Of Giza and Other Fine Places

“You old sorcerer,” the boy shouted at the sky. “You know the whole story. You even left a bit of gold at the monastery so I could get back to this church. The monk laughed when he saw me come back in tatters. Couldn’t you have saved me from that?”

“No,” he heard a voice on the wind say. “If I had told you, you wouldn’t have seen the Pyramids. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

The boy smiled, and continued digging. Half an hour later, his shovel hit something solid.
–Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist.

The Alchemist is one of my favorite books. It shares a plot, but not a moral, with a picture book we read when I was a child: A pious Jew follows a dream of treasure to a distant castle, only to be told by the captain of the guard that he (the Captain) had also had a dream about treasure hidden in a chimney in a distant village. The pious Jew heads home, busts open his chimney, and finds the treasure. Being a children’s book, the author states the lesson in words I still remember today: “Sometimes you have to travel far to discover what is near.”

That is not a very subtle way to begin this account of my similar experience around a trip to North Carolina in February. But it has been a challenging one to write; I hope this will make it easier. When I returned, I could hardly talk to friends, I wanted to write so much, to try my hand at travel writing. And yet, a month later, I’ve written nothing about the trip that showed me Portland is my home. So I’m blazing into it. Reader, I’ve already told you the ending. Perhaps that will make it easier to write the stuff in the middle.

I went into this trip thinking, in part, about how I would write about it. I suggested earlier that travel writers experience the trip through their writing and their style. Certainly that had an effect on my own experience, as I thought about what words to use to describe it. The idea of this writing was in my head before I landed, before I departed, in the periods of wakefulness on my unsatisfying red-eye.* As a result, I noticed things differently. Tried naming them for future paragraphs:

When dad and I stopped on our way home from the airport to pick up some firewood, I was paying careful attention, playing with words in my head. Weighty, wet Piedmont clay caked on my shoes after only a few steps into a recent clearcut. With an eye for how I might record the experience, I gave it the moniker “Carolina Red.”† Travelers take note: According to Heisenberg, writing about your trip changes the way you travel it.

The places I went in North Carolina, the people I saw – I was not exploring, but visiting, and I think these things will be interesting only to me. But the transformation that can happen on a trip is of interest to every traveler.

Most of what I did in North Carolina was talk about Portland. Or gushed about it. Or actually, it gushed out of me. I couldn’t contain it. This came out as joyful praise of the Multnomah County Library to my librariophilic friend, Zack (btw, they’re hiring.) Or telling my dad about friends, parks, shopping, or TriMet. This place I live was the most exciting thing that has happened to me in a while, and I guess I had a sort of evangelical zeal to share that.§ I attributed it to excitement, as well as to not having much else to report – subbing, at that time, was pretty unexciting. It was only upon landing in Portland that I really understood what had happened.

I landed in Portland on a city night when street lights illuminated the chasms between dark houses. We circled around and approached from the west, and I was surprised to find that I could read the darkness. It was Forest Park, a 5,000+ acre urban woodland that rises sans streetlights in North Portland. Those lights flashing? The St. Johns Bridge, Portland’s finest, though it practically vanishes at night. What struck me is that I knew exactly where look for it, before I saw it, just by seeing Forest Park and the radio towers on top of the West Hills in the distance. From the St. Johns Bridge, I could read the city’s face. I knew where to find the Interstate Bridge and Big Pink and downtown. A light bulb flashed not over my head, but over Portland, and I saw that I knew the city in a way I hadn’t realized.

I had a bounce in my heels stepping off the plane. Walking through the airport, I was sad that it was so empty. I was on one of the last planes for the night, and memories from my first trip to this airport, when there was someone to greet me with a hug, made it seem not just quiet but desolate. That is the nature of history.

It wasn’t until I claimed my bags and trudged to the Airport MAX (how romantic to be greeted by the train), that I put it all together and realized I had come home.

North Carolina is familiar, comforting. I know how to read the Southern landscape: a patchwork of trees and farmland: brown is winter forest, red is farmland or future subdivision (often both), green: pasture or corn or tobacco. The clouds are familiar and scrutable. The rhythms of the seasons familiarly sunny. I saw the first daffodils open on schedule to celebrate the Presidents’ Day vacation. (Though I noticed with amusement that one, in its rush to bloom first, decided proper petals were expendable.)

And yet, I don’t really want to be there.

I haven’t grown my roots yet, but they are seeking no other soil than this new city. It is still a grey Pacific March, but that will burn off to sunny, blue July. And at last I’ve come to a place I’m in no hurry to grow out of. Unlike the daffodil, I’m happy to wait a while longer. I’d rather have all my petals in order.

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* The problem with overnighting it eastwards is that the night is too short – just three hours in this case – for sleep.

† I don’t have a good picture of Carolina Red, but I found this doozy on someone else’s Picasa. That red hue cannot be contained in the soil. It seeps up capillary tubes and paints the landscape in pine needles and rust-colors the hardwoods. I got that name, of course, from my hometown ball team’s signature color and the ditty: “You can’t get to heaven in a red canoe, ’cause God’s favorite color is Carolina Blue.” (Carolina Blue is actually a naturally occurring color – it is the sky above our house for many days of the year.)

§ If you’re new to Schopenhauer or curious about Portland, you can read about my infatuation with TriMet and joy at the library system on previous posts.