My Kind of Place: Travel Stories from a Woman Who's Been Everywhere

by Susan Orlean

  We Just Up and Left

  A guy known as the Catman lived in Portland Meadows Mobile Home Park for a while; he had a hundred cats and a mouse-colored trailer, which he parked in Space 19, near a knobby maple tree. This happened to be prior to the animal weight restriction—that is, the rule that residents in the park could not own a pet that weighed more than twenty pounds. None of the Catman’s cats weighed more than around ten, but if you added them together, they would probably have weighed close to a thousand, and if the twenty-pound rule had been in effect, they might have required some sort of waiver. This is all academic, because before the rule was enacted the Catman had hitched his trailer to his pickup and packed up his animals, and in a matter of minutes all hundred and one of them were gone. In Portland Meadows, as in all trailer parks, people come and go. Everyone everywhere comes and goes, but people who live in trailers live in a constant state of possible mobility.

  Some people come to Portland Meadows, on the outskirts of Portland, Oregon, and then leave after no time; some people stay too long. A man who hated everyone and used a battery-operated bullhorn for normal conversation stayed in the park only a few years, but everyone could hardly wait for him to go; when he finally did, he pulled his trailer out and then sowed broken glass and planted pieces of barbed wire and crisscrossed fishing line all over his parking space. Some people stay for ages and are nearly unseen. They could disappear and no one would look for them, because no one would notice they were gone. Last April, the park newsletter noted one of the hazards of being invisible: “We must request that persons please not be getting inside the Dumpsters. . . . A person could be knocked out trying to get into or out of a Dumpster by a slip of the hand or foot and not be discovered before the Dumpster is emptied.” Some people who live in the park, though, make a big impression. A phony blind priest with a Great Dane Seeing Eye dog lived in the park for just a couple of months, but no one will forget him: He had lots of high-spirited friends who used to visit and who didn’t seem to mind at all that he wasn’t really a priest, that the dog was blind, and that the priest, in fact, was the one with excellent vision.

  Victor Nicolaevich Gorbachev, who told me he is Mikhail Gorbachev’s cousin, lives in Portland Meadows, in a crumbly camper with busted pipes. He works as a driver for Space Age Fuel. He has lived in the camper since shortly after he arrived in America, except, he said, for five months he spent in prison. He has moved the camper three times—from Fairbanks to Phoenix to San Francisco to Portland. He says that life in Alaska, Arizona, and California was not particularly pleasant, but he loves Oregon, and for the moment he is planning to stay. Drifting in a house with a license plate is something that Victor Gorbachev considers distinctive about the United States. “In America, the houses are light as wood and you move them around,” he says. “In Russia, our houses were made of bricks.”

  Portland Meadows is in a saucer of land rimmed by the Columbia River, the Willamette River, and the stagnant, coffee-colored Columbia Slough. Downtown Portland is a few miles south. To the north and the east lie the snowy tops of Mount Adams, Mount St. Helens, and Mount Hood. To the west are a race-car track and a horse track and the bundled black strands of the railroad tracks. It is an empty-feeling landscape of big, homely things—big trucks, big truck stops, a big toy warehouse. In 1915, when the park opened, it was called Portland Auto Camp, and on advertising placards its address was given as “Union Avenue and North Edge City Limits.” The park lies low. The land it sits on is two feet below sea level. It may be the lowest point in Portland. It is part of the Columbia River floodplain; several times in this century, it has been underwater. Jim Benson, who manages the park with his wife, Jan, says, “We’re way down. We’re really down in a hole.” Now the address is 9000 Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, but from the road there is no sign of the park, no front gate or portal: There is only a steep-pitched driveway, unmarked and unremarkable, that looks like one of the narrow off-ramps that truck drivers use when their rigs are running away. At the bottom of the driveway are a speed bump and a pothole, and then the asphalt levels off and the park spills out in every direction, like a puddle. Except that it is older and bigger, Portland Meadows is a lot like any other trailer park. It has some two hundred trailer spaces, a beauty parlor, and a dusty box of a building called the Country Store. It has an office and a Laundromat. It has a dozen narrow lanes that even have names—Main Street, A Street, Twelfth Street. At any given moment, several hundred people live here. Some are single, many are divorced, some are old; there are babies and children; there are people living on welfare and people with more money who just like low-maintenance living that they can take on the road. There are Elkhart Travelers and Airstreams and cab-over-campers, bulky Detroiters and Travelezes and double-wide longs. None of this is visible from the road. I lived in Portland for five years and drove up and down this block of Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard a million times and never saw anything to suggest that scores of lives were unfolding a few feet below me. People find their way here anyway. One recent afternoon, a boyish-faced man with wheat-colored hair stopped by the trailer park office. “You got any trailers for rent?” he asked.

  “No rentals,” Jan Benson told him. “You rent the space, but not the trailer. I’m sorry, honey, you have to own your own.”

  “I’ve been moteling it for two months,” the man said, jiggling his keys. His eyes had pink edges. He leaned on the counter, mussing a pile of Post Office change-of-address forms and flyers advertising pizza delivery and one noting the next meeting of the Portland Meadows Mobile Home Park Bible study group. “I come here from Missoula. I been bouncing from place to place. It’s me and my two kids.”

  Jan clucked at him soothingly. She is as big as a fullback, with thin, streaky hair and flushed cheeks and the tiniest, twangiest voice you’ve ever heard. “Why don’t you buy yourself a trailer, hon?” she said. She pulled out a map of the park. “Let’s see. Number eighty-six is for sale, she can’t pay her rent, she’s deceased is why. Sixty-five is for sale—they’re wanting more acreage, and our spaces aren’t that humongous. Sixty-three is a repo, seventy-three is a repo.”

  “What kind of money are they wanting?” he asked.

  She went over prices—four thousand for an old single-wide of about eight hundred square feet, ten thousand for something bigger. She told him the rent for a space was two hundred and sixty dollars a month. It is probably the cheapest possible way to live in Portland, and buying a trailer is certainly the cheapest possible way to live that would allow you to own something. He said he liked the idea of owning. Then she mentioned that all applicants in the park have to obtain and submit a police report detailing any criminal record they might have.

  “Let me be totally honest,” he said. “I been to prison. Eight years ago, though, and now I’m all done with my supervised parole.”

  “It’ll probably be okay,” Jan said. “But we have to visually see the report before we can rent to you.” They talked a moment more about his parole, about his bouncing around from motel to motel, about how he’d come to Portland to settle some legal matters and that he didn’t know if he would stay very long, but that if he bought one of the trailers, he could take it along with him no matter where he wandered next. Then Jan mentioned the twenty-pound rule—the restriction on the size of pets in the park. He listened, and a broody look crossed his face.

  “I’m just thinking,” he said after a moment. “How would that apply to a Rottweiler puppy?”

  Dreamers come up with dreamy names for trailer parks. In Oregon, there is Shady Rest, Cedar Shade, Cherry Grove, Rockwood, Fir Haven, Tall Firs, Stark Fir, Pine Cove. There are trailer parks with restful, poetic names in every state in the country. Often, nothing about them is actually bucolic. Chaos and sadness always visit poor people’s lives, but some trailer parks like Portland Meadows seem to attract extra tragedy—tornadoes seek them out, fires race through them, shoot-outs take place in them. People I met in parks in Oregon
seemed matter-of-fact about disaster. One morning, I drove from Portland Meadows to Carver Mobile Ranch, which is about twenty miles south. It is a more serene place, full of retirees. The endpoint of the Oregon Trail is a few miles down the road. A portion of the old trail lies just behind two of the trailers. I had been invited to drop in on a weekly crafts group that meets in one of them. When I arrived, the women in the group were stitching needlepoint Christmas trinkets. I sat next to a woman named Edith, who was working on a Santa Claus paper towel holder. She had springy brown curls and a narrow chest; her elbows were pointed and bony, and she poked them out as she stitched. She and her late husband used to work in a trailer factory in Loveland, Colorado, and they lived in a trailer then, too. “When the wages dropped in the sixties, we just up and left,” she said. “Up and left.” She eventually got to Oregon and went to work at a packinghouse, and then a pottery factory, and then a cherry-packing plant, and then a printing press. Before she and her husband got out of Colorado, a storm hit their trailer. She said, “We were blowed over, and we couldn’t get out. We were tipped over onto our side, and I opened the door and I was looking upwards. But that wasn’t so bad. We were used to it. The wind would get to blowing all the time, and then the hitch would flap and the dresser drawers would come wide open.”

  The women then began reminiscing about which of their neighbors had been washed out in the 1964 flood or blown away with the Columbus Day windstorm in 1962. “That time, there were three trailers smashed together,” one woman was saying.

  Edith looked up from her stitching and said, “Not yours, though, I remember. Yours got wrapped around the light pole.”

  Trailers are cheap housing, and cheap housing often looks rough and plain and worn out, but trailer parks, on top of that, look lonesome. In the West, trailer parks are often set outside the city on bare sheets of land; the sweep of the sky, the walls of mountains, the vacancy around them, make them look tossed down at random and as insubstantial and easy to crush as a pile of cardboard boxes. John Bunnell, the sheriff of Multnomah County, whose jurisdiction includes Portland Meadows, told me that trailer parks are populated with elderly folks and migrant workers and people with no money who need shelter, but that he mostly thought of trailer parks as places to go if you want to get lost, so they are the first places he heads when he’s looking for a suspect. He said that because trailer parks are isolated and secluded, they harbor a lot of crime, like drug dealing and prostitution; law enforcement people have nicknamed the worst parks “Felony Flats.” Portland Meadows, he said, had been cleaned up recently, but for years it was famous for its vice. He said that trailer parks are exactly where he would have gone looking for someone like Timothy McVeigh, someone who wanted to live in the margins, to be self-contained, to conduct business unnoticed. Then he added that he never passes a trailer park without getting the creeps, because the first crime scene he ever investigated was in a park near Portland: In the middle of the night, a drunk, half-asleep in his trailer, had heard a noise, grabbed his gun, and fired. The bullet pierced the wall of the trailer as if it were cutting through a cracker; it struck a three-year-old boy, who was peeing outside, and killed him.

  It takes only twenty minutes to unhitch a little trailer and get it on the road. It takes only a couple of hours to unhitch and mobilize a big one. A strong wind can blow a trailer loose in a second or so. Trailers are hardly attached to anything. In a park, small ones sit on their wheels; large ones sit on blocks. Sometimes they are secured by chains to a chunk of concrete sunk six feet belowground, which trailer people refer to as a “dead man.”

  Jim Benson was doing some maintenance work around the park when I arrived, so I rode in his pickup as he made his afternoon rounds. We bumped along, past a tan Buddy, a cream-and-brown Lamplighter, a turquoise Vagabond with an Astroturf-carpeted porch, a Traveleze with two American flags and bumper stickers saying support america and no cash on premises. A school bus had just dropped off the trailer park kids, and three little girls with pale shaggy haircuts were chasing behind us on bikes. Jim pointed to different trailers as we passed them: “That one’s horse people, they left it behind to sell it. This one’s a truck driver. That next is a shipyard fellow, retired. This is a trucker, been here a month only. This one’s a truck driver and his wife, her dad owned the trailer before and now they got it, so they’re second generation. This one’s—I don’t know them, they’re people that keep to theirselves. This one’s a young woman and her son. That one’s a fellow who owns five other trailers in the park and rents them. In that double-wide shorty, that’s a couple that has a boat, a trailer, a van, a dog, and a lot of kids, and they home-teach their kids. This one’s a lady who’s been here thirty years, and this one’s Art Powers, and he’s been here probably thirty-five. Art’s wife just died. She fell, and when they went to the hospital she said, ‘Dad, I won’t be coming home,’ and she didn’t.”

  A wide woman who was crouched in front of her trailer stood up and waved as we drove by. She was wearing green shorts and a mechanic’s jacket. Her hair was piled and twisted like a French cruller. Jim banged on the brakes when he saw her and then rolled down his window. The woman rested her elbow on his side mirror. “Just look at two forty’s yard,” she said to Jim. “It sure looks pretty.”

  “They’re getting there,” Jim said. “Two forty-one’s not bad, either.” The two of them looked up and down the row of trailers. After a moment, Jim said, “What are you up to?”

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “I’m out here murdering.”

  “Sugar ants,” Jim said, nodding. “Murder some for me, will you?”

  A long-haul trucker was working in his garden, tearing out a dead rhododendron bush and putting in a new one. The plot of land was about the size of a tablecloth. The trucker told me that he lived in the trailer with his bartender bride. His family had lived in Oregon for five generations. “We owned all the land from here to the mountains,” he said. “We were into building. My family built half the houses in southeast Portland. I lived in a house in southeast for a while, but it got too built up for me. Everyone pays attention to your business, and I don’t like that. You can’t even cut a shrub without getting a permit.” His trowel crunched the dirt. He said that several roads and one neighborhood in the city had been named for his family and that his grandfather eventually sold all his land to the Port of Portland for three cents an acre. “I own my trailer, and I can go when I want to,” he said. “But, as far as land, I don’t even have a sliver.”

  A bulky man in a plaid shirt was sitting in his trailer with the door open, and from my seat in the pickup truck I could see his living room and kitchen and even what he was watching on TV. I got out and went over to his open door. He said he didn’t want to talk to anybody, and then he started telling me that his trailer was the exact same brand as Lucille Ball’s trailer in a movie called The Long, Long Trailer, which he saw once when he was messing around watching TV. I asked him where he’d been living before he got his trailer, and he said, “In a motel, I guess.” He was watching a daytime talk show about women discovering that their boyfriends are transvestites, and every few minutes he would stop talking to watch the show for a moment, and then he would exclaim, “Now, would you get a load of that!”

  He told me he’d moved into the motel after he got divorced and moved into a camper after that. “Then I bought a little bitty travel-trailer, and moved here, and then I traded up for this one. I had a little poodle at the time, and she went crazy when she saw this much space.” The poodle had been run over by someone backing a trailer out, and he hadn’t got another dog, because the whole thing made him too sad. Hanging above the television set were two framed photographs of racehorses, and I asked about them. “Well, I never had any interest in horses,” he said. “The park’s right by the track, but that made no matter to me. But in 1987 I was talking to my neighbor and he was a racetracker, and I told him that I was looking for an investment, and he said, ‘Buy a horse,’ and well, you
know what? I did. I was sober at the time, too.”

  On my way back to the office, I saw a man I had noticed around the park buying candy in the Country Store or just loafing around outside his trailer. He told me his name was Paul May. He had a blocky upper body and long graying hair and a frozen, startled look in his eyes. Most days when I had seen him, he was wearing a black cowboy hat decorated with plastic animal teeth, a souvenir sweatshirt from New York City, and jeans. I told him I’d seen him around, and he said, “I saw you, too. I spent two and a half years in Vietnam. I got an extra set of eyes.” He told me that his stepdaughter from his first marriage hadn’t talked to him in years, and he wondered whether it had something to do with the fact that he’d fought in Vietnam. He had been in the park for only a month. He was staying in a ratty old trailer that someone who had been evicted had left behind. His own trailer hadn’t yet arrived. It had been his grandmother’s trailer, and she had recently died, so he was having it hauled here and was going to share it with his brother. Paul said he was a floor-care maintenance man working a graveyard shift and that his brother was a forklift operator. His grandmother’s trailer had three bedrooms and two baths, and he said it was beautiful.

  He used to be an eighteen-wheel long-haul truck driver, and after he got divorced, he decided to just live in his truck or on the road. Then, for a while, he tried living in an apartment in Oregon City, and he hated it—hated having somebody over his head, underneath him, and on both sides. Trucking, he said, ran in his family. His mother, who is seventy-two, is a long-haul interstate driver. “She just got a new truck, she and her husband,” he said. “They’ll be driving it coast to coast.” Paul asked me where I lived, and I said New York. He whistled and said, “That’s pretty spendy living. I like to save my money.” Right now, he was saving his money to buy gifts for his girlfriend. He said, “I like buying her things that make her feel special. She works really hard. She’s an exotic dancer, and she has a little boy, and she’s scraping to make things happen.” For Mother’s Day, he had paid to send her and her mother to Glamour Shots, a service where for a fee you get a fancy makeup session and then a photo session. Now he said he was planning to surprise her with a diamond ring and tickets for an all-expenses-paid trip to Mexico by herself—both of which he thought would help her decide to make a commitment to him. He said he was ready for the relationship. I asked where his girlfriend lived. “I’m not precisely sure,” he said slowly. “I know it’s some kind of neighborhood.”