Platial | Who and What's Nearby
Platial | Who and What's Nearby
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[December 18, 2006] It was a cold, introspective day in a cold, introspective week, and I had some thinking to do about transience. So when I finished my cleaning shift, I set off for the Portland Memorial Mausoleum in Sellwood.
The Mausoleum is on the edge of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, and the back of it looks out on a marshy lake I was not prepared to see inside Portland. The Mausoleum itself spreads across two and a half city blocks and is eight stories tall. Chuck Palahniuk's book on Portland says it has 58,000 people interred in it, more people than my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska (a town of 30,000 people). His book also says it has space for 120,000 more -- around a fifth of the population of Portland.
I only got to spend about 20 minutes in it before it closed for the evening. It wasn't what I was expecting -- the building was under construction for 70 years, and they only finished it in 1980, so it doesn't have the "old" feel I associate with proper cemeteries. The sections I saw (admittedly, few of them) seemed rather uniform, which makes me uncomfortable. I want to see more than just someone's name and the dates they existed between. The Mausoleum reminded me a little of Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu, where the U.S. military dead of World War II are buried -- impressive because of its shear scope, but depressing because there's no trace of who the people buried there were.
The building was startling cold inside. "Isn't this place heated?" I asked the security guard as he kicked me out.
"Used to be," he said behind me as I stepped into the elevator. "When it opened. But now, it'd cost the National Debt." The doors shut on his chuckling. I stared at the elevator buttons, each marked with the name of the President that the floor is named after, and chose the ground floor button. I found the door I'm come in locked, and my heart leapt at the possibility that I was stuck there for the night. But no; the Exit arrows on the wall pointed me out.
Outside the Mausoleum I selected June Madrona on my iPod, and walked off through Sellwood listening to somber songs about dreams and the death of loved ones.
[December 18, 2006] It was a cold, introspective day in a cold, introspective week, and I had some thinking to do about transience. So when I finished my cleaning shift, I set off for the Portland Memorial Mausoleum in Sellwood.The Mausoleum is on the edge of Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, and the back of it looks out on a marshy lake I was not prepared to see inside Portland. The Mausoleum itself spreads across two and a half city blocks and is eight stories tall. Chuck Palahniuk's book on Portland says it has 58,000 people interred in it, more people than my hometown of Fairbanks, Alaska (a town of 30,000 people). His book also says it has space for 120,000 more -- around a fifth of the population of Portland.
I only got to spend about 20 minutes in it before it closed for the evening. It wasn't what I was expecting -- the building was under construction for 70 years, and they only finished it in 1980, so it doesn't have the "old" feel I associate with proper cemeteries. The sections I saw (admittedly, few of them) seemed rather uniform, which makes me uncomfortable. I want to see more than just someone's name and the dates they existed between. The Mausoleum reminded me a little of Punchbowl Crater in Honolulu, where the U.S. military dead of World War II are buried -- impressive because of its shear scope, but depressing because there's no trace of who the people buried there were.
The building was startling cold inside. "Isn't this place heated?" I asked the security guard as he kicked me out.
"Used to be," he said behind me as I stepped into the elevator. "When it opened. But now, it'd cost the National Debt." The doors shut on his chuckling. I stared at the elevator buttons, each marked with the name of the President that the floor is named after, and chose the ground floor button. I found the door I'm come in locked, and my heart leapt at the possibility that I was stuck there for the night. But no; the Exit arrows on the wall pointed me out.
Outside the Mausoleum I selected June Madrona on my iPod, and walked off through Sellwood listening to somber songs about dreams and the death of loved ones.
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