THE NEW YORKER ONLINE Few days pass during which Wayne Pernu does not buy a book, or several hundred. During the summer, he hits as many as a hundred book sales per day in and around Portland, Oregon, cramming volumes into every inch of his car, stacking them on his lap if he runs out […]
Our climbing experience in Peru’s Cordillera Negra was not a metaphor for anything at all; The fact that we quit not even midway up the rock reveals nothing about the strength of our characters. At least that’s what my sister and I told ourselves as we were being lowered to the ground. About 140 feet […]
The emergency backup horse was tempting. It followed us up each of the passes in Peru’s Huayhuash Mountain Range, enticing us with its empty saddle. But my sister and I resisted the urge to hop on for the climb, opting instead to feel the fullness of burn. The trail through the Cordillera Huayhuash (pronounced WhyWash) […]
Laura, Alexis and I summited Mount Everest the other night under a full moon. Ok, so we weren’t actually in the Himalayas, and the mountain was a few thousand feet shorter, but we saw snow, we saw crevasses and there were ropes and crampons involved. It was basically the same thing. We climbed Vallanaraju, an […]
After straddling the equator for a bit, I chose the northern side — just in time for my third summer in a row. Yes, it’s true. I’ve returned to the United States after nine months living and working in South America. I am living temporarily at my parents’ house in hot, humid Greensboro, North Carolina […]
Many adventures begin in The Dalles, the end-point of the main Oregon Trail, a small city on the banks of the Columbia 85 miles east of Portland. The wide open roads just outside of town, sparsely trafficked and surrounded by rolling farmland, make for some excellent cycling. When it’s pouring in Portland, you can usually […]
Exciting news on the freelance front: Last week, The New Yorker published my story, “An Old-School Book Scout,” about Wayne Pernu, a Portland book scout who makes his living buying books for cheap at yard, estate and library sales and reselling them at Powell’s Books. Relying on his knowledge and intuition (rather than a barcode […]
Five friends and I snowshoed through the dark to the Forest Service cabin in Oregon’s Umatilla National Forest, aware only of what fell within the narrow beams of our headlamps — snow, mostly, and the dark silhouettes of trees. It wasn’t until we woke up in the morning and stepped outside that we really knew […]
Packing the Crystal Ballroom in Portland on Saturday, whiskery men pitted their facial hair one against another at the 2012 West Coast Beard and Mustache Championships. They competed in categories that included natural mustache, chops-style mustache, freestyle mustache, full natural beard and partial beard. In honor of the competition, which the “Portlandia” blog covered here, […]
Ooltewah Middle sixth-grader Price McGinnis feels differently about girls than he did last year. When he gets around girls at school, he said, he feels a weird combination of nervousness and happiness. “When you’re talking to girls, you’re pretty much flirting,” said Price, 12, who has a girlfriend he sees at church on Wednesdays and […]
Portland wears graphic tees and skinny jeans and slings a courier bag over its shoulder whenever it goes anywhere. Its favorite color, by far, is green. The city defies traditional categorization in many ways. But it also has some definite preferences. And here they are, in no order whatsoever: Likes: Riding bikes, listening to indie […]
I’m terribly sorry to have disappeared since, well… April 12. I got caught up in my job reporting for The Times (serving Tigard, Tualatin and Sherwood, Ore.) and funneled most of my writing energy into covering a rabbit hoarder arrested for breaking her restraining order against rabbits, a police investigation of a hobo hit by […]
Saw this caterpillar in the middle of a closed road up near the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina Aaaand, a couple more photos from a hike my mother and I took through some bear–infested territory near Craggy Gardens: Fin.
It’s a chimney swift slumber party every night in September at Chapman Elementary School in Portland. Since the late 1980s, Vaux’s Swifts have used the school’s smokestack as a roosting spot during their fall migration to southern Central America. As many as 35,000 of the small black birds circle the chimney each evening around sunset […]