HOW TO SURVIVE THE GREAT NORTHWEST FREEZE; or KEEPING PORTLAND SANCTIMONIOUS, part 4

pier park: who knew? i didn't. not until a couple of sundays ago when i decided to turn off lombard at the pier park sign into what looked to be just a park and ride bus station with a skatepark behind it. what i found behind the skatepark, however, was a welcome surprise. according to the portland parks and recreation website, pier park was designed in 1920 the style of laurelhurst park, which was then considered to be the most beautiful park in the city. there's an obvious resemblance between the two in their winding networks of paths and the stately verticality of their old, rugged conifers. pier park, however, is, at nearly ninety acres, over three times the size of laurelhurst; and unburdened by the looming luxury of a historically affluent neighborhood at its perimeter, pier park makes it much easier than laurelhurst for visitors to get lost. (laurelhurst park is to old timey dress up pig roasts as pier park is to romanticized hobo urban camping.) even better, and in true portland style, pier park is named not for it's geographical placement but for a man named pier who, ironically, seems to be one of the few men whose names grace our street and park signs who weren't admirals.

yesterday evening we weren't unhappy to wander for ten or fifteen minutes before finding the spot at the northwest edge of the park from which my companion said we could sit under the trees and watch the trains. the train sequences in "wendy and lucy" were filmed less far from the center of the city, but it's no fandangling to say that the aesthetic of the two sites and scenes is the same. i was happy to have recently found pier park and to have suggested it for the first destination on yesterday's ride if only because the trees and the trains and the sunset somehow managed to reignite my sense of wonder for the pacific northwest, a sense that had seemed utterly lost -- or just essentially juvenile -- as recently as my discovery of the park.

you have to take the bad with the good. although the article "our social dis-ease" by julia sommerfeld was written for the magazine of the seattle times in 2005, i was only made aware of it this morning (by a seattle native then transplant to portland who now lives back in new york). i haven't ever felt "the freeze" to be especially biting in seattle, but then again i've probably been the one putting it on, which is another way of saying that we shouldn't consider the phenomenon to be unique to seattle but rather as a characteristic of northwest culture at large. indeed, the crux of the article can be simply altered to expand its consideration beyond seattle and describe the region at large (or any of its larger cities):

[the northwest has] long been described in contradictory terms. The weather: Is it mild or dreary or mildly dreary? The politics: Progressive yet torpid. Progressing toward torpor? The attitude: Tolerant — of all like-minded people.

But the dichotomy most fundamental to our collective [regional] character is this: Polite but distant. Have a nice day. Somewhere else. [the great northwest freeze]

seattle's time may have come and gone, and its lingering frigidity is probably attributable to the sting of the lost limelight. portland's aloofness is only a natural consequence of its having inherited the glow. but vancouver? canadians are supposed to be friendly and welcoming, no? apparently, though, which is to say that i have it on good authority from a friend who moved from toronto, vancouverites are just as exclusive as the rest of their fellow cascadians. by the time canadian migrants have spent some time on the other side of the mountains in vancouver, their innate friendliness has been frosted over with just plain nice and polite.

According to the natives, we've trampled everything wonderful about their treasured cit[ies], so why haven't we cracked the icy crust?

First, it's an enabling cultural climate for socially inept people. So if you come here and you have any germ of antisociality, it will, like moss, take hold and flourish.

And if you arrive here open and ebullient, you're bound to lose your confidence and spark after enough cold shoulders. After all, why even bother going to that party when you know it will just be more nonchalant chitchat that will never go anywhere?

or, in better circles, nonchalant chitchat that will leave you knowingly and intelligently spurned. we could teach a class -- and that's just it. the best way to survive the northwest freeze seems to be to get in on it. find yours and then start pushing people away. right? if i've said it once...well, if i've said it at all then that should have been enough: there aren't any jobs in portland, so it's silly that you'd come here with the hope of making anything special, in particular a friendship with anyone i know. that's figurative, of course, because i'm obviously letting you in just by putting you on to the game. seriously, though, watch it. we know how much it sucks to have to go to the park alone sometimes, but we all got used to it. you can cheer yourself up by thinking that if you lose that leather jacket we'll work as hard as we need to find you and return it, even if we don't want to talk afterward. although there are those nights when you remember that talking with strangers can be fun. there was a shaman following the train we watched at pier park. wonder and awe.