Further memorable tales from my Portland Walking Tours of 2019.
MAY 30
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.
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!
JUNE 18
I love when I get honeymooners on my walking tours. I’ve had more than a dozen couples as tour guests, that I know of, over the years.
This morning’s pair were from Toronto. They had flown into Seattle for a couple of days, and are in Portland for a little while before they push south to San Fran.
When I talk about the historic Heathman Hotel, I always put a personal “button” on all the other info (from celebrity guest soloists with the Oregon Symphony to Fifty Shades of Grey) by adding “I’m personally fond of the Heathman ’cause I met my future wife there in the tearoom—”, whereupon the new bride joshed me by breaking in with “The one you haven’t married yet?” before I could get to “—28 years ago.”
[Thereafter, I’ve made sure to reorder the word order of that sentence.]
[Thereafter, I’ve made sure to reorder the word order of that sentence.]
JUNE 21
I had but one guest on my tour this afternoon, but oh, what a delight she was.
A tiny blonde sprite who grew up in Yorkshire—talkative and easy to laugh—she also happened to be a veteran of the British Army currently on assignment to a UK embassy in North America.
She told me she had previously been assigned for 18- and 24-month stints in places like Northern Ireland, Cypress, and Germany only a few miles from the former Bergen-Belsen death camp. She mentioned that Britain has 24 Army installations around the U.S.
She told me she had previously been assigned for 18- and 24-month stints in places like Northern Ireland, Cypress, and Germany only a few miles from the former Bergen-Belsen death camp. She mentioned that Britain has 24 Army installations around the U.S.
I asked where her toughest assignment had been to adjust, and she said here, because everywhere else she had lived on base, but here she’s had to live in civilian housing, and handle all those arrangements herself. I meant culturally, I persisted; what’s been the hardest adjustment generally?
She thought and said, again, the U.S., because when you speak the same language you kind of assume everything else is going to be much the same. You don’t expect retail checkout cashiers to ask their manager, “Do we treat them the same as aliens?”
She’s currently on her way to a two-week vacation with a package tour of the national parks of southern Alaska with a boat cruise and sightseeing at glaciers, but she said it’s always her policy to pause anywhere she has to change planes, and since there were no direct flights to Anchorage, she’s spending a day in Portland on her way up, and a day in Seattle on her way back to work.
She thought and said, again, the U.S., because when you speak the same language you kind of assume everything else is going to be much the same. You don’t expect retail checkout cashiers to ask their manager, “Do we treat them the same as aliens?”
She’s currently on her way to a two-week vacation with a package tour of the national parks of southern Alaska with a boat cruise and sightseeing at glaciers, but she said it’s always her policy to pause anywhere she has to change planes, and since there were no direct flights to Anchorage, she’s spending a day in Portland on her way up, and a day in Seattle on her way back to work.
I asked her what she hoped to see in Alaska. A whale, she said.
My guest tipped me a twenty at the end, which is higher than the usual rate I get per head on my tours.
One of this morning’s guests, a guy from Baltimore, got somewhat excited when he saw the plaque for “Allow Me,” the umbrella-man statue that’s one of the first stops on the tour.
My cousin was engaged to be married to the son of Seward Johnson, the artist who designed the statue, he told me, so he took photos of Umbrella Man and the plaque to send to his family. There’s a lot of his stuff in New Jersey, he went on, and I thought he was just an East Coast phenomenon.
Seward Johnson is a member of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceuticals clan. His grandfather, Robert Wood Johnson I, founded the company and is the name on a donor foundation you’ll often hear repeated on public broadcasting shows. Actor Michael Douglas is a first cousin.
“Was” engaged, I observed; the marriage didn’t happen, I take it. No, replied my Baltimore guest; she realized she’d be living in big homes with gates and security guards, the potential threat of kidnapping, etc., and she didn’t want to live that kind of life.
JULY 6
This morning’s tour featured a truly eclectic bunch.
My guests included a young couple from Guadalajara, Mexico (which is cool, because that’s one of Portland’s nine sister cities, and comes up twice in almost every tour I lead: at the milepost in the Square and at the bronze chair statue in the performing arts center) . . . an elder couple from Chennai, a city on the Bay of Bengal almost due east of Bangalore in southern India (I gathered they were visiting family in Seattle) . . . a young couple who hailed from Nizhny Novgorod, a city at the confluence of the Oka and Volga rivers about 250 miles east of Moscow (though they’ve lived in SF Bay area for 10 years) . . . a married couple from San Fran who consisted of a Taiwanese man and an Argentine woman, with her visiting mother in tow . . . and finally a young couple who grew up in Eugene, had lived and worked in Klamath Falls, and have been based in Beaverton (he’s a nurse and she’s an elementary teacher) the past two years.
The array doesn’t often get any broader than that!
JULY 12
This morning I led a private tour for Women Traveling Together, a web-based firm that arranges package tours for its members. Their contact-guide told me the company organizes about 150 tours across the nation led by roughly 70 guides like herself.
This one would takes its 14 participants (12 turned out to accompany me today) around the perimeter of Oregon, from Portland to the Columbia Gorge waterfalls, Crater Lake, and the coast in six days. Most were women of a certain age and older, but a couple were younger than I am.
Two days ago they met here and were all strangers from California, Missouri, Florida, Washington, and even Soldatna, Alaska, but had become fast friends by now.
For private, package tours, my gratuity is included in the fee for the group, but sometimes (as happened this morning), individual guests also hand me a little extra cash at the end.
JULY 16
My group of eight this afternoon included a woman from Dallas, Texas who was checking out Portland for a couple of days before she goes to Keizer to judge a barbecue cook-off.
She’s an operating-room nurse (for 20 years) who works just Monday-through-Wednesday shifts . . . so for the past two-and-a-half years, she’s traveled on weekends to manage the judging at various events organized by the Steak Cookoff Association(!).
She had attended chef school for a hobby and taught classes at a local Sur le Table for a while, until that got to be a drag. Her current part-time hobby has taken her all over the country, once to Australia, and she’s hoping for assignments in Japan and elsewhere overseas in the future.
JULY 26
It was 87 degrees on the Citibank digital clock when I got back from my afternoon tour to Pioneer Courthouse Square at 4:24 p.m. I’ll bet it was a lot hotter than that at various downtown locations wherever concrete was exposed to the direct sunlight.
I had to be extra creative in choosing what to talk about and when, as well as finding suitably shady spots to pause and speak to my guests along the tour route.
At 4:15 I stopped only a little way across the green strip of Waterfront Park, because there was still shade from trees on its west side next to Naito Parkway, but while I was talking to my six guests (a family of four from San Diego and a couple from D.C.), the sprinklers came on.
We lucked out, though, because the nearest one was aiming its powerful jets of water directly to the north and south, so I instantly moved the group east to the riverbank by leading everyone in a line to step across the sprinkler head before the entire mechanism managed to turn and soak us all.
Here’s an uncharacteristically deserted shot of Waterfront Park post pandemic shutdown (April 29) right about the place where I normally cross to the river with my walking tours.
Here’s an uncharacteristically deserted shot of Waterfront Park post pandemic shutdown (April 29) right about the place where I normally cross to the river with my walking tours.
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