Zoobombing Out the Bubble

 
      Many friends suggested I wouldn't like Portland, that it was a liberal hyperbole of a city, hipsters and home gardens and Oregon progressivism--a whole lot of people living in an ideal bubble where nothing serious could burst it.  My friends were right and wrong.  The Northwestern cities of Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver are like bubbles.  As long as you don't mind the absence of sunshine, you can live a young person's life more or less the way you want it, working forty hours a week, drinking delicious craft beer, eating local foodie food everyday, taking drugs openly, hiking our country's greatest mountains and trails on the weekend.
        It's a good life, where the weird can blend into the mainstream while in other cities in other states you'd be looked at as a freak or criminal.  But even bubbles have their sub-cultures, the freaks away from the freaks.   In Portland, the city accepts them too.
       Every Sunday night, starting at 9 o'clock, a group of bike nuts called Zoobombers collect at 13th and Burnside downtown.  There was a pole on the corner the city built for them.  The pole was twenty feet tall and capped by a mini metal bicycle statue.  At the the base were thirty or more children's bicycles, or "mini's" chained to the pole.  Every Sunday the Zoobombers unchain the bikes and carry them onto the local train, the "Max," and then ride the elevator up to Washington Park.  They gather in a field above the zoo, one of the higher elevation points in the city.  Then they ride the mini's down the twisting roads to the bottom, several hundred feet below.  Sometimes the mini's have no brakes and they have to use their feet to stop.

          I didn't have a mini, but an adult bike I borrowed from a friend on my last night in Portland.  There was no one at the statue so I rode around until I saw a hipster riding a mini down Alder Avenue.  
        "You're lucky," he said.  "You would have never found the place on your own."
         Dave carried a motorcycle helmet with him on onto the Max.
         "A lot of us don't have dental insurance.  So if you fall and break your teeth..."
         I had preconceived bombing as a weekly recreation, a quirky Portland thing that quirky Portland hipsters do on Sunday nights, but for Dave and the other long-standing members, it was an attitude and lifestyle.  Dave had just come back from a month-long vacation in Hawaii.  Not to surf or scuba-dive but to bomb the hills of Honolulu and any other island town with steep semi-paved roads.   He had organized a small operation where a local driver would carry their bikes to the top with a truck and then pick them up at bottom and do it again.
          "A bunch of Asian girls wanted to join us, but they chickened out," he said.  'They left us a 12-pack though."  I thought of my own friends who did not come out with me.   Haley, my hostess and a serious biker in Portland had accidentally been caught in a group of zoobombers once before.  "It was terrifying," she said.  She stayed home this night, not wanting to chance injury.
          Dave explained the risk, how zoobombing is not as dangerous as people say it is.  No more dangerous than driving a car or commuting by bicycle.
         "I mean, you're going to crash if you keep doing it.  Even if you ride a bike regular, you have to crash eventually, like, you might might ride a 1,000 years but then you'll crash that one time."
         I thought about risk and my own tolerance for it compared to others.  What Dave said made sense.   We can all calculate risk in terms of where we are and what we're doing, but we can never account for the majority of other factors that determine the outcome, namely other people around us.  
       When we get to the top we take a dark trail through the woods to the top of the hill where we could see the city from opposite sides, but where nobody could see us.  The field was lit by the moon and everyone gathered in a circle in the grass and smoked and drank and listened to ideas about throwing a zoo-bomb block party which had to be called a community event since no one lived on that block.
        After an hour there were almost thirty of us.   Someone called "2 minutes.  Everyone finished their beer and cigarettes.  We picked up our bikes and went to the road where it crested.
       Dave explained the rules with a call and response:
      "What do you say if you see a car?"
      "Car!" everyone shouted.
      "If you see a cop?"
      "Pepper!"
       "What do you do if you crash?"
       "Get the fuck off the road!"

       The longboarders went first.  Then the min-bikes.  A veteran with a feathered mohawk on his helmet cleared his throat and halted the other mini's.
      "Listen!  I've been riding for a long time and if there's one thing everyone should know, it's that you look very gay when you zoobomb!" The mini-bikes took off.  Then the adult bikes lined up and went.  Most nights there was a medic in case of a crash. There was none tonight.
     

  
             The hills were less steep than I expected but the switchbacks were sharp and dark.  We ignored stop signs.  I tugged my coaster brakes at all the turns and when I got to the bottom five minutes later my brakes smelled like burning rubber.
         I went back up a second time.  At the top seven veterans announce a "hellway detour," and took a quick left to bomb again, this time using the highway.  The rest of us went back up into the park.  They form a circle again and drink and smoke for another hour.  It was midnight.  It began to rain.
       All the bombers picked up their bikes and boards and headed for the road.  But instead of bombing they sought "sanctuary" under a pavilion.  I was sober and restless.  Dave noticed me anxiously peddling in circles by the road.  He gave me directions to bomb the hill myself.  This time I kept off the brakes.  I howled and I whooped as I soared downward, turning and gliding, gliding and turning, down and out of the park, through downtown, past Powell's bookstore and the foodtrucks, past cops in cars and cops on bikes, across the bridge and back towards my bed for the night.
        The next day I got on the Cascades train bound for Seattle.  Haley, my hostess, got hit by a Portland cop car that pulled out of a parking garage without looking.  Her bike was totaled.  They blamed her.  

For more information check the BBC report video and report here

       
 
        
     

The Coast Starlight

"I sought trains; I found passengers."  - Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar

 The Coast Starlight is a superliner Amtrak passenger train running from Los Angeles to Seattle.  It is 1,377 miles and was formerly known as the Southern Pacific Coast Daylight and you had to transfer to Union Pacific to get all the way up.  When Amtrak took over it merged the lines.  I took it from Emeryville, CA to Portland, OR overnight.  

The Coast Starlight out of Emervyille.  Departing 10:07 pm

       Paulo was tall and Canadian, and he didn't believe in bordeom.  "It's a first-world disease" he said.  He had homes in San Francisco and Vancouver and travels back and forth often, mostly by train.  He ate cheetohs, but calls them "cheesies."  He offered me some.  I ate them and offered him scotch.  It was 10:30 pm and the rest of our car was sleeping including an Amish family of twelve men, women, and babies.  Paulo went to find cups and ice and I headed to the observation car, the place people who can't sleep go at night. 

        The observation car, or lounge car, is adjacent to the dining car but above the snack car.  The observation car has wider windows and a second row of windows that curves into a dome-like extension of the ceiling, so that passengers can admire the Pacific sky.  The car is divided in half, with a section of containing a single row of seats facing the window like in a movie theatre, and lined with shallow window-side countertops.  The other section had dining tables and booths, not unlike a diner.   Something like it can be found on most trains, but it's more refined on the Coast Starlight, a 1,389 mile trip rail ride from Los Angeles to Seattle, and a model for commercial classism.  Passengers in sleeping cars have their lounge car with lacy drapes along the windows and flowers in the bathrooms.  They have wine and champagne tasting in the afternoon.  They were more peaceful and civil and that half of the train and if you tried to cross to the other side you'd have to show your ticket or turn around.  Our side was louder and nearly classless There were half a dozen men already drinking at the tables.   No man sat together.   The loudest were charming but vulgar.

         "If you sit together, you're gay!"  Paulo left my table.  They were all older than 30.  Everyone seemed to have their own liquor or beer.

         A young, stocky white guy with a white baseball cap and glasses leaned against the window with his feet out in the aisle.  He held a beer from the snack car in his hand. 

         "Alcohol is illegal on the reservation.  That's where I lived all my life.  I'm 29 years old now."  He sipped his beer like it was his first time drinking, his first time away from the reservation.  He sat in the booth next to Andrew.   Andrew was half-Egyptian, wore a blue cap, and was louder than anyone else at that hour.  He made fun of everyone in succession sitting in the car, but when asked about his racial identity he became more serious.

        "When I went to Egypt, I looked around, and realized, holy shit!  I'm not white!  It was one of the two most profound realizations, turning points really, in my life."  He didn't tell us the other one.  In his bag he had a bottle of 2 buck chuck wine which he poured into plastic cups of ice to make "wine spritzers."  He had four cups of ice.  

         Everyone on the lounge car was male and offensive.   They talked about the lack of women in the observation car constantly.  When Kenny, another white male in a baseball cap, arrived he asked, "Where all the women at, yo?"

        "What are you talking about?" Andrew said, "I'm getting my dick sucked by a hot-ass ghost right now.  Can't you see?"  

        All the most inveterate train travelers bring their own liquor.  They also realize the futility in learning the real names of each other, knowing we would likely never see each other again.  Mark became Paco because he was Mexican.  Billy became Sam Elliot because he dressed like a cowboy and looked like Sam Eliot from The Big Lebowski.  I became Klaus because I looked like an Austrian accountant, or a German internet mogul; they couldn't decide which.  Of all the travelers, Sam Eliot was the most veteran, the most wily.  He looks older than 60 maybe 70, and he spoke slowly and cryptically, sometimes with the intention of adding to his aura of old-man mystery and wisdom.  He was vulgar, charming, and without manners.   He had a wild grey beard and mustache, but shaved his sideburns, and wore a brown suede vest over a worn and faded blue linen shirt.  He wore boots and although he didn't have spurs, something metal on his body always jingled when he walked.  He carried a cowboy hat with a single white feather tucked into a rope around the inner-brim, but he only wore it when he got up to leave the car.  A knife stuck out of his back pocket.

       "So what are you?"  Andrew asked, pouring another wine spritzer, "a cowboy or an artist?"  

      "Well," he said with a drawl, "I'm a moonshiner.  Moonshiner by day, female escort by night."  Everyone laughed.  

      "How's business?" 

      "Lousy."  

      Somewhere before Davis, CA, James, a young black man going to see a girl in Sacramento, pulls out a napkin with marijuana in it.  The whole car smells.   He offers to sell it.   We tell him he should stay on the train, forget about the girl. 

      "Naw, man, I never leave California."   When he left the car Kenny put down his beer and pulled out a large bag of his own marijuana, more than an ounce, and offered to get everyone high at the next stop.  

     At Sacremento the train stopped for thirty minutes for what Amtrak unofficially calls a "smoke stop."  Everyone filed out behind Kenny.  I stayed behind in the observation car and poured another drink.  Andrew doubles back and shows me he has his own stash.  The two of us leave out a different car and smoke between the tracks, behind a truck, a couple grown men acting like teenagers in a state where it's practically legal.  An Amtrak employee filling the train's tank with gas spotted us.  He told us it is safer on the other side of the train.  

     By two in the morning Kenny was asleep and James had left us for his girl.  Frank, another stocky white man in a baseball cap, joined us.  He said he had some new property and a home in Washington.  

    "Where is it?" asks Paco.

    "I don't know.  All I know I get off the train and there's a bitch waiting for me in a car."  Paco explains that there is always a better woman out there then the one you have and talks about the pros and cons of sleeping with 19 year old's.  When he is out of rum he puts a banana and a condom on the table in front of me in exchange for my scotch.  I take the banana.  He has two more bananas which, after a couple more drinks, he starts to fondle and handle obscenely.  The more he drinks the louder he gets.  A pair of Amtrak employees come through and ask us to be quieter.  Sam Eliot puts his hat on and leaves.  He comes back with a guitar.

      "Now it's over," he says.  He sings folk songs about Paulo and Canada and Checkpoint Charlie's in New Orleans.  He sings about Egyptians and whiskey and marijuana and trains.  He sings about murder and betrayal and horses.   By two in the morning they herd around me because I'm the only one with alcohol left and the snack car is closed.  Sam Eliot is throwing money at me for my whiskey, which I don't accept.  I pass the bottle around until it's empty.  By three in the morning Andrew has gotten off the train, and Paulo, Kenny, and Frank are asleep.  Sam Eliot is still playing guitar and Paco is shouting amicably at some new fellows who joined us because there were too many crying babies in their car.  

Klaus, Paco, and Sam Eliot (not the real Sam Eliot)

        My bottle was empty and I was finally tired.  I left and fell asleep at my seat by the window.  

       When I woke up we were in Oregon and there was a wide rainbow sprouting from Upper Klamath Lake, the largest lake in Oregon  The rainbow climbed across the mountains and vanished behind a blanket of stratus clouds.  The Amish family was now awake and moving around the car, feeding babies, and eating hot noodle cups for breakfast.  There were twelve of them.  They had taken the train from Wisconsin to Tijuana where they went white water rafting, surfing, and rode jetskis across the Pacific shore.  They were headed back to their farm, where they are completely self-sufficient by growing all their own food.  For money they sell timber and chickens.  

      I went to the lounge car to drink coffee and write down some notes.  Two men with microphones narrated the sights outside the window:  "root beer falls," the longest covered bridge in Oregon, visual histories of landslides and their ability to disrupt and halt train service, Crater Lake National Park, lakes, mountains, rivers, falls, until it all seemed mundanely beautiful and green.  

        Sam Eliot was sitting at a table in the corner gambling with two older men and a young college student wearing University of Oregon swag.  By 10:15 Sam Eliot opened his first beer.   Paulo joined me after eating breakfast with the Amish.  He explained his theory in boredom, which is to say, he doesn't believe in it, unless he's in captivity.  The Amish sat next to us and spoke quietly in German, looking out the window and listening to the commentary.  Sam Eliot talked about them from the corner, "They're so quiet and dull.  Like sheep."  He felt they were his antithesis, the very opposite of himself and what he believes in, quiet people who could't enjoy life because they were square.  He hadn't talked to them yet; didn't know they had been on jet skis and rafts in Mexico. 

        When the commentators stopped their presentation at 11:30, Sam Eliot was on his third beer.  He picked up his guitar and howled.  This startled the Amish.  He began to sing a country bluegrass song about murder. 

        I got my bags ready as we headed into Portland.  The college kid was trying to sell a new iPhone 4 for $100 because he lost all his money in the morning poker game and didn't have enough to buy his next train ticket home.  Sam Eliot was irritated because he couldn't find liquor in Eugene and he is tired of beer.  He cornered the Amish men at the stop before to talk to them.  When they get back on the train they break from their English to make fun of him, "He says he is going to have a good time, and, try to stop him."  They laughed.  "He say nobody can stop him, nobody can stop him from having fun."  

       They all changed their appearance as they prepared to leave the Coast Starlight for the Empire Builder.  The men wore wide-brimmed tan hats and black vests and black shoes.  The women wore black dresses and a second black bonnet to cover their white one.  They even wrap their babies in black blankets that look like sacks that look like shrouds.  It looks disturbing at first until I see the baby that was just crying and is now silent and sleepy, so cozy in its layers that for a moment I have the infantile desire to go back twenty-six years in my life, to be that Amish baby, traveling by train from Tijuana up the green, watery Pacific coast, wrapped warmly in a series of black and white blankets.         

        They got off the train in front of me to wait inside Union Station.  Their next train headed East.  I helped them with their bags and waved goodbye.  I had two days in Portland.  Then another train North.   

        

In Portland. The Amish families on the right.

     

A Whole Different Animal

For the next month or two I will be documenting my travels across the country while on vacation from New Orleans.  Each segment will be amount my specific mode of transportation for that segment of the trip and the passengers I ride with.  This is my first post of the trip.      

       My train journey began on a plane.  I had sixteen days to travel the perimeter of the States, from California to Vancouver to New York, and the Sunset Limited from New Orleans to Los Angeles would take 48 hours of it.  So I flew to San Francisco instead.  It took three connecting flights to get there.  The first two were run by an airline company based out of Denver called Frontier.  They were newer, smaller, and their pilots less adept at landing planes without inducing extreme anxiety amongst their passengers. 
       When we landed in Denver the pilot thanked us.  "Thank you for flying Frontier: We're a whole different animal." 
      A female soldier in her uniform woke up in front of me.  "Did they really say that or did I just imagine it in my sleep?"
    "It's true," I told her.  "Look at the airplane tails."  There were two Frontier planes parked next to us.  On the tails they had painted large colorful photographs of wild animals.  A lynx, an arctic ram.  Ours had a bobcat. 
     In Kansas City International Airport there were designated tornado shelters, usually the sublevel corridors that lead to the underground parking garage.  In Denver's airport there were also tornado shelters, most often the men's bathroom, even though no one in Denver has died of a tornado in fifty years.  I used it, feeling safe, and hustled onto my final plane, through United.  They would not let a woman on because they couldn't identify where she got her boarding pass.  Frontier had issued it.  She had been the Frontier flight to somewhere in California until she refused to give up her seat so a mother and her daughter could sit together.  She caused a scene by protesting, not knowing that airports were poor places to be noticed, or take any kind of stand, political or personal.  Don't be noticed is the best rule of thumb.  She was asked to leave the plane.  The police were called.  Then they put her on United. 
       "I'm suing," she said into her phone.  "They can't treat me like that.  I didn't do anything wrong, yeah, I'm gonna sue."  Then she began to cry.  The person on her phone told her he wouldn't pick her up.  "Fine, I don't care, I'll just a take a cab.  I don't care anymore."  She cried for twenty minutes until she fell asleep.
      
         I arrived in San Francisco at night.  A friend picked me up and for the next two days I rode his bike along the coast, across the bridge, though parks, and up and down large hills.  At night we drank beer and walked around, reveling in the color of the city: hippies with dreads to their knees in the Mission, cross-dressing transexuals in the Castro, the erotic cookie shop, a guy who built lasers with things from his house with things from his kitchen, carpet-cleaning robots, and pubs with interiors made of glow lights and sheet metal.  
        I left on a Friday night after a final beer in the lower Haight.  I went to the back of the bus where I met Dylan, or Dylah the Killah, and a recently released felon celebrating his birthday with his girlfriend.  Dylah was thinking of opening a 4 Loko, but he had just "woken up on the beach, and was like, what the fuck?" after drinking one before.
        "Last time I drank one of those I cracked my rib," I told him. 
        "So you can appreciate the aeshetics of it."  Dylah was a rapper. He was high on cocaine and maybe acid. The felon was celebrating his birthday.  He spent his last five birthdays in jail and now he was arguing with his girlfriend. 
      "That's fucked up.  I don't care care about your feelings?!  How the fuck can you say I don't care about your feelings?  Of course I fuckin' care for your feelings.  And it's my birthday, goddamnit, my first out..." Dylah the Killah tells him he should fix his attitude and think more positively.  That this was a cause to celebrate and he was "going to fuck it all up with that negativity."  He offers to sell him acid to cheer him up. They agree to meet up later and then the felon and his girlfriend get off.
      I asked Dylah where I should get off to get to Emerville, but he didn't know. He raps about a blonde that is standing in the doorway.  He uses five or six-syllable words and improvises complex rhymes.  He raps about all the drugs he is on.  I ask the busdriver where I need to get off, but he doesn't know either.
       I figured it out, taking another MUNI bus, and wandering through a series of parking lots in the suburbs of Oakland to find an AMTRAK station with busted lights and a few people asleep in chairs inside.  I figured the train would be a step down in excitement, a relaxed footbridge to the next city.  I would ride the train and look out the window, reading, writing, drinking alone, thinking.  I was wrong. 

NOTES:  The felon was given that epithet, not in disrespect of citizens released from prison, but because I didn't catch his name or want to make it up here.  He was proud about his prison term just as he was proud to be free again.  Next post coming soon: The Coast Starlight and Portland