The City of Books

Notes from Margo (with Lynn):

Our first agenda item in Portland was to visit with Barry Locke, a former student of Lynn’s at SF State and a solid pickup basketball player. After covering the Giants for the Hayward Review and its sister papers, he moved to Portland. He worked for Nike, edited a newsletter for employees and traveled the world. No business like shoe business. Then, as he put it, they granted his release. It was generous. He smiles. Temporary joblessness didn’t stop Barry from getting married three weeks ago. He had only one day before the happy couple was to depart for their honeymoon in Italy. He had to pick up his newly acquired stepsons at school, so he suggested meeting for lunch at the Kennedy School. It’s an old-time elementary school that was saved from the bulldozers and refurbished by the McMenamin brothers (more on this later).

But before meeting Barry, Lynn needed to see the world’s most amazing bookstore. I had seen it when Kenny and I (and our friends Beth and Hanna) had come to Portland to look at colleges last year. Powell’s City of Books takes up a city block. So I knew that for Lynn, a book worshipper, this would be one of the wonders of the world. And Lynn wanted to give Barry the first of Donna Leon’s mysteries set in Venice. We found Powell’s with the amazing little GPS thing in my iPhone, and Lynn was suitably impressed – room after room of mysteries, histories, fiction, poetry, metaphysics, cookbooks, gardening, sports, biographies, books on tape, books on CD, self-help books, kids books. The red room, the purple room, the orange room: The place is so big there’s a booklet with a map of the store. Lynn said he wants to live here – not in Portland, just in the bookstore. In the end, the Donna Leon book was duly purchased, and Lynn was dragged away from the store.

So we met Barry for lunch at the Kennedy School. It was amazing – a beautiful 1915 building converted into a complex with a restaurant, brew pub, small movie theater, a “soaking pool,” meeting rooms, a B&B. Really nicely done. The brothers have done well, refurbishing older buildings and serving good food and good beer at reasonable prices. They now have about 50 properties in the Portland area and elsewhere in Oregon and Washington. Mostly old buildings, they have been turned into brew-pubs, restaurants, centers for community gatherings. We were impressed. The Kennedy School has murals and mosaics on the walls and lots of fanciful artwork. Some is in keeping with the old elementary school feel, and some is whimsical stuff that really had nothing to do with the past. It was charming and the food was good and not expensive at all.

It was great to see Barry – he was happy and optimistic in a ready-for-a-honeymoon kind of way.

Barry batted two-for-two in his suggestions for our stay in Portland. One was McMenamins. And the second was the daily sundown show of thousands of Vaux’s swifts swirling in a vortex over the Chapman School, funneling themselves into its smokestack-chimney to roost for the night. Bingo!! Make a birder happy.

I had actually studied this behavior in my ornithology class last year. Thousands of the birds roost in the chimney of the school in the month of September. Around sunset they gather, flying above the chimney and appear to form a vortex as they go in for the night. Thousands of people come to watch. So we went, me because I really was interested in the phenomenon, and Lynn because he’s being a sport. It’s enough of a scene that there are informational placards on the hillside where the watchers congregate, telling us what we need to know about swifts: Each tiny bird eats up to 5,000 insects a day. They construct their nests of spit. (I remember that from class.) They eat in flight, they can sleep in flight, they copulate in flight. Their feet are not adapted to grasping branches, so they cling to tree trunks or rock walls, which is what they do inside the chimney, they cling to the walls. Thousands and thousands of them.

Anyway, there we were on the little hillside in the schoolyard waiting for sunset with hundreds of families – kids, parents, grandparents, babies, young people on dates. Picnic dinners were spread out – deli takeout food, wine, juice, sippy cups, sandwiches, pizzas, the works. As the sun went down, the birds, amazingly agile in the air, arrived – swooping and swirling around the chimney, circling above the rim. Just a few at first, then more. Then more. And then after a while, they formed a swirling maelstrom of birds and went in the chimney. The show was interupted twice by some sort of hawk that swooped through and snared a swift for dinner. I heard a father tell a kid nearby: “Nature in action.” It was amazing really – the swifts’ show, the scene of people watching, and even the fact that there weren’t more hawks taking advantage of such a ready supply of tiny birds to eat.

We stayed two days in Vancouver, Washington, (just across the river north of Portland) with Lynn’s 87-year-old uncle, Richard. He’s a retired pastor in an evangelical community church. We’ve visited with him a number of times in our home in San Francisco but had never seen him in his native habitat. He was beyond gracious – really, really kind and welcoming – to his nephew, whose religious beliefs could not be further afield from his own, and his nephew’s wife, from the stiff-necked tribe of people, the Jews, who have never accepted the word of the gospels.

He welcomed us into his home and fed us a meal that would be the dream of any local/organic/slow food enthusiast. Corn from his garden, which we could see growing outside in the yard; salad and zucchini, also from his garden; and salmon caught in the Columbia River by a neighbor.

We saw the sights of Vancouver with him, but really the highlight was seeing the Glenwood Community Church, where he spent most of his years ministering. The church has grown tremendously. Now 1,200 to 1,400 people attend the two weekly Sunday services. Uncle Richard took us to the new church buiding, with 20 acres of land around it, a huge beautiful sanctuary, three floors that hold the offices and Sunday school rooms, the library, the youth ministry, the kitchen, the whole works. They have classes, support groups, Bible study, men’s groups, women’s groups, a quilting group, missionaries – dozens of ways to get involved. And Uncle Richard introduced us around to these people who have been his world all these years, and they clearly love and respect him a great deal. They credit him (and God, of course) with the church’s growth and success. It was beautiful.

Uncle Richard says grace before every meal. His prayers thank God for the food, but he starts by thanking God for the people at the table, the fellowship, the health and safety of the people at the table, and their loved ones. Food is wonderful, and we’re thankful for that. But we are really thankful that our loved ones are here. And safe. And healthy.

We said a farewell to Richard this morning, and headed north and west to the end of the Columbia River, where the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Corps of Discovery, finally found the Pacific in the winter of 1805. Lynn and I both read the book “Undaunted Courage,” so we’re interested in the Lewis and Clark sites. We’re camped for the night at the Fort Stevens State Park campground at the mouth of the Columbia River, probably the only site in the area where the Corps didn’t camp. Oh well.

When we paid for our spot, the parks guy told us cheerfully: “The biggest campground west of the Mississippi, 530 spots.” Yup. Full hook-ups, rustic sites, even some handicapped accessible yurts. We were afraid it would be laid out like a big noisy parking lot crammed with tents, camper trucks and RVs. But our site is lovely, surrounded by ferns and mature fir trees. There may well be 530 sites here, but we can only see a few, and the only sound at the moment is the wind in the trees.

Mileage today: Vancouver, Wa., to Astoria, Or.: 97 miles

Total mileage: 830 miles