Body High 22: The PNW
Feeling my way to Portland
A few days before beginning my trek from suburban Los Angeles to the Pacific Northwest my glasses broke. No backup pair was on hand. Here is one of those times where I am happy not to be car reliant.
In Portland a new pair would be coming to me.
As this sojourn begins, I ride Amtrak’s Coast Starlighter, just beyond California’s top border. The town of Klamath Falls is our train’s next stop. Here is my view:
An elongated crew break is scheduled for the stop. For me, Klamath Falls shall be a protracted vaping sesh. It is 7 am.
The skies up here blow me to smithereens.
Did you know that James Ivory of the hallowed Merchant-Ivory Productions hails from Klamath Falls? As concerned with high-toned Whiteness as James Ivory’s work is, I just knew this director had to be from Europe.
But Klamath Falls works, too.
Before catching the midnight train to Portland, I’d been in downtown Sacramento. Prior to that I crashed in downtown Oakland, going out most nights, minus awesome vision.
I like little better than a big, urban challenge.
There’s a chain convenience store that sits a couple of blocks from the Golden 1 Center, where the Sacramento Kings lost badly to the Indiana Pacers in a Sunday matinee. At the shop’s coffee station a couple guys are selling weed, assumedly to cost-cutting fans getting high before tip-off and when the final buzzer sounds.
Downtown Sactown has a lively pedestrian life on game days—complete with an ice skating rink that people line up for—so the mobile dealer enterprise makes sense. Thing is, Sacramento is a great legal weed town, so to see the unlicensed market thriving literal blocks from where state weed policy gets made is pretty delicious.
These streets made a Californian out of me.
The kids are not just selling bags, they are using the counter to roll blunts assembly line-style.
Hella raw.
I didn’t buy a blunt as I am committed to vaping live resin up through Portland, where I shall get off the train. Meaning, the live resin train. Vaping makes me dopey. Drippy. Forgetful and sloppy. These few weeks have been a departure, and until I am back in LA it will strictly be Oregon flower.
With maybe some Washington weed, for research.
So, I left the chain convenience store and took a long pen sip and felt my way toward the Sacramento Valley Station.
A couple of nights prior in Oakland I did the pedestrian night thing: Trying to make it back from this library before sundown. Aiming to reach that bar before there’s no more light. I did the stunt for a few weeks while living in LA’s Arts District, back when the last impoverished days of my health journalism fellowship had to be gutted out. Those efforts were tough in ways that getting around after a Kings game was not.
Sacramento’s civic center was the first city-sized downtown I’d known, arriving from Ohio at 18. The intersection at the main library. The bail bonds outfits are ingrained. Who needed to read street signs? I barely needed to consult my phone.
Even with its spotty, arena-based revitalization I know these Sactown streets. These streets made a Californian out of me. The shock of the homeless is vivid to this day, coming as I had from Reagan-era Smallville.
As Grant’s Pass, Oregon becomes a place in the past and Bend is in the offing, over social media Badly Licked Bear and I have a stimulating, intellectual talk about a recent (SFW) OnlyFans star’s documentary.
The mountain peaks of Oregon are covered with white. Badly is a person I know from radical PDX art. It feels right that we’re showing off our minds as I close in on that town.
With my sister in Portland I’ll cobble together a makeshift, emergency version of my glasses. But mostly I’m bound to chill low-key with family and friends and venture just a little into PDX, until the replacement pair on order lands.
While vaping at the Klamath Falls stop I had a revelation:
Finish the movie project and get out of LA.
Maybe The Bay is where I need to be. My destination probably isn’t Sacramento, but the landing spot has to be somewhere that can approximate home. LA has been so difficult this go-round.
👇🏿 is for the those who choose to go the extra distance. What sort of distance? Not my call.
