A Discovered Diary

Yesterday, I was sorting through a bunch of folders that had been stuck in a crate since two moves ago. I found maps to the fantasy novels I wrote when I was a teenager, 3x5 cards with story notes on them, postcards from Washington and San Francisco— and, most surprisingly of all, a diary that I had forgotten about. It’s a little notebook my sister gave me right before I left on my first WWOOFing trip in autumn of 2010. While spotty in content, it contains a lot of things I remember writing but hadn’t been able to find in any of my existing diaries. It included an elusive entry I have been searching for, about my first encounter with Portland. 

When I wrote these entries, I had been up since 4am, and just experienced a tumultuous week of bad and good— we had just learned that my dad most likely had cancer, and my brother had proposed to his girlfriend (they got married a couple months after I returned). My writing style reflects my tiredness (you’ll notice the paranoia) and emotional instability. I also like the glimpse into my younger thoughts. For instance, when I say “west,” I mean “Pacific northwest.” Now, “west” encompasses the Flint Hills of Kansas, the Rockies, and the Wyoming desert. My world was smaller at the time.

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September 1st, 2010

Almost noon, western time

I’m riding the light rail to downtown Portland. The train is airy, with a comfortable white noise, unlike the coarse banshee-screaming beats of San Fran. My first impression of Portland was green and gray: green forest, gray sky. Trees, parks and open cultivated land nestle comfortably between manmade structures. The airport is light, with bright turquoise carpeting.

The skies here are cloudy as only western skies can be. Missouri has mastered the art of unbroken dreariness, but in the west, gray skies are never boring. The clouds billow and oil, display a 3D view of layered strata, dance around by the hour and surprise us with glimpses of clear sky. I like it already.

3:42 Western time

Now I’m sitting in a rose garden, perched on a bluff to the west of the city center. The clouds have broken up to reveal a hot September sky. Now that I’ve wandered the Pearl and Northwest districts in search of a Starbucks (where I used three half-used giftcards to buy lunch), I’m in the process of forming an opinion about it. The city has the charming grunge of a river town. It has an average mix of ethnicities [I have no idea what prompted me to say this— Portland is white and Hispanic and basically nothing else]. People are not cold, but they are not friendly, either. More than once I’ve abruptly changed my route to make sure I’m not being followed.

The architecture is a delightful mix of industrial grunge and slick modern styles: one striking example of this was a Presbyterian church with a sharply-slanting steeple, the whole structure weathered and brown, standing in front of a ten-story high rise of blue glass topped with sharp white windmills.

I’m going to head to the hostel now and most likely fall asleep…

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