Travelling Portland

While the baby sleeps, I have been reading McCarthy’s Bar, a travel-guide-cum-inner-exploration by a boozy English-Irish writer named Pete McCarthy. To be honest, some of his stories seem so bizarre that it’s hard to believe they’re true. The man has a mind and a mouth that never stop chattering. Together the two of them seem to be responsible for a fair amount of anxious speculation, snarky commentary, and--I suspect--general embroiderment of reality. It makes for excellent reading.

McCarthy is propelled to wander the Emerald Isle by a sense of doubt as to whether or not he “belongs” in Ireland. Who wouldn’t want to belong to Ireland if they didn’t already? In fact, it's those who don't belong already who most want to. Ireland is loveliest to those who don’t live there permanently, I’m told. Over and over, as if he’s making his case to the reader, McCarthy wonders if he’s really Irish. Is he more Irish than the transplanted German running a hostel in an old convent? More Irish than the Italian tourists in expensive parkas who sip soda water in the pub? With two Liverpool-Irish parents both named McCarthy, I’m not sure why he feels the need to belabor the point: he’s obviously a McCarthy, and the McCarthys were Irish until the generation before him. Go back to Ireland if it makes ye feel good, say I.

But without the nattering doubt, there would be no story. It makes as good a scaffold as any, I suppose, for a string of tales centered around standing stones, standing pints of Guinness, the idiocy of tourists, the idiocy of the Irish, and more Guinness. Reading his book, I am reminded of the poignancy Ireland evokes in the children of emigrants, and the frustrations as well—so much so that I’m tempted to go back for a nice nostalgia-busting visit.

I close the book and idly start thinking to myself how you don’t really need to leave the US to get a taste of the foreign and the bizarre. Within this one sprawling country you can encounter completely foreign ways of doing and being. Within an hour of Portland—not to mention the rural South, or New Mexico—you’ll find people and places that will throw you for a loop so wild you’ll find it hard to believe you’re in the same country.

Today after the baby’s morning nap, we suit up and board the city bus for a cafe that features lunchtime folk music for small children and their families. Baby K watches the pimply guitarist with a passionate infantile intensity and crawls over to try to eat his sound cables. I distract him with his very first Cheerios, which he ignores. Nearby, a short slapping-match between two four-year-olds who hadn’t previously been introduced goes right over his head.

The music winds down just in time for us to miss the bus back to our neighborhood. Suddenly we have half an hour to kill along a desolate patch of East Burnside. We are only about 40 blocks from home, but they are unpretty, industrial, and involve a bridge and a large river. We will not hike home today. Instead we loiter near the bus stop, strolling about in the exhaust of an urban thoroughfare, marveling at particularly evil-looking examples of graffiti and particularly mangy cyclists.

We stroll downhill to the next stop, where a toothless woman with a jutting chin is sucking face with an blue-collar gentleman clad in a dirty baseball cap and plaid wool jacket. I keep moving, and the baby does not object. A fat man with a Santa-Claus beard whirs by on a small blue electric bicycle. I pretend not to look, but I can feel the baby cranking his neck to watch fellow go by. Behind the tall glass windows of the rock gym, people with time and money to burn are seriously contemplating a plastic wall as they rub chalk on their palms. We sit in a bus shelter and the baby tries to touch the graffiti.

When the bus comes, we are suddenly in close physical and olfactory proximity with an assortment of our fellow humans so eccentric and fragrant as to make me wish for staid, stodgy old Ireland. There is a black guy with mirrored glasses, fifty strands of Mardi Gras beads and old keys around his neck, and fingernails out to here. A disabled lady with stringy grey hair and a striking black mustache, who sits next to us and tells us about her grandson. A brown-skinned guy with some sort of skin infection speaks enough English to communicate that he has a son, “a junior”, K’s age.

I realize we are surrounded by the Other Half, the silent Americans who never had much to begin with, who saw no part of the last economic boom, who have been getting screwed for years, and who are on the brink of something much worse.

I may feel averse, but these people are interested in connecting with me; they sense a linkage I am slow to acknowledge. A Buddhist moment overcame me: suddenly we were all deluded beings, yearning for something we couldn’t quite comprehend, much less grasp. In our obliviousness and shortsightedness, we grasp whatever means of distraction is handy: music, drugs, Mardi-Gras beads--or Guinness, if you’re a boozy Anglo-Irish writer with an identity crisis.

Back in our neighborhood, I stop at the upscale “Artisan Bakery” for the express purpose of communing with my yuppie hipster brethren and sistern. They’re there, all right, hunched over their MacBooks, eating croissants with their babies, checking their Blackberries, tucking their perfect hair into hand knit caps for some purposeful striding in the cold sunshine. It’s a bracing re-entry into my particular cultural sphere. Just a quick stop to soak up the atmosphere and remember who we are, and we’re off down the street.

Coming toward me I spy a man with a bushy blond beard clad entirely in buckskins. They are clean, tawny, and fringed at every opportunity. On his head sits a tan leather Stetson. On his feet are tall moccasin-boots with fringed cuffs and rawhide laces. He wears a fringed tan leather jacket with extra fringe. And he’s feeling his way along with a massive red-tipped cane. He bumps into the mailbox on the corner and lurches around to cross at the same crosswalk we’re using. I sing quietly to the baby so he’ll know I’m there. The light changes and I mumble, “Let’s go,” to the baby, which he takes up as a helpful cue. He veers out of the crosswalk and bumps into the opposite curb. I’ve never seen a blind person do such a bad job of walking about. Maybe this is a candid camera spoof, or a psychology experiment. He stumbles sideways along the sidewalk until he’s in the middle of a group of people waiting for the bus.

I avoid eye contact and address the gold Sherriff’s badge hanging around his neck. “Sir, do you need any help to get where you’re going?”

“Oh, no thank you.” His voice is high and prissy, and his tone suggests long experience fending off helpful bystanders. “I’m right where I want to be, waiting for the number seventeen bus at the bus stop.”

And so he is. As are the other riders, who look at me as if I’m an idiot, trying to help a blind man get to where he already stands.

I stammer something and look up at the man’s eyes. He is wearing purple-tinted sunglasses, with a tiny sheriff’s star pasted to the center of each lense. Funny that someone who can’t see at all would take such pains to look the part of the psychedelic buckskinner. But maybe that’s just who he is.

And what am I? I walk along realizing I never have questioned whether I “belong” in Portland. I’m just here, along with the sad underclass of society, the posh upper minority, and the odd befringed blind-as-a-bat frontier sheriff. Nobody thinks to question another’s right to breathe this air and hash out a living on this land.

Oregon may resemble Ireland in its rolling green hills, and in the inhabitants who brew alcoholic beverages by any means necessary. But we do not have the fraught history of crowding, poverty, warfare, emigration and return. You just come here, or you are born here, and either way you live your life here. No one wonders if they legitimately belong here. You just do.

I sympathize with Pete McCarthy as he wrestles with his Irish identity. Occasionally I think the same thoughts myself, but in my case the question is theoretical. I already have the luxury of feeling at home here, in Portland, where the toothless and the tortured, the eccentric and the ethereal, the wealthy and the wanna-be, all live together in something resembling harmony.