Back in the saddle again

The "Bridge Pedal" is an August thing here in Portland.

It's...very Portland.

The idea is that for most of a summer Sunday a whole bunch of the downtown streets are closed to vehicular traffic - including most of Portland's Willamette River bridges - and are turned over to non-motorized (okay, well, non-large-motorized, since there are always some e-bikes and scooters in the peleton...) travelers to explore.

It's a real fucking nuisance if you're trying to drive around it, and I recall that when it began back in the 1990s the usual suspects pissed and moaned loudly about it. But since an overwhelming number of non-assholes enjoyed and still enjoy it, the whiners have learned to deal with it, so the first Sunday in August the bicycle (and scooter and unicycle and whatever...) wheels roll over the bridges.

Oh, and you can walk part of the route, too.

When we first met this was something that my ex and I did together and enjoyed. We were both just recreational cyclists - although Mojo did dream of a bit more glory and actually rode a century, a two-day endurance ride of one hundred miles, although finding the reality less rewarding than the dream - but for this? That was just fine. 

After my hips and knees started to fail, though, I got off the bicycle some time in the late-Oughts and even sold my old Kona "Lava Dome" by the time I started getting parts replaced in the Teens.

So I thought I was long past my bridge-riding days when my domestic world fell apart.

Since then, though...

First, I felt the urge to ride again. Remembered the joy I felt getting in the wind, pushing myself to speeds my legs no longer carry me with my feet on the ground. I missed my ex-riding-buddy, but I realized that I missed the riding itself. A lot.

And while I couldn't do anything about the one, I could the other. So... 

I picked up a second-hand bike at our local repair-and-refurbish collective.

I started riding again, beginning with our North Portland "Sunday Parkways" a week or so ago. 

And enjoyed that so much I decided to sign up to ride this year's bridges.

Top deck of the Marquam Bridge. Always a traffic jam...even with bike traffic.

The day cooperated; sunny but cool and breezy. I chose to put the bike on my car-rack and unload just above the descent from North Portland into Albina and from there downtown...

(which was a very good decision - I would have regretted adding in the extra two-dozen miles or so from there home to St. Johns after the full bridge ride.)

...and by the time I came off the Broadway Bridge I could take off my windbreaker, so the weather was perfect for riding. The startline on Naito Parkway was full, and my experience was that if you faffed around you'd get stuck in traffic, so I sidled as close to the start and...off we went, up the west ramp of the Morrison Bridge. 

This year's route was curious.

In the Olden Times the way this thing worked was that you could just ride a "downtown" loop that took in the central Portland bridges, or, if you were ambitious, a longer course that included the two "outlying" bridges, the Sellwood to the south and my St. Johns Bridge to the north.

The Sellwood is just a mile or so from downtown, but the St. Johns is a slog; probably eight or nine miles along the St. Helens Road - dead flat and through the grimmest parts of Northwest Portland's industrial wastelands, then back through my neighborhood and down through Overlook and Albina.

That seems to have been a deal-killer, so this year we rode this:

Across the Morrison and then down the pretty bike-path "Springwater Corridor" (an old interurban rail line) to the Sellwood. Back up through John's Landing to the Hawthorne Bridge, back across to the east bank to loop back across the Ross Island to the Hawthorne again!

From there over the first of the two "big bridges"; I-5 northbound's Marquam, which looped around the I-405 freeway - going north on the usually-southbound lanes - to the last crossing to the eastside, the Fremont Bridge.

Once back into Northeast Portland the route swung down along the Interstate Avenue right-of-way I'd ridden that morning to get to the start line...only instead of the Broadway it crossed back into downtown on the Steel Bridge and we were done. 

Fremont Bridge (looking west)

The taiko drum corps had their own iaidoka. Who knew?

Mind you, some things had changed since my cycling prime.

 

Back in the day I was a climbing beast. I was always a poor descender; frightened of crashing at speed, riding the brakes in a nervous sweat all the way down anything more than the gentlest of hills.

 

But going up? I was a fucking monster, "dancing on the pedals" and powering up the most awful grades. I vividly recall an afternoon in the Eola Hills with Mojo and two friends. It had been a nice easy ride until we started up the western side of the hills themselves. 

 

The slope got steeper, and steeper, and the others got slower and slower...until I told them I'd meet them at the top. And just rode away from them like they were sitting still.

 

They caught up with me at a little winery near the western crest where I'd been waiting nearly half an hour; watered, rested, and - as soon as the three staggered to a halt - ready to go on again.

 

I was lucky to escape with my life...but, anyway. I was a hell of a hill climber once.

 

This year? 

 

Not even close. The slightest incline had me spinning away in granny gear, passed by ancient gaffers and erratic small children. My days as the Marco Pantani of North Portland are clearly long gone.

 

Oh, well. 

 

I rode slowly back to Overlook Park where I'd left the car. Put the bike back on the backrack and then treated myself to coffee and a pastry. 

 

Fuck, I'd earned it.

 

Did the ride, and my enjoyment of it, make the world a better place?

 

Ohhellno. Don't even get me started on Fatso's idiotic vaccine order from today. We're still in the New Gilded Age with all that implies.

 

But it helped me feel a bit lighter. Like I'd accomplished some small something happy and good and just for my own.

 

And that was enough. 

Vacation snaps

 My little sister came to visit this past week.

(Though at 65/67 the whole "little" thing is kinda passe'...)

Anyway, we did Portlandy stuff for a while, then traveled to the central coast and did "Oregon Coast" things, then returned here. I promised her I'd post some of the better photos - she follows this blog, so it's easier than attaching massive jpgs to an email.

So.

Here they are, beginning with...well, us.

This is up in the Gorge. We did the closer waterfalls on the Oregon side, like this one (Shepperd's Dell).

This is Latourell Falls, a bit further west.

The bigleaf maples were trying, but we just don't get real "fall color"...

This outcrop along the old Highway 30 looks really familiar...

...to the point where I think it's a popular tourist photo.

The next day we went to the Japanese Garden.

The vinemaple was in a bit better color.

Here's the iconic view of the zen garden...

The exhibit was on "kintsugi", the art of decorative mending.

I missed this, an urchin shell mended with resin and gold:

Fascinating concept. Beautiful objects.

Let's see...

We went to the Oregon Zoo. Because, well, zoo.

I had to show off the core down at the MAX Zoo Station because I had a tiny piece of the installation.

Oh, and the Rose Test Garden...

Plus the view; can't forget the view of the city...

Then we went to the Coast, and that's the next bit.

Merry Leafmas!

Once a year the good people at the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation (i.e. the Streets people) come around and hoover up the leaves that fall in the streets and on the "city strip", the string of land between the outside of the sidewalk and the curb.

This is called "Leaf Day" because that's what it is; a single day (which varies depending on where you live) where this process takes place.

Ours here in the "97203" was yesterday, 12/18.

Note that the idea here is that the City is removing the "City's" leaves; the ones that fall on City property but are a more general mess and potential catchbasin plug.

So of course every Portlander worth their "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker cheats like a motherfucker; front yard, side yard, back yard...if a rake can reach it, the leaf falling in those private properties goes into the gutter for the City to haul off. Everyone politely pretends this doesn't happen.

So, like any good holiday, the key is in the anticipation and preparation; raking, sweeping, and blowing the leaves out into the street. Waking up early (or staying up late) to move cars and trucks out of the street out front to invite the City crew in.

And then the magic begins!

First the front-end loader shows up. The basket thing piles up the leaves and bundles them down to the street corner. There another loader with a standard bucket loads them into one of the City dump trucks cab-ranked nearby.

This, as you can imagine, is not really surgical. A lot of gunk and leaf debris remains behind:

That's why the water truck comes along and sprays down the street, washing this junk into the gutter.

Finally the sweep/vacc truck hoovers up this stuff, leaving the street sparkling clean for, well, at least the rest of the day.

And the wonder of :Leafmas is done for another year.

What's kind of sad is that I realized that "Leafmas" is as much or more of a genuine holiday for me than the big conventional holiday it's always adjacent to. Christmas is kind of "meh" for me. I have not a shred of religiousity, and the current American commercially bloated "Christmas" is an embarrassing  travesty.

But Leafmas?

It's both practical and satisfying, a sort of community ritual that pushes all my civic buttons. Like the ideals of religion, it brings us together in a common cause to make our world a bit better.

So a merry and peaceful Leafmas to all who celebrate!

Hazy Shade of Winter

It was just less than a month ago that I posted pictures of the autumn drama at the Portland Japanese Garden.

Writing shit about new snow
For the rich
Is not art.
 ~ Robert Hass (supposedly a translation from 小林 一茶 (Kobayashi Issa)

As Kobayashi-san says; that shit's done with.

The weather has made a hard turn to winter. Mind you, it's winter in the Northwest, which means one of two things.

Typically it's an endless gray drizzle spiced with days of genuine hard rain. Low temperature 42, high temperature 44, rinse, repeat. That's the "west-wind winter".

Then every couple of weeks the polar high looms down over the intermediate space between the Cascades and the Rockies, over the high desert, and the east wind blows the clouds away and the cold in.

That's when you get mornings of freezing fog, and bright, chill afternoons that never let old bones warm, and my bones - those of which that aren't titanium aftermarket parts - feel very, very old on those sorts of days.

They're also not beloved of Portlanders, creatures of the Mediterranean that we are. So the Garden was quiet and I enjoyed the change from red and gold to spare black branches. 

Or bare red ones, as on the red-twig dogwood...

I should note that True Portland dies hard in the winter; this young woman attending the annual "Crafty Wonderland" fair refused to let the biting weather nip her toes back into closed shoes:

That's not actually an uncommon sight here (I'm pretty sure I've blogged about it somewhere but am too lazy to look...), the combination of a heavy sweater or jacket above some chilly pink toes below. 

Part of it may be hardiness, part of it may be unwillingness to surrender to the season. Part of it may be the simple ease of slipping into sandals rather than wrestling with heavy socks and shoes.

Whatever the reason, it's a thing, and a Portland thing, at that.

Speaking of Crafty Wonderland, several Portlanders took advantage of the seasonal surroundings to let some pretty serious Xmass-y freak flags fly.

One such was this gal; I couldn't get a great shot of her outfit but this gives you the idea - the entire front of her dress was an solid mass of Christmas-tree bling, like the gold-encrustation on Smaug's belly:

Plus glittery silver snowflakes in her hair. 

The effect was completely insane in a sort of holly-jolly way. The Nikes make it sort of Ugly-Christmas-sweater-casual. Fun look, but I sure couldn't pull it off. There's something to being cute and /or pretty that helps make "okay, that's freaky" into "awww...that's cute".

But the award for Most High-level Holiday Cosplay goes to the Elf Off The Shelf:

I don't want to show her face, so you miss the Santa-hat topping, but given the rest of the outfit you get the idea.

My favorite bit is from the hem to the floor; you got your saucy fishnets going for the whole "Santa Baby" frisky sex-under-the-Christmas-tree thing, but then you've got the massive engineer boots that add a touch of "...but-fucking-try-it-and-I'll-kick-your-fucking-ass" danger. 

Clearly this is someone who has the authority to get you on the Naughty List.

That's all for now.

This little post has been too much fun to load up with serious business, so I'll close with Christmas standard you know (It's the "Piano Guys" doing the Vince Guaraldi Peanuts tunes, and since Blogger is being a dick about letting me embed it, here's the link to copy and paste - https://youtu.be/tyPDQpel8bI and a finger to you, Blogger, for being dickish about this). 

But I will be back later in the weekend to discuss some of the nonsense that we're getting up to here in the Land of the East Wind Cold.

Back in a bit.

Portland is Burning!

 Wait! No! I mean...Portland is on fire! 

We're LIT! Not actually burning! No smoke, no flames!

No. Just no. Outside of the usual assload of scruffy street people, Portland is fine.

So we braved the Antifa arson mobs the other day to poke around downtown, and ran into two of our favorite places here in the Beehive of Terrorism.

The first was Scrap.

Scrap is...well, pretty much everything. You want old stickers? Weird metal bits? X-ray prints? Patterns from the 1970s? Glitter, ribbon, postcards from 1908, decoupage (who knew that decoupage was even still a thing?), back issues of National Geographic?

Scrap's got 'em.

The Bride goes to paw through the fabric and other sewing treasures. 

I just like the congeries of weird and bizarre old vinyl, hubcaps, and random shit that the place has scrounged up. 

Sewing Susan? Ohhellyes!

There's even some stuff that is not entirely appropriate for the kiddies!

 

This is a postcard, BTW. I'd pay good money to see the look on the other folks at the post office when you take that out of the post box.

Even the street randos like them some Scrap!

Then down to near Pioneer Square to the downtown Kinokuniya.

Our local outlet of this Japanese bookstore has every manga and most anime every released (of course), and it is pretty critical for keeping up with Spy x Family and The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen and all my other manga favorites.

But it also has every cute, silly, whack, funny, goofy, and just Japanese thing that a would-be otaku could ever crave.

 

All topped off with a stop at St. Honore boulangerie for coffee and a croissant?

Because that's how we roll here in Little Beirut.  

Burn, baby, burn!

Shizukesa ya

 

"Oh, tranquility"...

...is the first line of one of Bassho's best known poems:

閑けさや　岩にしみいる　蝉の声 (Shizukesa ya/ Iwa ni shimiiru/ Semi no koe)

Oh, tranquility
Penetrating the very rock.
A cicada's voice.

 

The voice that penetrated the very rocks along the path up to the Japanese Garden last Thursday wasn't the cicada's, but the modern avatar, the gas-powered leaf blower. Why the groundskeeping staff couldn't have done that work on Monday when the garden is closed, I don't know.

The cold sunshine illuminated the maple golds and reds, though, as bright and bitter as the east wind that carried from the polar high that loured over the continent straight down the gorge and up against the West Hills.

物いへば　唇寒し　秋の風 (Mono ie ba/ Kuchibiru samushi/ Aki no kaze)

When you say something
The lips feel cold.
The autumn wind.

The value of membership is in being able to enjoy the quiet - well, the normal quiet - of this place before the crowds arrive. I've been coming here for ten years or more, and the carefully curated wilderness never fails to find a peaceful place within me.

Less leaf blowers help with that, mind.

The fall color is perhaps the most popular time for the garden, when photographers descend in troops to make art from the maples. Apparently the single most popular spot is "The Tree", the big red maple alongside the upper pond. So much so that the staff has barred off the Tree and posted a set of rules to keep the fighting down to a manageable level.

夏草や　兵どもが　夢の跡 (Natsu kusa ya/ Tsuwamono domo ga/ Yume no ato)

The summer grass
All that remains
Of the dreams of the warriors.

Or photographers, for that matter.

I with my little phone was no threat to their massive lenses. 

I took my snapshots, paused, and passed on.

As did she.

粽結ふ　片手にはさむ　額髪 (Chimaki yu/ Katate ni hasamu/ Hitai gami)

While holding the Chimaki dumpling
Her other hand held
Her bangs.

Scrappy Doo

The little re-purpose place Scrap used to be a "cool thing in North Portland" until it moved downtown.

It's still amazingly cool.

Because, well...

...because, well...

...because.

Well.

There's just so many freakishly weird and cool things that you can assemble in one place, but Scrap does a helluva job giving it a good shot. It it true that you can find pretty much anything at Scrap?

Next time you're in Portland?

Check it out.