Real, True, Actual Headlines (OMG - They're Back!?)
4 Years Later, Human Genome Project Bearing Fruit
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Late Flights Are Expected To Linger For A Long Time
Thus the name "late."
Group Proposes Food Drops For Lake Tahoe Bears
Tourists likely participants ... like cough drops, only more nutritious.
Portland Thotz
When you go up onto the top of Austin Bluffs in Colorado Springs' Palmer Park, you can look westward across the city, and also south; between you and the mountains appears to be a forest. Look the other way, out east, and to a degree to the north, and you see the land as it might have been generations ago - a treeless plain more suited to the arid climate here - sage and buffalo grass or dryland farms stretching to the horizon.
But that view over Colorado Springs at a low angle is a little mis-representative. Once you get down onto the roads of the city, the sky over your head, for the most part, is clearly visible - the deep, rich blue of high altitude and clean air (okay ... on a good day ... work with me here.) In older neighborhoods only, and occasionally in areas of the fragile evergreen forest, the sky closes up and is replaced by a canopy of growth.
Quite the opposite is true of Portland.
First, the climate is much wetter, so even the native landscape is covered by growth ... bushes and trees, vines, ground covers, thickets and glens. Little of it is first-growth any more, and increasingly, it is being overwhelmed by either invasive plants like blackberries and Scotting Broom, or by clearing for farming, cities, or logging, but the rule here is trees, trees, trees, rather than trees being the exception.
From above or below, trees cover the land, and when you drive the streets, the sky is rare and narrow. The sky is blue, but an easier, powder blue, and often shot over, or even obscured completely by leaden grey clouds. It's no impression that the city is in a forest; the city IS in a forest. There are many drives we take right through the heart of this city's neighborhoods that have long, long stretches where the road seems to be a country byway through a dense and unpopulated storybook forest land.
Another difference is that the native trees, down here on the flood plains of the rivers, are a mixture of deciduous and conifers. When you drive out into the farm lands surrounding the city, the sky opens up on farmer's fields, but still, wedged between farms, and where topography or drainage makes tilling tough, the old way prevails, and large stretches of old forest intersperse with pines and redwoods, fir and spruce, oaks, ash, willow and maple. All mixed together in some places like a crazy quilt, and standing apart and aloof in others.
As western cities go, Portland is old. It was settled from the sea, and came before much of the west was filled up with people between here and the river cities of the midwest. Portland was a gateway to rather than an end to the westward expansion that launched settlers onto the prairies between here and such mid-western, up-stream, river-side starting points as St. Louis or Pittsburgh. The towns and cities of America's Great Plains, and even more so, of America's Great Deserts, reached by wagonsful of hopeful homesteaders, were settled long after those mid-western gateways, and also long after the seaside portals of Portland and other west coast cities. Cities such as Denver and Colorado Springs, Lincoln, Laramie, Cheyenne, and certainly newcomers like Las Vegas all have appeared and grown since Portland had become a mature and prosperous city.
Portland shows a physical similarity, too, to those older eastern or mid-western towns like St. Louis or Pittsburgh. Narrow, winding streets as dictated by the topography of riversides and the associated constricting hills. Scattered villages grown together, leaving old down-town commercial centers now as vibrant neighborhoods strung together into a webwork of a city which often seems more like a federation of towns than a metropolis - many separate vital organisms clutched together by growth, but not overcome by it. Residences peacefully neighboring businesses neighboring industry neighboring institutions like churches, schools and government. A lesson clearly not taught to the planners of the newer cities of the west.
Traffic is dictated by tradition ... the immutability of existing roadways and the ferocity of residents in resisting traffic engineers who want to "straighten things out" at the expense of the precious sense of neighborhood and a human scale. Routes tied to critical nodes such as ferries, and later bridges, which lace this city together over rivers which divide it up.
Live and drive on Colorado Springs, and there is no doubt that you are in an environment created by a railroad engineer - wide, straight rights of way unencumbered by water courses, history, or sentiment. The contrast couldn't be much greater.
Each has its own virtues, and each seductive.
The rivers here have water in them, and the parks have trees. Oh, so many, many trees. When it rains, as it so often does, the water rushes to the rivers and then to the sea, and doesn't linger on the street. When it is hot, the trees offer a cool and shady refuge. When it snows, which it does ever so rarely, the people wander outside and gape, and if they dare to drive, they slip and slide, for the streets are made for water which wants to run away, not lay about making life difficult for everyone.
We love it here. We love it in Colorado Springs, too. But the novelty of Oregon is alluring after a lifetime spent on the high, dry steppes on the Front Range. We feel like we're completing our families' slow, westward trek as part of the Great American Migration.
We feel as if we've arrived.
