Portland Walks: South from Colonel Summers Park

This is the second post in a series of walks around Portland, Oregon. I walk through the city every day anyway, so I figured…why not bring you with me? Once a month, or maybe a bit more often, you’ll get a photo tour of my route along with my ever-churning inner monologue. What’s not to love about that?

When you live in a place long enough, to walk through it is to revisit a collection of moments from other people’s lives that you’ve accidentally witnessed over the years, highs and lows both.

This building, for example:

When I walk past this building, I remember a day long enough ago that I was pushing my now-eighteen-year-old son in a stroller. I remember a tall, wiry guy in his early twenties, wearing nothing but a pair of Levis that hung off of his skinny hips, climbing out of that window over the door to balance on the narrow ledge. He was high as hell and threatening to jump all ten or twelve feet to the sidewalk below. A young woman had her head stuck out of that upper window on the left, and she was trying to convince him to go back inside. I didn’t want to gawk, and even if I had wanted to, I had a toddler with me. I kept walking.

Just down the street from that building there’s this ghost bike. It used to have a basket with flowers on it. It used to have a seat. It’s been there a long time:

A number of years ago (which the internet tells me was 2017, but I can’t seem to quite feel that passage of time in my body), I read on a local message board that a dead body had been found in Colonel Summers Park. A few hours later, the person was identified as a man named Boyd Littell. He’d been found lying in the grass not far from the street, with his bicycle next to him. The guess was that he’d fallen from his bike, hit his head, walked over to the grass, laid down, and died there. The medical examiner’s report later supported that theory. His bike was still there, his money was in his pocket, and his skull was fractured.

I never met Boyd Littell. There’s a good chance that our paths crossed at some point, small city that Portland is, but I’d never even heard his name before the day he died. Even so, every time I pass by his ghost bike on the edge of the park, I think about him. I imagine the crash, the feeling of the impact, the thoughts he must have been having as he struggled to pull himself and his bike up from the street and stumbled into the park. When he laid down, did he think that he might never get up again? What did that small animal in his brain tell him? I hope that he wasn’t in pain. I hope that he wasn’t afraid. I think about him and his death every time I go past that bike. Every time.

Also in 2017, but maybe it was 2018, I tweeted about how someone had stolen my son’s skateboard from the side of our house. I posted out of frustration that someone would do that to a kid, and my main point was that I wished the thief an extended bout of explosive diarrhea. I wasn’t looking for anything beyond an outlet for that feeling of anger. A friend who skates saw my post and replied that he would look through his stuff and see if he could pull together enough parts to build my son a new board. Then a friend of his, the then-owner of Commonwealth Skateboarding, replied to the post and said he could help out, too. A bit later he DM’d me to say that he’d put together a new board for my son, and we could come pick it up anytime, no charge.

Maybe about fifteen years ago, outside of the 7-11 with that nice, wide wall that used to get tagged up mercilessly before someone thought to have a mural done, I saw a young couple with heavily tattooed faces carrying their groceries home from the store, each of them with a paper shopping bag in hand. They were laughing about something, and when they stopped at the crosswalk to wait for the light, the woman rested her head against the man’s chest and he kissed the top of her head . They did it so naturally that it was easy to imagine that kind of tenderness was simply the way they were for each other much of the time.

Continuing on SE 20^th, headed toward Division, I pass a house where maybe ten years ago I saw a woman in her early sixties playing with a large, fluffy dog in the side yard. I remember specifically thinking about how happy she looked, how at ease. It had been a long day, maybe, and finally she could be home tossing a ball around for her dog. A month or so later, I went to an estate sale at that house. The owner, I assume the woman I’d seen with the dog, had died. In the basement, several dress shirts hung on a rack beside the clothes dryer; the sort of shirt a woman in her early sixties might wear to an office job. It was clear that she’d intended to come back for them and put them away. She’d expected to put them on and go to work, and come home to play with her dog, but she died instead. I left the house in tears. I didn’t buy anything.

I took a photo of her house on my walk, but decided not to post it, for her privacy and the privacy of whoever lives there now.

We pass through strangers’ lives and they pass through ours in these postcard-sized memories. Who have I never met who carries a memory of me out in the world at one of my lowest moments or one of my highest? Who was in the hospital waiting room when I had my first miscarriage? Who was on the playground five years later when I watched my three-year-old daughter running and laughing, the yellow cape she’d put on that morning streaming out behind her? They couldn’t have known that I’d had two more miscarriages between that day in the hospital and the birth of this running caped wonder, but they would have seen the joy on my face and on hers in the playground, and maybe they held on to that as something good and true about the world and their own place in it. Maybe when they walk past that playground now, they have the flash of a memory of my daughter’s tiny body in gleeful motion, the distillation of someone else’s happiness passed on to them.

That three-year-old will be fifteen in a month. I, her smiling mother, am also twelve years older. Here I am, taking a selfie in what is almost certainly a two-way mirror in the door of some kind of workshop. I could hear people moving around inside, and maybe they were looking out at me. So let them either remember or forget the middle-aged woman–no doubt just one person among several on that day alone–who stopped to consider her own face in the reflection of their door.