Keep America Weird
A Letter From Oregon
It’s Thanksgiving, and I am wandering the empty streets of Portland, Oregon. A few other people are out; mostly homeless men quietly carrying their bags or occasionally shouting at me. A woman wearing a sparkly, Santa-coloured stetson is searching for something in the bushes outside the central library. Beside a French boulangerie, a young Black man under layers of clothes looks at me with bright eyes and says, “Happy Thanksgiving, sir!”
“And to you to!” I say smiling, unsure of the exact etiquette of the celebration. What do people actually do on Thanksgiving?
“Gotta keep a positive attitude!” he says encouragingly, before wandering off to drink from a water fountain.
At the gate boarding the plane, a woman had warned me, “Oregon is a dump.” She grew up there, she said, but had migrated north over the Columbia river into Washington State. Both states seemed similar to me, rural wilderness and buzzing cities, but clearly the firs are a bit greener on her side.
From London the flight in winter a 10-hour twilight as you chase the sun at 500mph against the earth’s rotation. The sky turned deep blue as we headed north over Greenland’s ice sheet but then the sun rose again as we flew south towards the States. As a final flourish, Mount Hood, the exact representation of the volcano emoji, but topped with early snow, not lava, was the final sign for the plane and the sun to drop below the clouds. My first impressions of Oregon were good, despite what the fellow passenger had said.
Another friend texted on landing, “Oregon is lovely; its politics are ugly.” As if to underline this, a quick, pre-bed trip to a local CVS pharmacy store revealed snacks locked behind glass with security tags on literally everything. Bags of nuts, tagged. Cereal bars, tagged. The green-haired assistant explained apologetically that otherwise homeless people would just come in and take them. She unlocked the trail mix and handed it to me.
The state was the first to decriminalise drug possession in 2020, but it reversed this officially in 2024. New laws since May of this year allow the removal of tented encampments in the city. I saw people openly injecting and smoking drugs on most of my walks around the city centre; there were only a few tents.
I was here in search of weirdness and it delivered. Austin, Texas may have claimed the motto first, but Keep Portland Weird fits perfectly. The city feels very like Glasgow but with volcanoes. Yet Oregon is far larger than one city and, like the country as a whole, is a diverse patchwork of physical and political geographies. I wanted to explore them.
In big cities it can actually be harder to find people for my portraits as you are a whisper in the noise. New York was a case in point. In Arkansas I had contacts in communities, but for Portland uptake was slower, so I had decided this would be the first location in my Gingers of America project where I would make a call-out in the media, despite knowing what could, and did, happen next.
The Willamette Week ran a great wee piece and responses flooded my inbox, like a spring thaw flooding the Columbia river. Hundreds of people populated my Gingers of America map, skewing it entirely but also offering some glorious examples of humanity.
I want to share them with you in early 2025.
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All images and text © Kieran Dodds 2024