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| crossing the river 1912 |
My uncle Miles once told me about coming
through Portland the spring of 1912. According to Miles my grandfather, who was
a Baptist preacher, had been "run out" of Condon by the two old
"hardshell spinsters" that ruled the local church. They were on their
weary way back to my grandmother Mae's birthplace, the green, moist valleys of
Tillamook. They crossed the Willamette river at dusk on the Morrison Street
bridge, and then, a very odd thing happened. My grandfather, who was as tight
fisted as a Scottish miser, headed the team of horses over to the newly
built and grandiose Multnomah Hotel. That
he would stay in a place of sin, tango dancing, drinking, and other highfalutin vices was nothing short of a
miracle; but it was a miracle of love for his frail and sickly wife who, at the
time, was nursing my newly born father.
Then the waterfront would have been a long
series of dilapidated wharfs where a great variety of vessels would have been
docked. The majority of these would have been small (by today's standards)
steamships, but there would have also been groupings of masts up and down the
river from the schooners, barks, jammers, and wind powered vessles of all sorts still in
use at that time. I can actually vividly image the scene, as if some sort of
genetic memory was passed on to me by my father. I can imagine the pedestrians,
the slow puttering motor cars (the speed limit on the bridges was the speed of a
brisk walk), the gas and electric lights reflecting in the waters. The sounds
would have been of horses hoofs, shouting bargemen, motor cars, and a wafting
of music from the houseboats beneath. The air would have been filled with the smell
of the river sewage mixed with chokingly thick coal smoke, and wood smoke, and the
smell of cabbage cooking somewhere nearby.
Now, in this 21st century, there are no smells and nothing is heard but
the swishing of cars as they speed across an empty river, and over an empty
waterfront into a modern city where life is carried out in brilliantly lighted
rooms on shiny screens connected to small, flat typewriters.
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