Remembering the year that was, and the Portland that’s actually Portland. by Ben Coleman This time last year I was sitting in a quiet cafe trying to decide if Portland was any different from anywhere else.  This was one of those eclectic, slightly hippie-ish coffee shops that used to be more common: colorful walls, mismatched armchairs, a big chalkboard advertising a local chess night and a knitting club. It was December 2024 and the national vibes, recall, were quite bad. Would things be any different here? A sleepy Portland coffee shop feels approximately one million miles away from the centers of power, but we live in a world where nothing is hidden and little is beyond reach. My fellow cafe patrons were as mismatched as the decor: there was an old guy with a wizard beard scribbling notes on a teetering pile of manuscript pages, a couple of posh moms in the back discussing the latest neighborhood intrigue, and as my cardamom latte arrived, a busker in a battered leather jacket jangled the door chime and started amiably hustling the barista for a bowl of soup. The kind of scene that’s unremarkable when things are going well, and at most, some good people watching. These days it feels like finding a precious gem in a pile of broken glass. I was right to worry of course, for as much good as worrying ever does. In the year since that rainy afternoon, Portland suffered most of the indignities heaped on better known cities. We’ve enjoyed our own bespoke versions of the housing and affordability crisis. There’s been ICE activity in every quadrant of the city and surrounding suburb. Military helicopters buzzed the South Waterfront, and court records indicate we were briefly occupied by the National Guard for the better part of an afternoon. We got our share of cruelty and chaos, just like everywhere else.  Back in 2024, the door jangled again, and what I assume was a father and son entered the coffee shop. The dad was maybe in his thirties, spiky hair and a death metal T-shirt, his son a mirror image at 13 or 14. The dad chatted with the professionally laconic barista. He had an appointment nearby, would she mind if the kid hung out in the cafe? And a sandwich if he wants one? Yes, of course, and how about some soup? “The soup’s good,” said the busker. And so on. Even longtime locals can struggle to describe what makes Portland Portland, beyond a general affinity for hiking and coffee, and a specific aversion to umbrellas and driving fast. When Portland news goes viral it’s usually some variation on pervasive drug use, impending ecological collapse, or maximalist proclamations about food. That’s not how most of us spend our time, but it is what outsiders tend to notice. Even the twee shit is an occasional indulgence for most of us. In the absence of easy definitions, colorful fictions are invented: we’re a failed anarcho-communist antifa puppet state, or the goofy farm-to-table utopia from a poorly-remembered Portlandia sketch.  We’re not any of those things of course, not really. The first President Bush once dubbed this city “Little Beirut" on account of the ferocity of the protest he encountered here. But lots of places protest lots of things these days, and Portland’s marching season was pretty chill this year. Turns out you can’t wage much of a war against aerobics instructors and old Unitarians in lawn chairs outside an ICE facility, or thousands in inflatable frog costumes vaping their way across the Hawthorne Bridge. The military campaign was brief. There wasn’t so much as a burning Waymo to show for it.  As far as utopias go, we’ve got work to do there too. The mayor’s plan to end homelessness seems to involve stacking folks like Tetris pieces until they disappear, a plan that predictably seems to have limited uptake. Meanwhile, news broke in a single week that almost 1,900 affordable housing units are sitting vacant, while tens of millions of housing funds sit unspent. Portland may be a paradise, but only for those who can afford it.  And so the kid hung out with the rest of us as we watched rain hit pavement out the window. Ate part of a grilled cheese, flipped through one of the battered paperbacks on the community bookshelf. Chatted with the old guy about homemade skateboards and submitted to some light fawning from the moms in the back. After a while his person returned, and the matched pair drifted into the deepening twilight. I have no idea if they were regulars, or knew the barista, or just had a knack for improvised childcare, but that’s not the point of a moment like that. The enduring nature of public spaces is that there’s rarely any backstory. You just get people being people. We’ve created so many systems for taking care of our needs, from government initiatives to private sector innovation, a thousand different apps and subscription services and nonprofit subcontractors. There was nothing in that cafe that couldn’t have been acquired more efficiently elsewhere: Amazon has coffee, Doordash has soup. Chess lessons, knitting patterns, battered paperbacks, and cluttered chalkboards, algorithmically delivered, subscribed to, or spliced into 90 second video tutorials. There are wine mom Facebook groups and old guy writing subreddits. The bit with the kid was cute, but so’s an Insta supercut of dogs greeting returning veterans. Or maybe just run the whole thing through AI. There wasn’t anything particularly unobtainable in that cafe except for the part where we all felt like human beings for half an hour.  There was so, so much darkness last year. Many were swallowed in it completely. But in the midst of that profound and enduring night, the small points of light have shone all the brighter. When federal nutrition assistance (SNAP) dried up during the government shutdown Portland restaurants, cafes, and farmer’s markets stepped up, offering free meals, no questions asked. When ICE activity was reported around several North Portland schools, neighbors raced to form a human wall around them. When our systems of efficiency failed, ordinary Portlanders have been strong in their response and uncompromising in their compassion. What makes Portland Portland? It’s not technology or fame or success. Portland will never compete with anywhere else in terms of soaring architecture or famous celebrities or winning sports teams. The food is good here, and there are a lot of pretty trees within driving distance. But most cities have nice restaurants, and trees, and as ecologists will tell you, those are in lots of places. We don’t even have a proper RoboCop statue.  The one thing this city has are the people who live here. Creative, eclectic, fiercely independent people who came out west to get away from the pomp and pretense of older, better run places. The people of this city dress how they want to dress, make what they want to make, and help each other where they can, as much as they can. In that coffee shop, some strangers were briefly a community, and that community helped a guy run an errand and a kid occupy part of a rainy afternoon.  Another year is on the horizon, along with all the cruelty and chaos we’ve come to expect from this benighted decade. And we won’t escape any of it. But if we can create comfort for our friends and neighbors, and do what we can to protect the strangers in our midst, maybe we’ll get through it together. ...read more read less