Portland, Oregon - Winter of 1993
After 10 months in the Grand Canyon, I made a quick, short-term move to Portland, Oregon with one of my friends and roommates from the Grand Cayon. My objective was to make alot of money. A little bit of background first, Up until this time, I was 23 years old and a college graduate from Michigan, but I had never made anything more than $4.25/hour in my life. My friend, also a college graduate from New York had spent some time parking cars in Portland, Oregon. He told me they paid $5.50/hour which shocked me to no ends. "$5.25!!??!! For parking cars? Thats it? You mean to say I can get alot of overtime doing this as well?"
My friend Chris had done this job many times in the past, and I decided I'd go up there with him at the same time. He'd also been in Yellowstone the entire 10 months, and we were both pretty much sick of living a somewhat tranquil lifestyle. I also had one other agenda, oddly I had plans to attend a guitar school in Minneapolis Minnesota (a school I found out about in the back of a Guitar Magazinze) and I was going to join my girlfriend that I made from working at the Grand Canyon.
First off, my friend Chris got his own apartment in Portland, and the deal was I could sleep on the floor and work as hard as possible for two months so I could save money to get to Minneapolis and join my girlfriend at that time. I routinely figured out what $5.50 would be at an overtime rate, and decided I'd work like hell to spend most of my time in the overtime hours. What happened? Well, I worked 100-hour weeks. The boss was amazed because I volunteered for almost anything and everything. It was also wintertime in Portland, and very much the rainy season. So this probably meant that fewer of their employees wanted to volunteer to park cars in the misty Portland rain. However, for me, I had a mission. I was running around all over the place. I had one stable parking lot that I always worked from 8-5. But the sooner or later, I'd ask around, do whatever it took, to try to help out anyone else who needed. Big nights were special events in Portland. I was able to pretty much get as many hours as I wanted. My friend Chris was pretty much always like that. So the owner who knew Chris well, also offered me to manage my own parking lot within a month after working there, because of how much work I was putting in there. In short, everything went quite well.
I spent two months in the rain of Portland. I slept on the living room floor, worked pretty much from sunrise to who knows when. It was a pretty good experience overall. I was able to make the money I needed, and shortly thereafter was on my way to Minneapolis. (As an aside, a few years later I realized how meager $5.50/hour actually was, but at 23-24 years old and growing up in Michigan, I'd never heard of wages being much more than that.
Year and a half in Minneapolis
You can email me at:
Wintermoon2@yahoo.com