I was raised in a nice two-story home in Portland, Oregon at the very end of Council Crest Drive back in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, when it was a rural tract of Stumptown not the prestige address it is today. It boasted a panoramic view of the city, Willamette River and the Cascade Mountains beyond. We had a two-car garage, a small front yard with a tall cedar hedge, a strip of lawn down the side of the house to the basement level, another strip of lawn running the length of the back of the house that led to a third strip of lawn which ran downhill parting a sea of ivy and leading to yet another level and the huge back yard. This expanse of grass, dotted with rhododendron bushes, was girded by dense forest that plunged further down to Fairmount Boulevard, and then even further I firmly believed to the Brazilian Rainforest and eventually the Australian Outback. My father considered this middle-class American spread to be his own private Xanadu.
© 2024 Eric Stromquist
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