On Landscape and Character
a speech
Hello readers,
It’s been a while. Bratwurst Haven has been out in the world six months now! I’ve been fortunate to do some events, including at two places that asked me to give a speech—so I formulated my first speech ever, and gave it in both places. I thought I’d share it here, too, for those interested.
I hope you’re well, and that you enjoy.
Rachel
On Character and Landscape
by Rachel King
This speech was given, in a slightly different forms, as part of the Oregon Legacy Series at the Driftwood Public Library in Lincoln City, Oregon on February 19, 2023 and for the Willamette Writers in Portland, Oregon on March 7, 2023.
In January, I stayed in Warrenton, Oregon for a weekend, two nights at a room in an Airbnb. I spent my one full day walking the beach and boardwalk in Seaside in the rain in the morning, then looking at art galleries in Astoria in the afternoon—but before that, I ate at the one diner in Warrenton, on Main Street, at 7 a.m. Across the room from me sat four men in their seventies and eighties, three of the four wore caps, one had some kind of military insignia on it, another wore camo pants. They joked with the waitress, and I knew they were regulars. I heard snatches of their conversation. They were talking about boards of cedar, something about cutting it and maybe also the different quality when buying it from different places, then they discussed seeing elk on a certain mountain nearby. This led to one guy describing elk hunting in Alaska, a time when he’d seen an eagle grab meat from a wolf’s month, meat that the wolf had probably taken days to accrue. That got the other men started on their eagle stories, each man had a different one, and each seemed enthusiastic about it in their own way—the tall, fit man leaning back, arms crossed, while recounting his, the tall, heavy guy leaning forward and waving his arms, the smaller guy with glasses resting his elbows on the table.
I was pleased to see these men there because of their familiarity—they reminded me of my last living grandparent, my paternal grandfather, who is well into his nineties, as well as a couple of my uncles, now in their seventies, and like my older relatives’ lives, I wondered how long this down-home, unselfconscious kind of rural Oregon man would be around, although, when I thought longer about it, I do have a couple cousins who might be their heirs. And probably because I knew I’d be coming here, to discuss how, for me, character and landscape are inseparable and intertwined, I viewed the men through that lens, too. I imagined these same men living the majority of their lives in other places in the United States I’ve lived—Baltimore, Maryland or Beddington, Maine or Morgantown, West Virginia or Boulder County, Colorado—and what kinds of wood or wild animals they might discuss, if they even discussed wood or wild animals at all. I wondered what my grandfather would be like if he hadn’t grown up in Raymond, Washington on the Willipa River, bordering the Willipa Bay, learning how to hut and fish, activities that still bring him joy, and around and in lumber mills, which he went on to make his life’s work, but instead had grown up like his grandfather on a farm in Michigan. Or what I would be like if my parents’ house in Portland, Oregon hadn’t had an overgrown, abandoned acre of orchard behind it that didn’t belong to them but where I went to play alone or with siblings or friends, to find solace, to find joy, to find fruit that I used to teach myself to bake. And that girl is very different from the woman I am now, or from the woman I would have been if I’d never left Oregon, if I hadn’t allowed these other landscapes and the people in them to shape me, before returning home.
The novelist Kathleen Rooney wrote a blurb for my novel that didn’t make it on the cover, but that I’ve tried to use while marketing and promoting it. She states, “Profoundly attuned to the natural environment and its impact on all those who live there, Rachel King’s People Along the Sand takes a lucid and discerning look at how people can belong to a place and whether or not a place can really belong to a person.” I had told people the novel was about the pleasures and limits of solitude as well as what and who are we responsible for as well as liberation and interconnectedness—but when I received Kathleen Rooney’s blurb, it seemed spot-on too. People can belong to a place, I think, but can a place belong to a person? I doubt that it can, but the novel explores that throughout, especially through its thread about the 1967 Oregon Beach Bill which made all Oregon Beaches public land. The public gained more access to the coast, but there were property owners, including one in my novel, who had to give up parts of what they’d considered their land, too.
I want to discuss the characters in the novel a bit more, as well as their relationship to their landscape and the land. The property owner who isn’t pleased with the Beach Bill is Elliot, a retired lighthouse keeper, Jackson owns a motel, and Marilyn, his wife, is the bookkeeper. Their son Tim is on the cusp of adolescence, and Leah, whose fisherman husband has just died, owns a bakery in town.
I think their personalities and their relationship with the landscape can partially be shown by how each character interacts with the ocean. For the boy Tim who grew up on the coast, the ocean is “a sibling.” I’ll read from the passage that states that.
“Tim went outside, cut through the space between two rows of units, and jutted onto the rocks and into perpetual mist. His tennis shoes dropped in and out of the crevices in the black rocks, stepping on barnacles and over small tide pools filled with dark green sea anemones until he lowered himself to the wet brown sand. He wasn’t cold. He didn’t think of the temperature. He didn’t think of the gray sea either. The ocean was like a sibling; something to play with, ignore, or yell at; something, above all, always there.
“He crouched, searching for agates, and ducked into a cave into which shallow waves curdled. He’d collected the rocks for years, substituting the duller as he found ones with more facets or shine.”
As a sidenote here, this whole novel came out of this image, an image of a boy looking for agates on the rocks, and then the other characters and plot formed itself around that. For me the person in their landscape comes to mind simultaneously when I’m creating a short story or novel. It might not be the complete person, but some semblance or kernel of that original character remains even as I deepen their character or explore their character further.
Here is how Jackson, Tim’s father, interacts with the sea:
“Jackson walked around the units to the ocean side and looked up. He imagined the new second story intact. Guests could see waves against rocks not fifty feet away. He imagined a brochure, one photo from this angle of the new units, one from a window of a new unit of the sea. He smiled and turned. The sea was azure, the sky long wisps of clouds. The ocean as its own entity didn’t enter his thoughts. Like emotions toward his little sister who’d died in childhood of meningitis, intimacy with the sea was distant and needless. He thought of it only in relation to business. When Leah spoke of the beach becoming public land, he didn’t mind, as long as such a law didn’t include the main feature near The Wave, the rocks. If the law included only beach the new hotel would lose one of their selling points. He’d seen their brochure, the structures hand-drawn since the place wasn’t built yet. Restaurant, pool, hot tub, it said, two acres of private beach.”
Jackson and Tim both grew up not only by the ocean, but also in the same place by the ocean, which is probably why they view it matter-of-factly, although differently. Something I didn’t notice until I placed these passages side by side is that Tim views the ocean as a sibling, who is alive, and Jackson, who had a sibling die as child, thinks any intimacy with the ocean isn’t integral, he has a more of a transactional relationship. Either way, neither view it as romantically as Jackson’s wife Marilyn, and the bakery owner, Leah, sometimes do, people who moved to the coast in their twenties and are in the forties at the time of the novel. Here is a passage that states Marilyn’s view from her apartment home:
“In the kitchen, Marilyn put on water for tea. She nibbled at the scone and looked out the window, west, over the units and out to sea. Dark-gray clouds hung low above the dark-blue water. Whiter clouds were high in the sky. During rain or sun, in any season, she found the view beautiful. The yet-to-be-built second-story units would block her sight of the ocean. Yes, she could walk above or on the rocks for a similar view, but she wouldn’t be able to enjoy it while preparing food, washing dishes, or making tea.”
Would Tim and Jackson miss the ocean if it weren’t there? Absolutely. Like they would miss their hand or foot. But they don’t pay attention to it on a daily basis, either, and I doubt they’d call it beautiful.
Leah, the bakery owner, is one of those people who belongs to the coast, as the blurb by Kathleen Rooney states, even though she wasn’t born there. I do think there are places people belong to, and it doesn’t have to be the place you’re born, though for me it is—it is Western Oregon, and probably Portland. I tried not to live here for a long time, for reasons I am now just beginning to understand, but I missed the landscape, and felt as though I’d left some integral part of myself here, so now I’ve returned. Leah grew up in logging camps in Washington State: her dad was a camp cook, but she always knew that someday she’d end up living on the coast. Here’s a passage about that:
“Leah thought of how she hadn’t experienced such generational concern. She remembered when she almost ran away with a man at nineteen. A coastal mechanic had courted her on her work breaks in an alley. One day, sitting on a wooden pallet and smoking, he asked her to run away and she assented. She rode behind him on his motorcycle. City dropped way to rolling farmland, then to forests of dense trees. Halfway to the beach he stopped at a gas station to buy smokes. Two truckers were filling up. When one asked where she was headed, she jumped off the bike and asked for a ride back to town. Although she loved the sea she didn’t love the mechanic. It wasn’t time for her to live on the coast. She showed up for work the next morning and no one knew where she’d been. Over ten years later, when she married Micah, her father had met Micah as a formality, not to give approval. Fishing isn’t as dangerous as logging, she remembered her father saying. It has that going for it.”
I like the line, “It wasn’t yet time for her to live on the coast.” Even though she belonged at the coast, there was a time for her to live in other landscapes, and a time for her to eventually settle where she belonged.
The final main character, Elliot, the retired lighthouse keeper, who had worked on Tillamook Lighthouse, also known as “Terrible Tilly” as many of you probably know, has a complex relationship with the coast, probably because he knows best what the ocean is capable of. Here’s a passage that states some of his experience: “To transport supplies or men the 130 feet between boat and lighthouse, they loaded them into a cage attached to a pulley. The lighthouse acquired a telephone a few years into Elliot’s service, but the rock remained remote: in harsh winters a boat couldn’t deliver supplies or letters for up to seventy days at a time.”
His view of the ocean includes Marilyn’s romanticism and Jackson’s practicality, but he’s also in constant awareness and awe of its unpredictability and power.
And so when I speak of the landscape and characters being inseparable, it’s worth noting that different aspects of the same landscape resonate with or appeal to or are amplified within different characters.
Several years ago now, when I was writing and revising, then trying to find an agent for People Along the Sand, I stumbled into Studs Terkel’s writing. For those of you who don’t know, he compiled several oral histories during the mid-to-late twentieth century. I first found and devoured his book Working: What People Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do, then read Hard Times, which includes interviews of people during the Great Depression, then American Dreams: Lost and Found, in which he interviews people on the concept of the American Dream. I love how he captures the voices of these people, something I’m always trying to do as a fiction writer. Listen to the beginning of his interview with a waitress in Working:
“I have to be a waitress. How else can I learn about people? How else does the world come to me? I can’t go to everyone. So they have to come to me. Everyone wants to eat, everyone has hunger. And I serve them. If they’ve had a bad day, I nurse them, cajole them. Maybe with coffee I give them a little philosophy. They have cocktails, I give them political science.”
I later found the Belarusian journalist, Svetlana Alexievich, and during the pandemic found a podcast called Working People in which the host, Max Alvarez, interviews contemporary working people in a very Terkel-esque manner. At the time, I’d been writing fiction seriously for close to fifteen years as an adult, alongside whatever jobs I had, and yet I had only stories published, not a book of fiction, and I wondered, why didn’t I just interview real people, why did I tell these fictional stories? Didn’t that seem more impactful, to do something quote “real.” I was obviously in a kind of crisis for what I’d devoted most of adulthood to, and I tried to remember why I’d begun to write fiction.
As a kid, I didn’t ask these questions, I just read fiction, so I wrote fiction, my first novel when I was eleven. I stopped writing creatively for several years, then returned to it my final year of college, and it felt like coming home, and I haven’t stopped since, for the past seventeen years. At the beginning, it came from a compulsion, and I wanted, first and foremost, to create something beautiful with that compulsion, and later I wanted to communicate, to share that beauty with others, and lately, in poems and in a future project I’m daydreaming about right now, I also have come to understand that sometimes I write to alchemize pain. But I keep returning to beauty because my family of origin as well as Americans in general are utilitarian and to make art allows me to step outside of that, at least the creating of it—the publishing and selling works within the capitalist system of course—but the creating of it allows me to do something without wondering about or being propelled by monetary value or by acquiring knowledge or by improving myself, or without, like Studs Terkel, or other journalists, the conveying of information as the primary goal. Sometimes when I’m doubting myself I think of my maternal grandmother who told me that she wanted to be a beautician, a hairdresser, but ended up being a bus driver, and I remember a lament in her voice that she hadn’t pursued the more beautiful profession, and it steadies my resolve to continue to do what I’m doing, to not be at the end of my life and have that regret. And that’s not to say oral historians are not aware of beauty—Svetlana Alexievich, whose books have incredible and intricate structures, won the Noble Prize in Literature—but I do think that often if not always pursuing beauty in journalism comes second to the conveying of information.
I’ve met fiction writers who took journalism in high school or college, and I’m sure that improved their writing, the concision of it, among many other factors, but for me, after writing a lot as a kid as well as acting out plays at my childhood home with my best friend, I turned to theatre, and loved becoming other people on stage and entertaining an audience, giving them a gift of an evening inside of a work of art. I’ve carried around this sheet from high school for almost twenty-five years now, this role scoring sheet that you can use in creating characters as much as in acting. It asks questions such as: What motivates your character to act? If your character has a secret, what is it? What is your character’s major objective for each scene in which they appear? And so on. I remember when I first started brainstorming for People Along the Sand, I would write answers to questions like these, allowing me to understand the characters better. The characters came to me in a flash, as I said, but just outlines of them in their landscapes, they weren’t fully formed. And I just acted in my first show last summer, a community theatre performance, after over two decades away from the stage, and I loved becoming a character different from me. And I think my fiction is an outgrowth of that early obsession, that if I learned how to create characters anywhere, besides reading and writing or simply watching and interacting with people and being a human myself, it was from becoming different people on stage. And for me writing fiction has more in common with acting than with journalism, that desire to create something beautiful, to entertain, and I think by returning to the stage, I reminded myself of why I want to write fiction too.
So I’d like to turn to my second published book of fiction briefly, called Bratwurst Haven, and talk about the beauty of it, as well as the characters and how they are inseparable from the landscape. This is a linked collection, so every story stands alone but they are also interrelated and the reader’s knowledge of each of the characters builds as they read because the main character in one story becomes the minor one in another story, and so on. And also each story is set in a different place in Boulder County, so the reader is piecing together the landscape as well as the characters as they read. Part of the beauty comes from each sentence, paragraph, and scene being there for a reason, and them building to create an emotional effect in the reader. It also comes from the beauty of the structure, how I ordered the collection, that I think the stories become more hopeful as the collection progresses, and also the logical arc of it: how the early stories start in the factory and with characters who work there, the middle stories explore people who live in the surrounding towns, then the final story returns to the factory.
Now to move on to character and landscape. The first story, “Railing,” came about because my boyfriend, now spouse, worked in a sausage factory for two and a half years, and one of his coworkers had run over a man when he worked as a train engineer, and I wondered how he felt about that. So inspiration for that first story is very directly related to an incident in life, but I’d say the rest of the stories—as well as the personality of the first character, because the man in real life, I didn’t know him—come from an amalgamation of many things: what I’d observed, read, experienced, imagined, daydreamed. To me, character and their physical and natural landscape come to me simultaneously, as I’ve said, at the beginning of the creative process, and then I figure out even more about their personality and motivations as the characters move within that landscape. So for example in “At the Lake” a woman wants to retire next to a lake she loves in Colorado while her husband wants to move to Arizona, in “Middle Age” two sisters drive from Colorado to Oregon, where they both are from, the landscape prompting their reminisces throughout the road trip—and so on.
This book set in Colorado is actually influenced by the Oregon landscape, not just in that one road trip story, where I mention that the women might have had more money if their relatives hadn’t sold off their acreage near Forest Grove before the dot-com boom, but the link is more indirect than in People Along the Sand. Bratwurst Haven is set primarily in the fictional towns of Laforge and St. Anthony, but they are in the actual Boulder County, Colorado, just as Kalapuya in People Along the Sand is a fictional town but set distinctly on the Central Oregon Coast, north of Florence, south of Newport. A lot of the landscape of the collection is inspired or mimicked after the landscape in Colorado—the Front Range, the towns along the foothills of the Rockies, a lake where I spent a lot of time, and so on. But I was writing this collection after I’d moved back to Oregon, when I was working for a few years at the Oregon City Public Library, and while I was revising the collection, I saw and accentuated the similarities between Oregon City and these towns in Boulder County. They are both Western industrial towns now gentrified, coal towns in Boulder County, the paper mill town of Oregon City, so you have the townspeople who have lived there a long time, as well as the townspeople who have been priced out of Boulder or areas in Denver who try to settle there—but then those small towns become more expensive than Denver, just as people were pushed out of Portland, then settled in Oregon City, but then Oregon City became more expensive than some parts of Portland. I also have a familial connection to Oregon City: my mom grew up there and some of my relatives still live there. So when I was writing the collection it was no doubt inspired by Colorado, where I had lived, but it was also inspired by the people and places right in front of me in Oregon City where I was working while I was writing it. And as I said I didn’t realize this until revision, so I wasn’t consciously doing it, and in general, I don’t think one place can be replaced with another, but one question I was exploring in this collection, after living back East then moving to Colorado, which felt closer culturally to Oregon than anywhere else I had lived was: What, if anything, does it mean to be a Westerner, someone who lives in the Western United States? So I think using Oregon City as a secondary, subconscious inspiration worked fine for me in this instance.
I had the pleasure of reading at Politics and Prose in Washington DC for this book and discussing it with the writer Mary Kay Zuravleff, who found humor in the collection, which I appreciated—the discussion is online if you’re interested. She also asked me how or why my stories because hopeful because she’s read so many short stories over the years, for contests and anthologies and in other collections, and most of them aren’t hopeful at all, quite the opposite, so I talked a bit about my influences as well as the stories themselves, how the topic was innately hopeful to me because I’d discovered through writing that sometimes these low-wage workers did support one another, something I’d wondered about, another question I realized in revision that I wanted to explore. But I also mentioned that one of my influences was Barry Lopez, particularly his book Winter Count, which often has hopeful endings that I admire and probably unconsciously emulated. Let me read you a couple of his endings:
This is from “The Orrery”: “The galaxy turned slowly above us. I stood with my hands holding the top of my head, the tail of my shirt lifting slightly in the breeze.
“‘If one is patient,’ he said, “if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved.’”
This is from “The Woman Who Had Shells”: “Her hair moved, as if in response to breath, and I saw the flush outline of her cheek. In that stillness I hard her step among the shells at Sanibel and heard the pounding of wings overhead and imagined it was possible to go of a fundamental anguish.”
And now let me read you two of my endings. I won’t tell you which stories they are from, in case you want to read the collection: Here’s one: “She couldn’t wait to see him, in whatever state he woke up in. There’d be plenty of time for lovemaking in the morning.” And another: “Then all four of them were laughing at her and at themselves and at the factory, and it felt good to be there laughing at something together, even briefly, while the world continued to do whatever it would do, outside.”
Barry Lopez’s work, especially this book, is also an influence in that it intertwines characters and landscape: in fact, it almost elevates the landscape over the characters, insisting that the landscape is paramount. Those passages I read earlier from People Along the Sand are humancentric, asking how the landscape of the sea might affect the characters, but in Lopez’s work the landscape often exists more outside of the character’s reach. Let me read you the first sentences in a couple of his stories:
This is from “Restoration”: “Just over the Montana border in North Dakota, north of the small town of Killdeer, there is a French Mansion.”
This is from “The Orrery”: “North of Tucson and east, beyond Steadman, is a place hardly accessible by car called The Fields.”
Lopez begins with a place, not a person—he centers the place, then adds the human element.
Now listen to the first sentences in a couple of my stories:
This is from “At the Lake”: “Rick left in early September, when it was still hot outside, before the leaves in the lower elevations of the Front Range started changing color.”
This is from “Pavel”: “Every day I sat on the curb in front of my apartment complex smoking, watching cops do their rounds, while pot sat between my feet in a brown paper bag.”
The person is always in a distinct place, but I think it’s centering the person and their experience, not the landscape, at least at the beginning. And I think the physical landscape sometimes propels the plot in Lopez’s stories in a way it doesn’t in mine—for example, the plot of one story in Winter Count is a man searching for evidence that a river has relocated, and at the end of another an almost mystical wind on a recluse’s property gives the narrator solace. Where in mine, in “At the Lake,” for example, a main character might hurt herself while on a lake, or want to retire by that same lake, but her choice whether to relocate to her husband is paramount to the plot. Or in “Strangers” a middle-age woman is squatting up in an old homesteader’s camp, waiting for low-income housing to become available, and a man driving around after work happens to meet her, and although the specific story couldn’t exist without the homesteader’s camp, it also doesn’t propel the plot as much as the meeting. There is also a kind of awe and wonder that I love in Lopez’s writing maybe partially because it doesn’t come as naturally to me. But he remains an influence: these characters wouldn’t be themselves without the landscapes they inhabit, or that inhabit them, just as my characters wouldn’t be the same people in a different place. And really, if the characters wouldn’t be themselves, have their same personality, in a different place, then the plot would be completely different as well—so it does propel the plot, though not in as direct of a way.
So I wanted to share one passage from my favorite living writer, someone who treats landscape in a similar manner to me—not as much an influence as a kindred spirit because I just discovered his books a few years ago—Colm Tóibín, who often writes about the small towns on the Irish coast southeast of Dublin. Let me read you the first two paragraphs of his second novel The Heather Blazing. Listen as he establishes a measured, intimate, calm tone while closely describing the character near their place of work.
“Eamon Redmond stood at the window looking down at the river which was a deep brown after days of rain. He watched the colour, the mixture of mud and water, and the small currents and pockets of movement within the flow. It was a Friday morning at the end of July; the traffic was heavy on the quays. Later, when the court had finished its sitting he would come back again and look out once more at the watery grey light over the houses across the river and wait for the stillness, when the cars and lorries had disappeared and Dublin was quiet.
“He relished that walk through the Four Courts when the building was almost closed and everyone had gone and his car was the last in the judges’ car park, that walk along the top corridor and down the centre stairway; old stone, old wood, old echoes. He loved the privacy of it; his solitary presence in the vast public building who function was over and done with for the day.”
Now listen to the first two paragraph of People Along the Sand, which I wrote several years before I knew his work:
“Leah stood at the kitchen island waiting for yeast to activate in warm water at the bottom of a tin bowl. Through the front windows of her bakery, mist fell through fog, the weather lit by porch lights. The yeast frothed; she broke eggs. With a wooden spoon, she stirred in cinnamon, sugar, butter, salt, flour, and raisins. She poured the mass from the bowl, pulled it toward her, and pressed it down with the palms of her hands.
“She made blueberry muffins; oatmeal, chocolate chip cookies; and honey, orange-peel scones. She stepped around the kitchen, firm and graceful, a dance with ingredients and implements. Baked goods, cooling on cookie sheets and metal racks, crowded the counters. Bowls, spoons, and spatulas filled the double-barreled sink. By the time she’d washed the dishes, the muted morning competed with the porch lights. She unlocked the front door and switched the lights off. She stood on the porch, smelling overgrown mint below the steps. A logging truck rattled by on the nearby highway. A ship horn blew farther off. The fog had thinned to ribbons and clumps, but the mist endured. It came at her sideways, wetting her arm. A crack of dawn did not happen here, she thought, but rather a gradual fade from darkness.”
Leah has been formed by her bakery and the coastal town it sits in and Eamon Redmond by Dublin, the courthouse specifically and the area around it. Tóibín’s characters, like mine, wouldn’t be themselves without the natural landscape, which often includes the ocean—not to mention that his characters are, like mine, often exploring solitude and religion and art and desire and are peripherally involved in politics, or at least aware of them, of how those decisions affect their lives, although they are also aware that ordinary people sometimes don’t have much say over political decisions.
Now that this talk is winding down, I’ll speak briefly on my current project since it’s an obvious depiction of a young woman being influenced by landscapes. It’s a fictionalized version of the Red Heads, a basketball team that went around the United States playing men’s teams during the Great Depression. A young woman who had been orphaned during the Spanish flu decides to leave her little sister to go play on the team in 1936. She has never been outside of the Portland area. In this project I am consciously writing toward awe and joy and mimicking it after my awe and joy I experienced, first when I left Portland for Eugene to go to college, then went I left Oregon to live several years all over the United States. I grew up in a conservative Christian environment and had very few friends in junior high and high school, and I loved the open atmosphere in Eugene and how many different kinds of people and communities and activities and ideas I could encounter and explore. And then when I left Oregon the other landscapes and the friends in them formed me, and I’m trying to harness aspects of that experience and put it into fiction. I don’t usually use my own experience in this way—usually I create then look back and see what came from own experiences unconsciously—so this is a new process for me, but I’m enjoying it.
I was away from Portland fourteen years and away from Oregon for a decade, before I returned seven years ago, in 2016. Growing up, I’d had relatives on both sides of the Willamette River, played soccer in every Portland park, explored bookstores and music venues, and worked as a line cook on the now defunct floating restaurant, Newport Bay. I thought I knew the city, but on my return, I realized I didn’t, and not only because it had changed drastically in my time away. I could have never gotten lost in Portland—my little sister and I tried once when I was visiting from back East, we tried for several hours to drive around and get lost, and we simply couldn’t, we always ended up somewhere we knew—but on my return, I realized I didn’t know many of the neighborhoods intimately, either. I started to go on city walks a few years ago, just taking a bus to somewhere on a day off and walking around, or more often following one of the many walks in these books so that I could read the history along the way. I’ve now gone on every walk in this Portland City Walks book by Laura O. Foster, and several in this one, Portland Hill Walks—the hill ones can be more challenging!—and I’m also annoyed and offended that none of the walks take place in the hundreds of blocks east of Eighty-Second where I live now and where I used to go, when growing up, to visit relatives. Maybe I will need to write one.
In January, I went on a walk from this book in North Portland, weaving between Albina, Killingsworth, and MLK, an area that I’d gotten to know a bit in college when I had a friend who grew up there, and a bit more when my brother lived there in his twenties. But I’d never walked around the streets with a historical guidebook, and as I walked down a street called Russell that lowered in elevation as it led toward the river, I learned that around the turn of the twentieth century, the street had a trolley and thirty taverns on it and had also led all the way down to the river instead of ending at a road and the train yard, as it does now. As I walked by the remaining brick facades, and saw new shops, and only one bar, I imagined it as it used to be: I could see it, smell it, hear it, even feel it. Its history reminded me of stories my grandpa tells of First Street in Raymond, Washington, how in the 1930s there were nine bars and three cathouses in three blocks. He delivered newspapers on that street as a boy, collecting money from the bar owners and madams. The entire street was built not on the river, but over the river, on a series of docks. My grandpa says that the bars had trapdoors and sometimes, for whatever reason—maybe drunkenness or fighting or not paying a tab—bar owners would open the trap door and drop men into the river. Sometimes they survived, sometimes they didn’t, and when they didn’t, they would be reported in the newspaper as “floaters.”
Something about this one street, Russell, in Portland, caught my imagination more than other streets, just as First Street in Raymond has caught my imagination as well. If one of these two streets do provide a backdrop for a story or novel, it will be a rare instance where the landscape has come to me first and not the specific characters and their landscapes simultaneously, but, ultimately, as an artist, I don’t see any reason for me to designate that the character or the landscape needs to enter my imagination at the same time, just because it has in the past. I want to always be open to new methods and modes of inspiration, which I think is another way of saying I always want to be open to beauty.