In Portland, Day Three

This city is full of damned hippies and I have aches in muscles I didn't think I had.

Our last day in Portland began at 7:30 AM Pacific time, which is so ungodly early that I don't think the East Coast should be allowed to live anymore. We had breakfast and made our way to the rendezvous point at a local visitor information center underneath a quaint little coffeeshop called "Starbucks" off of Morrison St.

There, we met Natalie. She would be our guide on what would become a four hour walking tour of Portland's culinary offerings. Under her guidance, we navigated the city in a tight cluster of 17 souls in search of tomato soup, biscuits, croissants, beer, mustards, wine, tea, gelatos, pizza — the list goes on. I can't even remember everything I ate. It was a really great experience.

One of the principles that the tour embodies was "FLOS": the foods we sampled were all intended to exemplify the qualities of being fresh, local, organic, and sustainable. Local suppliers of the foods or ingredients in the finished product, restaurants changing their menu to fit with seasonally available fruits and vegetables, reducing waste, and trying to lower their carbon output, too.

While the engineer in me is thrilled by the concept of using a vent to redirect excess heat from the pizza oven to provide heat to the building in which the pizza place resides, I had to draw the line at both a building whose roof is made of sod and the advantages of Portland's official "cars, like, totally suck dude" policy.

I was incredulous when I was told that Portland's parking meters issue printed tickets (on recycled paper, no doubt) that you can purchase on the street with a credit card are valid everywhere in the city.

When I was ushered into what was probably the fifth building I'd been inside that day that was on the city's official historic registry and had been renovated using original lumber from 1880, I proverbially rolled my eyes. Portland has some of the nation's highest property and income taxes for a reason.

When our tour group stopped to learn that original hitching post markers were preserved all along Portland's curbs by an activist group seeking to put My Little Ponies on them to promote awareness of them, I resigned myself to clubbing a baby seal just to maintain equilibrium in the cosmos.

I only spied one person wearing Crocs today, but there were enough people in the vegan deli with rolled-up yoga mats next to them that I'm pretty sure Portland's Pearl District needs to be the new home of a very large barbecue restaurant that cooks its pork ribs over old growth forest woodfires and adds carcinogenic agents into the chimney flume to ensure that a dark cloud is constantly belching forth from an enormous smokestack that is painted to vaguely resemble a nuclear reactor's steam silo complete with an oversized Bohr-era atomic model diagram on the side.

Don't get me wrong. I'd move to Portland in a heartbeat. I desire to live in a quaint apartment above a retail shop within walking distance of Powell's and I'd live a very happy life shuttling books to and from my abode. I walked away last night with a first edition of Leyner's Et Tu, Babe for only a few dollars. But Portland has to stop acting so self-righteous in the green department, at least long enough for other major cities to stop giving Portland's mayor wedgies at mayoral conferences and to start to want to reduce their own waste output.

As we bustled around on the tour, the sun started shining, which is unusual for anyplace in the Pacific Northwest. As I alternated back and forth between sunglasses and prescription specs, I caught some of Portland's street names. Lovejoy. Kearney. At this point, I put together that Matt Groening probably grew up here, and before long we ran into a Flanders Street as well. Wikipedia confirms it.

After the tour, we went to Sahagún. Stef insisted, despite Monk and I sternly warning her of the consequences. There were delectable chocolates and a hot cocoa made from beans grown in Santo Domingo. I abstained from eating anything since I had spent the previous four hours gorging myself on food and felt like a cup of very rich cocoa would probably give me an immediate heart blockage in one or both of my ventricles.

Shortly thereafter, we stopped for more Voodoo doughnuts to take on the road and then I somehow found the will to dine yet again when we stopped for tacos at a nice little place called ¿Por Qué No?. Very tasty food and they had a rare treat: cane sugar Coca-Cola in glass bottles. I am a pig. Yo soy jamon.

We scouted out a return course to I-5 and left the lovely city of too many damned, dirty, electric car-driving hippies and just the right amount of bitchin' bookstores and returned to Washington late in the afternoon.

It was already dark by the time we got back to Centralia, but I was very happy to meet up with Toni and Ryan again after about four months, three timezones, and two thousand miles. They're doing quite well. It was good to see Ryan's new brewery digs (second brewery tour of the day, the first being Bridgeport), and I was pleasantly surprised to meet Dick, the Dick, of Dick's Brewing Company for a few minutes.

As is the case with all feel-good reunions, it felt like it was over in minutes. This would conversely explain the agonizing march of weeks and months that led up to the ten-year high school reunion that I was bittersweet about skipping just last month. We parted ways. I now had over a case of delicious mix-n-match hand-picked beer, and I would have brought something for Toni and Ryan from Portland if I'd thought for a second that I could have found something in 3 days that neither of the Portland natives couldn't obtain for themselves in fifteen minutes while blindfolded.

It'd be like getting a Liberty Bell keychain for someone who grew up in Philadelphia. "Oh, hey. Thanks. Yeah. Liberty Bell. It's famous and everything, right. Could never have found one of these bad boys myself. It's great, through. Thanks. Now I can put all those pesky keys in one place. Finally! Sheesh. The nightmare is over."

At the very least, I patted Toni's now just-barely-tingling bump, which is an experience that will always remain special and weird to me. I'd normally take this opportunity to make an offhand joke about how women react when I try to get close to their wombs, but it's not really funny when it's true. In retrospect, jumping out of dark alleys at night screaming "I'm going to put my evil inside you" is probably not the best of pickup lines.

We got home late. Total return distance, 195 miles. The car is unloaded and I stopped unpacking as soon as I found my toothbrush. After three days of driving, sleeping on a funky bed-style bed (as opposed to my usual choice of couch), and walking around the city for hours on end, I am sore. I have muscle groups that ache in ways that I'd forgotten I could suffer. I took some aspirin and I'm fighting off yawns. At only 2:00 AM — the time I usually start reading my daily webcomics — this is a real sign of progress, but totally expected when capping off a sixteen hour day spent on the move.

Rest now. Pictures later. Portland fun.