mistakenly bought cilantro instead of Italian parsley? I have, embarrassingly enough, as well as vice versa.
Which brings to mind the evening I could not find cilantro when we lived in Portland. Swear to God, it took a five-mile, three-store trawl to find any, which only happens when you're absolutely desperately in need. A total foodie junkie, was I, that night.
The dramatic photo of a young woman getting a blast of pepper spray on her face during a mostly peaceful Occupy protest in Portland is destined to become an enduring image of the national movement.
The youthful protester vomited almost immediately after the Thursday incident and medics were able to wash out her eyes and nose so that she was not much the worse for it, Occupy Portland spokesman Reid Parham told The Times.
"She's OK," he said.
FULL COVERAGE: Occupy protests around the nation
Portland's Occupy the Banks demonstrations began Thursday morning with the arrests of 25 people on the east end of the Steel Bridge.
Interestingly, it was a gray-haired group that sat stubbornly at the entrance to the bridge, waiting to be taken away in flex-cuffs by police. The Portland Police Bureau put out a list of arrestees, and only one of them was under the age of 35. Seven were in their 60s. Five were in their 50s.
It might be that those were the folks who could afford the time to be hauled away, booked and possibly charged; certainly, it reflects Portland's deep history of street protest.
The Occupy Portland demonstrations of the last six weeks are only the latest in a long tradition of turbulent clashes that date back to the city's well-remembered anti-Vietnam War demonstration of 1970, and earlier.
A former member of President George H. W. Bush's staff famously dubbed the city "Little Beirut" in reference to the noisy reception Republican candidates traditionally received there. And street clashes between protesters and police have over the years been a regular event at May Day rallies and union organizing rallies even before Vietnam.
In that context, Thursday's events were relatively mild. Yet Occupy Portland organizers allege law enforcement took an inappropriate and heavy-handed approach.
"The city's overreaction and complete waste of tax dollars to quiet down a completely peaceful demonstration against the greed of banks was very unnecessary," spokeswoman Illona Trogub said in an interview.
Police said pepper spray was only brought out when a small group of unusually confrontational protesters refused to get out of the street and stood in the path of MAX transit trains.
Portland Police Bureau spokesman Lt. Robert King said the march had proceeded peacefully along most of the route, with officers trying to keep people on the sidewalk and out of the street.
There was initially "a pushing and shoving match" near SW 5th Avenue and Alder Street, King said in an interview, and again a "pretty intense confrontation" at SW 4th Avenue and Morrison Street.
The most raucous confrontation occurred near Chase Bank shortly after 4 p.m. as officers were trying to remove protesters who had entered the bank vestibule. But police were blocked by hundreds of demonstrators outside. Meanwhile, a core of protesters couldn't be cleared from the street, which is a path for one of the city's major downtown light-rail systems.
"Two of the protesters engaged in some kind of a struggle, a pushing match, with one of the officers, and in the course of that, tensions escalated and ultimately pepper spray was deployed, and that by and large resolved the disturbance at that location," King said.
Occupy spokesman Parham said one of the problems was that police, many of them on horseback, were actually shoving people into the street. "It's consistently true that the police were over-reacting and pushing people off of the sidewalks into the street, and then yelling at them to get out of the street," he said.
He said two people were stepped on by the horses, and one was knocked over. "All of the eyewitnesses say there was no warning that chemical agents would be used," he added.
King said the police have consistently employed an approach known as "tactical disengagement" during the last several weeks, often backing off and literally retreating from marching protesters "in cases where there could have been a flash point."
"What we encountered yesterday was different in its tone and its character from the previous marches," King said. "We're thinking it's because the people that were there yesterday were there to engage in direct action against financial institutions. This was designed to be an interruption.
"Again, there were hundreds of people, possibly as many as a thousand people, who marched. Many, many people were utterly peaceful," King said. "But there were definitely individuals involved that were more aggressive. Officers definitely encountered higher levels of resistance than they had seen in previous incidents."
The pepper spray deployment is under investigation, he said.
Meanwhile, the photo of the young woman taken by Oregonian staff photographer Randy L. Rasmussen has raced across the Internet, becoming, as the Oregonian described Friday morning, "a web sensation and an iconic photograph."
-- Kim Murphy in Seattle
Photo: A woman is blasted with pepper spray during Occupy protests in Portland Thursday. Credit: Randy L. Rasmussen/The Oregonian
Video: Police deploy pepper spray in Portland. Credit: KATU Communities
Four days after their eviction from two downtown parks, hundreds of Occupy Portland protesters massed Thursday morning near a bridge that is one of the city's most important mass transit connectors, then made their way to a rally on the Willamette River waterfront. Seattle protesters, meanwhile, were squaring off with the mayor over recent use of pepper spray against activists.
In Portland, Ore., about 15 protesters who refused to budge were arrested at the Steel Bridge during the morning commute, with large numbers of police blocking access and then leading activists away in handcuffs without serious incident.
The bridge reopened after the remaining protesters began streaming across a pedestrian walkway below, eventually joining a waterfront rally on the other side of the river targeting large corporate banks -- one of several such rallies underway across the country.
FULL COVERAGE: Occupy protests around the nation
A number of organized labor activists joined Thursday's protests, highlighting upcoming cuts to staff at Portland's unionized transportation bureau at a time when the Steel Bridge -- the symbolic center of the morning protest -- is in need of repair.
"The Steel Bridge rates about a 30 on a scale of 100 in bridge safety in this country, while the public workers that do maintenance on this bridge are being cut," Occupy Portland organizer David Osborn said in an interview.
Later Thursday, small groups of activists planned ad hoc "civil disobedience" actions targeting large corporate banks across Portland.
A number of nonprofits across the city were planning to join in; the Central American Solidarity Committee said it would highlight banks' funding of an immigrant detention center, while groups such as Rising Tide and the Animal Defense League said they would focus on financing of such projects as coal export terminals and mountaintop strip mines.
Angus Maguire of We Are Oregon, which is one of the major organizers of a coalition that includes more than two dozen Oregon unions and nonprofit groups, said his organization works with unemployed people facing foreclosure of their homes. "The goal is to join with other cities to highlight the economic emergency that we're in as a nation, and the fact that Congress is continuing to fail to really do anything to put Americans back to work," Maguire told The Times by phone from the rally.
Elsewhere in the Northwest, organizers of Occupy Seattle said Mayor Mike McGinn's apology Wednesday for the pepper spraying of protesters a day earlier didn't go far enough.
McGinn had said in a statement that he has ordered the Police Department to review the incidents and make sure that "appropriate commanders" are on scene with "appropriate levels of police resources" at future protests.
The mayor singled out the widely publicized case of 84-year-old Dorli Rainey, a well-known Seattle activist, who was among those blasted with the eye-stinging spray. A picture of her face streaming with pepper spray and antidote, taken by Seattlepi.com photographer Joshua Trujillo, has spread quickly across the country.
"To those engaged in peaceful protest, I am sorry that you were pepper sprayed. I spoke to Dorli Rainey (who I know personally) to ask how she was doing, and to ask for her description of events," McGinn said. "I also called in Seattle Police Chief John Diaz and the command staff to review the actions of last night. They agreed that this was not their preferred outcome," the statement said.
Occupy Seattle leaders, in their own statement, said they had notified the city of their intended march and route and it should not have been necessary to greet them with overwhelming force.
"Given that the police blocked our passage and then used pepper spray indiscriminately suggests that it is not Occupy Seattle that is unwilling to work with the city, but rather that SPD is not willing to work with Occupy Seattle," they said.
Rainey told the Associated Press that she had been on a bus when she saw the protests and decided to take part. Police, she said, began shoving their bicycles at the marchers and then opened up with pepper spray. She has no plans to withdraw from the protests, she added.
Occupy Seattle announced that Rainey will be the keynote speaker at a "Voices of the Revolution" rally set for Saturday at Westlake Park, scene of the movement's initial encampment.
"I'm pretty tough, I guess," Rainey said.
Don Ryan/Associated PressVisitors at the dedication of Electric Avenue on Aug. 16.PORTLAND, Ore. — Sightings of the Nissan Leaf are a regular occurrence here on streets and freeways. Residents are retrofitting their older cars to run purely on electricity. D.C. fast chargers are being installed. And in August, a block on the campus of Portland State University became Electric Avenue.
Nearly three months on, the academics, city officials and company executives who built and are monitoring the Electric Avenue project, consisting of a one-way street with six chargers and parking exclusively for electric vehicles, have started to tally the many challenges to promoting electric transportation.
At E.V. Roadmap 4: Getting to a Million, a two-day workshop on electric vehicles held here last week, a five-person panel outlined issues large and small.
Charlie Allcock, the director of economic development at Portland General Electric, the utility that helped build Electric Avenue, said that more direct lighting was needed to ensure that users could see the plug ports on their cars when recharging. The designers, he said, did not factor in that people would be plugging in at night and in the rain and fog.
They also did not expect the chargers to be easy targets for graffiti artists or the pigeons that perched along a sky bridge that paralleled the street. After the chargers became dirty, the board realized that it had not assigned a specific person to look after them. A worker in the parking lot across the street has since been deputized with keeping them clean.
“It was so obvious, we missed it,” said George Beard, who helped spearhead the Electric Avenue project and organized last week’s conference, which was attended by government and industry officials from Georgia, Indiana and Colorado, among other states. “No one had operational responsibility for this, so we had to keep an eye on it.”
Mr. Allcock added that while there was a widely acknowledged industry standard for electric chargers, each company interpreted it differently. Each charging unit, for example, had a different interface, so drivers had to learn how to use them all. The chargers also synched with the vehicles in different ways and, when the units were in sleep mode, had different ways of rebooting.
Rani Boyle, a planner in the Planning, Sustainability and Real Estate division at the university, said that the charger manufacturers were asked not to put any advertisements on their machines or issue any member cards to consumers.
“In essence, we were asking them to make the machines dumber than the companies wanted,” she said. “It didn’t fit all the business models out there.”
Katya Dillman, a transportation policy adviser for Portland’s mayor, Sam Adams, said that the city was starting to track parking violations by type to determine whether and how often drivers of gasoline-powered cars parked illegally in spots reserved for electric vehicles.
Mr. Allcock of Portland General Electric raised another issue: how to notify drivers that the chargers were there. The utility is trying to determine where to place signs on Interstate 5 and other major roads to guide drivers to Electric Avenue. The project’s chargers also do not yet register on many GPS systems.
“Once you install them, you have to figure out how to get them up,” he said.
The last of the chemical weapons stockpile at the U.S. Army's Umatilla Chemical Depot has been successfully incinerated.
For nearly 50 years, it was the deathtrap next door: 3,717 tons of nerve gas and blister agent, a big part of America's chemical weapons arsenal, stored at a depot near the little town of Hermiston, Ore.
On the last Tuesday of every month, 76 large sirens mounted on 50-foot poles across three counties would emit a blast of sweet-sounding Westminster chimes, followed by a reassurance that this was only a drill -- if not, a loud blare would have sounded instead and residents would have known that a plume of some of the deadliest poison on Earth was headed their way.
On Tuesday, the sirens sounded for the last time -- only hours after the final chemical agents there were destroyed. The end of the three-year disposal effort marked one of the closing chapters for the United States' once-massive buildup of weapons of mass destruction.
The last ton of mustard agent at Umatilla was successfully torched at 9:17 a.m., leaving the U.S. with just three of nine original chemical weapons storage sites, the last of which is scheduled for full disposal by 2023. Even deadlier caches of VX and sarin nerve agent were destroyed earlier at the northern Oregon facility.
“It’s a great thing for a community to have that hazard gone, and we can have one less thing to worry about,” Jodi Florence of the Umatilla County Emergency Management Agency, part of the Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness program, said in an interview.
“Today, the employees of the Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility made their mark on history by completing agent destruction operations,” Gary Anderson, site project manager, said in a statement. “More than 1,000 dedicated Army and contractor employees have made Oregon safer for its citizens.”
Umatilla had sheltered 12% of the nation's original chemical arsenal since 1962. But with the end of the Cold War and a 1993 international convention outlawing the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, work to destroy the deadly agents began in 2004.
An inherently difficult job
It was a formidable task. With liquid poisons loaded into rockets, bombs, warheads, artillery shells and mines, designed to vaporize when exploded, engineers had to design an incineration facility that wouldn't be as dangerous as the weapons themselves.
Even a drop or two of some deadly nerve agents on the skin can produce a quick, miserable death.
Disaster scenarios suggested that a major earthquake at the facility, followed by fire, could send a plume of poisonous residue as far as Portland, Seattle or Spokane. Most of the deaths in any accident, though, were forecast to occur in the small towns of northern Oregon and southern Washington that surround the facility and have depended on it for about 1,300 well-paying jobs.
The deadline under the international convention for destroying stockpiles is 2012, but the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks propelled the Army into a different kind of urgency, with the storage depots around the country potentially inviting targets for attack or plunder.
Various technologies were studied, with the Army settling on a controversial process of incineration in furnaces capable of reaching 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to rapidly destroy the poisons, with slightly less intense furnaces to melt their metal containers with little danger of release.
A number of organizations, including the Sierra Club and the Chemical Weapons Working Group, tried mightily through the courts to halt the incineration program, conducted at sites in Alabama, Arkansas, Utah and Oregon (some other depots used a less controversial water-neutralization disposal method).
Efforts to halt destruction
They argued that tiny amounts of hazardous dioxin, furan, mercury and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons could be released through the smokestacks during incineration, leading possibly to low-level exposures hazardous to those nearby who ate from their gardens or fed children with breast milk.
Bob Palzer, chemical weapons coordinator for the Sierra Club in Oregon, said very little monitoring for emissions other than chemical agents was conducted.
“The kinds of monitoring they did at the site wouldn't detect releases [of other materials] in a timely manner. They were looking specifically for agent, but in fact there would be other compounds that were virtually as hazardous, and there was not monitoring done for that,” Palzer said in an interview.
Army officials countered that extensive studies had shown the operations would pose “no significant human health impacts.”
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality in its own risk assessment pointed out that the likelihood of cancer-causing exposures would be limited to an area immediately next to the incinerator site, where no one lived. Outside the depot fence, “there should not be any adverse health effects,” the assessment concluded.
A federal judge in 2009 concurred.
The project did have problems as it unfolded. A worker was exposed to a small amount of mustard blister agent in 2010 and developed a blister on his hip, even though he was wearing protective rubber gear. That incident prompted retraining of workers at the facility.
In September 1999, about 30 construction workers building the incineration plant were overcome by apparent exposure to an unknown substance. They argued unsuccessfully in a subsequent lawsuit that the substance was one of the chemical weapons agents.
Mostly, though, people lived with the ever-present, though very unlikely, possibility of a doomsday scenario -- a plume of nerve gas wafting toward town.
Facing the risk
The warning sirens were designed for that possibility. Nearby residents were also equipped with tone-alert radios to provide warning and updates in the event of a release. Many homes had large plastic sheets and duct tape to seal their homes if the day came.
“Sheltering in place simply means going into your home, shutting doors and windows, shutting off fans and any kind of air system that would bring outside air into your home, and just staying put until the emergency has passed,” Florence said.
Nobody ever needed them.
In the end, the warning sirens never got beyond the soothing Big Ben test chimes and the subsequent reassurance.
“Chemical weapons have been safely and successfully stored here for right at 49 years. It's been a long history, and for a number of the folks in the community, several generations of their families have been employed here at the depot,” Michael Fletcher, spokesman for Umatilla Chemical Agent Disposal Facility, said in an interview.
“So we're talking about satisfaction at a job well done, and they're realizing that in making the nation safer, they've worked themselves out of a job.”
Warning: This story might make your skin crawl.
A new study has found that the gas pump is the germiest, filthiest thing we touch in everyday life. That's according to Dr. Charles Gerba of the University of Arizona -- and he should know. A microbiologist, he's known by the nickname "Dr. Germ."
In research results released Tuesday, Gerba found that 71% of gas pump handles and 68% of corner mailbox handles are "highly contaminated" with the kinds of germs most associated with a high risk of illness. The study, reported in USA Today, says that 41% of ATM buttons and 43% of escalator rails are similarly teeming with germs.
Other highly contaminated places that many people probably never considered before, and now might fear using, are parking meters and kiosks, about 40% of which are fouled by germs. Crosswalk buttons and vending machines were tied at 35%.
As part of the study, hygienists swabbed suspected germ hotspots and then analyzed the findings. They used general industry sanitary standards as their benchmark, according to Gerba.
Gerba joined forces with Kimberly-Clark Professional's Healthy Work Place Project, a subsidiary of the manufacturer of tissues, hand sanitizer and the like. (The project's website says sick employees cost the average business about $1,320 per employee.)
So what are we supposed to do? Apparently, it's all about "hand hygiene" -- washing your hands throughout the day -- and wiping down your work station with a cleaning product (naturally) because a desktop, keyboard and computer mouse can be a breeding ground for germs, say the folks at Kimberly-Clark.
"As your computer boots up, wipe down your desk and mouse," Brad Reynolds, leader of Kimberly-Clark's Healthy Workplace Project, said in the USA Today article. He also advised swabbing conference tables between meetings.
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August 21, 2011
Song" on "Infinite Jest," the novel by David Foster Wallace.
LOS ANGELES — While there are many details in the life of Michael Schur, the co-creator and show runner of the NBC comedy “Parks and Recreation,” that convey his obsession with the David Foster Wallace novel “Infinite Jest,” perhaps the most salient is that his wife once forbade him from discussing that 1,079-page-long work of fiction at social gatherings. “If you were at a cocktail party and you go, ‘Oh, you’re a person who’s into this?’ ” Mr. Schur said recently at his office in Studio City, “now I know what you and I are doing for the next two hours. We’re talking about this.”
That fixation never fully subsided, and Mr. Schur has recently been reimmersing himself in “Infinite Jest,” Wallace’s 1996 opus about a near future of alienation, drug rehabilitation and calendar years sponsored by corporations.
His literary mania has been put to productive use in a new music video that Mr. Schur directed for the Decemberists, the Portland, Ore., rock band, set to its track “Calamity Song.”
It is a project that so fully combines Mr. Schur’s favorite
“If Scorsese had directed it,” he said, “I would have been like, why does he get that gig?”
The video, which makes its online debut on Monday, depicts the playing of Eschaton, a game invented by Wallace that he describes about 325 pages into “Infinite Jest.”
Adolescents from a New England tennis academy are seen ritualistically serving balls on a court onto which a map of the world has been superimposed. The balls, which represent five-megaton nuclear warheads, are aimed at objects labeled as military targets — power plants, missile installations — while a lone child oversees the game from a nearby computer terminal.
All in all, it ain’t exactly Battleship. Wallace himself wrote that the athletic skills required by Eschaton separated it “from rotisserie-league holocaust games played with protractors and PCs around kitchen tables.”
Colin Meloy, the Decemberists’ frontman, said he was not thinking specifically of “Infinite Jest” when he wrote the brightly apocalyptic “Calamity Song” for the band’s recent album “The King Is Dead,” though a lyric about “the year of the chewable Ambien tab” is a nod to the book.
Mr. Meloy, who finished reading “Infinite Jest” a couple of summers ago after a few failed attempts, was drawn to the Eschaton sequence as he thought of a video concept.
Yet when he pitched the idea to his management, executives at Capitol Records and prospective directors, Mr. Meloy said, “A lot of people were like, ‘I have no idea how you could possibly turn this into a music video.’ ”
Enter Mr. Schur, 35, who had never directed a music video before, but who attended Harvard with the brother of Mr. Meloy’s band’s manager and had more than a little familiarity with the author (who hanged himself three years ago at 46) .
Not long after the publication of “Infinite Jest,” Mr. Schur successfully persuaded the attention-shy Wallace to come to Cambridge, Mass., and receive an award from The Harvard Lampoon, the collegiate humor magazine that had been the stomping grounds of John Updike, George Plimpton and William Gaddis. During the visit, Mr. Schur said Wallace talked about his fear that he had unintentionally cribbed the Eschaton section from the Don DeLillo novel “End Zone,” which also uses sports and games as metaphors for war. Though Mr. DeLillo was ultimately unconcerned, Mr. Schur said Wallace “told me that for a week or so he had this really sinking feeling that his whole career was over.”
Mr. Schur also wrote his undergraduate thesis about “Infinite Jest” and how it bookended an era of postmodern literature that began with Thomas Pynchon’s “V.” “I tried to read it like a year ago,” Mr. Schur said of the thesis, “and I didn’t understand a word I had written.”
To create the “Calamity Song” video, which was filmed over a rainy July weekend in Portland before the heavy lifting began on the new “Parks and Recreation” season, Mr. Schur drew upon the volunteer support of his television colleagues, including his show’s costume, props and graphics departments. He said he did not worry about seeking permission from Wallace’s business representatives because he had recently acquired the film rights to “Infinite Jest.”
(Mr. Schur added that he had no immediate plans to film an “Infinite Jest” feature. “I like my current job a lot,” he said.)
Seeing even a portion of the beloved novel brought to life was “like a weird dream fugue,” he said, though he reluctantly accepted that his video could not end as the passage from “Infinite Jest” does, with a child’s having his head crashed into a computer monitor.
“They’re all flat screens now, and you can’t put your head through a flat screen,” he said.
Despite the grim stakes that are implied by Eschaton, Mr. Meloy said there was “almost a ‘Looney Tunes’ aspect” to the “Calamity Song” video. He made the case that its spirit of “hilarious chaos” was exactly what was needed in a time that sometimes feels as uneasy as the one Wallace envisioned in “Infinite Jest.”
“There’s this kind of resigned dark humor that people can hold onto,” Mr. Meloy said. “It can be a moment of levity. Whether or not we are really moving into the end times, I think is hard to say, but at least we can have a sense of humor as we go down.”
PORTLAND, Ore. — The scene at the Bitter End Pub one recent Saturday was a sports bar’s dream: With the Colorado Rapids about to face the hometown Timbers in a professional soccer game across the street at Jeld-Wen Field, hundreds of supporters of both teams were shoulder to shoulder, laughing and toasting their team’s success.
After a victory, Portland's Eric Brunner and Mamadou Danso hoist log slabs cut by the team's lumberjack mascot, Timber Joey.
So maybe the spirit of American soccer fandom has not attained the open hostility that pervades the sport in much of the world. But what is playing out in Portland, where the Timbers are the hottest ticket in town in their inaugural season in Major League Soccer and passionate fans are embracing some of the trappings of their European counterparts, suggests that soccer might finally be poised to become a big-league sport in the United States.
Portland has embraced its new M.L.S. team like no other American city. The city’s once-unloved downtown stadium, with a capacity of about 19,000, has been revamped and hailed as a model of urban planning. Being a member of the Timbers Army, the team’s colorful fan club, has become a hip social statement among young, urban fans, many of whom also follow teams in the English Premier League or Spain’s La Liga.
It has not hurt that Portland has a healthy mix of men and women in their 20s and 30s — fans that advertisers and broadcasters crave.
None of this was lost on the Timbers’ owner, Merritt Paulson, who bought the right to operate the team in 2007 with his father, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the former chairman of Goldman Sachs and United States Treasury secretary. The younger Paulson was looking for a growth opportunity and, after numerous visits, was convinced the Timbers were a winner. He paid about $15 million for the Timbers and the Beavers, the Class AAA baseball team in Pacific Coast League.
“This is a league on the rise,” Merritt Paulson said in his office overlooking the field. “We’ve hit that tipping point.”
The Timbers’ impressive M.L.S. debut comes on the heels of the league’s seemingly successful forays into Philadelphia, Toronto, Seattle and Vancouver, which also joined the league this year.
“It’s a cauldron of energy for our sport,” Don Garber, the commissioner of M.L.S., said of Portland and the Timbers. “You have a recipe for success that we hope to replicate elsewhere in the country.”
Portland’s heady mix of rabid fans, appealing stadium and healthy corporate boosters, though, may be harder to export to other cities, notably New York, which is expected to be awarded the league’s 20th club. Building a soccer stadium in New York is certain to be expensive, and fostering fan loyalty like that in Portland may be harder in a city dominated by so many other professional teams.
Portland may be more the exception among existing M.L.S. teams. D.C. United and New England, two charter clubs, have stumbled on the field and at the gate, while playing in large N.F.L.-size stadiums with little atmosphere. The Red Bulls, despite their new 25,000-seat arena in Harrison, N.J., have never won a league title and are often starved for attention. More broadly, M.L.S. lacks the rivalries needed to spark fan interest, either because the league is still relatively young or because the distances between cities is too great.
The Timbers’ move up to the top level of soccer in North America in Portland, the self-proclaimed Soccer City U.S.A., suggests that the league may have found the right formula. The Timbers have built on a rich history dating to the North American Soccer League. (Pelé played his last official pro game in Portland, the 1977 N.A.S.L. title game.) After the league folded in the mid-’80s, the Timbers drifted in and out of existence before re-emerging in 2001 as part of the United Soccer Leagues.
The team performed well and captured the imaginations of a small but hearty group of fans known as the Timbers Army that seems to revel in its love of a game and a city that have been largely defined by their outsider status. One Timbers Army fight song (sung to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine”) includes the lyrics “We are mental and we are green, we are the greatest football supporters that the world has ever seen.”
“We have a counterculture sense in Portland, and the Timbers Army made it more participatory,” said Dave Hoyt, the president of 107ist, a foundation associated with the group that has sold 10,000 of their custom-made team scarves, with the proceeds going to charity. “There’s a hunger to feel part of the community.”
Mr. Paulson seized on that sentiment when he purchased the rights to the team, although as wealthy outsiders in a left-leaning and sometimes insular city, the Paulsons were bound to raise eyebrows. While soccer fans applauded their efforts to win an M.L.S. team, for which the Paulsons paid a reported $35 million expansion fee, baseball fans felt snubbed when the Beavers were tossed out of their home so the Timbers could have a soccer stadium. After a fitful search for a new home, the Paulsons sold the Beavers, who were moved to Arizona.
Critics also felt that Merritt Paulson was heavy-handed in his dealings with the financially strapped city, which ultimately agreed to pay for about a third of the cost of the renovating the stadium, using money from ticket taxes and parking receipts at entertainment facilities, like the Rose Garden, home to the N.B.A. Trail Blazers, in Portland.
“Why the Paulson family needed public money is beside me,” said Jack Bogdanski, a professor of tax law at Lewis and Clark College. “He came into town highly suspect in my book.”
Others say the money was not well spent because, despite the renovation and M.L.S. guidelines for stadiums, the seats are still too narrow, the concourse cramped and the number of bathrooms inadequate.
The team, at least, enjoys unquestioned popularity. The hottest tickets are those behind one of the goals, where 3,600 members of the Timbers Army have seats. An hour before kickoff, with scalpers buzzing outside the park and valets busy parking bicycles, the Army was inside waving flags and singing fight songs, including “Bury Me in Timbers Green” and “Onward Rose City.” They did not sit down or stop singing until the final whistle.
“It’s the cheers and the players coming to the stands to celebrate with us that got me,” said Heidi Grossaint, who has followed the team for four years. “My friends lined up at 7 a.m. to get seats. There’s an atmosphere of hanging out.”
Timber Joey, who cuts slices from a hefty tree stump after Timbers goals, had to settle for revving up his chain saw to excite the crowd, the Timbers having failed to score. But as the Timbers Army often sings, “There’s no pity in the Rose City.”
Photographs by Andrea Fuentes-DiazOne of the three Captured by Porches beer buses making its rounds in Portland, Ore.The Portland, Ore., metro area boasts more craft breweries than any other city in the world. One of the smallest is Captured By Porches, a literal “mom and pop” operation based in the nearby suburb of St. Helens. The mom and pop in question are Suzanne Moodhe and Dylan Goldsmith, for whom a home brewing hobby has become a sustainable family business with seasonal offerings, reusable packaging and a one-of-a-kind home: the Captured By Porches Mobile Public Haus, a bar on wheels that takes advantage of Portland’s spirit of mobile culinary adventure and loose alcohol regulations.
Captured by Porches’s summer brew, Two Cats Kölsch, next to their flagship beer, Invasive Species.There are three beer buses, spread across Portland’s warren of eclectic neighborhoods, and they serve between four and eight craft ales, allowing patrons to fill home-brought Mason jars and other assorted containers for $5. Captured By Porches’ flagship beer, the Invasive Species IPA, uses local hops and smoothly toes the line between sweet and pleasantly bitter, making for a pint that’s crisp, forward and floral. This summer’s seasonal, the Two Cats Kölsch, is a straw-colored German-style ale/lager hybrid with notes of mellow citrus and banana.
“We just can’t make enough beer,” quips Brian White, a brewer and occasional mobile bartender for Captured By Porches. Hence the operation’s recent expansion from a nano-brewery (roughly two kegs at a time) to a proper microbrewery. Passing by its Alberta Street location, a converted milk truck emblazoned in green and red, a curious local stops to ask: “Is there really a brewing company here? Inside a bus?”
“Yeah, for sure,” White says, his eyes brightening. “We’re open Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Do you live around here?”
Captured By Porches Mobile Public Haus, Portland, Ore.: 3221 SE Division Street; Kruger’s Farmers Market, Sauvie Island; 2223 NE Alberta Street. Tap service Thursday, Friday and weekends. Go to ccapturedbyporches.com
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