From Baltimore to Portland, twenty years later.

TOM GOES TO PORTLAND

by Tom D'Antoni

 Today, May 30, 2017 is the twentieth anniversary of my arrival here in Portland. I wrote this the week after I got here. I sold it to the op-ed page of both the Baltimore Sun and the Oregonian. Needless to say, it met with two different receptions on each coast.

I'm not as happy with Portland these days, but in 1997, it seemed like paradise compared to Baltimore.  -- TVD

  

          The rental truck was packed to the rafters with the evidence of my 50 years in Baltimore. There was just one more thing to do, fill the gas tank. After that it was four days on the road to get to my new home, Portland, Oregon.

          I stopped at the Citgo station at O'Donnell and Ponca. It would be my last communication with a live Baltimorean. I walked in and asked if they sold ice. The woman behind the counter didn't even look at me. I waited, trying out my new Oregon manners in advance. I waited some more. I asked again. She never looked at me.

          After a while, she snarled to I wasn't exactly sure who, "Get him some ice!"  A man in the room moved slowly toward the door and I followed him. He showed me where the ice was. He told me how much it cost. I brought it back and paid her. She didn't say thanks. She didn't say anything. She didn't say one word to me, or acknowledge she knew I existed the entire time.

          "A fitting way to leave town," I thought.

          Today, I walked in to my neighborhood Safeway for the first time. I wandered around just looking at things. As I approached the deli counter, a smiling woman behind it asked if I needed anything.

          I was startled. I said no thank you.

          Later, a smiling young man stacking oranges asked me the same thing.

          I was confused. I said no thank you again.

          Later still, a smiling woman putting out chicken breasts asked me the same thing.

          My head was spinning. I mumbled no thank you this time.

          Was there something wrong with me? Did I appear retarded? Or lost? Or what?

          When I got home I called my girlfriend and told her about this. She said that although she did not know if I had, in fact, appeared retarded or lost, that this is how people behave here. Not only do they ask if they can help you, and smile while they do it, but if, in fact, I had needed any help in finding an item, they would probably have walked me over to the aisle where that item could be found and pointed it out to me.

          Here we have a prime example of the major difference between my new culture and my old one. I have had to lower my voice. I speak more calmly, and I've found I don't have to hit people over the head to have them interact with me. They seem so eager to be nice. And I mean nice, not nosey, there's a difference.

          This is not in my experience as a Baltimorean.

          My second night in Portland, I attended the Rose Festival Starlight Parade downtown. A big event around here. When my girlfriend and I found a place on the street from which to watch the parade, it began to rain. Umbrellas went up, but people didn't budge. Well, a few with small children did, but only a few.

          The parade began. Lighted floats, Clydesdales, clowns came by. It rained harder. People still didn't budge. In fact, kids began to frolic in it, doing cartwheels in the street. High school bands marched by in the rain.

          I got wet. I didn't mind.

          It began to really pour, even (I am told) by Oregon standards. Another high school band marched by, their cheerleaders, in evening gowns, drenched to the skin. The parade didn't stop. The rain didn't stop. Everybody had a good time.

          Me, too.

          I've always said nothing goes out of style in Baltimore, but I have found evidence of my own history  here that I know has disappeared from sight in Baltimore.

          See, I was a hippie. I published Baltimore's hippie newspaper, HARRY. Today there is very little evidence that the spirit of self-determination, of peace, love and respect in Baltimore. I have found it here, and it brings a smile to my face, and a chuckle. Like when my girlfriend bought some bread baked by the Flour Power Bakery. Oh, yeah, I am reminded. All the nice stuff that has been beaten and kicked out of me as person-to-person interaction in Baltimore has coarsened over the years, is returning. I find it has been easy to be tough and mean. I look at people here sometimes, and wonder, "What the hell are you so happy about?" And then I look around, and find I'm not in Baltimore anymore, and I know why.

          I ask myself why couldn't I find it in my home town? Well, I'll share responsibility for that. But deep down, I know that Baltimore is a mean, dirty, inbred little town. It hurts me to have come to that conclusion, but it is inescapable. And, now, in the end, I have escaped it, by coming here.

          Does this mean that Portland doesn't have the same problems as other cities? Of course not.

          The difference is that murders in Portland make the front page. During the recent Rose Festival, a man was killed by a stray bullet fired during an altercation blocks away. The next day there were two more murders in a rough section of town. People here were shocked. In Baltimore, we have become so used to murder, both random and otherwise that they can often be found on the third page of the Metro Section, sometimes grouped in threes, with a bare mention of the name of the victim.

          Today's editorial in the Oregonian, the daily paper said, "...we do know the culture that produced these killers. It is a culture that accepts violence and the tools of violence. It is a culture that accepts the idea that angry disputes--over racial differences, or drug deals, or criminal territories--are common. And that they can commonly erupt into shooting.

          "This is not a description of some group of people that we do not know. This is our own culture. Our own children. And it is time we stopped accepting it."

          Portland's Mayor Vera Katz (herself a transplanted East Coaster) said, "Our city is as safe as the community makes it." And then she said that everyone in the community must take responsibility for violence.

          Compare that, if you will, with the statements of Baltimore's last THREE  mayors as the murder rate rose and the streets became battlegrounds where no one was safe. I don't remember anybody addressing the problem in as forthrightly or in a constructive way until Tom Frazier came to town. Tom Frazier came from the West Coast, from Northern California, an area, in attitude, quite like Portland. Now the self-serving racists who inhabit Baltimore's public life want the commissioner out.

          They actually want to work on the problem here in Portland, not call names.

They seem to have the idea that they can control their own destinies, and are not controlled by history or conditions of previous servitude.

          I sat in a coffee shop (inevitable in the Northwest) last night. A black woman sat at the table next to me. In the friendly atmosphere of conversation and caffeine, we exchanged a few jokes. Nothing much. Just like you'd do with anybody. She didn't seem to blame me, as a white guy, for her problems. She talked to me, as another human being. I did the same. It was such a relief.

          Over the past ten years normal human discourse between Blacks and Whites in Baltimore has broken down so badly, I found I couldn't even shop without being snarled at because I'm White. As a White grad of Morgan State, I am overjoyed to be able to talk with everybody I meet without being immediately written off as the enemy.

          And I haven't heard a single horn beep.

          Nobody has snarled at me.

          The bus drivers say hi and people getting off the bus thank them.

          I've seen exactly one police car with flashers rolling.

          And I haven't even mentioned the natural beauty surrounding me at every

turn.

          I miss my friends. I miss the O's. I miss Fell's Point. That's it.

          I like it here. You couldn't pay me to come back.