Looking for Laura

This post is going to be mostly a photo dump with some thoughts mixed in.

Snow flurries were pelting my windshield as I drove to a southeast Portland neighborhood I’ve been spending some time in lately. It’s the one referenced in my previous post about the death of Dave.

Walking up the tracks over broken glass and needles I spotted my friend Kevin Dahlgren talking to a pair of homeless women with big personalities. Laura had a lot to say. I’m not sure if it’s just her mental illness or if there were drugs involved at that particular moment, but she talked a mile a minute about all kinds of personal things.

It’s interesting to me that you can have such deep conversations with strangers in these circumstances but never get beyond the weather with people you see often in the “real world.”

She’s from this area and has children and grandchildren. Multiple concussions as a child led to her having some brain issues, she tells me.

Her camp was nestled directly by some very loud and busy train tracks. A dystopian setting for a 58 year old woman with brain injuries to be living.

Her shoeless situation was wearing me after I left that day. We wear the same size. She remained in my mind. I stared at a pair of my own shoes and decided to head out with them two nights later to look for her.

She had only one shoe on when we spoke, and I was concerned that she wasn’t in the right headspace to take care of replacing it on her own. I asked her what her size was and kept an eye out for a replacement for her when I was walking around. Shoes get abandoned everywhere here.

Heading straight to where her camp was, implored by my husband to not stay out too much after darkness set in, I called out for her. The camp was there and sealed up, but vacant. I walked to a more popular encampment spot where I’d made some friends before and started asking around for anyone who knew where she was.

Chef here was kind enough to talk with me for a while about where to look for her and also his own life story. I’d already heard about him from another person I met before.

Other people said they’d seen her recently but not that day. I spent some time train gazing in the dark before heading back home with my shoes still in my backpack.

Industrial spots with their harsh light and dual sense of vacancy and motion are a haunting place at night.

There really is no end to this story. Maybe I’ll run into her again and have something to add. Until next time, thank you for reading

-Tara-