Dinner with lawyers at Papa Haydn on North West 23rd in Portland, tears and wine, talk of our fathers gone, and celebration too that settlement is all but wrapped in the Oregon access case, walk back down Burnside past the Volvo dealer where the ramp I built, sometimes jackhammering sideways, as the only laborer many years ago still stands, a monument that will last, a kind of epitaph, we pass the First Baptist Church, souls in rough clothes spread on the sidewalk, a huge dog, a few people on the steps, dealing I figure, a scene from the Middle Ages, the next morning, Adam, a bureau chief, walks along to the federal building on Third and Madison where I poured concrete in 1974 with an all-black crew from the parking garage up 18 floors, now put my hand on the building to feel it, then walk down a block to the state courthouse at First and Madison where, when we ask for the clerk’s office, a young girl at the information desk sends us to “administration” on the seventh floor, where when I say we are from Courthouse News on the phone that sits there, out comes the clerk herself, trim, direct, friendly too, when in leaving I say she would have been a good witness, she answers she was ready, then down to the second floor where terminals are spread in an airy room, full of light, that at the back where the clerks work, looks onto the Willamette River, and where the young, black woman at the self-help desk is truly helpful when I say I want to check out a courtroom, directing us to a landlord-tenant court in session, modern, kind of Scandinavian interior, light-colored wood, a former heroin addict is explaining why he missed an earlier hearing, before the judge with a slight accent, southern it seems, gives him a chance at another hearing, then up a block and over one to the corner of Madison and Third into the federal courthouse standing behind new brushed steel blast doors that unfold down in front of the entrance at night and when demonstrators attack as they did for weeks on end, like a fortress in a sci-fi future, up to the 14th floor where the judge has kept the empty courtroom open, as though waiting for us to testify, lights turned way down, partly in shadow, sepulchral, dark red wood against black upholstery for jurors and counsel, churchlike, heavy with moments past and those to come, the witness seat where Adam was to testify right close to the judge, where I was going to testify that after graduating from Reed as a literature major, I became a journalist because Mark Twain started that way, the table where the lawyers would have argued, the jury box where the law clerks would be, a pair of modern tapestries, reflection of centuries-old wall covering, on either side of the room, whereupon we go down and out under the blast doors and hit the road, south to Bend checking state courthouses, some recently rebuilt, others beat up by time and industrial application of court machinery, a night of beers in Bend, at a restaurant in an old catholic school, first catholic school west of the Rockies, then a bar in an alley, next day onto Crater Lake where the immensity of the crater and the clear, deep, cobalt-blue color of the water hit us all, we hike down to the water, where a father and son from Ohio leap off a promontory into the lake, “that was stupid,” says the father as he swims to shore, we only dangle our feet in the cold water, wish we had jumped, onto Medford, stop at the courthouse built in brutalist style, in a town that says hard scrabble, onto Jacksonville nearby, newfound wine country, stay in an old sanitorium with Christian invocations on the wall, one from the Isle of Wight about new life represented in the dawn, walk to a tavern where the bartender, small and quick, sips something not coffee from a coffee cup, says “wine and weed!” explaining the wealthy economy of a region where she cannot afford to live, dinner at Back Porch barbecue with local Dos Mariposas red wine, a woman at the next table leans toward us, laughing, to explain that the woman at her table is slow and has just been taught to play the slots along the wall, and that night had won two jackpots of $240 and $400 dollars, back to Portland to pick up Chris’s trailer and his dog Grace, on to the coast of Oregon at Lincoln City, the Anchor Inn, nautical in all accoutrements, wall paper in the form of nautical charts, dark, varnished wood furniture, a painting above the bed of a fully-rigged Clipper ship in high seas, drink South Swell lager at the Rusty Truck brewery a short walk away along Highway 101, an aging waitress with an athlete’s form brings the beers, drive up the coast to Cannon Beach where Chris, western bureau chief, runs on the beach with Grace occasionally checking back on him as she gallops happily on the sand wet from mist and drizzle, and back to Portland in the afternoon, driving through a deep-green forest of cedar, fir, redwood and hemlock, in a hard rain.
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