Back In Oregon For a Space

Yes, but only mentally… My husband’s long-time best friend and his wife, both from Oregon, visited us last weekend. They brought fancy brewed beverages, naturally, and we made them a wonderful New Mexican dinner. I’ll write more on that later. Perhaps I won’t do a long-winded recipe post, but there is an aesthetic to New Mexican cuisine that is often corrupted by… I wasn’t going to write about that.

I was apologetic to my guests because I’d forgotten to buy good coffee for them. Oregonians are used to good coffee. I had a bag of not entirely fresh Starbucks’ French roast and Kuerig pods. Shocking, I know. Yes, I drink Keurig coffee. I’m generally the only person in my house/office, and I don’t want to make a French press just for myself that will quickly lose its heat. Thus, I do the unthinkable: I get up from my desk and brew a single cup from a pre-ground and measured pod whenever I want a fresh hot beverage. Again, shocking!

Friend’s wife, whom I wish I knew better, said she wasn’t a coffee snob like some Oregonians. This led us down a memory-road toward what Oregon used to be like. I’ve written about this before in my coffee memoirs, but it bears repeating, especially in these times when Portland has become a cesspool of homeless camps and rioting.

In my dad’s generation, Oregon — yes, including Portland — was a land of lumberjacks and fishermen. These were rednecks and hillbillies, often transplanted from the Appalachian mountains and the Ozarks. They didn’t go in for gourmet espresso shops and high-end cuisine. Their local diners served roast beef and mashed potatoes with sludgy gravy. Exotic meant a Chinese restaurant, the old-fashioned American variety with chop suey and bland broccoli beef.

In my youth, Portland was transitioning to the land of gourmet coffee and “unique identities”. I don’t exactly know why it transitioned. The locals liked to blame Californians moving in. Californians, sure. For example, environmentalists from Berkeley. Also: hippies looking for gorgeous forests that would shelter their illicit weed-smoking or magic-mushroom hunting and traveling bands like the Grateful Dead who just loved stopping in Eugene. After it was all said and done, these new people managed to shut down the lumber and fishing industries, to drive small Oregon towns into abject poverty and hopelessness, and then to gloat about it to this day

After these hippies squelched the native lifestyle, they quite promptly determined themselves to be Oregonians, true native children of the Pac NW. They claimed it and changed its identity like colonists always do. Of course, one could call the lumberjacks and fishermen colonists as well, and there would be truth in that, but at least they were following an unpretentious lifestyle like the natives had before them. Colonization has layers, see? From small native tribes hunting and fishing to what exists now: postmodern art, fancy restaurants, and roving bands of rioting communist youths who tear down statues…even the famous one of the elk. What did the elk do to them? One may never know.

There has been a push, of course, for the old lifestyle to be renewed. But there’s a far cry from hipsters donning lumberjack costumes and restaurants serving high-end “artisan” cuisine that misses the mark entirely because that roast beef and gravy dinner from my dad’s childhood wasn’t meant to be sourced from an organic cow and $10/lb organic, heritage potatoes. It was meant to fill the bellies of poor people who did hard, unforgiving physical labor that young, overfed communists will never know of, despite their romanticization of rescuing themselves from the shackles of capitalism.

I’m going to be honest; I’d rather have kept the instant coffee my parents drank than imbibe the enemies’ much better brews. Gourmet coffee is little solace to those who have been victims of cultural suicide and destruction.