MISTER DEATH MAKES A PASS

This was not supposed to be a day when he could die.

It was summer on the river, after all. And just a few days before, in the spirit of seasonal optimism, he had launched his Arctic kayak for an ambitious trip: paddling the distance of the Columbia River. If successful, that meant a good twelve hundred miles, no small feat. Staring down the length of this vast and mighty river, dwelling on nasty weather could easily become suspiciously like a bad attitude, naysaying in the face of a task requiring something quite to the contrary: a tremendous show of heart. And so Harvey Golden set off, putting shoulder to paddle.

Traveling by kayak is a distinct intimacy. The paddler rides immediately upon the water's surface, skimming along like a water bug across a pond. That's the thrill of it. But it is also a type of nakedness, a vulnerability to the water's temperament and the concert of elements at play upon the water's face. As Harvey paddled south on the river, the weather was punishing, and it only got worse. Eventually, rain and cold and wind overwhelmed the boat and its passenger. Numbed to the bone and suffering hypothermia, under assault by the wind and wave and rain that stormed through the surrounding canyon walls, Harvey was alone on the violent river. There was not another living soul, nor any chance of outside rescue. He searched for a place—any place—to land his kayak, before the cold overwhelmed him entirely. But the opportunity evaded him again and again.

Spotting an outcropping of basalt shoreline, Harvey struggled and managed to get himself onto the rocks but not the boat, which, as he clung to it, remained in the river, thrashing about in the waves. He desperately needed to get the boat ashore. But with all the provisions and gear the boat weighed over a hundred pounds, and the waves, meanwhile, were breaking onshore, buffeting the boat against the rocks.

"I was standing in the water, shivering like crazy!" Harvey recalls. "I'm trying to hold the boat off of me, trying to reach in and pull stuff out of the boat, and throw them up onto the sage brush." Just then a big wave crashed into the boat. "The wave threw the boat right on me," Harvey moans in recollection. It hit so hard that, for a moment, Harvey thought that all was lost, that the hundred pound boat had broken his legs. "I think it would have been over," he sighed. "Especially with the hypothermia," he says, underscoring the dire necessity to get warm. "I had no way to start a fire."

Harvey's legs were smarting but not broken, and he was eventually able to drag the kayak onto shore. Things were looking up. Except, Harvey was now stranded among the rocks and sagebrush. And, as it turned out, he would continue to be stranded for the next two days. Meanwhile, there was still the matter of his freezing to death. For this, Harvey's solution was simple.

"I got in my sleeping bag. And woke up alive."

ALL ABOUT THE WATER

These days, you can find Harvey safely ensconced in a twelve hundred square foot building, a former grocery store circa 1913, where he is surrounded from floor to ceiling—a twelve-foot ceiling—by kayaks and canoes. With six rows of boats, the accounting totals more than thirty types of boats from all over the world. Even in this small space, it's more boats than one can immediately comprehend. Their shapes are long and slender, with some wider and shorter, yet each displays its own distinct approach to construction. The cockpit openings sometimes swoop gracefully up at the front, guarding against splashing water, while others are trimmed out straight up and down, at right angles, creating a crisp oval aperture.

None of these boats are recreational, per se. Each has its own sensibility and approach to fishing, whaling, and navigating icy water. All of them are designs from a bygone era, for this is a museum, The Lincoln Street Kayak & Canoe Museum. The boats here are historical reproductions of Arctic kayaks and canoes. The museum belongs to Harvey. And every boat in it, save four, he has built with his own hands.

"I like the idea of being around boats and being on the water," says Harvey. His voice is telling and modest. "I'm not like a handmade-wooden-boat snob, or anything like that. Even a two hundred dollar plastic boat is a great way to get out on the water. Kayaking is all about being on the water."

These historical reproductions are based on Harvey's own hard-earned research of the originals. It's data collected from travel research and trips to museums all over the world. A collection process that is more complicated an assignment than one might suspect. Many museums do not have most of their kayaks on display, forcing Harvey to talk his way into museum storage to see and interact with them. When there were no specifications from books or that the museum could supply, Harvey took his own measurements and developed his own specifications and blueprints. And from these specs, he built his boats.

"I've studied two hundred kayaks in museums around the world. And only about fifteen percent of them are on exhibit. So, most of these kayaks in museums are not available for the public to see. There's many types where there's no place in the world that someone could go to a museum and see them, see the form."

Harvey's passion has given birth to something entirely unique. While there is a modest air about this former grocery—the museum is advertised solely by moderately sized, attractive window stencil, and the museum contents, the boats themselves, were created entirely by the drive of a single laborer—what you find after crossing the threshold and passing through the front door is the largest and most diverse collection of traditional Arctic kayak forms in the world.

It's a sight to see.

BOATS, NOVELTIES, PHOTOGRAPHS, AND A PHONOGRAPH

The Lincoln Street Kayak & Canoe Museum is situated on the corner in a residential neighborhood. The lawns and trees, bikes and cars, children playing and joggers puffing, all the sights common to the single-family dwellings on every side, lend to the museum the pleasant quality of a home-cooked meal. The museum itself is an unassuming presence, welcoming. It fits right in.

Guests entering from the street will find themselves standing before kayaks hung one directly above the other on racks. Front and center, as a kind of end-cap to the racks of boats, is a table with a nautical map of the Arctic Regions—with soundings in fathoms and heights in feet. There are two styles of self-guided tour, one quick and the other detailed. Take your pick. Often times, before you can even pick up a tour packet, Harvey has already greeted you from the back of the shop, saying hello and welcoming any questions.

Walking up and down between boats allows you to scan the white placards with black lettering that describe each and every boat. Kayaks are a vehicle of subsistence—an extension of economies not based on money, absence forms of buying and selling. This was true for the Koryak, Chukchi, Unangan (Aleut), Yup'ik, and Iñupiaq/Inuit, and Kalaallit cultures, all of whose kayaks are represented upon the walls. You could say subsistence is in the kayak's DNA. The kayak shells are a wash of brown and tan and black, stretched taunt, looking much like sea mammal hide. But they are in fact either nylon, which has been tinted with powder to appear authentic, or canvas. No dead animals and no cracking and rotting from the Pacific Northwest weather.

Interlarded between the boats are photos and postcards, alongside all manner of curios and novelty. All of it is themed to kayaks, their attending culture, or some seafaring motif. One long running shelf sports a stereoscope, a type of wooden 3-D Viewmaster from the turn of the 19th century. Next to it are a dozen or so slides that can be inserted into the stereoscope, tendering three-dimensional scenes of indigenous people fishing or paddling kayaks and canoes. Here and there on windowsills are models of both mechanical and sailing ships: barks, steamers, and hybrids that fuse wind and steam. In the spaces between boats, the walls sponsors framed and unframed photos and prints of paintings, in color and in black and white, depicting kayaking on the ocean, lake, and river. The overall suggestion is of the epic and the everyday of boating across time.

At the back of the room are wooden calipers, and blueprints for boats, hanging neatly on the wall. There is a drafting table, several glass display cases with model boats, and a gorgeous old wood-cabinet phonograph player—a Strand, circa 1921— that is butt up against a large wooden desk. Stationed before the desk is a single dark wooden chair. That's where you'll find Harvey.

The desk is the cynosure of the room, its soul. This is Harvey's writing desk. For in the midst of all the research, sailing, and hands-on construction, lives a writing project and a writer. For years and years now, Harvey has researched ancient kayak design; built replicas from those designs; christened each replica with a trial by water; evaluated the boats' performance and handling; and recorded the results for his book. The result is not only this exceptional museum of unique crafts, but also to be found here, perched at the desk corner on a small painting easel, is a large and handsome and solitary book: Kayaks Of Greenland: The History and Development of the Greenlandic Hunting Kayak, 1600-2000. By Harvey Golden.

ON THE ROOF, IN THE LIVING ROOM, ON THE FARM

"I didn't know anything about wood," Harvey says of building his first boat. "I bought mahogany, about the worst choice. It doesn't bend at all!"

Later, Harvey worked in a specialty lumberyard, a place with some eighty types of lumber, where four or five fellow enthusiasts all experimented with boat building.

"Which was kinda weird, cause I build boats outta junk wood," explains Harvey. Arctic tundra does not support the growth of trees; wood is scarce. Traditional kayak building is based on what you can find, driftwood and salvage. In the same spirit, Harvey builds his kayaks out of what he can find. Unable to afford wood when starting out, Harvey discovered that shipping pallets, spent two-by-fours, and other free recycled woods were perfect sources for kayak construction.

By the time he had mastered kayak building, and his historic reproduction project was in full swing, Harvey had developed a serious problem. Storage. Too many kayaks and no place to put them. Before the museum, Harvey had fourteen boats in his living room, fifteen in the garage, ten on the roof of his house, ten in a neighbor's garage, and three or four out on the coast at a friend's farm. The outdoor boats got weathered, squirrels would "poop in them." There were many issues. Among them, Harvey was forced to stop building full size boats because of space restrictions, and had taken to constructing small models.

"All these boats have been at my house for many years," says Harvey, gesturing toward the museum's full inventory. "And I've had people coming for many years over to my house to see them. Yeah, people from Germany, from France." All over. And when guests arrived, they would get a tour of the garage, living room, and roof. Then they'd get to meet the neighbors. Something had to be done.

MUSEUMS ARE WEIRD

While storage was reason enough to seek out another space, as far back as the 1990s, Harvey had a dream. And over time, that dream grew with the number of boats. "Having built all these, I want to display them," he thought. "I want people to see them. Even people who could care less about kayaks, they might appreciate the design variations. And the history."

Why not a museum? It was a strange thought, but a museum made a lot of sense. It gave an organizing principle to boat display. It was educational. It offered storage. It could also be a place to write. "I've always wanted to have a gallery—or just to exhibit all these boats—in some interpretative setting. Just to highlight all their variations… How powerful that is."

And so, in November of 2012, Harvey Golden opened the doors to a museum. His museum.

"I don't know," he says of the finished product, gazing about the space. "It's weird having a museum. Don't get me wrong, I love museums. But there's something odd about them."

HURRICANE FEVER

For a hard-core kayakers like Harvey, just being on the water means something a bit different than for the rest of us. Indeed, what Harvey deems entertainment with a boat might be considered somewhat more off-balanced than, say, owning a museum. While he nearly met his maker that day on the Columbia, Harvey has been in much worse, call it extreme, weather conditions. Conditions he met with enthusiasm, and which he deemed no less than "exhilarating!" For instance, a hurricane.

The high point of Harvey's paddling life came when he entered the Greenland annual kayak championship, on its first year accepting outside nations into this formerly national competition. One day, the championship was cancelled because of hurricane conditions on the ocean fjord. So a group of contestants—mostly Greenlanders and some folks from the contest—thought it was perfectly good weather to go out for a paddle. The forecast was for seventy mile-an-hour winds and ten foot swells. And among the paddlers was Harvey.

"The seas in these fjords really stack up—ten foot rolling seas," says Harvey of that day. "And, um, you're down in the trough—you're out of the wind—for probably sixty percent of the time. But it's topping these troughs in these light boats. You feel the wind hitting the boat as it's coming off the wave. And half your boat is in the air. You feel like it's gonna get blown off and back—and I've heard of that happening. And that's pretty exciting!"

Historically, Greenlanders would hunt seals with harpoons during storms. "Maybe not seventy mile-an-hour winds, but they would still be out stalking seals in it."

From a kayaker's perspective, the most dangerous part of such a day is carrying the boat down to the water. "You have this twenty-five pound boat and you're trying to carry it in seventy mile an hour winds and that—" Harvey pauses. "Is hard! It can be like a kite."

Listening to Harvey and watching him, you see someone quite calm, easy going, and reasonable. It makes you wonder about what drives each of us, that human spirit.

Harvey laughs. "I didn't take any good pictures that day."

KEEPING WATER OUT

There's a stubby boat at the museum, clearly not a kayak. It looks like a wooden washtub. "It's exactly the same function," Harvey declares, amused. "Only, it keeps the water out instead of in."

A few minutes later, a patron comes through the door of the museum. After wandering up and down the aisles for a bit, oohing and ahhing, the man addresses Harvey. First, the guest asks about the skins. Harvey directs him to the only boat that has an actual animal hide covering.

"My biggest nightmare is a boat with real skin," says Harvey in a voice typical of him, sweet and relaxed, yet smartly edged, obliquely humorous. Reflective but not shy. Pointing his finger along the deerskin, he continues: "It's not as good as some I've seen in the museum."

"Well—but you did it!" the visitor remonstrates, affirming Harvey's good work. "What is the germ of this?" the man continues, indicating with a nod of his head the entire kayak collection, which fills the room.

"Curiosity, really."

"Must feel good to be surrounded by your work."

"Yah. Yah… Sometimes I can't believe I've built all this."

When not entertaining museum guests, Harvey is at work on his second book, Kayaks Of Alaska. He is hoping it will take less time than his first, which consumed a good eight years. After that will be a third book, Kayaks Of Canada. Looking around the museum, one can hardly imagine where he'll find the room. Every book could be its own museum. This building is only book one. Yet, for all the demonstrable years of labor that has gone into the project, Harvey seems to take it all in stride, almost with a shrug.

A few days later, someone pointedly asked, why start a kayak museum? Harvey paused to snicker. Looking at the floor, he smiled to himself. Then, looking up, beaming, he had only this to say.

"It was either a museum or a bonfire."

LEATHER CLOUDS

Our story begins with the smell of coffee in the morning. Ahhh.

Only, the coffee is cold and no one is sipping it. As a matter of fact, everything about this scene is wrong. There is no warm coffee mug, no croissant on a serving plate, no stained paper napkin. The coffee itself is sloshing about in a brown ceramic jar that might better store dried linguine. Oh, and here's the kicker, yo. The coffee is sloshing because it's being dipped into by a paintbrush, from which the dripping liquid is then slathered, in steady strokes, back and forth, up and down, onto a large sheet of bone white watercolor paper.

"For the most part, there's not really a set plan for laying down the coffee," says Ray, the wielder of the brush. "There"s a lot of push and pull with the coffee."

Ray is a comic strip artist, a good-sized fellow, his chest filling out a black tee that shouts out Chi City in red letters. That's Frank Miller for Chicago City. That's hometown to Ray. The man is fun loving, easy to smile, thoughtful with an elliptical inflection to his reflections, sneaking in the verbal punches. He's a stone illustrator. But an illustrator who also takes a serious shot at painting. And has something to offer. The magic mixture in the jar is paint. Well, acrylic paint and coffee. Drip coffee—to be exact. Though, sometimes, Ray gets his painting going on with nothing but coffee grounds, for texture, like an Old Master sculpting with oils, thick and silty. Ray dips the brush once again into the jar and daubs off the excess onto the lip.

"Some areas are a little more blotchy, some are more faded," Ray continues, lazily watching the paint roll about. He looks amused. And there's that smile again, opening a curtain on those ample incisors. "I just look and see what I wanna do."

Ray insists that a piece of advice be inserted into his story. To wit: "In the wee hours of the morning—between two and four A.M.—make sure that the actual cup of coffee that is keeping you on the work is completely separate from the coffee you mix with acrylic."

The paper is tacked to a reclining cork bulletin board, the kind you'd use to pin up your utility bill. Clearly an improvisation, it works to perfection: the paper stays put. The liquid washes sweetly over the surface, pooling in some places, escaping in long streaks across the paper in others. As the paint runs away in zigzagging rivulets, Ray addresses them with sharp, chimney-sweep strokes of bristles. Increasingly, the entire paper takes on the appearance of an overcast day. A day of brown haze. And leather clouds.

ZOUNDZ....

THE KNOCKOUT PUNCH

Ray attacks art like a boxer in the ring, and he's not hanging on the ropes. It's a big swing coming at yah from the right. Or is it the left? Too late! Ray admires the knockout punch. It's an approach to style, and Ray takes pride in an artistic count-to-ten, the moment when his work has dropped you to the canvas. POW! Yet, as a black man, he's uneasy about what images this might bring to other people's minds, whites in particular. Ray shifts from side to side, restlessly contemplating the notion until, at last, he comes up with idea, and begins to imitate the daft thoughts of someone concerned about a black man whose art is deeply inspired by notions of boxing.

"What's really in the mix of his paintings?" Ray exclaims, mimicking a fearful person, paranoid about his motivations. "What am I plotting? —The revenge of the black man! Yeah, we'll come back, and come back strong. Not Folgers Choice!" Everyone laughs, heads titling back, including his white audience. Ray laughs, the black man, a full row of dazzling teeth. Yet, you can tell that he's thought about this—thought seriously about this. And wishes it weren't so. "You know—I probably shouldn't even say," Ray continues. "I don't even know if people know I'm a black man. I don't wanna put any more attention on myself than that."

The thing is, we're off-topic. Hell, a knockout might come from the painting's fragrance alone. Ray isn't using Folgers Choice in these painting, that's for sure; it's something stronger. Every one of them brims with speed and energy and anger and frustration and fire: figures leap, palms arch, fingernails spike out, humans fling themselves into the air. A halo of serious electricity sparks off a man wielding a hammer… or, possibly, it's a T-square. No doubt about it, Ray's a stone illustrator, the real thing. In spite of the strong evidence of the painting's visual punch, Ray gives us a whiff from the ceramic jar, as an example of just what the smell can do. It stinks. Lord how it stinks, like a coffee imbibing skunk. And Ray has a few words about that, about the possibility of that the smell alone could knock out an art gallery patron.

"Like my self-portrait—the one with the huge tongue lashing. Just the sight of that piece," says Ray, figuring rightly that the punch goes way beyond the fragrance. "Yet, having smelled what was used to make that painting in the first place! It is bold!"

POW! POW!

A DIARY OF EMOTIONS

Our story continues with emotions.

That ceramic jar is not the only way in which Ray is mixing up coffee. Ray's job is in the mix, too. You see, he's in the coffee business: no surprise there. Day to day, year after year, you could say that, as a barista, the experience of coffee has gotten under his skin. It has become part of him. Far from a gimmick, painting with coffee is a manifestation of Ray's inner conflicts, about life and art and work. And, naturally, about coffee.

"The coffee art is mostly depictions of me," says Ray. "They're symbolic depictions of what I'm doing, or what I'm going through. You know, when I'm working in this field."

Crazed inner conflict reigns in a Ray Johnson picture. Rather than actual moments, the scenes are caricatures—although real people may, at times, actually star in them. Even the security of work, the steady paycheck—things that make the job for most people—can rub Ray the wrong way. It all gets limned in the art. While his day job has kept Ray afloat financially, and he appreciates that—appreciates it a lot—at the same time, it's been an Achilles heel, even a crutch. As Ray puts it, it causes him to just get-by, and not focus on the inevitable, which is the art. And the artist.

In this way, while Ray's paintings are inflected with an illustrator's sensibility, a sensibility of caricature and high style, fedora hats and weaponized feet, these paintings are personal and raw, portraying genuine feeling in surreal settings. The coffee paintings are a diary, really. For Ray, a diary of emotions.

"It's a conflict that I deal with every time I start my shift to the end of my shift. The conflicts with the company, the customers, myself. It's just a constant struggle."

In the diary of emotions, even the small scenes have significance. Serving people who don't know your background, and who may see you mostly as a tool, Ray wonders, what are you suppose to say to them? And more profoundly, what do you represent? When a customer approaches the counter, and Ray greets them with a "Hi, how are you?", somewhere in the back of his mind, he wonders about all this. Does that customer really care? Do I care? The whole thing can feel like a shuck, writ large.

"If people haven't been on both sides of the counter, they can't relate. And they doubly can't relate, based on not being a minority, or someone of ethnic background, or sexual orientation. You're not in the know, you're not in the know. Experience is everything."

With each shift at work, Ray is mixing himself into coffee every bit as much as he mixes acrylic with coffee in his ceramic jar. After a fashion, his life has become one big sheet of watercolor paper, awaiting his special paint, the touch of brush, and the day's new subject.

"I like engaging my customers. I mean, I don't have to make them dinner, but I like to understand personalities and know how they work. As an artist, engagement is an important part of the work, of your character. And that's what makes a storyteller, whether that person is a writer or a illustrator or a fine artist."

There's a light irony in all this. In a manner of speaking, Ray's painting series is coffee that is commenting on—well— Coffee.

DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME

Our story ends with comics, a samurai sword, and something like sanity.

Ray's studio is filled with pencil sketches and comics that are lying about or pinned to the easel. A long horizontal painting, newly minted, stretches across the art table, drooping over the sides.

"I like how crazy I look!" Ray exclaims excitedly about the coffee series. "I like that I can look at myself in a different light. And that it's naturally related to a place that I work. And that I'm using a medium that is foreign to the typical medium that artists use. I'm not saying I'm the first, or that I'll be the last. But having that combination: I think is pretty rad."

When all is said and done, however, what keeps Ray sane is comics. Comics, comics, comics. In part, the sanity comes from being skilled. A fellow illustrator had this to say about Ray from Chi City. "Even though I've seen a lot people do comics—that was like my first love—you can tell when somebody has a unique angle. Even in a very common job—some people do backgrounds, some do ink, some do coloring—you can tell when someone is just trying to do their own thing. That's what caught my attention about Ray." High on the list of keeping Ray on the up and up is also his friends at Chibi Comics PDX. These are the very same folks who coaxed Ray to Portland. For better or worse. At Chibi Comics, Ray co-plots and illustrates a comic called Meanwhile, and an anthology called Ash Can. And he is frank about what it does for him.

"Chibi Comics helps keep my coffee on the canvas, you could say."

BLACK AND WHITE

Ray wanders outside his apartment with us. He has put down the paintbrush, and in its place Ray is wielding a samurai sword, with every intention of giving us—and the camera—a demonstration. He's obviously feeling a bit self-conscious, but we egg him on. After several quick action poses, in which, each time, he lacks heart and falls immediately out of character, Ray finally busts out ---moments with the sword that look seriously legit. Now, now. Take it easy folks, the man is simply horsing around. Though… Ray is not taking any chances. Striking a samurai pose and holding it, sword held high over his head, Ray turns to his two white companions, and, emphatically, has this to say.

"You folks gotta vouch for me. Cause I'm a black man with a sword in this neighborhood!"

KRAK!

She watches the figure that is her father, her second x chromosome, as he picks off his pinky toenail. Sketchbook on his lap, six pillows surrounding his body, one foot propped up for easier access to the pesky nail and its undeserving smallest toe. She watches as the details in the drawings of his plain, black sketchbook grow more and more intricate. The smallest of black lines that dip into one another, an ocean of defining lines, forming the images that he will never explain, no matter how many times she asks the question "but what does it mean?"

The stacks of plain black sketchbooks fill the closet of her parent's suburban home, each house its neighbor's twin. She wonders if the other twin homes have black stacks in their walk-in closets. Her father works at WordPerfect, Edward Jones, Convergys, occupations that hold no creative value. He keeps his creations a secret, an extension of himself too sacred to share, too curious to let others decide whether or not it is "what they are looking for at this time." He teaches her that the world and its doings are determined by the workings of her mind, that the circumstances surrounding her days are her own canvas. She has the privilege of deciding her life, creating her canvas.

He does not think before he draws.

When pen meets paper, the images that appear are the workings of his subconscious, a team of hand and mind, each working with the other in the production of a varied assortment of lines, letters, blocks of black ink, details that make up a drawing. The drawing that he won't explain to the being that is his daughter.

When she was 14 years old, she felt her home shake. The house, her childhood, was built on a flimsy foundation, never meant for such heavy things. The separation of father and mother left a fog in her memory, stole her father's courage, and was the villain responsible for the man-made earthquake, one that left her suburban home wrecked and emptier than before. But this villainous quake was not finished with her or her scribbling father. The greedy floor-shaker's aftershocks soon followed. A fall from religion, a ruin left where a care-free mind-set was once in motion, and a fight against all that had molded her, were left in its wake.

Years pass, as they do, and she finds the evidence of the quake in her father's plain, black sketchbooks. She remembers her questions, her "but what does it mean"s. The answers are there, as present as the black ink on the paper that fills the sketchbook, finally understood. These are the workings of the man that she wants most to have all the happiness he can carry.

His outlet: sacrilege, humor, vulgarity. Her father's ruined walk-in closet has turned into a clinking, metal storage unit in a no-name Utah town and is now housing books that contain a lifetime. The purest, the rawest, the truest depictions of human experience. The most painful of them, every crack ripping the concrete from the earthquake, all those years ago. The things that he makes, solid and timeless, with his ballpoint pen are his stories. A lifetime in a sketchbook, a daughter's definition.

Opposite Day stars Lester, an animated columnist. He might look primitive, but Lester keeps on eye on the human animal. Each month, Lester makes a report — about the funny business, the niceties, the hypocrisy. About the "dilemma."

In this episode, Lester tells it like it is, folks. I mean, this is it. Don't miss out on some seriously important news.

It is a late Sunday morning two weeks after I interviewed Michael Heald. Heald is the founder of Perfect Day Publishing, a Portland small press that has released some of Portland's most recently acclaimed books. Among those releases is Heald's own Goodbye to the Nervous Apprehension, a series of 11 personal essays addressing themes such as inadequacy, hero worship, stunted adolescence, fears of intimacy, and male competition. It is a book of honesty, honest right down to the sad, hilarious, awkward bone.

Why? Because I'm nervous. In fact, I am scared shitless.

It has been two weeks because I have been procrastinating on the task of writing this article. Avoidance might actually be a more accurate word. Why? Because I'm nervous. In fact, I am scared shitless.

Michael and I met for drinks and a chat at Beulahland in SE Portland two days before New Year's Eve. Michael is small, 5' 4" to be exact, in a t-shirt and jeans and always with his trademark Hugh Grant flop. I tower over him at my 5' 6" and heels. I am not intimidated, but I should be. Little do I know, he is about to expose me for the fraud I really am.

As Michael name-drops his writerly friends and associates, I notice my first twinge of anxiety. I start to feel dumb, un-researched. I realize how little I actually know about Portland's writing community since I opted out of it several years ago to pursue becoming a therapist. I have not even read Michael's book. Although, I admitted that when we sat down, I realize it is going to be a problem. I persist.

My anxiety mounts. I grasp that Michael's Chatty Kathy-ness might be unmanageable. I mean, is he really talking ad nauseam about his relationships with all these writers? He won't respond to my questions directly or he wanders in the course of the answer to non-related subjects. His responses are soliloquies. I think to myself "He would have made a good politician." I think to myself "I have no control over this interview. Fuck."

Finally! Michael gives me foothold in what, for me, has started to feel like a free-fall. A serious question, a "journalistic" question. At thirty minutes into the conversation, I start to feel like myself again.

This can even be true in profile journalism. Wink, wink.

Michael says something about his writing process that he asks me to strike from the record. He wants to know about the audience of the magazine, if it might offend them against him. He does this throughout the interview. This on the record, this off the record. Having never even considered this on or off business before, I hope I can keep it straight.

My inner-voice is shouting, "Parallel process, much?"

The interview is winding down. I have not clearly planned out my exit strategy to end the conversation. Yet another example of my unpreparedness. I feel like the worst former girl scout ever. The motto, "Be Prepared," ringing in my ears. I eventually tell him I have enough and stop tape. But I don't have enough. Our interview is so all over the map that I already know I have no idea what my angle is going to be.

Michael and I keep talking, our respective anxieties vibrating off one another. The conversation veers toward a subject he has a lot of energy around. He tells me to pull out the tape again. I have long since lost a sense of control over this interview. I do it. It seems as if Michael wants to confess something.

Michael and I start just talking again. I have given up on trying to make anything happen with this interview and settled into my complete inadequacy as an interviewer. I don't know what the hell I am doing but I have at least concluded one thing: I am not ready yet to interview people I don't already know. The grace my subjects, like Michael, offer is greatly appreciated.

Michael starts to question me, first slowly, then like rapid fire. I laugh about him turning the interview on me. He asks me about Eugene, where I live now. He asks me about my experience when I was more involved in Portland's writing community. Finally, we settle on music.

It's true, Michael. I read your book. That's why I connect with it, and although I live in Eugene now, I'm as Portland as they come.