6
A compilation of facts, large and
small, about our community
• Acres of land in the Oregon State
Forest system: 821,000
• Percent of Oregon forestland owned
by the state: 3
• Percent of Oregon forestland owned
by the federal government; 59
• Dollars budgeted for firefighting by
the U,$. Forest Service; 1 billion
• Square miles burned by wildfires in
the U.S. in 2014, as of July 23:2,471
• Square miles burned by wildfires in
Oregon and Washington in 2014, as
of July 23:1,394
• Number of native snake species
slithering about Oregon: 15
• Number of poisonous snakes out of
those 15 species: 1
Number of feet Haystack Rock at
Cannon Beach, the * third
far
tmro largest
coastal monolith in
ir the world, rises out
of the ocean: 235
• Number of years ago that the Grand
Ronde Mountains lava flows created
Haystack Rock: 10 to 17 million
• Number of Cooling Centers opened
in Multnomah County to help the
elderly and disabled residents during
extreme temperatures: 4
• Number of immigration detention
centers scattered across the United
States as of 2011: 204
• Amount the federal government
pays private detention centers per
detainee per day: $80-$120
•Amount that a detainee costs the
letention
(approx.)
• The number of Immigrants that the
Secure Communities program
designed by Congress to “detect
national security threats” requires ICE
to detain and deport each year:
400,000
Sources: Oregon Dept. o f Forestry;
Oregonian; Dept. o f Housing and
Urban Development: Oregon
Department o f Fish and Wildlife;
Oregon Blue Book: US Geological
Survey; 211-Info; National Immigrant
Justice Center
street roots
Aug. 1, 2014
Getting back
in stride,
pen in hand
BY SARAH HANSELL
S T A F F W R IT E R
im Brennan’s short stories blend
fantasy and fact: In one, the scene is
the greenery of Washington Park. He’s
watching a Shakespeare in the Park
performance in the hottest part of the
summer. It’s less than two years since the
car crash that broke a long list of bones on
the right side of his body. He’s still in a great
deal of pain so he’s sitting still, and a
stranger approaches.
In another, he’s living in a Salvation Army
shelter. It’s somewhere between two and
three in the early, dusky morning and two
men are exchanging blows and blood. So
they’re thrown out onto the street. Together.
He knows one of them will end up seriously
hurt. It’s the same day when he walks past a
tobacco store across from the train station
and sees blood being sprayed off the ground.
It was a man from the shelter, somebody
says, who jumped from the parking garage.
He writes a story about a man in a mental
institution in the middle of nowhere,
surrounded by stone walls, with no guards or
rules. An old friend of his in a cell across the
room draws with charcoal on the walls -
drawings that use negative space, that only
make sense when you look beyond the image,
at the space around the charcoal slashes and
swirls. The man spends his days plotting his
escape. But in fact he’s not in a mental
institution at all, but in a coma. Everyone
who speaks to him in the institution is
someone in the hospital. The head of the
institution is the dying woman in the bed
next to him.
Each of these is the plot of one of Tim
Brennan’s short stories — blends of his own
experience and his imagination.
“When you get home and you have these |
emotions and you kind of want to decompress
and compartmentalize them, it kind of helps
to put them into words,” he said.
Tim’s been writing since his first story in
kindergarten. In one of his original stories,
he falls off his bike, breaks a leg and dies
because his mother doesn’t get to him in
time.
“I had to have a parent-teacher
conference,” he said.
When he was younger, he read authors like
Dean Koontz and Stephen King - books “he
wasn’t incredibly proud of’ - until his high
school English teacher introduced him to
“Crime and Punishment.”
“My high school teacher said, ‘You seem
like the kind of guy who would really like
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Answers to puzzles on page 15
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P H O T O B Y COLE: M E R K E L
‘Crime and Punishment,’ and I didn’t get the
joke until years later,” he said. “That I was
going to get myself in trouble one day.”
Since then, he’s devoured anything from
Mikhail Bulgakov to Haruki Murakami.
After high school, he went to community
college for a year and half, but it wasn’t for-
him.
I “I didn’t like being stuck in a classroom,”
he said.
He used to live in Baltimore, and traveled
around the East Coast. He was friends with
an artistic crowd, and did creative work for
them like taking photographs and. running
sound machines for their post-graduate
projects. In mid-2005 he decided — after a
bad couple of months — that it was time to
leave Baltimore, so he packed up for
Portland, where he’d visited years before and
liked. .
“I just packed my bag, quit rny job, put all
my money in my pocket and moved out
here,” he said.
He worked in tech support for a while,’ but
when his roommate skipped town, he
couldn’t afford his apartment and ended up
living outside.
In 2007, a week before he was scheduled
to move into an apartment, he was hit full
force by a car as he crossed Broadway and
Lincoln. He broke his ankle, knee, shoulder,
pelvis in two places and fractured two
vertebrae
“If it hadn’t been for the car, I would’ve
been housed eight years ago,” he said.
. He was in a coma Tor a week and in flie*
hospital for about two more weeks before he
was moved to the Henry Building, where he
lived for three more months before going
back to the streets.
“Right around Christmas I had to teach
myself to walk because they were kicking me
out, and I would not have made it on the
street in a wheelchair,” he said.
He was living outside until he found
housing in 2011. Because of pain related to
the injuries he sustained in the car accident,
he couldn’t work.
“It wasn’t viable. I could do the work, but I
couldn’t guarantee I’d be there,” he said.
Now, he’s been selling Street Roots for
about five years and continues to write short
stories, hoping to get one published
someday.
Say hello to Tim at his regular turf,
outside the Food Front Co-Op at Thurman
Street and 23rd Avenue in Northwest
Portland.