Embracing the Obvious

Driving east on our way to Boston, we detoured briefly to Yellowstone - that quintessential national park teeming with families and RVs, where campsites are packed in tent-to-tent and the lodges are booked up a year in advance. We entered the park through the popular northern gate, making our first experience in Yellowstone the hordes of families at Mammoth Hot Springs - like Disneyland, but with steam vents.

Like many of our generation and temperament, I disdain the obvious. I do not follow well-trod paths; I like to feel original, to have "real" experiences when I travel (by which I mean, experiences not clogged up with other tourists). In an ideal world, I like my trips to be just un-mainstream enough to provide me with decent anecdotes for yuppie dinner parties. Yellowstone is as mainstream as it gets. 

But here's the rub: places are usually popular for a reason. Sometimes the collective does know best - consider, for example, crowd sourcing and (more often than not) juries. What Yellowstone lacks in obscurity, it makes up for with super-amazingness.

Here

Back in Portland, two posters hung over our bed. They look identical: empty white sheets of paper framed in black. But they each have a single, barely visible line of text precisely in their center. The one on my side of the bed said: Somewhere better than this place.

It is the motto of our meta-life. We met in Boston five years ago only to move to DC, to the Hague, to Portland, and now back to Boston with the expectation of another move two years from now. On good days, I feel like my life is a grand quest, with us cast as the fearless explorers (albeit of a modern, domesticated sort).

But on bad days - and there were many bad days in recent weeks - I feel scattered, my mind and body so jangly that the skin under my skin feels like it is vibrating. In our last couple of weeks in Portland, living amongst boxes yet again, our quasi-nomadic lifestyle deeply unsettled me: it's like a perpetual motion machine, with us propelled forward every time we think we come to rest. In those moments, I was drawn to the poster that hung on the other side of the bed: Nowhere better than this place.

With our remaining time in Portland slipping away like it never existed, I tried to collect a few last moments that were purely "here." It being June in Portland, I literally stopped to smell the roses.

Strawberry picking on Sauvie Island 

Sauvie's: a flat delta island just beyond the meeting of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers, a pastoral enclave right on the edge of the city. Most of the farms are u-pick, and the first big crop is the strawberries. It was a good year for Oregon strawberries; at the very start of June, the vines were already dense with fruit, real strawberries that are bright red and delicate all the way to the core. These strawberries are too fragile to ship; they can only be eaten locally. My sister wanted flats of them to make strawberry jam, yet with four of us, the picking only took twenty minutes. (A jar of my sister's Oregon strawberry jam was the first item in our new fridge in Boston. It didn't last long.)

The Rose Festival Grand Floral Parade

A repetitive childhood memory: waiting for what seemed like eons on an overcast day with drizzle for the annual Rose Festival parade to start. Was it an omen that this year, for the first time in my memory, parade day dawned bright and sunny?

Moving Day Doughnuts

We have officially survived Moving Day, that traumatic life experience Jeff and I keep repeating like a broken record every two years. As with other unpleasant but necessary life experiences (dentist appointments, final exams, various tests of reproductive organs), I usually have to bribe myself out of bed on moving day. In Portland, that means doughnuts.

Oh, doughnuts! How I love you! Fried cake with frosting and sprinkles, you warm the cockles of my heart!

Portland has good doughnuts, with countless independent purveyors scattered around the city. VooDoo Doughnuts gets all the attention, but waiting in line for a doughnut defeats the purpose: doughnuts should be guilty pleasures. If you have thirty minutes to weigh the pros and cons of eating a doughnut (or three), you're missing the whole spirit of the thing.

No, the ultimate doughnut in Portland is made by the humble Delicious Donuts, a small family shop in a nondescript mini-stripmall at one of the busiest and ugliest intersections in Portland (where E. Burnside crosses MLK). The friendly couple who runs the shop opens it at 3 a.m. six days a week; they often sell out by 9. Their basic cake doughnuts are soft with a moist crumb and just a hint of lemon; the yeasty raised doughnuts still have a bit of bite to them (none of this pure sugar, insubstantial Krispy Kreme nonsense); and their maple bars are both sweet and savory, without the cloying imitation flavor that ruins much of the maple genre.

And then there's my holy grail: Delicious Donuts' chocolate-frosted old fashioned doughnut. They shape their flavorful cake doughnut into a flattened ring, increasing the fry surface area and thus the crispness of its ridges, and then cover it in a thick, dark chocolate glaze - rich, dense, yet not too sweet. Yes, it's a heart attack in five bites, but it is also doughnut perfection.

So, for myself and for our movers, I pulled myself out of bed early on Moving Day to pick up a baker's dozen of Delicious Donuts. This was a fitting tribute to Portland: Boston might have cannoli and cream pies, but its doughnut market was long ago cornered by the nefarious Dunkin Donuts. Those sugary processed concoctions are a far cry from the real thing; doughnuts, as I know them, would soon be beyond my reach.

After securing my beautiful box o' doughnuts, however, I realized we had another problem. After 18 months, Portland managed to turn Jeff vegan just as we were packing up to move back east. My lovely doughnuts were a trial by fire: the poor man had to endure not only the trauma of Moving Day, but also hours of our house smelling like freshly fried dough and his wife having repeated food orgasms in the kitchen ("oh my gawd, this is sooo goooood!"). Some sort of recompense was in order.

Besides the doughnuts, we will miss Portland's large and growing cadre of vegan food establishments, from pubs (like Sweet Hereafter) to upscale cuisine (Blossoming Lotus, Natural Selection) to countless food carts and small cafes. This does not exist in most of the rest of the country, not even in the People's Republic of Cambridge, MA. Indeed, Portland has at least two vegan bakeries (that I know of). Think about that: a bakery that does not use milk or eggs or butter. Fascinating.

As luck would have it, we stumbled into one of them - Back to Eden - that very evening. Even I, a gleeful butter eater, have to admit that their stuff looks pretty good. Not as good as Delicious Donuts, mind you, but a plausible substitute for the true believers. Jeff got his vegan doughnut, and all was right with the world.

A few days later, we loaded up the car with the last dregs of our stuff and started the long drive east to Boston (Cambridge, to be exact). Early that morning, our friends came to see us head off into the sunrise, and they brought us one last farewell gift: a Delicious Donuts' chocolate-frosted old fashioned doughnut. 

Taking the Tri' to the East Side

When I was young, I wanted to be (a) a U.S. senator, (b) a novelist, or (c) a TriMet bus driver.

My affinity for Portland's buses was directly correlated to the amount of time I spent on them: just getting home from my summer camp at age 10 took three buses and about 1.5 hours. But kids don't mind killing time, and true to form, I used the gaps between connections to indulge in a daily food ritual (pork hum bao from an early downtown food cart, corn dogs from the Burlingame Fred Meyer's - I was not a svelte child).

The last bus on my daily journey - the 39 - only came every half hour and took even longer to reach my house, and its only riders were those like me who had all the time in the world. I always sat in the front seats, legs dangling, corn dog in hand, giant sweating fountain drink between my knees, so I could listen to the bus driver chat with the other passengers. Buses are still pretty friendly around here. Riders greet the driver and say "thank you" when they disembark, and drivers and riders are prone to striking up long and usually random conversations (which make great dinner table stories in the retelling).

Portland's bus mall and Bud Clark's muse.

Mushroom bus shelter-turned-coffee shop.

My TriMet heyday in the late '80s was the era of the original downtown "bus mall": two streets dedicated to public transit, with two bus stops per block and lots of 1970s public art installations to which our mayor Bud Clark famously exposed himself. The bus shelters were brown-and-glass mushroom-like capsules with honkin' television monitors that displayed, in shaky type like in airport terminals of old, the arrival time of the next buses (which was a-MAAAA-zing in 1988). One of these old stops has been left as a relic, turned into a coffee stand; the new shelters are all sleek and glassy, with flat screen monitors and no real protection from the rain.

Today it's the MAX light rail and the little streetcar that get all the attention (and the funding), but the buses still do most of the serious work. Don't be fooled if you come to town sans car: other than getting to and from the airport, the MAX and the streetcar are pretty much useless. You want the buses.

Granted, buses are not as tourist-friendly. But in Portland, you really can ask the bus driver for help identifying your stop or where you want to go. Plus TriMet has a decent trip planner, which is also integrated into Google maps, and there are more than 50 apps (as collected by TriMet) that provide real-time tracking of the buses.

Alas, due to serious budget shortfalls (and, imho, over-spending on extending the MAX and streetcar lines), TriMet has recently cut back bus service even further. What this means is that locals can't get cross-town quickly (say, from SE to NE Portland) - but it is still super-easy to get just about anywhere from downtown. And for tourists, that is likely what matters most.

The new shelters: sleek, yes; rainproof, not so much.

OK, so let's say you are staying at a hotel downtown, which also means you probably don't have a car, but you have an extra day to kill and you want to check out this "East Side" you keep hearing about (which is really, truth be told, where you find the heart of Portland these days). What do you do?

Pick a line, ride across the river, and hit up one of East Side's distinct neighborhoods. Roughly from south to north, your best neighborhood bets are:

How to Spend a Saturday in Downtown Portland

Let's say you're passing through town only briefly - for business, for a friend's wedding, as a pitstop between San Francisco and Seattle - and you only have a day to learn the lay of Portland's land. What do you do?

Welcome to PDX (says the White Stag)

My short answer: Waterfront Park and the Saturday Market, Portland's living room, Powell’s, some good food, and – time permitting – walking around the Pearl. Allow me to elaborate.

First, you should eat something. 

This is, after all, what one does in Portland.

Downtown has a number of “hot” as well as classic Portland restaurants. For breakfast, consider Bijou Cafe (132 SW 3rd Ave; no website), an early entrant on the Portland breakfast scene that serves excellent, largely local, largely organic breakfast and brunch dishes. Two other classic Portland restaurants serve consistently high quality brunches and lunches: the Veritable Quandry (with delightful patio seating; reservations recommended) and the Heathman (very classic Portland; reservations probably smart).

For “new” Portland (read: longer wait and no reservations), try Kenny and Zuke’s, a more industrial space with New York deli-style plates (they smoke and cure their own meats – including fabulous pastrami – and their bagels are above average). And the famous/infamous Tasty n' Sons, the unofficial King of Portland's popular brunch scene with the two-hour waits to prove it, has recently opened a second outpost right downtown, the aptly named Tasty n' Alder (it's on Alder).

Do do that voodoo that you do so well.

Or, if you really like lines, there’s always the downtown outlet of Voodoo Doughnuts. Now, I love a good doughnut – but I refuse to stand in line for more than 5 minutes for one. But Voodoo Doughnuts has rapidly become a Portland institution, and standing in line at the downtown store has become something of a Portland institution as well. So I leave the decision to you.