I also slept through the big stop, the service stop in Spokane where they split the train in two. The front half of the train (including the diner) continued to Seattle, while the back half (including the lounge car) continued to Portland. Most Amtrak schedules are designed so major cities are served at convenient times. On the Empire Builder, that's really only true for the terminals, though. Minneapolis is served late at night westbound and early in the morning eastbound. The next largest city is Spokane, where the train stops around 2am both directions. I'm glad I don't live in a place that requires me to board a train at such a ridiculous time. Fortunately both Winona and Mt. Pleasant have very convenient schedules.
We were up around 6:30 this morning. It was interesting to see that now there were crew members in the other economy roomettes of our sleeping car. Normally the crew sleeps in a "transition sleeper" at the front of the train next to the engine. That car went to Seattle, though, and the Portland crew had to have somewhere to sleep. Brian told us that in the event the sleepers are full, they just camp out in the lounge.
Because the diner also goes to Seattle, we were told in advance that we would be provided with "cold breakfast" on the last morning of our journey. We went to the lounge to get it, and it was interesting, though not at all what I expected. We were given a divided plastic plate with a dome cover. On it was a cold ham and cheese croissant, the sort of thing they used to call "snack" on airplanes--back when they actually served free food in the air--together with half-frozen fruit cocktail and a pre-packaged tub of yogurt. Replace the yogurt with a salad, and they could easily have served the same plate for lunch or dinner; in fact my bet is that's precisely what they do when the train is headed the other direction.
Since we were in the lounge car (which has take-out food) anyway, we also had a cinnamon roll and hot chocolate. We paid for the hot chocolate, though apparently we could have gotten it free with the sleeper meal. We then spent about an hour on the top level of the lounge (the glass-domed sightseer area) watching the sun come up over the Columbia River gorge. Next to us were two women with too much make-up and a rather bratty kid. The Columbia is wide river, but it's really not nearly as impressive as the Mississippi. Mostly we looked across the river at dry hills and an extremely empty interstate.
We walked back through two very full coaches to our sleeper. You hear that Amtrak is having money problems, but it sure isn't for lack of travelers. On Christmas Eve the train was entirely sold out, and now on Boxing Day almost all the coach seats were full. Things were lighter on Christmas Day itself, but even then the train was more than half full.
Another "freebie" you get for traveling in the sleeper is a complimentary local paper. Today we got some paper I'd never heard of from Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The train doesn't even go to Coeur d'Alene; the only Idaho stop is quite a bit further north in Sandpoint. That's obviously where they picked up the paper, though. It was a Sunday paper, but even so I thumbed through it in very little time.
We had looked out at the gorge from the lounge car because we figured it would be prettier there than from our room, which was not on the river side. Actually the view was at least as good from the room. Being "mountainside", we looked out at the cliffs that edge the river in Washington state. It was interesting to see the landscape get progressively wetter as we headed westward. Eastern Washington (and Oregon, too) is nearly desert, while it's essentially rainforest at the coast. There is a gradual transition, but it happens surprisingly quickly.
We were still ahead of schedule for all the stops in Washington, and we left Vancouver (one stop shy of our destination) right on time. Vancouver is right across the river from Portland. We crawled through rail yards on both sides of the river, but even so it took about 15 minutes to make the trip. The schedule is obviously padded to allow late trains to arrive on time. They schedule 55 minutes for the trip across the river, which meant we arrived more than half an hour ahead of schedule--shortly after 9am.
The city of Portland has won many awards. Several times it has been named America's most livable city, which is something both Margaret and I could agree with. However, it has also been called America's most beautiful city, and here I beg to differ. Portland isn't ugly, and its setting next to two rivers and at the foot of the mountains is rather pretty. No one will ever call the buildings or the city in general "beautiful", though. Move Omaha further west and you'd pretty much have Portland. Even Omaha has more of a skyline, though. The most startling thing about Portland was how low of a city it was. There are only a handful of tall buildings downtown (and only one you'd really call a skyscraper), and nothing away from downtown is more than two stories. It turns out the suburbs have taller buildings than the city proper. The metro area has well over a million people, but the city looks a lot more like Cedar Rapids than Denver.
The city may not be beautiful, but our ultimate destination-Union Station-was. It was built by the Union Pacific Railroad at the turn of the last century to be a gateway to the northwest, and "grand" is almost too tame of a word to describe it. It's a red brick and brown stone building with rounded corners and a lovely clock tower. (Since the '20s the words "GO BY TRAIN" have called out in neon from atop that tower.) Inside there's an enormous waiting room with a ticketing area at one end, plus a number of side rooms.
One of these, the Metropolitan Lounge, is reserved for arriving and departing sleeping car passengers. A tall, thin, dark-haired young man guards the entrance like a bouncer, checking to make sure that the riff-raff stays out. Inside there are elegantly upholstered chairs arranged in conversation groups with lamps hanging down overhead. There is also a business center where people can plug in their laptops and from which we called Steve in privacy. They have complimentary magazines and newspapers, plus free beverages (coffee, tea, hot chocolate, soft drinks, juice, and bottled water-all in unlimited quantities). Every one of those drinks would cost between $1 and $2 at the concession stand in the main waiting room; here we got it for free. We also were able to store our bags for free. The coach passengers can use a left luggage room, where they pay $1.50 per bag. With the Metropolitan Lounge, we got another $6 in value (and the same on the return trip) just from leaving our bags.
We had some coffee (Metropolitan Lounge blend) and left the bags and then set off to explore a little. We couldn't check into the motel yet, but we figured we might as well see where it was. It took a little bit of time to get our bearings (Portland's streets are on several different grids that all seem to meet at Union Station), but eventually we figured out the motel was not hard to find. Basically we crossed the Willamette (wool-AM-it) River on the endlessly long Broadway Bridge. The Econolodge Convention Center was right on the other side of the bridge, directly across from the Rose Garden Arena where the Portland Trailblazers play.
It took us about two seconds after stepping outside to notice one of the reasons why we disagree with claims that Portland is beautiful. The place is absolutely riddled with graffiti. Practically every empty wall is filled with various scrawls. Most of it isn't even the artistic stuff I've sometimes seen in Chicago or Los Angeles; it's basically just annoying tags of spray paint. In the whole city there were two pieces of graffiti that actually stood out-and we saw both of them in our first ten minutes in the city. Right next to the Broadway bridge were some silos belonging to a milling company. At bridge level someone had taken a template and spray painted repeatedly "BUSH IS A BIOHAZARD" with the biohazard symbol. On another set of silos south along the river the online bookseller Amazon.com had essentially put up a billboard with their name. Someone had altered the sign so it actually read "AMAZON.COM WOULDN'T FIT HERE".
That sign brings up one big point. There are two major cities in the Northwest: Seattle and Portland. Seattle seems to view Portland as a miniature copy of itself. Portland, on the other hand, sees itself as different (and in their minds better) than Seattle. There are legitimate arguments both ways. Both are young, liberal cities-though Seattle (home of giant companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, and Starbucks) comes across as much more business-oriented. Portland is also home to major companies (like Nike and Intel), but they seem very much on the periphery of town--both physically and in how they affect people's lives. Seattle is the ultimate "yuppie heaven", while Portland seems a more practical blue-collar town.
We walked through "Rose Quarter", the area surrounding the arena, and eventually came to the Rose Quarter MAX station. MAX is Portland's light rail system, and definitely one of the prides of the city. MAX is one of the great success stories of modern public transportation. In 1969 (when a government agency called "Tri-Met" took over a bankrupt bus company) they served just 65,000 customers a day. Today more than six times that many passengers ride Tri-Met, mostly by train. Portland built one of the nation's first modern light rail systems in 1986, when voters chose to put money that would have gone to build a new freeway into rail transit. Today three color-coded lines converge on the streets of downtown Portland and fan out east, west, north, and northeast. There are plans for two additional lines to open in the next decade, providing service to the southern part of the metro area. Many stations serve as "transit centers", with easy bus connections to almost every neighborhood.
MAX (which supposedly stands for "metropolitan area express") is a lot like the Minneapolis light rail system, only older. The cars are boxier than in Minneapolis, but they have the same low floors with steps up to the seats over the wheels. Like in the Twin Cities, you buy tickets from overly complex vending machines. Fortunately I had bought passes ahead of time. Today we used day passes, which we had to validate with the current date in a stamping machine next to the main vending machine. Once that was stamped, we were free to travel when and where we wished.
Most MAX stations are quite simple Downtown and in some residential neighborhoods, the "stations" are nothing more than the sidewalk, with a vending machine and a couple of benches thrown in. In suburban areas the stations run along freeways, and they are necessarily larger and more complicated. All the stations have some sort of adornment. An Oregon law requires that 11/2% of all construction projects go towards public art, and for MAX that normally means some sort of sculpture in the stations. At Rose Quarter there were bizarre tree-like objects that disguised the lampposts. Other stations had more traditional sculpture. Most stations also had windscreens with frosted glass in a variety of artistic designs.
One unique feature of the MAX stations is electronic countdown information. They supposedly have global positioning devices on the trains (and also buses) that allow them to pinpoint the exact location where each vehicle is. They feed that information to a computer which in turn gives a read-out of when the next train can be expected. Also, each minute a synthesized voice (a rather "come hither" female voice) announces how many minutes until the next train. We found these times to be universally too long; almost always the train would arrive when the electronic board said there was still 2 or 3 minutes until it was due. It's better that they should err that way than to say the train is coming when it isn't, though.
There are two different types of MAX cars-the old cars and the new cars. The old cars have red vinyl seats and are not handicap equipped (you have to go up steps to enter the car), while the new ones have purple seats and are fully accessible. The newer cars also have signs that light up saying what station is next. Most of the time there are two-car trains, with one of each type of car. The red line, however, always runs single-car trains (which are often overcrowded), always with the newer cars.
Announcements on MAX are in English and Spanish. First the seductive woman gives the English, then a matter-of-fact man gives the Spanish. There are a few exceptions, like the fact that they never tell you the doors are closing in Spanish. There's almost always something being said in the background-enough that it gets almost annoying. In addition to telling you the stations and on which side the doors will open, they also remind you not to litter, to leave seats for senior citizens ("los ancianos" in Spanish) and handicapped people, and to make sure you have a valid ticket outside of "Fareless Square" (the region downtown where all rides are free). There's always some little announcement between "doors closing" and the name of the next station, and it seems to be timed so the patter is continual.
Tri-Met has a user guide designed for a very multilingual clientele. The thing is printed in English, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. This struck me as odd, given that Portland really isn't all that ethnically diverse. Hispanics are far and away the #1 minority (which surprised me; I figured Asians would be more prominent in the Northwest). All those Asian groups do exist, but I don't know that there's enough of any one of them to justify printing the rider's guide in so many languages. I never saw anyone I suspected spoke Russian-but who knows?
The recordings reminded us to leave seats for seniors (actually the euphemism is "honored citizens" in Oregon--and apparently Washington, too, we'd later find out), but there are probably more seats than there are old people in Portland. This is a very young city. Again, it comes across very much like a college town. An absolute majority of people seems to be between 18 and 30. There's also a lot of kids (especially high school age, not as many elementary or younger) and a fair number of thirty-somethings, but beyond that things trail off quickly. I would definitely be on the older end of the spectrum, and I'm sure everyone thought Margaret was an honored citizen.
You see the youth reflected on the train. You don't see people skateboarding into an 'L' car in Chicago, but you do on MAX in Portland. There's also lots of people with bikes. Every car is supposed to have one "bicycle location", a bracket where people can hang their cycles. Frequently we saw two or more bikes in a car (once as many as four), and most people and most people just seem to hold their bike in the handicapped area.
Those handicapped areas are often used by those for whom they were designed, though. There are an amazing number of people (even quite young people) in wheelchairs in Portland, and they all seem to take public transportation. There's only a handful of times I've seen disabled people on the trains in Chicago, but here it was really quite a frequent sight.
We first took the train just a couple stops west, back across the river to the southeast corner of downtown. We walked about two blocks from the station to our first destination of the day, Mill Ends Park. This green space (though that's stretching it) has the unique distinction of being the world's smallest city park. Apparently it is even listed as such in the Guinness Book of World Records. The hunk of earth sits in the median of Naito Parkway, a four-lane street that is apparently busy on weekdays but was empty on Sunday. The site (a circular area with a radius of 12 inches) was originally planned to house a lamppost. That never happened, and a newspaper columnist whose office overlooked the site noticed how barren it looked. He planted flowers in the little circle and wrote about it in his column. The column was called "Mill Ends", and he named the park after the column. The rest, as they say, is history. Today the "park" is officially part of the Portland Parks and Recreation Department. They periodically change what is in the park. For Christmas the entire area was filled by a 21/2 -foot tall fir tree.
That tree was notable, because it was just about the only Christmas decoration anywhere in downtown Portland. We got back on MAX and went west through downtown. As we passed Pioneer Courthouse Square (the main downtown plaza) we noticed workers were taking down the city Christmas tree, just one day after Christmas--and on a Sunday, no less. Apparently they needed the time to set up for New Year's Eve, though.
Our next stop was at Kings Hill/Salmon Street, on a hill west of downtown. Salmon is just south of PGE Park, a AAA baseball stadium that my former student Brad Nelson will probably be visiting next year. (His new team in Nashville is, after all, in the Pacific Coast League-obviously the baseball executives need to study their geography.) There's a stop for the ballpark and a separate stop just one block south at Salmon Street. It was interesting to see the ballpark (with bright green grass in December), but the real reason we were here was to see Lincoln High School. This school is the alma mater of Matt Groening, creator of the long-running cartoon comedy The Simpsons. We had read in an offbeat travel guide that Groening had carved the image of Bart Simpson into the sidewalk in front of the school. (The guide even advised, "Remember kids, when you're famous they don't call it graffiti, they call it 'public art'.") I've been a Simpsons fan since the show started fifteen years ago, and I thought it would be interesting to see. It turned out that Bart was just a few steps from the station, but unfortunately we didn't know that. I assumed "in front of the school" probably meant in front of the main entrance, so we walked about two blocks away, first past the athletic fields and then past the school itself. There's a grand entrance, with lots of flowers (which were in bloom at Christmas), but no Bart. We made our way through every courtyard and down every sidewalk near the school before we finally saw Bart, behind the football field well in back of the school proper. It is indeed sidewalk graffiti of Bart Simpson, signed "Matt Groening, Class of 1972". So, two stops and two basically stupid landmarks-but both Margaret and I were enjoying ourselves immensely.
We boarded an eastbound train and went clear to the east end of the city, to 122nd and Burnside, a hundred and twenty-two blocks east of downtown. Not far past Rose Quarter the train runs along the shoulder of an interstate (the Banfield Expressway, or I-84), and it zipped along at about the same speed as weekend traffic. At the east beltway (I-205) is the "Gateway Transit Center", where the line to the red line diverges to go to the airport while the blue line continues east into the suburbs. East of the beltway the train runs down the median of a boulevard. Burnside is not a grand, tree-lined boulevard, though. It's basically a tacky strip with some seedy old houses mixed in with the business.
We got off at 122nd Avenue and walked south about two blocks. It was lunchtime, and our destination here was an Oregon institution, Burgerville. Burgerville is a regional chain that is actually based in Vancouver, Washington. They created a niche for themselves in the fast food market by using only locally grown natural ingredients. They stress an environmental theme right down to their kiddie meals, which feature the exploits of Melvin the Elk. Everything on the Burgerville menu is made with products from Oregon, Washington, or Idaho, and everything is delivered fresh (not frozen or preserved). Because of this their menu changes seasonally. The basic sandwiches stay the same, but the accompaniments vary depending on what is available. The current seasonal specialties were hazelnut milk\shakes (which were out of this world) and sweet potato fries (which were good, but couldn't compare with the shakes.
Both Margaret and I also ordered their signature burger, the pepper bacon Tillamook cheeseburger. The burger was the most disappointing part of the meal. The beef was OK, and I liked the pepper-cured bacon (Margaret found it tough). The cheese, though, was virtually tasteless. Tillamook is a brand named after a town on the Oregon coast where a cooperative creamery is located. They're apparently quite famous for their cheese (and I'd find out later some of it is quite tasty). The stuff they sell to Burgerville, though, tasted like solidified skim milk. It's called "cheddar", but seriously, there just wasn't much flavor at all.
Burgerville is expensive (about the same price as Culver's in the Midwest-think $5 to $7 for the value meal, rather than $3 to $5 at McDonalds), but it's a nice place to eat. The restaurant had a '50s diner décor, with red and white tile and lots of chrome. Both the seating area and the restrooms were immaculate, which is more than most fast food places can say. While I don't know that I'd eat there frequently, it would be nice to have a similar choice here.
We took MAX back downtown and got off at the Old Town/Chinatown stop. We walked through Portland's small Chinatown (it reminded me of Oakland's, with lots of Asian people but no architectural highlights at all) and past the traditional Chinese garden that is supposed to be one of the highlights of the city. The garden costs $8 to see; we peeked through a fence and saw pretty much everything we wanted to for free.
Something we couldn't help but notice as we wandered around downtown Portland was rather bizarre method they use to pay for parking. They don't have parking meters here; I suppose something so simple is just too "20th Century" for the high tech Pacific Northwest. Instead, on each block you'll find a big plastic-covered vending machine that takes coins, bills, and credit cards. In return it issues stickers that drivers are to place on their car windows. The stickers show the amount paid and the expiration time (at a rate of $1 per hour, with a minimum purchase of one hour). The modern equivalent of meter maids go around checking that each car has an unexpired sticker and ticketing those that don't. The one good thing about the system that I saw was that if someone moves their car before the parking time expires, the remaining time can be used at the new location. That one-hour minimum has to generate a lot of unused time, though. What's more, the machines are extremely hard to operate (that seems to be a requirement in government-operated vending machines), and I couldn't help but wonder just how much it cost the city to buy hundreds of new vending machines to replace the old parking meters that had were presumably paid for decades ago and built to last forever.
We made our way back to Union Station, collected our luggage, and then walked slowly back across the Broadway Bridge. It was easy enough to check into the Econolodge, though the young Asian boy at the desk found it very strange that we didn't have a car with us. The motel was very small, just 17 rooms total. Ours was upstairs and right in the corner. They had potted flowers lining the steps to the second floor. The window overlooked a cross street that was empty on Sunday afternoon. It was a basic, but quite large and pleasant, motel room. We had two double beds and a TV, plus a refrigerator and coffee pot. The bathroom had a dark green marble counter, and there was a strong, powerful shower in the tub.
Margaret wanted to wash her hair, but I set out exploring again. I went back to Rose Quarter and boarded a northbound yellow line train. The yellow line is the newest of the MAX lines; it just opened last April. It mostly runs down the median of Interstate Avenue, an old thoroughfare that runs along the east side of the Willamette. There was a fare inspector on board this train. I produced my day pass, and he moved on without a problem. One person didn't have a ticket, and she was issued a citation. I don't know what the fine is in Portland, but I'd gather it's less than in L.A.; the girl didn't seem to make a very big deal of getting the ticket.
Past Rose Quarter the yellow line runs through an old industrial area just north of our motel. There's a stop
there called "Albina / Mississippi" that's about the same distance from the motel as Rose Quarter. The next stop north of there is the aptly named "Overlook Park", which is indeed next to a park that offers pleasant views of the river from atop a high cliff. Beyond there the neighborhood is mixed commercial and residential, and it mostly looks like it hasn't changed (except perhaps ethnically-it's heavily Hispanic today) since the '50s. The homes are boxy little wood places on tiny lots. They reminded me of the place my Aunt Alaire lived in Seattle and also of my parents friends Bob and Verna's home in Moline. The #1 business appears to be motels. There are more ma 'n' pa motels along here than I've seen anywhere else. Some are on the seedy side, but most look fairly pleasant. We weren't paying an arm and a leg at the Econolodge, but we probably could have saved a bit of money by going a little ways further north. There are also a lot of Mexican restaurants, plus assorted fast food places. Then there's adult entertainment. Portland has more strip clubs and adult book and video stores than anywhere I've ever seen. Away from downtown (which is remarkably tame) there's X-rated entertainment everywhere. The one other landmark I noticed along interstate was a place called "Sports Lab Training" that had a big sign for their website out front. I checked the website after I got home, but I still don't really know what they do there.
My destination was a Fred Meyer store at the intersection of Interstate and Lombard. Fred Meyer is a chain based in Portland that appears to have stores all over Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. I remember Alaire shopping at one when we visited her in Seattle, and I saw an episode of "America's Most Wanted" where someone was murdered just outside a Fred Meyer store in Anchorage. Fred Meyer (if the Interstate location is in any way typical) is like a really, really nice Target store. It's a one-stop shopping combination of supermarket and discount store, but the discount store tends toward high-end merchandise. I bought some juice so we wouldn't have to patronize the motel vending machines, as well as a couple of souvenirs and some egg nog cookies that looked interesting (and actually tasted surprisingly good). Then I made my way back to Rose Quarter.
It was getting on toward evening when I got back to the motel, and Margaret was refreshed and ready to go out. After unloading the groceries, though, I couldn't find my Tri-Met day pass. I searched for nearly fifteen minutes and eventually just gave up and decided to buy a ticket from the vending machine. Tri-Met uses a zone-based fare structure. My ticket (valid for two zones) was $1.35, but it's $1.60 for anything longer. The day pass cost $4, which was a definite savings for any repeated trips. (As it turned out, of course, there was no fare inspector on this train-nor on any other train we took in Portland.)
We boarded a westbound MAX train and headed back through downtown. We couldn't help but notice the train was full of people who could only be described as "weird". There were lots of homeless people, plus a number of college aged boys who were holding unlit marijuana joints right out in the open on the train. Numerous people with tattoos and piercings were also among our fellow passengers. Perhaps the most amusing was a remarkably clean-cut high-school aged white boy (far tamer than almost anyone else on the train) who wore a T-shirt that proclaimed "I AM HIP-HOP!"
Just a little ways west of Salmon Street the train enters a tunnel which takes it under the "West Hills" that loom over the city. Apparently in the early 1900s a streetcar line went up the hills west of downtown. It was wiped out in a landslide and never replaced. Tri-Met didn't want to risk anything similar, which is why this is the only "subway" part of MAX.
There is one station in the tunnel, which happens to be North America's deepest subway station and the second deepest station on earth. It's so deep that they don't have escalators here. There are two oversized elevators and (we read later) an endless flight of emergency stairs. Along the walls of the platform they have core samples of the rock they drilled through to make the tunnel and a time line showing the wildlife that inhabited the area over the eons. Where most elevators would display floors, the elevators here display elevation, showing the dramatic rise from the tunnel to the top of the mountain.
The elevator surfaces in Washington Park, the city's main recreational area. This enormous park (which seems very like Los Angeles' Griffith Park, though greener) houses the World Forestry Center; the national rose test garden (one of the main reasons Portland is called the "City of Roses"); a traditional Japanese garden; the picnic areas, hiking trails, and athletic fields you'd expect in any large city park; and our destination for the evening-the Oregon Metro Zoo.
Each evening in December (except Christmas Eve and Christmas night) the zoo holds an event they call Zoo Lights, where the entire zoo is lit up with literally millions of miniature lights. I had read about this ahead of time and booked advanced tickets. The reservation was good, because there was actually quite a long line to get tickets. We were able to avoid it and enter quickly.
The first thing you notice at Zoo Lights is the trees. Hundreds of trees have all their limbs completely covered in lights. Typically one color of light is used on each tree, but the effect is a whole forest of multicolored light. Most of the zoo buildings are also outlined in Christmas lights, and scattered around the park are various light sculptures. (I especially enjoyed one that was an animated slinky of lights.)
You may wonder what such a light display has to do with the zoo. They definitely theme things around the location. All over the place are light designs of all the various animals that are in the zoo. (The animals themselves are safely inside and out of view at night.) Many of them are animated, and most are designed to draw a laugh. You can see gorillas beating their chests, elephants trumpeting, a penguin adjusting a bow tie, and cows jumping over the moon. The idea is cute, and it's all very nicely done.
It's possible to see all the Zoo Lights just walking around, but our advanced tickets included a free ride on the zoo's railroad. Although the line was horrendous(!!!), the train ride was delightful. They actually had two trains running--one a replica of an 1800s steam train and the other (the Zooliner, which we took) based loosely on those streamlined trains from the '50s. Both trains were themselves lined in Christmas lights, and the ride gave a pretty complete view of all there was to see. There was no narration, which was definitely a good thing. Instead we got to listen to all the kids on board oo-ing and ah-ing at everything they saw. It takes a lot to really "wow" kids that have grown up with video games and the like, but the Zoo Lights definitely did it.
I couldn't begin to imagine all the work and money that went into this display. The cost is apparently underwritten by Boeing (which, as far as I know, has no connection whatsoever with Portland), though they certainly make a lot of it back in admissions. The work that goes into it is just incredible. It's hard to even describe just how enormous it all is, and most of the lights are high up in trees or supported from scaffolding.
The place is absolutely gorgeous at night, and I couldn't help but wonder how it looked by day. Our schedule didn't permit us to go back to see the animals, and I'd imagine that was probably a good thing. Most Christmas lights are pretty ugly unlit, and an entire zoo full of them would probably be most unsightly. At night it is truly spectacular, though.
We had a snack at the zoo. We each had "elephant ears", which amounted to Indian fry bread with cinnamon sugar on top. Margaret had hot cocoa (which came out of a cappuccino machine), and I bought an enormous souvenir cup of diet Pepsi. It was really too cold for pop, but the cup (a 3-D view of endangered condors) made a nice keepsake.
We next took MAX to the Convention Center stop, one stop east of Rose Quarter. The Oregon Convention Commons looks like a big arena, except for one bizarre architectural feature. The thing is topped with two enormous towers that look like a cross between broadcast antennas and the anchorages of a suspension bridge. They're truly ugly by day, but at night they're lit up in neon green and have a strange other-worldly appearance.
I was still bit hungry and wanted a bite to eat. I knew I had spotted restaurants near this stop when we went eastward earlier. Indeed, Martin Luther King Drive near the convention center is basically fast food row. There was another Burgerville here, plus McDonalds, Denny's, Carl's Jr. (the western name for Hardees), KFC, Taco Bell, various doughnut shops, and two different Starbucks locations (one with a 24-hour drive-through). We settled on Wendy's, where Margaret had a salad and I ordered a large chili with cheese. The counter clerk (a high school age Hispanic girl) seemed confused that I wanted cheese with my chili and pointed out repeatedly that it would cost more. I knew that, and eventually she punched some buttons to make it happen. I proceeded to totally embarrass myself when I took the chili from the counter and immediately spilled it all over the floor. Fortunately they replaced it and cleaned up the mess quickly.
The chili cost $2.14 (1.99 for the chili and $.15 for the cheese). In Oregon the cost was exactly that--$2.14. That's because Oregon has no sales tax whatsoever. Research will tell you that overall taxes are higher in Oregon than in most states, but it all comes from property tax and income tax-the type of taxes that hit the rich much more than the poor. The poor pay a much higher percentage of their income on sales taxes than the rich, but here that isn't a problem. It took a little getting used to, though. I'm used to rounding prices up in my head, based on what it will be with tax. When there is no tax, it's a little bit of a shock.
Back at the motel I plowed through the various newspapers I'd collected during the day. As you'd probably expect in a place that comes across as an overgrown college town, Portland has more than its share of free papers, serving politics from moderate to radical and all manner of demographics. I, of course, picked up one of everything. By far the best of these is the Portland Tribune, which comes across as a "real" newspaper, albeit one that publishes only twice a week. They have real news from all over the city and seem to appeal to a broad range of readers. The cover of the current issue was a collage of photographs of people coming and going at PDX airport, symbolizing all the people who travel home for the holidays.
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The local black paper, the Portland Observer, had an interesting editorial called "Vote Your Pocketbook" which told how much various corporations had given in campaign contributions in the past year, and what percentage went to each political party. The introduction said "Be aware of which corporations helped to re-elect Bush, and vote with your pocketbook." It's not really a surprise that most large corporations give heavily to the Republicans; what was surprising was those that didn't. Many of the big clothing companies (Levi Strauss, Liz Claiborne, Calvin Klein, Guess?, and Portland's own Nike) contributed heavily to the Democratic Party, as did Arby's, Rite-Aid pharmacy, Seagrams, and pricey Hyatt hotels (most of whose customers are probably Republican). It also amused me that bankrupt K-Mart gave $524,000 to the Republicans, but Martha Stewart (whose housewares are primarily marketed at K-Mart) gave nearly as much to the Democrats. In a city where there are choices of stores and restaurants, it would be easier to do as the editorial suggested and vote with your pocketbook; unfortunately in rural America there's often no alternative than a corporation you'd rather not support.
The editorial gave me yet another reason to dislike one store that I used to have a very positive opinion of--Target. When they were the Dayton-Hudson Corporation, I always saw Target (and Dayton's, for that matter) as a very progressive, philanthropic company. Dayton's is now Marshall Field's (which is in turn owned by the same holding company that runs Lord & Taylor and dozens of other department stores), and since going on their own Target has made a lot of decisions I disagree with. While I don't care for their giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to President Bush, the main decision I disagree with was Target's refusing to let the Salvation Army have bell-ringers at their stores this Christmas. I wrote to complain to them when I heard of that decision, since to me few things are more a part of the holidays than the Salvation Army kettles. I got a rather terse reply that simply said "solicitation" was now against corporate policy. Apparently reminding shoppers that there are needy people in this world just wasn't part of the image they wanted to convey. If Dickens were writing of Ebenezer Scrooge today, he might well have set the tale in Minneapolis.
Perhaps Target could take a tip from Matt Seguin, a 7th grade Catholic school boy who was the subject of a holiday feature in the Oregonian. Apparently when she drops him off for school each day, Matt's mom leaves him with the admonition "Change the world today". When Matt complained that changing the world was too big a job for a little kid, his mother advised that it wasn't one big job, but rather lots of little jobs. Since then, he has taken his mother's words to heart and has come a long way toward changing the world. He hands out Gatorade (which he convinced a local grocer to donate) to homeless people and helps clean up litter around the city. His major work, though, is as a volunteer for "Loaves and Fishes", the local meals on wheels program. In addition to delivering meals by bicycle, he spoke at a fundraiser for the group shortly before Christmas and convinced attendees to give $172,000 (more than double the previous record) to provide meals for shut-ins Portland. His story is one of the most inspirational I have ever read, and it convinced me to put a sign in my room at Garrigan encouraging my students to "change the world today". It's advice we should all take to heart.
We were up fairly late this morning and spent quite a bit of time dawdling around the room. We had coffee and watched the morning news on TV. It was interesting that by far the best news was on the local Fox station. They had surprisingly little fluff or sensationalism. The big local story was a drive-by shooting in the Albina neighborhood, not far north of our motel. I decided it would probably be wise to continue using the Rose Quarter MAX station, rather than the equidistant Albina/Mississippi station. There were also very sketchy reports of what would go on to become the biggest story of the season, a major earthquake and tsunami in south Asia. One amusing aspect to the news was their traffic reporter, who seemed terribly disappointed that traffic was flowing freely throughout metro Portland. He gave his reports from a helicopter, but the helicopter was on the ground in the station parking lot.
We walked to Rose Quarter and took the yellow line north to the Lombard Transit Center, the stop I had used when I went to Fred Meyer yesterday. We went to a nearby Winchell's Dount house for a tasty breakfast and then waited at a bus stop by a 7-11 at Lombard and Denver. Portland's major bus stops (such as those associated with "transit centers") all have shelters. They're weird, though, because the shelters face the sidewalk rather than the street. You can't really see the bus coming from the shelter itself. Inside the shelter is an digital read-out telling the ETA of the various buses that will be stopping there (no sexy announcements here, though). Just like the trains, our bus came before it was due.
We boarded bus 6, which is known as "the MLK" since downtown it heads down that fast food strip that is named after the great civil rights leader. North of downtown the bus follows a strange and circuitous route. It runs on a variety of city streets roughly paralleling the yellow line. Near the north edge of the city it joins Interstate 5 and runs express to an island in the middle of the Columbia River. The bus exits there to serve Jantzen Beach-not a beach at all, but one of the largest shopping malls in the area. It then re-joins I-5 and exits again just inside Washington state, where it terminates at the "Transit Mall" in downtown Vancouver.
Margaret was surprised by what the transit mall was, but it looked exactly as I expected it to appear. Decades ago they had a similar set-up in downtown Burlington. (They may still-I don't know.) On a couple of blocks of what's left of downtown (which isn't much-in either Vancouver or Burlington) cars are forbidden, and the whole place becomes one big bus mix-master. There are overhead signs showing the numbers of all the different bus routes, and each bus stops by its sign. We needed to take bus #32. This bus was not operated by Portland's Tri-Met, but rather by C-Tran (short for "Clark County Transit), which serves the Vancouver vicinity. We could have actually taken a C-Tran bus express from downtown Portland, but it was easier to take the train as far as we could and transfer from there.
Tri-Met seems to be thriving, but C-Tran is economically strapped. The Washington voters seem much less willing to subsidize transit than their counterparts in Oregon. Apparently last November they voted down additional funding to C-Tran, and now there were posters and brochures stating all the various service cuts that would be phased in starting on New Year's. ...
(C-Tran honors Tri-Met fares and passes, which) worked out great for us, since for the rest of our trip we were traveling with Tri-Met "adventure passes". These $10 passes look like scratch-off lottery cards and are valid for three days. (You scratch off the specific dates you will be using the pass.) The driver of bus #32 had never seen an adventure pass before, but after carefully reading the fine print on the back he deduced they were valid and let us ride for free. On Tri-Met buses we just flashed them quickly, and on the train we kept them handy in case a fare inspector ever showed up (which never happened).
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