Ten years ago today, I loaded all my worldly possessions—with the exception of an enormous 1960s-model television, which I left on the front porch of my apartment building—in the back a blue 1983 Honda Civic. Still recovering from an epic night of Missoula-style debauchery, I drove eight hours to Portland, pulled the Civic up on the sidewalk outside the Westfal Apartments. The Westfal, a 1910 building in an incongruous location not far from Portland State University, had two things going for it: I knew where it was, and knew I could walk from there to the offices of Willamette Week, my new employer, on Tenth Avenue. I enjoyed dim apprehension at best of the rest of Portland. Addresses on the inner East Side seemed bafflingly far off to a lifelong resident of a micro-city; as for North and Northeast Portland, I knew them only as “the ‘hood.”
I spent the first night at the Westfal sleeping on a series of three four-inch-thick foam pads. In fact, I spent every night for several weeks sleeping on a series of foam pads, until my father hauled my mattress out from Missoula on the top of his car. The idea of buying a bed seems not to have occurred to me. Ditto furniture: I brought no furniture with me. None. Neither did I buy any furniture. I lived in an apartment without so much as a folding chair for weeks. I ate my dinners, almost exclusively pasta with the red sauce that was the pride of my culinary skills, sitting on the floor.
Every morning, I walked over to the Park Blocks and down to Willamette Week. I found the Park Blocks sort of mesmerizing—a vision of cultivated urbanity, exactly the sort of thing I had moved to Portland to find. Then I spent my working days extolling the city’s exploding indie-rock scene—yet another example of highly refined urban life. I could barely locate the clubs I was covering as WW’s music editor—I spent a lot of nights walking from the Westfal to Old Town and back again, because I knew I was on solid ground if my destination was Berbati’s or Satyricon. I could pick my way across the Burnside Bridge and up Sandy to EJ’s. Eventually, my friend Amelia showed me the Hawthorne Bridge and explained that if one crossed it, one discovered many other neighborhoods filled with things to do.
After work, I often dropped by downtown’s notorious Psycho Safeway to pick up garlic, canned tomatoes, pasta and beer. I would cook, crouch on the floor to eat, read, and then look through my latest treasured copy of Barfly Magazine. My urban-orientation method of the moment consisted of picking a tavern out of Barfly, looking up its address in the Thomas Guide and trying to track it down.
A few weeks into my stay, my grandfather drove down from Gig Harbor, Washington with a truck full of cast-off furniture, including one ratty armchair and an iron cot of possible World War I vintage. My godfather George visited in September and insisted I buy a table so we could eat dinner. Slowly but surely, civilization arrived at the Westfal.
That summer, the girl in the next cubicle at WW caught my eye. We started hanging out. We played a lot of late-night Scrabble and drank tequila sunrises, which seemed like a good idea at the time. Eventually, our friends demanded that we kiss.
A decade later, I have a wife, a kid and a mortgage. I spent a good part of a day, not long ago, evaluating different bed skirts. I live in and love mysterious North Portland. I work out of a humble little private-eye office downtown. I drive a Subaru and ride my bike when I can. I am a Portlander—not a native, but a more typical example of the species. Like the people who started and built this city, I came down the Oregon Trail to the place where the Wild West and the Pacific Rim converge, in search of some version of fortune.
As I walked around downtown today—a beautiful, even hot spring day, much like the gilded Portland spring of 1999—I wondered what my 24-year-old self would notice. He would still love the 10th and Burnside nexus, where the Powell’s mothership and the likes of Reading Frenzy and Half & Half embody Portland-style urban culture. He would be semi-appalled, semi-impressed by the Pearl District towers beyond. Downtown, he would see lots of new hotels and lots of faces that could belong to any city dwellers dating back to the founding of Rome.
As for the changes in the life of his supremely lucky future self, I suspect he would be pleased. He may not have known what he was doing, even in the slightest, back then, but his instincts proved true.
