Halloween Hijinks, Portland Style
My second favorite city in a perfect storm
Three years ago I moved from my university town to Portland, Oregon, for ten months. My retirement plans had been derailed by the COVID lockdowns. There was no way France was issuing a long stay visa — in fact there was no way sensible France was letting any Americans through the checkpoint.
So I did the next best thing, and in the spring of 2020 I rented a tiny modern studio sight unseen in Northwest Portland (Slabtown, as it’s affectionately called). I taught my final courses by zoom, of course, so the only difference for the students was the background, since I didn’t use those weird artificial zoom backgrounds that made my hair come and go. Enough cosmetic issues without that.
My sister has lived in Northeast Portland for years, and we got together regularly when I lived 90 miles down the highway. Now we lived only ten miles apart, she didn’t mind tooling across the river in her trusty little SUV, and there wasn’t a heck of a lot to do once we got together except go walking.
So we went walking.
Portland was caught in a perfect storm: one that hasn’t really let up, though the pandemic has receded. The Black Lives Matter movement hit the city hard in the midst of universal masking, lining up for groceries, and the devastating closure or drastic shrinkage of most restaurants and bars.
I was and am a fan of all those preventative measures, by the way. Just saying.
Also a fan of BLM.
Not a fan of defacement and destruction of public and private property.
Oh, and then there was #MeToo and #TimesUp.
Yes. Yes.
Speaking of which, there was the 2020 election that November.
Finally, I’ll just give the slightest nod to the seemingly-intractable-yet-completely-solvable homeless crisis. (HINT: Housing.)
One of the great things about Portland is that in some ways Halloween lasts all year. You know that cute saying, “Keep [Wherever] Weird”? Portland has earned its bumper sticker many times over.
My sister and I walked up into the hills of Northwest Portland at least twice a week. Portland is graced with one of the largest natural parks in the United States inside city limits — appropriately named Forest Park. It is adjacent to Washington Park, which contains the Rose Garden and the Japanese Garden, as well as the zoo.
The park itself offers seemingly endless looping trails through tall trees and ferny undergrowth. If we walked up the steep NW Portland streets, we could access the park from one or another unmarked entrance and walk several miles south into Washington Park, and then stroll back up NW 23rd Avenue to my neighborhood and my sister’s car. (“Up” was down — from south to north, down a mild slope.) Over the months, businesses gradually reopened and the popular shopping and dining area crawled back to life.
Up in the hills, wealthy homeowners offered the standard Halloween flourishes, often with a friendly twist, as if making up for the existential hell that we were collectively passing through. (In most of those homes, hell had more square footage than down in the valley.)
Then there were the slightly more creepy takes on the tropes.
I spotted this guy in a physical therapy clinic:
…and this one behind the windshield of a work van:
Sometimes, there is just the vaguest suggestion of unusual beings in the Rose City.
Sometimes it is way too easy to imagine the life that once they led.
And sometimes, not so much….
A toast to Halloween! Watch out for spiders.
