Love Letter to Portland!
Love Letter to Portland; Bridge City — River City — Rose City!
Published here on public media July 22, 2021
My city is composed of meandering roads, of cobblestones buried beneath black shining Macadam, which glitters brightly or disintegrates, dull and opaque, depending. Streets that sometimes make no sense, organized by Alphabet, and still hard to find, where the sun peeks beyond gun metal clouds.
The Portland sun illuminates those flickering avenues of tree lined blocks, disappearing houses and turn of the century buildings, most of which the wrecking ball deposes — this then is my city.
My city cradles the lonely awareness of its older citizens, those who can compare the then to the now, knowing that most payoffs are never fair and never will be fair. She carries the recollections of cooling bodies felled outside taverns, outside saloons, outside sidewalk cafes, and growing cold in the Portland lilac breeze.
Unrecognized are the old structures people stroll by, the confident Millennial’s, so sure of themselves, so convinced they will triumph, yet they have no knowledge of the sorrow the concrete contains. They don’t see the cemetery of tears fallen there, amidst broken glass and bright green weeds striving and reaching for the light.
Ghosts wander these mean streets unseen, but are not forgotten by those who may perceive. The chalk outlines crisscrossing the sidewalks, overlapping, because the decades have given us so many are clear to me. I see the outlines and know the hearts that fell there. I see them, but not everyone does. And why would they when they come for alluring images, rather than the reality of this mirage of roses and water?
The verdant dust of Portland is continuously reconstituted; the loess drifts on the wind and in the rain, imprinting the foot and hand marks of the newcomers who don’t see the torn down houses and the vanished trees. They smile when a fifteen story hotel goes up, at the expense of another boxy tenderloin structure, red with brick, that old Portland genuinely loved.
The beautiful Elk that stood sentinel over thirsty horses is gone. Spirited away from the old road where it sat 100 years or more, to a safe haven where the drunk and deluded can’t burn wood beneath his motionless hooves. The rain and wind will no longer touch our old Elk. He is in sanctuary now, buffed by soft cloths, cool artificial air, and the human murmurings of safety and promise.
The cosmopolitan downtown is tattered, dog-eared and shabby and the well heeled, well, many of them are leaving, embarrassed to say they live here. They’re leaving the “Pacific Northwest experience” behind. They are saying our city will never be the same. They’re the ones, who don’t know what’s happened here, who will not read the history books, and who don’t care to learn. They’re the ones who are leaving, but we won’t miss them. We wish them well and smile as we watch them go.
They were never meant to stay.
You can call my old city fallen, shamed, dilapidated but among the chaos and the rubble there is always something new, some glimmer of hope and of home that I recognize and claim as mine.
The fourteen bridges that span the river, I claim them. The things of beauty they are, they have stayed the test of inevitable decline, and have risen above the engineers concerns. They continue to sparkle each morning, and glimmer each evening with the faint dots of condensation that cover them like a new skin each day, evaporating with the sun and the wind.
Our Steel Bridge, a double-deck, vertical-lift Bridge still carries the Union Pacific railcars to their rumbling far off destinations, and remains the memorial site of the two young people who dangled from its steel in 1998.
Heroin poisoned their veins and killed all hope, so Mora and Douglas held hands as they jumped during Rush Hour traffic, their notes secured in their backpacks. They became yet another set of bodies, two more chalk outlines to be drawn in the ether. Memorizing the location, whispering a silent offering for the two children who chose death instead of their own heroin soaked lives, I will remember them, too.
The Willamette River, (once so clear you could see to the bottom) continues to move forward in silent evenness. With bones, bleached and brittle on the frigid floor, crumbling under silt, and tires, and ruin, our Willamette River continues to recover. She slowly loses the surface sheen of the motor oil of the 1980s, and gains the Jade green on the surface of the water that we know of today. This river also will remain and nourish those things that live in it, even now.
Our Portland roses, their fragrance lingers above most avenues and intersections, and they bloom each spring and summer. Roses gave our city her name, as Mayor Harry Lane said we needed. So began the Festival of Roses, going all the way back to 1905, and still it continues, today. The Royal Amethyst, the McCartney Rose, the Secret, and the Crimson Bouquet, these roses of Portland, I also claim.
While some “Portlanders” continue to pack and leave, I will stay. I will wander meandering avenues and streets organized by Alphabet; I will look to gunmetal clouds and smell the threatening rain, scented with lilac and chlorophyll, drifting down from the West Hills. I will walk on steel bridges and remember dead children who hanged themselves there and I will claim this city as my own.
While the interlopers leave, I will stay. I will remember turn of the century buildings the wrecking ball deposed and those men and women felled outside of taverns and saloons, the concrete and cobblestones becoming wet with the tears of the ones they left behind.
I will see my city as it is and as it has been.
I will see it as it becomes, again.
And I will not leave.
Theresa Griffin Kennedy © 2021
