Leaving Portland

As Desirée wrote below, we're currently at my old home of Arcosanti, having already traveled through California, visiting many friends and family along the way.

Leaving Portland was, as anticipated, a melancholy experience. I don't think I quite knew exactly how melancholy it would be until a few days before we left. Walking into my one of my favorite Coffeeshops (Half & Half) with my good friend (and co-worker) Tony, I told the baristas that this was probably the last time that I would see them. Their eyes grew improbably moist, and they said that I could have anything I wanted for free. (Of course I thanked them for their generosity, then insisted upon both paying and leaving a $5 tip).

That's when it struck me: in other large cities I've been in, the functional everyday interactions between people aren't really relationships at all -- they're formalized, depersonalized roles. Baristas and bus drivers and bank tellers and so forth are just that: job descriptions, not fully-realized people at all. When I studied environmental psychology in college, I was taught that this was the inevitable by-product of living in, and relating to, a large population. There is supposedly not enough room in the human psyche to perceive large numbers of other people as real human beings. Beyond a certain point, we percieve others as mere actors, automatons, what have you. That is why small towns are supposedly so much more personable and friendly than large ones: they haven't crossed the "deindividuation threshold".

After living in Portland, I'm not sure that I can buy this theory anymore. The people there are genuinely and sincerely friendly. They routinely thank the bus drivers when getting off the bus, for example. This is no mere empty etiquette, mind you -- on the one occasion when I had a truly obnoxious bus driver, the people getting off the bus told her to go fuck herself (in so many words), and they sincerely meant it. The much more frequent expressions of gratitude were also, I believe, perfectly sincere.

It's not this attitude that I will miss, per se, but rather the genuine human connections I made because of it. There were half a dozen baristas I was close to. We learned about each others' lives, and they never minded on the not infrequent occasions when I would absent-mindedly wander out of the shop without paying; they knew that I could always settle up later. They shared their favorite bands with me, and when I began experimenting with sensory deprivation tanks as a means of relaxation, several of them decided to give it a try as well. I always sought their opinions on my various & sundry plans for world domination. They were all-around excellent people. I will miss them.

I will also miss the tellers at the nearby bank, who were unaccountably sweet and mellow people; I will wonder about how Mark the Bank Teller's brand new kid is growing up, and I have no doubt that he will wonder, in turn, about how my crazy life is progressing. I will miss the wisecracking, shit-talking, deal-cutting employs at various car rental offices. I will miss the the guy whose only job was to stand on Burnside with a balloon-festooned "Mattress World" sign, waving and grinning at the passing traffic. Man, did he love his job! Gives me hope that there really truly is a place for everyone in this world. He'd always ask me how my day was going as I walked by on my daily commute. At the end of his day, he'd find some passing child (or anyone else) whose day would be made by adopting a cluster of balloons.

These people, and so many more -- some of whom I only met once or twice, but still had shockingly holistic interactions with -- are what I will miss the most about Portland. I will also of course miss my many closer and more official friends -- but not too much, because I know that they will always remain my friends regardless of where I am in the world and that someday, somehow, I shall see them again. And I'll miss the unique Portland-flavored eccentrics -- the jovial trombone player with the mickey-mouse ears, who seemed to be terribly confused by every fourth or fifth note, or the random Park Block people who distributed newspaper samurai hats or played croquet with bowling balls and sledgehammers -- but every place has its eccentrics, I hope. I will also miss the place: bicycling on the river during the warm clear days, reading at Powell's when it's dark and rainy, the winter ice storms, summer's leafy green light, the crazy volcanoes lining the horizon -- but these things will still be there when I come back to visit.

I won't be in touch with my bank tellers and baristas and bus drivers, however. They will likely have moved on to other jobs by the time I come back to visit, and I doubt that I will ever see them again. And this makes me sad, because these people became real to me, and I genuinely care about their lives.

When I was a child (around age 6 or 7, I believe), I went through a period wherein I found it almost impossible to believe that other people were real -- that there were billions of other people in the world, all of whom saw different things through different sets of eyes. It seemed utterly implausible to me. Being an individual struck me as such a terribly complex and singular thing that I just didn't see how it could really be infinitely repeated, with infinite variation no less. For a while I entertained the notion that all these other people were actually real, but rather simulacra who would pop out of existence the moment they left my visual field. (This raised certain issues. If other beings were mere artifacts that were constantly being created and destroyed based on their proximity to me, then the world must in fact revolve around me -- which also struck me as rather improbable. So perhaps I was living inside of some huge virtual reality experiment, designed by aliens to test my reactions. That would certainly explain a number of inconsistencies and improbabilities that I'd observed in the world: bad VR programming, that's all. I'd probably make worse mistakes, if it were left up to me. But wouldn't those aliens then also have their own rich and unknowable interior lives, bringing us back to the same problem yet again? When my musings went recursive, I moved on to other things.) Eventually I stopped worrying about it, but I don't think I ever fully grokked that all these other people in the world actually exist.

I suspect that most people go through a similar process, if more subconsciously (and perhaps leaving out the bits about aliens and VR). Eventually, they come to terms with the fact that their immediate friends, family, and neighbors are real people, but can't quite bring themselves to embrace everyone they meet within that fold. And then we're taught that this is all that anyone is capable of: authentic interactions within a limited social group.

But Portland taught me otherwise. I'd like to think that wherever I go, from now on, I will take a bit of this Portland attitude with me. I will try to always answer questions like "how are you?" with inappropriate honesty, and encourage the random strangers I meet to do what the same. I will always try to get to know the person who is serving my tea or bagging my groceries, because likely as not, they're decent people with interesting lives. This will make life richer, no matter where I live -- but it also makes leaving harder.