4th Day - Dateline: Portland

On our last day West we drove all the way from Crescent City, California, to Portland, Oregon. Again, it was a long and tiring drive, but I didn't want to miss Portland, and my husband was keen on taking me to the Multnomah Falls, which are truly spectacular.

If you click on the picture so it fits your screen you can get a sense of the scale of the people in relation to the falls, which are not only impossibly high (although it's only a one-mile walk from the bridge to the top of the falls, which I of course wasn't adventurous enough to embark on) but you might get a sense of the sheer power of the water.

There was a smaller cascade near the bigger one, named Wahkeena Falls, which reminded me of the Wahkeena Nature Preserve right here in Ohio. The website in Ohio explains that Wahkeena is an "Indian" word for "most beautiful," but that's like saying that zafacón is a Latino word for trash can.

While you may know that the word sounds like Spanish, you wouldn't know what group (Puerto Ricans) actually use the word, and which don't (Spaniards, for one, wouldn't immediately recognize what it means since it's reportedly a Puerto Rican-nization of the English words "safety can"). Since not all indigenous groups speak the same language I was left wondering at the linguistic connection between a place so Far Away and my present state of residence.

Before going to the falls, we visited downtown Portland and the famous Powell's Books, where I bought myself I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, which I've been wanting to read forever but hadn't had a chance to, and I bought The Art of Racing in the Rain, which is told from the perspective of a dog, Enzo.

The first book is a retelling by Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials through the voice of Tituba, the black slave who was accused of, and tried for, bewitching the crazy white girls, who claimed the devil walked amongst them.

The second is a totally hokey telling of the life of an aspiring racing-car driver from the perspective of his dog. While the novel is predictable, it is a perfect summer read (made even more perfect after a full year of only dissertation-related readings!) and I found myself weeping at the start and the end of the book not only for the dog, but also because it has the perfect ending (read: happy, celebratory, satisfying, not hard to predict, etc.). While I generally don't sit and read a book cover to cover in one day, the four-hour flight from Oregon to Chicago was the perfect way to read about Enzo's adventures and his insights into human nature y me bebí el libro, so to speak.

Thus, the Oregon-California trip was the perfect punto final to the dissertation fellowship year, and more significantly, to the last five years I've dedicated to this doctorate. The defense is Tuesday and, since returning from the trip last Tuesday I've cleaned up the bibliography (which was in both MLA and Chicago styles!) and fixed some odds and ends (faulty or missing citations) in the final draft. There's no turning back now, the checkered flag is out (to use Enzo's metaphor) and the end of the race is near.

With that end in sight, and to end this last, if rather unfocused, post about Oregon, I wanted to share with you a picture I asked my husband to take, although he wasn't sure why I'd want a photograph of an old piece of driftwood. There were many of these pieces strewn all over the first rocky beach we visited on our very first day in Oregon, and this one in particular captured my imagination.

What if this was the last remaining part of a long-lost ship that sank in the Pacific centuries ago, taking with it not just its cargo and its crew and passengers, but also their stories and their glories and their secrets? What if this is the last witness to so many lives and memories and emotions? A lonely piece of driftwood, perfectly polished by the years of drifting in the tide.

Part of our humanity is almost never knowing what our end will be, when or how it will come. But I think part of our humanity also is learning from those who have come before us, especially those whose stories (like Tituba's and, yes, perhaps even like Enzo's) we either don't have access to, or, worse, have been silenced.

Going to Oregon showed me a little of the many such stories I have yet to know, and for that I'm grateful. Each story that we rescue makes us more human, every piece of driftwood that we give a story to ignites the fires of that collective (if also intimately personal) past that is invariably our present and inevitably our future.