Departures: Portland Meander: Part 2 (of 2)

Of course, a Maritime Museum

Friday morning was the culmination of a long-term plan.

On my first day in town, I'd stopped off at the downtown Tourist Information Center to ask about local maritime tourist attractions. The nice lady there had pointed me at the local maritime museum. I'd swung past the place, noticed that it was open only on Friday and weekends, and said "nuh-uh" to some guy who wanted to sell me drugs.

So on Friday, I wanted to check out the museum. First, I wanted a good breakfast so that I wouldn't pass out and knock over some historic binnacle. I looked in the window of Roxy, a 24-hour restaurant whose sign I'd seen from my hotel window. I tend to like 24-hour places. But the Roxy looked dark and scary, so I went downtown instead.

On board the restored steamboat Oregon, there were plenty of pipes.

Downtown, I went to the Expresso Cafe (off the lobby of the Pacific Building on Alder) , where I had the breakfast Veggie Muffin. (There were no pancakes available.) If I'd looked at the menu's description more carefully, I would have seen that the Veggie Muffin involved both egg and cheese. Some people like egg and cheese combined. I was not one of those people. Not even the sandwich's broccoli could salvage things.

But I eventually got to the Oregon Maritime Center and Museum.

There were many ships' models. Many of them were riverboats, as you would expect in a river city like Portland. Apparently, seagoing vessels often need tugs to navigate their way up the Willamette. There were a few tug models, a few models of old steamboats. There were paddleboats, generally sternwheelers. One docent pointed out that the sternwheelers had two sets of rudders, one ahead of the paddles, and one to the rear. The rudders to the rear were called "monkey rudders." (Upon learning this, I of coure started muttering "monkey butter from the monkey udders by the monkey rudders, but I got over it.) All of this rudderage gave the boat more steering power, and helped a lot when the boat had to turn while going in reverse.

There were models, photos, navigational equipment, documents. There were plenty of these things. There was a photo showing the streets of Portland during a flood, in which an old barge carried around a then-state-of-the-art automobile. There was a model of a shikara from Bangladesh; the interpretive text told me that people live on these covered canoes on the Ganges. There was a model of the USS St. Lo, the first US naval vessel sunk by a kamikaze attack. There was a 1946 spherical sextant, which didn't really look like a sphere at all. There was a photo of the Jeremiah O'Brien at Portland.

There was an interesting bit of interpretive text:

SEQUEL
Much by accident in March of 1992, Herb Cooper, Jr. spotted a WWII German Plath sextant in a display case in the Oregon Maritime Museum. He noted it was used aboard the U-511, the very same submarine that had sunk his ship some 49 years before in the Indian Ocean. He also discovered that the owner of the sextant was Capt. Heinrich (Henry) Pahls who served aboard the U-511 at the time of the sinking and presently living in Portland.

These two former adversaries met at the museum soon after the discovery, shook hands, and talked together of another time and another place.

Portland's was in all ways a satisfactory maritime museum. And they had the Portland, a big restored historical paddleboat.

On board the restored steamboat Oregon, you can see the mechanisms which moved the paddlewheel and rudders and stuff. The part I really liked were the containers of lubricant that were attached to all of the joints. Instead of oiling the joints all of the time, I guess the engineer just needed to fill up these containers every so often and let the oil dribble out. They sure were pretty.

On board the Portland, there were binders full of photos. One of them seemed to show the Portland in front of that high-speed grain-loading facility in Seattle with all of the covered conveyor belts.

Yet more touristy stuff

I left the Portland, done with Maritime musing for the day. I walked West through Old Town, through Chinatown, and to the new-ish Portland Classical Chinese Garden.

The Portland Classical Chinese Garden deserves a photo spread and rhapsodic praise. It had decorative rocks, pretty plants, quaint bridges, playful windows, a chuckling waterfall: all of these things deserve some measure of gushing praise. However, I'm not up to it, and my photos didn't turn out very well.

I must encourage skilled photographers to visit the Portland Classical Chinese Garden. (As of this writing,) It's pretty new; you could be the first person in your photography club to go there. And it had a lot going on.

This was the first tourist site I'd visited such that I was glad I was there in the winter time. It was gray and cold, and there were few tourists about. Unlike the Hawthorne district, I was glad that the place wasn't too lively. Probably when it's full of tourists, it's not so easy to enjoy the peaceful contemplation.

This photo isn't showing you graffiti: the photo itself has been retouched. I drew in the star and the squiggle to point out the wooden protuberance on which I clonked my head.

There were lots of gardeners working on the garden. They were all whiteys. Maybe there's a story there.

Done with the garden, I had a so-so lunch (with great music) at the Little Wing Cafe in the Pearl district, stopped by my hotel room, went downtown to buy a postcard.

While downtown, I saw a Peet's at Broadway and Washington. Though it was late, I was drawn in like a moth to flame. As I walked over to Powell's, I greedily drank down coffee, and to hell with a peaceful night's sleep.

Earlier, I had walked past Powell's, had looked in its window. I'd noticed that Erotica and Nautical Fiction shared an aisle, which I thought of as the Naughtycal fiction aisle. But when I visited Powell's, I didn't go to the Naughtycal Fiction aisle, instead going to the Nautical History section. That's right, Powell's is such a big honking store that they have a Nautical History section. I picked up a bunch of books, there and in the science fiction section.

Somehow, I got all of those books back to my hotel room.

For dinner, I went to a Lebanese place on Morrison somewhere between 10th and 12 Avenues SW, satisfying my falafel cravings quite nicely. Actually, it was a bit awkward. I ordered the "Veggie Platter", and then sat down at a narrow counter. As it turns out, the "Veggie Platter" was not one platter, but a lot of little plates. There was a little plate of hummus, a little plate of babah ghanoush, a little plate of tabouleh, a plate of cheese, a basket of pita. More plates meant more wasted surface area. The result: I took up about three seats at the counter, just spreading out all of these little dishes. I felt pretty important.

I liked this warning sign for bicyclists approaching the light-rail tracks. I especially like the fact that the humanoid figure seems to have a misshapen head--until you realize that he's (whew!) wearing a helmet. Too bad he's about to break his wrists.

Back to the hotel. Back to sleep. At around 2:30am, I was awoken by the sound of revelers outside. There were a bunch of bars in the neighborhood, perhaps with 2am last calls. I got back to sleep okay.

Saturday was to be my last day in Portland. I had time to get breakfast. Remembering my Expresso Cafe regrets from the day before, I approached the dark and forbidding Roxy. I thought about dark places. I thought about the restaurant-vampire of Pasta Veloce. Wouldn't sun-hating vampires love a restaurant like this? And if there were such things as vampires, wouldn't they want to live in a sunless place like Portland? Ohhh, scary scary vampires!

Of course, egg-cheese-broccoli breakfast sandwiches were scarier. I entered the Roxy.

Wow, the Roxy (at Stark and 11th Avenue SW) was a great place for breakfast. I wish I'd gone there every morning. They had good pancakes. (I had the pancakes.) They had grits. (I had the grits, too.) They had good music playing on the stereo. It was kind of strange eating in the dim light. There could have been all kinds of health code violations going on in there, and I never would have been able to notice through the murky dark.

The waitresses were talking about the trouble that they'd had there last night. Apparently, things sometimes get rowdy there at 2am. No doubt the same is true of other 24-hour restaurants in places where 2am is last call. I get the impression that most of the clientele tends towards late-night partiers. Me, I was an early riser. When I was leaving, a waitress wished me good night. She was running towards the end of her day, I was just beginning my day.

It was pretty tough getting back to the airport. Actually, it was just tough going the couple of blocks to the streetcar stop. You wouldn't think that I'd have trouble walking just a couple of blocks. However, I'd been accumulating books throughout my trip. I'd bought books at Powell's Technical Books. I'd bought books at the Oregon Maritime Museum. I'd bought books at Powell's Books.

It had added up. My suitcase held a lot of books. How heavy was my suitcase? Really heavy. So when I got back home and was answering my email, I wrote, "I just flew in from Portland, and boy are my arms tired."

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