In less than two weeks I’ll head to Reykjavik for a little roaming around and hanging out at the Iceland Writers Retreat. Can’t wait!
Mount Fagradalsfjall has been intermittently erupting, thirty miles outside of the capital. They keep a close eye on it, nobody seems too worried. I’ll take my cues from their scientists and fly in without concern, too. I was a kid in Portland back when Mt. St. Helens blew, changing its profile against the skyline. We were farther away than thirty miles, still close enough to witness the eruption and to breathe falling ash like tiny cut glass. I kicked my way through thick, soft drifts of that ash. The ash seeped and lodged inside the bands of my Dr. Scholls, proving that what seemed so soft was not, not at all. Those cloudy, drifty pillows of ash cut my feet with countless tiny dashes of severing. Around then, I found a puppy—half dingo, they said—in a cardboard box being given away, under the Burnside bridge, convinced my folks to let me keep her, and named her Ashley for the blue grey ash in the sky that matched her blue grey mottling. I was happy, breathing in the lung damage of history and hanging out with my dog, my family.
More recently, on our father’s 89th birthday, I drove to the house where he’d lived, wished him a happy birthday and took out his garbage by way of a gift.
My daughter asked, “How does he even have any garbage?” He passed away last summer.
“Us,” I said. “We filled the bin.” His adult kids. We’ve been sorting out his house, throwing things out, organizing, distributing and archiving, painting and refinishing.
To take his garbage out, I made a long drive across the city, following one arterial road for miles. Luck rode with me—I caught all the lights: green, green, green. I sailed, my hand resting lightly on the steering wheel, barely meeting any traffic, nothing to break my cruise. I followed that arterial road as though it actually were an artery in a body, moving through a system, and I was the blood flow.
The road passes through a residential neighborhood, then cuts through industrial and commercial areas lined with warehouses, before it comes again to a residential stretch. I passed a dive bar with a restaurant where friends and I had, for a few years, lived on late day, all day breakfasts for $3.25, a single meal, home fries, eggs, toast and coffee. The place still sells all-day breakfasts. The basic layout is $9, still a bargain, plus now you can’t smoke inside so it’s not about eating the way cigarettes smell in every bite.
I passed a spot where I’d once heard gun shots too close, then saw a man fall, heard him yell, recognized his face from around. He survived.
I made one turn.
I passed a place where, decades back, friends and I had found an abandoned Christmas tree lot, late on Christmas eve. We dragged a tree across town, taking it out on the town first, bar to bar, scene to scene, then home to an apartment where it leaned against the wall.
As I drove, architecture shifted from boxy and small into expensive and elegant. The road curled past Reed college, before it dropped back down into working class bungalows. I parked in front of a small house with a weathered red pickup truck that was already parked in the street out front.
I’d mentioned the beauty of that particular drive to my father once, said I liked it, liked how it grows so lovely in certain areas, wooded in others, industrial then well landscaped, you can feel the shifts. He knew exactly what I meant. He told me about the feeling of driving that road with his dad, back before his dad passed away, so that would’ve been before 1951. As a kid born homeless, raised for the first five years in a tent in North Portland, then having made the move into one of those boxy, working-class bungalows, he and sometimes he and his father had made the drive a few times on the way to jobs, on the way to life. His father had been negotiating to buy a full-service gas station with a house in one of the wealthier neighborhoods. It would’ve changed everything, for their family, to own such a place. Unfortunately, his father passed away before nailing that dream. He, this grandfather I never met, was a guy who did what he could while he could, working hard.
Once, a friend said that it was brave to stay in one place so long, as long as I had, as long as I have. When she said it, in the moment, I had no opinion. It hadn’t occurred to me. I only thought, Is it?
I thought, Brave?
Maybe I nodded, but really I didn’t know, didn’t feel it. Since then, I think of those words when I feel the layers of complex emotion laced into what it means to stay in one place—the personal history, childhood, adulthood and everything in between, the accumulation of love, good times, high hopes, loss, jokes, nightmares, witnessing, making mistakes, forgiving each other, being human.
We’ve all been trying, one way or another, for a very long time, haven’t we?
I didn’t go in my father’s house. I took the bins out then kept going. I drove back along the same road, the artery, that means of existence, a road that maps a path of any potential for upward mobility, the graceful high hopes and tended lawns, the rugged homes left too close to a freeway after the city put that freeway in, the rise and fall and ways of getting by.
Soon I’ll go to Iceland, and everything I see will be new. I’ll be a tourist. On the way home, I plan to stop in New York. I’m still sorting out that piece of the plan. I’ll go to Boston, too.
Then, so soon after going away, I’ll bounce right back home.
Wonderful essay. I've lived in the same area for 35 years. So many memories. It certain adds texture to everything. Happy travels!
Thank you for giving me an excuse to share this:
https://youtu.be/e4dT8FJ2GE0?si=MyetVanRShp_nexa