Reading · It's Good to Be Here

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I was sad to hear that the bear house had burned down, but I was also very confused about where, exactly, the bear house was—and what it was.

I live just a block from one of the entrances to Washington Park, a 450-acre part that includes Portland’s rose garden, Japanese garden, arboretum, and zoo. As you can imagine, I’m there all the time. It’s practically my backyard.

I also draw it A LOT. Washington Park was the subject of my self-appointed artist residency in 2018. The city took possession of the first parcel over 150 years ago, so this place has some history.

And it has a lot of weird little buildings that were put up at some point or another, for some purpose or another. I thought I’d drawn them all—not in a very deliberate fashion, but just incidentally, as I walked around with my sketchbook.

The old pumphouse by the reservoir, now restored.

Today it’s a public restroom, but what did it used to be? I have no idea.

The zoo apparently got its start here in 1888 when some guy donated a couple of bears to the city (?!) and they housed them in stone bear cages, which were later upgraded to resemble a Tudor-style house. There was also once a bear pit where people could observe them from a safe-ish distance, at a spot that’s now inside the Japanese garden.

Grim and weird, I know. But there the bear house stood, neglected, overlooked, and not in the budget for either rehabilitation or demolition, until last month, when it burned down, probably at the hands of squatters. Nothing was left but the creepy stone bear cages.

When I read about the fire and looked at the pictures, I couldn’t remember drawing the place. Where, exactly, was it? How had I missed it? Descriptions in the media were vague. I asked some neighbors and they weren’t sure, either. So I set out with my sketchbook to find it.

I could smell it before I saw it. It was the smell of a wet campfire. Several of the nearby trees had burned, but it looked like they would survive. The building, though, was nothing but a pile of blackened rubble atop these grungy old stone enclosures, some of them still covered by iron bars.

I had definitely walked by this place. I don’t know why it never occurred to me to draw it. I wished I’d had a record of it to go back to, but I didn’t, so I drew it as it was, burned down and soon to be carted away, and later I drew a little picture in the corner based on photos from before it burned.

This got me thinking about what I had or had not drawn of my immediate surroundings—or, what you might call my territory, if I was a free-range cat.

I’ve painted the Fremont Bridge, which I can see from my house, a lot. That’s definitely in my territory.

There’s a little garage around the corner that appeals to me, so I’ve painted it a few times.

I seem to like little garages.

But of course, there’s a lot that I miss. And as you might know if you read my story about this tree, or now this one about the bear house, the stuff we see every day doesn’t necessarily last forever.

So—what does it mean to have a territory that you cover, and to be the chronicler of that territory? I’m not going to draw every tree and building with a mile radius of my house. But I do like to think that, after living here for almost nine years, I would’ve made a pretty good record of what my world looked like to me. If a building burns down or a massive tree goes missing, there ought to be a reasonable chance that I can find it in one sketchbook or another. It’s a worthy pursuit, anyway.

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