The Springwater
I live in Portland Oregon. More specifically, I live in the Lents neighborhood which is deep in South East Portland. Historically, the Lents neighborhood has been ignored and neglected since the the city put a freeway through the center of it in the 1960s. My neighbors are recent immigrants or people who have lived here so long they remember when it was mostly fruit orchards and cow fields. I think my neighbors and I have the die-hard spirit that is needed to live in a part of town bisected with a freeway, and ignored by the city. To me, this is the real Frontier, the real West.
When Woody Guthrie, singer of classic American resistance songs like This Land Is Your Land, found himself in Portland, he found himself in Lents. Famously, he said “Portland is a place where rich ones run away to settle down and grow flowers and shrubbery to hide them from the massacres they’ve caused.” He is not wrong. The boarding house he stayed in for like a month in the 1930s has been given historical status. This never made any sense to me as he had nothing good to say about Portland so why we would want to enshrine the place the folk singer saw all of Portland’s dirty laundry is a mystifying question to me. I walk by his house all the time and I think about what he said and the songs he sung .
The Springwater Corridor is a twenty mile stretch of decommissioned railroad tracks that run south east from the waterfront in Sellwood all the way to Boring Oregon. Jut like everything else, it runs right through Lents. On a good day you can see Mt. Hood from the trail. It is supposed to be a pleasant, family friendly hiking trail with sections of it reserved as a picturesque bird santuary. It is very popular with bike commuters because of its one percent grade and arrow straight path. Like every where in Portland the dominant vegetation is thorny blackberries, the kind that grow a foot a day and will slice and dice the shins of anyone who tries to penetrate them to get to the adjoining creek the runs along the trail.
Over the last ten years, as the homelessness crises worsened, people started to clear out the blackberries and set up tents. Huge camps were be set up in and encircled by the blackberries, something like a Boma in the Serengeti. From the asphalt trail of the Springwater it is hard to tell just how many people are living behind the blackberries on the trail. That is, until the pandemic. People with no other place to go seemed to find themselves on the Springwater.
This is an ongoing project for me. The Springwater Corridor and all of its residents is just five hundred feet from my house. I take a walk on the same stretch of the Springwater nearly everyday because it has become a part of my daily routine. The people who live along the trail have also become my neighbors, in a way. At least that is what I tell them when I introduce myself.
