I’ve been to downtown Portland a couple times since I’ve been here. I can’t find my original description of the city when I came here a year and a half ago— although I remember I used the phrase, “it has the charm and the grunge of a river town.” The thing about a river town is that you can never wash the river-slime out of the city’s armpits. Portland doesn’t try.
I live in a river town, as most of you know, so I feel free to critique them. St. Charles has a pretty waterfront with a sprawling park with neat pebbly paths and wooden benches. But skirt to either side of the perfect green and you will find scraggly woods dotted with trash and used syringes. You will find rotting buildings with weathered brick. You will find alleys beyond the tourist district that smell of algae and dead fish. So it is with Portland, and St. Louis, and every river-town I’ve ever visited.
Portland, as I said, tends to embrace this. The sign KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD displays the city’s unofficial slogan, and the locals do their best to obey it. White people destroy their hair to make dreadlocks. Clothes are patchwork. Nobody knows the concept of "natural hair color." Instruments, cigarettes, plaid flannel and strip clubs abound. The homeless people wear stylish clothes. Every person I breeze by, every strange building and coffee shop I pass, drills the mantra into my head: I do not belong here. I may visit, I may enjoy, but I am not part of the city. I am not a cell in the living body that is Portland. I am okay with this, especially since I’m not moving here (at least, for the moment). It’s a pretty cool place, but I won’t miss the city itself.Oregon, however, is a completely different matter…
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