Passing Through Portland
At the end of next week, Kim and I and our friends Frank and Lydia, will be passing through Portland, Oregon as we escape the confines of the Coronavirus for a road-trip holiday up through the Northern Coast of California, where the Redwoods proliferate and into Oregon. After Goos Bay, we are going to the mouth of the Columbia River, where Lewis and Clark ended their transcontinental journey. That expedition started in Pittsburgh in July, 1803, a mere three months after President Thomas Jefferson negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from France for $15 million and yet three months BEFORE the treaty authorizing the sale was ratified and signed. Meriwether Lewis started his famous journals on September 1, 1803 and promptly wound his way down the Ohio River by Keelboat to meet up with his co-leader, William Clark. They camped for the winter just north of St. Louis in Illinois as they provisioned themselves for the long journey. In early March the deal closed and the expedition of forty men start heading up the Missouri River, right after the Spring thaw and the annual flooding receded. The expedition spent the next eighteen months covering approximately 4,000 miles, given the circuitous and uninformed route through the Northern and Northwestern territories to the Pacific Ocean. In fact, they went beyond the bounds of the Louisiana Purchase territories into what were otherwise unexplored regions of the Northwest to the Snake and Columbia Rivers. Their finishing leg took them through the Columbia Gorge to the mouth of the Columbia River at what is now Astoria, Oregon, where they built their Fort Clatsop at the river’s merger with he ocean.
Lewis and Clark are a romantic favorite of many. Most school children know the names and the importance that the Louisiana Purchase played in the westward expansion of the United States. For some reason, I too have always wanted to trace the steps of Lewis and Clark, but the red state nature of the territory is daunting in this day and age. The closest I have come to doing that is a motorcycle trip we took up into Idaho along the Eastern side of the Sawtooth Mountains and up as far as Hell’s Canyon. That is well south of the Columbia River Gorge, which is the track taken, both coming and going, by Lewis and Clark as they marched to the Sea and back. The Columbia Gorge runs as the border between Washington and Oregon for about eighty miles into the Cascade Mountain range. It was a rather treacherous part of the Oregon Trail and many pioneers had to shoot the Cascade rapids in order to find their way into the verdant Willamette Valley of Oregon. That valley runs north/south and ends at the shores of the Columbia River. It was at that convenient spot in the geography where the settlers of Oregon gathered towards the end of the Oregon Trail migrations in the 1830’s, twenty-five years after Lewis, Clark and Sacagawea first stood at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers.
Sacagawea had been with the expedition along with her husband and infant son (born on the expedition) since North Dakota, earning her keep and the respect of Lewis and Clark as their guide and interpreter/liaison with the tribes of the native Americans along the way. That was an amazing accomplishment in a time like 1805 when women had no rights and few leadership responsibilities, and much less so for native Americans. But think of it, she was leading where neither she nor anyone had gone before and negotiating with tribes that were not her own. She herself was a Shoshone who had been taken into slavery by the Hidatsa tribe and then sold into marriage to a French trapper. Yet, here she was, perhaps the most important expedition member other than Lewis or Clark themselves. She has been painted into many a scene in courthouses and paintings all along the westward spine of America for her all-important role in the discovery process.
And now here we are in 2020. The City of Portland, Oregon, named after the city of Portland, Maine is at the epicenter of of one of the great conflicts of modern America. This liberal-minded city, run by a non-partisan mayor by charter, set in this liberal-minded state (at least for the last thirty years) under the leadership of a Democratic female Governor (Kate Brown, who coincidentally got her JD at Lewis and Clark College) has been beset by demonstrations since the George Floyd murder on May 25th. These have mostly been peaceful protests, protected under the First Amendment, but there was one incident involving some firecrackers and a Federal Courthouse. That has given rise to the Trump Administration using Portland as the stage for a show of force in the Law & Order theme used by Trump in his 2016 election and now adopted by the new campaign leadership for Trump as his clarion call for 2020 (given his disasterous polls, bungling of the COVID-19 crisis and his various legal and PR problems mostly still revolving around Russian sympathies). For the first time in anyone’s memory, the Federal Government of the United States is suiting up all manner of federal law enforcement officers (border patrol, HHS, Federal prison guards, etc.) and renting them minivans in which to patrol the streets of Portland against the expressed wishes of both the Mayor and the Governor. They are conducting midnight abductions and arrests without notifying the local authorities of their presence and intentions. They have turned Portland from a mostly peaceful city of protest for all the things that Sacagawea stood for into a scene out of 1930’s Berlin with Law & Order as a veil for the politically-motivated ugliness of racism.
What a fitting rebuttal to that heinous show of force that the women of Portland have formed a Wall of Moms much as the mothers of Santiago, Chile did against the rampaging dictatorship and death squads of General Pinochet in the early 1970’s. Mothers are at the center of our current cultural moment. It is mothers that bear the brunt of home-schooling that has become necessary in the Coronavirus pandemic lockdown. They have sacrificed much in their careers and their progress against the glass ceilings of corporate America will be paused while they take command of civil order and righteous defense of civil liberties. As we pass through Portland in the next few weeks, I suspect I will hear the echoes of Sacagawea in the megaphones of the Wall of Moms if the Trumpians haven’t backed down by then (which I suspect they will). No one wins against moms.