There’s almost as much water up here in the Pacific Northwest as there are trees. And believe me, there are lots of trees.
I’m not the only one who appreciates all that aqua. Portland devotes an entire week to honoring the stuff…or more specifically, to the stuff that floats in it. Fleet Week is a big deal up here. The United States and Canadian navies send a literal armada to the festivities. I don’t mean some cheesy outboard inflatables, mounted with a few measly machine guns. We’re talking big boys…destroyer escorts manned by hundreds of sailors who are trained to shoot missiles in defense of the fleet. They sail those puppies out of the Pacific and up the Columbia and into the Willamette River and they park all that firepower right in the middle of downtown Portland. The result is just the weirdest cohabitation of soldiers and tree-hugging pacifist citizenry on the planet.
This City’s unofficial slogan is “Keep Portland Weird,” and this year’s doin’s didn’t disappoint. I’d barely found a spot to watch the arrivals when I saw that someone had put diapers on the tugboats that were pushing the leviathans to their berths. No kidding! Diapers! Ok, so they were really just big pieces of canvas; and they were actually draped across the fronts of the tugs instead of the rears. But I still thought that was pretty neat. Talk about a civilized society…this Portland surely is. We’re so concerned about the environment that we even diaper our tugs, so as not to sully our navies.
The fun didn’t stop there, either. So much hardware attracts quite a crowd, not all of it, as you might expect, military appreciative. Not two minutes had passed before an activist appeared. This fellow had as much hair on his face as on his head, and all of it red and wild.
“Save our rivers!” he chanted as he puffed on a cigarette and jogged behind a baby carriage.
“Stop polluting our rivers! Stop polluting our air! Save our planet!”
He almost collided with a senior citizen street person who was using one of those aluminum walkers. The senior, sucking a cigarette of his own, quickly hoisted his cane like a baseball bat. But the jogger was already out of range.
“Save our rivers!” He made a u-turn and headed away. A little boy was inside the carriage. He was having a fine time, too.
“Save our planet!” the jogger yelled.
“Bubbweiser!” the kid yelled.
The spectators weren’t the only ones having a good time. The City had dispatched its fireboat to greet the fleet, and at the appropriate moment it cut loose with all nozzles. Geysers of water dyed red and blue mixed with the natural stuff and shot probably a hundred feet into the air. It made a good show.
But my favorite part of Fleet Week wasn’t the destroyers or the men and women who sailed them. My favorite part was down the sidewalk a ways, where the last operational PT Boat of World War II was on display atop a barge.
If you aren’t familiar with PT Boats – most folks aren’t these days – they were something that the Navy dreamed up to inexpensively destroy – or at least harass – large enemy warships. At only seventy-seven feet in length and made of mahogany, patrol torpedo boats were equipped with three Packard engines that on a good day could drive the little craft to a top speed of around 43 mph. The saying was that you could always spot a PT man. He would be the skinniest guy on the beach, thanks to the PT’s habit of riding so roughly that even experienced crewmen routinely succumbed to seasickness. PT’s stared in the old McHale’s Navy TV series and in the John Ford directed film THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, staring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery.
Well, the eighty-something-year-old PT man on duty the day I stopped by surely looked the part. If he’d turned sideways, he’d have disappeared! We visited for a long time, with him doing most of the talking and me mostly listening. And when it was over, I thanked him for doing his part in that war so long ago. For without him, and so many others like him, the world would be a very different place today.
“You’re welcome,” he said, as we shook goodbye. And he meant every bit of it.