Kaia Sand | ‘This neighborhood beats as one of Portland’s strong hearts, and its people who live their lives in public are people to love’
I have been at a loss for words as I listen to fearsome descriptions of Old Town on some media outlets and from the video screens displaying city council meetings.
I do not write to discount immense suffering, but this portrait of fear, accompanied by calls for more security and more police, becomes a caricature of the people in this vibrant neighborhood.
So this is an ode to Old Town and in particular, all the people living their lives in public. The chatty, emotional sidewalks, people leaning out of their tent openings, people outside their apartments.
People zipping about in wheelchairs, chihuahuas clutching to their thighs. This is an ode to the chihuahuas and all the other tiny dogs, and some big dogs, and a few cats perched on people’s shoulders, all doted on by people who live their lives in public. The dog sweaters, the pets carted about in baby carriages decked out with plastic flowers and shiny treasures.
This is an ode to a neighborhood where quick quips are exchanged, where many neighbors know each other’s names, where the breeze carries laughter, groans, shouts and wails in this neighborhood of old painted signs brightened with neon lights, the murals and palm trees and the dusty parking lots.
This is an ode to the man on Second Avenue who teases me for my mason jar coffee, the yellow lab who lives on Third Avenue, the street poet who called to apologize when I walked through the crossfire of his verbal rage.
This is an ode to the talking tents — the person who called out like a quiz show host to ask me whether I knew the origins of Ring-around-the-Rosie, their neighbor who answered “bubonic plague” from another zipped up tent.
The people who, in pauses between sweeps, stay in one place long enough to almost have an address – the color of their tent, the cross streets. The people in tents who barbecued for entire blocks when Old Town was quiet during the early pandemic, the fellow who pulled up in his pick-up and strummed concerts from its bed.
This is in praise of the people on Northwest Flanders Street who piled out of their tents in the bronzy dusk light when a car hit a man on a motorcycle, and they tended to the man bleeding in the street until the paramedics arrived.
This is an ode to the improvised carts – the broken wheelchairs bound and welded into hand-trucks, the walkers on which people haul stacks of possessions.
The crows that alight the twiggy branches at dusk as the nightlife begins. The rows of tents mounded in blue tarps when it rains.
The old man who expresses his suffering through raging curses at all who walk by. The woman who used to only shout, and now reserves an occasional smile as I become more familiar to her, sometimes indulging me in a few shards of stories that I’ll never hear whole.
The heart — my God — the heart in this neighborhood is something to behold. This neighborhood beats as one of Portland’s strong hearts, and its people who live their lives in public are people to love.
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