THREE HOURS IN OREGON CITY, OREGON: Guest Post by Caroline Hatton at The Intrepid Tourist

The Willamette Falls in Oregon City, Oregon.

My friend Caroline Hatton, a children’s writer and frequent contributor to this blog, took these photos in Oregon City, Oregon, in November 2023.

Oregon City (red dot) and Portland (black dot), Oregon.

My husband’s French horn sounded stuffy and one of four valves clacked. So we took it to a respected French horn doctor, Kevin Blodget at Wally’s Music Shop in Oregon City. 

As a spot on the land, Oregon City is where the Willamette and Clackamas Rivers merge. As a spot in history, it was the end of the Oregon Trail, along which emigrants came in covered wagons from the Missouri River during the second half of the 1800s. On a map, Oregon City looks like an integral part of the urban amoeba stretching out from Portland.

Once the French horn was in Kevin’s expert hands for diagnosis, we went for a stroll along the nearby, paved, McLoughlin Promenade, on top of the volcanic basalt cliff that parallels the Willamette River. Soon we started seeing the horseshoe-shaped Willamette Falls (photo at the top of this post). They have long been a culturally important place for many Native American tribes. Today, both river banks downstream of the falls are crowded with huge, ugly, decrepit industrial buildings like I had only seen before in post-apocalyptic movies. This results from a history of hydroelectric power and paper production.

Back at the shop, Kevin reassured us that the horn’s rotors were aligned correctly and demonstrated how to use two different types of oil to lubricate the instrument’s plumbing. The horn sounded sufficiently decongested.

Mike's Drive-In, Oregon City, Oregon.

Before the afternoon drive home, I voted in favor of a quick, local-color lunch at Mike’s Drive-In, a couple of blocks away. Waiters no longer come to parked cars to take orders or serve food. Instead, scanning a QR code leads to ordering online and customers must go inside to pick up their food.

Mike's Drive-In, Oregon City, Oregon.

It was early for lunch and the restaurant was almost empty, so we decided to eat inside. No crowd meant no waiting for a table or food, no noise to interfere with quiet conversation, and a lower risk of assorted seasonal contagions. The menu included hamburgers and fried seafoods served in red plastic baskets, ice-cream, and 23 shake flavors. We asked what the most popular item was—fried pickles!—but couldn’t psych ourselves up to taste them. We had perfectly acceptable hamburgers and onion rings.

The Kaegi Pharmacy display at the Museum of the Oregon Territory.

After lunch, I wanted to see one more thing. It had to be the Museum of the OregonTerritory because it contains a historic pharmacy exhibit, something I can’t seem to pass up, due to some inexplicable fondness for old pharmacies. The display presents antiques from the Kaegi Pharmacy, founded in 1927 in nearby Wilsonville.

In the pharmacy display.

Of the hundreds of pharmaceutical jars, bottles, and vials, I took pictures of those that made me chuckle.

In the pharmacy display at the Museum of the Oregon Territory.

One bottle label identified the Kaegi Pharmacies, and a drawer was full of antique labels, similar to those in my parents’ 1960s pharmacy in Paris. Long before I was twelve, my mother had taught me how to apply the right amount of glue on the back of a label, how to center it between the two side seams of the glass bottles containing ethyl ether, or 70% ethyl alcohol, or glycerine, and how to make sure it was straight… if I didn’t want to have to soak it off and start over. She reluctantly approved my first batch despite the fact that no two labels were at the exact same height—but only after I argued that no customer would buy more than one bottle at a time, so why waste glue and labels? Later on, she showed me the preceding step: how to fill bottles, up to the (exact same) level (in all the bottles in every batch or else…).

In the pharmacy display at the Museum of the Oregon Territory.

My mother did know that nobody’s perfect and that it’s O.K. After all, when she was in Pharmacy School in 1940s French Indochina (now Vietnam), she famously could not detect the distinctive stench of Asafetida (also known as Devil’s Dung), the stinky gum from a plant’s roots and an herbal medicine used to treat asthma, cough, and, um… flatulence (farting). Yet my father fell in love with her anyway.

All text and photos, copyright Caroline Arnold. www.theintrepidtourist.blogspot.com