Portland: Land of Calamity or Promise?

Moving to a New City

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In late September, 2010, when I was 27 years old and had just hit a brutal spiritual and emotional bottom with my alcoholism, I called one of my closest friends, who happened to be sober.

She—the sober friend—had grown up in the town I’d been born in, Ventura, a 100,000-population surfing town along the coast and Highway 101. We didn’t meet until sophomore year of high school, in the year 2000, at the fancy private college-prep high school we both ended up attending in nearby Ojai, the luscious orange-grove-filled, snow-cap-mountain peaked hippie town of 8,000 12 miles inland from the coast. Ever since then—almost 25 years now—we’ve been good friends.

So it was her that I called when I woke up the morning of September 24^th, 2010, hungover, bleary-eyed, shaky, having blacked-out the previous night (as always), remembering only snippets of the night before, full of self-hate, rage, fear and shame.

In 2008, she’d gotten sober, two-ish years ahead of me. When I hit bottom two years sober sounded like forever. Around 2009 she’d moved to Portland; she had family up there and needed a new experience. I visited her fairly often. (I remember one time in 2010, pre-sobriety, hitchhiking from the Bay Area to Portland, staying with her for a few days, and then unsuccessfully trying to hop a freight out of St. John’s in North Portland.)

That night, after nearly a full day sober, on September 24^th, 2010, she convinced me to throw my few possessions into a bag, snatch my old thumbing pack, and catch an Amtrak train (I had no car) up to Rose City. (Portland. Also known as Bridge City.) And so, feeling desperate and spiritually impoverished, I did just that. I didn’t think twice, and two days later I was there, in Oregon.

I stayed with my friend for a few weeks at her place while I got settled. She took me to meetings, introduced me to her sober friends, and toured me around. We wrote poems and read them to each other. We argued about AA and the concept of a “Higher Power” and about god and about religion and about letting go. I found an apartment in North PDX on Killingsworth.

All told I was in Portland back then for only eight months, but they were crucial months. I stayed sober. I went to AA meetings. I wrote every day, and like a fiend. (I had all this excess creative energy since I wasn’t drinking.) I got a bike and cruised around. Walks were frequent. I hung out with my friend. A lot of time was spent alone and in beautiful solitude. For so many years I’d been obsessed with movement. Hitchhiking, Amtrak trains across America, flying to Europe, moving apartments, towns and cities too often. In short: I was exhausted; physically and emotionally wrecked. A psychological veteran of wars only I knew about and waged within myself.

Eight months later, in early June, 2011, I headed back to California. I was ready to return. This time sober, 28, writing regularly, connected to AA and a Higher Power, and determined to finish my creative writing degree at SFSU and write the Great American Novel.

*

Fast-forward to now, September yet again, but 14 years after I hit that bottom and quit the booze. This time I have nearly a decade-and-a-half of sobriety under my belt. I haven’t had a sip of alcohol since that morning, the 24^th of September, 2010. I’m married. My father died over a year ago. I have sold a house I owned in the Bay Area and purchased a multi-unit with that money in Portland (with some savings to spare). We have three cats. We recently put our beautiful, perfect 16-year-old Border Collie down, because he let us know it was time. And we’re planning on getting renters in our upper unit, renting Britney’s house in Lompoc out, and moving for a few years to Spain. (In about 6 months.)

The choice of buying in Portland was fairly random. My friend I mentioned before—the one who I called when I first got sober—is still in Portland after all this time. She’d become a real estate agent. We’d originally considered buying a rental property in Lompoc, but there just wasn’t any inventory. I spoke with my friend and she started sending me places around town. Britney and I both loved the idea. And before we knew it we had a contingency offer. So here we are.

It feels both brand-new and yet somehow ghostly familiar, being back in Portland. Portland has always held a special place in my heart. Though it’s always been far more politically to the left of me, and though it’s always been a sort of freak-show for the “rejects” of society (and Lord the fixed-gear-riding hipsters, oh my!), I suppose I’ve always seen myself as in some respects one of those “freaks” and so, in a strange, indirect way, I feel I fit in. I’m never going to dress a certain way, form certain opinions, or act any specific kind of way based on where I live. I’ll always be my own weird unique self, for better and worse. But it’s not “fitting in” that I care about; it’s feeling like I’m in a cultured environment.

If Portland is one kind of extreme, surely Lompoc is the opposite kind. The truth is Lompoc made me feel a little like I was in psychological jail. I felt like an alien dropped into a desert and told to figure it out. I couldn’t relate. The raw natural beauty was there, but I was more interested in meeting intriguing, intelligent people, people who had passions and ambitions like myself. What I mostly found instead was an agricultural wasteland of kind, friendly working-class people who drove gigantic trucks and who mostly liked Trump. And look: That’s fine. It really is. But I just didn’t see anything there for me. *(Except for Britney’s kind, warm family; I always felt included and accepted by them. Good people with good hearts.)

So far—we’ve only lived here a week—I’ve really enjoyed the city. Just the amount of green in this place is astounding; the thick areas of trees, the wilderness, the city parks. It’s physically gorgeous in a different way from Lompoc or Santa Barbara. Lushness, green, rivers and creeks.

The freeways are a tangle of madness, flipping around and under themselves like concrete drunken gymnasts. But I don’t particularly mind that so much. The bookstores; oh my LORD the bookstores. Lompoc had one—count em one—bookstore and I’d describe it as mediocre at best. Bookstores are omnipresent in this city, of course. I went to an AA meeting—that’s another thing: First live meeting in almost two years! I didn’t go in Lompoc—in the Sellwood neighborhood last week and got there early so I walked into a random bookstore on Milwaukie Ave called Wallace Books (there almost 27 years) and it was like Alice in Wonderland: It seemed small out front but went on in a mazelike glory forever. (I bought F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.)

Anyway, the point is: This place has culture; bookstores, people reading physical books outside; coffee shops all over the place, some which stay open well past 5pm; colleges; museums; etc.

And I started walking dogs on Rover again. Back in 2022—when my dad was sick with cancer—I did this and it saved my life. At that time I needed warmth, fur and unconditional love. Since we just lost our dog on 9/3 (RIP, Franky), and since we need some extra cash (no renters yet), this was a no-brainer. And the second I brought my profile back up I was getting requests! This is a dog-friendly town! (I never got a single request for a dog-walk on the app in Lompoc.)

The other night I was walking a one-year-old Golden Retriever down along Naito Parkway, along the Willamette River, which cuts like a smooth knife through the city. It was 8pm, a final night walk before I passed out from a fairly long day with a lot of driving. The dog-owner lived in a high-rise apartment building right along the water. With the sliver of moon shining down on the slick black water, and the bridges, and the noise from the nearby freeway (405/Highway 30), it all strangely reminded me of NYC in 2020, during Covid, living in Lenox Hill, walking up along East End Ave in the 80s into Carl Schurz Park all those nights, strolling along the East River, seeing Ward’s Island to the north, and the Queensborough Bridge, 495 Bridge, and Williamsburg Bridges to the south. It was an odd, unlikely comparison. But it made me feel good.

*

So how is Portland, one might wonder, given the media attention it’s attained since 2020, when there were riots and protests galore, a de-policed zone for a while and righteous social justice havoc?

Well, given that we’ve only been here a week, it’s of course hard to accurately say at this point. I’ll keep you updated. But my initial impressions—living literally right behind a Trader Joe’s, dog-walking and house-sitting, going on long walks, etc—is that people are still “coming down,” so to speak, from the height of the 2020 madness, but that things are currently much better and continuing to improve.

That’s not to say things are perfect.

I’ve seen a fair amount of unhinged homeless wandering around, especially downtown. Although, frankly, not nearly as much as I’d expected. Sure, there are some areas I’ve driven past with tents, garbage piled up, old broken-down RVs along the road with people squatting. (One homeless woman, down the block from me in the Alphabet District, in the Northwest, began growling like a literal monster, shouting like a drunken 85-year-old man in pain, kicking things around her, boxes and cans of food and old ripped clothes. One man offered to help her. She became nonverbal. He walked off with a shrug. What can any of us do? Many homeless are mentally ill, addicted to hard drugs, and/or do not *want* to get serious help, or else aren’t able to get help because they can’t maintain enough “sanity” to comply. It’s very sad. It’s a complicated problem. Do we force them into facilities against their will? Or do we let them suffer and often die on the streets? Is there a realistic middle way? I do not know.)

*So far I haven’t seen anything even remotely similar to the horrors of the homeless blight in say New York City or, even worse, Oakland and San Francisco. (In NYC the homeless are everywhere and often very aggressive; in Oakland there are whole blocks of tent cities which bring to mind parts of Tijuana, Mexico.)

There’s a fair amount of random graffiti. Some people keep their eyes straight ahead when walking by you, which is more of a classic NYC phenomenon than the Pacific Northwest, in my experience. But that could be what everyone’s been dealing with the past four years as well. Hard to know who to engage with, who to trust.

One thing for sure: There’s a lot of anger, resentment and vitriol online in Portland. Britney experienced that first hand multiple times after using the app Offer Up to buy and sell, and, even worse, when she put our rental up on a Portland FB page. A lot of pissed-off retorts were hurled her way, about “rich people” trying to screw "the poor," etc. (I'm sure there is some of that. I’m sure people also hold unfair personal grudges for their own unique experiences which are often complex.)

Statistically—Britney and I did a deep-dive on our trip back from Alaska to Lompoc via Canada—Portland’s crime rate has slowly been improving since 2020. Homicides are down. Most crime is going down, though property crime, such as stealing cars and break-ins, are still too high for sure. Millions have been put back into the police department after having been (profoundly stupidly) defunded after the Woke Scare of 2020. Police can now pursue crime. Yet there’re clearly still far too few cops on the street here; my friend’s partner said the cops almost never come if you call them, unless it’s very serious (like murder). The city has walked back things like decriminalizing hard drugs. These have been nationwide, these walk-backs. The political leadership at the state and city levels understand that they were extreme in 2020.

*(Hayek, intriguingly, says that your civil liberties are most at risk during times of war, one might also add economic crises and pandemics, and, he adds, the restrictions are often hidden behind the veil of “social justice.” Sound familiar?)

*

It’s good being out of Lompoc and in a new, unfamiliar (and yet familiar) city. It feels good even to get out of California. Not because I don’t love California—I very much do, always have and always will—but because it’s something new and different, and that was what I was craving. I’ve been moving around a lot: The Bay Area to NYC to Santa Barbara to Lompoc to Portland…and soon Spain. That’s ok. We’ll have plenty of time to stay in one place later, establish roots, all of that. Right now, at 41 and 38, we’re living our lives to the fullest. It’s an adventure, life. At least that’s how I see it. Life isn’t about chores, money or work—though all those are required for survival—but rather about passion, love, connection, travel, adventure and experience.

Me? I’m glad we moved. I’m glad we’re here. And I can rest easy knowing that I’m less of an alien. I may not be a hardcore lefty—though after that debate it’s clear to me that Kamala Harris is my preferred choice in this situation, uncertain, waffling and coreless as she may (or may not) be—or be a hipster or be someone who needs to “fly their freak flag high,” but I am a man who loves to read, loves to have deep intellectual discussion, loves to meet other sensitive, smart, sagacious human beings. No city is perfect. No person is, either. (Lord knows I am full to the brim with flaws.) But this is a new taste, a new delectable moment in our lives.

I’m still sober. The same environment is still here, even if the rents are higher and too many Californians have settled in the city, and even if in some complex ways certain types of crime are still up more than they should be.

The point isn’t perfection. The point is experience.