Escape from New York

Another Brooklynite trades the Big Apple for a Portland state of mind.

By Daniel B. Smith

Portland now seems to be that promised land. It’s a dubious honor, I’m afraid. As Christine Hoag, a sales manager at Stumptown Coffee Roasters (which, incidentally, just opened a roasting facility in Brooklyn) characterized the intercity relationship to me, “It’s like the corporate executive falling in love with the waitress.” And we all know how reliable the executive’s attentions are in that scenario.

But not all of us are executives. Kougar14 and I, we’re just a couple of harried New Yorkers in love with a place where the lights are dimmer but the warmth greater, where egomania and ambition run a little less rampant, where the politics are more uniformly progressive, the outdoors more accessible, and, yes, the real estate less expensive.

And, speaking only for myself now, I don’t plan to be a former New Yorker for very long. Only a weekender wants a place to mold itself to his image; a settler wants the opposite. If I’m resented for acting on a fantasy so many others share, I’ll just have to stay long enough that no one remembers where I started.