Dancing back in Mordor

Portland and Montana share a dance

Several years ago, Michael and I left Portland, and drove up the Columbia Gorge for a late spring whitewater rafting run down the White Salmon River. The guide sat me up front with a warning of coming water. My wet suit and I were prepared. Freezing river water never tastes so fresh as when splashed in bucket volumes directly at your face. The guide was a friendly young beardy-boy, who claimed the guides and sportsters living up near White Salmon all referred to Portland as "Mordor," for the way its smoggy glow lights the sky down at the far end of the Gorge. Drive west on I-84, and, for all the trees and rivers running about, Portland’s fuggish gleam is unmistakable.

On a recent trip from Montana back over the Rockies and down the Gorge to Portland, the first rain (rather than snow) I had seen since last fall slapped my windshield, just as I noticed the "Entering Multnomah County" sign slip by me on I-84, aka “The Banfield.” Much of Montana is a “water limited, semi-arid landscape.”¹ Winter snows are dusty until they melt away into mud. My skin had relaxed since entering the Gorge, recalling how humidity used to feel and smell.

While I had often before left the freeway at Troutdale to drive along the Columbia on the shortest route to our former home up in St Johns, North Portland, we no longer live there. I was now driving to my sister's home near NE 15th and Fremont, close to the rental house I was coming to clean and turn over to someone new. So I stayed on the Banfield, watching four years of new construction and lane markers I had missed by living in Montana slide by on either side. The road was shiny. I drove like grandma, and eventually slipped off behind Holladay Park. I decided to take NE 7th north towards Fremont, a minor arterial coated with old memories for me.

The discoveries continued as I drove north. We left Portland before the most recent round of bike and bus only lanes came into play. Before the last four years of deep new un-patched potholes smacking my suspension every several yards opened beneath the city’s wheels. It was dark and late so no other traffic was in my way. I was caught up imagining how densely packed this narrow street could become, with all the new apartment boxes springing up every few blocks.

Over the coming few weeks, I drove in and around inner Northeast every single day, back and forth from my sister’s home to our rental house. Out to Lowe’s and back again, and again. Up to St Johns to see what has happened to our old digs over the past few years. Learning once again how inner Portland streets are often effectively one-way affairs, even if technically bidirectional, with cars lined along on each side and a single passage down the center. A gridwork of slender streets and occasional mazes (I am looking at you here, Alameda, Laurelhurst, Ladd’s Addition), striping and winding their way between houses crowded with what anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest would see as dense, lush overgrowth. One point four million trees live inside the city limits, says the city, plus even more shrubs, bushes, and vines². Rose, rhododendron, and ivy. Moss tinting and furring any available surface, dissolving roofs and walkways in a Thomas Kinkade haze. All of it regularly basted in drizzle and fog.

Spotting oncoming cars along these foggy stripes brought my reflexes back into play: where can I slip off-side to let them pass? Who entered the block first? Who is closest, or biggest, or seemingly friendliest? Have they already slipped to their own off-side ahead, so I can just drive on past? Or, am I the polite one this time? This side-street auto-dance returns to me quickly, instinctively. I even remember it can happen with the occasional hand wave, if the drivers involved are feeling friendly, or perhaps lonely.

In Montana, hands are waved this way when you are on a back gravel road somewhere, in places that are anything but crowded. A similar cultural tradition of mutual acknowledgment between drivers prevails out where new folks go get lost, but in response to a different environmental dynamic. In Portland, drivers may wave to acknowledge the dance partner they just navigated past. In Montana, drivers may wave just to say “I see you, you are not alone out here.” In both cases, the cause is density: either too little of it, or too much, for one to be fully safe without cooperation. Dance wrong in one scenario and you may be blocked. In the other you may be abandoned. In either case you are dancing with someone, if you choose to watch your steps.

1. https://montanaclimate.org/chapter/climate-change

2. https://www.americanforests.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Portland-Urban-Forest-Fact-Sheet-FINAL.pdf