Cohousing Tour, Part Three: Peninsula Park Commons.

There's a particular type of 1930s apartment design you see a lot of in Portland.  It's single-story, typically brick, laid out in a row that's usually bent into an L or a C in order to squeeze as many units into the lot as possible.  If you've lived here, you know the ones; some of you have even lived in them.  In 2003, local developer and contractor Eli Spevak bought one of these old complexes at the edge of Peninsula Park, not far from I-5 in North Portland.  "We just sort of stumbled into it," he says of the purchase, and thus Peninsula Park Commons was born.  After renovations, he sold 5 of the 7 units, most to young families like his own, for about $80,000 apiece.  The 6th unit became a common area, and he and his wife moved into the 7th, where his daughter was later born.

The apartment courtyard soon bloomed with an ebullient communal garden, a certified wildlife habitat and the scene of many social gatherings for its residents.  Eli, who has met us on the street to welcome us in, explains, "Every cohousing community has its own themes, and our themes are biking and gardening."  Sure enough, the concrete at the base of a nearby bike rack is studded with ceramic tiles, lovingly hand-painted with bikes and tiny poems about riding them.  The residents of the community are having a yard sale in the courtyard today, and many of them stand smiling beside tables and racks of cast-offs.  We smile back, and I deliberately avoid looking at their wares.  (Now is not a good time to bring home more stuff.)

Cohousing Tour, Part Two: Daybreak Cohousing.

At Daybreak Cohousing, the first thing you inevitably notice is the brand-shiny-new, ultra-conscientiously designed architecture: warm bright colors, ample windows, spaces laid out to facilitate eddies and clusters of residents.  A gorgeous old maple towers over a tidy community garden and a circular play area, a perfect peninsula of fresh wood chips on a lake of green lawn.  There's a spacious rooftop deck with a hot tub and a fine view of the humped green spine of Forest Park.  Electronic fobs allow access to elevators and common areas.  The place strikes me as a tad on the posh side, an impression reinforced by the price sheet I pick up off a table in the Common Room: the cheapest unit available, at 665 square feet, is $225,000 (not counting utilities and HOA dues).  To me, that seems like a lot of money for such a little space.

The World Was Never Grayscale.

When I was in college, some of my friends occasionally bought black and white film for their cameras.  It made our pictures look ironically sentimental and remote, like it all happened such a very long time ago.

Nigh twenty years on, that irony has twisted around to bite its own tail.

Wandering Around, With Photos.

Yesterday I had occasion to be out in Corbett, an itty-bitty town up the Gorge.  I was at Menucha Conference Center, and I had a bit of free time on my hands.

So I went exploring, lured by the promise of walking trails and spectacular views, and by the glint of sunlight on damp leaves.

They weren't kidding about the views, that's for sure.

Though the river was mostly hidden behind a generous curtain of trees, this was the view from the swimming pool.  The pool itself was also spectacular:

Not so much in the "wanna dive in!" sense as in: Wow that's green.

Not far from the emerald pool was a giant stone hearth.  It has clearly been far too long since someone set up a blaze here:

You could definitely cook some stuff in that thing.  If you click to see the photo larger, you might notice the inexplicable initials inside: J M.  It's obvious that stories are piled up here, thick and musty as the dead leaves.

Menucha also has a really nice labyrinth, made of brick and stone and moss and pebbly mosaic:

The plastic jugs had candles in them, stabilized by sand.

Walking the labyrinth is probably my favorite form of meditation.  The twists and turns made me think of the unexpected nature of living life in a chronologically linear fashion, and how sometimes, when it looks like you are moving away from the goal, you are actually moving toward it.

But the rich smell of damp leaf mold and sweet evergreen lured me deeper into the woods, past all the interesting things made of concrete and rocks.  I picked a trail and a direction, and started walking.

I didn't know where I was going.  I had a rough trail map, and a vague idea that most of the trails went in a circle, but I didn't really know where I was... and that was the best feeling.  My favorite dreams are like this, where I'm in an interesting place and I'm exploring it, with no sense of urgency, discovering curious new things at every turn.

There were a lot of things to discover, here.

I was sort of obsessed with all the moss, and took way too many macro shots of it.  Here is the best one:

The ferns were amazing, too.  I was trying to get a really good shot of the ferns from the underside, like from the perspective of a little forest creature looking up through them, when I was distracted by the sound of someone picking their way down the bank. I was annoyed -- I was enjoying the solitude and didn't want to shift back into polite banter mode -- but when I looked up, I froze.  It was a mule deer, about to take a shortcut across the path.  It saw me and it, too, paused.

I tried to sneak in a sneaky photo, without moving or looking away, just hoping I had the deer in the shot.  Flash!  ...oops.

 
Instead of bolting, though, the deer walked a few paces back (off to the right, still in the frame of this shot) and stopped moving, still nearly in full view.

Ah. Excuse me.  I walked softly away, and so (I saw, glancing nonchalantly back over my shoulder) did the deer.

I followed a narrow side trail, which began wobbling down a hillside toward the sound of rushing water.  I began to get excited about this stream, and about taking pictures of it.  But the mud was getting muddier and muddier, and I wasn't wearing mud-friendly shoes.  So when I reached a particularly swampy stretch of path, closely flanked by tall drippy weeds and blocked by a substantial spiderweb, I turned back... but not before looking up.

The weather has been all wrong for autumn color this year, but a few trees managed to represent anyway.  The gold-on-blue is so heraldic, I think.  Giving up short of a goal is always disappointing, but the golden tree made it feel like a triumphant moment: I came this far! And I knew when it was time to turn back!  Huzzah!