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.
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