The Road Trip: Lazying About Town

Sometimes, you arrive someplace you've long left and it's as if you've never been gone. As if the two years were mere days or hours and the familiarity surrounding you is pleasingly comfortable, like sinking into a soft chair on a cool day.

That's how I would describe the days we spent with our friends.

Our first day was all about Portland.

We went to Powell's where we once again walked out with more books than we could imagine reading. Elizabeth has recently been introduced to graphic novels, devouring every one she can get her hands on. Lucky for her, her friend Frankie loves them too. They huddled over the books, looking for used copies and creating a pile that threatened to topple with every addition.

Joseph stuck to the Goosebumps collection where he painstakingly looked for the least expensive copy so he could get at least fifteen books for his $40 limit. I stood on a handy step stool on tip toe, running my fingers across the spines of childhood classics, books that sang as I touched them: Little House in the Big Woods, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, Heidi.

I made my choices and then spent a happy hour wandering the stacks and floors, stepping over the outstretched legs of readers, and remembering to keep a bit of an eye on my kids though they assured me bad guys never go to bookstores. (And I stymied them with, "How else can they learn to be bad?" Until they reminded me, "Google.")

We walked over to a pizza place where the slices were delicious and the cider was crisp with deep pours. We walked to a fountain, my shoulders dropped to relaxation. Don somehow managed to procure three more ciders in to-go cups and we sat with our feet in the water while the girls splashed in shirts wrapped and tucked into midriff tops. The boys lay in the shade, their books pressed open as they left us behind and entered another world.

Don started a conversation with a couple and discovered they were newly transplanted from California. They talked a bit about the weather, the beer, and then in one of those quirks of fate discovered their neighbor in LA had gone to high school with Don and I.

To put this in perspective, Portland is ninety minutes from Cathlamet which hosts a population of around 800. There were only 150 students in our high school, bused in from around Wahkiakum County. And there, at a fountain in Portland, two decades after we graduated, we met Californians who had known our classmate.

It was one of those moments of such universe alignment it could only happen in Portland.

Or New York City, I suppose.

After a couple of hours, we decided to start heading in the general direction of Salt & Straw, an ice cream parlor I was told was worth the 45 minute waits.

They were right.

When I lived in the PNW, it was the 80s and early 90s. I still remember not knowing what a bagel was and when Mexican food came from Taco Time. At dinner before senior prom, my friends and I stared at a pile of artichoke leaves and wondered what they were.

The world was smaller then. Especially if you lived in a tiny community. Our staples were salmon, sturgeon, elk, goose. We ate crab and dug for gooey ducks. We caught crawdads in the creek and picked huckleberries, salmon berries, loganberries, blackberries, and raspberries. We had tayberry jam and marionberry pie.

Before I realized what a treat smoked salmon and crab cakes were, I didn't really know how seriously we took our food. For a while I was seduced by the international buffet of California. I devoured Mexican food spicy enough to make my lips tingle, I feasted on dolmas and pitas, I happily ate San Francisco sourdough and grilled tri tip.

Going home, I realized that not only has the world become so much smaller, but Oregon and Washington has become a foodie's dream.

Or maybe it always was.

After all, we were eating local and fresh before it was a catch phrase. We were catching fish in the morning and smoking it at night with chipped apple wood. We were baking berries the size of a bumblebee into pies. We were drinking milk from a dairy ten miles away and eating what could be the best cheddar I've ever had before or since.

But I forgot.

Until I went back, tumbling into gastronomical paradise.

Like the Salt & Straw where I had roasted berry ice cream with white chocolate and sea salt.

Tummies full, we wandered fabric stores and went back home where Makensy and I spent the evening hunched over sewing machines making small skirts, glasses of wine nearby and laughter mixing with curses and the sound of ripping seams as we struggled with elastic bands.

It truly is amazing to be able to sink into a space as if you were a treasured friend who had never really left.