January 23, 2025

Portland Walks: West Across the Burnside Bridge

This is the first in a series of walks around Portland, Oregon. I walk through the city every day anyway, so I figured...why not bring you with me? Once a month, or maybe a bit more often, you’ll get a photo tour of my route along with my ever-churning inner monologue. What’s not to love about that?

Let’s start this first walk on the east side of the Burnside Bridge. I can’t pass through this intersection without feeling a small, habitual rage at the sight of the building not-so-lovingly nicknamed the Death Star, but that’s a story for another day. Maybe I’ll do an Ugly Gentrifying Buildings of Portland walk for a future post. There’s no shortage of material there.  

Okay...hang on. That was a rough start. Let’s double back and get a glimpse of something good and beautiful in Portland: Concrete-devouring moss.

Now, back to the Burnside Bridge and onward. Or rather, westward, toward downtown.

And then... Damn.

One thing about walking around Portland is that no matter where you go in the city, you will be reminded of the severity of the housing crisis. There are many, many unhoused people in Portland, and they camp in whatever corners and nooks they can find. I hope that whoever built this nest on the bridge is okay. Temperatures dropped below freezing the night before.

Some gloomy shit, I know. At first I typed “Welcome to Portland,” but homelessness is a growing issue nationwide and I can’t imagine it getting better in the political shitshow we’re now in. If you live in a city, you certainly have unhoused neighbors.

But check it out: a rare sunny day in January. It’s cold and bright instead of our usual high 40s and raining, which is probably because of climate change but the mind can only tackle so much on one walk, so let’s set that one aside.

There’s downtown, and beyond the buildings the West Hills, which are camera shy and sort of hunch down and look smaller in pictures. They feel much more present in person.

And then onward along the bridge with all of my walking-across-a-bridge intrusive thoughts. I love walking across bridges even though I can’t do it without a loop of terrifying what-ifs running through my mind: What if someone runs up behind me and pushes me over the rail? What if I somehow lose control and throw myself over the rail—even though I’m as happy as current realities allow, even though I would never? So there’s the beauty of the view and the humming happiness I feel in my body whenever I’m out walking and at the same time there’s this undercurrent of fear, and then relief when I get safely to the other side. Brains: they’re strange creatures.

This is what greets me:

I love this neon sign, though even this has changed in the time that I’ve lived here. When we first moved to Portland in 2007 (and for many years before that) it said Made in Portland. It was an ad for a company called White Stag (hence the leaping stag). A while back it was changed to just read Portland, Oregon. It’s something for tourists to take photos of, a branding opportunity for the city (gag). But I have to admit that I take a photo of it every time I cross the Burnside Bridge, too. And I especially love it at night, when it’s all lit up. I even like that the stag gets a red nose at Christmas time. You know the random things in your own town that you feel a stupid affection for, that resist all of your jaded cynicism? That’s me and this sign.

Then I’m off of the bridge and walking west on Burnside, through Old Town, headed for the library.

Let these two tents stand in for the dozen or so I saw along the way on both sides of the river. Let these two tents also stand in for the many unhoused people I saw along the way.

I pass the tents by and wonder how long the people will be allowed to stay there before the city decides it’s time for another sweep. I don’t know what the solution is to the epidemic of homelessness in Portland, but what we’re doing now isn’t working.

I think about my friend Gus, who I first got to know when he invited me to lead an ongoing writing workshop at the drop-in center for unhoused youth that he used to run. I had lunch with him last week in the Sisters of the Road office, just a couple of blocks away, and at one point in our conversation he said, “Life doesn’t end with homelessness. You can still have moments of joy and laughter and friendship.”

I remind myself of that as I weave around the tents. It’s complex, I tell myself. The human experience, in all of its forms, complex. I look at the tents and I imagine abject, unbroken misery, but the truth is that I have very little idea what the lives being lived inside of them are like. When I volunteered at the drop-in center, the young people in my writing group weren’t there to recount to me all of the horrors and joys of their lives on the street. They wrote about dragons and fixing bikes and the ocean.

A couple of blocks west and I spy the Street Roots building across the street. It looks closed. It’s Saturday and I usually walk past on weekdays, when it’s bustling with their newspaper vendors coming and going. They’ll be at the library, I think, getting ready for the reception I’m headed to. (Yes, I have a destination. More on that when we get there.) 

Street Roots is a weekly street newspaper sold by people experiencing homelessness and poverty. The vendors buy the papers for 25 cents a piece and sell them for a dollar. Whatever they make in sales and tips is theirs to keep. It’s a fantastic organization.

Another block and there’s a man shuffling toward me, agitated. He’s got a dirty blanket draped over his shoulders and tired, unlaced boots on his feet. He’s clutching a backpack to his chest. He drops something but doesn’t seem to notice so I call out, “Sir, you dropped something.” I get closer and see it’s a plastic bag with copies of Street Roots.

He has a Street Roots vendor lanyard around his neck. He’s disturbed. Distressed. “I got too much insulin,” he says. “Can you buy me an ice cream cone at that store over there? They gave me too much insulin.”

I don’t know if he means that he’s actually been given too much insulin by someone or if he means that he’s having a low-blood-sugar event and the insulin is his shorthand for that, or if he’s just hoping I’ll buy him an ice cream cone because he wants someone to see him and do something nice for him. Who’s to say. Any of the possibilities would be a valid reason to help him out. I’m not particularly concerned with the “truth” of it. He’s shaking, he’s upset, he keeps repeating himself, urgently wanting to make me understand.

Low blood sugar. Okay. I dig a Clif bar out of my bag and give it to him, along with a $5 bill that I’d tucked into my pocket for this sort of occasion.

“I got no teeth,” he says, but he takes the bar anyway. It’s not the first time I’ve tried to give a toothless person something too hard for them to easily eat, and it always makes me feel a bit sheepish. Me with my dental insurance trying to share protein bars and whole apples and almonds. Each time, I think that I should find more gummable snacks to carry around, but somehow I haven’t actually acted on that.

“Maybe you can break off pieces and let them dissolve in your mouth?” I say. It’s got chocolate chips. It should help, right? And if he wants an ice cream cone he has that $5 bill. He can do whatever he wants with that.

“I got too much insulin,” he says, insisting.

I’m starting to walk away now, as one does. “Break off pieces,” I say. “Dissolve it in your mouth.”

He nods, but still looks frantic. I walk away.

As I go, I second guess myself. Should I have called for help for him? What do I know about diabetes? What if his blood sugar is dangerously low? Did I just give a protein bar and a bit of cash to someone having a major medical event? I almost turn back, but I worry that calling for help would actually make his life worse. He didn’t ask me to call an ambulance. He asked me to buy him an ice cream cone.

He was fine, some of you are saying, and a small voice in my head joins in. Maybe so. He needed the food and the money regardless of what was actually going on with him medically. I see ten or more people along the way who could certainly also use some help, but my cash is gone, my Clif bar given away. I keep walking.

Yes, I walk past Powell’s, but I don’t go in. I’ll take you to Powell’s another day, I promise.

Oh look. A giant hotel that nobody asked for on the site that used to be an entire city block of food carts.

And then, there it is. The Central Library, all fresh and gleaming after its recent renovation. Doesn’t a library just make your tired old heart go pitapat?

In we go.

Up the stairs.

I’m there to attend the reception and reading for project by photographer Jim Lommasson and Street Roots vendors called “What I Carry: a collaborative photo+writing storytelling project with Portland’s Street Community.” Lommasson invited the vendors, all unhoused or formerly unhoused, to bring in an object that was meaningful to them for him to photograph. He then made large prints of the photos and asked each person to write on the photograph of their particular object, talking about why it was special to them.

Here are just a few of the images. It’s a beautiful exhibit. You can see it in the Central Library’s Collin’s Gallery through March 15^th.

Lommasson gives a brief talk and then there are readings from six of his collaborators. They each read something about their photographed object, and several of them read poems as well. One man says that he wanted to take part in the project so that he could bring attention to the injustice of the sweeps. He and Lommasson had tracked down images similar to cherished objects that he no longer owned—a compass and a lighter from WWII that his father gave to him when he was a kid in the Boy Scouts, both of which were lost in a sweep.

Most of the readers share that the library has been a safe haven for them, a place to get warm or to cool off, to use the restroom, to rest. One of the readers, Bronwyn Fiona Carver, made a chapbook of her poems and is selling copies. I wish the poem she read about dry socks was in it so I could share it with you. It was terrific. (I also wish that I’d thought to take photos of the readers, but I was too busy listening, my phone tucked away.)

I tuck her chapbook into my bag and head back down the stairs, then north on Tenth Ave, east on Burnside, and back to the Burnside Bridge. More than two hours have passed, but I look for the low-insulin guy along the way just in case. I don’t see him. I hope he’s okay.

Back across the bridge with fewer intrusive thoughts because my brain is busy chewing over the exhibit I’ve just left. The photo of the key no longer used lingers. I only glance over my shoulder once or twice to make sure no one is coming up behind me.

Look how the fucking Death Star dominates the waterfront as you head east. Yeah, I’ll definitely have to do a post about Ugly Gentrification Buildings at some point. (You won’t be surprised, I’m sure, to hear that there was fuckery and City Hall ineptitude involved in its design and construction.)

And now we’re back on the east side. I’ll leave you here, up the block from where we began.

A branding agency with offices in that building painted that Long live the wildcards, misfits & dabblers there, and in that sense it’s just one more calculated move in the Portlandiafication of the city, but it’s hard to disagree with the sentiment itself. There’s a constant tension in Portland between spontaneous, joyful weirdness and calculated, commercial kookiness; between the sincere misfit heart of this place and the shrewd marketing of that sincerity. We see that right here in the slick branding message above countered by the graffiti below that screams SEE ME! I’M HERE! PLEASE PLEASE SEE ME!

Even so, I’m not immune. I smile when I see those words, every time. Wildcard, I think. Misfit. Dabbler. That’s me. The same thought as everyone else heading east on the Burnside Bridge, no doubt.

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