My Work as a Portland Walking Tour Guide

Five years ago, I became a guide with Portland Walking Tours. It was the first of several “ambassador of the city” jobs I do now (the other is Portland Streetcar, which I joined as a part-time customer service representative two and a half years later, in June 2014).

Since my first tour in early 2012, I’ve introduced the city to visitors from Palm Springs and Detroit, Berkeley and the San Juans, Iowa and Alaska. I’ve had guests from Germany, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Japan, Taiwan, Paris, Brazil (both Rio and São Paulo), the Ivory Coast, Stockholm, even a UN interpreter from Tajikistan. Just yesterday my tour group included two young women from China and third from New Delhi.

Every December and January, I host tourists from Brisbane, Perth, and Sydney, because it’s their summer break. More than once I’ve had guests from Fairbanks, Alaska who said they’re familiar with Loftus Road, a short street near the University of Alaska campus that’s named after my grandfather and his brothers because they had a cabin there while attending school in the late 1920s.

There’s a small but steady stream of guests who have either recently relocated to Portland, are visiting because they’re thinking about it, or are scouting local colleges with their parents. Every once in a while I get a longtime resident, even a native Portlander, who is finally checking out our tours, either for herself or to show the city to an out-of-town friend or relation.

I’ve had mornings when nobody showed up, and tours when nobody tipped me afterward. I’ve been tipped with a $20 bill many times, and once with a fifty. Quite often, I’ve taken a single person on the two-hour-plus tour, and at other times (usually in July or August) I’ve shepherded groups as large as 16, 19, 21, and (my record) 22.

We try not to let tours get that large -- the company nearly always brings in backup guides to split a large array of guests into more manageable groups whenever possible -- but now and then we get caught and have to do the best we can.

For me, the ideal size is six to eight: not too challenging to maneuver through the busy downtown intersections, and I can often remember everyone’s name.

The most memorable or surprising guests over the years have been:

• a young couple on their honeymoon from Glasgow, Scotland, and the woman was a big fan of “Grimm” who remembered my particular episode (that’s what I looked like, at left)

• a family of four from Paris, consisting of a tall, elegant French man, his petite Asian wife, and two lovely teen daughters, who were all here on a Travel Portland gift package tour the mother had won at a Pink Martini concert back in France

• a young German specialist in micro fermentation (the use of bacteria to create chemicals) who had just flown into Portland and was embarrassed that he had no U.S. cash on him to tip me, so we went to Bailey’s Taproom for a liquid tip he could purchase with plastic

• friends from my old high school who came alone or towing a mother

• a Taiwanese family who’d been living and working on the border of Brazil and Paraguay, near the fabled Iquazu Falls, for the past 11 years, so the two little girls not only spoke Mandarin and English, but Portuguese as well!

• a Manhattanite who had not only graduated from my college (many years after I did) but had lived in the same freshman dorm and same upperclass dorm as well

I get to accept a lot of compliments on behalf of our city. Both native Europeans and Americans who have traveled in Europe have told me Portland struck them as the “most European” U.S. city they’d visited.

When I asked a couple of Québécoise (they had grown up in Montreal, but were now based in Quebec City) what they were doing in town, Annie said “Urbanism” and Jean-Francois added: “You’re exporting your lifestyle … and it’s a nice one. We’re trying to catch up.”

Here are some other memorable tours:

• 2/2/16 -- It was five to 12 when I was crossing Lownsdale Square with my walking tour group. I noticed KGW and KOIN TV crews waiting outside Hatfield (federal) Courthouse, so I said, “Sorry, but press statements by Ammon Bundy’s lawyers were not covered in your tour fee, so we will not be pausing here.”

• 7/17/15 -- We were in the middle of Lownsdale Square and I was just launching into my discussion of “Grimm” when we heard a steady horn blast just over my shoulder. When we all looked at the intersection of SW Third and Salmon (in front of the Lotus), we saw a pedestrian not just blocking the path of a car that had the light and wanted to head south on Third, but the rather colorfully dressed young woman was sitting on the hood of the car -- even, I think, rubbing her rump on it -- while the enraged driver pressed his car horn. My usual line when a distraction like this happens (although it's more often a street person yelling profanities) is: “No extra charge for the local color.”

• 6/30/15 -- A woman was shrieking obscenities and rape at her boyfriend in Shemanski Park, so I edged a half block south of where I normally make a lengthy stop to talk about the historic layout of downtown . . . but then I noticed my guests’ eyes periodically straying to something going on behind me, and gradually realized some guys were conducting a light-saber battle back there.
  
  
  
  
  

• 6/26/15 -- On a hot and sunny day like today, I might tell my Portland Walking Tour guests: “Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am not able to show you typical Oregon weather today. I’m not authorized to offer a refund on your money, but you have my sincerest apologies.”

• 5/12/15 -- Joke I devised spontaneously during last Tuesday’s tour. There were a pair of Nissan Leafs hooked up to the electric charging station at First and Salmon, so I remarked, “when they’re all charged up, they LEAVE! Hyuk, hyuk, hyuk.”

• 10/22/14 -- I had a couple guys from Tennessee on the tour -- one bare-headed and one wearing a sweatshirt hoodie. They consistently refused the little umbrellas I offered them from my satchel and got soaked by tour’s end. I verbally awarded them the “croix de guerre touristique.”
  

• 7/30/14 -- Several “I own this town” moments occurred during this morning’s Portland Walking Tour: actor-colleague Jason Glick called and waved from a passing vehicle at SW 6th and Main; a former neighbor who’s an Umpqua Bank executive said “hi” at the corner of SW 3rd and Salmon; and we ran into the mayor on the corner of SW 5th and Main, so of course I greeted him -- “Mr. Mayor” -- and introduced him to my group of visitors from Hawaii, Toronto, Missouri, and elsewhere: “Charlie Hales, ladies and gentlemen.”

• 7/15/14 -- As guests were arriving for this morning’s Portland Walking Tour, one woman said “We’ve met before; we did a promotional shoot at Ponzi Vineyard with you” three years ago. It was Debbie Cargill and her husband Phil, who are at the table with me in the shot above, with their backs mostly to the camera. That’s Phil with me on the bocce ball court at Ponzi below.