FOREST PARK COULD CATCH FIRE

BRIAN BROSE

BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com

As wildfires tear through nearly 450,000 acres of Oregon this week, perhaps you’re feeling grateful to be a city dweller. Don’t be so sure.

Portland officials are increasingly concerned that the city’s showcase park in the West Hills places it at risk for a nightmare scenario: an urban forest fire.

Forest Park stretches for 8 square miles of Douglas firs, elms and cedars along the ridgeline of the Northwest Hills. It’s the largest urban forest in the nation.

But as climate change turns the Pacific Northwest’s natural blessings into liabilities with each bone-dry summer, city emergency officials say Forest Park catching fire is one of the top natural hazards now facing Portland.

The city first identified wildfire in Forest Park as a “mounting” threat a decade ago in its 2009 Wildfire Readiness Assessment. That document noted that fires in Powell Butte and Forest Park were of major concern to the city: “There is an ongoing risk that during a severe drought, park vegetation that is not normally flammable could dry out enough to carry a fire into the forest canopy, where it would be very difficult to bring under control.”

Jonna Papaefthimiou, director of the Portland Bureau of Emergency Management, says the risk has only increased since.

“More than 70,000 residents live in areas that would be directly threatened by a fire there,” she says. “And we know some people camp right in the park and would have no time or ability to evacuate. Furthermore, all Portlanders would be impacted by the smoke and massive disruption a Forest Park fire would cause—even if it were quickly contained. For all these reasons, we consider the fire threat in Forest Park to be one of the highest threats to public safety in our city.”

Kim Kosmas, a senior fire inspector and firefighter with Portland Fire & Rescue, says only earthquakes, flooding and landslides pose a greater threat to Portlanders than a match dropped along the Wildwood Trail.

“It’s definitely at the top of the list. If you look at our wildfire hazard map, it’s basically the West Hills,” says Kosmas. “Forest Park is beautiful and green, but with the right conditions—with winds and drying—it could burn pretty quickly. The trends are changing, and all the scientists are saying it’s going to get worse.”

Erica Nelson, a PF&R captain who patrols the park, describes the worst-case scenario: a source for the fire, an abundance of dry vegetation, heat to sustain the fire, and just one gust of wind to help it travel and spread.

“It’s not a big deal,” she says, “until it is.”

On the afternoon of July 23, two firefighters from Station 27 on Northwest Skyline Boulevard hopped into their Kawasaki golf cart, which labored up and down the steep trails of Forest Park, spitting fumes.

The cart had few accoutrements: a shovel, water bags that are attachable to special backpacks to put out small fires, and a chainsaw.

Nelson and Tim Gilbert took the cart on one of its standard routes on fire lane paths along Leif Erikson Drive Trail. Firefighters from Station 27 do this patrol every Thursday. Another fire station down the road handles the patrol every Tuesday.

They’re looking for remnants of a camp or stove fire, cigarette butts, and other human-generated fire hazards.

At one point, Gilbert slowed down the golf cart and peered down a hill. He nodded toward a faint outline of a trampled path off the main trail. That’s something else they look for: paths that indicate people may be camping at the end of them and possibly starting warming or cooking fires.

In April, the fire bureau responded to two fires, each about 200 by 200 feet, in Forest Park near the lower part above Highway 30. The fires started in homeless encampments, fire officials say.

Homelessness in Forest Park is hard to track because the park is so large and the greenery hides encampments. But PF&R Capt. Louisa Jones says the homeless population in the park has increased over the years. And 90% of Oregon’s fires are human-caused.

“We have absolutely seen an increase in calls,” Jones says. “If you have 15 people doing 15 fires a day versus one guy doing a fire a day, that’s a 15-fold increase in the risk.”

On July 28, Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty, who oversees the fire bureau, is set to present the City Council a new protocol to decrease the number of campers in wildfire hazard zones, including Forest Park.

The protocol warns, “Unauthorized camping in our designated wildfire hazard zones poses an unacceptably high threat of potentially catastrophic wildfire incidents.”

The PF&R plan entails a more proactive approach to relocating campers living in high-risk wildfire areas. First, it will send Street Roots staff to urge relocation. If that doesn’t work, it’ll bring in the city’s Homeless and Urban Camping Impact Reduction Program—the group responsible for sweeps.

But homeless camping is only one of three reasons the risk of a Forest Park fire is increasing.

The second is hotter and drier summers that are starting earlier in the year. “You can already see how dry everything is,” Nelson says, pointing at a fern from her passenger’s seat in the golf cart, its tips tinged brown and curling into themselves.

That means fires are popping up earlier in the year, making it more important to trim thickets away from the conifers.

Green vegetation might seem like a deterrent to fire, but the park’s largely unmanaged underbrush often reaches all the way up to the trees, providing more fuel to catch the trees on fire.

“If we don’t clean up the underbrush and you get a big enough fire underneath, that’s when it’s extremely hard to get contained,” says Jones. “We can’t just overcome it with hoses from the ground.”

The third reason a large fire in Forest Park concerns officials: homes threaded along the park’s edge—and filled with toxic material.

Elliott Gall is an assistant professor at Portland State University and air quality researcher who’s studied air pollution from wildfires. “That’s the concern of mine at Forest Park,” Gall says. “If there were a major wildfire in the park, what else would burn in close proximity?”

Building materials create a “more diverse and toxic soup” than just burning trees, he says. “Its proximity to a few million people, that’s a concern.”

The fire bureau is so alarmed by the homes in and surrounding Forest Park that it’s increasing public education about ways to prevent fire from reaching homes in an emergency—like clearing brush away from a home’s perimeter and having an action plan in case of fire.

“A lot of the fires that start are from the embers that find the receptive fuels near gutters or the welcome mat on the front door. If you can imagine a snowstorm, it’s like an ember storm,” Kosmas says.

Quietly, changes to Forest Park management are coming.

Fire officials want to make alterations to city code that would allow homeowners to chop down more trees and clear a wider berth free of vegetation around homes to create natural fire barriers.

Portland General Electric, whose power lines crisscross above Forest Park, is in discussions with the fire bureau to implement a plan to turn off power lines in case of extreme weather conditions. (Fallen power lines in a windstorm sparked some of the worst wildfire damage in Oregon last summer.)

And city officials were recently awarded a $429,000 grant by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to address fire risk in the Linnton neighborhood between the base of Forest Park and the Willamette River.

Kosmas says it’s about time.

“The policies about how to manage the park and natural areas were made 30 years ago, and they need to be brought up to speed,” she says. “Thirty years ago, you’d never think there would be a wildfire here.”

BRIAN BROSE

CHRIS NESSETH

BY SOPHIE PEEL speel@wweek.com

If you happened by the tennis courts at Sellwood Park in Southeast Portland early in the morning last month, you’d have found a scene straight out of Tom Sawyer: Nisa’ Haron and seven of her friends power washing and sealing the cracked concrete, free of charge.

The eight Southeast Portland retirees are avid participants in America’s hottest sport: pickleball.

They’re part of the PDX Pickleball Club, which has 300 members and most often plays at Sellwood Park, where just two of the four tennis courts are usable. Not even a month ago, the other two were spidered with inch-and-a-half-wide cracks that made them unplayable.

The club decided to fix that this spring. Members raised $9,000 to repair the courts Portland Parks & Recreation had neglected and, while they were at it, change them to pickleball courts. In June, Haron says, two parks employees gave them permission to start the work on their own dime. After all, she adds, parks management assured the club in 2019 that making two of the tennis courts into pickleball courts was part of its eventual plan.

But on July 9, two weeks after repairs began, the parks bureau refused the offer. A city employee ordered the club to halt its repair work.

Parks officials told Haron and her friends they would need to pay $1,000 to apply for a city permit and, if granted, another $2,500 a week in rent while the work was completed, according to the club’s calculations.

Henrik Bothe, a club member who helped with the repairs, is crestfallen. “It goes nuts in the park with pickleball,” he says. “It’s just gangbusters. You’ll see all eight pickleball courts packed with people, and not your typical athletes—a lot of older people.”

Pickleball is one of America’s fastest-growing sports. Participation grew by 23% last year, says the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. The game’s smaller scale—it uses paddles instead of rackets, the court is a quarter the size of a tennis court, and the ball is hollow plastic with air holes— made it a pandemic favorite for people looking to socialize outdoors.

Yet Portland parks contain not a single dedicated pickleball court. Lines are painted on a handful of tennis courts across the city, but not nearly enough to support the game’s exploding popularity.

In fact, city documents show 73 of the city’s 103 tennis courts are in disrepair.

Last November, City Hall hit up the public for a $48 million annual property tax levy to restore crumbling park facilities. The city sought the taxpayer dollars after years of aggressive expansion and deferred maintenance. Faced with the threat of dire cuts in service, voters overwhelmingly approved the funding.

That makes it all the more puzzling that parks officials dismissed an offer from pickleballers to repair courts on their own time and with their own money. It appears the bureau squandered a perfect public relations opportunity and a free upgrade.

“We wanted to do this without having to use any taxpayer dollars, for ourselves but also for the good of our community,” says Cathy Owen, the club’s secretary and Haron’s wife. “It’s sat for decades, unused.”

In response to questions from WW, parks bureau spokesman Mark Ross said: “There may have been some communications issues between the advocates and [the bureau]. We are working to smooth out the confusion. We appreciate the passion and advocacy of park users and sports enthusiasts.” He declined to say whether the bureau would insist on charging the pickleball club rent to make free repairs.

Commissioner Carmen Rubio, who oversees the parks bureau, tells WW she regrets if there was miscommunication from the city but says she’s grateful to the club “for their enthusiasm and passion for bringing more access to the sport to our parks.”

The parks bureau is keenly aware that most of the city’s tennis courts are in poor shape. This year, parks officials created a list of courts they’re looking to refurbish in coming years, a number of which they want to rehab to make them usable for other emerging sports like pickleball and futsal.

The massive project is laid out in a June 2021 city document that details which parks are on the docket to be repaired and which could potentially be refurbished as pickleball courts. Sellwood is one. The estimated total project cost is $7.73 million.

The project prioritizes parks in lower-income areas like Peninsula, Lents and Fernhill. Sellwood, a relatively prosperous neighborhood, is not on the top-priority list.

That’s why PDX Pickleball Club thought it was handing the city a win.

The club sent a detailed project proposal on April 22 to a parks maintenance employee. On June 24, Haron says, that employee handed the club the keys to the utility shed so it could access water and electricity. Volunteers worked for two weeks, from 6 am to noon, with a 45-minute break to eat sandwiches from New Seasons.

“It was brutal. We’re not spring chickens—we’re all in our 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s,” says Haron, director of the club.

And then, on July 9, a parks employee drove up and told them they needed to halt their work until they got a permit. They’d filled all the cracks in the top two courts and were working on a skim coat next. He chained and locked the gate to the tennis courts.

Stephen Bouffard, who oversees permits for the parks bureau, told Haron in a July 23 email that their permit was requesting a change of use for the top two courts. In order to change the use of a parks facility, Bouffard wrote, the proposal would need to go through a public process.

Bouffard said the parks’ plan for court restoration and redevelopment for some courts for other sports, such as pickleball, was undergoing a “public engagement” process, and that plans for each court in need of repairs would be finalized in September.

Until then, the club’s permit would be kept on hold. “Thank you for the offer,” Bouffard wrote.

Haron says the club has spent upward of $9,000 on supplies for the repairs already. Most baffling of all: City documents show the parks bureau hasn’t figured out how it will pay for the tennis court restorations.

“Parks gets in their own way sometimes,” says Elizabeth Milner, who lives nearby and supports a pickleball court. “In this case, it seems in the interest of engaging the public. They’re actually missing an opportunity to partner with an already engaged public.”

CHRIS NESSETH

Last month, the bleak reality of Portland’s streets confronted Deborah Kafoury—and chased her down the block. “I was out for a walk with a friend of mine the other morning and had to run,” she says. “Some human being was experiencing a mental health crisis and was charging towards us.” For Kafoury, 53, who has held the job of Multnomah County chair since 2014, it was a personal encounter with a humanitarian disaster she wants to fix. “It’s devastating,” she says. “It’s devastating for the folks who are living that way. And it’s devastating for our community members who see it on a daily basis.” She says the poverty and squalor unspooling each day on Portland’s streets are the direct result of a housing crisis she’s dedicated years trying to alleviate. Her critics might say she’s seen the results of her own policies. Perhaps no official in this city has labored longer and with such singular purpose as Kafoury on homelessness— the civic illness that never seems to abate. No leader, aside from late City Commissioner Nick Fish, has done more to champion dedicated funding to build affordable housing and provide services that help keep people there. The city and county work together to fund services for homeless people, while the city is in charge of a Housing Bureau that produces subsidized apartments. The city sets the policy for sweeping homeless camps while the county takes the lead on providing housing vouchers and other aid to the downtrodden. Fairly or not, her hard work ties Kafoury to the results on the streets, even as Portlanders emerge from pandemic shutdowns furious at the campsites they encounter in every neighborhood. Her critics—who have ranged at various times from Mayor Ted Wheeler to County Commissioner Sharon Meieran to businessman Jordan Schnitzer—have said local government should act with greater urgency and devote more money to shelter beds rather than try to keep destitute people in apartments. “I believe we need to be addressing the situation like the emergency that it is,” says Meieran. “People are dying on the streets in growing numbers.” If for no other reason, that fight makes Kafoury as interesting a politician as any in the state. But Kafoury is compelling for other reasons, too. The daughter of late City Commissioner Gretchen Kafoury, she comes from the closest thing Portland has to a political dynasty. Since replacing a scandal-plagued Jeff Cogen atop Multnomah County seven years ago, she has sailed to reelection with strong public support. Her supporters believe Kafoury is the one elected official in Portland who can plausibly claim to have tangled with the all toughest problems in the state and not embarrassed herself in the process. She’s an executive who has kept her focus on relieving poverty while getting a bridge and a courthouse built.

“Deborah Kafoury has done more for housing justice in Oregon than any elected official in our state’s history,” says Israel Bayer, director of International Network of Street Papers North America. That’s part of the reason Kafoury’s name has long appeared on the short list of possible Democratic candidates for governor in 2022. But such a candidacy appears increasingly unlikely. In the past week, WW has learned, Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek has neared a decision to enter the Democratic gubernatorial primary. Kotek, like Kafoury, is a Portland progressive and an ally of Gov. Kate Brown, but is also a longtime darling of labor unions. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for Kafoury. The emerging candidacy of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof crowds the race even further. By Labor Day, as many as four candidates—Kotek, Kristof, Oregon Treasurer Tobias Read and Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum—may have entered the field. (Disclosure: Rosenblum is married to the co-owner of WW’s parent company.) Yamhill County Commission Chair Casey Kulla is already in.

So what is Kafoury thinking?

We wanted to hear from her. She is not known for her candor; she’s doesn’t hunt for headlines and has an uneasy relationship with the press. Last week, she invited us onto her front porch in Eastmoreland to dish on the state of Oregon politics and Portland’s streets. One of the first things out of her mouth was an admission of the bitter resentment Oregonians feel toward their politicians. For the next two hours, as squirrels scampered across tree trunks in her yard, Kafoury engaged in an intricate verbal dance with WW, both defending her record and voicing the same frustrations Portlanders feel about the condition of their city. She said she wouldn’t sign a petition to recall Wheeler—but only after saying she was thinking about it and that she saw no way to help him save his tenure in office. She pledged the streets of the Portland would look significantly different in a year—but complained that City Hall should focus on picking up trash. She was disarmingly funny and willing to admit mistakes—but openly weary of the close scrutiny that comes with public office. The conversation shows what will be missing if Kafoury is not on the campaign trail for the state’s highest office. She had plenty to say.

Deborah Kafoury: Twelve thousand people on any given night who are sleeping with a roof over their head who would otherwise be homeless. That’s actual permanent housing. That doesn’t include the shelter system. We have families who are in shelter and then move into housing. There was not really any options for that before I came into office.

It’s very true. What is happening on the streets of our community is devastating.

It’s a failure on all of our part as a community.

I don’t know that you can point to any one individual. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just say it’s this person’s fault? It would. I don’t think it’s as easy as that.

It’s really hard to expect any one community to take on something as complex as homelessness. It’s a poverty issue. It’s a housing cost issue—market forces. It’s a mental health issue. It’s substance abuse. It’s social isolation. It’s a lot of issues coming together. And look back to the middle of the ’80s, where the federal government started just walking away from this, expecting local communities to handle this issue.

The pandemic has made things increasingly difficult. And, if you think about the number of calls to our crisis line from people who had never experienced a mental health crisis before in their lives, just the dramatic increase.

This is why I’m not the world’s most beloved politician, because I tell the truth. I can’t not tell people the truth. And the truth is that there are all the externalities that hit us.

The role that I can play best is thinking through where we’re going next. And prior to the pandemic, we were on a good trajectory.

We started with the Portland housing bond [that city voters approved for $259 million in 2016]. Then we had the Metro housing bond [that tricounty voters approved for $653 million in 2018.] And then, at the very beginning of the pandemic, [tricounty voters] passed the Metro supportive services measure [a tax on high-income households to raise up $250 million a year for homeless services]. Each measure builds on the last one with the goal of getting people off the streets and into housing.

I say: You’re right. It’s true. And that’s why we’re opening up more shelters. [But] a shelter does not solve someone’s homelessness, not by any definition. And you can get somebody into an apartment just as easily as siting a building or renovating a shelter.

I’m more committed than ever to actually ending people’s homelessness. And we’re opening up more shelters. We’re purchasing motels that are going to convert into a living arrangement. We’re expanding our behavioral health services, both for people who are sheltered and unsheltered.

And you really can’t discount the budget that the county just passed: 1,300 households will be in housing by the end of this year. And another 500 shelter beds will be open, and that’s going to make a huge physical difference. We’re not going to solve the problem in this next year, but we are going to make huge strides toward that.

Maybe not everywhere, but yes—1,300 households is a lot of people. So there will be a visible difference.

He is telling a story that suits his fundraising. He’s trying to fund his project. I don’t agree with him. I went out and visited Wapato—uh, Bybee Lakes [Hope Center]—and it reinforced my decision not to open it as a shelter that we run.

I saw a very expensive project. If the county had put as much money into that building as he has, we would have been on the front page of your newspaper.

I don’t know enough about the size of these camps, the structure of them, to say.

What would make a real visible difference that you could accomplish quickly is cleaning up the trash around town. [Editor’s note: A dozen agencies share sanitation responsibilities in Portland. Most are overseen by City Hall. None is run by the county.] Homelessness is a complex issue with a lot of factors at play. It’s not something that you can snap your fingers and solve. Picking up the trash is actually not that difficult. That’s a solvable problem. And one of the things that the city should do right now is to pick up the trash.

It’s going to be expensive. It’s going to take some maneuvering with all the different bureaus involved. But it’s something that you could actually solve. It would be visible. And I think it would go a long way towards helping people feel like their concerns are being heard.

It is important to clean up campsites, and there’s ways that you can do it that are less intrusive and less harmful.

I believe that [city officials] try to do the least intrusive way possible, but you need to clean up the campsites. Sometimes there’s biohazards—it’s harmful to human health.

I do care. And that’s why I think you do need to clean things up. That’s why the city needs to clean up the garbage. There’s easy, low-hanging fruit, which is cleaning up the trash. And I do feel like the public needs to just be pounding on the table about that.

I haven’t decided.

I think being the mayor is a really untenable job right now. I want someone really, really good to do it, if he does get recalled. I tried to get Tina [Kotek] to run for mayor.

I have heard.

Sure. Anybody who gets into the race influences decisions. Kudos to people who have jumped in already.

I haven’t. I have not had five minutes to think about anything.

Politically, it’s a smart move if he does, because there’s a large anti-incumbency sentiment and people feel like their leaders have let them down in many ways.

But it has always bothered me that people talk about “we’ve got to run our government like a business” or “anybody could have that job.” I don’t think anybody can have these jobs. I think it’s really hard. And it has gotten harder. No offense to journalists—wonderful, intelligent people who have that inch-deep, milewide knowledge of everything—I don’t know that is the best preparation for being the governor.

If he would do what I would say more often? Just ask my husband: If you just do what I say, things go a lot more smoothly.

I was joking. I’m not going to sign that. We just had the election. People had the chance to vote against him if they wanted to.

It is like kicking a dog when he’s down. If I believed that I could make it better by publicly criticizing him, I would totally do it. [Editor’s note: Kafoury was notably scathing in her reaction to Wheeler’s strategy for removing homeless camps from downtown sidewalks this spring.] I have publicly criticized him, and he hasn’t changed his direction. And I don’t think he’s going to. I don’t think there’s anything I can do or say that’s going to change his mind or make him do things better or different. I’ve tried it.

I think he is in a tough position. Like everyone, he early on had a stumble: leading with “I’m not going to prosecute people.” The way it was framed I don’t think made him look good in the public. Since then, I think he’s taken very seriously prosecuting people who’ve broken the law. And he’s said the police need to arrest people with an actual rationale that will allow him to prosecute them if they’re breaking the law. And arson is one of them.

Oh, you should ask my children about our evening dinner conversations. Stressful. I think the best thing for our marriage was him leaving the governor’s office [laughs]. I don’t know if we would have made it through.

Probably shutting down the county. We were going to be potentially destroying people’s lives. That weighed really heavily on us. But we were doing it to save people’s lives. I mean, it did destroy people’s lives.

Oh, I haven’t slept. It was kind of like having a newborn. I don’t sleep.

The emails and phone calls that I have received—what people are going through and what people have been through—it is just devastating. But if you look at Oregon’s COVID rates compared to any other state in the country, we did really well. We saved a lot of people’s lives.

I really thought we would be still in some form of shutdown through the fall. If I could go back in time, I would have pushed things to be open more quickly.

There is a real struggle with getting people back into an office work environment, especially if you have kids. We did try to balance our employees’ needs with the community’s needs.

It was déjà vu from the pandemic—learning about all the soccer matches and outdoor events that were going to be occurring that weekend. And trying to figure out who was going to call which team. I called the Timbers. They agreed to push off the start time to be later in the evening. We called through our caseloads—the people who are in aging disability [care], hundreds of thousands of calls.

There’s a lot of things. I don’t know if “differently” is the right word, or if there’s just other, additional things that we could have done. I don’t know that anybody except maybe the doctors understood really what it was going to be like to live through 117 degrees for three days.

Having an alert system, like an earthquake alert. That’s just something that didn’t cross our minds, but I’m darn sure going to do it next time.

BRIAN BURK

TriMet should have had a real clear message: We will have free fares. I don’t know what the threshold is—whether it’s 105 or 100 or 110 or whatever, but there should be no person who’s scared to get on or nervous about getting on a bus and not understanding that they can get on a bus and ride as long as they want.

Well, from what I hear, all politicians are pretty unpopular right now. It’s a tough time to be in elected office. It’s been a rough year and people are unhappy. And if you’re the top person in the state, it’s going to be you.

It’s frustrating. It’s sad to me to think that people are just so done that they would rather pick everybody up who’s living on the streets and ship them off to Burns than spend the necessary time and energy. We have the money to get them into actual housing and address their needs.

I think we have to do it.

AGE: 53 EDUCATION: Bachelor’s degree in English, Whitman College. “I thought that I would become a journalist,” she told her alumni magazine in 2019. MOTHER: Gretchen Kafoury, a former state representative, Multnomah County commissioner and Portland city commissioner. She died in 2015. “I do wish I could talk with her,” Kafoury says, “especially at the height of the pandemic.” FATHER: Stephen Kafoury, a former state lawmaker and Portland School Board member. OTHER FAMILY: Greg Kafoury, uncle, and Jason Kafoury, cousin; both prominent trial lawyers. HUSBAND: Nik Blosser, chairman of the Sokol Blosser winery, former chief of sta to Gov. Kate Brown, and chief of sta to the O ce of Cabinet A airs under President Joe Biden. HER JOBS BEFORE MULTNOMAH COUNTY CHAIR: Aide to U.S. Rep. Les AuCoin, political consultant, lobbyist, Oregon House minority leader (the youngest woman to serve in that role), and Multnomah County commissioner. ACHIEVEMENTS AT MULTNOMAH COUNTY: Oversaw replacement of the Sellwood Bridge; led construction of the new, $324 million Multnomah County Courthouse; and founded the Joint O ce of Homeless Services, which unites city and county programs. “I love the infrastructure projects because they have a beginning, a middle and an end,” she says. “Unlike poverty or racism, you can actually finish something.” SECRET TALENT: “I can make a martini. That is my specialty, FYI.” AARON MESH and RACHEL MONAHAN.

Portland’s reopening weekend welcomed visitors back to the heart of downtown for a free Pink Martini concert in Pioneer Courthouse Square and the grand opening of the Cart Blocks food cart pod at Southwest Ankeny Street and Park Avenue.

Photos by Chris Nesseth

COURTESY OF BLUE OX

ALEX WITTWER

A second (!) ax-throwing bar, Blue Ox, opens in Oregon City. It would have been the third ax-throwing bar, but one of the city’s ax-throwing bars closed.

WW Arts & Culture editor Suzette Smith changed her social media bio to reflect her new position weeks ago. Now her watch begins.

Some of the food carts displaced by construction of the Ritz-Carlton hotel reopen in Portland’s new “Cart Blocks” pod.

COURTESY OF THE CAMAS POLICE DEPARTMENT

WIKI COMMONS ANOTHER BELIEVER / MORGAN GREEN HOPKINS

Portland beer bar N.W.I.P.A. changes its name to Northwest IPA after an outcry about cultural appropriation.

SUZETTE SMITH

After a George Floyd mural in Northeast Portland is vandalized with white nationalist graffiti, dozens of volunteers show up to help clean it. A 3-foot, 100-pound opah, also known as a moonfish, washes up on the Oregon Coast.

Camas police find eight large snakes abandoned in Lacamas Park on the other side of the Columbia River.

Within the past five years, the price of Oregon Christmas trees nearly doubles, likely due to hotter summers.

Employees at several Portland eateries complain to OSHA about dangerous workplace temperatures during the recent heat wave.

Multnomah County recommends that everyone, vaccinated or not, wear a mask indoors.

Chuck Wendig in Conversation

Bestselling author of Star Wars: Aftermath and Wanderers, Chuck Wendig has another gripping, smart work of literary horror for you to gobble down. The Book of Accidents has enough family secrets, forgotten trauma, and haunted family history to make you want to stay away, but

Wendig’s prose just won’t let you go.

He’s also a little more fun to watch onstage than most authors. Wendig will be joined by game writer and author Cassandra Khaw. Register for the Zoom event at powells.com. 5 pm

Thursday, July 29. Free.

Nicole Byer Sketch and standup comedian Nicole Byer held us all together this past year with her amazing sex and relationships podcast Why Won’t You Date Me? riffing on everything from polyamory to butt stuff to grown-up breakups. She’s an Upright Citizens Brigade alum and has worked on shows like Girl Code. You’ve most recently obsessed over her endless one-liners on Netflix’s Nailed It! or the gift basket of character voices she performs on Cartoon Network’s Tuca & Bertie. Helium Comedy Club, 1510 SE 10th Ave., portland.heliumcomedy.com. 7:15 pm Thursday, 7 and 9:30 pm FridaySaturday, July 29-31. $25. 21+.  Minority Retort Presents:

This long-standing showcase with a focus on comedians of color is also, hands down, one of the best curated comedy showcases in the city. Neel Nanda’s strange thought trajectories about dating, roommates and beatboxing are great examples of what Minority Retort brings on the regular. Will there be a piano so he can do “Piano Jokes”? The crowd is hungry for it. Carlos Windham and Anthony Robinson also appear. Jason Lamb and Julia Ramos host. Siren Theater, 315 NW Davis St, sirentheater.com. 8 pm Friday, July 30. $25.  Dreckig and Yawa Dreckig and Yawa are two very idiosyncratic Portland bands that really know how to put on a show. Formed by two Portland scene stalwarts, Dreckig performs their krautrock cumbia wearing metallic hooded capes, like some kind of flute-solo space wizards. There’s a certain alchemy to Yawa’s stage presence, too. The singer and loop-pedal virtuoso blends hip-hop-influenced beats with swirling electronica that’s equally trance-inducing and danceable. Kelly’s Olympian, 426 SW Washington St., kellysolypian.com. 9 pm Friday, July 30. $8 advance, $10 at the door. 21+.

Lots of Laughs: Bri Pruett Bri Pruett’s Blazers huddle joke is borderline immortal in terms of how many times you can hear it and somehow find it’s still funny and fresh as a daisy. Her 2016 one-woman show Stellar bordered on a serious piece of art—in addition to just making the audience laugh and cry all over their soft, sweet hearts. Pruett is one of many talented Portland-area original comics making her way back home to visit as society continues to cautiously open up. The Lots of Laughs venue is well ventilated—it’s the Helium parking lot. Helium Comedy Club,1510 SE 9th Ave. 5 pm Sunday, July 31. $15. Bring your own chair, or sit on the pavement like a serf.

Lorelei Oregon’s landscape is said to be its own character in this locally shot film, so it’s fitting that Lorelei will get to debut in a movie theater, allowing audiences to soak in the state’s natural beauty on the big screen. A backdrop of mist-shrouded forests sets the tone for a fable about second chances in which Wayland (Pablo Schreiber) reconnects with his high school girlfriend Dolores (Jena Malone) after being released from prison for armed robbery. With Dolores now a single mother of three—all named after shades of blue—Wayland finds himself in the role of reluctant father figure not long after they reunite. Regret and missed opportunities weigh on both of them, but that ultimately gives way to a renewed sense of hope. Catch one of the two evening screenings at Living Room for a Q&A session with first-time director Sabrina Doyle. Living Room, 341 SW 10th Ave., pdx.livingroomtheaters.com. 7:15 and 9:25 pm Friday, July 30. $13.75.  Putney Swope (1969) Written and directed by the late Robert Downey Sr., this satirical comedy follows Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson), the only Black executive at an advertising agency. After he’s accidentally voted the new chairman of the board, Putney quickly finds success in his new role by completely overhauling the company, leading the uptight U.S. government to consider him a threat. Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy Blvd., 503-493-1128, hollywoodtheatre.org. 7:30 pm Tuesday, Aug. 3. $8-$10.