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OtherRealms Issue 28 Part 04
Electronic OtherRealms #28
Fall, 1990
Part 4 of 18
Copyright 1990 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved.
OtherRealms may be distributed electronically only in the original
form and with copyrights, credits and return addresses intact.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in printed form only for your personal use.
No part of OtherRealms may be reprinted or used in any other
publication without permission of the author.
All rights to material published in OtherRealms hereby revert to the author.
Editor's Notebook [Part 4 of 5]
Portland
Once you figure out the realities of a city that's built on the banks of
a number of rivers, with the associated roads that end abruptly and the
bridges that span the waters, it's pretty easy to get around Portland.
It's a nice, logically laid out city. That first trip off the main drag
can be a bear.
But Portland, the city, is wonderful. Green and very clean (the same
can be said for most of Oregon. Where roadside little was collected,
the piles of trashbags was significantly smaller than the same style
road in California. What really brought this home, though, was the
morning of the 5th. Outside the Delta Inn was a park that was used by a
few hundred people to shoot off fireworks. The next morning, there was
very little trash left behind. Even though many people were there until
10 or later in the evening, they picked up their stuff and took it home.
Unlike Californians, Oregon's people seem to believe that they
shouldn't expect someone else to clean up after them. I'm impressed).
What do you do in Portland? What else? First you go to Powell's Books.
For those that have never been there, let me explain that you don't 'go'
there as much as you make a pilgrimage. Powell's is an entire building
in the downtown area, and you wend your way through various rooms filled
with large numbers of massive bookshelves. They hand out maps so you
don't get lost (and you need them). It's the kind of place most book
people dream of. I was nice (to my budget) and didn't spend a lot of
money, limiting myself to a rare copy of Mike Resnick's "Redbeard" and a
couple of books on Roman Britain. Laurie picked up more English
history, and we browsed a few other things. We could have easily spent
both hours and hundreds of dollars there. Next trip, we just might.
(Right down the street from Powell's is Henry Weinhardt brewery. We
considered the tour, but that's something that's on the list for the
next visit as well).
One thing Laurie and I try to do when we visit a city is go to the zoos
or aquariums they have. It's nice to spend a day walking around and
watching the animals and looking at how different cities deal with
animal habitats and presentation. We're members of the San Francisco
Zoological society and the SF Zoo is a nice place, but aging and with
some serious facility and organizational problems. We have a new person
in charge, brought in from the New Orleans Audobon Zoo (one of the best
small zoos in the country -- their swamp exhibit showing off local
animals is awesome) that hopes to turn it around, but much of the zoo is
Depression area WPA building, so there's a lot of turning around to do.
Portland's Washington Park Zoo has some exhibits that show where our zoo
can go. One of the trends in Zoos today is clumping animals by region
instead of species, so that instead of putting all Bears together, Asian
Bears would go with Asian animals, North American Bears in with other
North American animals and so on. When this works (The Audobon Zoo
Swamp exhibit, for instance) it really gives you a feel for what it's
like out in the animal's true environment. When it doesn't work (San
Diego Zoo's River Walk, which just didn't impress me) it's blah.
Portland has two regional environments, the Cascade Stream and the
Alaska Tundra. The Tundra was okay (but nothing really special) but the
Cascade exhibit was almost as good as the Audobon Swamp (this might have
something to do with taking special pride in showing off the local
environment, plus the expertise to do so. The same can be said for the
Monterey, CA aquarium, which specializes in the aquatic environment of
Monterey Bay and nearby oceans). The Stream is a half to three-quarter
of a mile path through heavily forested woods with a selection of
animals and birds (including eagles and owls). There are beavers and
otters, a waterfowl pond and various other exhibits. One thing the zoo
very consciously was showing off, though, was the green that defines
Oregon. An upcoming area they're working on is the ubiquitous African
Rain Forest. Looks interesting, but so are a number of other zoos. The
Stream exhibit is special and very nicely shows off why Oregon is
special as well.
Other exhibits didn't fare as well -- I was very unimpressed with the
Polar Bears, which seemed dark, cramped and dirty. Overall, though, the
zoo is a success. Clean, seemingly well-run with the animals and
facilities in good shape. An honorable mention should be made of the
small-gauge railroad, done in a nifty art-deco style, that took people
from the zoo to the Rose Garden and back.
Speaking of the Rose Garden, Portland is called the city of the Roses,
and for good reason. The climate is perfect for roses, and that area is
one of the placed used to test new varieties. The rose garden on Mount
Washington is huge, with a wide variety of roses including patches of
all of the national winners from over the years. Since I'm a rose freak
(I plant them wherever I live) I spent a few hours wondering and
planning the garden here at home. Folks I talked to said the
Rhododendron garden they have is even better, although it was too late
in the season to see it at its peak. Another thing to do some other
time (Rhodies peak in May from what I've been told).
That took care of the two free afternoons. Other than that, we did a
fair amount of driving in random directions. Everything we saw was
pretty. There are a number of things that look interesting that we want
to check out next time, like the Portland Saturday Market, the Rhodie
garden, Fort Vancouver and generally wandering around the downtown area.
There's a lot of fun in Portland that we simply couldn't get to.
Conventions can be very inconvenient, especially when all your panels
are early afternoon (convention committee members please note: this is
NOT a complaint. Please do NOT put all my panels on at 10AM. Please.
I was joking. Honest.)
Another, highly recommended place that we didn't get was Paisley's, a
dessert house by Reed College. I was told Portland had two main
cuisines: seafood (not surprising) and sugar. We really didn't sample
the latter, but we were impressed with the overall quality of the food.
Thanks to David Levine, local fan and restaurant critic, we got steered
to a couple of really nice places for dinner: Jarra's, a family-run
Ethiopian restaurant and Alexis, reported to be the third-best Greek
restaurant in Portland (the first two were closed for vacation).
For those that have never eaten it, Ethiopian food uses chicken, beef,
or lamb and lots and lots of veggies. Most of the sauces are pretty
spicy using chilis and pepper. Think Szechuan Mexican and you get the
idea. Food is eaten with injira and the fingers. Injira is a flat,
soured bread that is used as fork, napkin and plate. you just grab
pieces of whatever looks good with the bread and pop it in the mouth
(and then grab for the beer. As I said, Szechuan Mexican). We eat
Ethiopian about once a month here in the Bay Area, and always look
forward to trying a new place. Jarra's is quite good. It turns out
they saute most stuff in clarified butter. The beef in my dish was
tender enough it was literally flaking apart. Yum. Highly recommended.
One thing that is missing for some reason in the Bay Area is Greek food,
although I've heard rumors of one restaurant opening recently and
another on the way. For a while, there was some food downtown and lots
and lots of really bad gyros. Because of this, we try to make a habit
of eating Greek whenever we're in another city. Alexis was quite good.
They evidently bake their own bread, which was delicious. My sauteed
Tiger Shrimp were wonderful -- very rich and plump. So rich I was
almost unable to finish them (but I forced myself). I also tried the
Retsina wine, much to the waiter's amusement ("have you ever had Retsina
before? Do you know what you're asking for? Are you sure you want
Retsina? Are you REALLY sure? How about some ouzo and we'll just let you
sleep it off instead?"). Some folks might be more affected by that wine --
I just thought it was okay. Nothing to go out of the way for.
There are literally dozens of good restaurants in Portland we didn't get
a chance to try. Damn, I think this means we'll just have to go back.
If it's not obvious, I like Portland. Portland is a city I would
seriously consider living in if I left the Bay Area, which puts it on a
pretty short list (other cities I've spent time in over the last few
years include Boston, which is great but only in the summer, New
Orleans, which has great food and a great zoo but which just drove me
crazy (nothing personal, New Orleans folks -- chalk it up to personality
conflicts or something. I just do NOT like New Orleans) and Orlando,
which would be a great place to live if I never had to leave the grounds
of Walt Disney World (good luck). To put it on the list of places to
live is a high honor, well-deserved.
Washington and places north
Back on the road to the real purpose of this trip: vacation. My parents
own a cabin near Port Ludlow, Washington (it's on the Olympic Peninsula
near the National Park). Nice, secluded (although growing less so daily --
growth is a major problem for the Seattle area, with 40% and more
appreciation in real estate per year right now. Traffic can be a bear.
Seattle has tried to limit growth and keep the quality of life good. It
also appears, in many ways, to be losing. All the no-growth proposals
in the world won't help if people come anyway) with no computers, no
telephone and no cable TV. In other words, heaven for a hard-core
techno-nerd like myself who spends double-digit hours a day with
computers.
On the way up from Portland, however, we took one more little side trip --
a couple of hundred miles through Mount St. Helens. Even after ten
years, the damage is devastating. Sitting up on hurricane ridge looking
over to what's left of the mountain (the volcano took the top 1500 feet
and either sent it up into the air or down into the valley in a massive
avalanche) and Spirit Lake is really a strong reminder that when Mother
gets mad, humanity loses. Period. The ranger was telling people what
the eruptions did to the area -- for instance, to find the original
surface of Spirit Lake (now a shrunken, ugly pool full of ten year old
rotting timbers) you go you to the current surface and then go straight
down 400 feet.
There are areas that have started rebuilding themselves. There are many
other areas that are still completely barren and dead -- and will be for
an unknown amount of time. One of the drives took us through an ash
'desert' -- a patch of nothing but dirt where nothing would grow,
surrounded by recovering forest. The drive back out was via a side road
that was one and a half lanes wide -- one lane plus turnouts. Not
exactly the interstate, but absolutely gorgeous country.
It'd been two years since we'd made it to the cabin -- my parents rent
it all but about six weeks a year to a man who spends two months a year
in Alaska with commercial fishermen and then the rest of the year out in
the middle of nowhere relaxing and doing odd jobs. Primarily, the time
in Washington was for relaxing, kicking back and exploring and helping
out with the occasional odd chore (my parents were up there doing the
same, but also taking care of various things that rental houses always
seem to need taking care of -- father is actively turning the lot into a
real yard, although upstream logging has again clogged the stream with
mud and made it useless. With any luck, that'll pass).
Last time we were up in that area we never made it into Seattle, so that
was our first stop. We spent one day by taking the ferry into downtown
and walking through the waterfront and Pike Place Market. On the water
is both the Seattle Aquarium and the adjoining Omnimax theater. The
Aquarium is decent -- not as good as Monterey but a lot better than many
I've seen, with an emphasis on the local ecology and a strong message of
protection and ecology. Good for them.
The Omnimax was showing a film on Mount St. Helens, a nice coincidence
since it gave us a chance to watch the eruptions and the ten-year old
footage and compare it to what we were seeing a few days earlier.
Unfortunately, the lamp was quite dim and viewing was difficult (this is
a not-uncommon happening these days, caused by not swapping bulbs at the
recommended number of hours -- save a little money on projector
maintenance; who cares if it screws things for the customer? Another
reason I rarely seem to go to the movies any longer).
The highlight, however, was clearly Pike Place. It's a modern throwback
to an earlier area -- the market street that predated supermarkets.
Combination farmers and flea markets, there are both temporary vendor
booths and permanent storefronts. Laurie found a really sharp sweater
in one mall and we grabbed cherries (Ranier, also known as Queen Anne)
and Walla Walla onions (a relatively short-season onion that is very
sweet and not sharp at all) and berries. Washington State is the number
one producer of berries in the country, but only the number two shipper.
Why? Because they keep all the good ones to themselves. Blackberries,
Marian Berries, Raspberries (including a yellow variety that I'd never
seen before that was very sweet and exotic), Blueberries and even
Strawberries (although I think California does better strawberries.
either that or the season wasn't quite right for them). For a few short
weeks each year, Washington residents sit down and eat massive amounts
of berries, savoring the tart-sweet morsels that remind them exactly why
it was they moved up there in the first place. I happily joined in --
eating berries on cereal in the morning, berries with lunch, berries on
ice cream (actually, the way I did it, ice cream on berries). It's
possible to get good berries here in the Bay Area (we found some last
weekend at the Palo Alto Farmer's Market) but they're twice as expensive
and not as good. Better than nothing (better than a LOT of things,
actually) but not as good as the real thing. We also picked up some
nice bread, some really nice English cheeses -- there's lots of good
food at Pike Street.
And fish. It was salmon season in Seattle, and there was Salmon
everywhere. My guess is that it's the salmon that keeps Washington from
being known as the berry capital of the world. The fish shops (plural)
were loaded with salmon to the gills (ugh, sorry). We didn't take any
back only because it was already there waiting for us. The fish up
there is wonderful -- probably as good as the berries in its own way
(but I can eat berries forever; I run out of appetite for fish after the
second or third salmon).
[continued]
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