UPDATE, 8/25: The city of Portland has a very helpful list of ways people can help those in need. 

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I am still processing our experience in Portland. It feels like an extreme version of something I've felt throughout my entire bike tour.

I am an extremely privileged individual, and I feel financially very secure. I have been fully employed my entire adult life. My wife and I spent several years with a relatively frugal mindset, saved our money, and planned for the possibility of a bike tour like the one I just took, possibly even a much longer one.

All this is to say that I was on vacation with a generous budget. And I wanted to see parts of the country that I otherwise might have no reason to visit. I expected to pass through some economically depressed areas, and in the process, I was happy to buy myself a meal and maybe even a night's sleep in a motel room. I say this not to boast of magnanimity but to set the stage for the uncomfortable feeling I'm about to express.

There's a common expectation when bike touring or when backpacking that the traveler is on a tight budget, and that is often true; traveling for extended periods can chew through one's finances very fast if you're not strategic about it. Many backpackers and bike tourists will resort to "stealth camping" (aka "wild camping"), or camping in a place where they don't have anyone's explicit permission. Of course, this is as cheap as it gets when it comes to lodging options. Other options, of course, include knocking on people's doors and asking permission to camp in their yard or other similar location.

And of course this is all just one way to try to keep expenses down. We're also doing things like buying food at grocery stores and then eating it while sitting on the curb in the sometimes-kinda-gross parking lot. We're sometimes going a few days without a shower, depending largely on where we are camping and what kind of bathroom is available at the campsites.

Speaking of bathrooms, you've got to drink a lot of water when biking all day. And I probably don't need to tell you that if you don't sweat it out fast enough, drinking a lot means you also need to pee a lot, so you are often desperate to find a bathroom — or a spot where it seems safe to just pull over and pee on the side of the road.

Where am I going with this? It all means that when I've run into someone who appears to be unhoused, I am confronted by a confusing and uncomfortable swirl of thoughts. The predominant one is feeling like an accidental thief sucking up other people's generosity or empathy. Does my sleeping in a church distract from those who really need the church's help? (On a case-by-case basis, it never seemed to, but I can't help but wonder.) Do people look at my dirty, grungy appearance, which I have chosen to tolerate, with more empathy than they would have for someone without that choice? (Or am I just projecting my own prejudices, which I am trying to overcome, onto others? I don't think so; I have gotten very clear impressions from people that they no longer feel comfortable going into Portland because of the protests and increase in the homeless population in recent years.)

And so it was with these thoughts and feelings that I walked through Portland with Dani on Sunday night, Monday and the first half of Tuesday. Seeing people sleeping on the street or asking for change is nothing new to us — we live in D.C. But it was still pretty jarring when you eventually realize how prevalent the tents and the people lying on the street really are.

I was prepared to hand out a dollar to anyone who asked for change and was surprised that the ask came so rarely despite the apparent need being ubiquitous. I don't know. I'm sure I'm looking at this wrong.

I read online in the Oregonian that the mayor had been ordering sweeps of some areas and that they had claimed without evidence that the efforts had been helping. I can give a dollar to anyone who asks, and I can give a granola bar to a woman lying on the sidewalk in front of the grocery store I just patronized, but I know it's basically doing diddly squat.

On Monday afternoon, we heard a man screaming repeatedly, "WHY IS NO ONE HELPING ME?!" and the anger in his voice was almost as unsettling as his desperation. I led Dani down the block (as I had been doing as part of a self-guided walking tour), where I thought we'd get a better view of the situation before deciding if any action would be wise. To my relief, someone had gone over and took the screaming man in her arm and started to walk him in the opposite direction from which he had come. We moved on.

Later, we walked across a bridge and noticed a small group of about three men. My brain didn't register what I was seeing at first. One man was naked. Yes, totally naked. And standing on the wrong side of the railing. Two other men were standing inside the railing and talking with him. I did not hear what they were saying, but three of them projected the sorts of expressions, body language and tone of voice that this situation was completely unremarkable. Everyone was calm. We had heard that Portland was weird, so I honestly thought maybe this is something that happens in Portland — you hang naked off the side of a bridge. I saw it as a stunt. In hindsight, I feel ridiculous for thinking this. But in the moment, we moved on.

On Tuesday, while sitting in a park, we watched a bunch of children playing in a water feature that was either a splash park or a fountain that seemed to be designed in such a way that it would inevitably be treated as a splash park. In any case, the children were enjoying themselves, some of them just rolling around in the ground in an inch or two of water, when a woman, whom we assumed to be the grandmother of some of the kids, came and started rolling around in the water, too.

I said to Dani, "Portland really is weird."

A few minutes later, the woman, whose name was Beth, came over to us and started telling us — through a smile that said "can you believe this?" — that her former mother-in-law had made her homeless a few months ago at age 61, that she was living in her car and the f—ing Christians would look at it and say "well isn't it nice at least you have that" and that it's so hard to find a bathroom and that she tries to keep track of when she left brushed her teeth and that she got to take a shower once at a man's house but he was pressuring her for sexual activity and she booked it out of there and that she had come to Portland because the city has so many services that she might be able to use but that they would require her to enter a rehab program even though she wasn't on drugs or alcohol and she didn't want to be locked inside there for a month.

And I'm thinking to myself that our hardest decision of the day was either which $12 sandwich to order for lunch at the sandwich shop or which flavor of ice cream to order afterward. 

I rationalize to myself that spending money in downtown Portland is probably something that it needs (I also read in the Oregonian that pedestrian traffic has finally been picking up after the pandemic and the unrest of 2020 scared much of it away). 

I had half-wondered, half-assumed that Portland was something of a magnet for unhoused people because it's got to be a little easier to find the things you need to survive in a city. But I don't know what I'm talking about, except for what Beth told us about the availability of services and what little I'd read in the news briefs and one short article in the Oregonian.

For those wondering, the coffee, beer and ice cream we sampled in Portland were delicious. The Portlandia statue, Powell's City of Books and brunch at Screen Door were also well worth a visit.

P.S.

If that last paragraph sounds snarky, let me clarify: I'm guessing that the city would benefit from your tourism dollars, and I don't think a few unhoused people on the street or a bit of graffiti should stop anyone from visiting. I hope I haven't given anyone that impression.

Now I will go try to determine which nonprofit organization is best helping the unhoused people of Portland so that I can make a donation.