While rolling along on my daily commute, I saw a realty sign for 503 Properties. It has a bold blue logo, and it started a thought-stream. With all the talk of gang shootings, tagging, etc… it reminded me of a kid I met a couple years ago. He’s a skater-punk, and his tag was “503″. I’m guessing one of those realty signs will be adorning his bedroom wall any day now.
503, for our out-of-town readers, (welcome!) is Portland’s telephone area code. For the longest time it was the whole state’s area code, but thanks to cell phones, iPhones, fax machines, (remember those quaint devices?) we have run out of numbers. So Portland kept 503, the majority of the rest of the state was issued different area codes, and we all started dialing ten digits.
PDX is Portland’s airport moniker, but has been adopted for use everywhere. (We’re using it now. See the pretty banner above.) It’s all over, but isn’t used much outside of Portland. Duh. It means “Portland”.
I grew up outside of the city, east of Sandy. The locals there considered themselves apart from Portland, and were proud of it. “We don’t need no gol-danged city folks messin’ with our Hee Haw lifestyle,” was a sentiment often conveyed by my parents’ friends. Having discovered TriMet, I could have the best of both worlds.
They are two different worlds. Folks indigenous to Portland may not realize there’s a whole other Oregon out there. Portland has the glam and glitter, (okay, black clothes and iPhones) and the rest of the state has a more western, rustic feel. I read Rainn Wilson’s tweets and wonder if the whole world thinks of Oregonians as “slow-moving sun bears in socks and sandals.”
When I think of PDX, I think of the fair city we love and worship at this site here. When I think of 503, I think of the highway to Mt Hood. I think of the upper Clackamas River, with its natural hot springs and hiking trails. I think of the ocean beaches, which I still haven’t visited this millennium. (One second while I cuss and kick something.) I think of the smells. Whenever I get more than five miles away from a freeway, I stop and look around, trying to figure out what’s missing? It’s the funk of car exhaust and other city smells. Getting out to where the only thing you smell is nothing? It’s a wonderful thing.
I don’t care what anyone says. Drinking stream water from a tin cup will always taste better than any foofy bottled water that costs $2.49.
I’ve got this crazy urge to get the hell away from the city for a while. I want to smell air. I want to smell the ocean. I want to eat a roadside berry that tastes like a berry and not car exhaust. I want to take a nap under a tree without having a bum come up and ask me for a cigarette. I want to see nurseries and farms and coyotes that don’t have a cardboard “need beer” sandwich board on their back.
I wanna take my PDX colors off for just a little bit, touch base with my 503 country roots, and be back in time for the food carts to open. Because, let’s face it, after a day or two in the outdoors I start missing the Twitter, the miniskirts, the cable TV. I even miss giving the Dust Bunnies the stink-eye. It probably wouldn’t take two days for me to start missing the city; the last time I went camping we came home as soon as we ran out of booze.
Still, I’d like to try…
(Personal to Wesley: I know you’re not the reading type, but if you stumble across this? Leave the goddamn sign alone!)
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This post hits home for me. I spent the first 18 years of my life in La Grande, then bounced around a couple years before landing in Portland. Although I love this city dearly, at times I yearn for the simplicity found in the Grande Ronde Valley. I’m also a little sad that this understanding of another way of life will be completely lost upon my baby boy, as he will be been born and raised in the city. I take solace however in the fact that Portland, unlike a lot of big cities, offers some of those “small town” simplicities.
When I hear the Beastie Boys say “1-2-1-2″ in the lyrics of pretty much every one of their songs, I always wonder if it has anything to do with Manhattan’s 212 area code. (preceded by a 1 if you’re dialing long distance)
I moved to Oregon in 1991, and even though I landed in Portland and have never lived outside the Southeast, I like to think of myself (if you’ll indulge me) as an Oregonian. Even though I’m from a bigger metro area than Portland and have never lived outside the city, in a lot of ways I relate better to the people I meet in eastern Oregon, in the rural parts of the valley, on the coast. City life is weird, and it may be getting to the point of weirding me out. If I can have all this social context online, why do I need all these people physically right around me, anyway?
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