MacCleay Park in Portland, Oregon, is a path through forest that begins in the city and leads along a stream. When I was a child, we often hiked there with parents. Partly along was a stone building that housed restrooms, gender-divided. Built in the Thirties as a public works project, today it is ruined. For a while it was filled with dirt to make it unusable. Some call it a "witch's house" and certainly it has the aspect of a Grimm's or Anderson's fairy tale.
About this same time, several teenagers from a family down the street babysat for us. They weren't very successful at keeping us under control and we greatly enjoyed defeating them. One was a boy. Then all that ended and we never saw those young people again. We gave it no thought until I was nearing retirement and reflecting on the neighborhood my mother came to as a bride in 1938 and left, aged 89, to a crematorium.
I asked her how it was that in my early years the women on the street, all mothers, were a kind of club that carried food back and forth and met for coffee or at "game parties," not bridge but silly games like "Cootie" where rolling dice controlled the assembly of plastic bugs. Her answer was a bombshell. The women were responding to a tragedy in the family of the babysitters. They sought to comfort that mother.
Macleay Park's stone restrooms had become a meeting place for gay young men. Our babysitter was among them. He was found out. He hung himself from a tree nearby. That's why the building was destroyed. In those days no one ever told children anything and if we had been told, we wouldn't have understood what it meant, but there was always a "vibe" or subtext about Macleay Park.
In the Seventies, recovering from a divorce and displacement after a decade on the Browning, Montana, reservation, I enrolled in an Ira Progoff "Intensive Journal" workshop. The fashion of the times was to explore one's life trajectory through the identification and exploration of "stepping stones", periods of one's life as separated by changes in location, status, education, and the like. The idea was to sit as a group and listen to directions from a certified leader. then to write together, each in our own journal. Maybe people would read aloud what they wrote. It was a good way to get started and build the habit of writing. The whole justification was vaguely Jungian.
I packed that journal around with me, writing in it when there was a moment. One day I was out wandering and -- passing Macleay Park -- thought of walking down the path a ways. While I was doing that, someone broke into my van and took my journal. I never journaled again. It was over.
About that time I was the first female animal control officer for Multnomah County, going into the neighborhoods of Portland to solve complaints about both trivia and disaster that involved animals. Forest Park, which Macleay Park is part of, is near-wilderness, miles on a side. A complaint came in about a band of pigs who lived in those woods, foraging for themselves. They were owned by an old black woman who lived up the street from my mother. She was from way down South where that was the conventional manner of raising pigs: take them out somewhere that no one apparently owned and after a summer "on the range", bringing them in for slaughter. Once she did that with her pigs, the problem was solved. After struggling with the problem, I began to think of them as the Gadarene Swine.
In the Nineties -- after leaving the ministry -- I was driving up Cornell road, the highway that runs along Macleay Park and Forest Park just at sundown when I realized that dozens of people were headed for the forest, some on foot and some on bicycles. They were young, dressed for rough living with backpacks, and the guys had a lot of hair. By this time I was working for the City of Portland as a clerk so I knew what was happening. These were homeless people who were camping in the parks. Towards the end one "hooch" was found that was quite elaborate, using Vietnamese technology.
This was the beginning of the forces that urged "keep Portland weird." It was expressed at that time mostly through the arts, the restoration of the old parts of town, writing, and a certain amount of "lefty" politics. Violence was not part of it. I attended a night of poetry reading in Washington Park, a natural amphitheatre surrounded by cultural emplacements: the zoo, museums, a Japanese Garden. At least one of the poets was a Portland cop. Ken Kesey read from "the Trannie Man," though he was drunk and it was dark. (I think there were candles.) Nearby dogs got into a fight before the pot smoke got so thick that even they were feeling peaceful.
By the time I left for good in 1999 because my deceased mother had left me enough money to move to Valier next to the Blackfeet rez, her house had become submerged in gang violence, Crips and Bloods. I had come back on a visit and slept at the curb in my van, as I did when I had been a circuit-riding minister and continued to do when traveling. Suddenly I jumped awake because of an explosion two doors down. It was a gang using a shotgun to try to destroy the opposition when they drove by. Every morning my brother went out and picked up a handful of spent ordinance from the previous night.
The City was not rising to the challenge. While I was riding in the rain crammed into an overcrowded bus every day, there were drug-smuggling gangs shooting in the streets. Once, the cops raided my bus and pinned the head of the gang against the side of the bus where I was sitting. It didn't occur to me to move to the other side, though a bullet (the cop had his weapon out) could have easily penetrated the side of the bus. I was sort of hypnotized by the boss's 3-carat diamond earring. One of my nicest neighbors in the decrepit but once-glamourous apartment where I lived was a Japanese man who sold cocaine. His apartment had no furniture, as is conventional in Japan. It worked well when he had to disappear quickly.
I've been back on the East Slope for twenty years and will soon be eighty years old. This tide of change is lapping at my door. It has not turned, but I have changed greatly.
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