth were all the main character of their own drama, woefully underdressed for the freezing temperatures in stylish black, pushing through crowds on the way to the next thing. Cool, but unable to enjoy it because of their coolness. Oh cruel irony. Adults had no time to talk or look you in the eye, they were also in a hurry. Especially in their cars, which they drove as fast as they could for as long as they could, hitting the brakes hard only when a collision was imminent.

And then, suddenly in the summer the city would thaw into a kaleidoscope of activity, open markets, jazz and comedy festivals, the bright colors of buildings and people bursting forth from the previously obscuring winter gloom. Now adults had time to talk, and the youth were no longer underdressed. The tamtams would start, a weekly gathering of resident freaks and weirdos to the city’s central park on the mountain from which the city takes its name. There, they would picnic and party, juggle, wrestle, roleplay, jump, flip and tumble, wheel and deal, footbag, slackline, and dance to the pulsing beat of hundreds of hippie hand drums. Truly a bohemian shambala paradise.

My time and life in Montreal were very centered around university, and although I spent most of four years there and certainly got out and explored the city, I still feel like I only caught glimpses of what is a much bigger picture. My lack of conversational French made true integration into the community at large impossible but additionally I was overwhelmed by everything. Going from the tranquil forest to an international city was a big change, and my personality and social skills didn’t automatically adapt just because I was there. As far as cities go, I liked Montreal and I could have possibly finagled a way to stay, I know kids who did even without speaking French. But by the end of my time in Montreal I had made my peace with it, learned to navigate, appreciate, and love it, but also, I was ready to leave. 

Places I: Vermont (1982-2000)

    I grew up in the woods. There were people there too, but it was mostly woods. My parents were New Yorkers who moved to Vermont. They met in Madison Wisconsin, attending college, where my father got a degree in teaching English as a second language and my mother started a jewelry business. My father got jobs overseas and they spent some time traveling in the Mediterranean and northern Africa, as well as India and Indonesia. Having recently returned, they had intended to move to Oregon, and were only visiting to pick up an anvil for my mother’s aforementioned jewelry business. But their Volkswagen bus broke down and they decided to stay. After scouting options around the state, they bought some land on a mountain, cleared the trees, and used them to build a house. Things were simpler then.

    I grew up looking out over the green mountains, alternately a beautiful red-orange-yellow show of foliage in the fall, or a soft, white wasteland in the winter. I drank spring water pumped from a mountain well, and breathed the air purified by thousands of trees. Nature abounded. Deer, moose and bears were in my yard, eagles and owls were in the trees, newts and snakes in the grass. Rivers and streams housed trout and other fish, as well as insects that floated on surface tension, and monstrous larvae amongst the stones. Ponds filled with tadpoles that turned to singing frogs, along with salamanders and dreaded leaches. 

    I ate fresh corn, tomatoes, local cheeses, apples and berries, washed it down with cider or maple sap snuck from buckets hung on neighbors’ tree taps. I hiked up mountains, watched the stars, swam in lakes, rivers, and ponds. I climbed trees, although never quite as high as my friends who were less intimidated by a trip to the hospital, and sledded down snow covered hills, although not quite as fast as my friends who were less intimidated by a trip to the hospital. We built forts out of sticks, hopped along river rocks, collected eggs from chicken coops, and rode our bikes to the general store that was also the post office, where we would buy popsicles or pennycandy. 

    In the winter I learned how to shovel snow and tend a fire, important skills if you didn’t want to get stranded or freeze. Our driveway was a quarter mile dirt road up a mountain. Even with my father's dedicated care, there were times of year it was inaccessible by car and the only option was to hike out. I lived at the edge of town so I was the first one on the school bus and the last one off. My town had no stoplights and all but two of the roads were dirt. My rides to and from school lasted an hour each way, and contained such perils as high school students and bumps in the road big enough to throw you out of your seat. Occasionally they would get so big kids would hit the top of the bus. For a while my friend and I would intentionally sit above the back wheels, where the bumps were the biggest, until we got tired of having the wind knocked out of us, an uncomfortable and terrifying feeling. 

    My first school had only two classrooms, but this was appropriate as there were only five people in my grade and so each class had several grades. One time bees got loose in the school. Another time a student brought a snake they found on the way in and it bit the principal. Eventually the school got to be too small or too unsafe or both. Certainly, the playground’s many wooden structures were starting to rot, leaving jagged, splintery holes and missing monkeybars. The second school was superior in that it was much bigger, and because in the corner of the property was a washed out culvert where at recess we could excavate cow bones buried back when the land had been a farm.

    Socially, Vermont was a strange concoction of eclectic energies blended into something palpable. The three primary tribes of hippies, yuppies, and rednecks, overlapped and blended in a loose Venn diagram that muffled and padded their differences, smoothing communities out into something cohesive and functional. People helped their neighbors, even if they didn’t always agree. The culture was also divided into three parts, although they strangely did not correspond to the social groups. One part was cute, quirky small town Americana, full of coffee houses, summer concerts in the bandstand, neighbors helping each other out, and all of the most generic holiday celebrations. One part was backwoods depravity brought about by wealth or lack thereof, a hidden underbelly of affairs, addiction, abuse, arson, occasional murder or suicide, crimes of the madness brought on by the wild spirits of nature and the extended solitude of the dark winter months. One part was comical hijinks and shenanigans, likely involving some combination of drugs, alcohol, fire, guns, sleeping with someone you shouldn’t, getting in a fight, and going to or from a place while unsafely operating a car in bad driving conditions. This all followed by reconciliations or an attempted cover ups and repeated with comforting regularity.

    I never fit in socially, although in high school I eventually found a small group of freaks and weirdos who trauma bonded together until they could go places where their talents and idiosyncrasies could be appreciated. I am grateful that I got to grow up in Vermont at the time that I did. It is a beautiful place and it has made a lasting impression on my perspective and ethos. But it wasn’t the right place for me, I had to leave and did so as soon as it was convenient. My visits back reaffirmed that Vermont is not a place where I thrive, but also that I am very lucky to have gotten to spend that time there.