First I pull out of the A.R.T parking garage and wait at the shortest red light in the city - always red when I drive up, always green immediately after I brake.
Then I drive up a hill and southward to Salmon. I always, without fail, pass Taylor and think "oh God! I've missed it! Now this insane city of one way streets will make me get on a freeway I don't want!" And then I get to the next stoplight and there it is. (And this light, somehow, is almost always green when I get there.)
[And there is often a couple hugging or kissing on the corner, but it never seems to be the same couple.]
Salmon: currently my favorite street to drive eastward, towards the river. Since the day after Halloween, most of the trees along Salmon have been roped with small white Christmas lights, which at first threw me off and now makes me happy. I don't like having Christmas show up right after Halloween, but I like the having the lights show up right after day light savings has made it dark so early.
I drive down hill on Salmon for a while, passing a parking garage where the bus always stops and a music store that has over-sized Play, Pause, Rewind, Fast Forward and Stop buttons painted on the side, as if the building itself was a walkman. I know I'm getting close to the river when I pass Occupy Portland.
Right after all the tents and hula-hooping protesters (I've often thought of Dewey girls), I reach a stop light with a "two way" sign posted next to it, which I always find a little funny. In every city, you assume each street is two ways unless a sign tells you it's not. Here, you need a sign to tell you it is, Portland has so many one way streets.
Then SW Natio Parkway, then the Ross Island Bridge.
Portlanders are proud of their neighborhood bridges and though the Ross Island bridge is not the most majestic bridge to cross the Willamette, it is my bridge. When I drive west on it, going into the city, I love looking at the downtown sprawled across a tree-filled mountain side. It's so orange and red and yellow and cosmopolitan all at once. But when I'm going home, I'm driving east across and then I love to see the scattered lights in the middle of the river, where construction is happening. I like to watch SE come closer and feel the darkness close in and then pull back as I pass the middle point of the bridge and leave the river.
After the bridge is Powell, and after Powell, home. I pull in and always look up to our apartment's windows. I can never see Mo through them and I don't actually glean any information by looking, but I always look.
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