Returning Home

by Jordan

Southeast: Added on December 02, 2002

Once, the day I returned a couple of years ago from North Carolina, I was feeling really low. It had been a long, seven-hours delayed flight. I found myself really out of it. But something greater called me. I forced myself to get up, to go outside into the city and wander.

I wandered for three hours. Through Southeast Portland- past places that I've seen change in my lifetime- Up Mount Tabor, down Hawthorne and Belmont lined with fancy shops and crowed with cars. Across the Hawthorne Bridge and into downtown. I remembered how it used to smell like hops from the brewery when I was a kindergartner at MLC and I remembered seeing Mayor Bud Clark in lederhosen, riding an antique bike and twirling his handlebar mustache while yelling, like a great blue heron: "WHOOP! WHOOP!" So many places, so many memories.

I was still feeling, distant, unconnected, I had hoped that when I got back to Portland- to the place where the geography and botany where embedded into my soul- that I would feel whole again.

I walked along McCall Waterfront Park and climbed down the boulders to the little beach and sat and closed my eyes...

The water lapped at the beach and cars made the bridge sing, there were seabirds who stood on barnacle covered driftwood logs, I heard the voices of people who were walking along the river. I opened my eyes and I started looking at the water. The seemingly random patterns of the surface of the Willamette river (Tualli and Kalapuyan who live there called it the Willama-the "Great Spill River") became more and more complex and I became aware of a deeper pattern. and then it hit me.

My whole life, I had been drinking of the Bull Run reservoir, which flows into the Clackamas which flows to the Willamette. My whole life, the water that left my body went, one way or another, into the Willammette.

This was not a little realization- it may be the most profoundly "spiritual" experience of my life.

I am just an eddy in the river, My blood is the Willammette river, I am just a temporary flux of a river.

And what about the landscape that I spent my day walking across? If I stay put, and my children too, and their children, and they eat locally, then: I had been walking on the bones of my children, grandchildren and my descendents. I walked away that evening feeling somehow reborn.

I can't go into that city without feeling that it is, for me, holy. Every time I go home is a pilgrimage.