Fugatives & Refugees

by Chuck Palahniuk

  The last day I visited, the steam engine for the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroad was also parked in the roundhouse, a double-expansion engine that uses the steam twice. The wheels of these monsters hit most people at chin height. The stock changes but also look for engines from the old Nickel Plate Road, plus European passenger cars and more.

  Western Antique Powerland

  Larry Leek points out a pile of huge cast-iron columns from the Oregon state capitol building that burned in 1935. Dark and cracked from the heat of the fire, they're here to become part of the Oregon Fire Service Museum. For most of the twentieth century the columns and their fancy cast-iron capitals and bases had been dumped into a local creek as landfill material. "Whatever people don't know what to do with, it comes here. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not so good." The field behind the trolley barn is an organized mix of decaying trolley cars and railroad parts on pallets. Pointing at a trolley car, all splintered wood and peeling paint, Larry says, "If somebody wants to give you a hundred-year-old car, it's hard to say no."

  Take Interstate 5 south from Portland to exit 263, just north of Salem. Turn right at the stop sign and then right again a quarter mile later at the sign for Western Antique Powerland, and you'll be traveling back in time. Here are sixty-two acres of history, a grassroots collection of museums and historical re-creations built and maintained by a half dozen different volunteer groups.

  "I started with an old tractor I brought out, and I've been here ever since," Larry says, now the group's president. "I'm basically what you'd call a scrounger—I like it all."

  Here's the Willow Creek Railroad, a miniature railway with over a mile and a half of track. And the original 1870 Southern Pacific depot moved here from Brooks, Oregon.

  Here's the Oregon Electric Railway Museum, a band of two hundred members busy restoring trains from around the world. Walk through an open-air car from Australia. A double-decker car with cramped, five-foot-ten ceilings from Hong Kong. Cars from Los Angeles and San Francisco. They have the two original 1904 trolley cars that ran to the amusement park on top of Council Crest, still with the original hand-painted signs for Jantzen swimwear. Jack Norton, the superintendent of operations, says how the museum's been around since the 1950s. Their car barn holds nine restored cars, and overhead wires allow them to drive out onto the museum's network of tracks around the grounds. Another barn holds nothing but tractors, including the oldest operating steam tractor in the country, built in 1880. Their newest steam tractor is from 1929, with most built between 1895 and 1915. Ask Larry to show you the creepy 1900 steam engine that a murderer spent his whole life insanely cutting into tiny pieces with a hand hacksaw.

  The museum of stationary engines could be a Stephen King nightmare of the Industrial Revolution. Row after row of huge engines loom over you, all of them big thrashing monsters of iron, brass, and steel. Here, Larry can show you a stationary engine that runs on hot air, turning the flywheel to work a Rube Goldberg—looking system of pistons and rods.

  Next door is the antique car and truck museum with everything from a very antique hearse to snowplows and the world's biggest monkey wrench collection—more than 1,006 unique monkey wrenches. Be sure to check out the before-and-after photos of the vehicles. They're unbelievable. The first one will be some rusty skeleton in a pile of weeds. The second, showroom quality.

  Don't miss the restored 1907 steam-powered sawmill, with the kind of huge spinning blade you'd use to kill a silent movie heroine tied to a log. It's powered by the engine from the abandoned Bumble Bee Tuna Cannery in Astoria. Next to it is the twelve-foot-tall drive wheel of the restored engine from the old B. P. Johns furniture factory that became the John's Landing shopping mall. Next to that is a working blacksmith shop.

  And opening soon will be the Oregon Fire Service Museum.

  The best time to see everything up and running is the last weekend in July and the first weekend in August, at the annual Great Oregon Steam-Up. For more information, call 503-393-2424.

  From trains to tractors to trucks, if you think it's gone—it's here. But keep that under your hat. As Larry says, "OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] would have a heart attack if they saw us running all this stuff."

  Willamette Shore Trolley

  Ride a century-old, double-decker electric trolley car from downtown Portland, south to Lake Oswego, through some of the area's best scenery. This is the old 1887 line that runs between the RiverPlace development on the Portland waterfront and downtown Lake Oswego, passing through the forested private estates of Dunthorpe, a tunnel, and skirting along the cliffs high above the Willamette River and Elk Rock Island.

  Beginning in April, the trolley runs every weekend, adding Thursday and Friday in May. Regular service runs through October. The best runs include the Fourth of July trips that let you watch fireworks launched from Oakes Amusement Park. Also, the December runs follow the fleet of lighted Christmas ships that cruise the river. And the Valentine s Day trips are also very popular. Reservations are very recommended; call 503-697-7436 or 503-222-2226. The southern trolley depot is at 311 N State Street in Lake Oswego; this end of the route has free parking.

  U.S.S. Blueback

  Launched May 16, 1959, the U.S.S. Blueback is a diesel-powered, Barbel-class submarine that was home to a crew of eighty-five men for its thirty-one years in service. In Vietnam it dropped Navy SEALs and mined harbors. It arrived in Portland in 1994, decommissioned, after being used in the film The Hunt for Red October.

  Look for RG Walker, the submarine manager, who says, "The effect we're going for is as if the crew's just left and gone on shore for the day." Food still sits on plates. Dirty dishes are piled in the sink. Razors and personal items lie where they've been dropped on bunks. RG will show you the pull-down screen where they showed movies during each two-month tour at sea. A former submariner, RG says, "On some tour of duty, we went out with just one movie— West Side Story. By the time we got back into port, everyone knew every song. They'd all be dancing around, singing, 'I'm a shark! I'm a jet!'"

  Really, the best tour is the "Techno Tour," given only on the first Sunday of each month. It's limited to eight people and led by an ex-submariner who has no problems lingering over the most obscure detail. Officially, it's two hours but can last up to four or six if the group is that curious. Buy your $15 tickets early at the front desk. The Techno Tour starts at 10:00 in the morning.

  Licensed ham radio operators can broadcast from the on-board radio station.

  The Blueback resides at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), at 1945 SE Water Avenue.

  (a postcard from 1996)

  One side of NE Multnomah Boulevard is Lined with Portland police officers in full SWAT gear, Kevlar face shields, and body armor, holding black riot sticks.

  The other side of the street is lined with Santa Clauses in red velvet suits and big, white beards. It's the thin blue line versus the fat red line.

  This is Portland SantaCon '96. Aka the Red Tide. Aka Santa Rampage. Every year, members of different Cacophony Societies flock to a host city. From Germany, Australia, Ireland, and every state in the U.S., they're here in almost identical Santa suits. All using the name Santa. No one's male or female. No one's young or old. Black or white. This is some 450 Santa Clauses in town for seventy-two hours of special events. From karaoke to roller skating. Political protests to street theater. Strip clubs to Christmas caroling. They jingle sleigh bells and carry spray bottles of Windex, blue window cleaner they use to squirt each other in the mouth.

  For window cleaner it tastes just Like Bombay Sapphire gin-and-tonic.

  This Saturday night the plan is to meet at the Lloyd Center shopping mall and join hands around the huge ice-skating rink. There, the Santas will chant and sing in an effort to manifest the spirit of bad-girl Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding.

  It hardly matters that Tonya is still alive.

  It does matter that the police got here first.

&nb
sp; It's a stalemate, the police forming a line along the southern edge of the Lloyd Center—the Santas are facing them across the street, hand-in-hand, in a line along the north edge of Holliday Park. Other Santas have snuck into the mall dressed as shoppers but carrying their red suits and beards in shopping bags. Still, when they duck into fitting rooms and restrooms to change clothes, mall security guards nab and evict them.

  Now the line of Santas chant: "Ho, ho, ho! We won't go!"

  They do the wave, back and forth from one end of the block to the other, chanting, "Being Santa is not a crime!"

  Through a bullhorn, the police say that the Lloyd Center is private property and any Santas who cross the street will go to jail.

  And the Santas chant, "One, two, three ... Merry Christmas!"

  Above the police line parents and kids line the railings of the parking garages. It's only six in the evening, but already it's dark and cold enough to see everyone's breath. Cars in the street slow to gridlock, so open-mouthed with surprise that no one honks.

  The kids are waiting. The police and Santas are all waiting.

  Me, I'm here somewhere, buried inside padding and red velvet. My name is Santa and I've been absorbed. Santa-to-Santa our marching orders come down the line in a gin-scented whisper.

  A light-rail train pulls into the station next to the park.

  The police lower their Kevlar face shields.

  At the signal the herd of Santas breaks rank and starts running. A flood of red headed for the train. To escape for downtown. For drinking and caroling and Chinese food.

  And right behind them—behind us—the police give chase.

  Animal Acts: When You're Sick of People-Watching

  The day I spent with Portland elephant keeper Jeb Barsh, he compared the city to a zoo. Comparing the city government to zookeepers, Jeb said, essentially their job is the same: to keep a population as happy as possible inside a confined area. Portland's size is limited by the Urban Growth Boundary—our cage, so to speak—and somehow we've all got to coexist within this limited space. Here's a look inside the other zoo, plus a few more animal-related events.

  The Elephant Men

  "Working with elephants is an obsession," says Jeb Barsh. "It sucks you in. Dealing with their psyches is such an honor."

  In keeping with Katherine Dunn's theory that every Portlander has three lives, Jeb's an elephant keeper, a writer of songs, fiction, and poetry, and a father to his two-year-old son. He went to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he wanted to write a children's book about elephants. For research he went to the local zoo to volunteer. That was eleven years ago.

  Portlands status as an elephant factory Jeb calls "an accident of nature." In the late 1950s the zoo bought Thonglaw, a highly sexual bull, and four fertile cows, including Belle, who gave birth to Packy in 1962, the first elephant to be born and survive in captivity in forty-three years. Until then, no one knew much about an elephant's pregnancy.

  Tom Nelsen, a volunteer in the Elephant House, says, "The veterinarian sat here for three months because we didn't know how long an elephant's gestation period would be."

  Thonglaw sired fifteen calves before dying at the age of thirty. The first, Packy, has sired seven, including Rama, the zoo's twenty-year-old bull.

  "Elephants are in a crisis on earth," Jeb says. "They're running out of habitat. In the wild an Asian elephant only lives twenty-one years out of a possible seventy." He says, "My job isn't to phantom a perfect world for them. My job is to take where they are and make the best of it. I have to do today what I can do right now."

  Jeb has a scar running through his top lip, near the right corner. Movie star handsome, he has longish hair curling over each ear and resting on his collar. He has gray eyes and a rough two-day start to a goatee. Maybe it's his shorts or his muscular legs from hiking and rock climbing, but every couple of seconds a different woman steps up to ask him something.

  Between questions, he says, "There's a tendency among those of us who work with animals to disappear into our animals. That's why I like to keep one foot out here among people. To continue to spread the word to people about the mystery and joy of elephants. It's an honor to be here."

  He says, "Every day of an elephant's life, it's collecting memories. We just try to keep mixing it up for them so their lives are interesting. They have the largest brains of any mammal on earth. We administer to their heads, not just their bodies. Every day, I know how these seven feel. From those feelings we plan our day."

  In the Elephant House, Jeb's staff includes Tom, Bob, and Steve—three very big men. They care for the zoo's seven elephants, three males and four females. The females are social and will hang together, but the males each stay off alone unless it's time to mate. In 2002 the zoo's most famous elephant, Packy, celebrated his fortieth birthday. Krista Swan, the zoo's event coordinator, says, "Picture this fourteen-thousand-pound elephant eating a cake frosted with peanut butter, with raw carrots as candles, while thousands of people sing 'Happy Birthday,' all of them wearing huge, floppy elephant ears made of recycled paper." She says, "Elephants communicate by moving their ears. God only knows what Packy thought they were all saying to each other."

  Elephants can live for sixty or more years. Keep April 14 free, and you too can wear the big ears and sing to Packy.

  The zoo's smallest elephant is Chendra (meaning "Bird of Paradise" in Malay), an Asian elephant who was just a calf when she and her mother raided a Malaysian palm oil plantation. Her mother was shot dead, and Chendra was blinded in one eye and maimed in one leg. She was kept in a children's school until she was too big, then moved to Portland, where the zoo hoped she'd become best friends with Rose-Tu, another female Asian elephant the same age. The problem is, Rose-Tu is the daughter of Me-Tu and Hugo. "Rose-Tu is a brat," Krista says. "And she just harasses Chendra." Rose-Tu's favorite attack is to grab Chendra's tail. She'll hold the tail tight between her rear legs and reach back with her trunk to pluck out the tail's sensitive black hairs.

  "At first," Krista says, "people talked about writing a series of children's books about Chendra and her best friend Rose-Tu... Then they thought: maybe not..."

  Jeb doesn't worry. "Rose-Tu's a healthy kid," he says. "She's pushing and prodding her environment."

  Chendra, he says, is a "pocket elephant," from a landlocked population of genetically unique elephants, and she'll probably be a smaller adult. Her blind eye is filled with pink and white muscle. Her good eye is brown and may turn a bright gold in maturity. She's only one ton, while Rose-Tu at the same age is two tons.

  "I don't know why," Jeb says, "but they gave Chendra my birthday, February 20, so she's a Pisces."

  About Hugo, Jeb Barsh says, "He's the 'Anti-Packy.' Some people call him 'Hugo the Horrible,' but he's my favorite bull. He's got such an energy field when you're with him. He's like a hot rock!" Jeb says, "He is the truth! He's energy personified! He's a hot daddy! He's a ride in a fast car!"

  Hugo was captured in Thailand at about age four, and came to Portland via another zoo and a circus. "Everything I could say about Packy," Jeb says, "you could say the opposite about Hugo."

  Hugo has a straight tail. Packy and all his descendants have a genetic trait for crooked tails. As a young elephant the tip of Hugo's trunk—equivalent to a human's thumb— was bitten off, so he's a little clumsy at grabbing items.

  Jeb, Tom, Bob, and Steve explain how elephants walk on just the tip of their toes, protecting the sensitive pad in the center of their feet. They can stop a rolling apple without bruising it. Their trunks have forty thousand muscles, and can weigh five hundred pounds and hold five gallons of water. Each elephant has only four teeth, all of them huge. They go through six sets of these teeth and typically die of starvation after wearing out the last set. Up to 80 percent of their communication is via "infrasound," subaudible sounds that for years led people to think elephants had ESP and could read each other's minds.

  "An elephant's brain is four and a half tim
es bigger than mine," Jeb says. "It's fifty percent more convoluted, so they're incredible problem solvers." He explains, "The elephant's brain has all these pathways for storing memory. As herbivores they don't need to be 'wily.'" One reason why elephants carry so much memory is because they're so destructive to their environment that they need to constantly know where to find more food.

  "They're touchingly similar to human beings," Jeb says. "They show a great deal of affection for each other. They're curious. They stay together as a family unit and won't abandon an elderly member. They even seem to mourn the death of each other."

  Asian elephants have been crowded out of their habitat for centuries, and now only forty thousand are left in the world. As a pragmatist, Jeb Barsh talks about Charles Darwin's idea that extinction is a natural, acceptable event. And maybe there is no more place for these huge, charismatic animals that require so many resources to live.

  About the Portland zoo, Jeb says, "This isn't Utopia, but for them there is no Utopia left."

  At THE Zoo

  If you want to see animals and not people, go to the zoo early and come in the cool spring or fall. According to Krista Swan, event coordinator for the Oregon Zoo, most of the animals are "corpuscular," meaning they're most active at dawn or dusk. Before the zoo opens at nine, the keepers hold the animals backstage while they clean each exhibit. At nine the animals are released into their fresh habitats and are most likely to be active and awake.

  Knights Boulevard, in front of the Oregon Zoo, is named for Dr. Richard Knight, a former sailor who ran a drugstore on SW Morrison Street near Third Avenue. For sailing ships a pet was an important mascot, usually a monkey or a parrot. Sailors would leave their pets with Knight and never return for them. In 1885, Knight fenced the vacant lot next to his store, bought a grizzly bear for $75 and a cinnamon bear for $50, named them Brown and Grace, and started a zoo. In 1887 he donated his menagerie to the city, but he still had to feed and clean the animals, which were kept in the cages of a failed traveling circus, on forty acres the city set aside as City Park. By 1893 the park inventory included "3 wheelbarrows, 1 auger (bad order), 1 pump, 6 deer, 5 axes, 1 grindstone, 2 padlocks, 1 force pump, 1 grizzly bear, 300 flower pots, 1 seal."