Cities Part 2: Portland

I love cities. So, a few months ago I started a series of posts on the various cities that my work takes me to. This week, I returned to one of my favorite cities in the country. Really, only Seattle, New York and San Francisco come close to Portland in the contest form my favorite US cities.

Unlike most cities, the Portland experience begins with getting there. The 1 hour and 23 minute flight, along the I-5 corridor, from Sacramento to the Pacific North West is one of the most is one of the most interesting flights in our nation. It is likely the most interesting as a ratio of intrigue to length. You definitely want a window seat.

There are two things that strike you as you fly north into the Pacific Northwest. The first is the clear cuts. The patchy vacancies of the wooded slopes tells a thousand tales of our collective appetites. [1]

But the real highlight of the areal approach to Portland is the Cascade Range. The cascades are unlike any other mountain range in the United States. They are benignly disguised as their more innocuous brethren but their solitary nature betrays a more menacing reality. Unlike the great communal mountains of bygone orogeneys in the central and eastern US (done growing and now, like most of us, experiencing the slow but relentless tug of entropy an gravity) the Cascades stand alone. These solitary frosted peaks loom ominously as signposts of volcanic power along I-5. It is as if, like Lewis’ inhabitants of Hell, their isolation is a function of their wrath.[2] We call them ‘dormant’ but that is a polite way of saying ‘not currently exploding’.[3]

The incredible experience of flying through the Cascades is that peaks that look so solitary from the ground line up like single file soldiers keeping ominous watch into the horizon. At one point you can see uncannily symmetrical and identical peaks[4] lining up like disciplined sentinels, successively monitoring our northward approach.

Mount Hood is the soldier Portland’s assigned soldier.[5] It seems more sinister in that it is only periodically visible (on Portland’s notoriously infrequent clear days).[6] But despite their digression, there is no major environmental hazard that is more visually ubiquitous. The northwest lives with its risk.

Portland’s highlight is the Waterfront. If Portland is a city that lives openly with its hazards, it is also a city that enjoys connection to its great river. There are walking/biking paths along both sides of the waterfront that makes you actually want to run.

They also claim the biggest bookstore in the country: Powells. Now this is cool enough to warrant checking out in its own right. You may not find a bigger fan of Amazon.com than me[7] but I do miss the many hours Amanda and I would spend on date nights in Madison Wisconsin wandering the dusty shelves of the town’s many book stores search of that rare gem. But Powells has been on my radar since it was practically a character in Don Miller’s Blue Like Jazz.

I ate at a couple of fun places like The Oyster Bar, which is over 100 years old.[8] I also finally made it to Voodoo Doughnuts. Voodoo donuts is home to some of the most original raised dough concoctions you will ever encounter. They include the maple bacon bar[9], m&m, tang, coco pufff and Captain Crunch[10] covered doughnut, doughnuts that resemble lit joints and a wide array of creative variations of the doughnut theme.[11] One of the odd things about V[12] is that you can get served in a relatively timely manner in the morning, but in the evening, forget about it…the line snakes down the block.

I got them for the class I was teaching on Thursday, the day I started with a theoretically difficult two hour lecture.

But, in my opinion, the highlight of the Portland food scene is ‘the carts.’ Along the outer edge of most downtown parking lots, people have parked converted wagons, vans, campers or tents and sell a huge variety of different foods. Overhead is low, so variety is high and it gets the city out of the office and onto the beautiful streets at lunch time.

I think one of the real attractions of Portland is that it manages to feel simultaneously small and cosmopolitan. You can walk the whole downtown in an hour and feel relatively safe at night, but it seems to bustle with culture and opportunity.

I think my least favorite thing about Portland is the uncanny density of strip clubs. I didn’t count, but the strip club/acre statistic has to be up there with any downtown in America.
Portland traffic is notorious…but it is really commuting traffic that is bad. There is surprisingly light traffic downtown for such a vibrant town. I wasn’t the only one who noticed this. The downtown traffic is comparable to a depressed rust belt city…but the downtown itself is buzzing with activity. I think the answer to this riddle is public transportation, walking and biking as Portland is perennially rated highly in each category.

As has become my custom on business trip I brought one book to read (John Updike’s In the Beauty of the Lilies) and one to listen to as I explore the city (Marylyn Robinson’s Home). By some strange coincidence or by some unsettling commentary on my literary preferences, both these books are period pieces about Presbyterian ministers and their deeply damaged children.

My last evening in town I took the light rail to the park.[13] Not like a standard urban park, more like a stand of well maintained woods on the edge of the city. Instead of the well maintained and obviously manicured lawns of the parks in San Francisco, Saint Louis or NYC, Portland’s Park appears to be a bonified wood managed for the outdoor enjoyments of its inhabitants. The number of runners and cyclists I saw here provided a hint to the dilemma I articulated in a mid-week facebook status:

Stanford Gibson thinks Portalnd is a magical place. They put bacon on their doughnuts and their sausages and still remain mysteriously thin.

I got out early on Friday and returned to the park to check out the zoo. The zoo was unremarkable, but its grounds were. It was built into the wooded hill of this great park, maintaining most of the towering trees, creating the illusion of a kind of wild otherness despite the teeming humanity.

One other thing I liked about this park was the subway station. You have to take an elevator down 250 feet from the park to the platform. There, on the platform (which is new, bright and clean) they display one of the borings extracted to explore the subsurface for subway construction. It is incredibly well done. 250 feet of 3” diameter baring cores were displayed in a horizontal acrylic tube. Each facies change was identified, dated and correlated with the palohistory of the region. There was ash and lava[14] and glacial silt and outwash from the Missoula flood[15]. Now, I know I enjoyed this more than most, but what a great opportunity to expand the pedagogical value of the museum stop for the park by providing something really interesting and subway related to help people usefully pass the time they spend waiting for the train.

Next Stop: Las Vegas

This post was prepared while listening to The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists[16]
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[1] I often wonder if there isn’t a substantial upside to well managed logging from a climate change perspective. In the classic global carbon budgets (the ones that demonstrate that there is a 4Pg surplus of carbon going into the atmosphere over historical levels) there is the curious phenomenon of ‘the missing Carbon’. The global Carbon balance does not balance. There is one Pg that is unaccounted for. Some speculate that it is in the wood that is sequestered in buildings around the world (wood that would have otherwise released its carbon into the atmosphere during the decay process). In a sense, buildings are the carbon swamps of our era.
Planting trees does not provide Carbon mitigation in perpetuity. There is an early benefit as carbon is fixed, but photosynthesis is mirrored by an exact reverse process that releases the Carbon as the trees die and decay. The replacement vegetation fixes approximately the same amount of Carbon, meaning that once an acre has mature trees it has maximized its carbon fixation capabilities. And while we are talking about atmospheric Carbon loads, few people realize that the carbon budgets identify soil disturbance from agriculture as an equal contributor as fossil fuel use. But, I digress.
[2] Lewis depicts hell in The Great Divorce as a vast suburban sprawl because the inhabitants of hell can not stand each other and want to be as spread out as possible, leaving an ever growing, sparsely populated, decaying urban core. My wife’s response to Lewis’ hell (before he revealed what it was) was ‘this place sounds like Buffalo.’
[3] The latent destruction these quiet cones represent is particularly real to me since most of my trips to Portland have dealt with the aftermath of Mount Saint Helens
[4] Well, identical except this one: Crater Lake.

[5] The video game that historically consumed the largest chunk of my time was the original SIM CITY. SIM CITY was a great urban planning game but once you got board planning your own cities, they had a dozen or so ‘scenarios’ in which SIM models of actual cities experienced disasters and your job was to re-plan the city in the aftermath. It included a dirty bomb in NYC and an alien invasion in some other town. But the most memorable was Portland. In the first time step of the Portland Scenario, a brand new volcano formed in the middle of the city and after the emergency management stage of the game, you had to re-plan the city around the volcano.
[6] Actually, Hood is sleepier than the peak overlooking Seattle. The catastrophe waiting to happen is Rainier which some volcanologists (people who study volcanoes not Star Trek cultures) say is way overdue.
[7] The diversity and mailability of books optimized the business for internet shopping and this is one area of my life where I prefer efficiency and affordability to human contact.
[8] I have mixed feelings about old-school restaurants. It is indisputably fun to go to a place that has been part of its city for generations. But I worked at a legacy restaurant in high school and they had simply been surpassed by more innovative establishments. It got that feeling a little bit about the Oyster Bar.
[9] This is exactly what it sounds like, a maple bar with a strip of bacon…and it is exactly as good as it sounds like.
[10] (that they cleverly call Captain, My Captain)
[11] Apparently, they had peopto bismal doughnuts for a brief period until the health department shut that down.
[12] This is how they abbreviate their business…not to be confused with the recent, surprisingly watchable alien show that borrows heavily from Battlestar Galactica (I’ll have more to say about that in my next fragments post). I can’t imagine why they don’t want to go with the natural abbreviation for their business (VD).
[13] I ended up encountering a professional soccer match on the way home. I had to choose between it and watching game 7 of Celtics-Lakers. It was a tough call…but I had gotten sucked into the Boston-LA narrative.
[14] Insight into the both the frequency and magnitude of the Hood’s awakenings.
[15] The Missoula flood is one of the great glacial paleo-floods of the Northwest. The story goes that as the glaciers melted, great lakes formed behind ice dams that periodically collapsed, releasing the biggest floods in history, the results of which can still be observed throughout the region.
[16] A Portland band.

2009: A Year in Books

I have two friends that try to read 52[1] books per year. For the last two years Joel has posted updates on how he did and brief thoughts about each work. I liked the idea...so I am stealing it. I do not remotely try to read 52 books per year. Twenty is more my pace…particularly because I take detailed notes on many of them in an attempt to retain the material.[2] Here is my 2009 in books.

Pigeon Feathers - John Updike
I am embarrassed to admit that the first time I heard of Updike was the day he died. I LOVED this little book. The man could write, and had an uncanny window into my psychology[3] in a way I suspect few experience. There is a sense in which I wonder why he has such wide appeal, because his work appealed to me on such a personal level and I consider my experience to be relatively eccentric.

Culture Makers – Andy Crouch
I was disappointed by this book. It was long and sluggish (especially for a book on Culture). But, as I look back over my writing and preaching since I read it, it is clear that Crouch has influenced my thought or, at least, has flourishes of quoteability. He did change the way I read some OT prophetic work.

Perelandra (A)[4] - CS Lewis
The best volume of Lewis’ space trilogy. Lewis’ fiction is mostly uneven.[5] But his playful and creative mind cannot be held down by his lack of mastery of the genre. There are flourishes of absolute brilliance. And these alone are worth the price of admission.

Ender’s Game (A) - Orson Scott Card
I am trying to consume more classic Science Fiction since that is what I have been writing lately. I listened to this while exploring Portland one week while I was there on business. For me ‘The Gate is Down’ will always be associated with morning runs along the Columbia and evening walks through one of America’s finest cities. I liked it, but have come to the conclusion that the criteria for artful prose is lower for classic SciFi than for contemproary or classic novels. At least I finally get a whole genre of nerdy jokes:

Imagine: A Vision for Christians and the Arts - Steve Turner
A book that culminates in an analysis of U2 isn’t exactly ground breaking, but despite a slow start and a predictable end, Turner can write and brings a pretty withering analysis to Christianity’s relationship to the arts. The middle chapter ‘The Split’ is, by far, the best.

Life Together - Dietrich Bonheoffer
Bonheoffer is one of my favorite theologians (maybe my favorite). I have taught classes on his theology more than once. But I had never read his work on community. It started a little slow but, on the whole, was unsurprisingly stunning.

Stumbling on Happiness (A) - Daniel Gilbert
My last post emerged from this book, but does not even begin to plum its value. The book’s general thesis is that humans are very bad at predicting what will make us happy and that the accounts of others who have been through a given event are much more reliable at predicting our experience of the event than our personal prediction.

In Cold Blood (A) - Truman Capote
Capote can write and can also structure a story. I am still amazed that he manage to spring a twist ending on me in a book that was supposed to be as predictable as Titanic.

Downtown Owl – Chuck Klosterman
Lets be fair. I am a Klosterman fanboy. He could probably write a diary of a year of bowel movements and I would read an enjoy it. But I was apprehensive about his first work of fiction.[6] I liked it.

The New Testament and the People of God[7] - NT Wright
Sweeping scholarly work tackling the literature and worldview of the inhabitants of Israel from about 200 BC to about 125 AD. Wright’s thing is to try to walk the line between what he calls ‘the two arrogances’ of fundamentalism and reductionism. He is a scholarly giant who brings to bear the best scholarship to first century studies and finds the outlines of an orthodox Christian faith[8] in the morass. I found that some of the points I thought were insufficiently argued in his popular works were thoroughly demonstrated in this volume.[9]

Acts for Everyone: Part 1 - NT Wright
But, the really intriguing thing about Wright is that he can switch hats so effortlessly. He can produce some of the best NT scholarship being written and then turn around and churn out these helpful, readable, accessible and enjoyable commentaries for preaching help and devotional use.

City of God - Augustine
I have written plenty about this tome in this space.

Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
I wrote an extended piece on this and my friend Joel wrote an extended response.

Assassination Vacation – Sarah Vowell (A)
Friends have recommended Vowell to me for years, so I finally picked upp her only work the Library had in Audio for our two ‘through the night Tampa<-->Panama City drives’ during our holiday vacation. It was very good. Though I was left wondering if Assassination Vacation should have been more like Killing Yourself to Live or visa versa. Vowell is insightful and funny, but her Northeastern Liberal requirement to express moral outrage[10] at most things southern got in the way of handling the Lincoln assignation sites in the nuanced, even handed way she treated the Cleveland and McKinley sites.[11]

The Rise of Christianity - Rodney Stark

I wrote a post on this one.

A Short History of Nearly Everything (A) - Bill Bryson
I am a sucker for science as story. Seriously, tell the historical narrative of how something came to be known, believed, or disbelieved, include a couple of outlandish personalities, make a couple jokes and I’m happy. Bryson’s little romp through a history of science was insightful, artful and entertaining.

Partial Reads

My reading time is probably my most limited commodity. Therefore I do not waste time finishing books that: (a) could have been pamphlets and yield most of their useful insights in the first 100 pages or (b) suck or (c) do not demonstrate enough potential to out compete the shiny new volume in the just-arrived Amazon box for my time.

Marriage: Sex in the service of God (30%)
Ash’s work is sound, scholarly and weighty. I got a lot out of what I read. Unfortunately, it is also dry. I’m not sure if it is a compliment or an outrage that he managed to make a book about sex boring, but I am going to go with both.

Flame of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit - Clark Pinnoch (50%)
Pinnoch’s book on the Holy Spirit was really good, but not good enough to finish.

Life: The Science of Biology – Sevada (30%)
This was the text for the two Biology classes I took in the Fall. It is actually very good. Well written, well illustrated…I enjoyed reading it and did most of the assigned readings though I knew they would not help me much on the tests.

The Message of Acts: The Spirit, the Church and the World – John Stott (30%)
Really liked Stott’s commentary on Acts – but only read the passages I preached on.

That Hideous Strength - CS Lewis (60%) (A)
This is Lewis’ attempt to make his argument from The Abolition of Man in a fictional work. I simply haven’t finished it yet. But it says a little about my ambivalence about the Space Trilogy that I was able to put it down and not completely compelled to return to it.

How Fiction Works - James Wood (70%)

My friend Tiffany recommended this after taking a look at one of my short stories. It was excellent, but I was not ready for it. There are two chapters on how Flaubert changed the novel. I have not read Flauber. So, hopefully, my 2010 list will include a couple of his novels and then I will revisit this text.

Apostolic Fathers - ed Michael Holmes (60%)
The Fathers were thrilling, but I got bogged down in the Didichae and the Shepherd. The latter are such crass moralists I had trouble identifying with them. But Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp et al were like finding family I did not know I had.

Mere Christianity - CS Lewis (50%)
I have decided to revisit some of Lewis’ writings. While his fiction can be uneven, his prose is unmatched. So much of contemporary Christian thought is just a repackaging of the things he wrote.[12]

From Every Nation: A Biblical Theology of Race - J. Daniel Hays (50%)
This text is full of intriguing factoids and effectively makes the case that the world of the Old-Testament must be read as a thoroughly multi-ethnic world. Unfortunately, it seems that Hays is an OT scholar and I read the book hoping it would help me unpack and preach the issue of ethnicity in the early church. Sadly, there were only four pages on Acts. This seems like a pretty dramatic failure, seeing as ethnic tension/reconciliation is probably one of the top 3 or 4 themes of this central Biblical text.
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[1] Joel and Alex – that’s one per week.
[2] I don’t know what the statute of limitations is on ‘year in review’ blogs, but surely I am flirting with it.
[3] As a quasi-existentialist, post-neo-orthodox Christian strongly influenced by Kierkegaard and Chesterton.
[4] (A) stands for audio book. I consume most of my fiction and popular literature through audio media. But I count these as ‘books I read.’ It's ok, you can judge me.
[5] With the exception of The Great Divorce, which is mostly dialogue, and, therefore, is just a more readable version of his prose.
[6] Apparently, I’m not the only one. He had to sign a two book deal to get this published, promising the same publisher his next major essay collection, Eating the Dinosaur which just came out.
[7] I finished this at the beginning of 2010, but am including it anyway
[8] Even if it is, at times, a strained orthodoxy.
[9] Which is the first of a 4-5 volume set.
[10] Yes, we understand, slavery was bad. We are not going to think you are a racist if you fail to express moral outrage every time you mention it.
[11] In a related note, she caricatured Jonathan Edwards, using him to demonstrate why an upstate NY free sex commune (where the middle aged men ceremonially ‘deflowered’ the girls) wasn’t so objectionable after all. How could someone who is so deeply curious and interested in the complexity of American History so completely mischaracterize (though it is a popular mischaracterization) one of our most interesting historical figures. Her penance should be to do an Edwards/Wesley/Awakenings book - that could really be in her wheelhouse.
[12] In fact, a recent CT article argued that Lewis is the bane of Christian writing because nearly anything we try to articulate, he has already done and with more insight and creativity.