Gulch

The Long, Dark, Rainy Season of the Soul; or, The Daily Weather in Portland

Wet, damp, depressing, soggy, bleak, cold, gray, and dark are all words that adequately described Portland this late November. Heck, those words describe Portland most every month, excluding maybe three weeks in August or the beginning of September and the occasional Tuesday here or there. It’s a rainy city – the type of place where the weathermen say things like: “Expect strong showers turning into steady rain by this evening” while staring into the camera with a crazed look in their eyes.

Or at least it used to be. Like most places these days, the weather in Portland seems to have been slightly off the last five years. Sunshine breaks out at the oddest times – mainly during weeks that aren't at the end of August or on days that are actually contiguous. I’ve heard some reports that there has been sunshine - warm golden rays even – that fell on actual weekends when people could get outside of their cubicles and enjoy them.

Now you’d think that they blue skies would gladden the hearts of many Portlanders, that they’d come outside of their many fine movie theaters and coffee shops and bookstores and microbrew pubs and movie houses that serve microbrews and bookstores that serve coffee. You would think that the residents of this fair city would peel off their gore-tex jackets and remove their hoods and joyously blink like cave dwelling fish at the bright light.

But they don’t. Instead, Portlanders feel an icy dread when viewing blue skies. The sunshine burns their souls slightly like vampires. It’s an instinctual reaction because they understand that the rain and damp chill is Portland’s defense system. If the weather was nice, or even just okay, or even if there was two or three days contiguous days of sunshine a month, well then, everyone would want to move to Portland.

Suddenly, Portlanders would find themselves in line for a beer at the movie theater and be surrounded by their relatives or high school classmates from back east because Portlanders, by large, aren’t from Portland themselves. The moved there last year or a couple of years ago or last decade. And despite the overwhelmingly, depressingly gray winters and springs and falls and, well, most of the summers, they stayed because they liked enough about the city that the constant rain bothered them less and less.

Those people who actually like sunshine - those that believe that strong showers followed by steady rain day after day makes it a choice between mental health and living in Portland – well, they don’t usually last more than a year or two before moving away to places like Austin or Phoenix. But for those who stay, when they are not reading books or drinking beer while watching movies or reading books, they begin to really like the rain. They hike in it, they garden year round in it, the idea of moss growing on concrete sidewalks begins to seem normal. And so, the recent bouts of sunshine has many worried. It is, after all, a city were fashion can run from gore-tex to polar fleece and sunshine just won’t do.

And so, I’m happy to report that as I spent the last week in Portland, it rained. It was wet and damp and depressing, not to mention soggy, bleak, cold, gray, and dark. And that’s just the way I like it.

Report from the Field: Sleeping at Portland’s Rock n’ Roll Hotel

The band tonight is not that shabby. As I listen to them work their way through their first set, I decide that I like their lyrics and, if I wasn’t lying in bed, I’d probably be tapping a foot to the beat. It’s a rare occurrence that I get to critique live music from the comfort of my bed. The fact that my head is only 15 feet from the lead singer, much closer than many of the seats in the bar, allows me to hear the music with perfect clarity. I could be even closer to the band but I’m in the top bunk. Jen, who is sleeping in the bunk below me, is probably only 10 feet from the band. Of course, this distance is in vertical feet and there’s a floor between us and them. But when you decide to book a room at the White Eagle, which bills itself as a rock and roll hotel, it would be disappointing if the music wasn’t loud enough to make the walls vibrate.

The White Eagle Saloon & Hotel is part of the McMenamin’s kingdom of brewpubs, bars, movie theaters, and unique hotels. It is also one of the best deals in Portland for cheap, quality accommodations. A small, two-story building, the saloon takes up the entire first floor and there is a dozen hotel rooms on the second floor. Since the White Eagle is located in an industrial area under the Fremont Bridge, the urban views are spectacular.

The White Eagle originally opened in 1905 as a bar that catered to Polish immigrants as well as dock, mill, and railroad workers in the nearby industrial areas. According to the McMenamin’s website, the patrons could indulge in a brothel upstairs or an opium den downstairs. Another feature of the building, the website states, is that in the basement was a tunnel leading to the waterfront. Legend has it that through this subterranean passageway unlucky patrons were shanghaied to fill the ranks of ships’ crews. In the early 1970’s, the bar started having live music and that tradition continues today, with live bands playing seven nights a week.

As Jen and I discovered, $30 will get you a small room with bunk beds right above the stage. A bit more will get you beds that fit two people and slightly more distance from the band. All rooms are “European-style,” with bathrooms down the hall. There is free McMenamins-roasted coffee in the morning, free wireless Internet during the day, and the cover charge for the bar is waived in the evenings.

The McMenamins, like they have done at all of their properties, have put a lot of attention into the details. From the historic photographs of the hotel to the tiled guitars in the shower and the painted quotes in the rooms, I spent a fair amount of time wandering the small hotel just looking at the walls. The hotel might be small, cramped, and loud, but it has enough quality and charm that these become good things.

The band tonight is some sort of a folk/rock act which is much better for sleeping than the thrash metal band who played the night before. I look at my watch and figure that they’ll be playing for another hour. Most bands this week seemed to have knocked off at about 12:30am. As I lie in the dark room, I think that I’ll have to look up their name in the morning. That way, when they become famous, I can brag that they once sang me to sleep. Of course, that is, if I can fall asleep. And not fall off the top bunk.

Scientific Observations

From the Past 30 Days of Field Research

North Idaho

The pale girl with dreadlocks who sat across from us in the hot springs pointed vaguely towards the hillside. “The St. John’s Wort over there is my favorite patch of St. Johns in the whole Pacific Northwest,” said the girl, whose name was Rain.

“Oh, you planted that?” asked the one-armed guy who was also sharing the hot springs. His left arm ended shortly after his elbow. He held a can of cheap beer in his right hand.

“ No, no,” Rain said, with a hint of annoyance in her voice, “it grows naturally. I just like to visit it.”

“What does it do?” The one armed guy asked.

“It relaxes you; it’s really good for the brain. It regrows myelin,” Rain stated.

“Is that so?” said the one-armed guy when she finished. He swigged his beer, transfered the can from his good arm to a nook between his stub and his body, and then used his good hand to wipe some foam away from his mouth.

Portland, OR

My friends’ newborn baby looked up at me with giant eyes.

“Wow,” I said. “She’s really small.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how they come out.”

Victoria, BC

“What type of food do you like to eat?” I asked the tall Spaniard sitting across from me in broken Spanish. We were sitting in the dark, cellar-like space of The Mint restaurant, and I squinted at the menu, trying to read it by the flickering candle light.

“Como ninos,” Jordi replied.

My mind sluggishly translated: Como - “I eat”, ninos - “children”.

Jen and I met Jordi and his wife Ester, who were from Barcelona, for the first time earlier that day. They were cousins of a friend of ours and they were on their honeymoon and traveling through North America for the first time. Owing a karmic debt to the many people who have let Jen and I sleep at their places while we traveled, we had invited them to stay with us for the night they were in Victoria.

“Uh, you eat children?” I ask hesitantly.

Jordi laughed. “No, no, comimos como ninos.” We eat like children.

“Ah”, I said and took a drink of my beer.

Montana

After the professional comedian finished her show, my aunt approached her.

“Have you ever thought about performing at funerals?” asked my aunt.

“Uh…” said the comedian, a friend of the family.

“My husband is dying, you know,” My aunt continued.

“Oh, I heard that,” replied the comedian. “I’m very sorry.”

“Well,” my aunt paused. “Think about it. You have my number.”

In Which I Postulate the Obvious: Dancing Can Be Macho

When it comes to dancing, I learned the first rule of not looking like an idiot the hard way: never make a bet with an Australian when personal humiliation is on the line. Thus, as I climbed up the short ladder and squeezed myself into a metal cage suspended above a crowded dance floor at a packed dance club, I was glad I had remembered the second rule: a little alcohol goes a long way.

Earlier that night, I had gone out dancing with a group of friends, most who were from far off lands like Europe or South America, exotic places where dancing is not only an accepted form of entertainment, but can also be considered, well, macho. Now, my years in the Montana public education system left me with the ability to fake a country jitterbug fairly well and I’ve even gone out dancing a number of times in Montana; however, most of my friends from back there wouldn’t really put dancing on a list of macho activities. Not like, you know, spitting. Or shooting things.

This group of friends, though, knew how to dance. Most of them grew up dancing in their home countries and had been taking Salsa and Tango lessons for months while living in Portland. When we would go out dancing, instead of heading straight to the bar to get a little bit of that liquid courage and stalling technique that I call a good micro-brewed beer, they would head straight to the dance floor.

I’m always slightly embarrassed when I start to dance. I feel pretty self-conscious, awkard, and my overall goal is not to hit too many of the people around me in the head with my flailing appendages. Thus, it was probably a bad idea when I turned to my Australian friend, nodded to the suspended dance cage, and said, “Hey, I’ll give you five bucks if you dance in there.”

A wicked gleam came into his eyes. “Nah, mate, I’ll only do it if you do it,” he responded.

I was reminded of this event earlier this weekend when Jen convinced me to return to the dance floor and continue where I had left off in my training of that spicy Latin dance known as the Salsa. My last Salsa lesson had been almost two and a half years earlier while I was traveling in Guatemala. Luckily, that hour-long class had been my only salsa lesson and thus, when I stepped out on the dance floor, I didn’t feel like I had lost much. In fact, I quickly realized that I had lost nothing since the instructor was actually teaching the Meringue. Which, apparently, is some other type of dance in which I would totally be awesome at if the goal was to whack into your neighbors with your elbows while doing the exact opposite of everybody in the room.

It was here in Victoria at the Salsa Palace where I finally realized why dancing might be considered macho. First, I finally mastered the ability to tell which is my right foot and which one is my left (the left foot is on the same side of the body of the hand that forms an L shape when the thumb is held out). Then, when I finally looked at something other than my feet, I noticed that while there were exactly four men on the dance floor, there were at least thirty young women, wearing tight dresses and high heels and looking for men to dance with. Trust me, spitting rarely attracts such an attractive, well-dressed audience. After the lesson, a dj started playing songs with catchy Latin beats. “I am Mr. Salsa” He said in a macho Latin accent. “Salsa! One Two, One Two, Sa! Sa! Sa!” He shouted . I grabbed Jen and we stepped - one two, one two – and we twirled and it was macho, even without the spitting.

Macho, though, was not what I was feeling that night in the dance cage. When I finally climbed in and looked down to see what seemed to be a couple hundred people on the dance floor, I wish I could say I let mind go blank and my body become one with the music. Instead, I thought about the one dance whose instructions I’ve always been easily able to master - the Humpty Dance:

First I limp to the side like my leg was broken
Shakin' and twitchin' kinda like I was smokin'

That's all right 'cause my body's in motion
It's supposed to look like a fit or a convulsion

No two people will do it the same
Ya got it down when ya appear to be in pain

Now, if only Salsa dancing were as easy.

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To see someone who has truly mastered the art of dancing, traveling, and doing both at the same time, be sure to check out this video.

The Curious Incident of the Exploding Root Beer

About 45 seconds before the bottle exploded, my friend Brace held it six inches from his face to read the label. It was a large 22-ounce bottle of dark brown glass that had originally held a micro-brewed stout from one of the better breweries in Portland. Some months before, that dark, foamy liquid had served its higher calling by being drunk before a meal of pasta. The empty bottle was washed, put in a box in a basement, then later retrieved, sterilized, washed again, and ultimately refilled with a copper colored liquid that tasted similar to, but not entirely like, root-beer.

There is a basic theory that scientists have been studying and refining for decades to better describe and understand the universe. This theory states that: “If an individual enjoys beer and lives in the Pacific Northwest, they will eventually try to make their own homebrew.” This theory, known as the Relative Theory of Beer Conservation, has further permutations that state that the homebrew will usually taste like murky swamp water and that the maker will encourage you to sample many of the said bottles of homebrew at various parties and holidays.

Back around the turn of the millennium, Brace and I had been operating under this theory for a while. We had experimented with our own beer by adding different ingredients that included jalapeno peppers, ginger, coffee, chocolate, and a few stems from a sage bush that Brace had growing in his yard. The result was almost always a liquid that tasted like, well, a carbonated swamp but we drank it anyway because it was our beer. Plus, no one else would drink it when we brought it to parties.

I eventually moved back to drinking the store bought stuff while Brace continued his beer research, eventually creating liquids that not only tasted like good beer but that people actually requested. A good homebrew is a labor of love and Brace took his beer as serious as any of his relationships.

In 2001, Brace and I decided to go to Victoria, BC for Thanksgiving. Jen had moved up there the year before and I was using my holidays to go visit her. So, we got up early on that Thanksgiving Day morning and drove up to Port Angeles to catch the Coho Ferry.

We were about half way across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which separates the Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island, when Brace reached into his bag and pulled out a large brown beer bottle. We were sitting in the rear cafeteria section of the ferry, which was crowded with people taking advantage of the four-day weekend. Brace placed the bottle on the table between us.

“Is that one of yours?” I asked, speaking loudly to be heard above the noise of the other passengers and the ship's engine. There was a label painted directly on the bottle, unlike Brace's normal blank-bottle look.

“Sort of, I tried making some root-beer last month,” He replied. “I thought I’d bring a couple of bottles for the weekend.”

“How did it turn out?” I asked.

“Not bad, not bad,” he said. “At least for the stuff that I used sugar in. I tried making some sugar free stuff by using stevia. That stuff’s not as good but it’s drinkable. Sort of.”

“Sort of drinkable is always the goal,” I said. “So, which is this?”

He picked up the bottle to stare at the label. “It’s Thanksgiving. It’s the good stuff, of course. Let’s have some.”

He put the bottle back on the table and reached into his pack to find a bottle opener. He was just unclipping a buckle when there was a loud BAM! as an exlosion went off. I sat there, my brain needing a few micro-seconds to interpret the raw data that life was presenting before it could understand what actually happened.

The noise was the first thing to register. It sounded like one of those firecrackers that border on dynamite, an M-80, going off. The noise steamrolled over all of the other sounds in the ship, seeming to silence everything. A split second later, I noticed that the bottle of root beer was gone. A fraction of a second after that, I noticed that I was covered in shattered glass and, well, root beer. Across the table, Brace’s eyes were wide and he had a slightly dazed expression. Small slivers of brown glass stuck to his face. I looked up – dark drops of root beer dripped from the ceiling.

Root beer and glass covered all of the tables and people next to us. The entire ship had gone silent and there was a slightly panicked feeling in the air. It was only a few months after 9-11 and it was clear that loud explosions on international ferries weren’t something anyone was really comfortable being around. My ears were ringing. People were looking at us suspiciously.

“Uh, my root beer exploded,” Brace said loudly to the silent room.

There was a long pause and then someone laughed and the silence slowly ended. People talked with slightly hushed voices and snuck weird looks at us. We talked with the people around us and were amazed to find out that no one was cut or even very mad. We had avoided getting cut ourselves, although we were very sticky.

“Wow,” said a guy who walked over from across the room to talk with us. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. That was just root beer you bought at a store, huh?”

I looked at Brace. “Oh yeah, store bought, no doubt,” we quickly replied.

“Hmm,” the man said thoughtfully. “I guess the vibrations from the engine caused the carbonation to build up until it exploded.”

“That’s probably it,” I said and went to grab a mop from a member of the crew. We cleaned up the mess as best as we could, finding that some pieces of glass had been flung across the entire length of the room. After returning the mop, we sat back at our table for a second and then decided to make ourselves as scarce as possible by sitting outside, in the cold wind.

“Man,” I said. “I hope we don’t have problems with immigration.” I could imagine some other passenger telling the customs agent to be on the lookout for two sticky looking individuals that had set off some sort of explosive device on board. “You can’t miss ‘em,” I imagined the person saying. “They smell just like root beer.”

“Uh,” Brace said, pulling me from my thoughts, “I probably should have told you that I was having a small exploding problem with the root beer.”

“What?”

“Well, I’ve been storing them in my beer closet and have had six or seven bottles explode in there. It’s been weeks since the last one exploded. So I figured if they hadn’t exploded by now, they were never going to and that they were safe.”

We sat quietly, lost in our thoughts. A few people walked by, giving us suspicious looks. We didn't talk much until eventually the ferry sounded its loud horn, ripping away our introspection and signaling that we were entering the Victoria Harbor.

And so, this Thanksgiving, I find myself once again giving thanks for not being around any homemade root beer. It seems that not having your beverage explode is something we take for granted far too much. I’m even more thankful, though, that no one has asked me to try their homemade ginger-chocolate-fennel-jalapeno beer at any parties this year. That stuff's really dangerous.