Portland didn't become the US capital of cool overnight. The city was a centre for independent music for decades before the press got wind of it. If a hipster is a person who wants to seem creative without actually creating anything, there's a serious lack of hipsters in this city. The music and art being made here are world-class.
But it's not just the music scene in Portland that makes a trip to the north-western state of Oregon worth a journey: its coast is spectacular, too, and, unlike neighbouring California, its beaches are almost empty. You can immerse yourself in the music scene then spend a week on some of the US's most beautiful shoreline. Portland residents today flock to pretty villages such as Cannon Beach – sometimes called Portland on Sea, as it has so many art galleries – and Manzanita.
Cannon Beach is a pretty warren of independent bookshops, cafes, galleries, and record shops. I travelled there recently while spending my summer in Oregon with my boyfriend, who plays in Portland indie-folk band Brothers Young. In front of us, the Pacific glittered all the way to the horizon. Great rock formations rose from the sea into the sun, black against a burning blue-bronze sky.
We had a beachfront dinner of bouillabaisse, oyster shooters and local wine with some friends at Mo's Restaurant (moschowder.com) down the road in Tolovana Park. Later, at the Treehouse – a one-bedroom cabin in evergreen forest, high above Cannon Beach – we talked and sank beers on the deck as the ocean turned pink and grey through the darkening treetops.
Mornings, the only sound was the scuffle of falling pine cones through the open windows. Downstairs, there was a cast-iron stove, a sofa, a telescope and a hand-built kitchen. Up here, there was just our bed and a glass wall view of the ocean. Blissful: watching the waves from the duvet; reading on the deck; moseying down through the village shops to curl up on a rug on the beach in the evenings.
When Cannon Beach began to feel just a little too perfect, we drove a few miles up the coast to the resort of Seaside – all concrete hotels and exuberant kitsch. We had a ball on the fairground rides – then decided maybe we actually preferred Perfect, after all.
We had spent several days further south at Yachats – a sleepy village of wooden houses hugging a sparkling inlet dotted with surfers. I'd been talking a lot to our friend Trevino Brings Plenty, who is Native American (about 40,000 Native Americans live in Portland), and kept thinking about how this beautiful spot had been the legal home of the Alsea tribe until an unratified treaty created the Coast Range Reservation in the 1850s. Road-diggers turned up Alsea graves in the 1930s when they built the coastal highway. Everywhere we went had two histories, and one of them lay under blowing sand. But Yachats means "little river with a big mouth". That's a good description of any half-buried past. It speaks eventually.
Our cottage there stood on the long beach between Yachats and Waldport. I swam in the Pacific in the mornings, and wrote, and wished I could stay forever – or at least long enough to write a book. Ocean wind blew through our curtains, flowers in our garden grew sideways, and in the brilliant glare of the midday sea, the distant spume of whales caught the sunlight. Most days, our beach was empty. South of Yachats, vast dunes sweep for 50 miles from Florence to Coos Bay; the most impressive rise over 150m, at Umpqua.
Just north of Yachats, at the mouth of the Alsea river, we went crabbing at midnight with gear from the bait shop by the pier. The tide towed our trap away from us to the muted strains of Country & Western from a radio belonging to crabbers just along the shore. A full moon shone on the harbour and on the slick heads of seals, streaking them silver.
When Michael hauled our trap in it was clattering with Dungeness crabs. I liked the waiting times in between: looking out at that black racing water, knowing we might have something underneath it. Conversation was just ripples on the peacefulness. At two in the morning, we wedged our bucket of crabs in the bed of the rental truck, drove home down the starlit highway, and feasted.
The drive from Yachats to Cannon Beach is a glorious road trip. We stopped first in the bustling town of Newport for a whale-watching tour. Boats were unloading albacore tuna on the quay. The shadow of the huge 1930s steel bridge eased over us as we slid further out, past pelicans on stone jetties, into the ocean. Grey whales dived close, their tails making giant wishbones that dripped against the lush green shores.
Back in dock, we bought takeaway clam chowder plus saltwater taffy – chewy coastal candy – for the car. We stopped again at Yaquina Head, part of the Oregon Islands national wildlife refuge, and ate our chowder on a bench beside the lighthouse. A cliff path led down to a black lava cobble beach scattered with bone-white driftwood. Starfish and turban snails clustered in the tide pools. I lay down on the cobbles in the hazy heat, and watched a colony of guillemots.
The coastal highway carried us on over narrow creeks and wide reedbeds. Pines clung to cliffs that tumbled down to the sea; dark gold sand sliced the roadside. Always there was the Pacific, racing and shining beside us, flickering behind red alders. We drove with the windows down and the music up, passing Lincoln City, where the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians now operate the Chinook Winds Casino.
In the Siuslaw National Forest a pair of eagles circled above the Douglas firs. In the town of Tillamook, whose dairies process milk from the fertile grasslands of the Tillamook, Nestucca and Nehalem valleys, we stopped at the cheese factory (tillamook.com). We gorged on cheddar samples, and nearly left after consuming half our bodyweights in lactose … but then found the ice-cream counter, with flavours from wild blackberry to root beer. It was evening when we finally pulled in to Cannon Beach.
While exploring the state this summer, I returned of course to Portland. The city is heaven for music lovers, but it actually exceeds its own hype. Tiny joints such as Valentines (232 SW Ankeny, valentineslifeblood.blogspot.com) host bands that, in the UK, would instantly be hailed as the Next Big Thing. Rontoms (600 East Burnside, rontoms.net), over the river, puts on free concerts every Sunday with local and touring musicians that would be hard to catch for any price back home. The Secret Society Ballroom (116 NE Russell St, secretsociety.net), formerly home to various underground Victorian brotherhoods, puts on big gigs in its velvet-draped concert space, complete with a wood-panelled cocktail bar.
I stayed with Michael in Sellwood, a suburb to the south-east, where vintage cars roll past art deco shopfronts and retro bars. Division is another great south-east neighbourhood, home to the Bluebird Guesthouse, a 1910 villa filled with vintage furniture. We browsed the Sellwood antique stores, swam off the docks and caught a movie at the tiny 1920s Moreland Theatre on SE Milwaukie Avenue. There are excellent food carts in the district: in Sellwood, the best are on the corner of SE 13th & Lexington; in Division, they're at SE 48th & Division. I liked blueberry soup and emmental toasties from a cart called Chowdah.
We treated ourselves to a night of luxury at the Heathman. Like a Hollywood actress trying to live down a sex-tape scandal, this classy hotel was politely trying to downplay its starring role in Fifty Shades of Grey. It has a lending library for guests, stocked with signed first editions and staffed by a sommelier. I reclined on the chaise longue, reading DBC Pierre. All very Heathman, but it didn't last. A few hours later, we were down by the river in the Star Bar (639 SE Morrison Street, star-bar-rocks.com) a punk hunk of old ungentrified Portland, drinking whiskey while the Ramones blasted out on to the street.
Independent record stores thrive in this city; Crossroads Music (3130 SE Hawthorne, xro.com) also sells beautiful collectible gig posters by Portland artist Chris Bigalke. I couldn't resist the world's biggest independent bookstore: Powell's City Of Books (powells.com) on West Burnside, with 1.6 acres of new and used volumes. I would have got completely lost in here without Michael, but there are worse places to lose your way than somewhere between Sherman Alexie and Mark Twain.
Rock & Rose (616 East Burnisde, rocknroseinc.com) is a vintage clothing store that also stocks gorgeous leather bags from Martine Satchels in which to stash your lastest Palahniuk novel. For clothes, there are heaps more vintage stores, plus local designer shops such as Isaac Hers and Communion. But I preferred to buy from The Bins (1740 SE Ochoco St) – a pay-by-weight used clothing free-for-all – and from neighbourhood yard sales.
Brothers Young were playing a gig in Michael's hometown of Bend, on the edge of the desert, so we made a trip of it. The three-hour drive from Portland winds over Mount Hood and through dusty canyons and the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, to the high desert plateau. Sagebrush spreads silver over open spaces and snow-capped volcanic peaks break the flat horizon.
Once a rough lumber town, Bend has reinvented itself as an outdoor activities centre: with mountain biking and abseiling, rafting and snowboarding. We canoed on the Deschutes river, through overhanging willow and clouds of ducks, and swam by the old timber mills. Beneath Broken Top mountain, I hiked past waterfalls in the Tumalo gorge, the towering white water-knives cool among the juniper, then sat down on a gravel bank to read Steinbeck.
In downtown Bend, I shopped at Ranch Records (831 Wall Street) and the lovely Between The Covers bookstore (645 NW Delaware Ave) with its shelves of old-school candy. We had drinks on the firelit patio of McMenamins hotel and bar, where I became quite attached to the house-made wildflower wheat beer. We played ping-pong and Keno in late-night bars whose names I can't remember. Bend is 1,100m above sea level, so maybe it was the altitude that fogged my memory.
What remain clear in my memory of Portland and Oregon are moments of sheer happiness. Lying across laps in the back seat of a car crossing Burnside, warm night air and streetlights racing past. The dazzle of the ocean. Moonlight on harbour water. The scent of the forests, and swimming from docks. The music that came from the desert expanse, from roadsides of roses and half-forgotten histories.
