portland

The late child actor Stanley Fafara known for playing Beaver Cleaver’s friend Whitey on Leave it to Beaver, who spent the last portion of his life in the Old Town slum of Portland, Oregon, said that he made the move to Portland from Los Angeles because it was a city catered towards drunks. “Instead of waking up in prison, I would find myself in a detox center with a free breakfast,” Fafara told the Oregonian newspaper in a 2002 interview not long before his death.

Currently in the middle of a backpack trip to Europe, I am writing this ithe downstairs bar of an 800-bed hostel in London, witnessing the evening’s crowd of international youth dwindle down, and drinking what should surely be my last cider of the night, cider not being my first choice of drink, but as they say, ‘when in Rome’, or in this case, England.

Greetings from Portland, Oregon, the city from which, along with former figure skating angel, Tonya Harding, I have called my home for most of my life. This is the place that Kerouac called the land of bridges, whose nicknames vary from; the Rose City, Stump Town, P-town, Rip City, PDX, and which the former mayor dubbed ‘Brew Town’, a city that had double-digit unemployment long before it was popular, more strip joints per capita than anywhere else in the country (and most recently made news for the first ever vegan strip club), home to an active volcano within city-limits, soapbox derbies, and naked bike rides where attendance is in the thousands, and where at one point in history was the world capital of the white slave trade which according to various local legends, drunken citizens awoke to find themselves facing the decision of offering their services on a boat in the Pacific or a long swim home.