Portland & Seattle

Late Saturday evening I returned from a trip to the Pacific Northwest: the Notre Dame Liturgical Choir went on tour, and I joined them. (My instinct, before we left, was that spending a week with a crowd of undergraduates would be insufferable, but it turned out to be quite enjoyable. One is always pleasantly surprised with Notre Dame students.)

In Portland I got so far as writing the first draft of an entry (dated 12 January), which I present here.

I suppose I might as well send you, dear reader, greetings from Portland, Oregon, where I am currently on tour with the Notre Dame Liturgical Choir. In many ways it is a pleasant city. The climate is at least comfortable: today a dusting of sleet was considered sufficient cause to shut schools down early. (The day we left South Bend, two feet of snow had fallen, with talk of more to come.) I spent several hours at Powell's Books, and suspect that I could've been there considerably longer. (Among the eleven books I purchased were the Bainton biography of Luther, a memoir of Antarctic exploration, a book about Prester John.... I suppose I shall have sufficient reading material for a while, now.)

I'm not sure I saw enough of Seattle to judge it properly, but from what I saw it seems a beautiful city (near-constant rain notwithstanding). Both cities are replete with two extremes of people: hipsters and yuppies on one end, and the homeless on t'other. (A more waggish observer than myself might observe that the only difference in attire between hipsters and the homeless is that hipsters choose to dress that way.) In both cities an awful lot of the people are from Somewhere Else.

There is an undercurrent of desperation in the major cities of the Northwest. For a century-and-a-half now, these cities have been the final destination in that great exodus from points eastward (Europe, New York, Iowa): all those people, leaving home in hopes of a new and better life in the West, find themselves facing the open Pacific, with nowhere else to run to. What is the end result of an incurably mobile society? We might observe it first in the cities of the West.

And yet Portland and Seattle are in several ways quite pleasant. People there are at least aware that recycling and public transit are Good Ideas. The seafood is excellent (a welcome consolation for one who views red meat with increasing — though not yet total — distaste). Though chain restaurants and cafés are ubiquitous, there are also some very good local places to be found nearly everywhere. There are some simply excellent organs to be found in that part of the country: we visited Paul Fritts's workshop and he took us on a tour of several important instruments in the area. (Fritts has the beady eyes and quiet demeanor that are apparently required for organ-builders, but he seems a nice fellow.) All in all, I can't say I've firmly made up my mind about either Portland or Seattle. While there is much to criticize, there's much to admire as well. I hope to travel to both cities again.