In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. For beyond the islands scattered west roll endless miles of ocean, while north-east at the city’s back jut jagged mountain peaks. With the slate-gray skies of autumn come the cyclone westerlies, raging winds and boiling clouds that sweep in from the sea. In waves these bloated clouds tear open on the peaks, and the rain which fills each gut spills and rattles down.
To live in this city, you learn to like rain.
Funny how sometimes you retain information from the unlikeliest of sources. I was in eleventh (or twelfth?) grade when I asked a friend if he had anything interesting to read. He lent me the novel Headhunter (Michael Slade). The plot is about Royal Canadian Mounted Police hunting down a serial killer in Vancouver. The passage above is how the story begins (after the first chapter which is more of a prologue). People who live in the pacific north-west would agree that the same passage applies to the other two big cities in this region — Seattle and Portland.
I must have been in fifth grade when I was doing a map (marking cities and lakes and rivers and mountains) of North America. One of the items was listed as “Vancouver (Canada)”. I did not know what Vancouver was; and, seeing Canada in parenthesis, I assumed they meant Canada (even though I had a feeling that couldn’t be right). Later, my sister laughed and told me that I was supposed to mark the city of Vancouver and not just Canada. So I learnt that Vancouver was a city and would later learn that it rained there all the time (courtesy the serial-killer tale above). A few year later, a friend of mine was interning at Starbucks in Seattle. “That is where Starbucks started.”, he told me, and “It rains here all the time.”. Just like Vancouver, I thought. It all made sense.
Almost exactly an year ago, I was having a phone interview. I already had a tentative offer (in Boston!) so I wasn’t taking the phone call seriously. I was on IM with a friend, planning to go to a 5 o’clock show of The Dark Knight. The interview went well and ended just in time for me to get to the movie in time. It was pouring. I got wet just walking across the parking lot. A couple of weeks later, I was in Portland interviewing for the job. It rained the whole day, almost exactly like the day I had been in Seattle, on another interview a few weeks back.
I never made it to Boston – not even for a face to face interview. I ended up taking the offer in Portland – a town that came close to being named Boston.
And that’s how I live in Portland now. In this city, it often rains. Geography demands it. … To live in this city, you learn to like rain.
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