Cold Feet

Yesterday the cold wind blew in.

As I was saying; we get these clear days in the Black Months every so often. This type - when the polar high blows in off the interior - is the more common. Typically we get anywhere from a day to a week of brilliantly clear, frigidly cold days and nights before the Rains return in a horrid pelter of ice and sleet and automobile wrecks. Oregonians are awful drivers in any sort of slick weather; they won't stay home but they won't chain or snow-tire up, either. Portland becomes a sort of Fellini movie only with more dented chrome.

The hard crystal-sunlight is almost worth the bitter cold.

Yesterday was Veteran's Day (you're welcome, and I happily accept American Express, VISA and Mastercard...) and the kids had the day off. We were drilling up in the West Hills and from the look of it several of the surrounding residences contained daughters in the same grade; fourth or fifth would be my guess. This little troupe came scampering out into the cold about mid-morning, raced through our work site in the winter coats and jammie bottoms - the last in line barefooted - up the steps to one of the girls' home where they proceeded to bounce shrieking on the outdoor trampoline for about three-quarters of an hour or so.

The girls slowly bounced to a stop and, after a pause for discussion and the hunting of coats and slippers (for those who had worn them), trooped back through our part of the street en route to another girl's house.

As the last girl, the one in the sock feet, reached the sidewalk she paused for a moment and looked around at the stained-glass leaves glowing in the late morning light.

"My feet are so freezing." she said to no one in particular, and then sprinted down the street to catch up with her friends.

Shaken, not stirred

I was driving north on I-5 through Portland just before Christmas when I tried to point out the famous "Martini Glass" light display to my kiddos (whose only experience with that cocktail is the knowledge that it "tastes yucky!" according to the Boy).

But I couldn't spot it.

In my biased and cynical opinion this thing is something of a treasure. The story is that the big martini glass was originally constructed by a homeowner's kid in the West Hills some time in the Seventies, when getting plowed on Christmas Eve was still looked on as a risque Rat-Packesque sort of jest.

At some point in the Nineties (I think) the owner placed the red-ring-and-slash around it either as a reaction to criticism or a personal statement of anti-drinking sanctimony I blame on that MADD-infested era.

But I liked the whole magilla as a deliciously juniper-scented antidote to the usual Christmas kitsch and was a trifle disappointed that it seemed to be gone this year. Like so much adult and iconoclastic (as opposed to simply adult and rude; the difference between the respective works of Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain, say, and Adam Sandler) it seemed to be just another victim of our general incomplexity.

And it was especially disappointing given that our West Hills are to Portland what Grosse Pointe is to Detroit or Scarsdale is to New York; a rookery for our plutocratic overlords. From there they may literally look down upon the rest of us. Old Portland tales claim that in the early years these aristos would even use their position to toss their garbage down upon their lessers dwelling below them (although I lend no credence to the claim that what reached the valley floor was not further discarded but eaten).

If anyone had a Reason to Toast the Season it would seem to be our own local oligarchs; if the 1% can't sip a martini and advertise that fact then perhaps the Great Recession is indeed bleaker than even I took it for.

No fear; it turns out that the glass isn't gone; it is merely taking a year off whilst the homeowner retools his pricey hillside pied-a-terre.

"The glass's huge metal frame remains firmly in place, and Hall said he plans to keep it that way by requiring in the deed that the glass be lighted at the holidays."

Calloo, callay, oh frabjous day! Let our gin-infused joy be unconfined!

It's good to hear that at least one of our elites is still fighting the good fight against the War on Christmas. Prosit!

Plain Tales from the West Hills

Had a job of work up on S.W. Montgomery Place the other day. Portlanders would recognize the address as up in one of our our tony West Hills neighborhoods, and indeed it is. It's a lovely old turn-of-the-last-century house in Portland's Vista Heights neighborhood that's having some slope issues - not a terrific shock; many of the developments cut into the slopes in our Southwest do.

(As an aside, here's a nice post from a fun little blog that, along with food, fire stations and Japanese kaiju flicks, talks about the cablecar lines that used to run into - among other places - the West Hills in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. The houses in the picture below are along Montgomery Drive, the larger street just east of my client's place. Fun blog, and the old car lines are kind of amazing - the Vista Trestle must have been a hell of a fun ride!)As I went about my business outside the beautiful home my surroundings prompted a couple of thoughts, and prodded up from the varves of my mind a couple of memories.

My main thought, sadly, was a question: "Hmmm...I wonder how long it would take two tweakers to strip all these gorgeous, chi-chi copper gutters and downspouts off this freaking barn to sell at Dirty Eddie's down in Lents for crank?"I have a dangerously low-rent mind. But copper downspouts, really...it's like tweaker candy. Good luck with that.

The memories were of the early days of my time in Portland. I was in grad school and working on a grant for the Oregon state geological survey, doing seismic refraction field work up in the West Hills.

This involved carting around a portable seismograph and geophones in my old Mazda hatchback and setting them up along the streets in hundred-foot-long arrays. I would - or Barry, the other grad student who was my field assistant would - then strike a steel plate with a sledgehammer to generate the noise source that would travel down and along the soil and rock layers beneath us and back up to the geophones.

We desperately wanted to use the small dynamite charges that are more common and more useful for seismic work - they generate a stronger and far sharper noise source. But the state geologist in charge of the project took one look at the two of us and clearly imagined the effect on the public of turning us loose in the affluent West Hills with a sackful of quarter-sticks of dynamite.

We were told that we would use the hammer, instead.

So we spent all the summer of 1992 doing this, up and down the streets of the Vista and Burlingame and King's Heights neighborhoods. It was hard work but fun, in its way, and I got to know the wealthy heights pretty well for a poor mook from Beaverton.

Barry, who was even more poor and desperate than I, truly loved discomfiting the well-to-do residents of the Hills. He'd throw the steel platen down on the sidewalk to make it ring in the quiet of an August morning and grin; "Time to wake up some rich people..!"

So it shouldn't have surprised me when I got an angry call from the state geologist I was working for.

Seems that I'd been down at one end of a block of S.W. Vista when the homeowner at the other end walked out to see what Barry was doing setting out the "pots" (i.e. geophones) in front of his house.

"What are you doing?" he asks in his polite, well-bred fashion.

Barry looks up and sizes up his questioner. "We're doing some seismic research for the state geological survey." he replies.

"What are you researching?" asks his interrogator

"Oh, you know, the soils here and what's gonna happen in the next big earthquake."

(Mind you, this was before the 1993 "Spring Break Quake" that alerted everyone in Oregon to the hazard of earthquakes. At the time a lot of people believed that one of or big advantages over California was that we never had them.)

"Earthquake?" says the homeowner "What earthquake?"

So Barry explains about subduction zone earthquakes and what happens to homes on hills during eight to ten minutes of strong shaking, fire, landslides, the dead rising from their graves,dogs and cats living together, total disaster. His listener becomes increasingly horrified and agitated as he goes through all this. Finally he can't wait any longer - he has to find out the REALLY important thing.

"Ohmigod that's awful!" he cries to Barry "When do they expect this earthquake?!?"

Barry looks thoughtful. "I dunno...could be any time. Could be today." he says. "In fact...what time is it?"

Barry said that the panicked scramble of the guy for his cell phone and his insurance agent was worth the ass-chewing that Matt at the Survey gave us for being smartasses and scaring the rich people.

Update 2/14: Just because I can't resist showing y'all how smart and literary I am, my Valentine's present to you is the Gutenburg link to the Kipling book that shares the title of this post. Hard to say which is better: the tragedy of "Lispeth"? The magical realism of "The Bisara of Pooree? The domestic farce of "Miss Youghal's Sais"? Regardless - go, read it. Kipling, though he knew almost nothing of Indians other than the racist fantasies of a middle-class Victorian, genuinely loved India and his fellow Anglo-Indians. Outside The Jungle Book, his early tales of Anglo-Indian life may well be his best work. And the best of Kipling is, well, pretty damn good.