Jenny Bucket Goes West

Out in the woods / 2023 / Photo by RCS

Jenny moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Portland just off Southeast Hawthorne Street, and around the corner from the Bagdad Theater. In the late-1980s, the neighborhood’s vibe was retro-cool-techno-pagan, with a whiff of the early 1970s still hanging in the air. Within a week, she was working at Powell’s Books as a shelver, which she turned it into an art practice. Customers asked her not just questions about a book they were looking for, but for life advice. The bookshelf sections she sorted books into was granular – subcategories told the tale of the entire bookstore with two words: Horror, Terror. Clearly, someone had given a spooky degree of thought to decide where books should be placed. How was Horror different from Terror? Isn’t Terror often in a Horror story? Are there crossover Horror/Terror novels? When not becoming the best shelver Powell’s had ever seen, Jenny explored every tree-lined backstreet in Portland – walking side streets and alleyway shortcuts after work, bumping into art walks, impromptu concerts in backyards, and sinking into existential coffee shop conversations. Perpetually losing and finding herself. Walking across bridges and daydreaming. Wandering through  the neighborhoods of Portland. The Pearl District, Southeast, Old Town, Northeast, Laurelhurst, Northwest, Chinatown, Southwest – and riding her used 10-speed on streets and narrow bike paths, or driving her VW Bug outside the city to go on day hikes in the surrounding foothills, and trails leading up near the summit of Mount Hood. As flat as Lakeland had been with its fenced-in fields, Portland was its opposite – hilly, sensual, flowing, with the Willamette River cutting through the heart of the city. The forested city parks, the multitude of bridges, the distant mountains offered her a sense of belonging mixed with anonymity. Jenny turned 19, 20, and 21 in Portland. There was a subterranean music scene developing. Subcultures sprang up. Coffee shops and craft beer brewing helped to reinvent hanging out, and an underground writing scene spilled over into poetry readings in coffee shops, harkening back to the 1950s and looking ahead to the 1990s. All around Jenny, there was a cultural renaissance underway. On several weekend visits up to Seattle, she saw an identical scene sprouting there – in the way mushrooms were an underground living network, their mycelium threads communicating over long distances – underneath mossy Northwest forest floors. The Pacific Northwest hadn’t been discovered yet, as it would be in a few years’ time during the Grunge era. For the first time since Lewis and Clark, the Northwest would once again be discovered. People listened to the radio and wondered, where was this strange new music coming from? The average non-map-literate American in a pre-Internet world thought Portland and Seattle were both located on the Pacific Ocean. These faultily imagined geographic placements would, in fact, be wrong. Linda-Lou flew up from LA for a week to celebrate Jenny’s twenty-first birthday. They talked into the night, telling stories about what had been happening in each of their lives – recounting beginnings, endings, changes, books read, meals savored, explorations, boyfriends, girlfriends, friends-friends. While out drinking pints of Red Hook Ale (trucked down 1-5 from Seattle), she celebrated her birthday with Linda-Lou in a brew-pub on that breezy early autumn evening. It was there, Jenny spotted a guy at a nearby table who lived in her building. During a recent hot August night, she’d accidentally seen him naked – during a day and night when everyone in Portland had fans pointed directly at their mostly- or-completely sweating (panting, if not pantless) nearly naked bodies. Will’s door had been propped open to let a crosscurrent of air into his apartment, with two fans strategically pointed at his head and belly, and he’d fallen asleep on the living room floor with his legs propped up on a chair. Jenny was on her way back from Fred Meyers with a bag of salad mix, cherry tomatoes, olive oil, and a six-pack. As she passed Will’s door she peeked in, saw him  sprawled asleep, unaware how much his propped-open door had swung open. Jenny walked over, smiled, pulled his door almost completely shut with just enough space for a breeze to crawl through, and filed the incident away for another time. Jenny’s intimate  birthday party was the time and place. She called Will over to their table, told him it was her birthday and they were neighbors who passed each other in the hallway and often said hello at the mailboxes. He sat next to her, and they talked about the apartment building they lived it, where they grew up, and the winding paths that brought them to Portland, and what they were thinking in that particular moment. The three of them walked hand-in-hand back to Jenny’s apartment, opened three beers at the kitchen table, and when half an hour had elapsed Linda-Lou whispered in Jenny’s ear, kissed Will’s cheek, and headed out into the night. “What happened?” Will asked. “She’s going to check out the lesbian bar down the street.” Jenny said. “Ah,” Will said. Jenny leaned over and kissed Will, afterwards saying, “A girl deserves a birthday kiss.” Will leaned over, returning the kiss.” He said, “I couldn’t agree more.” Her next birthday present, after unwrapping a new boyfriend, was an unexpected postcard in her mailbox the next morning. It was from Crazy Aunt Doris. She wrote that a Raven named Roger had let her know Jenny was in the neighborhood, as the crow flies. There wasn’t a return address, but there was a phone number. Jenny ran upstairs, dialed the number and heard the warm and mischievous voice she’d wanted to hear for so long. When the machine’s message picked up on the other end of the line, there was no mistaking Aunt Doris’s voice – sounding older, wiser, and still as free as a bird. Jenny left a message saying she was over the moon to hear from her Auntie after all this time. She was beginning to wonder if that long-ago backyard barbeque conversation had been a childhood dream. After taking a long walk up to Mount Tabor Park, Jenny returned in early evening and went to her bedroom, then fell into a deep sleep. She dreamed she was hiking on a trail going up Mount Hood, and had just stopped at a waterfall. From behind a Douglas Fir tree Aunt Doris stepped out onto the trail, smiling, and outfitted in well-worn jeans, hiking boots, a loose-fitting jean jacket, with a walking stick in her hand, and a Raven on her shoulder. Jenny’s phone rang at 2:32 a.m. She put the receiver next to her ear and said, “Auntie?” “Yes, Jenny Dear,” Aunt Doris said. “Happy Birthday! I’ve missed you so. I decided it was time to have you come up for a visit.” Jenny’s heart was in overdrive. “Where are you, Auntie Doris?” “Someplace with a top floor view of  the soon to be going crazy US of A. I can see the Olympic Mountains from my penthouse apartment. It’s next door to a vintage hotel called The Sylvia. To my right shoulder is Stanley Park, the lungs of Vancouver. I’ve booked you and your boyfriend a two week’s stay at The Sylvia, so you can be right next door to me and have a bit of privacy.” This was a lot to take in, so Jenny went back to their original backyard conversation. “How old are you now, Auntie?” “I’m 222, and on good days I feel like a spry 190-year-old,” Aunt Doris said. “I’ve taken up meditation,” Jenny said, “and it’s unlocked hidden chambers in my heart. Sometimes I go flying into the stratosphere, where I can reach up and touch the universe.” There was a pause on the call, and Jenny breathed in the reality of the experience she’d just spoken aloud, and felt beyond wonderful and wonder-filled she’d shared it with Aunt Doris. “You’ve been going where I spend hours, and sometimes days – up above the clouds. You’re building a new life in your mind, heart, and soul,” Aunt Doris said. “You know, that’s how I saw you’d escaped the South and made your way up to the Pacific Northwest. I saw you using astral traveling the way I used to at your age. My heart sang when I found you, Jenny. I’m mailing you your plane tickets tomorrow. Tell Powell’s Bookstore you’re taking two weeks off. Starting, the first of October. Good night, and love to you, Jenny.” “Love back at you, my dear Auntie Doris.”