Jim is walking downtown along the electric light rail tracks, looking for a coffee shop near the university, thinking about the farm, and the giant Douglas firs, and what the old farmer's life was like - the old man when he was young, and his wife and kids, and how they are now connected to the city - the farm is just a few miles from the terminus at the other end of the light rail, out in the county.
The thing about Oregon is there is strict land use planning. You can't just go out of the city and buy a half acre, and build a house. There's an invisible urban boundry, and where the cities and suburbs end, there are only farms, and parks, farther out, public and private forests. Between Portland and the coast, there is the wine country. Sprawling vineyards and small forested mountains, a few small towns. You get out there by just hopping on the electric train, and driving or even riding your bike out from there.
But Portland was built by logging and loggers, and by the men and women who left their families back east and came out by covered wagon and settled the rich farmlands of the Willamette Valley.
The first explorers trapped beavers back in the early 1800s, and then the brave settlers came here for opportunity - but it was dangerous, and there were no guarantees. Jim thinks, you didn't leave your family in Ohio, perhaps saying good-bye forever, selling all of your stuff and investing in a wagon and farming supplies, and claw your way through the Rockies and over the Cascades, and find your way into the cold rainy Oregon winter, and expect to walk over to the social services office and get assistance.
Why were Oregonians today looking to the government for solutions? You still have a vast territory with a relatively small population, seated on the edge of the mighty and pristine Pacific, where you can go to the beach on a winter day and walk alone, and not see another person. Oregonians are blessed, and on the other side of the great ocean, where the sun shines at night, the Chinese are making something out of nothing.
Jim pauses to take a drink out of a water fountain. It continuously bubbles fresh glacial water from Mount Hood, which towers to the east. These fountains were placed long ago by a lumber baron, so the loggers who came to town with their wages would have more than just beer to drink. Some of the spans that crossed the Willamette river in the city of bridges were built by the same company that had brought an electric steel furnace to young stumptown to make steel castings for the logging industry. Portland still has a lot going for it. He knows the coffee shops are filled with educated young people, who have come here from all over country, seeking opportunity. Smart, motivated, idealistic, but mostly unemployed.
