Portland Walking Tour Tales, 2019 . . . part 3

Further memorable tales from my Portland Walking Tours of 2019.

MAY 30

Another double-header today. The morning group had 13, who ranged in origin from Denver to South Carolina, Texas, and Memphis; the second, a dozen, came from California, Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, and Tel Aviv, Israel.

For any number of reasons, these are larger groups than I prefer to have to shepherd through downtown, so I was expecting a long, exhausted trudge home afterward. But the couple from Los Feliz, California asked me if I’d like to join them for a drink at The Nines hotel where they’re staying. They took me up to the hospitality room where I enjoyed quality munchies, two beers, and a lovely two-hour chat about our family backgrounds, her art therapy work, Judaism, Harlan Ellison, acting and photography, and many other topics. (This is a view of Pioneer Courthouse Square, decorated with potted blossoms for Portland Rose Festival, from that height.)

It was a surprisingly lovely way to finish what might otherwise have been a fairly unmemorable and frazzling day.

JUNE 16

Gay Pride Day in Portland presented its special challenges this afternoon.

The parade was over, so it did not pose an obstacle to my 2 p.m. tour, but a lot of wildlife were hanging out at Waterfront Park, where the tour ends, when we got there.

My guests were from Fort Worth, Texas; Babylon, Long Island; and a family of eight from San Jose and the Philippines . . . and I had a challenge holding their attention when there were brightly painted, nearly nude males and females wandering about us — not to mention the young woman with her skirt hiked up to her waist, straddling her boyfriend under a tree near the original Portland Loo.

JUNE 17

I had just finished my afternoon tour — a tidy quintet of women of varying ages from Richmond, Virginia; Wyndham, New Hampshire; and South Berwick, Maine — and was stepping out of the office in Pioneer Courthouse Square about 4:30 p.m., when who should come strolling down the brick ramp by our door by my old book group buddy, Jack Ohman, the former editorial columnist for The Oregonian, who won a Pulitzer the year after our paper pushed him out after 29 years and he was swept up by The Sacramento Bee. (At left is a caricature of yours truly that Jack drew when we ran into each other on the #20 Trimet bus, way out at the eastern end of its run on July 9, 2009; it appeared in the paper three days later.)

He was in town this week to accept an honorary doctorate from Portland State; you can call me Dr. Ohman now, he told me. And he hugged me. Twice!

A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 7

Week 7 of the new reality. . . . 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 22

4:00 p.m. — I had an online video chat with family this afternoon: my brother across the city, my brother the optometrist downstate in Ashland, where my mother also lives in her own place (but she’s mostly staying with him because she’s recuperating from neurosurgery performed on March 17, just three days before elective surgeries were barred at that southern Oregon hospital).
We had a lovely catchup. Mom’s stitches came out without a hitch, Ken is seeing a few of his eye patients and getting well caught up on paperwork, Toby has been doing online musical collaborations. Stay-at-home for weeks on end would have been so much more difficult before the Internet.

Just before midnight, Toby uploaded his latest home isolation video: singing and playing “I Play Viola” to the tune of the 1958 Peggy Lee hit “Fever.”

THURSDAY, APRIL 23

11:28 a.m. — Information has been and continues to be shitty. We don’t know where the cases are centered here in Multnomah County, we don’t know how many people are hospitalized or where . . . and we certainly don’t know how or where the people who have tested positive might have been infected.

The Oregon Health Authority web page has been dutifully reporting the total number of tests, and positive and negative results — county by county — every day. Suddenly yesterday it got stuck with “pending *” entered in all the boxes for negative tests and total persons tested statewide, as well as negative results in each county.

I just checked it; no change in the last 24 hours . . . no new data.

And all along for the past six weeks, the numbers may have been far too low to reflect reality on the streets because of low, restricted testing when we should have been testing everybody — on request, at least, if not everyone, period. Otherwise, we’re administering policy at the government level, and trying to do the right thing at the individual level, in the dark.

Meanwhile, I have to go out today to get medicine for my girls. I’m trying to anticipate all the potential obstacles and challenges, and pack whatever tools I can think of or have on hand to meet them.

8:19 p.m. — For today’s long walk, I took a MAX light-rail train all the way to its northern terminus, at the Portland Expo Center just off the Columbia River and walked back into the city. After walking five miles south through various North Portland neighborhoods (and taking a selfie with the Paul Bunyan statue at N. Interstate and Denver), I hopped a train back across the river to the west side, swung past the uncharacteristically locked and empty Powell’s Books and Multnomah County Library/Central Branch, and took a streetcar home.

Along the way I saw a Canada Goose and a cormorant on Columbia Slough, lots of tulips and apple blossoms, squirrels dashing about quiet yards, and my filmmaker colleague Sean Parker at his home.

FRIDAY, APRIL 24

A very happy birthday to my dear wife, Carole Barkley. Here’s a piece I posted to this blog three years ago, when we had more to celebrate.

3:40 p.m. — I might have known.

My insurance provider has refused to cover disinfectant injections.

No . . . I Didn't Really Type That, Did I? (best typos of 2018)

Editing and proofreading is detail work that can be tiring. One of the compensations is the perennial potential for running across a typo that creates a hilarious image or self-contradiction — a sort of natural pun.

After I posted the best ones from last year, I realized I had not collected up the beauties from the year before. So here they are. . . . 

Jan. 4:  “It’s common for toddlers to be weary of strangers….”
No kidding. Especially if they want to talk investment strategies or tax policy.

Jan. 25:  Tonight I was spot editing a website for a dentist in Florida and discovered one of the icons on her Home page that’s supposed to link to a professional ratings site directs instead to the review for an OB/GYN in the state of Washington who happens to have the same name.
I notified the in-house project manager for the site and commented: “I understand different orifices are involved.”

Going to Work for Harlan Ellison . . . a 1996 memory

I saw Harlan Ellison in a more conventional setting the following year. It was a lecture at MIT, at the other end of Cambridge. I remember he took a while to tell much of the story about the anguish of dealing with moronic movie producers while working on his screen adaptation of Asimov’s I, Robot a few years before.

During the autograph session afterward I handed him a print of the photo I’d taken of him at his typewriter at the Sheraton Commander the year before, and he thanked me in a personalized signing of my first cloth edition of Deathbird Stories.

Around the same time, I was lucky to see the pair of artists who had done so many covers for Ellison as well as the inner illustrations for the Dangerous Visions series. Partners in art and life, Leo and Diane Dillon came to Boston on tour. I bought a copy of the most recent coffee-table children’s book they’d illustrated, Jan Carew’s Children of the Sun, but also had them sign their names next to Harlan’s in my first edition of his most recent collection that carried their cover art, Shatterday.

In the summer of 1987 I left Boston to return to my home state of Oregon. I landed a job as a reporter for the daily paper in Roseburg, and settled in to cover local news, write concert and film reviews, and compose occasional hell-raising op-ed columns for fun, practice, and the angry letters to the editor they brought in.

A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 6

Week 6 of the new reality.

This goes back a ways, obviously. I may or may not get more caught up soon, but (on the one hand) there's so much else to write about and do — I have more Portland Walking Tour stories, more hilarious editing typos to share, and ideas for potential photo essays to compile about life under pandemic lockdown — and (on the other hand) it’s not as if conditions are shifting wildly from week to week, so many of the thoughts that crossed my mind in mid April will likely be worthwhile for weeks and even months to come. . . . 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15

11:51 a.m. — I just sat down to read and ran across the following:

“. . . an epidemic of unprecedented proportions struck the city of thirty thousand. Though fairly common in the tropics, yellow fever had not been visited upon Philadelphia for some thirty years. Nearly half the city fled to the uninfected countryside, among them the president of the United States. Government was at a standstill. By the time the contagion has passed, several thousand were dead. . . .
“Death on so large a scale produced scenes of daily horror, with many more rotting corpses in sight than there were brave nurses. Approximately half of those who exhibited symptoms eventually died from the yellow fever….”

You have to be sharp enough on your U.S. history to put together the clues and recognize this had to have occurred during the brief period when Philly was the temporary capital of the United States: 1790 to 1800. I certainly didn’t expect to read about a serious plague when I picked up the dual biography, Madison and Jefferson by Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, but here it was on page 273.

Portland Walking Tour Tales, 2019 . . . part 2

Further tales from my banner year of more than one hundred walking tours in 2019.

MARCH 25

Partly because the weather was so gorgeous yesterday, I found myself herding an unusually large tour group of 16 guests in on a Sunday afternoon!

Four individuals (two separate couples) were visiting from London . . . a trio from Grand Rapids was scouting the University of Portland for the daughter (who all but admitted she didn’t have any other college choices when I asked; and that getting to live in Portland was a good portion of the appeal) . . . a couple had come down from Seattle, another from Vancouver BC . . . I didn’t catch where the male half of a pair of late arrivals was from, but the woman told me she was from Somalia . . . and I had a Salem resident and a couple who relocated to Portland a couple months ago from LA.

Long ago, I fell into the habit of employing the Yiddish term “mishegoss” to refer to the uproar that resulted from the kidnapping of the bear cub from the “Animals in Pools” bronzes along SW Yamhill between Sixth and Fifth.

Nearly two hours later, after I’d formally concluded the tour, the woman from Seattle shared that she had had to translate that term for her husband who’s Norwegian, so not a “member of the tribe.” I had to inform them that I’m not a Jew either, but my Catholic-bred wife became one back in 1997, and I’ve attended synogogue services with her so many times that I know many of the Hebrew prayers . . . and refer to myself as a non-practicing atheist.

APRIL 9

As often happens, there were some first-time-ever incidents on today’s tour — the biggest one was that the Pioneer Square weather beacon underwent testing at the unusual hour of 10:15, just when I was showing it to my tour group . . . so they got to hear the horn fanfare, view the spray cloud of mist, and watch the tower shuffle through the sun-face, the grey heron, AND the dark-grey dragon!

APRIL 13

This afternoon I was assigned to lead a tour of brand-new admittees to Lewis and Clark Law School — some of whom intend to come, others who had not committed, so a walking tour of downtown was one way the law school hoped to entice the latter to attend.

I leaned on everything I know about the courthouses: from the Hollywood film “Men of Honor” and episodes of “Leverage” and “Grimm” shot in the all-wood courtrooms of the 1933 Gus Solomon Courthouse, to the Prohibition-era booze poured into “the grates of what they THOUGHT was the sewer system” in the courtyard of the county courthouse, and the roof garden atop of the Mark O. Hatfield US Courthouse.

Several young women were visiting from Seattle, Minnesota, and Colorado, but the most interesting guest may have been a very tall, rugged young man (I would have placed him in his early 30s, perhaps) with a cowboy hat and beard who said he was from Fields, Oregon. Where? Harney County. (Wikipedia says population 120!) Of course he nodded knowingly (as did several other guests) when I mentioned the Malheur Wildlife Preserve occupation and the Bundys.

He also mentioned as we were walking back to the square for them to catch their bus back to Lewis and Clark that he applied to a LOT of law schools — 18, I believe — and had been accepted to 7, so he had not made up his mind where he planned to go in the fall. I’d sure love to have heard more of his story.

APRIL 20

A double-header today: two tours that totaled 27 guests altogether (28, if you count the non-paying kid in the stroller).

The afternoon group included a mother and daughter from Shizuoka (the daughter a med student in Kobe who’s doing a two-week course at OHSU), and a couple who live in work in the Netherlands, but he’s a native Macedonian who works as a data scientist for a telecom and she’s Polish and teaches philosophy at the university level.

The astonishing thing was that the Polish woman turned to the Japanese pair to greet them in their native tongue. Turns out her father had served in the diplomatic corps in Tokyo!

MAY 12

I had only two guests on my tour this morning, but we had a lovely time.

They were a young couple on a brief visit from Indiana. Since she works at a Starbucks and he at a grocery store back home, they were not the typical retirees, conventioneers, business travelers, international tourists, or parents scouting a college I typically get as guests.

They had come by train, having boarded on Wednesday and arrived Friday (by coach! — so they hadn’t gotten much sleep on the journey), but she said she had “always” wanted to visit. Fortunately, they had upgraded to a sleeper for the return home starting tonight.

Their youth and mobility, plus the quiet, low-traffic Sunday streets, meant I was able to use my “inside voice” for much of the route, instead of having to yell repeatedly over buses, light-rail trains, delivery trucks, and other ambient noise.
The woman punctuated many of my stories with popping eyes and verbal expressions of wonder and delight. I took special pleasure in pointing out that the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie” had been banned by the governor in their home state back in 1964. (Below is the building that prompts me to talk about the Kingsmen and “Louie Louie.”)

Since they were young and traveling on the cheap, I half expected little or no tip, but at the end of the tour she said her mind was pretty much made up that she was going to move here someday . . . and he pulled out his billfold and handed me a twenty.

The cherry on top was that after the tour was all over, they mentioned their next stop was the Oregon Zoo, and they would probably Uber it. I told them they could get their a lot cheaper via MAX, and mentioned the zoo had just gotten in a new Red Panda. That’s his favorite animal, the young woman said of her companion.

MAY 16

A theme of this afternoon’s tour was marriage.

My guests were a lovely young couple from Sydney, Australia at the start of their four-week honeymoon in the Pacific Northwest (with Seattle, Vancouver, Banff, and Jasper coming up) . . . plus a trio of youthful female friends in town from Georgia and South Carolina for a wedding in the western burbs on Saturday.

Of course I mentioned my own wife several times; in particular, how I first laid eyes on her in the tearoom of the Heathman 28 years ago.

Professionally, the newlyweds were a project manager and an actuary, and the trio of Southerners consisted of a massage therapist, a speech therapist, and an electrician.

At the “Allow Me” umbrella man statue early on, I gave them my usual spiel about the unusual nature of Oregon rain, and by golly, it started to sprinkle an hour and a half later, as we approached Chapman Square. The Australian woman took out and raised an umbrella, and one of the Southern gals pulled up her hood, but the three others proceeded through the trees bare-headed, and by the time we got to Mill Ends Park 15 minutes later, the misty drops had stopped.

The rain was just like you said it would be, the southern trio marveled.

[Note: My colleague Brick told me the trio of gals from Georgia and South Carolina took his Beyond Bizarre ghost tour later that evening, and they were still raving about my Best of Portland tour: It was the best walking tour they’d ever been on, they told him; we learned more in two hours than we would have in a month of classroom study!]

MAY 21

This morning I purposely took extra time to complete the walking tour — with the approval of my guest.

Yep, I had only one, but he was perfect: had nowhere to be until 4 p.m., was on a two-and-a-half month tour of the U.S. (with possible swings through Europe and Southeast Asia after), has been taking as many local tours as possible along the way, is expressly checking out potential places to move away from his native LA where he’d just sold his house, and — the topper — is a free-lance architectural and urban design consultant.

You’d never guess any of this to look at him. He’s very youthful, smiles easily, and repeatedly murmured “sure, sure, sure” as I explained details of art, architecture, and urban design.

And though he was totally open about where he’d ultimately resettle from Larchmont Village — the neighborhood just north of Wilshire, east of La Brea, and south of Hollywood and Paramount Studios (he even checked out Klamath Falls “because it was a red dot on the way” of his Amtrak route) — he said more than once he was feeling spoiled by Portland, as if there might be no need to check out the later planned stops on his continental tour (which include Seattle, Vegas, Florida, and the Atlantic seaboard at least up to Boston).

I mention protests early on my tours — and sure enough, we passed droves of people headed to the rally against abortion-bans in Terry Schrunk Plaza. When we spotted yet another gathering with picket signs outside Senator Merkley’s office in the World Trade Center, he said, “I feel like you arranged all this just for me to spoil me.” (Above, Electric Avenue, with ten outlets along SW Salmon, just outside Senator Merkley’s office.)

Several other lovely coincidences piled on. One of my standard jokes at Mill Ends Park is the potential danger of the park being wiped out by a Camry — whereupon my guest remarked, “I just gave my Camry to my niece!”
Minutes later, when the tour ended, he topped me a twenty. I have a feeling he may be back. . . .

Go to Portland Walking Tour Tales, 2019, part 1

See an introduction to My Work as a Portland Walking Tour Guide (with some of my best stories from 2014-2016)

A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 5

Notes from a thoughtful self-isolator in Week 5 of our new reality. . . . 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8

9:34 a.m. — More tactics for maneuvering about your neighborhood in mask and gloves:

— Step out onto the street and go around parked cars, to avoid pedestrians and cyclists on the sidewalks. Try to anticipate the need by keeping an eye open and making your move a block or more in advance, assuming the vehicle traffic will allow it.

— If someone is unloading a truck or moving slowly with a dog, cross to the opposite side of the street if possible, or head up an entry walk or driveway and stand aside to clear the route, if you can.

— Hold your breath in elevators, which often have poor air circulation. Inhale slowly but deeply as the car arrives and doors open, hold your breath once you’ve stepped inside, and if you can’t keep holding it, exhale slowly until the doors open and you can step out.

— If there’s no way to put sufficient distance between yourself and a cyclist or another pedestrian (which happened to me several times on Terwilliger Boulevard), do the hold-your-breath-in-the-elevator trick: breathe in deeply as they approach, hold as you pass, and exhale slowly so they’re at least 30 or 40 feet away the next time you breathe in.

I have no idea whether the above practices raise your chances of avoiding infection, but they encourage you to stay alert while out in public, trying to get your aerobic exercise.

7:17 p.m. — One of the great consolations of self-isolation has been the frequent visits by hummingbirds to the feeder on our balcony. The hummers have also enjoyed sipping from the blossoms of a rosemary plant in a pot at one corner below.

Today I caught more than a minute of video in which one bird chased the other away from the feeder, then followed it down to the fence wires around the balcony to make sure he maintained dominance and drove the other one away (though I’m sure the loser sneaked back to our feeder later!).
I tried to upload the video here to my blog, but it didn’t take. It’s a 123MB file, so the size may have been too much for this site. You’ll have to settle for these screen shots of the two squabbling at the feeder (the victor is still perched at lower left as the vanquished flies off at upper right), and then the victor flying off after having drunk his fill:

8:29 p.m. — For today’s long walk, I took a cue from my host at Rose City Book Pub, where I read “Story Time for Grownups” once a month last year. It’s the birthday of the owner, Elise Schumock.

I trekked across Tilikum Crossing bridge . . . north on Water Avenue and Second ’til I got past the Burnside Bridge . . . then worked my way diagonally northeast across Weidler, MLK Boulevard, and Broadway to continue north on Eighth.

Then it occurred to me that I’d be passing near Dick Lewis’s home (Dick and I were co-founders of the Bridgetown Morris Men back in 1992; that logo patch you see prominently displayed on the team’s web page was designed by my wife, Carole Barkley), so I phoned him from Eighth and Brazee to let him know I was coming, and he stepped out his door to sit in the porch swing while I chatted with him from his front yard.

After visiting with Elise and her two other guests, I headed home. It was a good 9 miles or so.

Selfie at Rose City Book Pub taken at about 3:45 p.m. today. This is the venue where I’ve done my live literature readings, “Story Time for Grownups,” every month for the past year.

Today I did an impromptu reading of the first few pages of Marilynne Robinson’s novel Home, which was the request of the owner, Elise Schumock, whom I visited on site to wish her a happy birthday. I also read “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to Elise and two of her friends at the pub because I felt like it, and the elegiac tone of T.S. Eliot’s century-old poem felt oddly appropriate.

THURSDAY, APRIL 9

9:56 a.m. — During yesterday’s nine-miler, I heard a train whistle blowing while I was on SE 12th at about Lincoln or Division. I glanced to the west and could see a slow-moving freight train headed the same direction as I was.

It was now after 5 p.m., I’d walked at least 7 miles already, and my legs were aching. I realized I might be held up at the place where I’d intended to cross the tracks at grade, and it would be a significant backtrack to find a bridge or viaduct that would take me over them.

At the rail crossing on SE 11th, the train was stopped dead. Automobiles lined up on the street were making three- and more-point turns to find another escape route. I paused at the crossing and watched another pedestrian climb over the rail cars to get to the other side.

As I was making up my mind to do the same, the cars rattled and lurched infinitesmally to the right, and I realized the train engines had reversed to close all the tiny gaps in the couplings and give themselves to start again in the other direction.

By the time I got up my nerve, the train had started to move forward and east, but at far less than walking speed, so I climbed the steps, strode across the train, and hopped down the other side. Once safely across, I turned back and took a photo of my escape route.

FRIDAY, APRIL 10

8:55 p.m. — Today’s long walk through Southeast Portland: north to Tilikum Crossing bridge, cross to the east side, south on Water Avenue and McLoughlin Boulevard to Sellwood, then across the New Sellwood Bridge to the west side again and north along the Willamette River.

Length was somewhere between 7 and 8 miles. I saw many beautiful and interesting sights within a mile of my home (at least as the crow flies) that none of us usually notice because we normally fly past them in a vehicle.

Everywhere I’ve walked in the city this week — southwest, northeast, southeast — it’s clearly tulip season. Here’s a patch in Sellwood, along SE Sellwood Boulevard overlooking Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge at about 9th Avenue, I saw this afternoon.

9:23 p.m. — Carole: “You’re gonna laugh at this, David; we’re getting another Amazon delivery on Sunday.”
Me: “Hope we’re home.”

SATURDAY, APRIL 11

9:27 a.m. — I listened to NPR’s “Morning Edition” 20 minutes. It was the first time I’d turned on the radio in months. Like cable TV, long before the pandemic hit, we’d simply gotten out of the habit . . . in favor of reading, checking news and entertainment online, walking the dog, and talking to each other and reading aloud over meals.

I recognized voices such as Scott Simon, of course, and the reporters were perky or at least matter-of-fact . . . but at the heart of most of the reports were the darker currents of our era: people with substance abuse issues are isolated, and more likely to be stressed . . . clinical trial studies that might have been the last hope for terminal patients with cancers and other deadly diseases have had to be dropped to keep clinics and hospitals available for anticipated covid-19 cases . . . shootings in Portland doubled in April . . . .

How will we count the rising death rates among:

— sufferers of (proximately) non-lethal medical conditions (e.g., hypertension, diabetes, COPD) who can’t get to treatment or are refused it

— substance abuse addicts who can’t take it anymore

— stranger-on-stranger shootings

— domestic violence (including more shootings with “protective” firearms in the home, no doubt)

— suicides by whatever variety of means

None of the above would qualify as an unmistakably direct result of the novel coronavirus . . . and yet aren’t they?

10:55 a.m. — Here’s another reminder of how little we really know . . . how inaccurate the daily stats (and the projections based on them) may be . . . and therefore how foolish are any predictions any of us (especially You-Know-Who in Washington) might make at this point:

A friend of Carole’s in Michigan — currently the third-worst state for identified cases of covid-19 and deaths; it zipped past California earlier this week — just reported that her son had gotten tested for coronavirus and had to wait 16 DAYS to get his results.

That he tested negative might mean the general picture there might be better than it appears . . . but the incredibly long delay could also mean it’s much worse, because health authorities have fallen way behind in tracking it.

SUNDAY, APRIL 12

9:01 a.m. — Part of the pleasure of walking everywhere is the surprise of looking at things you’ve always seen from the other direction . . . how different everything looks when you walk the wrong way on a one-way street for drivers. Try this downtown on Broadway, sometime: Look up at the buildings in the blocks ahead of you, instead of just the storefronts on your block.

This can be as startling as the things you see close up that you’ve missed when you were riding by at 20 to 40 miles per hour.

12:21 p.m. — Nicholas Kristof, Yamhill Carlton High School graduate, reports on the view from the front lines in two hospitals in the Bronx:

“The truth is that the doctors too are frightened and exhausted, overwhelmed by death and their own helplessness. Dr. Nicole Del Valle, 29, told me that what shattered her was treating a 30-year-old woman with Covid-19 whose 23-year-old sister had just died of it; Dr. Del Valle called her own younger sister and ordered her not to leave home.

“All day in the hospital, Dr. Del Valle maintains her reassuring manner as she intubates patients, holds their hands, fights for their lives — and then, she acknowledged, she goes home and cries….”

3:57 p.m. — An ongoing “plague” for many years has been faux certainty: ordinary citizens taking a stand on social media that says “This is what’s going to happen” as if they’re a featured guest on “Meet the Press” or any of an array of Sunday TV talk shows or Fox channel talking heads.

The past week it’s been “Trump is gonna be reelected, Biden can never win” . . . but I’ve seen hundreds of similar flat declarations based on little more than guesswork, far from complete information, as well as the speaker’s biases and guesswork.

People even think they’ve heard certainty — absolute and positive statements — when I’ve merely questioned theirs. Though my response has consisted of little more than “that ain’t necessarily so,” they fire back immediately as if I’ve taken the polar opposite stance from them. I’ve done nothing of the sort.
The coronavirus pandemic has loosed a flood of such behavior, of course — conspiracy theories and predictions galore.

A little more effort to identify more of the unknowns and variables, or a willingness to wait until them come in . . . just a clean, straight, “I don’t know; we’ll just have to wait and see” . . . would be so much more intellectually honest, but far too few individuals seem able to manage that.

9:32 p.m. — Drivers . . . why are you running red lights and rolling through stop signs? Unless you’re running a Covid-19 case to a ventilator, what could possibly have you in a hurry these days? Aren’t you getting to your usual destinations a lot sooner than you used to, given the current traffic?

Cyclists . . . There is so little vehicular traffic on most streets and roads now, why not get off the sidewalks and use the marked bicycle lanes? Why not stay on the streets? They’re probably safer now than they’ve ever been in your lifetimes, and probably will ever be again.

MONDAY, APRIL 13

3:57 p.m. — One of the endless series of ironies I’ve encountered during this strange era:

Here’s an ad for the theater company whose most recent production I was in — my first ever with them, and my first full stage show in seven years. Its performance run was cut short precisely halfway through its run by the collapse of society due to the pandemic.

This is the Trimet bus stop for the #35 line on SW Macadam at the Boundary Street intersection, roughly a dozen blocks south of our apartment.

8:23 p.m. — For days on end, Carole has tried to order frozen peas online for delivery, and it’s never available.
Her theory is that it’s one of the few vegetables that children will eat.

TUESDAY, APRIL 14

8:04 p.m. — Today’s long walk between 2:30 and 6:00 p.m.: across the Ross Island Bridge . . . over the railroad yards via the Holgate viaduct . . . to Reed College on SE 28th and through the campus to visit three different sites where I performed in plays or concerts between 2005 and 2010 . . . back across McLoughlin Boulevard via Bybee to Tacoma and the New Sellwood Bridge . . . and home through Johns Landing.
Likely more than 9 miles.

I don’t like to plan out the routes of my long walks in advance.

Possible infection bottlenecks such as bridges have to be approached tactically. I avoid busy arterials (especially for their heavier bicycle and pedestrian traffic), but other than that, I expect to head through quiet residential neighborhoods and large parking lots that parallel the boulevards.

Public parks can be a mixed bag — lots of other people head to those, especially in weather as nice as we’ve been having — so I tend not to target those as destinations.

Today I made lots of in-progress decisions. One was the choice to veer into the campus of Reed, which I hadn’t anticipated at all. Fortunately, the grounds were largely deserted, but I was surprised by how many striking memories surfaced, given that I had not attended the school as a student.

I acted in three productions of classic Greek plays (Euripides’s “Alcestis,” Aristophanes’s “Peace,” and Sophocles’s “Antigone”) in the outdoor amphitheater, and Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” on the Great Lawn, between 2005 and 2008. In 2010, I did vocal narration and a little bit of singing for the world premiere of then-Oregon Symphony associate conductor Gregory Vajda’s “Gulliver in Faremido,” with Third Angle New Music Ensemble, in Kaul Auditorium.

Read “A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 4”

See “A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 3”

Go to “A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 2”

See “A Journal of the Plague Year . . . Week 1”